I wanted to also briefly send out a few links to work I’ve been doing in the public media, attempting to tell the ‘culture first’ story I discuss below that still works with the important need to write and speak clearly in mainstream media.
Here are a few pieces I’ve participated in (in no specific order):
1. 5 Myths About Social Media – In the Washington Post’s Outlook Section, Sunday Edition (print), September 30, 2011 (online)
2. “London, Egypt, and the Nature of Social Media” - In the Washington Post’s On Innovations Section, August 11, 2011.
3. Interview on National Public Radio’s (NPR) Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep on the challenges of distortion and echo-chambers that are part of an over-reliance on social media.
4. TV Appearance on Al Jazeera’s The Stream, discussing the role of Social Media in Egypt.
5. Discussion on Al Jazeera as to whether Social Media can enrich democracy.
6. Appearance on Al Jazeera (from Cairo via Skype) todiscuss activist networks of social media, specifically from minute 43 onward
7. Appearance on Al Jazeera to discuss activists and the current political situation within the Arab Spring.
8. An article in the Middle East News Service’s MediaLine.
9. An appearance on Al Jazeera discussing Sri Lanka, social media and activism.
10. An article entitled “Putting Social Media in Its Place” released by UCLA Today.
Share on FacebookI have been enraptured by the stories gathered from my interviews in Egypt in June and July of 2011, and learning from these further convinces me how important it is to start with culture, community, context, and environment when discussing technology’s interaction with social, economic, and political movements. I’m currently working on a hybrid academic/public piece about networks – how Egyptians from a variety of walks of life narrate and imagine these, with the goal of identifying which networks actually drive activism and resistance.
I want to share some of the main insights I’m elaborating upon in my writing:
1. Networks exist so long as humans do, and so long as humans are social beings, which we all are naturally. Technologies may generate new networks, and disrupt or empower existing ones, but it’s important to remember that with or without technologies networks matter, and in so far as social, cultural, or environmental factors drive action, networks matter.
2. Technologies then may work to generate but one layer on top of an existing set of networks. But this layer may only directly influence a very few, particularly in a nation like Egypt where most (over 95 percent) do not engage with Facebook/Twitter/YouTube. Mobile phones penetrate much deeper, but it’s not clear whether these actually generate a new layer of networks for most. As in the West, most studies of mobile phone networks I’ve read in other parts of the world argue that mobiles work *with* existing geographies rather than dominantly transcend these. Of course with distance-bridging technologies, the possibility of developing international, globalized networks skyrockets, dating back to Manuel Castells’ brilliant three volume piece on the topic, but my sense in Egypt and other places I have worked in the global South is that international networks are more part of the lives of the wealthy, educated, and powerful rather than larger masses.
3. Social media needs to be clearly teased out. It’s a brilliant lump term but we all know that Twitter (personalized information streams, rapid sourcing of information, conversational in an @ # logic), Facebook (groups, ‘friends’, filter bubbled walls), YouTube (video sharing), and Mobile phones (associated with intelligent economic schemes, can be called even without credit, can keep with you on your body), are all *very* different in terms of how they prescribe impact and maintain affordances for the ‘social’. Moreover, *participation* with each of these differs. Using YouTube to watch videos is very different than trying to build influence networks via Twitter. Attending a virtual protest on Facebook is very different than using a mobile phone to figure out the location of snipers in a combative riot situation. UCLA’s PartLab, of which I am part (: ) ), is working on trying to distill out these different modes of participation and usefully unlock the lumpy categories of social and participation.
4. Class, education, and power all majorly shape one’s participation with social media. I mentioned that 95% of Egyptians do not use social media, and that there are 135K Twitter users in a country of 85 million. On top of this, even if one does have mere access to these technologies, to truly take advantage of these (and participate in this influence-wielding manner) one must also carry the infrastructural advantages (electricity, bandwidth, hardware, software updates, office/home space), media/information literacy (not just how to ‘use’ the technology but how to use it creatively, tactically), and networks in the *physical* world (meaning that just because one joins Twitter does not mean that they will be heard, however when Barack Obama or a well known media pundit joins Twitter, that’s a different story altogether). So if anything, social media amplifies already existing class-based inequities, and while it may bridge some of these, it also highlights these concurrently.
5. This is not to say the social media do not critically matter. Their influence on journalism is profound, especially in liberalized semi-authoritarian regimes like the former Egypt (note that every regime differs, and that the Mubarak Egypt is very different than a more highly controlled television/newspaper regime of the former Soviet Union, or even today’s Iran). Journalists I spoke with mentioned that they often source stories using trusted sources on Twitter, though as I discussed on National Public Radio (NPR), not unproblematically, with problems relating to echo chambers, different grievances held based on one’s place in life (social media users tend to by my interviews have less economically and materially specific grievances than poorer people who were very concerned with wages, food prices, ability to get married, employment, etc.), and sometimes lack of verification for exaggerated claims.
Moreover, I learned quite a bit about how social media groups can rapidly bypass emergency laws, where in-person meetings would be disallowed, monitored, and lead to arrests. In Egypt where infrastructure can be poor, and in Cairo where traffic is disastrous, social media activists told me how the Internet did serve as *their* public space of meeting. I also learned how social media can allow these activists to bypass international borders, with some like the well-known April 6th co-founder, explaining that he and his colleagues were in contact with activists worldwide thanks to social media, including in the neighboring Sudan!
6. So the question really is how did the masses emerge and take to the streets. Many colleagues are focusing on this as have I in some of the media appearances I’ve been doing. Without getting too into this, I will say that most explained to me that what occurred on Jan 28, 2011, related to the confluence of networks – keeping in mind as I mentioned earlier that social media was not a part of everyday life for most, particularly the younger, urban poor males who physically confronted and overwhelmed police. The power of mosques, street networks and community organizing/unions, classic institutions (including the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists), and word of mouth (Egypt is a very oral, conversational society from what many told me) speak to these other networked layers.
This said, as one journalist mentioned, “even in the best of democracies, elites and the educated really matter – they are influence leaders and opinion shapers”. So of course while most social media activists may not be elites, their relatively higher placement in Egyptian society and smaller numbers still do matter in the types of networks and journalistic effects traced out above.
7. So finally, the above six points are but a very small start to a fascinating story I’ve been working on telling from a place of humility, acknowledging that in one month one is more reminded of what they do not know rather than what they do. But what this reaffirms to me is the power of culture, context, and environment – without these foregrounding in our global understanding, our stories about technology will remain inappropriately and falsely mythical, and ignore the far more interesting stories produced by people’s practices, values, and everyday lives.
Share on FacebookI’ve just returned from several fascinating weeks of fieldwork in Egypt where I spoke to an inspiring range of citizens about the political, technological, and media climate. We discussed Egypt pre-January 2011, during the 18 days after the initial Jan25 protests, and the current environment. I’m now working on an article length piece for the popular press that reminds us to remember that this movement was powered by masses of laborers and working class families, and not just technologically-savvy educated and wealthy youth. Yet technologies do play a key role, one which catalayzes another set of networks that impact journalism, high-end organizing, and upper middle class mobilization. But how do we think about the ways in which the mass, street power speaks with the digital world without telling a story that forgets one in light of the other? And how does learning about the ways in which the Street and Digital World speak to one another better allow us to analyze other political movements that involve technology and a variety of classes worldwide? The article I’ll be writing will hopefully appear in a widely available media outlet and ask our public to think about the intelligent ways in which different groups come together to mobilize.
You can look up Tweets I was writing while I was in Egypt seeing the actions and intentions of people first hand by following me on Twitter @rameshmedia.
I’ll be posting earlier versions of this article here on my blog, but here is the argument in a nutshell.
Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinces me that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth from educated, wealthy families at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This article spells out how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users. This story, of the balance between the physical and digital world, brings light to the factors beneath the Arab Spring that are capturing the global eye.
Share on FacebookWorking through Morozov’s Net Delusion book, which is well-written and offers some nice examples and critiques of ‘cyber-utopianism’. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether I’ve ever met (or will ever meet) a cyber-utopian, who would argue that in simple access to open networks and technologies, empowers grassroots activism and democracies. Much more likely, a combination of various conditions, which themselves empower or disempower, institutions and peoples, impact uses of networked technologies for grassroots or policing aims. It’s very fashionable to dismiss the internet’s uses on the grassroots level as hype, though there are plenty of examples to the contrary, including work my colleague and I have done in Kyrgyzstan, and the wonderful illustration done by Frontline on PBS of youth protesters in Egypt.
More on this issue coming soon, but it seems to me what we are begging for is a more analytical approach toward studying the conditions that impact grassroots activism versus policing. Specifically, what are the conditions by which grassroots appropriation occur vs. the Morozov’s Iran/China/Belarus dystopia? What assemblages of institutions and social demographics impact DIY appropriation vs. what types of state configurations push further oppression? This would have to take into account such factors as institutions in a society and how internet use amplifies (as per Phil Agre) their goals, levels of technological literacy and expertise, attitudes of governments, larger socioeconomic realities of the nation, relationship to other layers of media, including digital television, coalitions and communication patterns between networks of activists, and more. I’m working on distilling this further so we can start to move past a rather pointless debate.
These are the questions that should frame the debate rather than cherry-picked strawman examples, that are then overly extrapolated. If we get more analytical and empirical, then we can start to answer the much more important question that I wrote about on the front page of the Huffington Post last week : How *should* the internet matter and how do we make those conditions possible?
Share on FacebookVery honored today to have been have been featured on the front page of the Huffington Post (and in the Technology, Politics, and Media sections as well). I am re-posting this piece, a response to Secretary of State Clinton’s major speech on Internet Freedom today.
Let’s stop being so confused about the Internet’s role in revolutions. Technology works with human networks and amplifies human activities, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. But is an open Internet a human right?
Politics, Ethics, and Constitutional ideals of free speech were the focus of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s speech today, marking the first time a major political figure has presented a detailed analysis of the role of Internet freedom in global democracy. Protecting free speech on the Internet was highlighted as critical to global diplomacy and an open society.
David Brooks from the New York Times noted on PBS last Friday that since 1974, 85 autocracies have collapsed under the weight of popular social movements. As these protesters and citizens become further wired, it is critical that United States diplomats use new technologies to listen to these voices and communicate with these citizens with consistency. While it is going to be difficult to implement such a vision, and inevitably points of tension and potential contradiction will emerge, this post lays out key issues from today’s speech that we must deal with to protect the Internet as an open and democratic public space.
The Continued Importance and Reach of Technology: Cultures and societies develop using the tools and technologies of their time. With four billion mobile phone users and 30% of the world’s population with basic Internet access, it’s absurd to dispute the implications of these technologies on social, political, and economic life. While 70% of the world’s population has yet to join the conversation, many are indirectly affected by technological change. In an earlier speech on January 21, 2010, Clinton expressed this when she stated,
The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. When something happens in Haiti or Hunan, the rest of us learn about it in real time — from real people. And we can respond in real time as well.
Today’s speech offered us a way out of an unproductive debate. It asked not whether the Internet as it stands today matters, but instead what kind of world do we want to live in, and whether the public space of our time can be a place of true dialog, exchange, debate, and openness. Even if new technologies can serve both democratic and repressive purposes, no one disputes their continued growth as the economic, social, political, and cultural substrate of our times.
3 Key Diplomatic Questions: New technologies are not static, nor are their uses. Social media is barely past the toddler phase, and its new uses in distant regions of the world are even younger. Working to create a world of openness shifts our discussion away from ‘yes’ or ‘no’, toward asking questions like “How can the inevitable increase in mobile and internet users empower democratic aims?” Or “How can one develop social and technological solutions that escape governmental policing, repression, and surveillance?” Or perhaps most importantly, “How can diplomats convince foreign governments that their nation’s economic well-being is dependent on an open Internet?
President Obama, in his recent State of the Union address, highlighted the importance of today’s information economy on the United States, and its need to innovate to compete. There is an explicit political and ethical dimension to the realities we all experience living in an economic world where the internet has facilitated globalization and outsourcing and how that translates to the health of an economy and the stabilization of a government.
Grassroots Uses of Technology: The recent protests and regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia, and today’s spread of protests across the Middle East, including Iran, Yemen, and Bahrain have got every techno-intellectual in a tizzy. In each of these cases, according to yesterday’s New York Times, the Internet served as a central organizing hub for protest leaders. Specifically, the article focused Facebook ’25 Bahman’ page in Iran, Twitter Feeds, and opposition websites. Mobile phone services have been disconnected – yet these sites, set up by sympathetic outsiders, have allowed Iranians to report on the events underway to the global community through uploaded video, audio, and photos. This same article explains, “Twitter feeds informed demonstrators to gather quickly at a certain intersection and then disperse as rapidly–one video showed them burning a government poster as the chant against Ayatollah Khomenei rang out.”
Governments, from Egypt a few weeks ago, to Iran today, immediately shut connectivity down as protests emerged, speaking to the importance the technologies have. People in Egypt found a way to circumvent these networks via older technologies, such as fax machines and copiers. Internet technologies have connected organizers with one another across regional and national boundaries. Organizers have used such technologies to strategize carefully and communicate nomadically via proxy servers, even when they spread messages using older media such as megaphones. In Kyrgyzstan, I observed first hand the importance of Internet use by revolutionary leadership in early planning stages, in a nation where over 90% of the population lacks Internet access. As a strategy was developed using the technology, it was then re-mediated into older forms, such as newspapers, messages in megaphones, zines, and posters in remote regions. Moreover, in Egypt and through the Arab world, Al Jazeera and other media networks used the Internet much like the ’25 Bahman’ Facebook group, to globally broadcast information and events as they happened, through live feeds. This global, real-time exposure to previously distant events increased global scrutiny and sympathy with demonstrators. This global exposure has become a new tool for change as we saw after the Haitian earthquake as well as in Egypt.
Skeptics argue that the Internet has empowered government surveillance, presenting a ‘net delusion‘, or it is largely inaccessible and a Western fetish. Revolutions have come and gone long before the Internet, these skeptics say, and it is humans, not technologies that make the difference. But no one is debating that people are the core and cause of all of this activity. We create technologies in our image, and we use them for the aims we pursue. That was true with the pen and telegraph, and it is true today.
Share on FacebookVery interesting interview this morning on Democracy Now with journalist Ahmed Shokr on the goings-on in Egypt. He explains that much of the impetus behind the first stages of this demonstrated was initiatedby a number of young, activist students and facilitated through their uses of a facebook group. The events in Tunisia also communicated the urgency of a call to action both to this group as well as the larger population. Quickly, this movement seems to have re-mediated away from this specific group toward a more heterogeneous mix of identities and communities: From the Islamic Brotherhood to reformist Mohammed El-Baradei (former Nobel Peace Laureate and Chief of IAEA) to other oppositional leaders. The identity therefore of the larger movement is heterogeneous, much moreso than seen to be the case in the recent Iranian Green Revolution. It thus becomes unclear, particularly as tools of internet mobilization are disabled, who truly leads this protest or movement, again complicating the critiques from Malcolm Gladwell last October of the need for successful political movements to have clear leadership.
What’s interesting about this is the zeitgeist or slipstream around which these events occur including:. 1. Geographic proximity and cultural similarity: With a neighboring country (Tunisia) recently revolting, Egypt, a very demographically different country, sees now as the time for a larger revolt, 2. The lack of clarity around what governing forms will or won’t emerge even if the movement is successful. Will the end-game look like what occurred in the Iranian 1979 Revolution, of an uneasy alliance between leftists and Islamists, turning into an authoritarian theocracy? Specifically, the lack of identity and ideology other than opposition to the status quo makes this Egyptian set of events very interesting, and 3. Organization and Mobilization outside of Social Media: Clearly, fans have tended to overdetermine the impact of social media on all forms of participation and mobilization. It now looks like mosques, institutions, and other ‘older’ points of references have become critical points of information sharing, and social coordination, though right now it remains unclear how coordinated what we see actually is.
Keeping tuned!
Share on FacebookI’ve found the protests in Egypt, with the intent of overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, to be gripping, in terms of the larger debates around two major issues: (1) the role of new media in coordinating and empowering democratic political struggles, and (2) impacting the ways in which distant and local audiences see and understand the events occurring around the globe.
On the first point:
Many, from Malcolm Gladwell to the more recent book by Evgeny Morozov, have weighed in about our delusions of the Net. Some of these perspectives are based on the belief that techno-libertarian Western fantasies fuel an incorrect reading of the actual data. In developing world nations, internet access remains relatively limited, certainly in terms of bandwidth strength. And mobile phones which have profused worldwide, tend to remain as basic access-oriented devices (rather than “Smarter” phones) for most. In this reading, the masses may not be *directly* mobilized via the internet, and the internet as a *causal* factor in generating a political movement is mitigated. I’ve countered this perspective pointing to work done in Kyrgyzstan for example where my colleague and I saw that revolutionary leadership (the limited few) can benefit from internet technologies in early planning stages, even in conditions where many lack access to the technologies themselves. And as planning and missions are coordinated using the advantages of internet authorship, they can then be re-mediated into older forms, newspapers, messages in megaphones, zines, and posters in remote regions. My sense is that we tend to overstate the power of the quantitative data around use early on, ignoring the realities that often populist revolutions are fueled by a smaller group that tends to be literate, educated, and more tightly knit. The ability to author and share information via the internet nomadically (without having to assemble in the same place in other words), via such modes as scrambled proxy servers, and work on a message and strategy through coordinated sharing and reflection on information (like what we do when we co-write a paper on google docs, or respond to one another on a facebook wall post), speaks to the power that the internet has early on in terms of impacting causality and potential for a movement to actually occur. Moreover, these networks may move beyond borders – Egyptian activists today have pointed out that they were in internet-facilitated contact with activists in Tunisia as an example.
Is the above sufficient to inspire the type of movement that we see occurring in Egypt now? Likely not. However, it’s critical that the role of media is key to augmenting the spreading of the messages, the development of the mission, and the key element: the coordination of protests. It’s telling that the Egyptian government has now (in the fourth+ day of protests, and second since they became very large/animated) disabled most forms of internet access in the nation, including mobile phone coverage ( CNN Report Here). This speaks to the importance of the medium once the movement has reached a level of visibility and popularity. As more citizens are galvanized to protest and take to the streets, they have turned to the internet for information and Twitter/Facebook and other social media tools for coordination and updates. A Facebook page devoted to Friday’s planned protests had more than 80,000 followers as of 2 p.m. ET Thursday, compared with some 20,000 the previous day, according to another report. Once the movement has scaled to these levels, the technologies function to coordinate large numbers, which would not be easily achievable before, according to reports from the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera. Egypt is also the most populous nation in the Arab World, adding to this issue of scale. Facebook pages in memory of a dead victim ‘Khaled Said’, invoke the massive attention focused on Neda, the young woman assassinated during Iran’s Green revolution. And the hashtag #jan25 is dominating worldwide trends on Twitter.
Now the last two examples I raise point to my second point above, around the power of the net to take the local and rapidly make it global. This is a point that many are well aware of, so I won’t comment much here, except to say that I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which Al Jazeera has focused on covering this event (Live Stream Here). I was watching the live cast this morning and was interested in the ways in which they contrasted themselves to the Egyptian State-run Television. Specifically, they pointed out (in a blistering critique of the Egyptian State TV) the State’s real-time video feed which showed calm, peace, and the skyline of Cairo in contrast to their own video feed of activity on the streets, defiance of the curfew, and so on. They also pointed out that the video cameras were only located a couple hundred meters from one another, yet showed such contrasting views of the events on the ground. Clearly, the subjectivity of how one tells a story, and associated issues with journalistic integrity continue to dominate within the context of online video.
An important question thus persists whether in an old or new media era: What is the real story and who has the power to tell it? With the restrictions on internet access in Egypt, the ability to upload video and other media documentation is likely compromised. And even if one were exposed to those videos, the validity and credibility would need to be scrutinized. An aggregation of many videos, may not necessarily be easily digestible, as well, an issue that even YouTube is encountering, with its concern that users spend only an average of 18 minutes on the site per log-in (quite a bit lower than one’s average of the use of the television). And the other important question: Does the real-time, on-the-ground video feed of these distant events really shape Western audiences in new ways? Does it impact transnational mobilization and increased support for on the ground agendas (whether by the government or protesters)? Has it forced more rapid reactions and admonitions from foreign governments than before, as per Hillary Clinton’s comments this morning?
I think it’s appropriate to end this short post with some words from an earlier post, related to my response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted article in the New Yorker last October. With my response here. The Egypt case continues to confirm these thoughts from a few months ago:
Social media thus lies at the heart of both sides of the network. It can generate the weak-tied awareness that then enable social roles and associated organization to emerge out of a complex, seemingly disorganized network. Or it can empower a smaller group of coordinated activists to hone their message, cultivate their strategy, and then reach out to larger groups of potential followers. It’s clear that while twitter is not ‘the message’, it still remains a viable social tool that can contribute to politically powerful events.
Share on FacebookWanted to post a conversation I recently had with media theorist/critic Geert Lovink who runs the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Many of the ideas discussed below form the basis of my more recent writing, particularly a paper that I’ll soon be releasing entitled : “Re-writing the Cultural Codes of New Media: The Question Concerning Ontology”. The argument I’m making below with Geert is that a deeper thinking around communities and cultural voices can influence work that not only considers how technologies are used in different ways, but actually how diverse cultural ways of making knowledge, or ontology, can allow scholars and practitioners to directly re-think how technologies are designed, purposed, and circulated. Here is the conversation with Geert:
Code and Complexity for Global Communities: Interview with Ramesh Srinivasan
Posted: December 26, 2010 at 10:11 am
By Geert Lovink
Ramesh Srinivasan is an ambitious worldwide traveller. Maybe we could best describe him as a techno anthropologist. He is based in LA where he is assistant professor both in the Department of Information Studies and in Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. He is describes himself as a “hybrid of an engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer.” His research and consultancy work focuses on the interaction between new media technologies and global cultures and communities. This involves studying the ways in which information technology shapes global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements. So far he worked in places like Kyrgyzstan, India and Native America. Every now and then he shows up in Europe where I met him in Amsterdam at the New Network Theory conference in June 2007. Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. In this interview we discuss how to balance the fast-changing global community IT research and the scholarly requirements of U.S. academic life.
Geert Lovink: Correct me if I am wrong. The overall ambition of your work is rewriting the architecture of the machinery. You believe, as I do, that it should be possible for grassroots organizations, activists, artists and others to change the very structure of information technologies and networks. Code is not fixed. Could you give us possible versions of the history of this idea? How does this notion differ from Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture and the idea of the prosumer on the one and free software/open source on the other hand?
Ramesh Srinivasan: I’d argue that creative and strategic *uses* of technologies are important as a grassroots form of appropriation, yet still fail to challenge the dominant value-systems embedded in the machines themselves. Instead, what I argue is that through sustained, embedded, and ongoing partnerships with local communities, technologies can be inscribed with other types of meanings, ones that computationally express a different set of ethical values, and consider diverse practices of making and sharing knowledge. A creative, grassroots use of a mobile phone differs from the design of a system that presents and models information according to, for example, a Native American way of describing a cultural object, or mapping the land. The latter is a much more active mode of re-writing systems to consider value systems that have been largely absent from our dialogues around technology, culture, and society. And I’d argue that with digital media, much more so than older, linear and analog forms of media (including video), there is a possible to introduce a read-write culture that places diversity and diverse communities as pro-coders or pro-designers rather than merely prosumers.
GL: Every now and then you leave Southern California to go on a big trip. You’re on the road right now. Where have you been so far and what’s new in comparison to a few years ago?
RS: It’s been a fascinating process of moving around the world every year. My work is built around collaboration. I have grassroots partners based in different parts of the world whom I am in continuous contact with. This ensures that the projects we co-develop live every day on the ground, where they matter the most, and that I, as a designer, can work concurrently with different communities in a way that creates sustained projects, all involving a strategic design of a technology to impact an economic, political, or cultural reality faced by a set of local communities in different parts of the world. What I have noticed, of course, is the ubiquity of mobile phones and their absorption worldwide. I think that this reality runs the danger of forcing us to take our eye ‘off the (proverbial) ball’, evangelizing equal forms of access while failing to recognize that access itself has many layers to it – our ability to access information and act upon it has much to do with social, economic, and political conditions outside of the technology. At the same time, I’m impressed and excited by the growth of organizations (within the developing world itself) that focus on technology’s role in democratized governance, public health, and grassroots politics, and more. This last summer I actually spent time in New Guinea, a country that has pretty wide access to mobile phones but little in the way of bandwidth. My interest in New Guinea though has much more to do with an interest in its profound biodiversity and linguistic/cultural diversity (over 800 languages spoken in a single country!). My sense is that a place like New Guinea can teach those of us concerned with the future of internet how to learn diversity sustains itself, and to try to consider these realities when we consider the world of digital media.
GL: In your work you propose to ‘rewrite databases’ as a post-colonial act with the aim to empower local agendas and bring out marginalized voices. Do you feel that the database structure itself (as the dominant mode to store and retrieve information) should also be questioned?
RS: Precisely – I have argued in previous work that networks and databases are two key features that are present in ‘new’ media. Neither are new, but both are ‘new’ relative to analog, linear media. Our interactions with systems, whether through the act of browsing or searching, creates a narrative focused on databases. This differs from the experience of watching a video or listening to a radio broadcast, in that the information we access and interact with is dependent on the logic of the database, how it organizes, classifies and retrieves an information object. So indeed my argument is that the database itself is largely only conceived of in hierarchical forms and through binary logic – that is, an information object can only be considered ‘on’ when it = true within a particular database table. Of course information need not be classified solely under this logic. We see examples of aboriginal meteorology that do not see a particular day as only within Winter, but instead existing concurrently within multiple states of time. Thus, a non-discrete, and non-binary notion of knowledge. As I said earlier, there’s a lot that we can learn from these types of approaches and part of how we apply them to the internet requires critically considering the contexts in which a hierarchical, western database is appropriate (or not).
GL: Why is important for you to stress that these are ‘complex, adoptive systems’? Isn’t the use of the word complex another way of saying: you don’t understand anything so please shut up? It could backfire, no? People know very well that the secret of blogs, Facebook etc. is that they are supposedly easy to use.
RS: There’s a lot to the notion of complexity that can be actually understood and learned from – and indeed it tends to be a good term for describing a lot of what I am arguing for in terms of how we design digital media systems and networks to connect and share knowledge that is practiced in different ways by different communities. David Turnbull has argued that a CAS (complex adaptive system) is a network of autonomous agents that act in parallel, actively acting and reacting to the other agents in the system. Therefore, a CAS is decentralized. Consider a CAS in contrast to a top-down database that gathers and accumulates information from a variety of sources, communities, cultures, or traditions and stores all this information according to a single set of classifications. This is the opposite of what diversity actually is in my mind – and our very acts to digitally preserve and empower diversity end up doing the opposite, imposing a single logic via the database. Instead we can promote decentralized communication networks between communities allowing for knowledge to be developed through the interaction between communities rather than according to a pre-created database logic. If you think about it, biological, linguistic, or cultural change occur not through their static preservation but instead through the interactions between the agents that practice these knowledges. Yet these knowledges themselves ontologically differ; they cannot neatly be fit into one another. For example, a simple dictionary of translation fails to allow us to learn a new language relative to the actual practice of just entering that new linguistic world as it stands.
I’m currently developing a project based on this very idea, the idea that different knowledges need to stand on their own and be shared with one another as they are. We are designing a digital system that connects groups of archaeologists, curators, and indigenous peoples to share their knowledges around a set of digital objects that were excavated in Zuni, New Mexico (USA). However, instead of presenting each’s perspectives via a pre-created database we are simply enabling each group to communicate with one another ‘as is’, allowing new ideas and insights to occur through interaction and emergence, even if they don’t make sense at first.
GL: Can you tell something about the concept of the ‘fluid ontology’?
RS: This is a key idea within my earlier research – namely that local communities can look back at themselves and their practices by viewing media they have created, whether that involves writings, video, audio, or something else. Through a collective act of reflecting on these pieces, the fluid ontology approach engages communities to techniques to sketch and map out their ways of collectively describing their knowledge. Some fluid ontologies I have looked like trees, while others more recently have begun to take on more rhizomatic features!
GL: Can you tell us where ethnography and its methods are today? This discipline seems to get more and more influence these days, in particular in internet research. I associate this with the decline of speculative and general theory. We could see it as ‘narrative turn’ that, even though part of the social sciences, is qualitative in nature (like theory) and is not in need of quantative data and visualizations.
RS: The growing excitement around ethnography relates to the increased understanding (finally) that visualizations may provide explanation but embedded within each visualization is a certain ontological perspective around how that information is to be counted, mapped, and coded, and thus visualized! Instead ethnography which starts with raw, unbridled observations, and attempts to be explicit about the bias of the researcher and present as much information as possible from the ground-up, can be seen as more respectful and at least at first puts bias aside to present data in less structured forms. I’m interested in the more general movement toward the digital humanities in this vein and the associated understanding that much like the dominant logic of the database, tools and technologies have been designed that are better suited for quick decision-making rather than interpretive understanding. Finally, there’s appropriately increasing interest in the relationship between ethnography and design – it appears that the design world has increasingly understood the importance of building tools out of raw, observational insights rather than focus groups and interviews that tend to bias the answers they gather via loaded, priming questions.
GL: You publish first and foremost in academic journals that very few have access to, and in fact almost no one reads. What the rational behind that decision? At first sight it seems to contradict all the community work you do.
RS: Indeed this is a real challenge – navigating the conservative traditions of academia that value exclusivity in being able to publish with the reality that my work is ethically built around principles of respecting equity and diversity. While promoting the importance of open access journals in my work on editorial boards and committees, I also have launched a public blog where many authorized copies of these papers are available, talks and tweets are linked to, and open commenting is made possible. Finally, through the active traveling I’ve been doing, I hope to reach as many people as possible in person! However, I very much agree that this is a challenge that scholars need face. The credibility and quality of academic work need not be compromised by making it more publicly available and engaging.
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More info on Ramesh Srinivasan can be found on http://rameshsrinivasan.org.
This is the second provocation on the theme of digital labor from myself and Adam Fish
Digital labor functions to generate corporate value, yet also can be seen as empowering of individual agency by allowing for a variety of uses and interactions by the user. Systems such as YouTube and Amazon’s mechanical Turk, both function in these ambivalent manners based on ethnographic data we have gathered. This blog post traces out some of the details around new media systems and their ambivalent, concurrent invocations of agency/access and exploitation/capitalization.
Free Use as Free Labor on YouTube
YouTube, subsidiary of Google, serves as a notable example of how a company creating value through free, user-contributed labor. User-producers upload content to YouTube for free and are given the opportunity to freely use Google’s immense, proprietary data centers (commonly called the “cloud”). Adding content, commenting, tagging, and even browsing all add value to the corporate product, though the amount of user investment and creative immersion differs in each of these cases. In the process, content creators facilitate Google’s ability to place targeted advertisements. These advertising schemes are monetized via the billion+ views YouTube receives per week. Commenting, tagging, and browsing are more passive forms of labor, as each adds to YouTube’s ability to build a social space that users will continuously return to, and optimize algorithms that allow for more efficient retrieval and browsing.
While a number of select YouTube partners are being selected for revenue sharing agreements, the vast majority of contributors receive no revenue from the advertising profits generated around the content they produce. As several anthropologists have pointed out, YouTube is also a social space (Lange 2009) and an educational tool but it is first and foremost a business that until the YouTube partner program got going in earnest this year was loosing 100s of millions. YouTube demonstrates the importance of free digital labor in creating profit-making value for a major corporation.
Is the free labor users contribute to such sites exploitative? Let’s assess a second example, one in which users are given pennies for networked work.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
YouTube’s ability to profit from free labor relies on its openness as a system – users can browse, upload, and comment easily. Amazon’s mechnical turk (mTurk), differs from YouTube in that it functions as a more targeted site, linking jobs/employers with potential laborers worldwide willing to work for the price specified. In contrast to free labor sites such as YouTube, mTurk is built around the relationship of an employer assigning a compensated task to an employee who bids on it. This and other digital labor sites (such as odesk.com) connect employers who post simple digital labor jobs (such as spellchecking, color correction, and basic software development) with any laborer worldwide who accedes to the employer’s compensation terms. These tasks are often ones which automated computational systems struggle with, such as image recognition. mTurk laborers can thus be seen as humans working to complement and augment algorithms and systems.
Interestingly, mTurk’s name is inspired by the Englightenment-era chess-playing automaton, “the turk,” which purportedly would play chess against intellectuals and aristocracy in the 18th century. The chess machine magically engaged the chess player or employer. Yet the turk was actually a clever ruse, a machine where a small Turkish man would stand under and move chess pieces that were magnetically linked to the bottom of the table, and often defeating the “machine’s” opponent.
Is mTurk an innovation that positively impacts access to employment for the traditionally excluded? Or can it also be seen as exploitative through the corporate use of this technology to access cheap labor?
Share on FacebookThe agenda to use social web 2.0 media tools to promote civil society is in full force, and now in full debate. It accompanies the larger debate about revolutions, politics, governance and social media, exemplified by Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article on Revolutions and Social Media and my my recent response, as printed in the New Yorker two weeks ago. As always with new media technologies,the skeptics have come out – disputing the ability for technologies to work across borders, in local contexts, with much emphasis placed on their unintended, dystopic consequences. Yet I believe that tools and programs launched by governments agencies such as the Department of State can show effectiveness, if they focus on building technologies and approaches that are lightweight, flexible, and involve a low barrier of entry for participation.
The eDiplomacy office within the Department of State (e-Diplomacy Office), led by Richard Boly, and Secretary of State’s Office of Innovation has recently launched its Civil Society 2.0 program, intended to support the local, grassroots work being done by non-governmental organizations worldwide who are doing the work of generating a ‘civil society’, and supporting democratic possibilities that resonate with American diplomatic interests. The Civil Society 2.0 project focuses on linking carefully selected NGOs, developing tools for NGO use, and providing resources that NGOs can use to their benefit. Civil Society can sometimes be a confusing term that we loosely play with, so the detailed Wikipedia entry may be useful to look at. The project has been discussed by Fast Company here and is focused on familiarizing selected NGOs with important new media crowdsourcing and disaster preparedness tools, and linking these NGOs with technologists and tool builders.
An i-Revolution post reponded to Daniel Drezner’s (law professor at Tufts’ Fletcher School) critique of this program. Drezner focuses his argument on the possibility of ‘information cascades’, relatively spontaneous, viral waves of protests that can occur in reaction to a defined event, such as an election. He points out that both liberalizing grassroots organizations as well as bureaucratic states can benefit from new media technologies, and that in open societies, civil society movements are more empowered via the internet versus in more repressive regimes, ostensibly where the Dept. of State is focusing as well. In authoritarian states, by stemming the flow of information, the state can maintain its control though lose the economic benefits it may gain from lowered transaction costs, all part of the ‘information revolution’. In contrast, by opening up its information networks, the state may promote the types of strong and weak-tied organizing activities that could impact its ability to maintain authoritarian power.
The point that Drezner emphasizes, however, is with internet technologies, illiberal, potentially anti-Ameican agendas and groups may be mistakenly promoted by Civil Society 2.0. That is, the resources and networks the initiative fosters can promote agendas by groups that hold aspirations and values counter to the American diplomatic interests. Other bloggers, such as Nancy Scola have weighed in with their support of Drezner’s position, arguing that the vast variety of organizations and agendas in the world is too complex to be effectively impacted by an initiative such as Civil Society 2.0.
Scola (and implicitly Drezner) are advancing an argument that is common today – that social media technologies often generate unanticipated effects, and that the cultural populations they engage have different practices and realities that diverge from what the creators of Civil Society 2.0 are designing for. I have made similar arguments in my writing, arguing that tools forced upon diverse cultures and communities for passive consumption and information access usually fail to sustain in those environments. Instead, I have noted that either one needs to develop tools that are locally cognizant (resonating with local, fluid ontologies), or that the tools need to be built around human relationships and a design that is open, lightweight, and flexible enough to allow them to be used in unanticipated manners. One talk I gave on this general topic can be found here. Yet to throw out the baby out with the bathwater in this project is unfair. This project seems to give explicit language to engaging NGOs in active forms of use of technologies that worked in many environments (such as Ushahidi, and some mobile banking platforms), and also by being built around human relationships and focused design strategies (in terms of linking technologists with NGOs), the process for creating locally, contextually-cognizant technologies is increased.
This countering of the easy dismissal of new media’s potential parallels my response to to Gladwell’s criticism of social media’s power in impacting grassroots movement (blog post). In this post, I argued that one indeed needs to look at the context of the networks formed around the technology access to see whether the initiative empowers an authoritarian state, a pro-Western grassroots agenda, or another grassroots movement that holds its own potentially subversive agenda. The study I conducted, with Anthropologist Adam Fish, was based in Kyrgyzstan where we uncovered that localized technology access and use in the hands of carefully chosen partners (in this case bloggers who were more aligned with American interests) did refine strong ties, through the creation of strategies, mission statements, and strategies for outreach. This may not have directly caused the recent Kyrgyz change in government, but was certainly a tool in the hands of some involved in the movement.
What is the implication of all this for Civil Society 2.0? Clearly, the project and its specific components need to be analyzed in the field environments and over-time, but Scola’s conclusion that its future is a roll of the dice seems ungrounded from the specifics of Drezner’s critique. The internet is generative and associative of a variety of different forms of networked publics, some of which may resonate with American interests. Yet, the question with this inititative, is how effective is it at : (1) vetting and selecting the appropriate organizations, (2) how lightweight, flexible, and easily usable are the tools that are designed/generated, (3) how ‘culturally aware/appropriate’ are these tools, and (4) how well do the tools enable for organization and planning to occur either within and between the organizations it works with. It seems clear that the more bureaucratically impositional the project gets the more likely it will be to be culturally mismatched with the environments in which the organizations operate. If this initiative can function in a lightweight manner with low-overhead and visibility and start with a few small pilot studies in low-risk environments, then possibility for it to circumvent these problems increases. Perhaps the goal may be then to create simple linkages between organizations, quietly arm them with resources they request, and in the spirit of Ushahidi observe the interventions’ effects over time, with a sense of what the correct data is to be measured.
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