The Ethical Blogger

free spaces: Arab Women & Blogging

2009-03-10T08:07:00.002-04:00

Since we are celebrating the international women day and since I belong to the Arab region I thought to contribute to the discussion of blogging ethics through introducing some findings of a research of mine about the Palestinian Female bloggers. The research was titled “ free spaces: Arab Women & Blogging
Content analysis study to the Palestinian females’ blogs” .

There are many reasons for the suffering of Arab women in general and the Palestinian in particular, despite the relative improvement in laws and the official policies concerning women rights in the Arab countries, Unfortunately, still some religious leaders and some media contribute in one way or another in the promotion of customs and traditions that seek to strengthen the rule of men to women's lives and bodies from the birth time to the grave.

The Palestinian women sufferings is derived from many sources from one hand the family traditions , the society customs and from the other hand the misery of economic conditions or the loss of husband or brother or beloved children, from houses demolitions, siege and closure of roads by the occupation authorities.

I found that Palestinian women feel powerless and can’t complain about their own problems because usually they face much important financial and practical difficulties.
Through the literature review I found that women in general experience wars and military conflicts in a different way from men. Wars in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Rwanda in the nineties of the last century, drew the attention to the horrific levels of violence against women in times of armed conflict. Women may be also targets of violence by the occupation forces because of their political activities or because of the political activities of their relatives. I found also that Communities living under the restrictions of occupation turned by time into a semi-military societies, many families have weapons that can be used in incidents of violence against women by husbands.

Meanwhile, communication technologies specially the Internet and its applications represent a new public sphere for the freedom of expression to the Arab world. Blogging is a new hope for Arab women because it is characterized by the decentralization that makes it more liberal and interactive. Many female bloggers told me that the best thing about blogging is that you can write what ever you want freely and remain anonymous .

Blogging the Palestinian issue is still a central interest to many Arab bloggers . I have analyzed a purposive sample consisted of 200 Arabic blogs on maktoob.com ( the union of Arab blogs) according to the traffics, selecting the highest 10 blogs from every Arab country according to hits or visits. And I found that the majority of the blogs in the sample have posts about t the Palestinian issue .(90%) of the blogs from Algeria , (70%)Jordan, (50%) Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. (40%) UAE, Mauritania, Bahrain, and Syria, and (30% and less) of the blogs from 10 countries: (Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, Tunisia, Kuwait, Oman, Djibouti, Libya)

In my study I tried to shed light on the Palestinian female bloggers ( those who lives in the Palestinian territories in Gaza and west bank) I tried to approach their demographics, their Internet usage habits, their blogging interests, and some of their ethical standards.

Demographics:

It was an opportunity to test also the theory of Everett Rogers on the spread of innovations within the different cultures “diffusion of innovations”.
I used a descriptive content analysis to a sample of the Palestinian females blogs on the site of the Arab Bloggers Union ( Maktoob.com) along with questionnaires.

The study found that the majority of the Palestinian female bloggers were educated belong to the age group 16 to 24 years and they used their blogs for advocating the Palestinian right for having their independent state and advocating women’s rights.

Palestinian bloggers participation in the compound was in the seventh rank after Egypt - Morocco - Saudi Arabia - Syria - Jordan - Algeria. The number was 1103 blog of the total 17,846 Arabic blog hosted by a site at the time of the study, Palestinian women have almost (11.42%) of the total Palestinian blogs.

(61.9%) Palestinian female blogger mentioned her profession , while (38.1%) didn’t. Undergraduate students & Graduates (41%) followed by journalists (19%).
For the variable of age(72.22%) mentioned the age while (27.77%) did not I found a variety of age groups, where it became clear that the majority of them belong to the age group 16 to 24 years

Why do they blog?? They wrote that:

"When the words rose up inside me and I felt the desire to write and to communicate this blog came to existence, I chose it to be a personal blog, it’s my blog and its only for me! I do not really know what is the real reason which encouraged me to blog? Is it the need to reveal? Or is it my need to feel existed as a separate entity! With ideas, opinions and point of view?! "(Liel wa eqhwan blog 2007)

"Robba of Palestine" another female blogger wrote that
“It is ones right to achieve his own myth, the legend is for me to participate and share my ideas with others through blogging" (Rabbi of Palestine, 2007)

Blogging topics:

Analysis also showed the diversity of blogging categories, (50%)of the Palestinian female bloggers classified their blog to be public blog which means that the posts are about public concern issues that can be political or social, while (18.25%) classified their blogs to be personal blogs means its about their personal ideas , experiences, and emotions and the rest didn’t chose a specific category.

Concerning the posts topics( 55%) of the posts were about Palestinian rights and the creation of an independent state. (40%) dealt with women's right to safety, love and freedom and equal opportunity. ( 5%) of the posts were about technology, sports and others.

The blogs and the posts show various forms of oppression and discrimination against the female bloggers. For example some times families prevent them from continuing blogging. one wrote in her blog which is one of the most visited Palestinian blogs as demonstrated by quantitative analysis titled “ Masdar elhamy” means the source of where my inspiration:

“I watched everybody then I start crying then after all tears I turned to my blog, its topics became to be more personal day after day against my will….but it’s the way to reveal because I know that in this world there are people can feel me, even if we do not see each other and maybe will never meet...... .
Even my blog they will take it from me one day, as they said .........
Take all of my writings, burn it or distributed to the sellers of sweets to use it ,
I suggest you take every thing I wrote since I was so young, through it from the window and make it fly in the air before the eyes, but unfortunately, something will make you angry after all. My blog will remain on the Internet and many people will be able to read it after all "(the source of my inspiration 2007)

Blogs also mention some forms of rejection of some social customs like the use of the term of spinsterhood a Palestinian female blogger wrote:
"The term itself is offensive.., as if women in the universe were created for one purpose only, is to be a breeding machine. "( Mschriologgio 2007)

Blogs also mentioned many testimonies about cases of violence against Palestinian women, both by the occupation forces or by their relatives and neighbours, including attempts of rape, sexual harassment, and others.

Code of Ethics:

I have posted 300 questionnaire to some of the female bloggers trying to get their input concerning whether we need to develop a new code of ethics for the bloggers and the majority of the responses ( 55%) was against this code for different reasons:
(25%) of them justified their refusal because of the fear of transforming this into a new type of censorship. (10%) have some questions about how to apply such code, While(10%) doubted the importance of these codes. (10%) didn’t give any reasons.
(35%) accepted the idea of code of ethics for blogging and (10%) were neutral.

Limitations:

Ofcourse there are many limitations to the study like analyzing of a specific site limits the ability to generalizing the results, also using Quantitative analysis of the content does not include what could be regarded as the tone or the context of the posts.

Social and Political Innovation through Social Media

2009-02-20T14:58:00.013-05:00

Last week I attended a great panel on Social and Political Innovation through Social Media as part of Social Media Week NYC. It was hosted by Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) at the New York Times building and organized by Toby Daniels (@tobyd). The panelists included Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for President Obama's campaign; Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology; and Jamie Daves, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with more than ten years of experience in the public sector who has helped found a number of successful nonprofit and political organizations. Here are the highlights from my notes:

Jamie Daves emphasized the disruptive effect new media technologies have always had when they shift the social balance of power to new agents. He also mused whether the two components of democratic capitalism can continue to function in their current forms worldwide given the current trends and uncertainty. Daves said that the rise of social media is creating the largest accrual of social capital we've ever seen. This trend forces corporations to no longer be faceless, and it forces the people who work in business to engage as individuals, leading to an increase in personal responsibility and accountability.

Rasiej said Obama scored points by being the first national candidate to use the pronoun "we." He also noted that an organized minority will always triumph over a disorganized majority, and that social media technologies have lowered the cost of organization.

Chris Hughes noted that the strategy behind my.BarackObama.com was to provide an organizing toolset for supporters to do their own outreach, fund raising, and event hosting.

Rasiej noted that Whitehouse.gov is lackluster so far concerning social media. "Technically every citizen should have their own login," he said. But government doesn't have a Chief Technology Officer to guide things yet, and discussion moderation tools are still imperfect.

Hughes said these things require time, technology, and money. The Bush White House had only one person manning the Web. And the goals are more complex once you're in office, whereas a presidential campaign has one focus: winning.

Daves noted that it was naive of government to be scared of contact when it could actually benefit from the crowd-sourcing of answers. The trick is to connect common strands and the people who weave them. To illustrate his point, Daves cited one of the recent crane crashes here in NYC. There had been numerous citizen complaints about the shakiness of the construction site, but the local government didn't put their comments together into a bigger picture, and the people had no means of finding each other online to amplify their message.

Rasiej said 95 percent of human behavior is about maintaining position, so it's no wonder governments are slow to adapt to new technologies. For example, he came to be known as "wifi guy" when he ran in 2005 for Public Advocate in New York City because he wanted to modernize the city's telecom infrastructure. Nowadays a pejorative and reductive moniker like that might not stick, or might be a positive, because the upside is that social norms change relative to power and technology.

Daves emphasized that the universal service model for broadband connectivity is essential. He cited Pew statistics showing that 75 percent of people 18–24 are active in social networking.

Rasiej replied that older demographics are fast catching up and show some of the strongest growth rates. Globally he said many people will receive a mobile phone before they get access to clean water. Old institutions may fade in the face of these new technologies. One example where mobile phones could prove particularly useful is election monitoring. They may also unleash a new type of grassroots populism. For example, reform of marijuana laws consistently rises to the top of online forums where users are allowed to vote on commonsense priorities for their government.

Daves commented on the roles and responsibilities of old versus new media. We shouldn't look to the New York Times for social solutions, he said. They do a great job articulating the problems, but the mobilization will come from elsewhere.

A question was raised about the economic meltdown and whether this signified a broader meltdown of trust in our society. Hughes responded that transparency is actually natural to Internet technology. Rasiej agreed, stating that in a world of social media it's easier to build than destroy, and there's more vetting than ever before. Everything is recorded, meaning that to fear Big Brother is to fear ourselves.

Another question was raised about the momentum built by the Obama campaign and where it will go now. Hughes, speaking now as a private observer, said they had compiled 13 million emails and that 2 million accounts had been created on my.BarackObama.com, so the infrastructure of a movement does exist and could be channeled into activism, service, and other goals.

A question was raised as to whether social media will chip into the two-party system. Rasiej believes we have drifted into a somewhat post-partisan era where people may be more likely to self-identify as empowered citizens rather than Democrats.

Rasiej also discussed the potential of social media to save politicians from being "sound bited" to death in traditional press conferences. Interactivity can spur a virtuous circle between representatives and their constituents, as was somewhat the case when a cadre of my.BarackObama.com supporters staged the FISA Rebellion, forming a popular group within Obama's own site and threatening to suspend their fund-raising if they didn't get some straight answers from him on warrantless wiretapping. Obama responded directly to prove that he was willing to listen.

Rasiej seemed adamant, however, that social media will not morph government into rule by popular referendum, à la thumbs down in the Coliseum. But I wonder if he isn't being a little preemptive in his reasoning here. If the evolution of technology makes it possible to give more power back to the people, A LOT MORE POWER, why shouldn't it? One can conceive of a People's Digital Parliament rising in parallel to the traditional structures of government and wielding significant influence over legislators. Perhaps it would eventually be annexed to the government as a new branch with specific and limited authority. There may come a day when the dusty documents of a predominantly agrarian society, ingenious though they were, will have to be discarded and rewritten to fit the new ethics, politics, and technologies.

Meanwhile, said Daves, Members of Congress pay attention to four "M" words: Message, Membership, Media, and Money. And Rasiej concluded that there will be no expansion of participatory democracy in America without rebuilding education. Education funding and our view of it has been choked for decades, he said, citing the one hour per week that New York City school children spend on a computer.

Stimulus Bill and Internet Transparency

2009-02-16T14:31:00.008-05:00

One of the most fascinating transformations we'll watch over the course of the Obama administration is how the U.S. government embraces digital and social media to improve transparency and responsiveness. The wisdom of crowds and loss of total message control are hallmarks of online interactivity, and new technologies such as OpenCongress indicate the enormous potential to improve accountability through greater citizen participation, but these trends often conflict with the traditional patterns of government.

Already we're seeing the limits of where government is willing to go. The Obama transition ran into trouble when it was perceived that the incoming press secretary snubbed the question that the greatest number of visitors to change.gov [now whitehouse.gov] wanted to see answered: "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" And the thorny issue of marijuana criminality almost always rises to the top of online discussions, noted Personal Democracy Forum Andrew Rasiej last week at a panel on Social and Political Innovation through Social Media, indicating that the netroots may eventually push decriminalization or legalization up the ladder of priorities.

For context on how digital accountability is already starting to crop up in legislation, here are two excerpts from the stimulus bill detailing how disclosures will be made public:

With respect to funds made available under this Act in the form of grants for operational purposes to State or local government agencies or other organizations, the agency or organization shall publish on the website Recovery.gov a description of the intended use of the funds, including the number of jobs sustained or created.

Each contract awarded or grant issued using funds made available in this Act shall be posted on the Internet and linked to the website Recovery.gov. Proprietary data that is required to be kept confidential under applicable Federal or State law or regulation shall be redacted before posting.

Media on Gaza: Not enough, not enough, not enough

2009-02-12T16:58:00.006-05:00

Not long ago, I went to an event here in London at the Frontline Club on the media's experience 'covering' the conflict in Gaza. The event, aptly titled 'Media Talk: Gaza - Missiles and Messages', brought in a number of media experts to discuss not so much the politics of the event, but the media's experience in attempting to get 'in' the thick of things. Representatives from the Guardian, Jerusalem Post, Channel 4, and Al-Jazeera were more or less allied with or pitted against an Israeli affairs specialist.

I won't go into detail about most of the conversation as it will soon be uploaded on the Frontline website, but one thing I did notice (and, subsequently asked a question relating to), was that despite the complaints from the media about restricted access to Gaza, there seemed to be little done in terms of outreach to the respective Israeli or Palestinian communities, to the potential (or already) citizen journalists.

Not to risk careless comparison to the respective political situations or the oversimplification of the specific nature of the conflicts themselves, but when the monks began protesting and the Junta effectively shut off all electronic or tele-communication with the rest of the world, there was what almost felt like a mass movement from major newspapers and media outlets requesting that those inside Myanmar should do whatever possible to upload photos via cell phone (as an example) so that the outside world would have some idea of what's going on. Where was this in Gaza? If the media (at least from the side attempting to enter through Israel) keeps saying: not enough access, not enough support, not enough access, not enough support--then why was there virtually no outreach to the inhabitants of Gaza? I wonder if any of our readers can speak to this.

BK on FB

2009-01-17T15:45:00.003-05:00

Another Burger King campaign to approach the ethical line: Will you sacrifice your digital friends on Facebook for a burger? The Slate video above rightly gets the main points here:

1. a booming business despite the global economic downturn is Internet marketing; the webbier the campaign, the better
2. it is questionable how much people are attached to their digital friends, even though social networks are invaluable
3. even though BK had to pull the Facebook campaign, it will reap the benefits of press exposure

Gaza and the Battle for Public Opinion

2009-01-12T13:39:00.006-05:00

Seventeen days into Operation Cast Lead, Israel and Palestine are engaged in battle both on the ground and online. The Israeli Defense Force is the first national force to launch its own YouTube channel, complete with footage of attacks on Gaza, and the Consulate General of Israel in New York held a press conference in December via Twitter.

The Israeli military spokesman recently called new media a “new war zone” in which the battle over public opinion is a crucial component of military operations.

With that in mind, the Israeli military blocked foreign journalists’ access to Gaza in order to maintain some control over the flow of information out of the conflict zone. A few outlets who already maintained a presence in Gaza, however, have been closely following the conflict. Al Jazeera, the only international news outlet with a presence in Gaza, has been taking particular advantage of the Internet in order to get its news to English-speaking audiences. In addition to the station’s use of Twitter updates and YouTube, Al Jazeera has published an interactive map which tracks bombings, deaths, provision of aid, and other information using the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi allows users to submit information related to international crises via cell phone or Internet, which is then fact-checked and published to the web.

Israel’s information blockade has also failed to stifle the voices of citizen journalists, and has potentially increased dependence on them. Images, video, and first-hand accounts from Gaza are spreading rapidly on the Internet.

Although web 2.0 and citizen journalism can help amplify aspects of a conflict that otherwise wouldn’t receive attention from the traditional press, the risk of biased or inaccurate information is also extremely high.

Already, video footage has been taken out of context. One video that has been widely circulated online and broadcast on France 2 claimed to depict dead and injured Palestinians in the aftermath of an Israeli bombing. According to the UK’s FirstPost, however, the footage was actually “the aftermath of an accidental explosion of Hamas’s own weaponry at a rally in a Gaza refugee camp in September 2005.”

In a similar vein, the BBC has debunked a video from the IDF’s YouTube channel:

Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared to show rockets being loaded onto a lorry. The truck and those close to it were then destroyed by a missile.

This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their strikes were and how well justified…

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

But the misinformation, as well as emotion-filled if accurate accounts from bloggers, has effectively polarized the debate.

According to Dev Raj Dahel, head of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Nepal:

In a situation of ongoing conflict, media's role lies in debating impartially about the health of the country and citizens, framing conflicts in a rational manner, offering concrete options rather than just criticism of actors and furnishing practical initiatives to the conflicting parties to resolve the conflict of various kinds—direct, structural, perceptual and latent. Capacity building of journalists on conflict reporting, communication and peace education thus helps to identify and release deep-seated knowledge located within the various sub-systems and systems of society, weigh a range of alternatives and adopt multi-track measures to seek peaceful resolution of conflicts.

A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review critiques the use of social media in the Gaza conflict, questioning in particular whether or not the use of Twitter by the Israeli Consulate is in fact an improvement over a traditional press conference:

…this angle emphasizes the mere fact of democratization over the more salient question of what, exactly, is being democratized… As long as the people answering questions have public relations, rather than public information, as their primary goal, throwing the doors to a press conference open to the general public won’t make the press conference any better. It’ll just make it more crowded.

Followers of the “propaganda war” being waged online may be led to believe that violence is the only option available-both to Palestinians and Israelis-in the debate over Gaza. However, a 2006 report by the United States Institute of Peace found that “for the first time since the start of the peace process, a majority of Palestinians support a compromise settlement that is acceptable to a majority of Israelis.”

What’s been called the “over-democratization” of conflict journalism may be making it more difficult to amplify the moderate voices within the Israeli-Palestinian debate that are calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

The use of new media in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict encompasses a number of the ethical questions we often address on this blog: How can an audience verify the accuracy of citizen journalism? Is a certain amount of professional training necessary to produce quality reporting? Should YouTube censor extremely violent and gruesome footage of potential political significance?

It may also emphasize the responsibility of professional news outlets to maintain rigid standards despite an influx of information and amateur competitors. While new technology is making it easier and faster to get more news out to a wider audience, it's no less important for professionals to verify, edit, and contextualize citizen reports in a way that mediates, rather than sensationalizes, conflict.

How to Blog: Share, Link, be Consistent

2008-12-19T15:53:00.001-05:00

Slate puts on the web today some tips from Arianna Huffington's new book on blogging. See Slate's "How to Blog."

Here is the truncated list on best practices on blogging (bloggers, including Josh Marshall have told me that consistency and uniqueness are the keys):

1. Set a schedule. Blog often. Jeff Atwood, who runs the fantastic programming blog Coding Horror, told me that the key to his early success was sticking to a realistic target of six posts a week.

2. Don't worry if your posts suck a little. Unless you're Jeffrey Goldberg, your first blog post is unlikely to be perfect. Indeed, a lot of your posts aren't going to be as great as they could be if you spent many hours on them—and that's OK.

3. Write casually but clearly. This one flows from the last two—the best way to stick to a blogging schedule is to write quickly, and a good way to write quickly is to write as if you're talking to a friend.

4. Add something new. This might seem obvious, but new bloggers tend to forget it: Readers aren't going to stick with you unless you give them something they can't find elsewhere.

5. Join the bloggy conversation. And link! The only way people will find your blog is through other blogs—and you'll get other blogs to notice you by responding to what they're writing about.

6. Don't expect instant fame. Actually, don't expect any fame. There are better ways than blogging to get rich and famous.

It strikes me that sharing, consistency, uniqueness, and volunteerism are themes here, and they happen to be the themes in a lot of business literature on how to be a good worker in the global economy. How to be a good blogger and be applied to life; and many are lessons we learned in in kindergarten.

These themes have also come up over the past several months at the Carnegie Council. "Join the bloggy conversation. And Link!" is like Jay Rosen's "ethic of the link."

Similarly, Lawrence Lessig spoke recently at Carnegie Council's Public Affairs program on sharing economies or a hybrid economy. He sees the hybrid economies as those that combine the value from free and shared labor and commercial value.

The volunteerism that is often done on the web, for example social networking or product ratings, are free work that gives network power to companies. David Grewal also spoke recently about his "network power" concept:

Are Politicians Their "Friends"?

2008-12-16T11:03:00.005-05:00

I recently reconnected with a former colleague from Manila through Facebook. She invited me as a friend, I accept her as a friend, thus reaffirming our friendship, both online and off. I saw she had more than 300 friends on her list and I was curious if I would find some old friends that I wanted to be in touch with again. I did find old friends and some, namely, some politicians holding no less than national seats. This made me send her a quick message to ask: Are these senators actually your "friends"?

The Philippine political scene is apparently evolving fast. Senators and congressmen have jumped on the bandwagon of social networking, and can be found in three of the most popular sites in the Philippines - Friendster, Facebook and Multiply. A number of my Manila-based friends are "friends" with a range of colorful political characters, from the ambitious novice Senator Francis Escudero, the media-savvy Senator Richard Gordon, to the acerbic veteran Senator Joker Arroyo, whose profile is suspiciously too detailed to be the work of an 81-year-old legislator. Some senators are on Friendster, the most popular networking site in the Philippines, and popular among Internet users in the provinces.

So what does being "friends" with a politician mean? My journalist friend says sometimes she uses Facebook to contact these officials but the responses are usually not as helpful. One senator quickly responds to her questions but starts his answers with "This is off the record." Other senators reply too but, she says it is obvious that their aides are doing the replying for them.

As U.S. President Barack Obama has shown, being on social networking sites can be an effective political tool and other politicians know this all too well. And with the national elections due in May 2010, expect Facebook and Friendster to be the new campaign platforms.

Army Invades Second Life

2008-12-09T11:44:00.007-05:00

By Joshua S. Fouts
Carnegie Council Senior Fellow
Chief Global Strategist, Dancing Ink Productions, LLC

In the wake of Google closing down its virtual world, "Lively," and Reuters noisily closing its Second Life office, you'd think that virtual worlds would warrant the Sturm und Drang predictions that have replaced an equally misguided first-round buzz of interest.

Maybe it's just growing pains.

Enter the United States Army.

Wired reporter Noah Shachtman recently blogged that the US Army will be opening up shop in the virtual world of Second Life over the next month. According to Shachtman, their effort "will actually consist of two virtual islands. One of them will serve as a ‘welcome center' with an information kiosk and the means to contact a recruiter." The other will offer virtual experiences like, "jumping out of airplanes, and rappelling off of towers and using a weapon."

I asked my friend Peter W. Singer, who is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, and author of the upcoming book Wired for War -- what he thought of this. (Singer's program at Brookings is notable in that it was one of the first to host a session on the impact of Second Life on the future of politics -- Singer's wife Sue works for Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life).

"A lot of credit is due to the Army for being willing to take this first step," he emailed back. "It is a great way to connect to potential recruits, who it might not reach otherwise, through a growing medium. But I hope they don't just see it as merely an advertising tool. Just like many other organizations entering Second Life have found, there is a whole new world of possibilities, as well as perils, for them to learn more about."

It's indeed a wise decision for the Army. In our research for the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project, CCEIA Senior Fellow Rita J. King and I encountered many people from around the world who found the experiences in virtual worlds offered them a safe environment in which to explore things with which they were unfamiliar. Why not present the Army in the same light? Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has already found that people take experiences in virtual worlds with them into the physical world. A May 12, 2008 Time magazine article reported "even 90 seconds spent chatting it up with avatars [in a virtual world] is enough to elicit behavioral changes offline."

The Army might also learn something about their potential recruits in Second Life that they might not learn otherwise from meeting them in person. In an interview I conducted in January 2008 with IBM executive Sandra Kearney, Global Director for Government Research Initiatives and Programs and the lead for many years behind IBM's Virtual Universe Community, she explained that work within virtual worlds has, "made obvious the value people have beyond the box they work in all day long. I'm able to leverage in the organization the passions and the skills that the employee has by what I learn from and about them in virtual worlds. It's addressing the whole person in a really different way."

But it's also a risk--one that I'm glad to see the government taking. Ironically, these kinds of chances seem to be lead by the military more than other parts of the government. For example, in May 2000, before online video games had fully entered into the psyche of advertisers and marketers, the US Army commissioned the creation of the video game "America's Army" which was released in 2002 and later turned into a wildly popular game exceeding even the Pentagon's expectations to become the number one online action game in 2004.

There's reason for hope that other parts of the US foreign and military apparatus are watching and learning. James Glassman, US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, made a stunning announcement at the New America Foundation on December 1, 2008 about the State Department's "Public Diplomacy 2.0" efforts. Glassman, who is the "the government-wide lead in strategic communications, or war of the ideas," provides "leadership and coordination for … the Defense Department, the intelligence community, and beyond." In his speech, Glassman makes the case for the importance of integrating a full-fledged approach to Internet outreach, arguing that government needs to let go of its desire to control the message. "[I]n this new world of communications, any government that resists new Internet techniques faces a greater risk: being ignored. Our major target audiences – especially the young – don't want to listen to us lecture them or tell them what to think or how wonderful we are."

I found Glassman's words inspiring and exciting. In the fall of 2005, as director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, I had the opportunity to brief Under Secretary Glassman's predecessor Karen Hughes before she took office as Under Secretary of State. Our group recommended that, among other things, she integrate games, virtual worlds and blogs into her public diplomacy outreach strategies. Nearly three years later, I'm thrilled to see that her successor has implemented all of those ideas and more. (Disclosure: Glassman's speech also mentions a January 12, 2009 event in Second Life in which he will be appearing that Rita J. King and I will be co-hosting as part of a project with the American University in Cairo.)

Glassman argued, as do we, that virtual worlds are no substitute for real world experiences. They serve, however, as excellent gateways to better understanding people or opportunities to augment or extend ideas – such as expanding and continuing relationships formed in exchange programs.

While the Army is considering Second Life, maybe they should also consider theater. A year ago, Rita J. King wrote about a play by the Scottish National Theater called "Blackwatch." The play, about the famed Scottish military regiment, described the collapse of the unit after their involvement in the War in Iraq. The play's tour in the US was funded by the British Council, the public diplomacy arm of the British Government. It shed unique insight into the British experience in the US-led War on Terror.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to get a better understanding of a US soldier's experience in the Iraq War. I was a participant in the off-Broadway production of "Surrender," a play co-written by my friend Josh Fox (who coincidentally played in a high school rock band with the aforementioned Wired journalist Noah Shachtman – Shachtman played bass) and Sergeant Jason Christopher Hartley, Iraqi War veteran and author of the extremely well-written "Just Another Soldier," about his experiences in the war in Iraq. The three act play allows you to either observe or participate. I chose to participate. I arrived a few minutes late and was rushed into a changing room where I was issued a standard military uniform while the sound of a drill sergeant (played by Jason Christopher Hartley) barked orders to a group to do push-ups until the latecomers were ready. The play began with training in basic combat techniques including a crash course in rifle handling, room clearing and engaging the enemy. In act two I was deployed with my squad, which consisted of actors and participants, although I did not know which was which breaking into darkened rooms under the deafening cacophony of helicopter gun ships, sirens, gunfire, screams all capped my squad and company leaders fevered commands. Each room offered a different panic-inducing scenario – from interrupting a tryst and having the paramours shoot at you, to encountering an otherwise innocent looking family who also then shot at us. Act three was our hallucinatory "reintegration" into society in which the various participants were required to act out the fate of their characters. This entailed reading lines from a teleprompter while actors responded accordingly. I played the part of a soldier who had to have his legs amputated and ended in a mental institution. Next it was determined, that I had a pre-existing mental condition and would not be receiving medical coverage.

The experience participating in Surrender was a powerful one. It radically changed my view of the experience of soldiers in urban ground combat.

Surrender is opening for one week only January 7 – 12. If you're in New York City and want to understand the Army, this is one virtual experience you don't want to miss. After that, try something little more relaxing like visiting the Army's virtual offices in Second Life.

cross posted at Fairer Globalization
photo by Seb Ulysses

Advancing Corporate Citizenship in the Media: Working Group

2008-12-08T16:22:00.005-05:00

The media certainly have a great deal of influence over public opinion and discourse. During my recent trip to Brussels, I even heard one finance expert blame the media for the worsening of the financial crisis, saying that the media sector is stoking fear beyond reason.

Can a sense of social responsibility or ethics be instilled in the American media sector? At the Carnegie Council, we convened a small working group of media professionals called "Advancing Corporate Citizenship in the Media." Based on our first meeting, the following are some of the big issues that the group might explore:

balancing media coverage vs delivering a socially responsible message;

whether good behavior can be recognized without the use of certification;

distinguishing opinion from fact;

balancing the need to be entertaining and profitable with the company's role of informing societal debate.

Media CSR Forum has identified issues in three categories: those that are common to all sectors (such as the environment); those that have implications for the media (such as intellectual property); and those that are specific to the media (such as media literacy).

In this final category, the Forum has identified media literacy as a common concern and workable issue for its stakeholders. Its campaign asks, for example: Are you a receptacle for the unacceptable?

Trust in the media has been increasing in several countries, according to the Forum's research. It was surmised that public engagement, such as conferences, and transparency in the media sector could be given partial credit for this improvement.

How to create incentives for better behavior? I asked the group whether non-bottom line and non-shareholder issues could influence behavior. What about moral suasion? Can the interaction of peers and competitors at working groups facilitate better behavior? What about certification, reputation risk, association in a working group? Can these things build trust among competitors? One practitioner suggested that we attempt to shape popular culture to create moral suasion, tying brand, culture, and CSR.

There appeared to be traction in this area since "self-regulation is preferable to government regulation." One way could be to share information on each company's internal code of conduct toward improving the sector's conduct and embedding good behavior in corporate culture. One code of conduct for the sector as a whole is a possibility especially if stakeholders demand it.

Nevertheless, it will be challenging to create a universal code since there are so many types of media (music, new media, print, etc.). I asked if we could use the Equator Principles as a model. It was noted that those Principles worked because they were targeted specifically to project finance, suggesting that the more focused, the better. One practitioner wondered how we would know when a CSR ethic was embedded in the company? Is it already there? How do you embed it?On media literacy, one practitioner wondered whether the focus might be better placed on examining infotainment. In other words, which comes first: creating a better product or teaching people how to use it? The cart or the horse?

A code of media ethics should be connected to how media companies relate to their readers and stakeholders. Indeed, a business case for ethical practices will be made if readers demand it. Shareholders will get the message. One of the companies in NYC is trying to engage its readers directly with its editorials and by making its style guides available. Advances have been made in distinguishing fact from opinion in print by using different font treatment. One practitioner agreed that demands from clients can also change ethical practices dramatically. What if large newspapers demanded green policies from clients wishing to run green ads?

It was noted that CSR is coming back because there is now a struggle to define CSR, and this struggle is creating opportunity. One observer said that while CSR is on the minds of media executives in the big cities, it has not yet reached the heartland, yet this market could have a big effect if tapped, suggesting another opportunity.

Overall, CSR can be seen as a business opportunity and a way to reduce risk. This is the lens through which a task force can make a case.Another approach toward introducing CSR in the media is for the media to critically assess corporate behavior and then report on it. Corporations can engage the media for more critical self-assessment.

Several participants noted that American top tier media companies have a responsibility to make the case for climate change mitigation. Future meetings might take emulate the Media CSR Forum's model and bring in experts from media and civil society to speak.

Indonesia Seeks Blogger's Identity

2008-11-25T19:19:00.006-05:00

Some debates simply refuse to go away. And those that keep recurring are obviously no close to being resolved.

The Indonesian government has announced that it is seeking the identity of a blogger who posted the controversial newspaper cartoon that purportedly insults Muslim Prophet Mohammad, and will detain him/her for defamation. Indonesia's Deparment of Communication and Information has formally requested for the blogger's identity from the blog host, Wordpress.

This, once again, raises the debate between respect for religion and freedom of expression. When the cartoon first came out in a Danish newspaper in 2005, it triggered a wave of protest actions in Islamic countries, including Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. The protests intensified after the cartoon was reprinted by several European newspapers, whose editors defended their move under freedom of the press. But some publishers, subsequently, restrained further reprints.

The question now is, will Wordpress give in to Indonesia's demand? If it does, it will not be the first blog platform to do so. In 2007, Google gave up the IP address of a blogger who had been sued for defamation in Israel. Three months ago, Google was also directed by a local court in India to provide information on a blogger who complained about a Mumbai-based company. In 2006, Microsoft admitted that it blocked a blog by a Chinese journalist, which was hosted by MSN Space, to conform to Chinese laws. In 2003, Yahoo was accused of providing information that led to the conviction of a Chinese writer who was accused of providing state secrets to external parties.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all defended their decisions, saying that they have to follow local laws and that they only provide information after a due process. Meanwhile, Wordpress appears to have made the first step to appease public opinion in Indonesia. It archived the offending blog, http://lapotuak.wordpress.com, for violating Wordpress' terms of service.

The New Kid in Malaysia's Blogosphere

2008-11-18T22:13:00.004-05:00

One of the most exciting developments in the blogosphere is happening in Malaysia where bloggers are slowly but surely trying to chip away the government's notorious sensitivity to press freedom. And guess who is Malaysia's most popular blogger these days? It is no other than the former prime minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, whose government designed the draconian laws that kept an inquisitive media at bay for the 20 years he was in power. Through his blog, www.chedet.com, Mahathir now "fights the system he perfected," reported the New York Times two weeks ago.

The first entry was made on May 1, 2008, Labor Day, which is traditionally marked by labor protests in various parts of the world. His blog is clearly a form of protest to the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. The first entry was a criticism of Mr. Abdullah's decision to form a commission to appoint judges. Since then, the 83-year-old leader has commented, in either English or Malay, on various political, social and economic issues of the day, from lobbying practices, the rule of law, and race, to traffic and attending a school reunion. He has criticized U.S. policies and recently wished President-Elect Barack Obama "the best of luck." Occasionally, he attacks his former deputy prime minister and now opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, and answers allegations against him and his family. But his harshest criticisms, for now, are reserved for Mr. Abdullah's government.

Indeed, Dr. Mahathir is now enjoying the very freedoms that his leadership sought to suppress. Malaysians, too, welcomed the entry of the iconic leader to the blogosphere. On its first day alone, Chedet received at least 10,000 visitors.

One wonders how the government is taking Dr. Mahathir's renewed popularity. His iconic status may have spared him the typical government reaction against its critics, but others have not been as lucky. One of Malaysia's most popular and outspoken bloggers, Raja Petra Kamaruddin (RPK), who manages Malaysia Today, was detained in September 2008 under Malaysia's Internal Security Act, and was freed only two months later. But RPK's problems are far from over. Yesterday, he was summoned for police questioning over reports that he had insulted Muslims.

The Need to Teach Evaluation of Information

2008-11-11T10:07:00.002-05:00

The sheer volume of information available online today is often overwhelming. The problems this creates for those who do not have the time to sort through it all, or those who are inexperienced in evaluating the quality of information, became apparent during this past election. I would hazard to claim thousands of Americans, and likely many others around the world, relied on sources such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker to gauge the truthfulness of claims made during the campaign. But beyond a presidential campaign, what resources are available in evaluating information on the internet?

I recently spoke to a group of high school students, all pursuing research projects that excited them. All were also overwhelmed by the volume of information they were dealing with. The common question: How can we tell what's true? Simple corroboration was sometimes just not enough, and not unlike the rest of us, the more extreme claims stuck in their minds the most, for good or bad. Responsible research of their sources often led to competing claims regarding the agenda of that source, further complicating the picture of whether or not the information was truthful and objective.

Fortunately, their teacher understands the problems and provides assistance. But what happens to the millions of other kids who may not be so lucky? Young people know how to operate the internet, but how many really know how to use it? To promote good citizenship, nationally and globally, students need to be taught how to evaluate information and the sources producing that information beyond the simple warning against reliance on Wikipedia.

The problem is not limited to the young. During the campaign, I received e-mails tying then-candidate Barack Obama to Armageddon by people who seemed to be believe Revelations clearly stated Armageddon would begin with the election of a US president approximately 40 years old and from a Muslim background. Never mind that Mohammed wasn't even born at the time Revelations is believed to have been written, nor that the US was about 1300 years from its founding. People receive unfiltered biased claims in their inbox every day without questioning the agenda of those producing it. After all, many of these e-mails are from trusted "sources," namely family and friends - the adult version of education on the grade school playground. For the newest in internet capabilities to inform and educate the masses, we should all take a lesson in fact-checking and information evaluation. Figuring out how is the challenge.

Prizing Academic Freedom

2008-11-06T17:13:00.005-05:00

Recently, the Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University School of Law in New York City awarded its prestigious Stein Ethics Prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Fordham University calls itself the Jesuit University of New York and continues to see its Jesuit founding as an integral part of its teaching students to serve the community and be good citizens. However, the question of the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fordham Law School came into question when Justice Breyer was awarded the Stein Prize.

Seemingly due to his authorship of the Supreme Court's decision that overturned Nebraska's ban on late-term abortion, Cardinal Edward M. Egan, archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, reportedly rebuked school administrators. The cardinal's spokesman was quoted as saying, "As a result of these discussions, the cardinal is confident that a mistake of this sort will not happen again."

Fordham Law School students and professors were immediately incensed. An on-line petition was started as students decried the parochialism of the Catholic Church and the erosion of academic freedom. Many in academia would agree that blanket statements barring the law school from engaging in certain activities or giving awards to a Supreme Court justice smacks of censorship and harms the integrity of the academic institution.

However, this disagreement raises some fundamental questions that both academia and religious institutions have failed to deal with effectively. On many levels, religious leaders have failed to continue to play a real and relevant role in academia without impending academic freedom. With the fight over teaching intelligent design raging on in the public schools, the debate over the meaning of academic freedom continues in Fordham Law School and throughout the United States.

Religious leaders and academics both seem incapable of engaging each other in meaningful discussions. Instead of rebuking administrators after the decision, why wasn't there engagement with the decision making process? It could have been during that time that someone would have pointed out how Justice Breyer and the Church share a commitment to social justice and civil rights. That may not have been enough to satisfy the cardinal, but I've always thought education is really more about learning to live with people you disagree with than anything else. Although, that may simply be too much to ask of priests and lawyers.

Digital Social Responsibility Panel at Japan Society

2008-10-31T12:23:00.001-04:00

It has been an eventful week. On Wednesday, I participated in the Japan Society's panel on Digital Social Responsibility: Search for a Sound, Responsible Information Society with Charla Griffy-Brown of Pepperdine, Jun Kurihara of Harvard, and Harriet Pearson of IBM. This conference could not have been better timed: It took place hours after Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft agreed to new guidelines that would aim to protect human rights, privacy, and free expression. From the Scientific American:

The three software giants today (Oct. 29) announced creation of the Global Network Initiative designed to persuade oppressive governments to allow their citizens to freely express opinions, via the Web in particular, without fear of
retribution.

Participating companies must agree to "respect and protect the freedom of expression rights of their users when confronted with government demands, laws and regulations to suppress freedom of expression, remove content or otherwise limit access to information and ideas in a manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards," says the new group's guidelines.

The guidelines were a response to criticism from NGOs about Internet companies cooperating with the Chinese Government. From InformationWeek:

Yahoo helped launch the initiative after becoming one of several technology companies criticized for how they deal with restrictions on speech in foreign countries. Yahoo was accused of giving the Chinese government information about users that led to the jailing of dissidents. Google has been criticized for filtering search results to comply with demands from the Chinese government. MSN and Yahoo also filter search results to comply with Chinese government
restrictions...

GNI members said they commit to protect freedom of expression and privacy, partner with others for collective governance and accountability, and spread their objectives around the globe. They agreed to require governments to put information requests in writing and to interpret those requests as narrowly as possible.

As expected, there is already some skepticism about the initiative. From SA again:

Don't expect any radical chances results any time soon: companies joining the
initiative (at a cost of $100,000) have two years from the time they sign on to prove they're following the guidelines. It is unclear, however, the consequences a company faces if they join the initiative but fail to meet these guidelines.

Several themes emerged from the Japan Society panel. The overall theme is that companies and Internet users must build a foundation of trust in order to fully exploit the benefits of Web 2.0. That means stewardship of the Internet and of information will become a big focus--information stewardship happens to be something that IBM has been thinking about since the late 1960s. Some other big themes from the panel:

1. A "ubiquitous network society" or "collective intelligence" is emerging from the Internet and Web 2.0, allowing for better and quicker response to crises and problems. The use of crowd sourcing is one such example. With so much information out there, will the global economy begin to put a higher premium on other skills, such as empathy? (BusinessWeek has made this argument, too.)

2. The Web is allowing companies and operations to move from an international model to a multinational model to a truly global model in which data are processed in multiple places, through cloud computing, for example. As John Ruggie mentioned at the Carnegie Council this week, the speed and scope of business has surpassed traditional governing organizations like states. How do we keep up

3. Web 2.0 can help mitigate risk (as well as create new risks) in many areas, including supply chain, brand, and public relations. Lines between competition and cooperation are blurred as are those between friends and enemies. How do we better facilitate these interactions, for example to boost the "integrity of the crowds," as I would put it. This point was brought up by Andrew Zolli at our Web 2.0 panel at the Carnegie Council.

4. Finally, ethical leadership or "courageous leadership," as Kurihara put it, will be needed to resolve the paradoxes and ethical dilemmas posed by Web 2.0. Zolli made a similar point at our panel by saying that ethical leadership is the fastest mover affecting brand value. The others are about stewardship--social and environmental.

(Photo collage from Japan Society of Kurihara, Griffy-Brown, Pearson, and me.)

On Writing About Your Kids - Oversharing?

2008-06-06T15:31:00.004-04:00

Slate writer Emily Bazelon has just written a piece in which she struggles with the ethical code of writing about one's children. It is a topic that is very much related to "oversharing," the problem that plagued Emily Gould, as Bazelon mentions toward the end of her article:

In my paranoid moments, I worry that by writing about our kids, we're encouraging them to loosen or lose their own boundaries. Then someday, they'll hurtle toward the vortex that produced the awful, self-destructive oversharing of former Gawker editor Emily Gould, as she related at such length in the New York Times Magazine recently.

I'd like to think, like many of the writers I talked to, that the small revelations I offer about my kids are harmless. But what if they're not? A few weeks ago, after writing about my 5-year-old son's frustrated search for his pre-soccer snacks, I got an e-mail from reader Marc Naimark. "I was just about to post the following to the Fray," he wrote. "Fortunately Emily uses her maiden name.
Otherwise she is being cruel level 9 on a scale of 10 to her kid. Stuff on the internet lasts forever, and I'm not sure that 16-year-old Simon is going to be pleased for his friends to learn that he used to scream bloody murder about not finding his friggin' veggie sticks." This gave me pause. Maybe I need new ground rules. Or maybe at some point it will be time to stop. Except not just yet. Last night, I was talking with Eli about his misadventures at recess and thought, ah, good topic.

A problem with writing about one's kids is that the writer may not realize that he or she will be creating the first published narrative of a person's life. As Bazelon notes, in the bottomless Internet, what we write will be around for a long, long time. In my view, an ethical approach to capturing a child's life on a blog would include a eye toward fairness. If you are setting the permanent record on one's beginnings, would it be something that person would be proud of later on? Is it fair for you to be making it public? How would you feel if your kid were blogging about your life?

The Slate article generated a lot of discussion from the Fray. One posting applied the Golden Rule:

As with any ethical question, the golden rule is a pretty good guide, in my opinion. Here it is stretched by time and perspective:
1) Would the child presently want to be written about in the story as published?
2) Would the child AT ANY POINT IN THE FUTURE want to have been written about in the story as published?
It seems to me that there is such uncertainty in both these questions, especially the second, that the governing presumption must be not to publish, with only occassional (sic) exceptions. As there is certainly some wisdom to be gained by the writing and by the reading of others' writing on the subject of one's child-raising experiences, here is an additional ethically safe route, it seems to me:
1) write anything and everything one likes
2) publish nothing, or only that which passes the strict golden rule test above
3) when one's children reach some age of majority and independence, present the material for their assent or veto and publish accordingly

Ethics of Friending and Gossip

2008-06-01T12:36:00.005-04:00

This is interesting. An old article on the ethics of Facebook de-friending in Slate magazine is now on the most emailed list. Here is the author's advice on de-friending in 2007:

Is it OK to de-friend someone?
Say you've been too generous with your friending policy, and a gaggle of strangers is now hogging your News Feed. You too can launch a Great Facebook Purge. The beauty of this is that no headline or notification pops up in your ex-friend's inbox announcing, "You've suffered a humiliating rejection at the hands of _________." It's all very stealthy, thus making it the perfect way to deal with promiscuous frienders.
But what if your so-called friend scans through their friend list and notices that you've gone missing? First off, anyone who is policing their Facebook account this rigorously is morbidly obsessed and thus best kept at arm's length. If she confronts you about it, the best strategy is to plead ignorance: Perhaps the site's massive growth has led to some unexpected technical difficulties? Re-friend, then wait at least six months before trying another de-friending.

When we started this blog, people thought an Internet ethics was far fetched, but the idea seems to be catching on--even with those who are not completely aware of it. You may have seen the expose, tell-all story in the New York Times last weekend from the woman who gossiped her way to stardom but now feels a bit dirty about it. This is a funny excerpt from the article (funny in a sad way):

As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.
After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet.

That "queasy" feeling is your moral compass trying to tell you something: Stop what you are doing.

Total freedom to act with pure impunity is not a good thing. It is something moral philosophers have talked about throughout history. Sometimes restraint is the kindest thing you can do.

The ironic thing is that this meta-narrative of how the author felt bad about doing something only worked to promote her story and (probably) compound the damage to those hurt. I gave a talk at Net Impact in San Francisco on Friday about Internet ethics. I asked who had read this New York Times article. Everyone had read it but no one could finish it because they were so repulsed by the actions of the author.

If you did make it to the end of the article, you would have seen that the author came around:

I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I’ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I’m an oversharer — it’s not like I’m entirely reformed. But lately, online, I’ve found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn’t make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing. But I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004 — there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.

Blogging the China Earthquake

2008-05-14T11:02:00.016-04:00

Chinese citizens have been turning to the Internet for information on loved ones who went missing after an earthquake in Sichuan province took up to 13,000 lives. Twitter, the online tool that allows friends and family members to send short updates to one another via IM, SMS, and social networking sites like Facebook, has helped many Chinese keep each other up-to-date on their safety as well as on news related to the quake.

There's been discussion of Twitters becoming more and more popular as a "platform for serious discourse," used by citizen and professional journalists alike. Twitter apparently broke the news about the earthquake before the earthquake tracking agency, U.S. Geological Survey.

But the influx of information spread via Twitter, as well as YouTube and various blogs, in some cases may be raising more concerns than it's quelling. Many Chinese bloggers are questioning why the government wasn't able to predict the quake and help citizens prepare:

Local media in April noted water suddenly draining from a large pool in Hubei province, east of Sichuan. That report has been snapped up by bloggers looking for natural omens.

Other bloggers have unearthed a statement by a local government bureau in Sichuan, quelling rumours of an earthquake about a week before Monday's disaster.

Some "conspiracies" floating the blogosphere are that the government may have tried to ignore the earthquake out of a "desire for a peaceful Olympics." According to the UK Telegraph:

[Blogger] Shanghaiist posted 90 updates to the story, and started a rumour that the authorities had prior warning of the earthquake which provoked an official rebuke and more chatter across blogs.

The website gathered together material as diverse as reports that spy satellite images of the region were being used in the rescue operation, to the fact that Monday was Buddha's birthday, to a posting about how people killed in the earthquake were "victims of China's economic miracle.

Some have compared the situation to the handling of Hurricane Katrina by New Orleans and the US government. The situation also looks a lot like the 2003 SARS epidemic, when Chinese citizens spread exaggerated accounts of the numbers affected by the disease through SMS, sparking widespread panic and international criticism of the CCP for not better managing the crisis.

Times Online quotes "established journalist" Chang Ping's reaction to the quake:

"...as someone with relatives in the affected area, I could not stop myself from seeking whatever information I could ...”

He added: "The information was clearly unreliable, and it was difficult to tell what was true or false.

"Together it all spoke of a single problem, and that is the people's fierce appetite for information when faced with a public incident."

Most talk about citizen journalism revolves around whether or not it should be considered reliable or professional. On the one hand, this type of panic on the blogosphere could serve to delegitimize the Internet as a news source. But irresponsible blogging could ironically have just as much of a positive impact as the citizen journalists uncovering the truth about the
not-always-transparent Chinese government.

WSJ reports that the state-run Xinhua has "proved surprisingly aggressive at covering the earthquake in Sichuan province" to protect the country's reputation now that they have millions of competing accounts being spread through the Internet:

A regulation promoted as increasing government transparency took effect just two weeks ago. The regulation urges government officials to disclose more information to the public, including "information on the management, usage and distribution of social donations in funds and in kind for emergency and disaster relief."
At the same time, the leash has tightened on the country's news media. Just last August, the government approved a law restricting news outlets in covering natural disasters. The law says that "units and individuals are prohibited from fabricating or spreading false information regarding emergencies and government efforts to cope with emergencies," according to a Xinhua report at the time.
Though the law was aimed more at relative muckrakers, Xinhua was affected too. Yet since the earthquake, it has filed more than 200 reports and updates...

The verdict isn't clear when it comes to Xinhua's performance in covering the disaster. "Are they going to ask deeper questions about possible early warnings?" [David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong] says. "We'll wait and see."

Israel-Palestine Wiki-Conflict

2008-05-13T16:43:00.005-04:00

According to Electronic Intifada (EI), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) "is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged."

An EI report documents action alerts emailed by Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst for CAMERA, which explain in detail how CAMERA volunteers can promote Israel's image on Wikipedia without being perceived as having an agenda:

"So, for example, imagine that you get rid of or modify a problematic sentence in an article alleging that 'Palestinian [sic] become suicide bombers to respond to Israel's oppressive policies.' You should, in parallel leave a comment on that article's discussion page (either after or before making the change). Avoid defending the edit by arguing that 'Israel's policies aren't 'oppression,' they are defensive. And anyway Palestinians obviously become suicide bombers for other reasons for example hate education!' Instead, describe how this sentence violates Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. One of the core principles is that assertions should adhere to a Neutral Point of View, usually abbreviated NPOV. (The opposite of NPOV is POV, or Point of View, which is basically another way of saying subjective statement, or opinion.) So it would be best to note on the discussion page that 'This sentence violates Wikipedia's NPOV policy, since the description of Israel's policies as 'oppressive' is an opinion. In addition, it is often noted by Middle East experts that one of the reasons Palestinians decide to become suicide bombers is hate education and glorification of martyrdom in Palestinian society ...'"

(The EI report notes: "In fact, there have been numerous studies debunking claims about Palestinian 'hate education,' or 'glorification of martyrdom' causing suicide bombings.")

In some emails, "a veteran Wikipedia editor, known as 'Zeq,'" offers advice to CAMERA volunteers, including a how-to on how some of them can become "neutral administrators"in charge of arbitrating disputes over contested articles.

Writing for the Jerusalum Post, Andre Oboler questions why EI would expect any different from the tools of Web 2.0:

To understand why this accusation of "infiltration" is so poisonous one must understand the nature of Wikipedia. Its basic idea is that anyone can edit the on-line encyclopedia. How, then, how can anyone be said to be infiltrating it?

Some might protest, "But these people were seeking to coordinate and thereby achieve a level of control over the editing process!"

I say, "So what?" This is how Web 2.0 works. This is Web 2.0 democracy. It is not perfect, and many would argue it is not even a good idea. Yet this is the model on which Wikipedia is based.

But the JPost author does admit that CAMERA should have been more transparent. Electronic Intifada reported:

Throughout the documents EI obtained, CAMERA operatives stress the need for stealth and secrecy. In his initial action alert, Ini requests that recipients "not forward it to members of the news media." In a 17 March follow-up email sent to volunteers, Ini explains that he wants to make the orchestrated effort appear to be the work of unaffiliated individuals. Thus he advises that "There is no need to advertise the fact that we have these group discussions."

Devin Stewart previously blogged about transparency concerns on Wikipedia, particularly that it "allows anonymous editors to change or delete entries."At the end of April, an IP address traced to the US Department of Justice was blocked by Wikipedia for "vandalism" after repeated attempts to remove information related to the CAMERA controversy. CAMERA encouraged its members to create screen names (but not those that could be seen as pro-Israel) and log in before making edits so as to avoid having their IP addresses recorded.

Blogger's Publishing Responsibility: Speech at The Korea Society

2008-05-08T17:44:00.003-04:00

Here is me talking recently at The Korea Society about a blogger's responsibility as a publisher (with a little story to illustrate):

The Empathy Economy: CSR and Web 2.0

2008-05-08T16:51:00.006-04:00

I just got back from participating in an innovative discussion this week in Orlando at SAP’s SAPPHIRE event. The workshop covered the intersection of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and web 2.0. I am posting my initial thoughts on Fairer Globalization and the Ethical Blogger because the topics are relevant to both blogs. Here are some of the points I made and heard:

From an ethics point of view, web 2.0 has the potential of dissolving the false divisions between people—whether it is between nations and communities, producers and consumers, or labor and capital. With more ownership—both in influence and voting power—of the global economy, these divisions can fall away.

I start with the premise that companies are full of people, individuals, each of whom has an ethical duty. Naturally, some of these people are bloggers and some are stockholders. Companies can find champions outside the corporate walls to force change within a company for the benefit of society beyond the simple bottom line.

An ethics of the web is needed. Without one, we could face more government regulation, creating an excuse for governments to control information and connectivity. Some of the ethics of the web are simple: link to others, log in frequently, and share content. They are the principles that speak to the scientific origins of the web. Other principles might focus on the integrity of the information on the web; those would be transparency, honesty, and disclosure.

In the case of CSR, companies should consider the principles of sincerity, innovation, and pluralism (as Mikkel Sorensen and Nicolai Peitersen have argued in “CSR 2.0”). Companies can draw on the infinite wisdom out there (in publics). They have this great list of principles for CSR 2.0:

1. Inclusiveness – involving stakeholders directly from beginning to
end
2. Market driven – no longer expert driven
3. Innovation – smart companies turn market pressure into stakeholder led
innovation
4. Sincerity – you can no longer uphold an image that is not real
5. Co-ownership – a truly embedded value-based culture requires
involvement
6. Dynamics – standards and annual audits replaced by 24/7 engagement
7. Quality - CSR as immersive business strategy
8. Personal - It’s about you, not your sector! What are your own
ethics?
9. Pluralism – number and nature of CSR projects will expand
dramatically
10. Proximity - local impact is global

Megacommunities or multistakeholder initiatives become a reality with web 2.0, producing more sustainable solutions. Not only are the solutions drawing on more information but they also get more buy-in from increased participation. Web 2.0 has empowered civil society to do its job: producing social values and fostering the positive dynamic between companies and civil society.

The convergence of web 2.0 and CSR also occurs in the need for public goods. The web is a public good much like the environment, public health, and human rights. In this way, web 2.0 and public goods can help one another. The revolution in the relationship between corporations and society is syncing up with the IT revolution in web 2.0, democratizing corporate governance (I suggest democratic wealth funds here).

Formal compliance is giving way to informal compliance measures, making ethics more important relative to strict law. As I put it, in this new business environment, what is increasingly important is empathy, not regulation. As one panelist put it, it is democracy without rules, challenging the way companies communicate. As Booz Allen has put it, companies are now “always on.”

Does the intersection of web 2.0 and CSR bring about mutual benefit? I think so. Transparency is fostered when companies are forced to listen to their stakeholders. And privacy can actually be strengthened through transparency. Some people track themselves online to preclude further surveillance, and more information availability can eliminate the need to investigate. I have suggested blogging our emails in order to deter people from writing things that are hurtful or libelous.

Making sure web 2.0 brings about a better world will be about fostering trust. Software that can facilitate trust will be a huge business opportunity in this realm.

Finally, time is precious. I would assert that efficiency is ethical. Several people at the workshop dreamed of a day when our communications become more streamlined, eliminating the need of outdated methods like email. Remember when email was the future?

Channels for communication between the corporation and civil society were spelled out: blogs (topic specific); wikis (with a final goal); social networking such as Facebook (for awareness and promotion); crowdsourcing (to ask crowds to solve problems or prioritize goals); and the boycott and buycott.

Photo by linkerjpatrick.

For the truth about Zimbabwe, turn to the blogs first

2008-05-06T09:51:00.017-04:00

If you are looking for timely news and information regarding the tenuous political situation in Zimbabwe, you might want to turn to a blog.

Over the the last several weeks I have identified a troubling delay in the reporting of hard news from Zimbabwe by major Western media outlets. Part of this is of course a function of President Robert Mugabe's open disdain of foreign media. Barry Bearak, the Johannesburg bureau chief for the New York Times, and Stephen Bevan of the U.K. Sunday Telegraph, were arrested and spent several days in a Zimbabwean jail last month for the "crime" of practicising journalsim without accreditation by the regime. The Committee to Protect Journalists claims that "seven years of government intimidation and deteriorating economic conditions have prompted a steady flow of Zimbabwean journalists to leave the country."

But a significant part of this news deficit seems related to the sourcing demands of traditional media. The blog This is Zimbabwe, covered the story of a Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe about a week before the New York Times did. Then there is the case of armed Chinese soldiers spotted patrolling the streets of the city of Mutare, Zimbabwe's fourth largest city. The story was reported on the website of the Association of Zimbabwean Journalists in the UK on April 15th, but only appeared in the Times and the Independent on the 19th.

I'll be the first to admit that these stories, when read on a blog, initially carry the whiff of rumor. This is especially so for second and third person accounts of events related to a blogger via text message (SMS), as is often the case in places like Zimbabwe where internet access is rarer than cell phone service. In both cases, however, the stories turned out to be true, but the slow moving traditional media either sat on or ignored them.

About 10 days ago, I attended a lunch with Eric M. Bost, the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa. He told us he had recently dined with Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Although projected by many to have won the presidency, Tsvangirai now lives in self-imposed exile in South Africa as chaos and despotism gain increasing traction in his country. Bost told of videos he had seen featuring Mugabe supporters entering districts supportive of the MDC, dragging people from their beds, beating them, and setting their houses on fire. As the fires burned, these thugs were heard asking the local people, "Who will you vote for now?"

All of this is getting soft play in the traditional press. In my opinion, U.S. coverage of the crisis has severely undereported the degree of violence, intimidation and brutality going on in Zimbabwe. To the average American, the situation comes across as a slightly heightened version the Florida recount of 2000 rather than state terror on par with the most despicable regimes of the 20th century.

Is this because, as the Committe to Protect Journalists notes, the foreign press has been run out of Zimbabwe? Or is their a more fundamental problem with the way in which information is processed and regurgitated by the traditional media?

Press freedom cartoons by Mick Stern are available on the website of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

UPDATE (5/9/08 1PM EST): The New York Times is preparing to run this report by Celia W. Dugger in the paper tomorrow. It appeared on their website ten minutes ago. Finally, someone is reporting on the brutality and intimidation in Zimbabwe. They might also have included pictures such as this, this and this documenting the torture (warning, the last one is pretty graphic). Or they might have run this photo of three-year old Samson, beaten because his parents work on a white-owned farm.

Photos taken from This is Zimbabwe, a blog published by Sokwanele, a civic action support group based in Zimbabwe. Their name translates as, Enough is Enough.

'Codes of [Blogging] Conduct'- Reflections on Cyberethics Panel

2008-04-09T14:49:00.008-04:00

'Code.' Four letters. Two vowels. Two consonants. One syllable. Over 1.6 billion Google search results.

In the blogsphere, the first reaction to the word 'code' is computer programming. Whether the initial thought is equal sign, quotation mark, or < and >, code holds specific connotations for the blogger who seeks to embed a video or create a hyperlink.

The word 'code' takes an entirely different meaning when paired with the word 'conduct.' 'Code of conduct' is defined as a group of expectations outlining the proper practices for an individual or organization. When this 'code of conduct' is moved from the gala circuit to the Internet, specifically to the blogsphere, a door to an ethical debate about duty and expression is thrust open.

So what, if any, 'code of conduct' should the blogging community uphold?

Many companies that host blogs set out basic rules of engagement. For blogger.com, the host of this blog, its 'code of conduct' is as follows:

We respect our users' ownership of and responsibility for the content they choose to share. It is our belief that censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.

In order to uphold these values, we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages. As a result, there are some boundaries on the type of content [including pedophilia, incest, bestiality, commercial or child pornography, hateful or violent content, or material that violates copyright infringement] that can be hosted with Blogger. The boundaries we've defined are those that both comply with legal requirements and that serve to enhance the service as a whole.

Some groups have adapted preexisting 'codes of conduct' for the blogsphere. CyberJournalist.net has created A Bloggers' Code of Ethics, adapted from the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics:

Be Honest and Fair.
Minimize Harm.
Be Accountable.

Others have approached it at a more individual level- creating 'codes of conduct' for themselves, that they then recommend to others. Tim O'Reilly writer of O'Reilly Radar sees a 'code of conduct,' and more importantly a discussion, stemming from the statements below:

Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
Ignore the trolls.
Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

Author of Rebecca's Pocket, Rebecca Blood, argues that the six rules below form a basis of ethical behavior for online publishers of all kinds:

Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
Publicly correct any misinformation.
Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
Disclose any conflict of interest.
Note questionable and biased sources.

All of these 'codes of conduct' share one common ideal and that is to be open and honest as a writer, and active and engaged as a reader. So should the 'code of conduct' for the blogsphere be as simple as that? For now it's up to each blogger and reader to decide.

Prognosis Positive for Ethical Bloggers

2008-04-06T12:32:00.005-04:00

Our groundbreaking Cyberethics luncheon last week was preceded by a cerebral dinner the evening before with several media experts and personalities, including Carnegie Council fellow Josh Fouts, Salon.com writer Alex Koppelman, and Linden Labs CEO and Second Life creator Philip Rosedale aka Philip Linden. (Phil is stepping down as CEO of Linden Labs.) One of the major themes we discussed that evening was the relationship between online and offline identity and accountability.

Phil's contention was that the identities that we create online, in virtual worlds such as Second Life, may be truer to our real identities than what we are born with. In a sense that philosopher John Rawls might have a appreciated, since we are in control of our online identities, the persona you create online is in some ways closer to your "true" self, if such a thing exists. Panelist Rita King, a Carnegie Council fellow, blogs about Phil's view in her post "Becoming More of Yourself" in Dispatches from the Imagination Age:

In the last few months, I've spoken about the cultural value of the Imagination Age on four continents, and I know how people react. Some are fascinated. Some are disgusted. Many respond with the predictable, "But I already have a first life." Some lament a perceived decrease in socialization and intimacy between people. Quite the opposite. The issue of virtual identity is an extremely critical one in the development of global culture.

"When you're in Second Life," Philip Rosedale said during the hearing, "there's a very strong sense that you are kind of, in a way, becoming more of yourself."

I never expected it to happen to me. But it did.

The name of Rita's online identity is Eureka Dejavu. The fact that her name online is different from her real life name begs a question that we have dealt with a lot on Ethical Blogger: How do you hold people accountable online if they use fake names, pseudonyms, or no names at all (anonymous)?

Rita, Phil, and others answered that like an author who writes a book under a pseudonym, a blogger or inhabitant of a virtual world spends a great deal of time in creating his or her online persona (a "truer" identity). With this time and energy invested, they accumulate a reputation that they feel compelled to defend and protect. In other words, if the dream of a true online identity holds, these people will avoid reckless behavior.

The problem, which Phil and others admitted to, appears when people create multiple online identities that fit their mood rather than their "self." When identity is split, there is less accountability. Phil said people might have a party self or a mean self or a nice self online. This could create a problem. When identity is unified, online societies can hold that person more accountable.

And this dynamic of people investing themselves online and related societies emerging online was the essence of the positive prognosis for Ethical Bloggers. No one wants the Internet regulated or censored as it is in China. The alternative is that we govern ourselves--that a sense of ethics emerges, not regulatory regimes or even systems of laws.

More on the Cyberethics panel later. Stay tuned for video clips of Alex Koppelman, Steve Clemons, Rita King, Michael Getler, and Jay Rosen as well.

Reflections on Cyberethics Lunch

2008-04-03T22:31:00.003-04:00

Just wanted to pass along some reactions to the excellent discussion of cyberethics at the Carnegie Council this afternoon.

I think it is very important to acknowledge how important 9/11 is, and will continue to be, to the substance of today’s discussion. There was consensus among the panelists about the benefit of tapping into informed online communities on particular topics, and September 11th is an event around which perhaps the largest, and most diverse, such community has naturally coalesced.

While it is important for the New York Times to acknowledge, as they did, the deficiencies in their reporting leading up to the Iraq war, it is equally important to recognize the damage done by those deficiencies, and others like them. The atmosphere which contributed to the failures the Times acknowledged would have been impossible without September 11th, and as someone who was serving a gatekeeper function for newspaper editors in years immediately following September 11th , I can personally attest to the emotional component of the limits that developed on mainstream reporting during that period.

It just so happens that 9/11 occurred at a moment in history when citizens were not confined to traditional outlets of information. Official secrecy surrounding the event motivated many reasonable people to search for alternative sources of information. The credibility of the most of sources which ended up filling those gaps is certainly open to question, but it is important to acknowledge that the ability of conspiracy theorists to influence so many people stemmed in part from the (largely excusable and not conspiracy-related) short-comings of mainstream coverage. As a result, 9/11 became an important test-case for what contributions the Internet can make to educating the public about the world.

I was shocked to hear the questioner’s assertion that 1/3rd of Americans believe the CIA had something to do with 9/11, and if that is the case, it does not speak well of what the Internet’s contributions have been thus far. Whether or not the percentage is accurate, even the use of that figure in a setting like today’s discussion is striking.

It is often repeated that newspapers constitute the first draft of history, but the question of what role blogs will play in drafting history is only starting to emerge. As one of the panelists pointed out, there have already been instances in which individual bloggers have impacted a story such that it would be impossible to write an accurate historical account without mentioning them. I want to be 100% clear that I am not saying that I think the CIA had anything to do with 9/11. What I am saying is that our collective understanding of the event itself, and the factors leading up to it, has certainly been informed by the presence of the Internet- and that is important. As that history continues to evolve, I believe it will be one of the most important battlegrounds where the competing forces discussed today will vie for the public’s trust.

Continuing with a forward looking focus, the other comment I have is about something that was referenced in Devin Stewart's opening remarks; the generational element of the range in perspectives regarding the role of the internet in journalism.

I feel very lucky to have “grown-up” with the Internet. When my father first brought the net into our house, it was all text-based chatrooms and it took so long to download anything you weren’t supposed to be looking at that it was hardly worth it. While I think its important not to overestimate the influence the net has on kids’ mental development, I’m not sure how I would have handled the today’s Internet at the age when I first encountered its basic predecessor. I recently had the opportunity to discuss these themes with some high school students, and while it’s difficult for me to put into words, it was clear that we were approaching the Internet from two very different perspectives.

There certainly was at least one generation gap separating today’s panelists and I suspect another huge gap in perception already exists between people my age (26) and those ten years younger about their relationship to the net. As the medium continues to develop and these young people enter the marketplace of ideas, I am very curious to see how their perspectives on the role of the net in journalism will differ from someone like Mr. Koppelman, who, by that time, is likely to be serving the editorial role discussed as being so important to the continued evolution of the medium.

I think a well informed teenager would have made a useful contribution to today’s discussion. While he or she would not have the depth of knowledge and background on the issues being discussed, I think it would give the audience a preview of the attitudes of that will be taking the medium in yet undefined directions.

An unexpected catch to Amazon's wishlist

2008-03-31T22:49:00.003-04:00

A Japanese blogger reports on her surprise at how the default setting for Amazon’s wishlist leaves your full name and email address open to the public. To begin with, Japan has no custom of listing the things they want before an event (such as bridal registry, or a present list for birthdays or holidays). There is no equivalent word for “wish list” in Japanese, and in fact recently Amazon.co.jp changed the name of the wish list from “wish list” in English to “list of things I want” in Japanese. The author of the blog worries that the default setting of Amazon leaving all information open to the public will not be compatible with Japanese society, currently obsessed with private information leakage and protection. Internet has permeated modern society to the extent that each nation has developed its own internet culture—MNCs now must be savvy of the subtle differences in each country’s internet culture as well as their culture in the traditional sense.

-Watson Institute for International Affairs Research Assistant

Viewer Protection or Political Suppression?

2008-03-29T16:58:00.007-04:00

Following the violence in Tibet the past several weeks, China has blocked access to YouTube and other websites showing videos of the riots. The Wall Street Journal ran a story last week about the inconsistencies in YouTube’s censorship policies in Asia and the Middle East:

In Thailand, in order to be accessible, [YouTube] agreed to block Thai users from seeing clips deemed insulting to the king in violation of Thai law. In Turkey, YouTube has suspended the account of the person who uploaded the Ataturk video, though the site remains banned there. In Myanmar, YouTube was banned after clips of protesting monks appeared on the site. In that case, YouTube declined to remove the clips and remains banned.

Media analysts say YouTube's string of censorship flare-ups -- and the site's sometimes inconsistent responses -- indicate it needs to develop a more transparent strategy for dealing with these issues. YouTube's community guidelines state the site encourages "free speech and defend[s] everyone's right to express unpopular points of view." But the site also reserves the right to remove content it deems inappropriate, which gives it significant discretion when it comes to politically sensitive content.

The article states that YouTube often has to choose between “bending to censorship and losing business opportunities.” But YouTube isn’t just bending to foreign governments, and censorship is more than a business development issue.

The WSJ article leaves out mention of the Egyptian political turmoil and violence which was caught on video last fall by activist and YouTube user Wael Abbas. Abbas is the first blogger to receive the Knight International Journalism Award for his work, which led to the conviction of police for torture, but YouTube suspended his account. The nearly 100 images “including clips depicting purported police brutality, voting irregularities and anti-government demonstrations” that Abbas had uploaded were blocked, not just in Egypt but worldwide.

According to Reuters, YouTube told Abbas that the videos generated complaints about the content of torture. Human rights activists protested, including Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, who argued that the intent of Abbas to expose human rights violations should have been taken into account. Abbas’ access was restored in December and the majority of his clips were allowed back online.

The WSJ article discusses a similar case in Russia:

After being alerted by users last month, YouTube removed a video clip that appeared to document abuse of prisoners at a Russian prison camp that YouTube determined violated the site's graphic-violence policy. It eventually restored the video but required viewers to click to consent to watch a clip that "may contain content that is inappropriate for some users." YouTube says its staff hadn't initially been aware that the video was meant to document alleged human-rights abuses.

Where is the line between protecting viewers and censoring content of political value? Should YouTube be required to develop more consistent guidelines when it comes to political censorship, and in doing so is it YouTube's responsibility to decipher users’ motives?

Blogging and Health

2008-03-26T16:05:00.005-04:00

Policy Innovations ran a story earlier this year about addiction problems related to online gaming, citing an American Medical Association report suggesting that "gaming addiction is likely to be a subset of Internet addiction and may cause negative physical, psychosocial, or behavioral problems."

An Amazon.com search for "Internet addiction" returns over 400 books, mostly self-help guides, and you can take online quizzes to help you determine if you suffer from excessive Internet use. According to the New York Times, the constant pressure some bloggers feel to keep their blogs up-to-date can create stress-related health problems.

But a study released this month suggests otherwise. Researchers James Baker and Susan Moore from the Swinburn University of Technology surveyed MySpace users who were intending to start blogging and found in follow-up questionnaires that “after two months of regular blogging, people felt they head better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.”

We found potential bloggers were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn't feel as much part of a community as the people who weren't interested in blogging," Ms Moore said.

"They were also more likely to use venting or expressing your emotions as a way of coping.

"It was as if they were saying 'I'm going to do this blogging and it's going to help me'."

In the follow-up:

Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Are these findings contradictory, or does blogging have different effects on different personality types? It would seem that individuals with addictive personalities or compulsive tendencies would be more inclined to run into health problems with continuous blogging, whereas those with problems socializing offline may find blogging more helpful.

If the latter is true, does that mean a code of blogging ethics would have to be tailored to address individual psychological or social predispositions?

Well-Informed on the Internet

2008-03-26T15:34:00.003-04:00

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government--Thomas Jefferson

As the primary season draws closer and closer to the end, it is important to look back and reflect on the role the Internet plays for politicians and their constituency. At a basic level the Internet provides a vast array of information. Some of that information is valid and accurate, while other pieces of it, simple put, are not. As Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal article today "Does the Web Deserve The Power It Gained To Influence Politics?:"

Considering the rapidly growing number of Americans who rely on the Web to follow the election and judge its players -- even if mostly via mainstream-media sites -- it's a good time to look at all the Web does very well with politics, and at what it messes up.

Gomes explores the role that Web videos, blogs, forums, and email play. For him each is a mixed bag that has “the ability either to elevate or to debase the political discussion.” Web videos show full speeches and also napping politicians. Blogs and forums, allow for a democratized form of expression, but also tend to focus on the issues of the moment and not ones of the platform. Email provides an efficient and effective way to spread information to contacts regardless of false statements contained within them.

For the individual, the Internet has shifted the power of information, to a large extent, into their hands (or fingertips). The increase in speed and directness at which individuals can obtain and post information about a given candidate makes the Internet an obvious choice for investigation and research. It is up to the individual to sort through the onslaught of information that is provided to them- to determine what information comes from reliable sources and what information is created in the mind of an angry teenager in Springfield. The art of being efficiently and effectively well-informed is about sifting through the vast sands of information to find the reliable golden nuggets that will help the individual decide how to vote.

For the politician, the Internet, much like television and the radio before it, is creating opportunities to expand to a greater audience. The successful use of current technologies can help win campaigns or improve approval ratings. On the one hand, FDR effectively used the medium of radio when he broadcasted fireside chats to his constituency. On the other hand, Nixon poorly used the medium of television when he lost the first presidential debate on television.

The newest presidential hopefuls should aware of the positives and the negatives of the Internet. Down the line, the ones that are able to use it most effectively will most likely be the ones in office.

Does News Polarization Lead to Truthiness?

2008-03-25T17:10:00.003-04:00

Blogger Alex asks if a polarized news environment may lead to what some call truthiness? Very provocative. (Accoding to Wikipedia, truthiness is a word that U.S. television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1])

I think truthiness is a very real risk. You have at least two trends playing out here. First group polarization: People converge to parts of the Internet that they agree with, fostering extremism. Related to that, you have news polarization, the market reaction to satisfy the demand for polarized takes on a narrow set of issues--Iraq, U.S. politics, etc. Meanwhile, media is losing an ethic that may have been unique to newspaper people. As Eric Alterman writes in the New Yorker article this week "Out of Print:"

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from "dead tree" newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of "news" itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

By contrast, new media is very much about satisfying the desire for opinions on why things matter and what should we expect. Alterman writes:

Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

Group Polarization to News Polarization

2008-03-20T11:39:00.004-04:00

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has described an undesirable phenomenon he calls "group polarization"—the Internet can accelerate the tendency of people to gravitate to groups that agree with their views, thereby making extremism more likely (from his Oct. 2000 Yale Law Journal):

The central empirical finding is that group discussion is likely to shift judgments toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the median of predeliberation judgments. This is true if a group decision is required; if individuals are polled anonymously afterwards, they are likely to shift in precisely the same way.

A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that a similar polarization or "narrowing" is happening in news coverage as well.

As AP writer David Bauder puts it, "The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago."

The most worrisome statistic might be this (from Bauder's article):

Two stories — the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign — represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.

Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said.

'Powerful' Blogs

2008-03-12T11:37:00.002-04:00

The Guardian has just come up with their list of the '50 Most Powerful Blogs'. Do you agree with their choices? What makes a blog 'powerful'--and, by that same token, how are you defining 'powerful'? Here are their top ten:

1. The Huffington Post

2. Boing Boing

3. Techcrunch

4. Kottke

5. Dooce

6. Perezhilton

7. Talking points memo

8. Icanhascheezburger

9. Beppe Grillo

10. Gawker

An article of note...

2008-03-10T16:23:00.002-04:00

Jeff Bercovici over at Portfolio.com's Mixed Media blog has a great article out this morning about none other than ethics and blogging, providing some good context for the O'Reilly-Huffington showdown and the Tilley suicide. You can read it here: The Wild Web.

Two Ethical Blogger Events in April

2008-03-10T11:21:00.003-04:00

Two upcoming Ethical Blogger events. We invite you to attend...

Cyberethics: The Emerging Codes of Online Conduct
Thursday, April 3, 2008
12:00 PM to 2:00 PM

This Workshop for Ethics in Business luncheon will explore the codes of online conduct that are emerging as new media gains more influence in political and business affairs. Going beyond commonsense ethical codes on the Internet, such as honesty, accuracy, and transparency, this panel will examine the relationship between money, the media, and the health of American democracy. What role does private money play in influencing elections and how does this influence play out in the blogosphere? How is the media performing as a watchdog for our political system? What companies and media organizations are advancing a more ethical internet society?

Steven C. Clemons, publisher of The Washington Note, will speak on political blogging, blogging ethics, and money in politics. PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler will discuss standards of editorial integrity in old and new media. Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions will talk about the evolving ethics of virtual worlds and their use in public diplomacy. New York University Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen will draw on his experience as a press critic and innovator of new media projects. This event is cosponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton's strategy+business magazine and the NYU Center for Global Affairs, and is part of the Ethical Blogger Project.

Location:

Global Policy InnovationsCarnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs170 East 64th StreetNew York, NY 10065-7478(212) 838-4120(212) 752-2432 - Fax

Contact:

The luncheon cost is $50 (fee can be waived for students, academics, and nonprofit professionals). Please send your RSVP and payment info to: kburgos@cceia.org

The Republic of Bloggers
Thursday, April 10, 2008
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

With some of the highest rates of broadband and wireless Internet penetration in the world, Korea and Japan are home to thriving online communities that affect politics, shape public opinion, and forge new forms of social bonding. In Korea, the net has empowered citizen journalism and created a new national pastime of "massively multiplayer online games." According to the Washington Post, more blogs are written in Japanese than in English, despite the fact that English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by five to one. Both countries are bastions of participatory Internet use, but what accounts for subtle differences in user attitudes and behavior? In addition to exploring the challenges and lessons learned by people blogging about Korean and Japanese society and politics, the panel discusses how the peculiarities of Japanese and Korean political and online cultures affect participatory democracy in those countries, and whether these experiences will be a bellwether for the global community.

This program takes place in conjunction with the ongoing, two-year, Ethical Blogger project conducted by Brown University's Watson Institute, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Demos, NYU's Center for Global Affairs, and Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Introductory remarks by Devin T. Stewart, Director, Editor, Global Policy Innovations program, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Speakers:

David Weinberger, Author, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Wendy H. K. Chun, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Tobias Harris, Publisher, ObservingJapan.com; freelance blogger and journalist

Stuart Thorson, Professor of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

Samuel Jamier, Senior Program Officer, Contemporary Issues & Corporate Affairs, The Korea Society

Moderated by Daniel B. Levine, The Korea Society

Location:

The Korea Society, 950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, New York City (Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

6:00 to 6:30 p.m.
Registration and Reception

6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Presentation and Q&A

$10 for members (The Korea Society, Japan Society, or Carnegie Council), $15 for non-members.

Contact: Please RSVP by email:
patrick.ny@koreasociety.org

Tidbits of Dangers--Potential and Not--in the B'sphere

2008-03-03T09:47:00.004-05:00

First it was the outing of Prince Harry and the backlash from big media outlets that the Drudge Report had 'disobeyed' the embargo for discussing Harry's whereabouts as a British soldier.

As for putting the prince in any high danger in Afghanistan?: thwarted, though not without plenty of backlash.

Secondly, perhaps this is a case of Megan Meier 2.0, but commenters on the blogs AdScam and AgencySpy are targeting the two sites for contributing to the suicide of Paul Tilley, DDB Chicago's managing director for creative. The reactions to his death have been confused if not consistently pointing to Tilley's being known as a complicated man. But what's so interesting is that within the blogosphere, fingers have been pointing left and right as to who caused Tilley's death (he was only 40 years old).

AdAge has an interesting piece that criticizes all of the speculation and blame-gaming, and the New York Times has set up their Readers' Comments section today for discussion on the question of: What responsibility do you think Web sites bear for the comments they host?

This question also goes back to a (fairly) recent exchange of hostilities between Bill O'Reilly and Arianna Huffington, during which O'Reilly blasted HuffPo for championing hate speech. O'Reilly accused HuffPo's anonymous commenters for their disparaging comments about Nancy Reagan. But, then he went so far as to claim Huffington was a Nazi--and not back down after coming under fire for his comments.

So, how do anonymous responses play into the ethics of blogging? What impact--and to what extent--do they have on the safety and danger that we face on a daily basis? What happens to our accountability for our actions? Who (or what), ultimately, is to blame?

"Back Channel School Sites" in Japan

2008-02-27T02:22:00.004-05:00

Recently there has been a phenomenon in Japanese society of clandestine websites run by middle and high school students known as “Urasaito”, or literally “back channel school sites”. These sites generally have message boards that allow students to exchange information as bland and trivial as homework and class announcements, but more importantly, have too often become a place for harassment, bullying, and slander. More than 40% of respondents to a survey stated that the worst part about these sites was the libeling that goes on.

The bullying that occurs on these sites all have a common characteristic—teachers and parents remain painfully unaware, and often until it is too late. These sites, estimated to be at least 200,000 in number by some experts, are unofficial sites of the school and hard to find for unknowing adults because most of them are titled using nicknames or abbreviations of the school and are spread by word of mouth. This issue came to the forefront of national concern in 2004 when a 6th grader was stabbed to death by her classmate because of comments on a website. Since then, there have been numerous cases similar in nature.

One of the reasons this is a problem specific to Japan is that Japanese cell phones are unique in that almost all of them come with access to the internet and internet use through cell phones is very widespread. A survey found that 40% of respondents accessed the internet from cell phones, while 60% accessed from computers. Internet use from cell phones is much harder for parents to monitor than internet use from PCs, thus many parents and teachers remain oblivious and have a hard time fully grasping the issue.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications are trying to tackle this problem by requiring providers to supply a filtering service for all underaged cell phone users. However, experts believe that this will not be sufficient, as some “back channel school sites” are still accessible through these filters.

Charity begins at home

2008-02-26T16:08:00.004-05:00

P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute." Just don't go looking for them on the web.

Consider the case of Holden Karnofsky. A well paid, young financial hotshot, Mr. Karnofosky was hunting for a charity worthy of his donation. Put off by a lack of reliable, transparent information (and sensing a market need) he enlisted his friend Elie Hassenfeld to form GiveWell. Borrowing a page from Moodys, their new non-profit began researching, analyzing and ranking charitable organizations according to their effectiveness.

Things went well. They made some noise. Profiled by The New York Times, NPR and by noted philosopher Peter Singer.

Last month, however, Karnofsky was swiftly relieved of his duties as Executive Director of GiveWell by its Board of Directors after a stunning lapse in judgement. Posing as someone looking for a reputable place to donate, and posting under the pseudonym Geremiah, Karnofsky queried users of the blog Ask MetaFilter for guidance on an organization that could reliably vet charities.

All the websites I've seen just have huge lists of charities with some basic financial data/ratings. I'd ideally like to hear from someone who has put some time into examining/comparing charities and can recommend someone who's good. Any ideas?

After a commenters suggested Charity Navigator, a GiveWell competitor, Karnofsky made his move. Assuming a slightly (*ahem*) transparent screen name, HoldenO, he began posting answers to his own question, guiding the "donor" to GiveWell's website. He was busted after gettting the ire up of user Miko, who smelled a rat when HoldenO and Geremiah both seemed to gang up on him. Miko writes:

Is This Transparency? OP with very slim, one-year posting history asks a question about finding a good charity in AskMe, just prior to year-end tax-decision time. Newly registered responder posts a newly formed charity-aggregator/evaluator organization, without mentioning that he is, apparently, one of the two founders. Self-promotional setup leading to self-link? Or am I being too cynical?

No, Miko, it seems you got it exactly right. Mr. Hassenfeld admitted to indulging in similar self-aggrandizing online behavior a week later. And so Messrs. Karnofsky learned the same lesson as John Mackey, namely that if you try to fool the online community, you are trying to fool an extremely savvy demographic.

Web 2.0 Accessibility and Disability

2008-02-23T14:13:00.006-05:00

Disaboom.com is an online community for people with disabilities where members can, among other things, blog about their experiences, research relevant information on health and lifestyle, and find resources on disability related policies.

An article that appeared in Wired in 2005 highlighted how the online virtual world, Second Life, was being used by individuals with certain disorders “to experience being around other people without being judged”:

"Many of the real-world challenges are bypassed in Second Life," said June-Marie Mahay, who works with the nine at an adult day-care center in Mattapan, Massachusetts. "Fewer folks have a problem hanging out with them, which is quite the opposite in real life. Also, due to their speech challenges, many would need help understanding them in real life, but in Second Life, I just type what they say and do what they want."

Added Mahay, "They felt stigmatized by their disabilities, (which) kept them from the normal social integration we take for granted. Second Life removes both of these things."

Mahay's charges spend their in-world time on the small island known as live2give. Another in-world island, known as Brigadoon, is a place created for sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to try out the social interactions that are so hard for them in the real world.

The Internet in general can make independent living easier for those with disabilities by providing opportunities for distance learning, online shopping, and rapid exchange of health-related information, to name just a few examples.

But Web 2.0 is raising some concerns. Although its development has allowed for many positive advances in social interaction, with more complex functions come greater challenges to accessibility and inclusion for disabled individuals.

Take AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), for example. The programming technique is used to create dynamic and interactive web applications, but continually changing or updated text makes it difficult for screen readers to interpret websites for visually impaired Internet users.

The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides information related to web use by people with disabilities, including an overview of different impairments that may affect web accessibility and scenarios, such as a student with dyslexia using online curricula and a teenager with deaf-blindness seeking entertainment on the web.

Mary Zajicek of Oxford Brookes University’s Department of Computing notes worrying trends related to internet accessibility in Web 2.0: Hype or Happiness?:

The increase in the use of video on Web 2.0 is cited by Liz Ball who is deafblind, and uses Braille output, as causing one of the greatest problems. She says [4] ‘“Video is being used more and more either to augment or instead of other web content. It would be a tragedy if the increased use of video led to deafblind people becoming less and less able to access the web. We need to ensure that people do provide text alternatives.” ...

Many Web 2.0 facilities rely on fast download times, which are unattainable for many disabled people and older people who live on low incomes and rely on dial up. For them large downloads are very slow and therefore extremely expensive...

Isolation of particular groups – while particular disabled groups can gain support and useful information from special community sites there is a danger of isolation. While Web 2.0 has enormous potential to bring people together it could encourage the formation of isolated groups that do not engage in mainstream activities and who develop their own sub culture which excludes others.

WAI also provides a list of guidelines for making web content accessible.

Compliance in some cases isn’t just an ethical question but a legal one. Read more about different countries’ policies related to Internet accessibility and disability here.

Wikileaks shutdown raises censorship questions

2008-02-21T10:14:00.006-05:00

The muckraking website Wikileaks was ordered shut down earlier this week by a Federal Judge in San Francisco, in response to a request made by Swiss bank Julius Baer (the site can still be accessed via its IP address http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks).

Wikileak's mission is to provide a repository for "untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." Whistleblowers can post to Wikileaks anonymously. The site made a splash in late 2007 when it posted a military manual with details of the daily workings of the Guantanomo Bay detention facility.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography - the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

Predictably, there has been much online discussion of the shutdown order -- most of it disapproving. Palo Alto, CA internet attorney Julie Turner told CBS News that the order "is akin to seizing all the copies of The New York Times, locking the doors and ordering the landlords not to let anyone back in the building."

Whoa!

While conceding my belief that Wikileaks undoubtedly provides an aggregate benefit to society, allow me to indulge in a bit of devil's advocacy. Looking at the injuction request with my untrained legal eye, it seems pretty clear that Julius Baer sought only the "temporary and preliminary" shutdown of the site until the removal of the documents could be verified. As the bank alleges that the documents were pilfered by a "disgruntled employee" and subsequently altered, their continued display causes the bank "further irreparable harm."

Now, we could all potentially agree that the bank is probably lying here. And we could all see eye-to-eye on the likelihood that the bank will lose this case, and rightly so. But, wouldn't we also agree that property rights (these documents are the bank's property) and privacy rights (they refer to client's financial information ) are the bedrock rights of our legal system?

"But what about Wikileak's First Amendment rights," you say?

Good question. We should be ever vigilant. But should those rights extend to stolen property? We know that they don't.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but at the very least, I think disputes of this sort should play out in court, not online. Some jurisdictions may not allow a transparent and impartial setting for whistleblowers to make their case, but San Francisco is certainly not one of them.

The fact is, we are not talking here about a rogue judge shutting down The New York Times without cause or warning. This is a legal dispute in which one side is seeking legal protection and the other is displaying potentially prejudicial evidence in public.

South Africa struggles with online hate

2008-02-19T09:59:00.005-05:00

It's not often you hear a newspaper editor question the value of free speech. Yet, that is precisely what Ray Hartley, editor of The Times, a daily published in Johannesburg, South Africa, did in a blog post last week. In a mere 250 words, Hartley managed to convey the frustrating divisiveness that is the byproduct of new media formats. Here is the post reprinted in full:

Is Web 2.0 stirring up racism and hate in South Africa?
I ask this question because of the hundreds - yes HUNDREDS - of highly abusive, racist and hate-filled comments that are posted on any story to do with anything on South African sites that allow the public to comment. Fortunately, these comments are mostly filtered out by administrators, but they do suggest that the open social media utopia that we dream of is in danger of becoming a cesspit of hate and anger.
A typical discussion thread goes like this:
1. An article is posted, say on why the football team drew a game after a valiant 90 minute effort;
2. A reasonable, argued comment goes up along the lines of: “We should have done better, but our defence was too weak and we lacked a striker”;
3. Then comes: “Maybe they should have stuck with a white captain. But Neil Tovey would never even get into this new South Africa trash side.”
4. The floodgates open and the racist invective flows like blood from a severed caratoid.
5. Those posting comments start reporting views they disagree with as abuse and these are removed.
6. Moderators sift through the flotsam and jetsam at a loss for words.
7. The next article goes up and it all starts again.
I don’t mean to demean the many very positive, very constructive and frequently highly articulate participants in our discussions. But there are seriously awful people out there who are finally giving vent to their seriously awful views online.
Makes you long for the old media.

As you can imagine, commenters on this post took the opportunity to prove him right -- often pseudonomously. It may be tempting to conclude that post-apartheid South Africa, a nation struggling with violence, disease and extreme social tension, is particularly susceptible to online racism and anger. But we know that South Africa is not unique and that the internet is, by its nature, an international forum.

How long before well-meaning people give up on new media as a space for childish venting and the anonymous realization of cowardly fantasies?

Level Playing Field? IOC to allow limited athlete blogs at Beijing Games

2008-02-16T09:12:00.004-05:00

The International Olympic Committee has decided to allow athletes to blog during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Many unofficial blogs have appeared during previous competitions.

But there are draconian restrictions regarding what content an athlete can post. The IOC has taken the tack that blogs are personal expression, not journalism, and it is guarding the intellectual property associated with the event and the broadcast rights. For example, video and still photography of events and medals ceremonies is disallowed or limited.

Is this censorship in the name of branding? "Domain names for blogs should not include any word similar to 'Olympic' or 'Olympics,'" reports The Canadian Press. I would think Olympics qualifies as public domain after several thousand years; fair use at the very least.

Has anyone heard how the IOC intends to enforce this policy? In addition to the usual medals being stripped for steroid use will we see an angry IOC dragging athletes to court for copyright infringement?

Steve Clemons Interviewed on Blogging

2008-02-15T16:43:00.003-05:00

Blogger Steve Clemons was recently interviewed by The Pakistani Spectator:

Would you please tell us something about you and your site?

I am a policy entrepreneur in Washington working at a think tank called the New America Foundation, but on the side, I run and publish a popular political blog called TheWashingtonNote.com. The blog is focused on a variety of things ranging from American politics to foreign and national security policy to economic issues — but many people read the blog because they like the pictures of my dogs, Annie and Oakley, two Weimaraners that I occasionally put up.

The object behind every blog is the attainment of a state of being. Do you agree with this statement?

No. I think blogs are different depending on who is writing or using them. I think people in my business who are writers and thinkers use blogs to distribute material and information — and to interact with audiences. Others use them as diaries or hobbies. These latter bloggers may be achieving some state of being — but I’m not into the metaphysical aspects of blogging.

I'm wondering what some of your memorable experiences are with blogging?

I’ve had too many to recount — but some of the most interesting began when Senators and Congressman began writing letters to the blog — or wanting me to cover their events or views.

What do you think is the most exciting or most innovative use of technology in politics right now?

I think that Facebook is the leader among social networking sites that allows new groups to quickly and efficiently form, raise money, and take action. Next to blogging about politics — I think the social networking sites are the most interesting in politics. And then the next pillar is political video commentary on YouTube and elsewhere.

You are also sometimes found on Huffpo, why is that site so popular?

There is a great deal of diversity. It’s a little bit sensationalized — and never static. People who read HuffPost want to hear what some Hollywood celebrities think about politics but also want a gusher of information. Much of it is very original and high quality. But some of it needs to be skipped over. Arianna Huffington has more than 1800 writers on board with her. She can stir up stuff any time she wants with that kind of stable.

Do you think that these new technologies are effective in making people more responsive?

Yes I do. People can use technology to gently nudge them in different directions — and I think that RSS feeds, blogs, desired email notes, etc. all mean that the recipient/reader/user is pointing a self-designed pipe of information at themselves. I think it’s amazing — and very powerful for distributors of information and receivers.

What do you think sets Your site apart from others?

The Washington Note is mostly serious, principled, genuinely “radically centrist” and not ideologically stuck on any candidate or position. It has a view — but that view seems unpredictable to some who follow different ideological grooves. I think people like to see the pictures of my dogs. It’s a human blog. My essays are often long and clunky — not short and humorous. So people who read my blog are “readers” and “thinkers”. I also break a lot of original news and have — according to others — very original analysis of political and foreign policy dramas.

If you could choose one characteristic you have that brought you success, what would it be?

I enjoy writing and think I have a sense of strategy. This helps get through the simple binary, yes/no, black/white, off/on style that dominates political punditry. I’m a bit different and more nuanced.

What was the happiest and gloomiest moment of your life?

Happiest moment was fishing with my family when I was in Junior High School in New Hampshire before we all moved to Japan. The gloomiest was my first day of college when my father died.

Do you think [the use of Twitter and other social networking tools by politicians] is bandwagon jumping or what?

Not sure what you mean by bandwagon jumping so can’t respond. I like microjournalism and “twitter commentary” though from all users of it — politicians, journalists, or just average people.

If you could pick a travel destination, anywhere in the world, with no worries about how it's paid for - what would your top 3 choices be?

Antartica, Tibet, Congo

Please see into your crystal ball and tell us who would be the next President of US?

No idea — but I think the Dems will win this round, so either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Both have strengths. Both have flaws. Both would be exciting — though Obama certainly would be something far “newer” than Clinton — but there are things that worry me about his profile as much as hers. We need a hybrid of them. I doubt they will, but I sort of hope that one is on the Democratic Ticket as President and the other as Vice President.

What is your favorite book and why?

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt — because it tells the real story of how a fragile balance of interests got cobbled together into a republic and established the roots of America’s style of democracy and nation. One realizes that all branches of government and society have to vigorously pursue their interests for the balance to remain in check. I thought that the book was magnificently written and exciting — and has great insights regarding our struggles today inside America.

What's the first thing you notice about a person (whether you know them or not)?

Whether they bite their fingernails or not — and thus if they are nervous or confident. I try to make those who are nervous to feel calm or at ease. There are too many bulldozer types in Washington.

Why US is still unable to find Osama after all these years?

Because it’s not the Bush administration’s highest priority, because of mistakes that distracted resources and national attention, and because bin Laden has devout followers and doesn’t want to be found.

Is there anyone from your past that once told you you couldn't write?

No. But one of my uncles was surprised when former California Governor Jerry Brown hired me to be his speechwriter for a Japan trip he was taking when I was 20 years old. My uncle said, “couldn’t Brown afford anyone else?”

How bloggers can benefit from blogs financially?

If they can generate large traffic, they can sell advertisements — but trying to make a living from blogging is something that only a very few people have been able to do.

Is it true that who has a successful blog has an awful lot of time on their hands?

No. The best blogs — the most read blogs — are done by people who typically have multiple roles as academics, journalists, policy practitioners, think tank intellectuals, closeted soldiers, and the like. The busiest people with no time on their hands generally write the best blogs.

What are your thoughts on corporate blogs and what do you think the biggest advantages and disadvantages are?

I am ambivalent about them. There is little advantage — and the disadvantage is that they tend to be advertisements in another form. Corporations are not dedicated to inquiry and free expression. That’s not what they are designed to do — so they ought not to try and move to far into this kind of venue. They’ll get punished by the market of ideas and opinion that won’t like the controls companies must deploy on their content.

What role can bloggers of the world play to make this world more friendlier and less hostile?

Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes. I wouldn’t think of burdening bloggers with such lofty ambitions unless they chose to pursue these goals themselves. Blogging is not easy and requires passion. That’s something that can be encouraged — but not dominated with the objectives of others, no matter how lofty and worthy the goals. That said, just getting more people up to bat, so to speak, on blogs or video or political cartooning is healthy for society and probably the world at some level.

Who are your top five favourite bloggers?

I can’t limit to 5

TalkingPointsMemo.com
ArmsControlWonk.com
The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan
HuffingtonPost.com
RawStory.com
Tapped by American Prospect
OpenLeft.com
Matthew Yglesias Blog — at the Atlantic Monthly
The Swamp/Time
CalPundit
TheRealist.com
AcrossTheAisle
ProspectsforPeace.com
ThinkProgress
TPMCafe.com
RaggedThots
Foreign Policy’s “Passport”
CommentIsFree/The Guardian

Is there one observation or column or post that has gotten the most powerful reaction from people?

I have many. I have written more than 2,750 blog posts. And many of them have been considered zinger articles. But the role my blog played during the 21 month long battle fighting John Bolton’s confirmation vote as US Ambassador to the United Nations is what made my blog particularly famous. I think that the blog is also now having an impact on the ecosystem of foreign policy discussion in Washington — at a broad geostrategic level, and also focused on the Middle East, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and US-Cuba relations.

What is your perception about Pakistan and its people?

I think Pakistan’s equilibrium as a cohesive nation is out of balance — and I think that it will take some time for the country to bring the military, the lawyers/judges, and the various groups of citizens back together behind a cohesive state. I think highly of Pakistani people and have many friends from Pakistan and in Pakistan.

Have you ever become stunned by the uniqueness of any blogger?

I am not easily stunned, so no. But others may have been. The one person I think is remarkably unique in the world of new journalism is not a blogger — but rather a political cartoonist named Tom Toles who is at the Washington Post. But behind the cartoons he draws are ideas that often animate others like me — and thus to some degree, I’m convinced that blogging is a lot like being a political cartoonist.

What is the most striking difference between a developed country and a developing country?

Developed countries are generally rich, have options — but tend not to realize how fortunate they are and don’t have a good sense of how they achieved stability and success. Developing countries are hungry for success and want more options for their people — but they are stifled by many different constraints. Occasionally, their collective energies and focus help them achieve real success moving up the economic ladder and the ladder of self-determination and stability. But many developing societies are fundamentally unstable with shifting sets of winners and losers and thus subject to waves of political convulsions that are hard to accept and work through.

What is the future of blogging?

Huge. Blogging will spread globally — and will become the foundation of a new journalism, a new political organizing mechanism, and a new global communications vehicle. But blogging may become less and less written and may become more and more video, spoken, or driven by the personal creation of non-verbal images.

You have also got a blogging life, how has it directly affected both your personal and professional life?

It as enriched both my personal and professional life by bringing me into contact with hundreds of thousands of people I did not know. It has made me more aware of alternative thinking and made me a more efficient writer and political commentator. I enjoy all of this so my personal life is enriched as well — after all, I put pictures of my dogs on the website. They are now very famous. Just go to Google and type in the word “Weimaraner”. My dogs picture and mine come up --- this is because so many people in the world have linked to it. That’s fun.

What are your future plans?

To eventually finish this long interview. And then sleep. Then I’ll blog again and go running. Not sure after that.

Any Message you want to give to the readers of The Pakistani Spectator?

Thanks for reading all the way through this. I wish I could give you a prize or medal for making it to the end. Seriously though, blogging or any other kind of civic expression is a vehicle to participate in our respective societies. We are all stakeholders in our communities, our nations, and in the world — and blogging gives a portal for many who have been “passive” in this contract as stakeholders to become “active” and “engaged.” I hope those who read this check out my blog at TheWashingtonNote.com — but I also hope that you find a way to learn, to listen, to share, to celebrate, and protest when the need arises those things in society you like or dislike. As Cicero explained over 2,000 years ago — our collective good depends on active engagement of all the constituent parts of our societies. Otherwise, the system won’t find an equilibrium that generally works for all.

The Internet Ablaze

2008-02-11T03:08:00.000-05:00

As CGM (Consumer Generated Media) becomes more and more widespread, “middle media” known as “CGM aggregators” are becoming popular. CGM aggregators filter through the flood of blogs and SNSs (Social Networking Service) to pick up notable articles or events going on in CGM. The proliferation of CGM has caused an overflow of information on the internet that is impossible to sift through; thus middle media is a way for consumers to access information that has already been screened, condensed. Middle media also acts as a bridge between CGM and mass media, that is, stories that are picked up by middle media are in turn, covered by mass media.

However, this seemingly convenient tool has also given rise to one of the newly rapidly escalating issues of the internet: “ablaze” sites and internet mob lynching. “Ablaze” sites and blogs was a term coined in Japan in 2005 when site after site was forced into closing after being picked up in middle media as “inappropriate” or “problematic” and millions of viewers rushed to the site, leaving angry comments, working together to expose individual information on the owner of the blog or site. Disagreements on the internet have a tendency to get emotional, heated, personal, and very self-righteous. In the heat of the moment, people work together to expose a person’s personal information very quickly, and contact related authorities or institutions to demand reparations and punishment. In fact, there are whole sites dedicated to the exposing and progression of their jihad against a particular individual. One such site is committed to reporting the actions of one college student working part time at a bookstore who secretly took a photo of a customer with a skin disease, posted it on his page in an SNS with derogatory comments. Another internet user with skin disease stumbled upon the page and reported it in a middle media, causing a mob of internet users to immediately flood the page with angry comments and the student was eventually forced to leave the SNS, not to mention that he was reported by one of them to his school and suspended.

Until only a few years ago, this kind of “mob lynching” was a tool only mass media enjoyed. They wielded a self-righteous power in what and how they reported, seeing themselves as the “voice of the people”, meting out social sanctions even before the law would come to a conclusion. However, as mass media and internet media work in unison, this phenomenon is only escalating. A common argument in defense of media is James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds", in which he states that

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them

However, he also notes that the conditions required for this is

(1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.

On the internet, while 2, 3, and 4 are satisfied, 1 is certainly not, and this mob mentality and urge to bandwagon out of fear of being ostracized is perhaps the biggest cause of internet mob lynching.

Bloggers Impact Transportation Security Administration

2008-02-09T12:25:00.000-05:00

Late last month the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) launched its Evolution of Security blog to improve communication about TSA policies between travelers and TSA officials. From the Welcome post:

The opportunity is that we will incorporate what we learn in this forum in our checkpoint process evolution. We will not only give you straight answers to your questions but we will challenge you with new ideas and involve you in upcoming changes.

The blog's motto is "Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play a Part."

On Wednesday, the administrators posted a thread titled “Hooray Bloggers!” explaining how the commenters on the blog “had their first official impact on [TSA’s] operations”:

On Monday afternoon we began receiving questions about airports that were requiring ALL electronics to be removed from carry-on bags (everything, including blackberrys, iPods and even cords). This practice was also mentioned on several other blogs and left us scratching our heads.

So…we checked with our security operations team to figure out what was going on. After some calls to our airports, we learned that this exercise was set up by local TSA offices and was not part of any grand plan across the country. These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon and blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night. (Fat Tuesday of course).

Not all of the feedback, however, has been so helpful. The blog began moderating comments after having received over 700 comments within 24 hours after the first post went up:

In the spirit of transparency, we plan to note how many comments we've rejected and tell you why. Mostly the rejected comments include profane language, political rants or abusive posts that we just can't print, and some are completely off topic. Other than these, every post will go up as written and we will continue to operate this way.

The Chicago Tribune’s Internet Critic posted an “advance copy” of guidelines for the blog, including “Commenters must arrive at the blog 45 minutes before attempting to post a comment,” which you can read here.

Professionalism and Profit

2008-02-06T00:43:00.000-05:00

The New York Review of Books recently ran an article on blogs by Sarah Boxer. Boxer discussed differences in print versus online media, such as hyperlinks and multimedia. She also differentiated between bloggers and professional writers:

Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog.

Suggestions that bloggers and journalists are at opposite ends of the media spectrum run throughout Boxer’s review:

Bloggers thrive on fragmented attention and dole it out too—one-liners, samples of songs, summary news, and summary judgments. Sometimes they don't even stop to punctuate…

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford who writes for newspapers and radio and sometimes contributes to the blog Language Log, admitted on NPR back in 2004, "I don't quite have the hang of the form." And, he added, many journalists who get called upon by their editors to keep blogs are similarly stumped: "They fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they give context and background, and tack helpful IDs onto the names they introduce." Guess what? They read like journalists, not bloggers.

Citizen journalism, which the blogosphere has allowed to flourish, is defined as citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information…to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”

When done right, this sector of bloggers counters many of Boxer’s generalizations. But the ethics of paying for blog postings is a concern that’s being raised by many others.

To what extent does removing the independence factor affect the reliability of citizen journalists? What kind of blog postings merit payment? What percentage of revenue for ads run on blog hosts should go to the writers? Where’s the line between sponsored product reviews and influence peddling?

Chris Mooney, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, suggests that a bloggers' union or guild might be the answer to some of these questions:

I imagine it something like this: the most successful writers take the initiative to organize, because they’re the ones who will actually be listened to by employers. Then, they’ll set up a structure that separates the workhorse bloggers (those who make large collective sites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post possible) from the pure “hobbyists.” Whatever these distinctions may be, they should have nothing to do with whether or not the blogger in question has another salary from another job. (Not all writers in the guild work full-time on TV and screen writing, but all are equally protected.)

A bloggers guild could also, of course, work to protect bloggers’ intellectual property and help ensure they’re compensated for it. In 2001, the Supreme Court heard The New York Times Co. v. Tasini, in which six freelance writers took on publications that had run their work in print, paying them for the copyright, and then republished that work in online databases. In a 7-2 vote, the Court found in favor of the freelancers, ruling that writers should be compensated for work published online in addition to their print compensation. It takes only the tiniest of logical leaps to apply this ruling to the work of bloggers.

The paradigm shifts we’re in the midst of—in media usage and, then, in standards of intellectual property—demand that we rethink not just what writers contribute to the media marketplace, but also how they should be compensated for their contributions. Individual blogs, and Web sites hosting large numbers of bloggers, are profiting—not just culturally and intellectually, but economically—from bloggers work. Organizing, in that sense, seems not only inevitable, but necessary; “professional” bloggers need to be compensated for their work. It’s only fair.

Canada wrestles with speech laws

2008-02-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

This past week, Canadian authorities announced an investigation into the blog postings of Solman Hossain, a University of Toronto student. Although he has not yet been charged with a crime, the government is monitoring and reviewing Hossain's activities online. The case promises to test Canada's controversial free-speech laws.

At issue are posts, such as those found on this comment thread, that Hossain made urging the killing of Canadian soldiers training for deployment in Afghanistan under NATO's banner. Hossain writes:

Canadian soldiers on Canadian soil who are training to go to Afghanistan or Iraq are legitimate targets to be killed. Now it is possible and legitimate ... believe me, if we could have enough of our soldiers killed, then we'd be forced to withdrawn (sic) from Afghanistan.

From the Associated Press report:

In a December post Hossain wrote that he hoped the Taliban would kill Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay during his December visit to Afghanistan. Hossain also writes many anti-Semitic blogs.WHEN DO I GET TO SHOOT A FEW JEWS DOWN FOR ATTEMPTING TO BLOW UP DOZENS OF MOSQUES IN AMERICA RIGHT AFTER 9-11?

Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication" to "everyone" in Canada. However, the Criminal Code of Canada (section 319) criminalizes anyone who issues "statements in any public place, [and] incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace."

Hossain's posts appear to fit that bill. But Canada is a multicultural, multilingual society struggling to define the limits of appropriate speech. (You can read some of the vexing details of the recent Canadian trend toward political correctness on the issue of speech here and here.) Investigators are therefore proceeding cautiously.

The Hossain case is merely the latest contentious debate between Canadian muslims and a Canadian institution to play out in public. Four muslim law students filed complaints with several Canadian governmental bodies in late 2007, alleging that their human rights had been violated by a series of articles in Maclean's magazine. One of these articles, "The future belongs to Islam" by author and columnist Mark Steyn, highlights demographic trends in Europe that seem to indicate a greater political role for Islam in the near future.

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies....Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

In the filing, the students charge that Maclean's "targets the Muslim community, promotes stereotypes, misrepresents fringe elements as the mainstream Muslim community, and distorts facts to present a false image of Muslims." You can read Steyn's reply to the charges here.

Canada's hate speech law seem in for a real test. In a story on the Maclean's flap, the Canadian Broadcasting Company quotes Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association: "Even truthful articles describing some of the awful situations in this world could run afoul of this law, it is so broad and such a potential threat to freedom of speech." That organization's motto is "The Freedom of no one in safe unless the freedom of everyone is safe."

Easier said than done.

Is Google losing its edge in Japan?

2008-01-30T00:41:00.000-05:00

When we think of search engines, Google immediately pops into our mind. However, will it always stay that way? A Japanese blogger notes how search engines used to include search options by date and by nation until Google began the trend of discluding them. While this simplified searching, it is inconvenient for economic news. Furthermore, another Google user notes that the same set of words searched in Japanese Google and English Google bring completely different results. English words searched in Japanese Google often come up with unhelpful and obscure results from Japanese servers, he notes.

Recently, Baidu, the third most used search engine in the world with 5% of world shares and 70% of Chinese, started its Japanese search engine. Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu announced that it would be channeling an image of “entertainment” rather than trying to compete directly with Google and Yahoo! The new search engine will focus on image and video searches, and Baidu is confident that the common culture of using characters will give it an edge over English-based search engines in refining search results. Although Baidu's unique tool of MP3 search is not included in the Japanese search engine, it remains hopeful in implementing it in the future and bloggers believe it may be Baidu's key to surpassing Google.

Blogger Expands Languages

2008-01-28T13:57:00.000-05:00

If ethics can be viewed as the expansion of choice, the Blogger service is trending in a good direction. They recently started offering blogs in three new languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. These languages posed a programming challenge because of their right-to-left orientation. Blogger responded with new templates and bi-directional text editing.

It will be interesting to see how this expanded reach impacts the blog communities in politically sensitive countries where these languages are spoken, in a region that could really benefit from more positive dialogue. Policy Innovations has covered a little bit of the Iranian Internet censorship story, and the revolutionary potential of blogs, but there is also the risk that this language customization will feed into the group polarization effect that Cass Sunstein identifies in Republic.com 2.0.

Targeting the blogosphere

2008-01-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

An interesting conversation is unfolding on The New York Times website on the subject of a story in today's paper titled "Target Tells a Blogger to Go Away," by Michael Barbaro.

In short, a blogger wrote an e-mail to Target, the big-box retailer, taking it to task for using an image of questionable taste on a billboard in Times Square. Target blithely dismissed the blogger's concerns on the grounds that they "do not participate with nontraditional media outlets." According to Barbaro, "Target’s policy is to focus limited resources on the big media outlets, like television stations and newspapers, which reach large numbers of shoppers."

The Times asked its readers to weigh in on a question first posed by myself and Devin Stewart in October: Do you think bloggers should expect to be treated the same as traditional media outlets?

Some of the responses:

To me, most blogs are a disappointment. They are quickly taken over by hardened "pros" and hardened "cons" whereas they seem to be a vehicle to explore different ideas. -- Deweyjon

No, althought the news media may be somewhat biased in its reporting; most bloggers are far too opinionated to relate objectively without reflecting their opinions. Of course, ideally, all reporting should be objective and non-biased. — Bill M

you think that I should be allowed to perform back-of-the-eye surgery just because I happen to have an opinion on its benefits and drawbacks? — ErikK

And my personal favorite:

Real journalists tend to have some education as journalists and some exposure to journalistic ethics. They maybe even had to pass a class or two in college dealing with the legal and ethical issues in their profession.There is not yet anything resembling a professional code of ethics for bloggers. And anyone with an Internet connection who can type can call himself or herself a blogger. It's the Wild West out there.In view of that, I don't think bloggers should expect to be treated like real journalists. — Patricia

Internet "Jackal Bins"

2008-01-18T15:40:00.000-05:00

I just got my copy of the Jan/Feb 2008 edition of the National Interest. In it, scholar David Frum writes an excellent article called "Foggy Bloggom" (aka “Blogs Gone Wild”), which starts with the confessional "My name is David Frum, and I am a blogger." (The article’s title is a play off of Foggy Bottom, the Washington, DC neighborhood that is home to the State Department.)

In the article, Frum tells a funny story about how Lyndon Johnson aid John Roche dismissed the anti-war movement as a bunch of “Upper West Side Jacobins.” It turns out that the journalist covering that comment miswrote the quote as “jackal bins” instead of the name of the French revolutionaries “Jacobins.” According to Frum, residents of the Upper West Side wondered what a jackal bin was.

The jackal bins, however, serve as the symbol of Frum’s central point: The vitriol in the blogosphere against liberal think tanks is basically a family dispute—within the Democratic party—between liberal bloggers and conservative Democrats inside think tank land. The article confirms a suspicion a colleague of mine had that the blogosphere is more heavily populated by liberals than by conservatives.

But it also explains something I have wondered for a while: Why bloggers make such a fuss about think tanks when so many policymakers in Washington find them to be marginal players that are helpful at best. Is the think tank drama playing out on the Internet one in which insurgents, our jackal bins, are trying to over throw the established foreign policy community or FPC as Frum puts it?

The Carnegie Council is holding a luncheon conference on April 3, 2008 as part of our Ethical Blogger project with Oxford, Brown, NYU, and Demos. It will explore the nexus of private money, the media, and political influence. I hope you will join us.

Photo "Jackal with Breakfast" by Picture Taker 2.

Online Identity Management

2008-01-16T23:45:00.000-05:00

Matthew Hennessey reported last November on the case of Megan Meier, a 13-year-old who committed suicide after receiving bullying messages from someone she thought was another teenager named Josh. “Josh” turned out to be Meier’s 47-year-old neighbor, Lori Drew.

Someone later used Drew’s identity to publish a blog entitled “Megan Had It Coming,” purporting to be Drew’s self-defense outlet:

Yes, I made this blog. Yes, I’m Lori Drew… Now that Mr. Banas has made public the announcement that there will be no charges filed against me or my family, I feel it is time to speak out about this tragic affair. I cannot count on any media organization to fairly represent my story, as they have grossly misrepresented and sensationalized the story so far. So, I must present my case here, on the blog that has been my only outlet…

(The original post has been taken down, but is copied in part here.)

The Ethical Blogger experienced something similar when it came to our attention that several comments submitted to our site were posted not only by an individual pretending to be someone else, but with the obvious intent to slander. The comments were often strange and in many cases only tangentially relevant to the topic being discussed. The body of the posts were signed using two names. While the comments struck the blog administrator as unusual, nothing about them was explicitly derogatory or inflammatory.

Only when we received a phone call from the party whose name was signed to the post did we begin investigating. The pen name was linked to a Blogger profile that was in turn linked to two Blogger hosted blogs. A quick analysis of the nature and content of the blogs revealed that both they and the comments posted on our blog were intended to smear the reputation of the party whose name was signed to the post.

A Google search of the names signed to the posts revealed a pattern of comments on other blogs that, in light of the phone complaint, seemed consistent with the poster’s intent to discredit the party whose name was signed to the post.

Using someone’s identity in an attempt to damage the person’s reputation is clearly unethical, but what are the legal implications?

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers, the US Supreme Court has ruled that blogs have the same constitutional protections as mainstream media as concerns defamation. And those protections are dependent on the context in which the comment was made:

For a blog, a court would likely start with the general tenor, setting, and format of the blog, as well as the context of the links through which the user accessed the particular entry. Next the court would look at the specific context and content of the blog entry, analyzing the extent of figurative or hyperbolic language used and the reasonable expectations of the blog's audience.

More details are available here.

Google is reported to have handed over the IP address of an anonymous blogger in Israel (after the blogger failed to appear in court) for defamation after comments were posted on Blogger suggesting that members of the Shaarei Tikva Council take bribes and have links to organized crime.

No charges that we know of were pressed against the Ethical Blogger commenter.

Comments not intended to harm can still damage a person’s reputation. Whether or not the law applies, individuals and companies can turn to firms specializing in online identity management.
From ReputationDefender’s website:

First we SEARCH… Next we DESTROY…

Our trained and expert online reputation specialists use an array of techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an important and time-consuming task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night.

Anonymity vs Real Name

2008-01-16T07:05:00.000-05:00

Recently there has been a buzzing debate in Japanese blogs on the benefits of anonymity versus real name. The simplest argument is that requiring or using real names increases the responsibility of the user; that is, the author is less likely to make libelous or unfounded statements. A Japanese blogger credits anonymity with the growth of the internet, however, also labels it responsible for the recent slack in blog growth compared to SNSs like Facebook and LinkedIn, both of which require real names. Libelous comments not only hurt the recipient, but also any companies that use the site for advertisements. He cites the difference between Wikipedia, “paradise of unlawfuls” as he calls it, and the new knol, a Google-powered site very similar to Wikipedia except that it requires the author’s real name. Google’s Udi Manber, the VP of engineering, emphasizes this difference:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

However, other bloggers argue that the risks in blogging anonymously and blogging with your real name are not that different, in fact, that it all depends on the context. A penname no longer gives the cover of anonymity should people realize whom the alias refers to. On the other hand, using your real name does not matter if the reader cannot place you in context:

Unless the reader knows who you are, your name is only another pen name. However, once the name is associated with a company, for example, the story changes. For example, readers will receive very different impressions from “Mr. Tanaka” criticizing NTT on his blog, and “Mr. Tanaka who works for NTT” criticizing NTT on his blog.

The opinion is nearly evenly split outside the blogosphere as well; when viewers of a certain Japanese TV program were polled through their cell phones and internet whether “Internet users should be required to publish their real name”, the results were 53% affirmative, 47% negative.

Death & the Digital Age

2008-01-10T19:48:00.000-05:00

U.S. Army Major and blogger Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq on January 3, but his last blog posting appeared online a day later. Olmsted sent the post to a friend last summer and asked her to post it if he died in the war. The post covered topics from war and family and included a paragraph on blogging:

If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them. While the blogosphere has its share of partisans, there are some awfully smart people making excellent arguments out there as well, and I know I have learned quite a bit since I began blogging.

The friend who published the last post also linked to places where readers could leave their respects for Olmsted, including a memorial posting.

As of yet, no overarching policy exists among services on what to do when a user or blogger dies. According to MSNBC:

MySpace avoids deleting the deceased's profiles unless asked by family members, which means the profiles-turned-memorials can stay active for years. Other social-networking and blogging sites, such as Xanga and LiveJournal, also host memorials tied to deceased users' pages.

"We often hear from families that a user's profile is a way for friends to celebrate the person's life, giving friends a positive outlet to connect with one another and find comfort during the grieving process," MySpace, a unit of News Corp., said in a statement.

Last April, Slate Magazine reported on social networking sites in the context of the Virginia Tech shootings, linking to the victims' MySpace and Facebook profiles and tribute websites.

Some suggest that these online memorials have replaced traditional mourning processes for teens who've grown up communicating to each other online. MSNBC quotes Amanda Lenhart, of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, saying "What better way to grieve or mourn a person than in a space they created." In 2006, MyDeathSpace.com was created as a forum to gather information on and pay respects to deceased MySpace users.

But there are downsides of grieving online. Joanne McNeil of Brainwash Magazine is critical of the practice:

On the Internet, mourning has surreal or even sanctimonious undertones, especially for those who only knew the deceased as a web presence. It could be because emails and blogs are the worst places to communicate sincerity... The time-shifts that are the natural web-crawling experience prevent us from ever really dwelling on a tragic experience.

Online mourning also creates privacy issues. Writing in Journalism Ethics, Alfred Hermida said that journalists' presence on social networking sites in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings was the equivalent of "barging into the [VT students' dorm] rooms and leafing through personal journals."

Researchers at the Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida, including Dr. Ilene R. Berson, are studying the impact of social networking memorials on copycat suicides:

On one end, because the frontal lobe of the brain doesn't develop until early adulthood, teens are naturally built to be impulsive, Berson said.
"In an online environment, they're bombarded with images and digital stimuli that strengthens the response of that part of the brain," Berson said. "It feeds that sort of behavior to engage in that activity."
But she realizes that digital spaces also provide outlets for grief.
"We may find that in general it provides a supportive part of the grieving process," she said.
Berson says plans for the study are evolving. But she's certain of this: MySpace is giving psychologists more insight than ever into the teenage mind and social structures.
"We are getting access to things we never had before, or at least didn't have easily," Berson said. "We can sort of watch from behind the scenes."

Blogging and Marketing in Japan and the U.S.

2007-12-28T12:39:00.000-05:00

In a New York Times article published yesterday, blogging is touted as a “low-cost, high return marketing tool” for small businesses and certain guidelines like transparency and frequent updates are laid out.

Wal Mart and its PR firm Edelman came under fire in October when it was revealed that two bloggers writing positively about Wal Mart stores across the U.S. were actually hired to promote the company.

An article in Free Internet Press compares America’s “abrasive self-promotion” with Japan’s “conformist culture” which the article claims is apparent in the blogosphere. The article refers to Junko Kenetsuna, who reviews restaurants in her blog, “I had my lunch”:

In all the blog entries she has composed at home and in cybercafes over the years, Kenetsuna has never written a discouraging word - not a single critical reference to bad food, lousy service or rip-off prices, she said. Such harshness, in her view, would be improper and offensive.
"If I think the food stinks, I don't write it," said Kenetsuna, 43, who makes a living writing advertising copy for a weekly newspaper for female office workers in Tokyo.
"There is a part of me that feels sorry for the restaurant, if it were to lose business because of what I write," she said. "I don't want to influence the diners."

Although politeness is generally considered ethical, isn’t honest criticism more important for customer reviews? Is self-censoring negativity about another company more or less transparent than self-promoting oneself under a guise?

There’s a similar dilemma posed by blogs hosting advertisements. Japanese venture capitalist Joichi Ito recently began an online marketing tool in which bloggers choose the advertisements that appear on their sites. According to Business Week:

[AdButterfly] aims to put marketers directly in touch with bloggers. Like Google's (GOOG) AdSense and other similar services, AdButterfly relies on complex algorithms that automatically place ads on relevant Web sites run by bloggers who sign up. Marketers can also manually search for blogs whose subject matter is a good fit with the brand or products they're advertising.

AdButterfly, unlike AdSense and other rivals, gives bloggers the final say on the ads that appear and also allows blog owners to comment next to the advertisement. Ito believes this to be more “authentic” than “sly behind-the-scenes marketing techniques.” But the article also warns against filtering ads:

There are, of course, drawbacks to advertising on blogs, which don't have the long reach of mass media. And analysts worry that AdButterfly muddies the divide between paid-for endorsements and grassroots buzz. Not all bloggers are likely to come clean when there's a conflict of interest. "This model is both unique and murky," says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of market researcher Nielsen Online Strategic Services. "My guess is that a set of informal rules will emerge."

Business Week says that despite the potential threat of bloggers running advertisements for companies they dislike just so they can criticize them, this has not yet happened on AdButterfly. This may be due to the “conformist culture” or the fact that the service is only used by about 2,000 Japanese bloggers as of yet.

With the growing trend of merging marketing with blogging, what role will cultural differences play? Japanese and English are the two most-used languages in the blogosphere and users of the two languages appear to have different marketing approaches.

Will Americans, who are supposedly more self-promotional and less averse to offending, abuse Japanese advertising tools? What sort of guidelines for online marketing might help bridge the alleged cultural divide?

Online at 30,000 Feet

2007-12-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

On this blog, we have explored the codes of Internet conduct in various environments--in a free country, in an oppressive state, or in a family plagued by abuse. How does one conduct one's self on the Internet while in the air?

Some airlines such as Qantas and AirFrance are exploring various online services on their flights. See AP article "Airborne Internet might bring turbulence."

These services could potentially bring etiquette, openness, and freedom of speech issues into these close quarters. But like the Internet in general, the result will very much depend on whether customers can self regulate.

AirFrance is going to try out new services before they start to regulate:

AirFrance, which plans to start allowing cellular calls through OnAir within months, said it would see how people use such services before crafting rules.
"Are you going to reach your wife to tell her what you did the entire day or just tell her, 'Can you pick me up at the airport?'" Air France spokeswoman Marina Tymen said, adding that passengers might tell the airline that data services fulfill all their needs.

"Citizen Curators" at the Met

2007-12-22T23:05:00.000-05:00

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all reported today on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Blog.mode: addressing fashion.”

From the WSJ:

Fashion criticism has long been the exclusive realm of an insular band of journalists who traveled the big runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York and seemed to speak their own esoteric language. But the Met's new exhibit, "Blog.mode Addressing Fashion," is inviting anyone with an Internet connection to critique the clothes on display. With its new blog, blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/, which went up this week, the august museum is also acknowledging that traditional fashion criticism is over.

WSJ quotes designer Hussein Chalayan: "At the end of the day when you have a critic write about your work, it is just one person who is supposed to be an expert," he says. "Why is this taken more seriously [than a blogger]?"

The Washington Post is more critical of what it fears may become a trend in “citizen curating”:

Museums need to be attuned to the communities they serve and should strive to attract as wide an audience as possible. Museums don't own culture, but they sort through it, rank it and attempt to make some sense of it. Theirs aren't the only valid points of view, but they are especially valued because they're the result of research, dispassionate analysis and intellectual curiosity.

Should your next-door neighbor's opinion of Rei Kawakubo sit side-by-side with the point of view of the Costume Institute's curator? Should they be given similar weight?

Direct Dial Democracy

2007-12-18T16:19:00.000-05:00

Worried about a bill under consideration in Congress? Think twice before emailing your rep. As Garrett Graff noted recently, these abundant virtual missives tend to provoke only an auto-reply. In the real world where scarcity and effort influence value, real letters and telephone calls are holding their own. Enter Committee Caller. This automatic calling service dials all the congresspeople on a committee of your choosing, one right after the other without hanging you up. It was developed by Fred Benenson, a student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

Committee Caller is a new project, so there's obvious room for improvement. I'd like the site to display the Congressional calendar, perhaps even link to C-SPAN in some capacity. A connection to the biographies and voting records of the Members of Congress would also be useful, maybe in connection with a wiki like Congresspedia. And perhaps version 2.0 can replace the robotic narrator with a celebrity voice-over. (If James Earl Jones is busy I nominate Monica Lewinsky.) Overall, though, Committee Caller seems like a necessary innovation for the motherland.

Is Using Facebook as Data Source Ethical?

2007-12-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

A team of researchers from Harvard and UCLA are monitoring the activity of an entire East Coast college’s Facebook activity, reports the IHT today. Scholars are examining the ways in which people connect with one another. But, partly to keep the data clean, the Facebook users do not know they are being watched. Is this kind of study ethical?

One problem is that Facebook is not necessarily representative of the population at large. The IHT article notes that: "Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace."

In my mind, this sampling issue came up the other day during Garrett Graff's talk here at the Carnegie Council on his new book “The First Campaign” (listen to his talk here). Graff was talking about how the 2008 U.S. presidential elections will be the first campaign in which technology as both the medium and the message will determine the outcome. But doesn’t that also beg the obvious question:

Won’t those who are more technology-savvy therefore have relatively more influence in the political arena?

A sample bias may also occur in that people who are engaged in politics online might be peculiar in a certain way. Do these people have more time on their hands than do others? It reminds me of a polling data problem: Polls draw from surveys conducted over the phone… What kind of person answers the phone call from a stranger? Related, the people answering the phone surveys are probably the mirror of the techo-savvy since the surveys can only legally be done on land-line phones—something many of the savvy netizens gave up altogether for mobile services.

Another problem with the Facebook study is that the subjects have not given the researchers permission to study them. Feelings are mixed on this issue reports the IHT:

Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site's vast amount of data. The site's users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it "fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment," and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook's "relationship status" box. "You're not really dating until you put it on Facebook," she said.

But Derrick Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, "I don't feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook." He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students' permission.

Clearly the data would be skewed if the subjects knew they were being studied. If the identify of the particular subjects is withheld in the research findings, it would seem OK. But that is very difficult to do, as researchers discovered last year after AOL made available the search queries of 650,000 users. From the New York Times:

Although the 650,000 AOL users were not personally identified in the data, the logs contained enough information to discern an individual’s identity in some cases.

AOL quickly withdrew the data from its research Web site, but not before it had been downloaded, reposted and made searchable at a number of Web sites. And on Monday, the company dismissed Abdur Chowdhury, the researcher who posted the data, along with another employee. Maureen Govern, AOL’s chief technology officer, resigned.

Democratizing Market Forces

2007-12-16T23:54:00.000-05:00

Friday’s Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by Randall Rothenberg on Facebook Beacon and Facebook’s decision to allow users to opt-out of the advertising program. From the Facebook website:

Facebook Beacon enables your brand or business to gain access to viral distribution within Facebook. Stories of a user's engagement with your site may be displayed in his or her profile and in News Feed. These stories will act as a word-of-mouth promotion for your business and may be seen by friends who are also likely to be interested in your product.

While this may be great for business, and also allows Internet services to remain free to the public, it caused an uproar among users whose Christmas gifts were revealed to recipients via Facebook's News Feed, and when businesses failed to ask permission or even issue a warning before transferring information about purchases made with an email address different from that associated with the Facebook account.

A group of 50,000 signed a petition created by MoveOn.org calling for Facebook to add privacy features that allow users to opt-out--and it worked. Rothenberg used a term coined by Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR's On the Media, to describe the phenomenon: “Listenomics,” according to Garfield, means “the herd will be heard.”

Rothenberg goes on to offer an explanation:

Why does the herd have such a powerful voice? Because the technologies that enable people to network to their 10,000 closest colleagues, build a blog or launch a global digital video network are now built into personal computers or available gratis on the Web.

A blogger on nowisgone.com expands on the economics part of the equation:

Yes, social media marketing needs to be monetized either directly or indirectly. When the dust settles any marketing organization must remembers its most valuable asset is its community members. Social media is driven by people banded together to form communities, not by technology or informal networks. When community is sacrificed for dollars, organizations lose both. No community equals no transactions.

Just how important of a factor is economics compared to the power of the Internet to mobilize? Will "listenomics" be as effective in politics as it is in business?

MoveOn.org has another petition demanding that Congress not grant immunity to the telecom industry for its role in illegal wiretapping. Will that matter if companies like AT&T and Verizon are donating tens of thousands of dollars to Senators?

Knol Thyself: The Utility of Wikipedia Rival

2007-12-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

A fascinating debate has emerged about the future of Wikipedia and Google’s rival project that promotes bylined knols (or units of knowledge). This is from Google’s blog introducing the concept:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

A quick blog search shows many people predicting the “death knol” for Wikipedia. Others warn that we shouldn’t leap to conclusions since other Google products such as Froogle and Google Apps have failed to kill their rivals.

But Google has a lot going for it in this project. As one blogger said, the Wikipedia rival would allow Google to control the three levels of the searching experience: the front door (Google), the search results, and now the content you get when you click on those results. Google would have the money and power to promote its own units of knowledge and with the use of advertising could create a stronger business model than could Wikipedia.

We have debated the utility of anonymity extensively in our blog. Many have suggested that anonymous postings allow people to express themselves or inform the public without jeopardizing their own security. Theoretically, this use of the anonymous post works as long as the topic is not an ad hominem attack. But the weakness of Wikipedia is that anonymous editors post, modify, and even delete whole entries without much accountability.

Google would seek to avoid this pitfall by allowing as many entries as the market produces and let the market decide (through) ranking which entry is best. It better uses the power of the invisible hand.

One thing I have not seen the bloggers talk about yet though:

Beyond the business model, another huge strength of Google’s approach is that it more closely resembles a traditional encyclopedia and in that way becomes more useful in the classroom and citations. If you have credible authors writing bylined posts, you get credible information.

Many teachers and professors have told me that they have banned Wikipedia from the classroom, homework assignments, and paper citations. If Google gives space to acknowledged experts, it is actually eating into the market of encyclopedias. It is spreading knowledge. And when someone asks you where you learned a piece of information, you would no longer have to say meekly, Wikipedia. You could name an expert.

Wiki Rival: Transparency

2007-12-14T13:49:00.000-05:00

Google is in the process of developing a rival to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows users to post entries with handles, effectively giving them a degree of anonymity when they post. On the upside, that means someone with intimate knowledge of a subject might be able to contribute even if that person has sensitivities about doing so in public. But Wikipedia also allows anonymous editors to change or delete entries.

It seems that the Google rival service would do away with both of these aspects. First, the service would promote bylined entries:

Google asserts that the Web's development so far has neglected the importance of the bylined author.
"We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content," wrote Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, on the official Google blog.

Second, the entries would not be edited by other users but would rather accumulate. The most credible entries would emerge from Google’s search technology:

Entries can't be edited or revised by other people, in contrast to Wikipedia. However, other readers will be able to rank and review others' entries, which will then be interpreted by Google's search engine when displaying results.

According to the New York Times article "Google Develops Wikipedia Rival," Google’s project is in the beta phase. Google has a long way to catch up to Wikipedia in this area. Can they do it?

2007-12-13T16:46:00.000-05:00

In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former NBC correspondent David Hazinski offers a sharp rebuke to proponents of "citizen journalism."

The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people "journalists." This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a "citizen surgeon" or someone who can read a law book is a "citizen lawyer." Tools are merely that. Education, skills and stanandards are what really make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip.

I guess the question is: Is that true? Should journalism schools offer certification, as Hazinski suggests, to citizen journalists? Is too much information necessarily always bad? Must news be passed through the filters of giant media conglomerates before it is offered for consumption?

Merging Citizen and Professional Journalism

2007-12-11T13:02:00.000-05:00

PRI’s The World reported last night on trends in global news coverage, questioning whether or not foreign bureaus are necessary in the information age. (According to a report by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, the number of foreign correspondents at U.S. newspapers fell 25% between 2002 and 2006.)

Given increased attention to global issues post-9/11, some attribute the closures to the corporate media’s alleged desire to place profits over quality reporting. The program highlighted the Hot Zone, an “experiment” by Yahoo! News in which a single photojournalist, Kevin Sites, “will deliver stories via a five-fingered multimedia platform of text, photography, video, audio, and interactive chat - all available on one website.” Sites travels the world with the goal of covering every armed conflict in one year.

While sending a single person out into the field is notably cheaper than operating entire bureaus, many, including John Schidlovsky from Johns Hopkins University’s International Reporting Project, are skeptical:

We’re missing depth. One reason the American media failed in its job of covering the lead up to the war in Iraq miserably was partly because we didn’t have enough good correspondents who were out there telling the American people what was really going on in the Middle East.

The World highlighted another project, France 24’s The Observers, which has professional journalists and editors gathering, editing, and verifying content on the web submitted by citizens around the world, which is then broadcast as news.

The Shorenstein Center recently published a discussion paper on “Journalism without Journalists,” in which Michael Maier, former Sagan Fellow at the Center, comments on the integration of citizen journalism and open source media into mainstream press:

I would definitely consider bloggers--who dedicated themselves to unconditional freedom early on--to be outside the media. And I hope they are able to stay there, so that their minds can remain open and their speech remain truly free. Several attempts have been made to integrate bloggers into old institutions in order to inject fresh air, but it was not the traditional media that changed through these efforts. Rather, the bloggers lost their spicy language and became tame to please their old-news bosses. The blog as a truly independent, stand-alone format should be kept alive in all it’s uniqueness. [sic]

Bloggers are descendants of the European “Pamphletistes” who in the Age of Enlightenment wrote excessive and unrestrained polemics. The old media would be wise to encourage bloggers to stay independent, but building some kind of connection may be beneficial—the anarchy and irreverence of the blog world invigorates journalism tremendously.

You can see France 24’s editors debate the merit of professionally edited blog content as journalism here.

Corporate Bloggers Launch "Blog Council"

2007-12-07T11:32:00.000-05:00

A group of big corporate bloggers has formed a Blog Council to "help corporate blogging efforts become more successful." Their press release indicates a little about their mission and method:

The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

And here are a couple interesting excerpts from the FAQ:

7. Is this an ethics organization?
Our purpose is to help our members develop effective policies and learn from each other. Teaching ethical best practices will be a core part of our program. The Blog Council is a community, not a trade association, so we don't set or enforce polices [sic].

8. Are you trying to 'regulate' or 'police' the blogosphere?
Absolutely not. The Blog Council is a peer community where we learn from each other. We have no intention of creating policy or regulating anyone. The opposite is actually the case ... we help companies learn to work with the existing standards of blog ethics set by the free and open blogosphere.

It being a brand new initiative these are probably QWFAO (Questions We Frequently Ask Ourselves), so I'd like to see them define their terms a little further. A Google search for the exact phrase "existing standards of blog ethics" gave me zero results. A search for "free and open blogosphere" yielded six results, one of which is a fascinating article on "The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere" by J. D. Lasica in Online Journalism Review from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication. That article was a lucky find because it mentions the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Ethics Code, and WOMMA was founded by Andy Sernovitz, the guy who's also behind Blog Council.

For further reading, here's a Technorati page collecting the blog buzz on the Blog Council. There's definitely some skepticism floating around about why this initiative is proceeding mostly behind closed doors, and if that's even useful for the participants given the messy, public, interactive nature of blogging. But I guess that strategy is not so farfetched in light of the sensitive proprietary information that companies deal with and the uncertainty some must feel when opening up to blogs.

China's "Mental Firewall"

2007-12-05T13:56:00.000-05:00

Today’s Wall Street Journal reported on bloggers in China and touched on two important issues discussed previously on the Ethical Blogger: trust and credibility on the Internet in

China

and the blogger Zola’s influential corruption coverage. The main emphasis of today’s WSJ article, however, was on the role of self-censorship, rather than government controls, as a hurdle to free speech on the Internet:

China’s 162 million Internet users are a largely young and wealthy set who typically aren’t engaged in politics. Most don’t seem intent on accessing the sort of content that would upset the authorities. They are busy amassing virtual weapons in online games and posting photos to blogs.
But when content does get political, the government doesn’t have to do all the censoring itself…
China’s Confucian values teach respect for authority and the subordination of the individual to the family and state. In China’s rigid education system, young people rarely are encouraged to express their opinions. And people have learned to keep quiet as political orthodoxies changed with the wind over the decades, with leaders coming into power, then falling out of favor as new regimes installed themselves. Finding yourself on the wrong side could lead to punishment, including exile and jail.

The Chinese government has made it very clear to the public that the tradition of harsh punishment for dissidence extends into cyberspace. In addition to placing rigid barriers to market entry on Internet companies, making it difficult for independent Internet service and content providers to compete with State controlled entities, the Chinese government has laid out rigid regulations for companies and individual Internet users to follow. Companies that skirt the rules can be subject to fines of up to RMB 50,000, closure of sites, and revocation of business licenses, while in extreme cases, individual cyberdissidents have been sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty. This alone has deterred a number of Internet users from pushing their limits.

In some instances the line between self-censorship and government censorship is blurred. A May 2006 New York Times article entitled “As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching” spotlights Hu Yingying, a student at Shanghai Normal University who monitors the university’s discussion boards and steers conversation away from politics or other sensitive topics:

Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.
But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.

These tactics haven’t completely eliminated sensitive political discussion. Cyberdissidents in China use email spamming techniques to dispense information. Li Hongkuan, who goes by the alias Richard Long, began sending a newsletter called VIP Reference News out to roughly 250,000 people in via email. His newsletter is actually a banned website, but Li is able to provide his otherwise unavailable information to the masses because email recipients can claim that it was unsolicited and avoid punishment (although some suppliers of email addresses were jailed). Other modern communications tools like text messaging have been crucial to organizing protests, and since cell phone use is more widespread than the Internet in China’s rural areas, this may for now be a better tool for disseminating information and mobilizing the masses.

So perhaps blogs don’t provide complete insight into the spectrum of controversial activities going on in authoritarian regimes, as dissidents may be finding it more beneficial to spread their influence through multiple communications outlets.

Baghdad Fabulists, Left and Right

2007-12-04T13:02:00.000-05:00

In August, Slate.com covered the conservative mil- and political bloggers' outrage by the possibility that Army private Scott Beauchamp, who had been sending dispatches to the New Republic, had actually fabricated his horrific and vivid accounts of life as a soldier in Iraq. Since then, Scott has supposedly recanted his statements; then not recanted; then admitted to simply wanting to 'use his experiences to enhance his writing and provide legitimacy to his work possibly becoming the next Hemingway'. Since then the New Republic has come under intense scrutiny from conservative bloggers, calling a clear violation of ethical reporting of the war; how could a publication with the credibility such as TNR fail to do an adequate fact-check before publishing Beauchamp's dispatches? With multiple accusations of censorship, editor Franklin Foer recently published a 14-page long explanation of the events as understood by those involved at TNR (including, somewhat famously, Beauchamp's wife):

In the New Republic case, Foer acknowledged a key "mistake" in checking on whether Beauchamp lied or exaggerated in writing that U.S. soldiers had made fun of a disfigured woman, run over dogs for sport and played with an Iraqi child's skeletal remains. Foer said Beauchamp's wife, Elspeth Reeve, then a researcher at the magazine, was assigned "a large role" in checking the story. While Reeve acted in good faith, he said, "there was a clear conflict of interest."

Ultimately, TNR concludes with the following:

When I [Foer] last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

After going through such intense public (and online) criticism, TNR may have just had its day: reports are coming in that the same thing is happening over at the National Review Online. The NRO's editor Kathryn Jean Lopez is declaring that this is hardly the same situation as TNR's case of the 'Baghdad Fabulist'. Though the story over at NRO seems yet to be over (despite Lopez's claims), one uncomfortable admission from Lopez seems to be making some waves in the blogging community:

As one of our sources put it: “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.” While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That’s why we’re revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.
...
If Smith was too trusting of his sources, that is a journalistic faux pas of an entirely different sort. It does not, contrary to some bloggers’ claims, make him a fabulist.

Yikes! Is how they write it over at New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer. And Jeff Bercovici over at Portfolio also seems to find this defense troubling, if not altogether racist:

So that's what happened! Here's Smith, doing his job like a good reporter, when along come those Arabs with their "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate" and trip him up. Gotcha. If only he'd remembered this, NRO-approved simple rule of thumb: Unlike everybody else, Arabs lie!

Oh, and as for that "doing his job" part, that's only true if you define his job as "sneaking into Hezbollah bases and stealing their property, thereby endangering all Western reporters in the region."

I'm curious to know what will happen with this particular case with the NRO, post-TNR debacle. For all of Beauchamp's horrific statements with regard to what he saw and did, TNR initially granted him the freedom to say what he wanted to say without casting judgment upon the content of his own views or stories. But with the NRO, it seems as if the support for Smith goes beyond what TNR did for Beauchamp, venturing into a sticky territory lined with institutionally-based racism. Given conservative bloggers backlash at TNR, I'll be interested to see how leftist bloggers respond to the NRO, for when asked by the New York Times if he was experiencing any joy over the NRO's own troubles, Foer had responded: "I have a feeling of how difficult this situation must be for them, and I wish them luck in resolving it."

South African Journalist Fired for Blogging

2007-12-03T01:31:00.000-05:00

South African journalist Llewellyn Kriel was fired from the newspaper Sowetan last Thursday after blogging about the company's mismanagement on Thought Leader. The official reasoning was that Kriel disclosed confidential information about Sowetan, which the company sent out in an email to employees. Others, Kriel included, viewed the decision as an infringement on freedom of expression. Journalist Arthur Goldstuck quotes Kriel:

“Here is an organisation whose entire existence is premised on freedom of expression. It’s an organisation that continually calls on private and public institutions to account for their behaviour. Yet, they don’t want to be measured by that yardstick.

“If a company is putting out a moratorium on new appointments, surely this is something you can argue is in the public interest to be known? Nothing in the email, and nothing in the way it was distributed, gave any indication of sensitivity or confidentiality at all.”

Sowetan published an article just a week earlier on employees' constitutional right to criticize their employer's management practices.

Andrew Trench ponders what the case may signal for the future of intellectual property rights:

WiIl we see employment contracts in media restricting staff from blogging without the permission of their employer, much like freelance writing clauses which are pretty standard in contracts these days?

What if a staff writer developed a popular blog independently within their own time and was able to sell advertising to generate income from it? How would this be dealt with?

Social Networking for the Socially Exclusive

2007-12-01T09:23:00.000-05:00

Are you a high net-worth individual that just can't find a place online to connect with people you feel comfortable with? Feeling unfulfilled by the stodgier trappings of wealth and privilege? Want to get in on the social networking phenomenon, but just don't want to mix and mingle with the nouveau riche? Rest assured, there IS a place for you.

There are several, in fact. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, "a new crop of social networking sites has taken aim at the rich, seeking to create exclusive Web communities of like-moneyed friends."

Interested parties should apply to the Diamond Lounge and A Small World. But be warned, the barriers to entry are high. And as with many social networking sites, members find much to complain about.

One member recently posted the question: "Is it just me, but lately I see people on ASW who really shouldn't be there. Who invites these people? We should be selective who to invite. What about quality control?" Another member wrote: "In the real world, we are each discerning about who we make friends with, who we socialize with. There is no reason why when we come online we should have to socialize with truck drivers etc. from hick parts of the USA."

What was it Groucho Marx said about membership in these types of clubs?

Iranian blogger in bow-wow row

2007-11-30T16:54:00.000-05:00

Under some interpretations of Islamic law, dogs are considered unclean animals. (N.B.: As with many aspects of the Holy Quran, there is considerable, complex debate over this. You can read examples here, here and here.)

A story first appeared in The Guardian on November 20 revealing the use of bomb-sniffing security dogs by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's security detail. Now, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is reporting that Iranian blogger Reza Valizadeh is being detained by authorities after blogging about the purchase of 4 German dogs by the president's security staff.

Arash Kamangir reports on Arabisto.com that Valizadeh is being held on charges of "acting against public security as well as disruption of public opinion."

From the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report:

Valizadeh's arrest comes two days after dozens of Iranian journalists and intellectuals issued a statement to protest the jailing of journalists who are critical of the Iranian government.
One of the signatories, journalist Issa Saharkhiz, told Radio Farda on November 26 that a government crackdown on journalists has intensified in recent months. "There are some who are sitting and thinking of ways to fill up Iran's prisons. Unfortunately, we now see this not only in Tehran but also in the provinces," Saharkhiz said.
Saharkhiz added that journalists and media workers have lost their jobs as a result, and society has been limited to a "single voice."

The Grand Old Party's lookin' for somebody who can lead...

2007-11-29T11:55:00.000-05:00

So begins the first video to introduce the Republican candidates at last night's CNN/YouTube debate. Poring through just under five thousand submissions (4,926 in all) to YouTube, journalists in CNN's political unit pared down the numbers until they hit 34. (and given all the banter over the Boston Red Sox, maybe that has some significance. hmm.) Meaning, roughly, that just under 1% of the videos were going to be seen by the candidates. Or, unless after doing an extensive and exhaustive search on YouTube, anybody who watched the debate. (CNN reportedly pulled many of the videos from the public for review.)

With more than two thousand more entries for the Republican debate than for the Democrats' debate in July, are Republicans just that much more YouTube savvy than the Democrats, or is this model really allowing citizens to get the issues most important to them out in the open? Is this kind of user-generated video debate the best way to spark activism and interest in politics? And is it actually working?

The New York Times's blog coverage of the presidential race did a nice job of explaining the "behind-the-scenes" action when it came to deciding what videos got picked. An interview with CNN Washington bureau chief and one of the executive producers of the debate David Bohrman revealed that a lot of careful reviewing and editorial decisions went into selecting the final videos. In a similar article on Broadcasting & Cable, despite the perhaps more democratic flavor of selecting the debate questions, the focus remained on:

"... a serious debate, a Republican debate," Bohrman added. "We're going to weed out the obvious sort of Democratic gotcha grenades that are there to just be disruptive. The campaigns were all nervous that there'd be this leftist Web Democratic sense of the questions, and we're going to weed that part out."

In the aftermath of the debate, viewer responses haven't been too kind. In a post this morning on The Caucus (at NYT), Amanda Huber who describes herself as a "Democrat who often votes Republican" said:

I missed the first hour of debate, and so I watched the analysis afterward to hear some of what I missed. What I heard was that there were no questions about education, health care, Iran or energy! What? The Democrats talked at length about several of these subjects. What is CNN doing?

Are the Democrats getting the meaty, hardball questions that the candidates can use to really define themselves, and the Republicans get a bunch of nonsense questions that they will essentially all agree on?

And "Hank" responded to the above-mentioned collection of viewers' impressions, offering a somewhat more exasperated take:

Anderson Cooper was better than Wolf Blitzer but the questions and questioners CNN chose to show were cartoonish, silly and stereotyped. A guy with the Confederate flag in his bedroom? Come on! A guy brandishing a rifle and making a mock threat asking about gun control? Give me a break! An arrogant question about the bible? Oy! If these people truly represent the base of the Republican Party then they are in even worse trouble than anyone thought. Why not choose questioners who are normal, serious and thoughtful and who represent most of America, not the goofballs who populate YouTube and the internet.

Janis Hotham via the Huffington Post had a few good insights yesterday before the debate aired:

With 5000 questions and only 40 being picked to air during the debate, are we getting a fair representation of what people really want to ask? A quick scroll of YouTube's feature site for the upcoming debate shows mostly males sitting in front of their computers with questions about the national debt, social security, and what the role of government should be in the years to come. Bohrman said so-called "lobbying questions" about gay marriage and abortion won't be considered, despite the bickering between candidates about their nuanced and past positions on those issues. What does that leave?
It will be interesting to see if this debate that marries classic questions with more new media, and whether that will stay true to CNN's vision of a "serious" Republican debate. Of course, it's much easier to craft that kind of debate when you have 5000 nearly identical questions at your hands.

In theory, and to some extent in practice, the sheer number of videos submitted is a positive; people want to be involved, want to raise awareness for the issues they find important. To easily produce and upload for free a video message to the next potential president (and have it be answered on national TV, no less) is appealing, exciting. For me, personally, the jury is still out. At the end of the day, the 'average Joe' image that these debates try to promote is misleading. You can access all of the used videos from both debates on the YouTube YouChoose '08 website, but where is the breakdown for all of the videos submitted? Of the more than 99% of videos that we aren't seeing, what are the issues that are coming up most? What are 'the people' talking about, concerned about? What aren't we seeing and why not?

Tales from the online darkside

2007-11-28T14:15:00.000-05:00

The AP is reporting that as many as one in three children in the US have been a victim of what is being called cyberbullying. This comes hard on the heels of the much publicized case of Megan Meier, a 13 year-old from suburban St. Louis who committed suicide last year after believing that a boyfriend she met on MySpace had broken up with her. The boyfriend was later revealed to have been a hoax creation of Meier's 47 year-old neighbor Lori Drew. The story received widespread coverage in the national media. Local authorities declined to charge Ms. Drew with any crime, but the local Board of Alderman chose this week to pass an ordinance making online harassment punishable with up to 90 days in jail.

On a related noted, I noticed a story on the Blogging Ethics newscrawl installed this week on the lower right hand corner of this page by Devin Stewart. This from OKC Friday, which bills itself as "the Newspaper for Oklahoma's Trendsetters":

A Village woman’s nasty blog posting was met with real life threats that led to Village Police sending out a metro-wide notice regarding a potentially dangerous person. On Oct. 17, a woman called police to report receiving threatening email messages. According to reports, the woman suspected the messages came from another woman who had been involved with the caller’s ex-husband. She told police she had written bad things about the other woman on her MySpace page and, although she did not name names in the posting, thought the subject of the postings had somehow found them and knew they were about her.

You can read the rest here.

Two examples of the anonymous world of the internet spilling over into the "real world" with tragic consequences. Have you been bullied online? Do you consider this a tolerable byproduct of the freedom of expression that the internet provides?

Ethical Blogging vs. Email

2007-11-28T14:07:00.000-05:00

We all know what a hassle it is to wade through hundreds of pieces a spam every week in your inbox just to keep up with your legitimate email correspondence. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday titled “Email’s Friendly Fire” has identified “colleague spam,” email from your coworkers who always press the “reply all” button. The article goes on to offer some solutions in the form of email sorting technology such as ClearContext.

Are we witnessing the death of email? Can blogs help out?

I always suspected the day would come when email would begin to die. First, with the wave of spam growing every year, legitimate email gets lost in the tide. There was an excellent article in the New Yorker in August describing this phenomenon called “Damn Spam: The losing war on junk e-mail”:

As the Web evolves into an increasingly essential part of American life, the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. Most of those messages have something to sell.

Second, corporate spam filters aren’t always accurate in identifying which emails are spam and which are not. I have witnessed several cases in which spam filters have gone berserk in the past few weeks inside my office and at the offices of others. The bottom line is: When you hit that “send” button on email, you can’t be so sure the recipient will get it, open it, and read it. Finally, the addressee can always claim, “I never got your email.”

Why not shift the responsibility on the readers by posting everything on blogs? Indeed, as you know, one of the origins of the blog in its current form was from an ah-ha moment: People emailing to one another discovered that the discussion thread amounted to something of value and thought the discussion could be posted publicly. Many corporations are trying out internal blogs as ways to share ideas and innovations, thus reducing the amount of “colleague spam,” I would hope—assuming their idea was more than “Brownies in the kitchen.”

Essentially communication is diversifying at a rapid pace. Chad Lorenz of Slate magazine declared “The Death of Email” just a few weeks ago. We communicators are hedging against the risk that email may not be infallible. Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and blogs, I would argue amount to a communications potpourri. The great thing about blogs (and Facebook for that matter) is that you can see your post as soon as it goes online. “I didn’t get the message” can be a thing of the past if people trust the integrity of their message to be viewed by the public.

Perhaps a transparent blog posting in lieu of a secretive email message could save people from becoming victims of embarrassing gossip or other affairs. For private matters, it might be best to make a phone call or do what's sometimes called "Facebook in the flesh."

Blogger Garrett Graff to Speak at Carnegie Council

2007-11-28T11:09:00.000-05:00

Hey Ethical Bloggers,

One more announcement: For those of you living in the New York City area, the Carnegie Council would like to invite you to a Dec. 6 evening talk by Garrett Graff, the first blogger to be admitted to cover a White House press briefing.

To attend, please sign up here. (There is a fee to attend.)

Here is the information:

The Carnegie Council presents:

A discussion of “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House”

with

Garrett M. Graff

Thursday, December 6, 2007
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
Merrill House
170 East 64th Street
New York, NY 10065-7478

The emergence of the Web as a political tool has shaken up the campaign process, leaving front-runners vulnerable right up until Election Day. How will the two major parties take advantage of this new technology? And how instrumental will technology be in deciding the outcome of the 2008 Presidential campaign?

Garrett M. Graff is editor-at-large at Washingtonian Magazine and covers media and politics. He was also the founding editor of mediabistro.com’s Fishbowl D.C. (www.fishbowldc.com), a blog that covers the media and journalism in Washington. As the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing, he is a frequent speaker on blogging and the intersection of politics and technology. He served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean's first webmaster.

Presentations begin at 5:30 PM, followed by a question-and-answer session at 6:00 PM and a reception from 6:30 to 7:00 PM.

NYU Center Joins Ethical Blogger Project

2007-11-28T10:43:00.000-05:00

Dear Ethical Bloggers,

As you may have noticed, New York University’s Center for Global Affairs joined the roster of institutions participating in the Ethical Blogger Project. We are seeking additional institutions worldwide, so if you have suggestions, please let us know. Please send ideas to Devin Stewart at the Carnegie Council or post them on this blog. The plan is to convene meetings around the world to engage publics in every region on this topic over the course of the next two years.

We are very encouraged that a part of the NYU community, with its global reach and superb academic reputation in law, media, business, and international relations has joined us.

Here is the announcement:

NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (CGA) is pleased to join the Ethical Blogger Project, a collaboration created by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Demos—The Think Tank for Everyday Democracy, and Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Launched in the heart of lower Manhattan in 2004 on a tradition of global affairs education begun in 1984, the Center for Global Affairs at NYU facilitates change by educating and inspiring its community to become global citizens capable of identifying and implementing solutions to pressing global challenges. Through rigorous graduate and non–degree programs and provocative public events, the CGA prepares global citizens who will be at home–and thus be effective agents of change–in diverse environments around the world.

“We founded the Center for Global Affairs on the principle that ‘global’ and ‘international’ are different in important ways,” says Vera Jelinek, CGA divisional dean. “Understanding these differences informs our mission of creating global citizens and demands that we engage our community in a deep and meaningful examination of ethics at every level. The Ethical Blogger Project focuses a critical spotlight on ethics and new media and is a perfect fit for our students and our mission. We are delighted to engage in this exciting project with such outstanding peer institutions.”

For more information on the Center for Global Affairs, please visit the site or call 212.992.8380.

November 27, 2007
New York University
New York, NY

Convention Blogger Corps

2007-11-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

Democrats and Republicans will both make more room for bloggers at their respective conventions next year. "The Democrats are starting a state blogger corps, with credentials going to 56 blogs, one from each state plus the territories," reports Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times. Many other bloggers will also get credentials for the DNC in Denver, and hundreds more are expected in the mix of convention-goers.

The presence of more bloggers is itself part of the narrative, feeding into the media's love of self-analysis. Seelye writes that we will see "more stories by the media about the media covering the media." The whole endeavor will be a great test case for the effects that blogs have on our political perceptions. Imagine the snapshot mosaic of all the bloggers' comments on a particular speech. Will they align or diverge? Which details will prove salient?

The Colorado blogosphere has teamed up with dailykos.com to host an adjunct blogger hangout across the street from the convention. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas put in a plug for the alternative location, citing the security nightmare as a deterrent to convention access. Blogging from a safe distance is indicative of the state of fear in America. During the 2004 RNC, midtown Manhattan was a ghost town populated mostly by police. Echoes of FDR's first inaugural address seem pretty relevant.

UK tells MySpace generation: You might regret that hearfelt blog confession

2007-11-26T08:54:00.000-05:00

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is the UK's independent authority set up to promote access to official information and to protect personal information. On Friday, the ICO released the results of a survey whose findings suggest that teenagers are recklessly posting personal information, photos, diaries and blog comments on social networking sites, blogs and personal web pages. These posts, the agency warns, may come back to haunt teenagers:

As many as four and a half million young people (71%) would not want a college, university or potential employer to conduct an internet search on them unless they could first remove content from social networking sites, according to new research by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). But almost six in 10 have never considered that what they put online now might be permanent and could be accessed years into the future.

In this case, young people are defined as 14-21 years old.

David Smith, Deputy Commissioner for the ICO, said: "Many young people are posting content online without thinking about the electronic footprint they leave behind. The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees."

An argument in favor of anonymity perhaps? (Devin Stewart has written extensively on the debate over online anonymity. You can join the conversation here.)

The ICO has launched a new site to help UK teens safely navigate the online space? Will it work? Could government possibly know more than teenagers about social networking? Does the internet make it easier for teens to make foolish choices? Haven't parents always worried that kids will make tragic mistakes in their teenage years and "Throw their life away?"

You tell me. Just be careful what you write........

Photo by Annie in Beziers under terms of Creative Commons.

Is Lurking Ethical?

2007-11-24T12:03:00.000-05:00

Hey Ethical Bloggers,

I added a Google newsfeed below and called it Ethical Blogger News. An interesting essay showed up from the New York Times: "In Defense of Lurking" (on the Web). Here is Virginia Heffernan's argument:

Which brings me to my lurking problem. I can’t tell whether lurking is a devious violation of Web ethics or a return to luxurious nonparticipatory reading. I do know it seems indulgent. When I lurk, I relax, fall silent, become a cosseted 19th-century baroness whose electronic servants bring her funny pictures and distracting tales. I have no responsibilities. I’m entirely on intake.

In participatory media, is it OK to sit on the sidelines? Is lurking ethical?

Diplomatic Blogging

2007-11-21T12:39:00.000-05:00

Last week it was announced that the State Department’s new Digital Outreach Team has entered the blogosphere to counter misperceptions about U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world, with plans to expand into Persian and Urdu blogs as well.

According to an article that appeared in Reuters today:

The Digital Outreach Team's job is to spring into action when they see bloggers on Arabic-language sites maligning the U.S. and casting aspersions on U.S. policies.
Duncan MacInnis, the man in charge of the team, described it as "an initiative to counter ideological support for terrorism."
Government bloggers "speak the language and idiom of the region, know the cultural reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesman," he said.
"This is a major departure from our previous ways of conducting public diplomacy. It requires both creativity and a new set of skills."

A Washington Post article from earlier this week touched on the anonymity issue:

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, "we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, 'flamed' when we come on" -- meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

They were not, and there were such posts as, "We don't like your policies but we're sure glad you're here talking to us about it," MacInnes said. As a result, State is expanding the team to six speakers of Arabic, two of Persian and one of Urdu.

As well as moderating:

“Because blogging tends to be a very informal, chatty way of working," MacInnes said, "it is actually very dangerous to blog." So State has a senior experienced officer, who served in Iraq, acting as supervisor and discussing each posting before it goes up.

But it doesn’t talk about how the Digital Outreach Team ensures that others know who their true members are. Someone posing as Condoleezza Rice for a TV or newspaper interview would easily be found out- it may not be that easy on the blogosphere.

This counterterrrorism tactic further illustrates how powerful blogs have become and brings up issues of blogging ethics with potentially high stakes.

Blogalization and its Discontents

2007-11-21T12:11:00.001-05:00

A recent commenter travelling by the name I, Candyman, took sophisticated umbrage at my use of the term "blogosphere" to describe the imagined online community of weblogs, wikis and other such media that comprise our object of study.

"Oh wow. Every time I read the word 'blogosphere', a little part of my soul dies," he wrote.

Ever since, I have been toying with the idea of a new post titled "Blogosphere," comprising nothing more than an infinite repetition of the word "blogosphere" separated by double spaces. (Just to see what would happen.)

Instead, I give you an entirely new, evocative and likely annoying word-scramble for the Candymen of the world to seethe at: Blogalization.

Syria blocks access to Facebook

2007-11-19T18:45:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I mentioned the wonderful site Global Voices Online -- a sort of clearinghouse for international blogs. The site "aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore."

And fair play to them.

At the top of Global Voices tonight is this post from Amira Al Hussaini, detailing the censorship in Syria of the social networking site Facebook. (Access to Google's Blogger, which hosts The Ethical Blogger, is also blocked in Syria.) Hussaini links us to the Syrian blogger Golaniya, who claims to be "neither an 'Arab' nor a 'Syrian', not even a 'female'." She blogs "for the right to be a citizen."

What follows is bold, brave and truly inspiring.

...recently there has been a cultural awakening [in Syria]; people are starting to organize their interests in concerts, galleries, conferences, plays, screenings…etc. and Facebook is facilitating the process which is very hard to do in an inactive militarily controlled society. There are no cultural institutions in Syria, no private independent NGOs, no civic institutions, who represent the populations except the government? Syrian Facebookers are trying now to represent themselves. Those who cannot be activists in a "real" Syria can be one in a virtual Syria. Facebook is becoming a tool to bring together these very individuals to promote their socially, religiously and politically prohibited thoughts. We are not talking about blocking of a social networking tool, we are talking about blocking an awareness networking tool, a chance to express, to finally speak and do something about it. It's high time to demand our right to seek ALL and ANY information regardless of its source, we have the mind to decide for ourselves what we should/should not read or believe.We have the right to organize ourselves and activate our numb citizenship. We want to be socially and politically active. We want to campaign for human rights, we want to be civilians instead of abstract "Syrians," instead of mere Muslims and Christians. We want to engage in building our nation. We don’t want to be permitted to act; we want to be voluntarily and spontaneously acting. We want to be doers and actors. We want Syria uncensored!

As we discourse here on the appropriate use of profanity and anonymity in fora such as this, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that freedom of expression remains out of reach in some corners of the globe.

As Ian Bremmer points out so eloquently in his book The J Curve, authoritarian regimes rely heavily on state control of the media to keep the citizenry in the dark.

...the slightest influence on their citizens from the outside could push the most rigid...states toward instability. If half the people of North Korea saw 20 minutes of CNN (or of al Jazeera for that matter), they would realize how egregiously their government lies to them about life beyond the walls. That realization would provoke widespread social upheaval. The slightest improvement in the ability of a country’s citizens to communicate with one another—the introduction of telephones, email, or text-messaging into an authoritarian state—can likewise undermine the state’s monopoly on information.

No doubt the Syrian regime feels mortally threatened by the latent power of sites such as Facebook. It is not hard to see how easily the political opposition in Syria (such as it is) could leverage these sites, both at home and abroad, to destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad. Even the lowliest technology (think of the role of the cassette tape in the Iranian revolution of 1979) can conceivably be employed to illuminate "life behind the walls."

We should acknowledge and commend the brave struggle of dissidents such as Golaniya.

Blog Ethics du Jour

2007-11-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

In their article Searching for the Ethical Blogger, Devin Stewart and Matthew Hennessey ask a key question that this blog and its related project hope to explore: "Which ethical standard should govern the blogosphere? Is it necessary to choose, or can multiple codes coexist?"

Perhaps a boiled down code of basic principles is possible, but would it cover the spiciness of the blogosphere or just reheat the well-worn sole of free speech? Personally I'm pitching my hat with multiple codes. I think it's the practical and democratic option, more in step with Internet culture, and more ethical. At the Carnegie Council we sometimes look at ethics as the expansion of choice, and I think that's a solid footing from which to evaluate blog behavior and collect resources and thinking on the topic.

Multiple codes is practical first of all because of diversity. Blogs are owned and authored by too many people from too many different countries for too many different purposes to make applicability or enforcement of a single code possible or desirable. It's ethical because it's something people opt for, not something imposed upon them.

From that starting point we can start to piece together some of the structure of what an á la carte code of blog ethics might entail.

APPETIZERS (Your opening choices)
Anonymous and Pseudonymous Blogging: Very tasty option under repressive regimes.
Transparency: This clear soup lets everyone know who you are, what you're an expert on, why they should care, and how they can contact you in case something unpalatable happens.

MAIN DISHES (You could skip this course, but it's best not to.)
No illegal content or activity: libel, child pornography, trafficking delicious endangered species, etc.
Disclosure: If you're blogging about sensitive information, do you have a conflict of interest?

DESSERTS (Tasty but not necessary)
Comments Policy: Moderated or unmoderated? What is allowed, what is deleted?
Copyright Policy: Are you using traditional copyright or sharing your work with the Creative Commons?
Your Blog's Ethics: Share the recipe! If you've chosen certain principles, post them prominently.

More on Anonymity

2007-11-18T15:40:00.000-05:00

We are fortunate to have sparked quite a lively debate on this blog. We got a lot of love from Google. Last week our magazine Policy Innovations was accepted by Google as a news source and Google's Blogger named The Ethical Blogger a "blog of note," triggering a flood of traffic and comments.

One of the biggest areas of debate so far has been about the utility of anonymous postings. I originally called for general transparency in the blogosphere here and mused on the counter intuitive credibility an anonymous blogger can have in oppressive environments, such as in China. We also had a touching comment from a teacher in the New York school system who was sanctioned for writing an op-ed, using a professional email address. Here is an excerpt:

I hate the feeling that in this country, a supposedly free country, that people must hide behind anonymous names.

I, too, hate the namecalling and animosity I read in debate. We can disagree without bashing the person; we can converse without rude language.

This is a topic I care about personally and professionally. How can students learn to debate and converse when all around them they see venomous attacks and language not worthy of intelligent thought?

This is a complicated case, as they all are, because this teacher tried to do the right thing but was caught in school system politics. I am not sure if this advice is applicable, but Tim O'Reilly has discussed anonymity quite a bit on his blog thread on developing a Blogger's Code of Conduct.

One of his codes of conduct is to connect privately before we respond publicly: "When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved--or find an intermediary who can do so--before we publish any posts or comments about the issue."

From the lessons he learned so far, he notes on anonymity:

Another place where we clearly erred in the first draft is in the suggestion that anonymity should be forbidden, as there are most certainly contexts where anonymity is incredibly valuable. (Some that come to mind include whistleblowing, political dissent, or even general discussion where someone might not want to confuse their personal opinions of those of an organization to which they belong. As one commenter remarked, it might even be useful for a shy person to whom anonymity gives a bit of courage.)

Like the New York Times Public Editor (read Matthew Hennessey's post on this topic here), O'Reilly concludes that civility is therefore of utmost importance:

But I believe that civility is catching, and so is uncivility. If it's tolerated, it gets worse. There is no one blogging community, just like there is no one community in a big city. But as Sara Winge, our VP of Corporate Communications pointed out, it's not an accident that "Civil" is also the first two syllables of "civilization." What's more, when an exchange of ideas turns into an exchange of insults, everyone loses.

Without civility, a few bad apples ruin the Internet for everyone.

Student bloggers monitor Hong Kong elections

2007-11-18T09:01:00.000-05:00

Rebecca MacKinnon is a former journalist and co-founder of the international citizen's media community Global Voices Online. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her blog is called Rconversation. As I write this Sunday, her students are spread out around the city monitoring local district council elections in Hong Kong. You can follow events as they unfold at the blog MacKinnon set up for her young citizen journalists. Click here for MacKinnon's real-time aggregation of other local blogger's observations on the election. MacKinnon:

Quite a number of my students' stories have quoted pro-democratic candidates complaining that the pro-China camp has better resources to reach out to the grassroots, while pro-China candidates have questioned who is more "democratic"
than whom...

She offers a link to an english translation of a thought-provoking blog post by Jasper Tsang Yok-sing titled Democracy in Need of Emergency Help:

"Democracy needs emergency help"? This is a risible slogan. In an open, fair and just election, it is a victory for democracy no matter who wins. It is a basic concept in the believe [sic] of the people and democracy. The people who need emergency cannot be democrats, for they can only be those people who wave the flag of "democracy" but are unwilling to do the practical work to gain the support of the voters.

Blogosphere 101 for Grandma and Grandpa

2007-11-17T11:45:00.000-05:00

This weekend, Parade magazine introduces millions of behind-the-curve Americans for the first time to the web technology that is changing politics. For many, this will be an eye-opening first encounter with YouTube, MySpace and Google. A good many still won't get it. It's a generational thing.

You know Parade as the floppy little insert that falls out of your Sunday paper and offers middle-of-the-road profiles of mainstream celebrities like Keri Russell, Drew Carey and Lucy Liu. Official circulation: 32 million. Estimated Weekly Readership: 71 million. Hardly small potatoes. Here's the opening paragraph of "You Have the Power," by Michael Scherer:

In this new Internet age, democracy means much more than a trip to the polls. Every day at personal computers across the nation, people are speaking back to their politicians—posting essays and videos that will be seen by thousands, organizing their neighbors and delving deep into the issues they care about on their own terms.

While this will hardly seem like breaking news (or required reading) to denizens of the blogosphere, it will certainly clarify a few things for some members of the so-called "old school." It should be noted that in 2004 the 65-74 year-old voter cohort was the most active in terms of turnout -- nearly 75 per cent voted.

Is it safe to assume that most of the online politicking so characteristic of this election cycle is geared toward relatively young, web-savvy voters? Yet, less than half of 18-24 year-olds voted in the last presidential election.

Are the candidates wasting their time online? Shouldn't they be courting the editors of Parade rather than Ariana Huffington or Andrew Sullivan?

China's Citizen Journalists Check Government Corruption

2007-11-14T21:44:00.000-05:00

An article that appeared yesterday in AsiaMedia reports on the third annual China Blogger Conference, with an interesting note on how blogging has helped counter the country's corruption:

After [Zola, a panelist and blogger,] investigated and wrote in April about a couple who refused to accept a below-market price from a real estate development company, traditional Chinese media outlets and overseas press such as The New York Times and Time magazine's The China Blog picked up the story. The issue wasn't only about a big company's business practices, but also about the local government's collusion with businesses in the name of economic growth. According to a Washington Post report, with nationwide media attention, local officials worked to reach a compromise; the developers increased their offer with a ground-floor apartment affording space for the couple's restaurant business and $120,000. The couple accepted. Beijing Youth Daily's weekly tabloid, yWeekend, celebrated the incident as the "birth of citizen journalism."

Zola, who goes by Zhou Muguang when he’s not blogging, has been contacted by other Chinese citizens battling eviction orders all over the country, according to Reuters. Given that traditional media outlets are barred from reporting on high-profile corruption cases, bloggers may be the only hope for those whose land is seized by developers in collusion with local governments.

The Reuters article notes other instances when citizen journalists have stepped in, like demonstrations and disasters. But it also reports that the less rigid restrictions on the Internet have given journalists and impostors an avenue for exploitation:

Authorities jailed four men in October who tried to blackmail a local official by threatening to write incriminating information about government abuse of power in land usage.
In January, a local reporter for a Beijing-based newspaper was beaten to death by hired thugs during an investigation into an unlicensed coal mine in Shanxi province. Officials there said he lacked accreditation and suggested he may have been seeking payoffs in return for not reporting problems at the mine.

Devin Stewart wrote previously about a survey which found that the credibility of Internet media in China is actually derived from its anonymity. At what point will impostors and blackmailers impede the work of sometimes anonymous citizen journalists trying to cover sensitive issues, and what sort of regulations could prevent this?

Blogging Under Martial Law

2007-11-13T12:35:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek reported yesterday on the Internet's role in informing the public of the state of Pakistan after General Musharraf enforced Martial Law on November 5th and in mobilizing citizens in opposition:

A complete blackout of cable television—the most pervasive medium in Pakistan—radio, and the Urdu press had blocked images from public view, but word spread. The students decided to participate in the protests.

That's when the blogging began. On Nov. 5, the Emergency Times (and an attendant wiki, http://pakistan.wikia.com/wiki/Emergency_2007) appeared. It declared itself "an independent Pakistani student initiative against injustice and oppression," which gave readers a regular update and comments on the emergency, and student activities against it across Pakistan. It announced that there would be a protest by LUMS students on Nov. 7 at 2 p.m., as also at FAST-NU, a technical university in Lahore.

Other protests were organized using Facebook, not just in Pakistan but around the globe, which you can track on Teeth Maestro, a blog that shifted to “crisis mode” after Martial Law was instated. The website also publishes updates on in-country demonstrations and tips for protesters, submitted by readers via Blackberry and email.

With thousands of lawyers and human rights activists in jail and media outlets being pressured to abide by a new "code of ethics," the current situation is a perfect example of how the lines between citizen and professional journalism are becoming blurred. The New York Times recently appealed to Pakistani citizens to submit eyewitness accounts of blocked protests via text, video, or photographs.

Last week Dr. Awab Alvi, who formerly ran Teeth Maestro, warned fellow bloggers of the dangers they may face in light of this power:

I THINK ITS TIME THAT ALL PAKISTAN BASED BLOGGERS SHOULD STOP BLOGGING AND BE CAREFUL SINCE ITS BEING CONFIRMED THAT MARITAL LAW IS IN EFFECT WE ALL HAVE TO PLAY IT SAFE - HAND OVER REIGNS TO INTERNATIONAL REPORTERS AND BLOGGERS TO HELP REPORT - WE CANNOT RISK IT HERE

Other bloggers have decided to remain anonymous, fearing their opposition movement may be hampered by leakages of information in the press.

With any media coverage of conflict or civil unrest come ethical questions: Should reporters risk their lives to get accurate information to the public? Under what circumstances can unnamed sources be used and trusted?

The situation in Pakistan suggests that bloggers too now have to ask these same questions of themselves.

I Built My Blog of Glass

2007-11-12T11:38:00.000-05:00

The article about how the New York Times is striving to maintain an editorial policy of "civil discourse" in the comments on its blogs raises some interesting issues (Matthew Hennessey touched on a few here). It led me to think that in some ways blogs blur the lines between public and private space. For example, if you have an open house party and a guest leaves footprints on your walls you're well within your rights to give him the boot. But discouraging similar unruliness by deleting or editing comments on a blog can quickly lead to accusations of censorship.

This issue is compounded by the fact that blogs are hosted and owned in a number of different ways, from free public services like Blogger to proprietary and commercial institutions of journalism like the NYT. That's why bloggers and hosts develop content policies and terms of service to set the rules of use, indemnify themselves, reserve rights, etc. Otherwise all the huffing and puffing might blow their blog down.

It seems natural then, given the public/private nature of blogs, that many would adopt a "house rules" approach to filtering content, and transparency comes from making that policy explicit. Do the blogs of journalists, press, and media carry unique or additional responsibilities for disclosure or tolerance? Many letters to the editor never see the light of day, but there's no public outcry over that.

Photo of Philip Johnson's Glass House by Mel K (CC).