Occasionally, something on the Internet makes me happy
And today is one of those days. Thanks to TYR for linking to Make Your Own David Cameron Poster, and some results at mydavidcameron.com.
Google: warlord in a world of bandits?
How to think about Google?
On the one hand there is its widespread participation in open source projects, its statements in favour of openness, its consistent promotion of net neutrality, its recent announcement about "pulling out" of China, and its opposition to California's discriminatory Proposition 8. On the other hand, there is its embrace of secrecy around its core operations, its willingness to promote digital rights management for big media on Vevo, and its cavalier attitude to privacy.
Google is a company that frames its actions in ethical terms, and which takes a public stance on issues beyond its immediate commercial concerns, while making it clear that it's a business and it exists to make money. The language makes it easy to think about Google as "good" or "evil", and to search for some commonality among its actions along those lines. If it's good then we can trust it with our private information. If it's evil, then its apparently good actions must be a cloak to hide some more devious intent. [Before anyone accuses me of setting up a straw man here are a … Continue reading
The Edge World Question: Meet the New Boys’ Club, Same as the Old Boys’ Club
Every year an organization called Edge Foundation, which is not at all pretentious, publishes a World Question and asks "some of the most interesting minds in the world" to reflect on it. Edge is dedicated to promoting "the Third Culture", which it modestly describes this way:
Throughout history, intellectual life has been marked by the fact that only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody else. What we are witnessing is a passing of the torch from one group of thinkers, the traditional literary intellectuals, to a new group, the intellectuals of the emerging third culture.
That new group, in case you are wondering, would be the interesting minds invited by Edge.
Edge and its forerunner The Reality Club are single-minded in their search for these "interesting minds". It has "a simple criterion for choosing speakers. We look for people … Continue reading
Digital Activism: If Information Is Not the Problem, Information is Not the Solution
Right after I finished Matthew Hindman's book The Myth of Digital Democracy, Prospect Magazine has published a debate between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky about digital activism in authoritarian countries, particularly Iran. (Links – Round one: Morozov and Shirky. Round two: Morozov and Shirky.)
In brief, Morozov worries "what do we really gain if the ability to organise protests is matched (and, perhaps, even dwarfed) by the ability to provoke, identify and arrest the protesters?" Shirky, who is in moderate "Shirky mode" as opposed to demagogic "Clay mode", counters that "While the use of social media in the Iranian protests quickly garnered the label 'Twitter Revolution,' the real revolution was the use of mobile phones, which allowed the original protesters to broadcast their actions to other citizens and to the wider world with remarkable speed and immediacy. This characteristic, of a rapidly assembling and self-documenting public, is more than just a new slogan."
There is a technology arms race between the protesters and the government, in which increasingly sophisticated levels of censorship, censorship evasion, identity masking, and so on are all playing a part. Your Facebook account might be a great way to communicate with … Continue reading
The Myth of Digital Democracy, by Matthew Hindman – reviewing the reviews
The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman, Princeton University Press 2009
The last sentence of Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy is "It may be easier to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard". The book is about collecting and analyzing the following large data sets on the way to this conclusion:
- The links among 3 million American political web pages together with data showing how Google leads its users to political sites. Hindman concludes that "link structure is an effective proxy for audience share" and that "communities of Web sites on different political topics are each dominated by a small set of highly successful sites". The scale of online concentration is so profound, he argues, that claims the Internet "democratizes" politics are misleading. For example, when it comes to blogs, "the top blogs are now the most widely read sources of political commentary in the United States", but these widely-read bloggers are very few in number (a few dozen) and they are "overwhelmingly.. well-educated white male professionals". The kind of voices that get heard in political discussion are the same kind that were heard through offline media, only perhaps more so. "The vigorous online debate that … Continue reading
The Web 2.0 Dilemma: Profit and Liability Go Together
Google and other Web 2.0 companies have a problem: like it or not, profit and liability go together when it comes to delivering content. Maybe opening up the algorithms will provide a solution.
Neutrality and the Common Carriage Bargain
At the heart of the net neutrality debate is an old bargain called common carriage [Christian Sandvig link to a small PDF]:
Common carriage is a common law legal concept that may date to the Roman empire… In brief, a common carrier is a private party offering transport or communication services who is subject to special public duties in return for legal benefits. The chief obligation of the common carrier is nondiscrimination—it must undertake to carry all people indiscriminately. (This is of course the center of the network neutrality debate.) Common carriers include railroads, taxis, airplanes, and telephones.
In exchange for this burden of nondiscrimination, common carriers have received a number of benefits: chiefly, liability protection. As common carriers can have no interest in the content that they carry, they are not liable for transporting stolen property—you can’t sue the phone company for copyright infringement if a telephone is used to read aloud a copyrighted work. Carriers may also … Continue reading
