Review of "Reinventing Knowledge" by McNeely and Wolverton – includes an intriguing parallel between the "society of letters" that characterized scholarly discourse in the 1600s and the world of the web. (Stephenson got there first…)
Excellent piece from Russell Morse on the political awakening of the hip hop generation: "It used to be the only portraits you saw on the chests of young people were Scarface and Tupac. Now the image on the glittery, XXXL t-shirts you see on the smiling and optimistic faces of the Hip Hop generation is a presidential candidate."
I’ve been researching stories that help demonstrate how the Internet has helped people make connections across cultural boundaries… and the ways in which it’s fallen short of its potential to do so. One of the stories that’s fascinated me is the story of how Filipino singer Arnel Pineda became the new lead singer of US rock band, Journey. For those who missed my post earlier this year, or the interview with Charles Osgood on CBS Sunday morning, the story goes like this:
While Pineda was already well known in Asia from his performances in Hong Kong and singing contests in the Philippines, You Tube displayed his gifts to a much wider audience. Specifically, he caught the attention of Neil Schoen, the founding guitarist of Journey, one of the bands The Zoo regularly covered.
Journey reached the peak of its popularity in the early 1980s, with a succession of chart-topping hits sung by Steve Perry, whose high, clear tenor gave the band it’s signature sound. Perry left the band for a solo career in 1986, returned for a reunion in 1996 and left the band for good 2007.
Finding a new frontman has been difficult – the songs Perry is remembered for are technically challenging and stretch the vocal range of many talented singers. And Journey’s fans, like those of many classic rock bands, are looking for performances that honor the original recordings, not a novel interpretation of the classics.
So Schoen was two days into a restless perusal of YouTube, watching videos of Journey cover bands, when he discovered Pineda’s uncanny vocal talents. Schoen emailed Gomez, who’d posted the video, and their email exchange – which Pineda initially dismissed as a prank – turned into an invitation to audition for the band. Pineda is now the frontman of Journey on a concert tour through the US, a tour that’s been warmly received by fans, who compare Pineda’s vocals and energy favorably to Perry’s.
I’m interested in the story because it seems like a realization of the highest aspirations some of us had for the internet when it entered the public consciousness in 1994. Here was a space that promised a common ground, a level playing field for people around the world to share their ideas and talents. (Needless to say, it’s never been truly level, as barriers of language, education and access make it likely that many geniuses living in rural Africa will go undiscovered.) The internet hints at a truly globalized world, one where the best person for the job has a chance at it, no matter what her accident of birth; a world where the best idea, invention or performance might win out despite the origins of its author.
I’ve been thinking about using Pineda’s story as a contrast to other, less hopeful videos that show how difficult it is to understand the needs, motivations and worldview of the person on the other side of the screen. For me, the paradigmatic video about disconnection in a connected age is the “Nigerian Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the video, a pair of young Nigerian men perform Monty Python’s Dead Parrot Sketch. They’re performing because they believe they’re auditioning for a drama scholarship – instead they’re performing for the pleasure of Mike Berry, a “scambaiter” who spends his free time responding to 419 scammers, encouraging them to humiliate themselves and posting documentation on his website, 419eater.com. Some consider scambaiting an effective and amusing way to combat internet abuse and attempted fraud. Others wonder whether “some of the more derogatory baits say something about our darker selves, laying bare the divide between white and black, rich and poor, First World and Third?”
In thinking about how to frame a constrast between the videos, the Dead Parrot one struck me as more troublesome. It’s clear that email scams are pervasive and damaging, not just to the people cheated by them but to the economies of African nations, who now have difficulties persuading overseas business partners to enter into legitimate partnerships. While the jocular abuse on sites like 419eater is disturbing, so is the gangsta stance associated with celebrations of 419 in Nigerian culture in songs like “419 State of Mind“. The more I look at the phenomenon of scambaiting, the harder time I have feeling comfortable with the motives of anyone involved with the encounter.
The more I read about Pineda’s story, the more I realize that this story is complicated as well. One aspect I’d never bother to consider was the challenges Pineda might have had in getting a visa to audition in the US. There’s an intriguing forwarded email, posted on Filipino-community blogs like Flipland, evidently authored by a US embassy staffer at the visa section in Manila. The anonymous author tells the story of hearing The Zoo in a Manila club and being amazed by Pineda’s abilities. A week later, the author found himself sitting next to an immigration officer, who turned to him bemusedly, midway through interviewing a “nutjob” who wants to go to America so he can audition for Journey. The author offered to take the case, with some skepticism: “Given the malarkey you get at a Manila NIV window, this story only got points for being original. He produced some flimsy emails and letters, etc.” So he asked Pineda to prove his bonafides by belting out “Wheel in the Sky”. The author closes his story:
I said, “Look sir, there isn’t a person in this Embassy who would believe that story– going to try out for Journey!– not a soul would believe that. Except for me. I saw you sing last Friday and I couldn’t shut up about how your vocals were perfect Steve Perry.
So I tell you what. I’m giving you that visa. You’re going to try out. And you’re going to make it….”
For me, the story is a reminder of how fragile a success like Pineda’s actually is. It isn’t enough to be able to emulate Steve Perry and capture the attention of an eighties guitar god – you’ve also got to survive an encounter with (understandably) skeptical and suspicious US government bureaucrat. Pineda’s good fortune raises the spectre of a Srinivasa Ramanujan never able to leave his clerk’s job the Madras Port Trust office to join G.H. Hardy at Cambridge, helping push the boundaries of number theory.
(Not that Ramanujan’s story is an uncomplicated one, either. His intuitive working methods caused clashes with some of his British colleagues, and the difficulty of maintaining a Hindu vegetarian diet during WWI Britain might have contributed to his early death from hepatic amoebiasis. )
Filipino blogger and journalist Benito “Sunny” Vergara has a provocative and thoughtful set of columns in AsianWeek on Pineda’s improbable story. (Please see “Tongues like Parrots“, “The Man Can Sing Anything”, and “It’s Steve and It’s Not Steve“.) One column focuses on the idea of “plakado”, which Vergara defines as “a compliment given to bands that can unerringly reproduce what is heard on the plaka, or vinyl record.” (In an earlier post, he refers to a longer phrase – “plakadong-plakado”.) This highly accurate mimicry may be related to the popularity of karaoke machines that score performances based on their technical accuracy, their similarity to the recorded version. (If you’ve played “Rock Band”, this experience will be familiar to you.) With truly plakado singers, it’s as if you can close your eyes and imagine you’re listening to the original performer. Vergara observes:
This act of closing one’s eyes is important. It signals a kind of erasure of cultural difference: that these Filipino musicians are, in a sense, aurally alienated from the products of their musical labor, so that they act as substitutes or copies of “the real thing.” And part of the pleasure in consumption of this technical mastery is that the audience would open its eyes, as it were, and discover, to its surprise, its music uncannily reproduced by the Third World.
In a later piece, Vergara wonders whether Pineda has to erase his cultural difference (not to mention a difference in age and in experience) to experience his new life:
Do the guys hang out with him after work? What do they talk about — are they all friendly, or are the conversations sometimes awkward? Does he tell them stories about how he was a big Journey fan back in the day? Do the other band members reminisce about Steve, then remember he’s not there anymore?…
Does he feel lonely? Does he get homesick? Does he think about his former bandmates, his family, his people, his homeland, thousands of miles away? Does he get to sneak out, away from the tour bus, and find the nearest Filipino restaurant? Does he get tired of the American food on tour, and long for tapsilog in the mornings?
In other words, is it possible to become “the ultimate Overseas Filipino Worker” without becoming a little – or a lot – less Filipino? A version of the question applies to everyone who’s ever lived and worked within another culture – how does the experience of encountering another culture, living in another world, change you? Are you the same person after the experience? Is the reward – fiscal or otherwise – worth the price?
Commenters on Vergara’s post point out that it’s Pineda’s presence on stage – bold, striding, playful – that is impressing the fans as much as his vocal qualities. They’re not closing their eyes and imagining Steve Perry – they’re reveling in the dislocation of hearing a band sound just like they did 25 years earlier, despite faces full of wrinkles and an energetic Filipino frontman. But I think Vergara’s right to be worried – watching the interview on CBS, Pineda looks nervous… not necessarily unhappy, but clearly still adjusting to the profoundly weird developments in his life.
The internet – more than the telegraph, telephone, radio or television – has the potential to bring the rest of the world closer to us, to help us cross cultural boundaries quickly, casually, accidently. But the human work of bridging cultural distance hasn’t gotten any easier, and it’s still a challenge to understand the world we encounter. We’ve got a long way to go before the internet helps a British scambaiter empathize with a Nigerian spammer, or a Nigerian scam artist with an American victim. Maybe a Filipino balladeer is just the man to lead us as in bridging this disconnect.
“But enough about me. What do you think about me?”
That old joke was my response to the idea that Global Voices might choose to cover the 2008 US Presidential election. When Rebecca and I began discussing the Global Voices project in 2004, one of our motivations was a belief that US media paid too much attention to stories in the US and not enough to international, especially developing world, news.
Fortunately, I got voted down and Global Voices partnered with Reuters to produce Voices without Votes, a blog aggregator that portrays the US elections through the eyes of individuals around the world. There’s no doubt that there’s widespread interest in the US elections in many corners of the world and a desire to understand the decisionmaking that American voters are going through in our apparently perpetual election process.
Al Jazeera wanted to give their hundreds of millions of viewers a slightly different perspective on the convention, covering not only the speeches in the convention center and stadium, but watching the speeches on television with average Americans in a suburban Colorado town. After some investigation, they chose Golden, Colorado, the home of Coors Brewing and of 18,000 opinionated and vocal citizens, a gold-rush town 14 miles west of Denver.
Initial plans for Al Jazeera’s presence in Golden included broadcasting from a (pork-free) barbecue at City Manager Mike Bestor’s house. After extensive local debate, Bestor revoked the invitation, citing the concerns about perceived slights to the local veteran’s community.
(Update: Golden, Colorado mayor Jacob Smith clarifies that the barbecue was moved to another house, where it went off without a hitch. Please see his comment below.)
While no longer invited for barbecue, the Al Jazeera team has been embraced by the owner of the Buffalo Rose bar and roadhouse, Murray Martinez, who has invited them to broadcast from a corner of his establishment. This decision has been controversial in Golden, gathering a group of protesters across the street from the Buffalo Rose and motivating Martinez to post a copy of the First Amendment to the US constitution outside the bar.
It’s worth watching the above video, produced by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, as well as reading his written piece for the Post. The article sounds as if a major confrontation is underway, reporting a truce from three biker gangs so that they can protest Jazeera’s presence at the bar. The video’s significantly more lighthearted, showing a wide range of Golden’s citizens, including a pro-Jazeera (or at least, pro-welcoming international reporters) citizen riding a six-foot tall Penny Farthing, as well as a wide range of angry people wielding air horns.
Al Jazeera wanted to film in Golden because they wanted to show their viewers how the election is viewed in different American communities. The protesters for and against the network’s presence, as well as the Buffalo Rose customers who simply appear bemused by all the attention, are probably a pretty good representations of the mixed feelings many US communities have about international attention to a domestic election. (Remember the Guardian’s plan to have readers around the world write to undecided Clark County, Ohio voters in the 2004 election? That went well.) While I’m embarrased that some of the citizens of Golden would demonstrate agains the right of a network to report news, I’m hopeful that the coverage will include some of the citizens who were excited about welcoming international perspectives as well.
By the way, it looks like an excellent night to be at the Buff Buffalo Rose, as the locals evidently call it – it’s ladies night, and there are $4 pitchers of Coors Light for the fellas. And death metal band Grimoire starts playing at 9pm, right after Obama’s speech. Bet they’ve thought very little about the possibility of building their Qatari fanbase.
(Smith clarifies that, whatever visiting journalists think, “I’ve never heard it called the Buff. It’s either the Buffalo Rose or the Rose, and I have a great deal of respect for Murray (one of the owners) and his staff for being so stalwart. They never blinked.” Thanks for weighing in, Mr. Mayor, and thanks for your willingness to engage with these issues.)
Two good friends have taken the blogosphere to task for its failures during the conflict. Rather than rise to the defense of Georgian, Russian, Ossetian and global bloggers, I wanted to take a look at their critiques and at the phenomenon of citizen media during the conflict and at the emergence of one of the interesting epiphenomena of citizen media: citizen propaganda.
Joshua Foust, a Central Asia analyst who covers Afghan blogs for Global Voices, takes US political blogs to task for, basically, not being very interesting. He notes that “bloggers who normally provide worthwhile insight into conflict provided curiously generic analysis or links to the same”. Most blogs, even those that consistently offer useful analysis, “were still linking to the same narrow set of news sources —sources that offered little more than thin quotes from government officials.” He’s particularly concerned that US bloggers weren’t linking to Georgian and Russian blogs, even though some bloggers were writing in English, and Global Voices was working to round up posts from the region.
I thought of Foust’s critique while listening to journalist David Remnick’s conversation with Bob Garfield on On the Media. Remnick drew a distinction between reporting on the Ossetian war, which he thought was generally good, and commentary, which he thought was pretty poor. His worry was that commentators who don’t know the region well ended up reaching for analogies that might not be applicable: “When you have people who have never been to that region, who’ve probably maybe been to Moscow once in their life, who, God knows, have never been to Georgia or South Ossetia or North Ossetia, never have experienced this and never studied the history of these conflicts. And so, they reach for the first set of adjectives in the thesaurus, ‘thundering tanks’ and all the rest, and the first set of historical analogies that they can possibly reach.”
This problem with analogies is one that occurs in both mainstream and citizen media, in my experience. Early analysis of post-election violence in Kenya made inappropriate analogies to genocide in Rwanda, anticipating uncontrolled, systemic violence that (thankfully) didn’t come to pass in Kenya. It’s probably fair to wag fingers at both bloggers and commentators for comparing Ossetia to the end of the Prague Spring in 1968, but it’s also understandable that bloggers who don’t know the situation well would reach for what appeared to be an appropriate analogy. But Foust’s criticism is on the mark – it only makes sense to look for bloggers in the region and get their perspectives as well.
Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who’s fascinated with both citizen media and the different faces of cyberwar, is frustrated by a different form of blogger shortcomings: the absence of citizen war reporting in Ossetia. Morozov acknowledges that Ossetia is pretty far off the beaten path and that it may not be fair to expect there to be many bloggers in the region: “It would be sublimely naive – and condescending – to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection.” I’d add that South Ossetia is a region with a very small population – less than 100,000 people in total – and that the population skews high in age, as many young people have left the region, seeking opportunity elsewhere.
Besides the scarcity of blog accounts from the ground, Morozov is concerned with their veracity and reliability: “Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.” On the one hand, one could dismiss Morozov’s expectations as unrealistic… as I did in an email to him, where I pointed out that if tanks rolled into my hometown of Pittsfield, MA (with a population similar to that of Tskhinvali) there wouldn’t be very many local bloggers with established reputations to follow, despite a significantly less serious digital divide.
On the other hand, Morozov is pointing to a very real problem with blogs focused on Ossetia. There’s a wealth of blogs that claim to give eyewitness reports of the conflict, and these eyewitness reports tend to strongly favor one interpretation of events over another. My friend and colleague Ivan Sigal pointed me to OSRadio, a blog that promotes Ossetian independence in English, and features reports from television cameraman Algis Mikulskis. His accounts are profoundly anti-Georgian and include a blurry mess of first person observation, second-hand recounting of journalist’s war stories, and the repetition of rumor… all legitimated by the fact that the correspondent is on the ground in the warzone. How reliable is Mikulskis? How biased towards one interpretation or another of events on the ground is he? These are questions that have to come into play when considering interpretation of events on the ground. Morozov tells us, “the few blogging accounts I did find enlightening were almost exclusively those written by people I had met on earlier trips to Georgia – and whom I trusted. ”
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Julia Ioffe finds Russian journalists writing on their LiveJournals, offering opinions and perspectives that are far more extreme than what they’d offer on air or in print. She cites Russian journalist Dmitry Steshin, blogging as “Krig42″, pledging to stay up all night posting his videos of Tskhinvali as “a personal response to the base claims of Human Rights Watch. These fuckers thought there weren’t enough casualties in Tskhinvali.” These accounts, she tells us, are desperately sought out by Russian readers: “Combine a culture already suspicious of all things political with the natural, magnifying outlet of the free-for-all blogosphere, and you get Russian bloggers searching desperately for the necessarily elusive key to the riddle of this war.”
Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in contemporary conflict: the world of citizen propaganda. We expect – or should expect – that the governments of Russia, Georgia and Ossetia would all be seeking rhetorical advantage in the conflict. Remnick, speaking on On the Media, observes that Sakashvili’s proficency in English gives him a decisive advantage in the US media over his Russian-speaking rivals; the framing of the conflict in Cold War terms in western media further this advantage as well. What may be less expected is that citizen media accounts – blogs of eyewitnesses, journalists writing in a personal capacity, the writings of people who know and are passionate about the region – are actively engaged in rhetorical warfare as well. Georgian, Russian and Ossetian bloggers – whether off-duty journalists or ordinary citizens – all want the suffering of their group acknowledged on a global stage and are all presenting the conflict from their personal perspectives. These perspectives sometimes include troubling eyewitness accounts, and sometimes include amplification of rumors, usually ones that support that author’s interpretive frame.
It’s probably naive to expect citizen accounts of a war zone to be less politically biased than those from professional media, but in a situation where one believes professional media to be part of a propaganda strategy, it’s understandable that readers would turn to bloggers for an “unfiltered view” of events on the ground. Interpreting these views – as Morozov observed – involves making judgement calls about trust, reliability and bias… much as reading professional media does, when one suspects that analysis is biased and not neutrally framed.
What’s most interesting to me is the ways in which citizens have become actively involved in these propaganda battles. The “cyberwar” so breathlessly described by many professional journalists is little more than one set of propagandists trying to make the other side’s propaganda inaccessible. Unlike in the Russian/Estonian “cyberwar”, where denial of service attacks made key government services inaccessible, most of the attacks in this conflict are oriented more at defacing Georgian or Russian websites and discussion boards, or simply making them unreachable. (See “Misunderstanding Cyberwar“.)
These rhetorical battles are springing up in a variety of online spaces, not just blogs and message boards. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Morozov reports about a controversy brewing over a segment on Fox News, posted on YouTube. Shepard Smith interviewed an Ossetian woman and her aunt, who blamed the violence squarely on Georgian forces, thanking Russian forces for their intervention. (Morozov implies that Smith is attempting to silence the women – I disagree with that characterization, and invite you to watch the video and draw your own conclusions.) On YouTube, the video has generated passionate comment threads, and as Morozov reports, has launched speculation that YouTube has been supressing traffic statistics on the video to diminish its visibility.
Russians aren’t the first to turn to YouTube to make their case for their nation’s actions. During the Lhasa riots, a number of Chinese videographers produced montages explaining their view that Tibet was an inseperable part of China, or challenging what they perceived as Western media bias in coverage of the riots. These videos were in English, intended to persuade a non-Chinese audience to either change their views or acknowledge another point of view. It’s easy to dismiss the presence of such user-generated propaganda as the result of government initiatives like the “fifty cent party” (wumaodang), a team of online commentators paid to put forth pro-Party views on the Chinese internet. But while David Bandurski’s done a great job documenting Chinese-language commenting that appears to be organized by the Chinese Cultural Ministry, there’s no indication that efforts like anti-cnn.com or the web videos referenced above are anything other than citizen propaganda. (Imagethief has an excellent piece looking at “angry Chinese youth” and reminding us that there’s a difference between being passionate and nationalistic and being brainwashed.)
Even more than the Lhasa riots, the conflict in Ossetia is tailor-made for citizen propaganda. Analysts in the US – removed from the conflict both in distance and knowledge – are likely to rely on existing frames that may not represent events well or accurately. Citizens of Russia and Georgia are well aware that international opinion matters in the resolution of these events and turn to citizen media tools to make their cases. Their audiences, perceiving that professional media is biased against their interpretation, may place more credence on “eyewitness accounts” than they would if not already frustrated by mainstream accounts. Reading anything in these circumstances becomes a challenging task, navigating the stated and unstated agendas of anyone who’s speaking, discounting and revaluing all opinions based perceived biases.
It’s a dangerous practice to start one’s day with BoingBoing – it’s far too easy to lose a couple of hours exploring a thread touched on in one of the fantastic foursome’s excellent posts. Mark Frauenfelder points to an excellent article in this month’s Harpers by Joshuah Bearman, about champions of “golden age” arcade games, the upright consoles like Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong that were ubiquitous in my 1980s childhood.
A rare breed of late-thirties and forty-something obsessives have mastered these games, and Bearman’s article follows Billy Mitchell, who holds the record for a “perfect” game of Pac-Man – every dot, every ghost, every fruit for 256 levels on the first man… and his nemesis, Abdner Bancroft Ashman, whose obsession focuses on the game’s successor, Ms. Pac-Man. The challenge of the games turns out to be somewhat different – Pac-Man is pre-programmed and is beaten by mastering a set of patterns that work on different levels, while Ms. Pac-Man is somewhat random, and a player needs to develop a strategy on each level based on the initial configurations. There’s a fixed high score to Pac-Man – 3,333,360 points – while Ms. Pac-Man includes the intriguing possibility that scores could increase beyond today’s known highest scores. It’s a beautiful little essay, and a wonderful stroll through the past for those of us who hoarded our quarters as children, waiting to discover something strange and amazing as we stared into these screens.
It sounds like Jason McIntosh spent much of his childhood wondering about the mysteries of the arcade in much this way. He’s got a wonderful (though too short) set of videocasts where he talks about his childhood while playing the games he remembers from those days. Above, he walks us through the (vicious, difficult) side-scrolling game Scramble while talking about taking ice skating lessons, his fascination with the arcade games in the skating rink and how staring at his skating instructor likely cemented his ideas of female beauty. It’s an honest, moving and lovely piece of storytelling, and I’m glad I stumbled on his podcasts while searching for information on Nibbler, a game mentioned in the Bearman story and the subject of Jmac’s third “arcade” podcast.
McIntosh and friends now produce a television show, podcast and blog called “The Gameshelf” which looks in depth at board, arcade and computer games. It looks to be video crack for folks like me who consider playing obscure board games with friends to be one of the best possible ways to spend an evening. Stepping away from the browser right now.
Once you’ve thrown an election, the preferred next step is to return matters to normalcy, dissipating the anger of those who opposed you by making your leadership appear routine and inevitable. That’s been Robert Mugabe’s plan in Zimbabwe. As talks about a power-sharing government have dragged on, Mugabe’s moved forward to reconvene parliament, on schedule, perhaps hoping to return to a state where legislators solemly rubber-stamp his legislation.
The opposition has opposed reconvening parliament, as it’s counter to the memorandum of understanding ZANU-PF and MDC signed in July, agreeing to hold talks on all matters of substance before resuming the process of governing. Some MDC (opposed to Mugabe, now the ruling party in parliament) parliamentarians have suggested boycotting Parliament rather than allowing it to become a rubber stamp, taking to the streets in acts of civil disobedience.
They’ve tried something quite different, and so far, it’s going surprisingly well. Parliament elected Lovemore Moyo, the chairman of MDC, as parliament speaker, a powerful position, by a significant majority. The speaker can control what gets debated and when, a powerful advantage, and may be able to keep certain legislation off the table – it augurs a new parliamentary climate for Mugabe, one where the Parliament can block his legislation, procedurally or substantively.
But that probably didn’t prepare Uncle Bob for the reception he got when he opened parliamentary session today. Appearing in full regalia, accompanied by a 21-gun salute and a military flyover, Mugabe was jeered and heckled during his address. MDC members refused to stand to acknowledge him, and as he spoke, they shouted him down as he made particularly egregious statements (declaring that all parties had been responsible for election violence, and that Zimbabwe had now “moved beyond it”, for instance).
The defiance, which included signing the MDC anthem “ZANU is Rotten”, is unprecedented in Zimbabwean politics. One of the surprising aspcts of Zimbabwean politics is the extent to which institutions and procedures are respected, even when outcomes have been rigged. It’s very unlikely that Mugabe expected this reception. As a commentator on BBC radio pointed out this morning, state-controlled television simply didn’t know what to do: should they cut away from the speech, disrespecting the (alleged) President) or should they continue to broadcast the dissent of MDC protesters?
Let’s assume that MDC’s defiance continues. The showdown is likely to be over budgetary issues, when Mugabe’s government tries to pass measures to continue paying salaries to security, army and intelligence forces. (A currency in free-fall requires frequent changes in budgeting.) If MDC refuses these budget changes – as they likely will – a showdown seems inevitable.
Two things to watch for:
- In a parliamentary system like Zimbabwe’s, the President can call for new elections at any time. If Mugabe concludes that he cannot govern with this parliament, it’s possible he’ll call new elections and attempt to intimidate opponents as he did in the run-off, hoping to regain parliamentary control. This would take some time, and the country would be effectively paralyzed in the interim.
- The parliamentary majority currently stands at 12 individuals. It’s possible that intimidation, detention or violence could erode this majority. I would expect to see systematic harrasment of MDC MPs, including arrests and possibly farm burnings or kidnappings. While I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, Zim watchers should pay close attention to any of these reports, as they might point to a pattern designed to create a majority without forming a new parliament.
Ulrike explains that this release is the preview of a quarterly magazine, focused on the idea of understanding what “we” means in the age of the internet, and what “we” are capable of, collaborating, competing, sharing and creating in different ways. The project was sparked by an observation from Henry Jenkins, commenting that YouTube really needs to be considered as WeTube, a place that isn’t just about individual creators but about the communities that lead to creation.
I’m working my way through the interviews in the magazine, which often include videos as well as transcripts with thinkers like Joi Ito, Dan Gillmor and Sugata Mitra. Ulrike was kind enough to interview me for the magazine about Global Voices while I was still recovering from eye surgery – if you’re interested in watching an interview with me as I squint uncomfortably, please check it out. But make sure you check out the whole thing – I think WE is onto something, and I think it’s great that they’re sharing their thinking with the whole web, customers and browsers alike.
A nice version of the "online access doesn't equal democratic revolution" argument from Antony Lowenstein – "The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than political revolution"
A nice version of the "online access doesn't equal democratic revolution" argument from Antony Lowenstein – "The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than political revolution"
Academic research, at its best, is about asking interesting questions and then designing experiments to answer them. One of the toughest challenges is designing experiments that are both possible and capable of answering the question at hand. The gap between the set of possible experiments and convincing experiments can sometimes be a vast one.
Just like the former US secretary of defense, you go to publication with the data you’ve got, not the data you’d like to have. And different data can lead to some very different conclusions, which helps explain why two competent groups of researchers can answer a question very differently.
I’m interested in questions of whether the internet, and specifically the rise of the read/write web, is broadening or narrowing the perspective of users. On the one hand, the rise of pervasive read/write media means that lots and lots of people are creating content – tens of millions by some counts – which should make a great wealth of perspectives and viewpoints available to the internet user. On the other hand, the structure of digital media means that it’s very easy to select just the media you’re interested in… a scenario Nicholas Negroponte termed “the Daily Me“.
Negroponte thought the Daily Me was an exciting thing. Cass Sunstein thought it was worrisome and wrote a book (twice!) about the reasons it troubled him. An academic debate continues to rage, pitting Sunstein the skeptic against a long list of cyberenthusiasts, including Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins.
This is the sort of question social scientists love to explore: thorny, complicated, but ultimately testable. All we’ve got to do is look at some people who spend a lot of time online and others who spend little and see who’s got a broader view of the world. Piece of cake. (The < SARCASM > tag may not be rendering properly in your browser.)
In October 2004, John Horrigan, Paul Resnick and Kelly Garrett released a paper called “The internet and democratic debate” as part of the Pew Internet and American Life project. They didn’t lack for confidence in their conclusions, subtitling the paper, “Wired Americans hear more points of view about candidates and key issues than other citizens. They are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree.”
The first sentence of the subtitle is experimentally true – that’s what their research demonstrates. The University of Michigan School of Information and Pew IALP conducted a study which surveyed 1500 Americans, some who used the internet to follow the news, some who didn’t. They asked participants whether they’d heard certain political arguments, in favor or against particular political candidates or sensitive issues. Out of a set of of eight arguments (four for a candidate or an issue, four against), broadband internet users had heard 5.5 arguments, while respondents as a whole had heard 5.2 and non-internet users had heard 5.0.
The tougher question is what significance we should attach to this result. The study sees a slightly larger gap in knowledge between people with strong political opinions and the average respondent (5.6 for strong Kerry supporters, 5.7 for strong Bush supporters) – perhaps people with strong political opinions get broadband so they can track politics more closely? Maybe rich people have more leisure time to hear political arguments and more money to buy broadband connectivity? It’s difficult to determine which variables are correlated without doing regression analysis, which attempts to isolate the inpact of each variable.
The Pew report promises that regression analysis has been done and that “Internet use did have an indepedent and positive effect on the number of statements people heard about the candidates.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the analysis, and it’s not clear whether internet use is a major or small factor, or whether other factors are better predictors of having heard a large set of arguments.
More difficult for me to swallow is the connection between awareness of political arguments and diversity of viewpoint. I don’t consume a lot of right-leaning US media (to my detrminent – I’d likely be a better informed citizen if I did), and I’d heard all the arguments on the left and right of the issues presented. I’d be willing to guess that I’d heard many of the “right” arguments from “left” media, sometimes in posts that began, “The right is trying to sell argument A – here’s why it’s wrong.” I’m tempted to conclude that Horrigan et al. found a correlation between internet usage and a more-informed citizenry – a correlation that may not be causal, as one can imagine people with a strong interest in being well-informed might seek out broadband internet, or might be wealthier and likelier to have broadband.
But concluding that internet users “are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree” seems like it’s blurring an important distinction between knowing the other side’s arguments, and having listened to someone make a persuasive case for them. But the distinction quickly points to the difficulty of determining how one would measure a broadened perspective. Is it knowledge of other opinions? A softening of one’s political stances to acommodate other positions? Are we looking for knowledge, for sympathy, or for some sort of change to demonstrate an ideological diversification that comes from online media?
Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence and John Sides are intrigued by the same question explored by Horrigan and friends. They approach the topic in a paper titled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation in American Politics“. The title invokes a related set of political science arguments – Habermas and others have argued that societies depend on a healthy public sphere where issues can be freely deliberated. Sunstein’s recent research on this topic focuses specifically on deliberation, where he makes the argument that deliberation with like-minded fellows can lead to increased political polarization. (My objections to the Pew study might be summarized by saying “knowing the other side’s key arguments isn’t the same thing as good-faith deliberation.”)
Habermas believes that deliberation is an essential ingredient in a healthy society. Sunstein worries that polarized deliberation can make society worse, and fears that the internet enables this sort of polarization. Farrell abd friends point to another complication – citing Diana Mutz, they see evidence that deliberation with people who hold other opinions can lead to increased tolerance but to decreased political participation.
To test whether internet users are more polarized than non-users and how this might affect their participation, Farrell and friends look at a different set of data, the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. This is a much larger sample set than the Pew data, covering 36,501 participants, but since the researchers didn’t control the questions asked (they were proposed by a large set of researchers) they’re forced to mine the data they have. 5,481 respondents reported reading blogs, and 3,948 listed one or more blog they read. The researchers coded the blogs and discovered that 2,312 respondents reported reading one of 476 political blogs.
Using this data, Farrell and crew classified blog readers as “carnivores” or “omnivores”. Omnivores consumed both left and right leaning blogs, while carnivores consumed only right or left. There are a lot of carnivores – 94%, according to their analysis. Unsurprisingly, folks who read a lot of left-leaning blogs tend to be politically left, and vice versa across the ideological divide. The researchers see a similar pattern in television news consumption – viewers of Fox News tend to be from the right, while viewers of other networks skew left.
This polarization in consumption appears to be correlated to political polarization. The carnivores are not only more polarized than the average citizen, but roughly as polarized as US senators, folks whose political success often depends on their strong, steady party alleigance. (The CCES political opinion data is designed to be comparable to the NOMINATE data collected on senatorial votes.)
The small group of omnivores – 6% of those who report reading political blogs – don’t seem to face the demobilization Mutz warns of. All the blog readers participate at a higher level than the average citizen, other than right-wing carnivores, who participate at roughly the same level as the average respondent.
Farrell and his collaborators conclude with some confidence that blog readers are significantly more politically involved and polarized than the average citizen, a result that might seem to be at odds with the Pew results. After all, Pew’s study concludes that wired Americans “are not using the internet to screen out ideas with which they disagree.” But if we ignore Pew’s interpretation and just focus on their data, the studies are more compatible. Both Pew and Farrell see internet users as better informed than average citizens. Farrell would likely tell you that some of these well-informed internet users are carnivorous blog readers, who are knowledgeable about political arguments through their voracious consumption of ideologically-compatible blogs.
My interest in these experiments has less to do with questions of political polarization and more to do with interest in international news. Are internet readers more inclined to look for information about other countries, since they’ve got such a wealth of information at their fingertips? Or are they more inclined towards information on their home countries, since they can easily choose to avoid international news. Extrapolating from Pew’s data suggests that wired readers might consult more sources and perhaps consume a more diverse diet; Farrell’s research points to a strong homophily effect, which suggests the possibility of geographic cocooning.
Guess I’ll need to design my own experiments using whatever data I can as a proxy to indirectly answer the question… and hope other researchers find other data and other methods to challenge my assumptions.
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