Year: 2013

Brief thoughts on Internet and class

dobry Uncategorized
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

Techno-Utopians exist because new technology almost always brings the promise of a new, hopefully better world. This is especially true of the disruptive technologies of the Internet, which seem to hold the opportunity to disrupt rapidly calcifying class structures throughout the world.

But why haven’t Internet technologies had more of a leveling effect? Are they really so different from everything that’s come before when it has become clear that the elites have co-opted largest share of technological gains to support their own position. Sure, there has been a shuffling of the elites with nerds-from-privileged-backgrounds rising and the standard bankers, dictators, and CEOs forced to make room. If all the Internet has done is allow the children of millionaires to become billionaires, there’s a lot more it can do to change society.

Part of the problem, the thing that turns our utopia into a potential distopia, is that traditional elites have been, by far, better positioned to take advantage of the new technologies than the people at the bottom of the social ladder – and these vested interests have used those technologies, not to level the playing field, but to shore up their own positions. The Internet held the promise of allowing people, regardless of class, to take control of their own destinies by forming new and strong networks to help them advance their own interests. It is fundamentally important to ask why that hasn’t happened yet (if it hasn’t), whether it can, and if so, how.

Suboptimal Mechanisms and False Dichotomies

dobry mppdigital assignments , , ,
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

What’d I read?

I’ve read quite a bit this week, but I think the following make the most sense together in the limited amount of time we have together:

Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked is a thorough and interesting examination of how the emerging technologies can empower oppressive governments too.

“The #freemona Perfect Storm: Dissent and the Networked Public Sphere” by Zeynep Tufekci draws from her experience helping her friend, journalist Mona El Tahawy, after she’d been arrested during the Egyptian protests at Tahir Square.

Evgeny Morozov’s afterward to his book, The Net Delusion, puts some of his arguments in more recent context and engages with the book’s detractors.

Was it any good?

I can say nothing ill about MacKinnon’s book.  She effectively marshals anecdotes, academic research, and a thorough grounding in political thought to show how the collusion between Internet business and all governments (not just the ones we think of as oppressive) is corrosive to liberty and democracy. Her emphasis on the problems of both business and governments is very useful and timely.

Tufekci’s fascinating article supplies us with invaluable food for thought: “When activists are arrested, in some cases, it is best to keep it quiet. In some cases it is best to kick up a big storm. Worst option, however, is to kick up a small storm which irritates the powerful, but without enough strength to nudge them to action.” Aside from that (which alone makes her article worth reading), the article describes and analyzes a great many themes (the problem of attention diffusion, the power of networks, the dangers of oppression and activism, even practical advice on how to mount a global campaign) cogently and effectively. The article isn’t naïve about the role technology played in helping Mona (after all, no one could spare her almost a day of what could only have been terror) while still asserting that it can play a valuable role.

Morozov’s lengthy-yet-highly-readable afterward hammers home the important and depressing point that we are not doing enough to notice and counter authoritarian suppression of dissent online. His statement that “while the temptation to do good with the help of the Internet has never been stronger, our understanding of how not to muck things up is still rudimentary” is immensely valuable.  His description of the disconnect between Silicon Valley’s lack of genuine awareness of social responsibility and the plaudits high tech companies receive is also well taken.

However, his attack on “Internet-centrism” seems like a straw man and almost fatally detracts from his valuable main point. Are there any serious writers out there who actually believe that the value of the Internet in politics can be discerned solely by looking at the Internet itself? Morozov himself knocks it down, saying “even the wildest cyber-utopians would agree that it was not the use of particular digital tools that ensured the timely departure of Egypt’s and Tunisia’s rulers” – so it isn’t entirely clear why he thinks he’s arguing against someone and his explanation is not particularly satisfying.

So?

Tufekci’s article was, as an anecdote, a great mirror to hold up to the odious (more so the more I think about it) story that Shirky’s otherwise good book opens with. Where Shirky’s hero managed to get a cell phone back from some lower-class girl, Tufekci uses similar means to actually (maybe) help someone who needs it. She even hammers home the important point that social media and technology may exacerbate existing disparities in prominence and social access (this is her point #5).

I agree with both MacKinnon and Morozov that the current situation with regard to Internet speech is less than optimal.  I might fall into Morozov’s camp with his pessimism, but his argumentation makes it hard to go along. I think its unfortunate that he falls into what Ivan Sigal today referred to in class as “the false dichotomy of cyber activism versus cyber skepticism.”

My only problem with MacKinnon’s vision is that her “Netizen-Centric” Internet requires that we leave notions of sovereignty behind in favor of empowered individuals operating in an ICANN-like multi-stakeholder body that will help make the web safe for free exchange of ideas. ICANN, however, is a mostly-technical body involved with relatively unobjectionable standards. I think that is why it is able to exist in the way it does (and even then, not without meddling by sovereign powers). If I’ve learned anything from my studies in global governance this year, its that sovereignty is a powerful notion and, by definition, most useful to the most powerful global actors that it is hard to see a world where subjective issues (like human rights) are given over to anything other than institutions created by and comprised of sovereign powers.

So I guess I am skeptical about the chances for things to get better without the backing of governmental authorities, but at the same time, I want to believe that we’ll find a way, just like MacKinnon says, to create a civilization in the Hobbessian “digital rainforest” we’ve found ourselves in.

It Still All Comes Down to Money . . . Also, Emails

dobry mppdigital assignments , , , , , ,
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

What’d I read?

In “Persuasion Points Online” Schlough, Koster, Barr and Davis show how Harry Reid was able to pull off an upset victory thanks to his campaigns embrace of the web. “Yes We Can” by political scientist Kevin Wallsten drills down on this topic further and explores one aspect of OFA’s media savvy – the important role that campaign staff (and bloggers) had in constructing and dismissing some of the viral videos that dominated news cycles in 2008.

The case study, “Obama versus Clinton: the YouTube Primary” by John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld, on the other hand, gives a birds-eye-view of the entire 2008 campaign season and reviews the various candidates strategies in light of the web. Another study, by Mikołaj Piskorski, Laura Winig, and Aaron Smith, “Barack Obama: Organizing for America 2.0”, showcases what is arguably the most effective use of the internet by a candidate for political office.

Zack Exley’s article, “The New Organizers” shows how OFA took a decades-old concept, community organizing, to new levels of effectiveness by harnessing the power of the web to enhance already-existing interpersonal connections. Seth Colter Walls then describes how a piece of that organization, namely VoteForChange.com works in “Neighbor To Neighbor”.

Was it any good?

The Piskorski, et al., case study is well researched and does a great job describing how well-planned the Obama ’08 campaign was. The authors also do a wonderful job projecting some of the things that actually did happen after the establishment of OFA – namely the use of the tools the campaign had developed to help push President Obama’s agenda. While the threatened break with the Democratic party didn’t happen, the analysis marshaled in the case study make a compelling statement about the strength of a permanent campaign/organization that takes advantage of one of the key features of the web – that nothing really ever goes away.

The other case study, by Deighton and Kornfeld, is equally well thought out but more striking because it effectively refutes the conventional wisdom that Clinton was less tech savvy than the Obama team. Both sides knew the importance of the Internet to the campaign, but OFA was still able to come out on top. I think the questions the case study raises about what exactly makes an effective Internet campaign are still worth asking and it will be a while before we sort everything out – at least a few more Presidential campaign cycles, anyway.

The Exley article does a good job of synthesizing the two main strengths of OFA – community organizing and technology. He effectively shows how they really can’t be considered each in a vacuum, but were so effective because they were blended. This may be one of the answers to the questions posed by the Deighton and Kornfeld case study.

So?

The big take away here is this: if the internet has enabled regular people to engage and create in new and interesting ways, it has just as much helped the rich and powerful to magnify their own messages. Schlough, et al., couldn’t have made the point more clearly in their article on Harry Reid’s latest campaign. It was the fact that he was willing to devote significant resources to the Internet side of the campaign that it was successful. The implication is that small-time candidates and regular people simply cannot affect the political process through the Internet anymore (if they ever could).

The Web has been institutionalized and co-opted by the wealthy and powerful, as just one more piece of the toolkit to maintain political power. As the Obama/Clinton case study shows, it isn’t a battle between a scrappy-yet-nerdy candidate and the establishment giant, rather it’s between two establishment figures trying to get an edge. The fact we see it the former way just shows how much we, as a people, love myth-making.

With that being said, the scope and capacity of the OFA organization was, indeed, astounding. As someone who volunteered and worked for campaigns in 2004, 2008, and 2012 for the Democratic Party, it was surprising to see how much changed between elections. It was also amazing to me (and is more fully described in our readings, like the Walls article) how the use of the web and of technology was far more advanced in the Democratic campaign than the Republican one. Even as late as 2012, I noticed that the Republican GOTV efforts were similar to what we had done in 2004 and our GOTV/Voter Protection processes were far more advanced and effective.

“old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy” [Clay Shirky]

dobry Uncategorized
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

What’d I read?

This week’s readings dealt with the disruptive impact of Internet technology on mainstream journalism, mostly newspapers.

First up, Nicco Mele’s The End of Big describes how the era of big newspaper conglomerates is essentially over. The problem, this chapter points out, is that professional, watchdog-style journalism is vitally important to accountability within our self-governing republic. Luckily, Mele describes several potential models for the future of professional journalism. [Full Disclosure: the author of this book is going to grade this blog post]

“Readings from News Execs” by Dave Winer makes the case that the people running large newspapers don’t understand how the internet will affect their business models. His metaphor of the cardboard box is very useful: if the box is the editorial structure and its filled with news, the execs think they can simply take that box and move it from the print space to the internet space, but that’s not going to work for many of the reasons the other articles in this section flesh out.

Patricia Gray’s article “Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth’s Findings Before They’re Published” in Wired fleshes out one alternative journalism model in which very wealthy special interests finances the kind of journalism that interests him. This is exactly the type of journalism we need to be done, but it raises serious questions about the motives of the parties involved.

Our friend Clay Shirky’s blog post on “Newspapers and the Unthinkable” is, like the Winer piece, an interesting description of newspapers’ “forward thinking” as really just attempts to preserve current business model. His framing shift is an important one – we shouldn’t worry about saving newspapers, rather about saving journalism and saving society. The business model can go, we need that content, though.

Peter Daou’s article introduces the notion of the Triangle, an interesting take on the relationship between internet journalists and “the old guard” of MSM and establishment figures. Daou convincingly argues that, in order to spread one’s message, political figures need to establish a triangular alliance, a unifying blogs, traditional media, and the political establishment.

Finally, Dean Starkman’s “Confidence Game” attempts to counter the Shirky-style future-of-news (FON) consensus by spelling out the important societal role of professional journalism. The article functions as an apologia for institutions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Was it any good?

Mele’s point that professional journalism is complicit in it’s own downfall is an especially powerful one. The average mainstream newspaper in the run up to the 2003 Iraq War and the 2008 Financial Crisis certainly “abdicat[ed] its traditional duties as objective, impartial newsgathering organization[].” Just as striking is the recurring theme of the vital importance of professional journalism in ensure that the people can hold their government accountable. It’s therefore a great relief that the chapter ends on a hopeful note, describing potential methods of protecting professional journalism while the newspaper business as we know it slowly collapses.

I wish Clay Shirky had answered the burning question of why someone would want to pirate Dave Barry’s columns. That being said, he did a  better job than Winer did of describing why newspaper owners’ opinions are so retrograde. His (and Mele’s) contention that print journalists’ work is used by everyone and is important is a valid one, while the related notion that “‘[y]ou’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model” puts the entire downfall of the newspaper industry, which supports such an important societal function, into context.

The Triangle article is great, but it fails to predict (and really, it should’ve) that the battle for Bush’s legacy does not end with him leaving office. In a world where there are so many voices so willing to keep harping on a theme, this is impossible. Things that used to be considered givens are now up for grabs again. So legacy is really a constant battle of revision in which the triangular alliance one has established to make policy or political headway has to be constantly stoked to defend the history you’ve made, apparently forever.

I actually agree with Starkman’s point (if you can find it) that journalists should be empowered and that good journalism involves knowing the issue you’re covering (borrowed from Rosen). That being said, his style is so snarky and off-putting, his straw men so obvious, and his conspiracy theory (that Jarvis and Shirky are out to get him and professional journalists) so weird that I wouldn’t blame anyone for stopping after section two.

So?

In another class, we’re discussing the importance of framing as a way of getting issues in front of the global community. In a nutshell, framing is a concept taken from cognitive psychology: we see the world through “frames” which are points of view loaded with moral and ethical constructs reaching deep into our basic ideas about how the world is meant to work. I think these articles set up an interesting framing question.

If we frame professional journalism as a business model, then, as good capitalists, we can rejoice in its downfall as transactions costs plunge and amateur journalists eat the professionals’ lunch. This, I think, is Starkman’s problem. He’s defending for-profit institutions by claiming public good. I think that its quite a stretch to say that the only way to ensure the public good of journalism is by continuing a clearly inefficient, monopolistic business model.

If, on the other hand, we look through the Shirky/Mele frame – which I think is generally right – then professional journalism should be nurtured as a public good. The newspaper industry as we know it is welcome to fail, but journalism itself must be preserved. The problem then becomes ensuring that the new versions of journalism are trustworthy. Like so many things relating to the Internet, the answer is to encourage diversity and transparency. Corporate or wealthy interests may well bankroll some of the new journalists, but as long as the reader is sufficiently apprised of the conflicts he or she can consider the validity of his or her source. Diversity is then important to ensure that everyone has a plethora unbiased (or at least differently biased) news sources to read.

I Gave Up My Privacy and All I Got Was This Lousy Filter Bubble

dobry mppdigital assignments , , ,
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]
what was I reading this week?

In “Hyperconnected”, chapter eight of Christakis and Fowler’s Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, the authors examine how our natural inclination to create social networks is strengthened and enhanced by the Internet. While some forms of social interaction must take place along with actual physical presence, the authors explain how the web offers the possibility to both engage in new kinds of social interaction and to spread our traditional networks more quickly to more far-flung locations.

“Social Has a Shape: Why Networks Matter”, chapter 5 of Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, similarly describes how social interaction has changed, making use of a number of computer/web concepts (power laws, long tails, network effects) along with social psychology to help make sense of the new ways we interact online.

Pariser’s TED Talk on “Filter Bubbles” helps describe one of the pitfalls of easy access to information along with engaging in most social interaction on the web. Stray’s article, “Are we stuck in filter bubbles? Here are five potential paths out”, on the other hand, asks us to rethink whether these filter bubbles are really harmful first and, if the are, how to get out of them.

Finally, Palfrey and Gasser’s book Born Digital examines these issues through the lens of the first generation to be brought up entirely in a web-enabled world. Their third chapter, “Privacy” examines some of the serious issues arising from the bargain we’ve made to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.

Was it any good?

The readings on social networks were very useful – particularly reading Christakis & Fowler and Rheingold together. Both pieces demonstrated a great sense of history as a way of informing our ideas of how the Internet has both augmented existing social structures and revolutionized how we interact as human beings. Rheingold’s mash-up of social theory, personal anecdotes, and historical trivia made for especially enlightening and, frankly, entertaining reading.

The Filter Bubble and Privacy pieces, strong as they are, just scratched the surface of the issues they raise. Pariser’s TED Talk was great in that it’s always nice to hear the person who identified a concept talk about it in his own words. Stray’s article was also very good in asking much needed questions and his strongest point is in refining the notion of a filter bubble to reflect weak ties. Stray also helped to remind us that, before the advent of the Internet, mass media was really just a filter bubble for middle class white men that everyone else also happened to be stuck in.

What both these pieces miss is that perhaps the filter bubble is a feature and not a bug. Confirmation bias has been a part of the human psyche since long before the Internet and probably even before written language existed. People want their notions to be confirmed and are intimidated and angered by inconsistency. So maybe the fact that the Filter Bubble is so easy to see now is that, like everything else, the Internet enables us to get what we really want – not so much junk food for the mind or nutritious food for the mind, but the comfort food of the mind.

Born Digital’s chapter on privacy is a great taking-off point. Considering what’s happened in the realm of Internet privacy since that books publication, however, merely worrying about corporations keeping one’s freely given-up data isn’t enough. Apparently we now have to worry about living in a surveillance state and whether those privacy sacrifices are worth making.

So…

Taken together, the readings give us a good way to think about the web and privacy. Christakis and Fowler described how online social networking has recognizable roots in the types of interpersonal connections humans have made throughout our history. In order to make these connections, we must give up some privacy (at the very least, reveal that we exist) and hope that revelation won’t be used maliciously in order to secure for ourselves the benefits of social interaction. The web allows us easily to connect with everyone but this forces us to give up our privacy to everyone. Unlike previous, limited social interaction, interaction with everyone virtually guarantees that someone will abuse his access to someone else’s privacy at some point.

The concept of the “Filter Bubble” helps explain why we give up some of our privacy. It turns out that we seek out information that confirms our preexisting notions (this is not new), but with the aid of technology, this isolation is given even greater force in a self-replicating cycle wherein our searches form the basis for search and social network algorithms, which then feed us more of the same in the interests of keeping our eyes glued to the screen so that they can charge advertisers to intrude into our lives. In order for this to work (and we do want it to work) we have to give up information about ourselves to the companies running these algorithms. We trade our privacy and our freedom to be let alone from advertiser intrusions for the ease and comfort of our filter bubbles.

If this trade were an arms-length one, where everyone using the Internet understood the value of his/her privacy and could make a rational determination as to how to give it away, there’d be little to complain about. However, Born Digital helps show that we really have very little idea of what, in the future, could be done with the information we so readily give up today.

If we’re going to keep any recognizable part of our privacy on the Internet, we need some kind of regulation. Private self-regulation occasionally works, especially when it’s done by the far-sighted minds who work on the Internet (see ICANN). However, now there’s so much money in people’s private information that we’re unlikely to see any pro-privacy self-regulation with teeth. This seems like the ideal place for some kind of government regulation, but, considering the NSA revelations, who can say our government is up to the task? We’re seemingly left with few options: A) hope for benevolent corporate self-governance with the understanding that it’s not likely to fully protect us; or B) try to get some regulation by the government with the added burden of having to continually police them as well.

This would probably be a good segue into Consent of the Networked, but I will get to that in a future post.

Here Comes Everybody asking “What is Web 2.0”

dobry mppdigital assignments , ,
[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]
what was I reading this week?

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

This is an anecdote-driven explanation of how technological innovations on the Internet (and almost exclusively through blogs and social media) enable and hyper-extend our inherent capacity for forming social connections. Shirky describes the impact of these innovations and provides a useful framework to think about the kind of group tasks that the web can enable. He describes how the web knocks down traditional walls and lowers the transaction costs for sharing (easiest group task) to cooperation to collective action (most difficult group task). From mass amateurization of professions like journalism to mass control of the means of production to rapid deployment of social tools, Shirky helps explain how the new technological innovations of the last decade are shaping our culture and society.

“What is Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s article is a bit more limited in scope. He sums up much of what we’ve seen happening on the web under the moniker “Web 2.0”. His article is a mostly description of business model competition (operating systems versus browsers-as-platform; traditional media versus the blogosphere, software-as-service versus software-as-product; apps for single devices versus apps the coordinate across devices). In the end, he describes the significant changes the businesses must undertake in order to survive in a world grown comfortable with using the web.

was it any good?

Both of these pieces aim to explain how the web changes some aspects of our society. O’Reilly does a bit better with his razor-sharp focus on business models. Shirky, because he is taking an approach that aims to show changes in the culture as a whole, is bound to fall short.

O’Reilly captures and explains most, if not all, of the things that the average reader will think of when she hears the term “Web 2.0”. My main problem with the article is its scope – by limiting himself to the business ramifications, I think he misses out on the greater cultural impact that the “Web 2.0” style changes are making on our work- and lifestyles. Doing so would have allowed for a logical progression from his fleeting but prophetic question, “[w]ho owns the data?” to a discussion of he personal ramifications of a business model where all data is worth something. But I’ll talk a little more about the importance of data and the implications of data-as-commodity to personal privacy below.

Shirky, on the other hand, does have a larger scope. However, for all the good he does being descriptive – giving an account of the cultural significance of new technology – he fails to become comprehensively proscriptive and seems to shy away from discussing the significance of those changes and how they have or have not fulfilled technology’s egalitarian promise.

I’m particularly disappointed in his failure to note more than in passing how the new technologies were already being co-opted to support and strengthen existing class structures. It is still clearly class that matters – just take the example of Evan in the first chapter – he harnesses the power of the web in order to get the police (who are already looking out for the interests of upper-class professionals) to gratify his need to exert power over a lower class girl who happened to acquire the wrong phone and had the temerity to be a jerk about it to her social “betters”. This is where a proscriptive approach would have been helpful – the web does have the capacity to erase these distinctions, I would be curious to see how a writer like Shirky explains why that isn’t happening and what we can do to create a more egalitarian technological revolution.

so…

Having worked as an attorney and dealt with consumer privacy issues, some of the changes highlighted by O’Reilly’s article stood out to me. I wonder whether it was naïve for such a smart writer to only devote one sentence – “[a] further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data” – to the notion that maybe the data most coveted by businesses might very well be the data we most want to keep to ourselves? Considering at least two post-Web 2.0 giants are earning opprobrium in their boundary-pushing pursuits of data, this may be one of the most important issues to arise from the world envisioned by O’Reilly’s article. Now, we also know that even something as seemingly innocuous as the business model shift to browser-as-platform has all sorts of unintended, potentially negative consequences to personal privacy. People like to think they own their data, but we’re now coming to the point where we have to figure out what to do when there’s another claimant to that ownership.

This weeks readings show that the societal shifts engendered by new and ubiquitous technology like social media and the web-based systems aren’t just business or even communications or social issues. This technological revolution presents us with novel moral, ethical, legal, and political challenges. The institutions that we use to deal with these challenges aren’t nearly as nimble as the firms that Shirky and O’Reilly describe, but they’ll have to become so in order to minimize the harm and maximize the good (and there is a lot of good) that can come from our technological achievements.

here he goes …

Aside dobry non-substantive ,

“Hello world”

The very first thing I ever coded (in the 1990’s) did only one thing, it displayed the text “hello world”.  I imagine this is the same as virtually everyone else who learned about computers and programs in a formal setting.  At this point, I don’t even remember what I was using to write the code.  That’s not quite as important to me as the fact that the availability of fast and cheap computing has changed our lives, generally for the better, I think.

I’m hoping to use this forum here to discuss how relatively cheap and available computers and the internet have created new and interesting legal and policy problems over the last few decades and how our institutional ability to cope with these problems has seriously lagged the march of technological innovation.  Ideally, I’ll be able to present at least some solutions to these issues.