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.

A recent blog survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability from Fernanda Viégas at the “MIT’s media lab”:http://web.media.mit.edu/. The results found were interesting but I found one of the asides in the report interesting as well, for a different reason. Ninety percent of those blogging in their (admittedly biased) sample have better than a high school education but the report begins by being critical of the notion that weblogging is “a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy”?

Sometime in the last couple of days without noticing it my “Endnote”:http://www.endnote.com/ database of book, journal and academic web page references broke through the 1,000 record mark. Record 1000 was probably one of the papers I recently downloaded from the site of “Dr Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm, one of my supervisors…

Note: I haven’t read all of the documents I have entries for – and some of them date back to my Masters…

“Giles Turnbull”:http://www.gorjuss.com/index.html asked readers of a mailing list he runs “why they gave up blogging”:http://www.gorjuss.com/luvly/20040317-blogless.html. The answers were interesting, particularly if you look at them from a Bourdieusian perspective. Reading between the lines, several of them started weblogging because it was ‘cool’ then gave up when it seemed like everyone else was doing it and it therefore became uncool. Or as one respondent said, “General sense of despair with: a) myself, b) the internet population in general.” I wonder whether the generally more snarky and amusing character of the comments he received were anything to do with his respondents being more likely to be British? Hmm…

Thanks to the ever-interesting Danah Boyd for the link

Over at the academic group weblog Crooked Timber, they are asking their readers why do you run a weblog? This just happens to be one of my own PhD research questions! I intend to look at a much broader field than simply academic blogging activity but I still find the answers interesting – particularly as I try to think how I might fit such responses into my own (Bourdieusian) theoretical framework.

By a bizarre coincidence a friend of mine posted “a very similar question”:http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/archives/002289.html at the same time. A “paper on the subject”:http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/nardi.pdf [PDF] has been submitted to Communications of the ACM.

What about you? Why do you have a blog or personal home page (if you do)? If you had one once and abandoned it was there something you were hoping would happen that didn’t? Please use the comment feature to answer – I would be interested to know.

I’m coming to this one a little late – Wired reports that according to HP researchers, the most popular weblogs aren’t necessarily the ones that come up with the interesting new ideas first:

topics would often appear on a few relatively unknown blogs days before they appeared on more popular sites.

and often bloggers fail to mention the sources of their ideas:

when an idea infected at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of the blogs did not provide links back to another blog that had previously mentioned the idea.

You can try out the software that they used to do the research – the “Blog Epidemic Analyzer”:http://www-idl.hpl.hp.com/blogstuff/index.html

If you want to read their (pre-print) paper about their results it’s “here”:http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/blogs/blogspace-draft.pdf and there’s a thread about their work on “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/05/152244.shtml though before you read it you should probably read the researcher’s own “comment”:http://www-idl.hpl.hp.com/blogstuff/faq.html#10 on that thread.

“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.

The “Pew Research Centre”:http://www.pewinternet.org/ has just released “Content Creation Online”:http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=113 which finds that, “44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world”.

I haven’t had the chance to dig into the detail yet but some of the activities they class as online content provision don’t match the kind of activity I am most interested in studying for my PhD. The people of most interest to me are the 13% with their own websites and the 2% with weblogs. I wouldn’t count the 20% who allow others to download music or video files from their computers as being content creators, nor would I count the 8% who have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses if they didn’t do it out of choice. But doubtless different people would slice the data different ways.

Given my reservations about their definition of content creation I am cautious about leaning too much on their results but I note that even with their rather liberal definition, online content provision tends to be done by a relatively priviledged sample of the US population – particularly in terms of education. For example, 6% of people who didn’t graduate high school contributed content online compared to 46% of those with a college degree or higher. I find it interesting that although there is a section on the demographics of content creation in the survey this stratification is not mentioned in the “summary of findings”:http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/reports.asp?Report=113&Section=ReportLevel1&Field=Level1ID&ID=484.

I look forward to getting my hands on the raw data (Pew “makes its data sets available”:http://www.pewinternet.org/datasets/index.asp six months or so after they have been collected).

Check out the “Dead Thesis Society”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html which runs a “Yahoo Groups email list”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deadthesissociety/ for peer support and also has an excellent “resource library”:http://freewebhosting.hostdepartment.com/d/deadthesissociety/resources.html (displacement activity?). I checked out some of the humour sections – “how to tell you are a grad student”:http://www.cs.umbc.edu/www/graduate/how-to-tell.html is quite good, and I always liked the earlier, funny Matt Groening but I didn’t realise (or forgot) that he “wrote about grad school”:http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~dmirman/gradschoolhell/schoolishell.html. This one – “Why God Never Got Tenure”:http://www.stanford.edu/~smarti/Fun/godtenure.html particularly tickled me.

Thanks to Marcelo Vieta for the link

A 23-year-old Oxford student with no knowledge of economics bluffed his way into a trip to China to teach a course on the subject at Beijing University to business leaders. He thought he was just going to be delivering a single lecture to school students so he figured he could get away with it. He was probably offered the work because he shares the same name as a New York University professor. See BBC News and “The Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/20/nchina20.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/20/ixhome.html (requires registration) for more complete details – they broke the story originally.

(Note for non-Brits – the textbook he used to produce his lectures – “An Introduction to Global Financial Markets”:http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0312233477 – is aimed at advanced high school students).