Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

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3 May 2004

Eric Lee makes an interesting argument – he suggests virus writers are targetting working class people (because they don’t have the money for anti-virus software and are less lilely to have the time to develop the experience or skills to avoid viruses). I can’t see that virus writers actually bear working class people any ill will but I do think it is worth pointing out viruses as one more reason why use of the Internet is less likely among the working class.

I disagree with his suggestion following on from this that unions and other service organizations should be promoting open source software to the working class as a way for them to avoid vulnerability to viruses. As I have “said earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_open_source.html#000215 because it is still not fully user-friendly it may be difficult to train non-computer literate (or indeed semi-literate) people to use. I also worry about whether the basic skills Linux users learn will be useful if they enter the world of work where the environment is Windows.

28 April 2004

A netfriend of mine, Melanie McBride has written an excellent overview of the issues around “Blogging, Equality and the Future”:http://www.mindjack.com/feature/linkedout.html on “Mindjack”:http://www.mindjack.com/, a magazine I have been involved with for some time. It quotes those who believe blogging is a vital democratic tool but also includes the welcome cautionary voice of “Danah Boyd”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ who points out the un-acknowledged barriers to blogging (very much in the terms I plan to in my own PhD). I could go on but why not read the article for yourself!

21 April 2004

It’s in the planning stages (see “this wiki”:http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/LoicLondonMay04) but seems to be settling around the evening of May 12th. It looks as if there’ll be at least 50 people coming, including quite a few of the people on “my blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I’ll be there – especially if it’s at a Japanese restaurant…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

(If you like this you may also want to check out “Notcon”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_net_politics.html#001081)

15 April 2004
Filed under:Academia,E-democracy,London,Net politics at9:52 am

“NotCon”:http://www.notcon04.com/ on 6th June in London is a conference covering some, none or all of the following:

* Geolocation services
* Social software
* Hardware hacking
* Actual impacts of blogging
* Alternative media
* Politics on the net
* Politics *of* the net

It is being organized by a large proportion of the UK’s Internet policy wonk community…

Thanks to Tom Steinberg for the link and for helping to arrange the conference

10 April 2004

“Free Culture”:http://www.free-culture.cc/, “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/’s latest invaluable manifesto on the need to reform copyright which has been “taking the blogorati by storm”:http://allconsuming.net/item.cgi?isbn=1594200068 is available for free in “lots of digital formats”:http://www.free-culture.cc/remixes/ including “as audio”:http://akma.disseminary.org/archives/001253.html (which is how I intend to ‘read’ it).

Thanks to Tim Aldrich for the link

5 April 2004

I’d like to collect a selection of weblogging “manifestos” containing descriptions of what weblogging is supposed to be “for” and who webloggers are (not statistical surveys, but people’s views). I sense that there is a growing self-awareness from “a list” bloggers and an emergent notion of what weblogging is supposed to be about but I would like to trace its roots. Can any of my readers suggest a good way of collecting and analysing what has been said in a way that is ‘unbiased’?

I want to write about the documents I have found wearing my academic hat so I can’t just say ‘here are some interesting links that I found’ – I have to be able to claim that these are in some way representative – or preferably that these are the most influential. I tried typing ‘weblog manifesto’ into various weblogging search engines and didn’t get much back that was useful. Googling for ‘weblog manifesto’ found some interesting stuff (a “commercial blogging manifesto”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html and a “Draft Manifesto for the Role of Weblogs in the Larger Society”:http://www.thesentimentalist.com/archives/000076.html), but I sense that the links I found were not the most influential either. I didn’t find the paper on “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html that way for example – and I imagine it has been influential (or at least the views of its writers have been). I would be interested in the most important “old media” writers about weblogging as well. Any ideas?

30 March 2004

The New Republic has published a story “dictatorship.com”:http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040405&s=kurlantzick040504 pooh poohing the notion that access to the Internet in a nation can help to undermine dictatorships. Needless to say this was like a red rag to a bull for some of the more Internet-philic – “Jeff Jarvis”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_27.html#about calls the piece, “load of naysaying, stick-in-the-sludge, cynical, behind-the-times, underreported, snotty crap“.

Though Jeff is right to pour scorn on TNR’s occaisional recycling of un-researched prejudices like the assertion that the Internet “lends itself to individual rather than communal activities”, I have to say I think TNR’s article is on the whole a welcome corrective to the kind of utopian thinking often espoused by online pundits and the furious reaction to the piece only reinforces this view. That’s not to say that the Internet does not have a potential role in the growth of civil society – of course it can be helpful. But to say as Jeff Jarvis does that, “In the last century, Coke meant freedom. In this century, the Internet means freedom” is to indulge in knee jerk technological determinism that overlooks the vital importance of the social context of technology use.

Also see an “earlier blog entry”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_academia.html#000758 of mine on an excellent book on the Internet in authoritarian regimes cited in the TNR piece.

10 March 2004

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/02/27#a138 has produced an interesting paper on blogging as a political force in the Third World – commenting on the enthusiasm for Internet-mediated political debate expressed by Jim Moore in an essay “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html and by Joi Ito in “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html. I blogged about the latter essay “some months ago”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#000687.

He warns astutely:

“If that group [enthusiasts for ‘weblog democracy’] forgets that they’re outliers in terms of larger society and fails to include others in the shaping of these technologies, it’s unlikely that these tools will be useful to the wider world”.

He also suggests that bloggers can’t provide a critical alternative to the mainstream media when a region is not adequately covered:

“When journalists don’t cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar – they have no signal to reinforce. There aren’t enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what’s really going on.”

He suggests that Third World expats writing about their own nations from abroad and (though he doesn’t explicitly say this) First World expats writing about the countries they are visiting or trying to help could help fill the gap in coverage of third world issues and give the rest of the world a personal view.
He notes the weakness of this proposal:

these discussions are open only to people with the access to the Internet (which cuts out people in countries who censor, people in unsderserved rural areas, as well as people who don’t have money to spend time online); primarily open to people who speak and write English well; primarily open to people who can afford to spend time online engaging in these dialogues (cutting out many people whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of working in front of a CRT).

He highlights some interesting solutions to the problem of language and cultural barriers to mutual comprehension – “Blogalization”:http://www.blogalization.info/reorganization/, for example, encourages bloggers who can speak foreign languages to translate interesting posts and news items into other relevant languages (chiefly English) – acting as a volunteer news agency. “Living on the Planet”:http://www.livingontheplanet.com/about.html is similar (but only translates to English.
In the end, he acknowledges:

Generally speaking, though, in most developing nations, the Net is not the obvious place to look for political change. So few citizens are online, and those who are generally are atypically wealthy and powerful that the Internet is a poor way to reach the grassroots. Instead, it’s useful to think about what media are analogous to the Internet in developing nations. One likely parallel is talk radio.

He seems to suggest in his conclusion that the “solution” to ensuring that the third world can part lies with the toolmakers – a technical fix.

But a real solution, I suggest, would have to involve a lot of grassroots capacity building work to ensure that a broad range of people in these countries (not just the elites):

1) have access to the technology
2) have the time and literacy to engage with them and
3) are listened to by those with power in their countries.

Big (some might say impossible) preconditions but without them a Third World Blogosphere would be an elite echo chamber. I fear that if tech boosters succeed in persuading developing country governments to foster a burgeoning blogosphere in their countries it would just serve to further benefit the articulate middle classes and elites in those countries who already have influence.

26 February 2004

Edward Felten posted defending the way Google search results are delivered, suggesting the ‘votes of web authors’ is a fair way to determine website prominence in search. This touched off an interesting argument. As one poster pointed out, “think about how you will feel when a search on evolution brings up creationist sites explaining why evolution is wrong and evil. That’s a widespread view in the U.S., currently under-represented online but that may well change as the net penetrates more deeply into society.”

I was also struck by the comment by “Armature”:http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/ in which he points out, “One interesting side effect of Vivisimo’s clustering of search results is that Vivisimo’s less vulnerable to tyranny of the majority than Googlocracy.”

12 February 2004

The TrueMajority Oreo video is to my mind a very well-crafted political ad (done as a Flash animation). It shows dramatically just how much money goes towards US national defence and how much goes to – say – renewable energy programmes or food aid.

It gets around what I see as the biggest problem there is in trying to tackle macroeconomic issues seriously – nobody outside of a few policy wonks can juggle government programs costing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and keep them all in proportion.

“TrueMajority.org”:http://www.truemajority.org was founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s fame and is a broad-based liberal lobbying organization based around getting people to respond to monthly action alerts and send faxes to their political representatives by filling out web forms. I suspect fax deluges are getting to be a discredited tactic as they are relatively cost-free for the participants – I hope that truemajority will take the “Dean Road” instead and start getting these people to organize themselves.

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