Last June, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society published a study entitled “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent.”

It is no question, of course, that the postcolonial skeptic wouldn’t turn a blind eye to breaking down the study. The study “identified 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs.”

The divisions are created like borders in the Arab World. Consider these breakdowns: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Levantine/English Bridge, Syria, Maghreb/French Bridge, and Islam-focus (these are the largest collectives).

This would most likely fall within the Levantine/English Bridge (bloggers in the Levant using English and connected to the US and international blogospheres). Given this designation and the use of the English language, then it cannot fall within an ‘Arabic’ blogosphere, but rather an ‘Arab’ blogosphere. This would allow for non-Arabs to speak on Arab thought.

As the study states ‘Anglophone bloggers are more likely to advocate reform and discuss economic and women’s rights issues.’ This ignorant distinction is indeed meant to highlight the assumption that the Arabic-speakers do not have the will or capacity to speak on ‘reform’ and ‘economic and women’s rights.’

I actually did read through this entire study (although I may have skipped a few sentences).

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice how the Egyptian compilation has a healthy overlap of ‘Secular Reformists’ and ‘Muslim Brotherhood.’ I am not the first to note this troubling notion, as I have come across a few who have commented on this – ‘Secular Reformists.’ The association with reform is somehow irreplaceably intertwined with secularism. Then, on the other hand, you have the ‘Muslim Brotherhood.’ The non-reformist perhaps? A/k/a the ‘everyone else?’

The study goes on to explain:

Egyptian bloggers comprise nearly one-third of those in our map and form a large structural cluster that contains several attentive clusters, including Secular Reformist, Wider Opposition, Egyptian Youth, Egyptian Islamic, and Muslim Brotherhood.

Nevertheless, it is worth the read, and there are a lot of interesting things to read about the ‘Arabic blogosphere’ no matter how difficult it may be to comprehend the clusters. It definitely does one thing, demonstrate the diverse ideas of bloggers in the Arab World.

Over the past 1.5 days I had the privilege of attending Harvard Forum II: ICTs, Human Development, Growth and Poverty Reduction. Convened six years after the first event, HF2 was convened to allow the (mostly) same 20 participants to reflect on what has changed since 2003 and what they believe are the most important trends and issues confronting the field of information technology and human development. The opportunity to sit with Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence, and other ridiculously smart people was an incredible treat to say the least. The event was sponsored by IDRC, the Berkman Center hosted the event, and Global Voices provided blogging, tweeting, session summaries, and webcasting (Ethan and team are amazing so follow the links to learn everything that transpired).

Which allows me to offer a couple of highlights from my perspective:

Hearing non-ICTD folks talk about ICTD
The views of Sen, Yochai Benkler, Michael Smith and other HF2 participants are centrally relevant to the role of ICT in development, and yet they are not the ones who attend ICTD conferences or publish in ICTD journals. To be fair, there are ICTD scholars who build on the work of Sen, but otherwise this workshop offered yet more evidence that the field has to do better at reaching out to those who don’t self-identify with “ICTD.”  I’m not sure of the solution. On the one hand we need to do more work to legitimize and raise the profile of ICTD, but on the other hand the term has a tendency to make us seem like an exclusionary club.  In any event, I came away very stimulated by the perspectives these people brought to our discourse. All participants submitted thought pieces in advance of the workshop.

Contesting the meanings of development
Between Sen’s focus on capabilities and interventions from Anita Gurumurthy, Ineke Buskens and others, a very interesting theme of the workshop addressed the benefits and limitations of the market’s role in ICTD. This was in contrast to much of today’s ICTD discourse which in my mind over privileges the market (as evidence in the current infatuation over mobile phones and making financial sustainability the litmus test for assessing the value of an ICTD endeavor).

Critically examining mobile phones
While the ICTD majority continues to leap onto the mobile bandwagon, HF2 offered up a host of questions that I completely agree require our critical examination, else we believe we can pack up and go home because mobiles and the market will take care of everyone’s ICT needs. Ethan Zuckerman made the strongest argument, which Yochai and several others echoed in various ways.  Yochai summed it up best – Mobiles offer a more decentralized and open platform than broadcast media, but they aren’t the Internet at all, and that gap between mobiles and the Internet is critical.

Again, read Ethan’s summaries. This workshop was a feast of ideas that I will be referring to again and again.

In 1997, Charles Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain founded the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. A research center focusing on legal study of the Internet, notable fellows have included Jimbo Wales, Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, and Yochai Benkler. The Center has recently transcended academia to defending an admitted filesharer in the ongoing war against music piracy.On July 29, Charles Nesson gave his opening statement in the copyright infringement suit involving Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum. Mr. Tenenbaum admits to using Kazaa, a peer-to-peer filesharing service used primarily to share mp3s of copyrighted music on a commercial scale. His argument seems to be, however, that he did so for the love of the music, not to make money. Whether that has any relevance whatsoever to the law is another question entirely.

Of the many lawsuits the RIAA filed against peer-to-peer filesharers, this is only the second to go to a jury trial. The first, a suit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset in federal court in Minnesota, resulted in a $1.92 million verdict for copyright infringement. Most alleged filesharers threatened by the RIAA opted to settle for a few thousand dollars instead. In this suit, Mr. Tenenbaum has opted not to settle, tempting fate like Ms. Thomas-Rasset and a potential million dollar judgment.

Perhaps thinking that the odds might be against him, Professor Nesson engaged in some theatrics in his July 29 opening statement. The Boston Globe reports that the seventy-year-old Harvard professor dropped hundreds of puzzle pieces on the floor before a jury in the Moakley Federal Courthouse today, explaining, “Here it is. Bits. . . . Can you hold a bit in your hand? You can’t. . . . And suddenly you have songs being shared by millions of kids around the world.’’ The record companies went for a more orthodox approach, explaining that “[t]he defendant knew what he was doing was wrong at each step of the way, but he did it anyway.” Sooner or later, however, these Boston jurors will simply have to decide whether Mr. Tenenbaum violated federal law.

If Mr. Tenenbaum is found guilty of wilful infringement, he could face $150,000 per song shared. That amounts to a cool $4.5 million. Fair? For an interesting take, see Howard Knopf’s fantastic Excess Copyright blog. And, of course, feel free to discuss in the comments.

– P.R.

Image source

Today at Harvard Law Schools’s weekly Berkman Center lunch, Aaron Shaw presented into the potential  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk(AMT) holds for social science and the culture that surrounds it. His talk drew upon research-in-progress from the Berkman Center’s Online Cooperation group, in collaboration with Daniel Chen and John Horton.

Although the presentation itself, cheekily entitled “HIT me baby one more time, Or: How I learned to stop worrying & love Amazon Mechanical Turk,” was a bit light on statistics, the conversation within Berkman’s community around the issues of labor laws, privacy, methodology and technological potential were fascinating, as always.

Aaron Shaw at Berkman

As Shaw noted, the origin of the name for  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk lies in a chess-playing “automaton” that was no mechanical creation at all, but instead a clever contraption that hid a chessmaster inside. Amazon’s version farms out small tasks — or “HITs” — that require a human to accomplish.

As an aside, I have to note that, as Peggy Rouse pointed out in Mechanical Turk, Powerset and enterprise search, there may be considerably more to Amazon’s strategy than the creation of a crowdsourcing market for simple tasks. She thinks Mechanical Turk may play a role in enterprise search down the road. She’s a canny observer, I’d recommend reading her thoughts.

Early in his presentation, Shaw offered up a shoutout to Andy Baio (@waxpancake) who asked two questions late last year in “Faces of Mechanical Turk“: “What do [Amazon Turk users] look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?”

Credit: Andy Baio, Faces of Mechanical Turk

As Shaw noted, however, when it comes to the Turk,  no public, trustworthy, aggregate data is available. What evidence is available derives from self-selecting surveys and experiments. Those samples showed a large number of women, from many countries of residence (although mostly in the US & India). Speculatively, he noted that the age of users appears to be low, while education and income is high.

Shaw posited that the geographically component is likely correlated to Amazon’s requirement that users hold a US banking account.  As a result, Shaw’s research relied upon whatever his team could collect on the Turk or through interviews with users and Amazon executives.

So, does the Mechanical Turk work for its users? Sometimes. Shaw noted that once you get a few people performing a given task, the accuracy rate for completion goes up overall, providing the example of machine-learning algorithms.

As he noted wryly, it’s “Not all bots, cheaters and scripts.”

Task selection and design is important to that success rate: skill matters, on both sides. It’s not just the skill of users and their ability to follow instructions – success also relies upon the skill of the creators of the HITs. Social scientists — scientists of any stripe, really — recognize the issue here in experimental design.

The uses of Turk cover a broad spectrum, though by nature each represents some form of crowdsourcing. Amazon itself used to Turk to generate product descriptions, questions and answers, thereby “spamming itself,” as Shaw put it.

Spectrum of users of Amazon Mechanical Turk

How else is the Mechanical Turk being put to use?

• The Extraordinaries: “micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot”
• CastingWords.com is using it for transcription
• AaronKoblin.com uses Mturk to create art. For .02, he pays users to draw a sheep facing left. He then sells sheets of them  for $20, some portion of which is donated to charity.
• Also noted: oDesk, reCAPTCHA, Threadless, Aardvark, liveops

Aside from commercial, artistic or volunteer uses, Shaw believes that Mechanical Turk has considerable potential to enhance social science.

Specifically:

1. As a pool of subjects for randomized experiments
2. As a pool of inexpert raters for distributed observation, or “coding”

Advantages to labs?

Low cost of use, ease of paying subjects, speeds, diverse subjects (potentially), one HIT = one person, workers do not (usually) interact.

Experiments can consist of contextualized real-effort tasks. As the Turk has created a real labor market, as for text transcription, there’s utility in many areas, like canonical games in economics and paired surveys.

In other words, its neither reducible to a manifestation of the “Internet hivemind” or some sort of “latter day child labor,” at least in Shaw’s view. The online conversation around the presentation, which included Esther Dyston, was more skeptical on the latter point, noting that the potential for skirting labor laws was not inconsiderable. Shaw readily conceded that the issue is salient, although he sees such labor issues as “downstream,” he expects to see more given that the “tension is so clear, so stark.”

Shaw has been advised by Yochai Benkler while at Berkman, who evidently considers the Turk to be of use for content analysis for distributed observations. In this context, the ability for researchers to randomly assign HITs for raters to code objects is helpful. Shaw brought up Klaus Krippendorf, of UPenn, in the context of understanding some of the theory here; I’ll need to go do my due diligence in understanding Krippendorf’s work.

Yochai has noted that specific groups involved in distributing computing types, like SETI, have performed admirably. According to Shaw, in fact,“The Knights who say “Nee” perform quite well when measured against other countries with distributed computing.”

I also heard about the “Turkopticon,” a Firefox extension that allows users to submit feedback about HIT creators. Although Shaw said that it is not widely installed, there’s clearly a step towards community self-policing.

When asked about the utility of using the Turk for searching for missing computer scientist Jim Gray or searching for Steve Fossett’s plane, Shaw immediately recognized the value but hadn’t examined the data sets in question at length.

The question itself begged for a follow up, given the release of Chris Andersen’s “Free” this week: How and why are users motivated to provide hits when altruism is involved? Is work of higher quality when there is money involved?

Shaw offered a cautious affirmation, though with reservations: Payment vs free is “such a loaded issue in society. The symbolic value of money or donation is humongous.”

A Berkman Fellow in attendance, Chris Soghoian, noted that his advisor pays 5-10x the market rate and gets email about when the next task is coming, along with decent results.

In Shaw’s view, there needs to be “a more serious examination of the question. Experimental evidence of research suggest sub-populations of people who would respond differently. Some people will be motivated by doing good, others don’t care, want the .05. We need better ways to test. It’s situation-specific.”

As he wryly noted, “We’re not all homo economicus.”

As usual, this was an excellent lunch.You can view the archived video of the presentation as a .mov.

Following the presentation, Aaron wrote me to add the following:

“Daniel and John’s contributions to the field of experimental research on online labor markets include

1. recognizing that AMT could serve as a venue for experimental studies;
2. conducting the earliest labor market experiments on AMT;
3. solving a bunch of difficult problems so that they could make valid causal inference based on the results of these experiments.”

I have to note one other organization I learned about today: “TxtEagle.” TxtEagle is a innovative concept for active “mobile crowdsourcing,” distributing small-scale jobs via SMS and payment the same method. 

In other words, microjobs with micropayments. The mobile platform’s founders recognize that there are more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the developing world that could potentially be leveraged to perform tasks. The BBC wrote that “txteagle is changing the dynamics of outsourcing labour.” Hard to disagree with that.

The first Open Video Conference, being held in NY on June 19-20, is bringing together producers, techies, distributors, lawyers and others involved in “the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.”

The conference is a production of Yale Internet Society Project, Participatory Culture Foundation (creators of the open source Miro internet TV player) and Kaltura (developers of a full open source video platform), in partnership with Mozilla, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Among the many speakers and presenters are producer Ted Hope; Daily Show and Air America co-creator Lizz Winstead; Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack; John Lech Johansen (famed DVD DRM cracker and co-founder of the Doubletwist universal media platform); Eirik Solheim, project manager and strategic advisor at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (where they’ve launched a promising initiative to distribute TV programs using P2P); Jamie King, director of the Steal This Film documentary and co-founder of Vodo; Clay Shirky, author and professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program; and Yochai Benkler, Professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center and author.

(Title lyric from British Sea Power.)

This Berkman Center for Internet and Society project provides a visualization of the Iranian blogosphere, a very active blog space “of approximately 60,000 routinely updated blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers” from within and outside Iran. Here is a snapshot of the visualization. The main techniques to mine data was “computational social network mapping in combination with human and automated content analysis.” Studies such as this are helping to create “initial conclusions about the actual impact of technology on democratic events and processes, and to identify questions for further research.”

The size of the dot represents the number of other blogs that link to it, a measure of its popularity. The position of each dot is a function of its links with its neighbors.

Snapshot of "Iran's online public" by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Fromhttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public

I spent lunch today at a talk by David Bollier focusing on how to govern (or manage // semantics) the digital commons. His premise, more or less, is:

1. There now exists a digital commons not that different from the commons from way back when. Whereas villagers once benefited from a shared space for, say, sheep grazing, Internet users now benefit from shared code and media (among other things).
2. Commons have to be maintained and protected (see “tragedy of the commons”). What Bollier was interested in was less the shared space and more the norms and relationships that allowed users of the commons to protect it and not abuse it.
3. After giving numerous examples of how people did so for the regular commons, how do we do so for the digital commons?

Just goes to show that few things are new — we’re just changing the scale and tweaking the metaphors is all.

His set up suggests the answer to his question. The way you protect the digital commons is to build the digital equivalent of the commonwealth. Actually, his book’s subtitle suggests that too: “How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own“. And all the qualms you might have about real commonwealths basically the same ones you have about the digital ones.

Some things touched upon:

• The concentration of power within commonwealths (hegemons)
• Defending the commonwealth from outsiders
• The tension between openness and security
• The imposition of Western frameworks upon non-Western societies

All very familiar to the Harvard government concentrator.

Funny thing though — for all of the emphasis that this was a “political question”, there were very few politicians (or political scientists) in the room. Make up was primarily lawyers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and software people. And while that’s a pretty diverse group of people, I got the impression they all share a libertarian anti-establishment egalitarian vibe. // I mean egalitarian in the libertarian sense of the word, obviously.

So when you bring up, say, hegemons and the concentration of power, the response was defensive. “Free open-source communities are democratic.” “This is a problem we need to solve.”

To someone with an international relations background, I think the response would be more ambivalent. Hegemons, for all their abuses, are sometimes seen as guarantors of free trade regimes and relative peace and stability. The accumulation of power allows solutions. The restrictions of some freedoms allows the growth of others. And so on.

There are definitely examples of this in the software / Internet world. Would computer penetration have been nearly so high without the propietary Windows operating system? What would the web be like without Google’s current dominance? Would MP3 players have really taken off had Apple committed to openess on the iPod? Those are tricky counterfactuals.

Yet the motivating idea behind the closest thing to a dominant ideology among “netizens” is “free as in freedom” . The very notion of power and control is antithetical to many of these people — so the answer to the above questions is: Yes, society would be better off if Linux replaced Windows, Google was not so powerful, and Apple never used DRM of any sort.

I’m not really sure where I stand of all of this yet, but I will note this: America was founded on very much a similar notion — the promise of a libertarian, egalitarian, free society that stood in constrast to the bloated, corrupt tyranny of Great Britain whose most notable achievement was being somewhat better than the French.

Who would have though that 230-something years later, America could itself be regarded by some as a bloated, corrupt “evil empire” whose notable achievement was being somewhat better than the Soviets?

// Disclaimer: I like America.

From the Berkman Center

–

Are you a lawyer interested in dealing with emerging legal issues relating to the intersection of law, journalism, and new media on the Internet?  Would you like to help online journalism and new media ventures meet their legal needs?  Do you want a stimulating yet laid back work environment?

The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society is looking to hire a Staff Attorney/Resident Fellow to assist with the development of a pro bono network of media lawyers and law school clinics to support online journalism and new media startups.

The position requires a Juris Doctor degree with admission to at least one state bar (and eligibility for admission on motion to the Massachusetts bar if you’re not a Massachusetts lawyer) and a minimum of 3 years of legal-practice experience with a significant Internet, intellectual property, or media law focus.  Our offices are located at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, so you must be willing to work in Cambridge, MA.

We’re really excited about this position and about bringing someone new on board to help with our work.  We’re building a network of lawyers across the country who want to work on online media cases, and we need an extremely capable individual to take the lead in screening new cases and clients, maintaining relationships with clients and members of the network, and providing direct legal assistance to clients in collaboration with lawyers and law students in Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

It’s a great opportunity for experienced media, Internet, or IP law practitioners who want to serve the public interest, transition to academic pursuits, or simply work in an intellectually invigorating environment.  The Staff Attorney will have many opportunities to expand his/her knowledge of technology and law, including frequent interactions with other fellows at the Berkman Center and throughout Harvard University.

Applications should be submitted as soon as possible, but no later than February 27, 2009.

You can find more information about the position and how to apply at http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/CMLP%20Staff%20Attorney-Job%20Description.pdf

.

This week, Blogging Censorship will look at student speech: the new technologies that create more spaces for free expression, and growing concerns about cyber-bullying, internet filtering, and student online speech off-campus.

Today, we’ll look at cyber-bullying, peer-to-peer. That is, students harassing other students online. A recent report from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University declared that cyber-bullying, not online predators, is “the most common risk minors face online.”
This conclusion has been reported as a minor salve to parents concerned about their children’s safety, but it also adds some more weight to ongoing discussion about youth (and therefore) student expression and the role of policymakers and schools to protect students and the school environment.

As the Berkamn report notes, cyber-bullying can different from “offline” bullying in its visibility: both to other students and to parents and school authorities. As the PEW Internet & American Life Project “Cyberbullying and Online Teens” memo reports:

In the past, the materials of bullying would have been whispered, shouted or passed around. Now, with a few clicks, a photo, video or a conversation can be shared with hundreds via email or milions through a website, online profile or blog posting.

Cyberbullying itself is hard to define. The National Crime Prevention Council (an educational non-profit, most famously know for McGruff the Crime Dog) has defined youth cyber-bullying as: “teens [using] the Internet, cell phones, or other devices to send or post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person.” Although 35 states have cyberbullying legislation, the attempt to create a federal statute after Megan Meier’s suicide was knocked down (we should note that this case was about adult-to-student, rather than peer-to-peer, cyber-bullying). The May 2008 proposed statute stated:

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

As Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Consipiracy noted:

So if I harshly criticize Reps. Sanchez and Hulshof (“hostile”) at least twice (“repeated”) in a way that a jury finds “severe,” whatever that exactly means, and if I do that “with the intent to … cause substantial emotional distress,” I could go to prison for up to two years. My criticism could be perfectly accurate. … The desire to cause substantial emotional distress could be prompted by the target’s reprehensible actions or political views, and could be coupled with a genuine attempt to persuade the public. Doesn’t matter: My actions would be a crime. This is clearly unconstitutional.

The Berkman report recommends more resources for “schools, libraries, and other community organizations to assist them in adopting their own risk management policies and for educating children, parents, and caregives on issues relating to online safety.”

In “Student Online Expression: What Do the Internet and MySpace Mean for Students’ First Amendment Rights” by David L. Hudson Jr. at the First Amendment Center, the author quoted Thomas Hutton from the National School Board Association. Interested in preserving the authority of local school boards to set policy as they see fit, Hutton said:

We do not advocate any one particular approach. If a school is going to go after student behavior off-campus, the school must make it clear in the code of student conduct so that it puts the students on notice. … There is a lot that schools can do short of imposing disciplinary actions, such as educating kids about responsibilities online and educating parents about the Internet. If a school official is aware of cyberbullying, one option is rather than imposing discipline, call the parent of the student who has been doing the cyberbulling.

This sentiment, that parents, rather than legislators, are best equipped to address cyberbullying, is amplified in James Tucker’s entry at the ACLU blog. He writes:

“Cyber-bullying” is a loaded term to be avoided by anyone interested in engaging in an objective look at online speech. Like past legislative attempts to justify online censorship, such as the “Deleting Online Predators Act” (DOPA) and the “Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act” (SAFE Act), the term is intended to stack the deck against the First Amendment. Specifically, it is meant to imply the regulation of unlawful conduct, not the censorship of protected speech, under the guise of protecting our children. …

Parents, not the government, are best positioned to police the websites and content that their children access. Efforts to inform parents and their children about what is available online should be encouraged. Ultimately, the only way for the Internet to remain a true marketplace of ideas for the 21st Century is to continue to promote the free exchange of information and speech, with the understanding that online speech can be as beneficial or as hurtful as speech occurring offline.

Ontem, o New York Times trouxe uma reportagem sobre a Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) do Centro Berkman para Internet e Sociedade da Universidade Harvard. A dita força-tarefa foi criada por 49 procuradores-gerais de justiça americanos para investigar os casos de abusos sexuais contra crianças e adolescentes na Internet. Eis que o relatório final mostra que o assédio sexual a menores na Internet não é um problema significativo e que os menores são alvos pouco prováveis para serem assediados e, quando o são, são menores que se colocam nesta situação e que já vivem em situação de risco (menores com depressão ou vivendo em lares instáveis).

O relatório tamém demole com mitos como o qual que diz que uma entre 5 a 7 crianças e adolescentes já foram assediadas na Internet por adultos pedófilos; na maioria dos casos, os propositores também são menores. O relatório também demonstra que a exposição de dados pessoais nas redes de relacionamento (o alvo da força-tarefa) não aumenta o risco de abordagem por pedófilos. Como disse John Cardillo, presidente da Sentinel Tech Holding (que mantém um banco de dados de pedófilos condenados):

Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons
Redes socias são muito parecidas com as comunidades da vida real, que são, na sua maioria, compostas de pessoas boas que estão ali por boas razões

O relatório afirma ainda que os sistemas disponíveis para verificação de idade e identidade não funcionam, assim como não oferecem ajuda substancial na proteção de menores na Internet.

Bom, adorei o fato da força-tarefa ter sido criada pela pressão dos procuradores-gerais, em especial do Procurador-Geral de Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal (alguém citou os infames TACs?). Blumenthal acusou as redes de relacionamento social de facilitarem a atividade de pedófilos, discurso muito parecido com o do senador Magno Malta (PR-ES). E como se diz na terra natal de George W. Bush (como eu já estou saudades do Bush), o lugar mais perigoso para se estar em Connecticut é entre Blumenthal e uma câmera de TV. E pronto, temos uma histeria de pedofilia em curso, bastando apenas um acesso à mídia e dados duvidosos. Pois falando em dados duvidosos, acompanha a minha contabilidade (copyright Magno Malta):

1. Em 5 de novembro de 2008 sai uma notícia com o título “CPI recebe dados sobre álbuns do Orkut suspeitos de pedofilia“, falando de 18.500 álbuns fechados suspeitos de pedofilia;
2. No dia seguinte, 6, a manchete é auto-explicativa: “Magno Malta quer identificar 7 mil pedófilos que agem no Orkut“, de um dia para outro, uma queda de 62,16% no número de suspeitos e
3. No fim do mês, dia 26, a manchete é “PF identificou 117 pedófilos com base em perfis do Orkut“. Do dia 6 para o dia 26, o número de suspeitos cai 98,32% e do dia 5 para o dia 26, caiu 99,36%.

E daí que haja uma condenação, blablablá, o número cairá ainda mais e se compararmos com as dezenas de milhões de usuários do Orkut, como o Caribé já fez, os números tornam-se totalmente desprezíveis.

Eu sempre desconfiei desta história de onda de pedofilia para atochar umas leis que mais parecem terem saídos da cabeça totalmente depravada de Mao Tse-Tung. Agora, há a prova científica contra Magno Maltas, Azeredos e Blumenthals da vida.

P.S.: O relatório, até o momento desta postagem, só foi citado em míseros três portais de notícias, nenhum deles relevantes; dois portais brasileiros e um português.

Clay Shirky at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Internet technology trend watcher, researcher, and author, Clay Shirky recently spoke about his book “Here Comes Everybody” at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Here is his presentation along with two others: one the keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo, an technology industry conference and the other his Ted Talk.

“We are living through the biggest increase in human expression in human history.”
-Clay Shirky

During the presentation, Shirky points out that the web helps solve the problems of collaboration:

5 People-10 Connections
10 People-45 Connections
15 People-105 Connections

“Makes the links very, very easy to produce. Relatively ad-hoc. Relatively light weight”

Clay Shirky “Where Do You People Find the Time” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York (Part I)

Clay Shirky “Where Do You People Find the Time” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York (Part II)

Clay Shirky at TED: Institutions vs. Collaboration

Making public media future-relevant: everyone has a piece of the puzzle

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard has a paper out on the future of public broadcasting (download the PDF). Among the trends and forecasts, authors Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark note “a few participatory media public broadcasting experiments gesture to a future in which audiences are treated as both trusted partners and engaged citizens.” One of these experiments is Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Network, whose members serve as sources, story suggesters, brainstorming allies, and volunteer interviewees for reporters. The other is the World Without Oil game:

“A web-based project of ITVS’s Independent Lens, World Without Oil not only demonstrated the potential of online role-playing games to spark participation around social issues, but foreshadowed public reactions to our current oil price crunch. More than 1900 gamers from 40-plus countries collaboratively imagined their reactions to a simulated 8-month energy crisis through submissions via blogs, Flickr, YouTube, and podcasts. Participants virtually carpooled and bought bikes, moved out of transportation-poor suburbs, and started backyard gardens—and then reported corresponding changes in their real lives.”

The report summarizes: “Such immersive, authentic engagement with both audiences and issues is what is needed to ensure public broadcasters’ relevance in an ever-more participatory media universe.” One exciting idea: Local stations could change what they define as their core task, becoming more like an electronic public library for the
community. Except that the “library” focuses on futures (and the local actions that choose among them) rather than the past? That’s a value proposition that’s relevant to our time.  Photo by Will Survive via Flickr.

Chris Soghoian describes how he bumped up against Google’s questionable ad-sense trademark enforcement policies.

Soghoian’s story is troubling and it exposes yet another way in which the structure of web traffic has positioned Google as a de-facto arbiter of all kinds of legal speech, political salience, and good taste. More broadly, it demonstrates how key actors and institutions exercise influence in the networked public sphere.

For more on that idea, check out Matthew Hindman’s research. In his new book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Hindman makes a related argument in a number of different ways, not the least of which is his compelling notion of “Googlearchy.” I disagree with Matt on a number of substantive points, but the significance of his analysis is undeniable. His work complements more established models for thinking about how social structure circumscribes certain kinds of thought and action.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Internet is that powerful forms of social order & status originate in seemingly innocuous expressions of aggregated opinions (e.g. the PageRank algorithm). Hindman’s work takes on the notion that such aggregated opinions are somehow equivalent to a utopian radical democracy or a free market of ideas.

In this sense, his argument parallels the work of economic sociologists, many of whom have analyzed the importance of the “embeddedness” of economic markets. Simply put, the thesis behind the concept of embeddedness is that the sorts of decentralized, disaggregated behaviors that occur in market-like settings are always an extension of the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. It’s a relatively simple idea, but it violates one of the core assumptions of neo-classical economic theory: that markets are a free and accurate expression of individual actors expressing rational preferences for the enhancement of their own wealth and welfare.

Sociologists such as Viviana Zelizer have shown how the economists’ assumptions break down in markets for deeply valued cultural goods such as intimacy and adoption. More recently, a number of scholars (including Marion Fourcade – a professor of mine at Berkeley) have taken up the idea that financial markets are also expressions of (economists’) cultural preferences and not merely an aggregated form of pure rationality.

Considering Hindman’s work and the continuing emergence of experiences like Soghoian’s, I think there’s a case to be made that research on the embeddedness of search technology might be a promising topic. Granted, I don’t know if there are many “neo-classical” information theorists out there that would be willing to defend the straw-man position that search technology serves up knowledge in a pure and rational form.

Out of a total of about 90 members, twenty are based in Chennai, and of the twenty members seven attended the meeting at Chennai held at the office of Kalyaan Kumar Gogineni, who hosted the meeting.

The meeting was informal, we discussed about Chapter Development after an in depth introduction about ISOC.

During the meeting we watched Bill Graham’s presentation on Internet Governance and Jonathan Zittrain’s Talk at the Berkman Center, Harvard, delivered a short time before the launch of his Book “The Future of Internet and How to Stop It“

Internet censorship continues around the world

Internet censorship continues not just in autocratic nations such as North Korea, Iran, Syria and China, where it is becoming more sophisticated, but in more liberal countries, including South Korea, India and Singapore.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University hopes to put a foot down – dressing down censorship in addition to Web site filtering and government surveillance in violation of international standards. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined in.

The three companies along with the center and a coalition of human rights groups, academics and investment firms launched the Global Network Initiative.

“From the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, companies in the information and communications industries face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies that require censorship and disclosure of personal information in ways that conflict with internationally recognized human rights laws and standards,” the group said.

The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society provides “legal assistance, education, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media.”

The website contains a wealth of information, including a regularly updated blog that handles current issues surrounding citizen media, current and relevant court cases, and practical assistance in matching citizens with lawyers should their rights be challenged.  The Citizen Media Law Project’s mission statement states:

We seek to build a community of lawyers, academics, journalists, and others who are interested in facilitating citizen participation in online media and in protecting the legal rights of those engaged in speech on the Internet.

The Citizen Media Law Project is affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Center for Citizen Media.  It is financially supported by the Knight Foundation.

“The ability to pool the knowledge of millions (if not billions) of users in a self-organizing fashion demonstrates how mass collaboration is turning the new Web into something not completely unlike a global brain…Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service where the simple activity of tagging and storing web links becomes the basis for learning new things and making connections to new people.  “The actual database”, he says, “represents crystallized attention – what people are looking at, and what they’re trying to remember”

“There was a period of time where cinema was a very technical art.  You practically had to be an engineer just to run a camera.”  As the art form evolved, directors stepped up to become story tellers who were less and less preoccupied with cinematic engineering and more concerned with crafting rich and engaging experiences.  “I think something like that is happening on the web today…”

“The Internet is becoming a giant computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure for creativity, participation, sharing, and self-organization.” -Wikinomics

I highly recommend – if you’re becoming bogged down with research or things like that and having a hard time keeping track of it, getting equipped with Google Reader or ShareThis.  Sharethis is particularly dope cause you can just embedd it into Firefox.

This is important too – however.  This woman at Northwestern University is doing research on “link-literacy”.

Scholar Lokman Tsui comments on it as well here:

A lot of people just cannot seem to distinguish bad from good links – there is a gap in ‘link literacy’. Now if some people already have trouble using links, can you imagine them using social tagging or other more sophisticated tools? Tools by themselves are not enough to empower people. Left without education, literacy and expertise, the rich will only get richer and the poor only .. poorer.

On a different note.

MIT OpenCourseWare

There is nothing more important than the safety of our children. There is also nothing more important than the education, creativity and innovation that has been, and can still further be, unleashed and harnessed with suitably crafted policies, and incentives, focused on the issues surrounding their use of digital media and other digital technologies, whether such policies and incentives come from parents, teachers, librarians, governments, lawmakers, or social media or other Internet-focused companies. These are some of the key subjects covered in Born Digital. But to begin to grapple with these issues, as the authors inform us, we must first understand Digital Natives.

The term “Digital Natives” is used, generally,to refer to people born after 1980. This book is about the issues surrounding Digital Natives and their intensive use of digital media and other digital technologies. They were born into a world that was already pervasively digital. Assuming they were born into an advanced industrial economy – and are not the ones at the low end of the participation or technological gap, they did not transition from an analog world to a digital world as most of us have.

The book is especially focused on the issues surrounding Digital Natives’ intensive use of the Internet and online social networks (like Facebook and MySpace) and other digital tools and media they use on a daily basis (such as instant messaging, texting, online chat rooms, video games, YouTube, etc.). We are no longer living in an analog world. The world – especially as experienced from the viewpoint children and young adults who have access to these technologies – is now – but more importantly has been for them since they were born – digital. They were born digital. We had better learn to understand this age group (or cohort) to deal with it effectively and to craft policies and incentives that maintain and foster the good aspects of these technologies, while minimizing their risks – or at least not arrest the positive aspects of their use and involvement with ill-suited policies based on fear.

The organization of the book is excellent. It was organized tightly into coherent chapters dealing with a single overarching category or theme. It then elucidated some of the more pressing issues in each category or theme, and then provided specific guidance and suggestions to parents, teachers, lawmakers, librarians, etc.

Being an attorney who was deeply interested during and immediately after law school in what was called at the time “Internet law” and intellectual property issues implicated by activities on the Internet, only to lose interest after the dot-com bubble burst, this book has reignited my interest in studying the technical, social, and legal aspects of the Internet.

Born Digital has also spurred me to dive deeper and study in more depth social media and online social networks, as well as intellectual property law as applied to the increasingly digitized information environment or ecosphere. To this end, besides an excellent book covering Digital Natives and the issues they and we face as their parents, teachers, lawmakers, librarians, and as members of society, I also commend the authors for the excellent notes and bibliography. I look forward to reading some of the key works that the authors of Born Digital found most helpful in their research and analysis and exploring these issues further.

I have recommend it to my friends in the technology sphere as well as my friends who are parents and who have children who are at the age where they are beginning to use the Internet and other digital technologies, such as cell phones, or video games, intensively. I also highly recommend it to teachers, educators, counselors, librarians, law enforcement officers, lawmakers, policy-makers, or anyone interested these issues.

This is kind of a shot in the dark, but the project I work on at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University is hiring RA’s.

The lead researcher on the project is Professor Yochai Benkler

Read the full job posting and contact me if you have questions

You don’t need to be a Harvard affiliate to get the position, but you do need to be able to attend regular meetings in Cambridge, MA between now and mid-December. Details are in the posting.