 I want to pick up on the thread that was the last one left open by the short exchange between Professor Fischer and Professor Zitrin about the history and present and future of our republic. The next session is about whether the use of internet technologies will in fact have a salutary effect on politics and democracy, or one that's not so good. And this, as those who have participated in the space who have been studying these matters know is a hotly contested topic in the academic field. Is the internet good for democracy or not? And how does that play out? How does that play out in different parts of the world? How does that play out at different parts of our own republic? And what do we mean by democracy? All of those things are very much up for grabs. And it's one of the central focuses of the Berkman Center past, present, and certainly future. We want to engage you in this conversation. And one other note just as to mode, rather than being one great lecture followed by some discussion, this is going to be much more in the distributed mode. We're trying multiple modes through this conference. So the microphone will be early and often passed around. There are a few people I admit I have planted in the audience who may say some specific things, but jump in at any point as we go along and explore this exchange. One thing I want to commend to you that also picks up the thread that we ended with last time is a new project we have at the Berkman Center that has started for the Berkman at 10 celebration. We've asked a group of internet experts, luminaries, and people who don't actually spend a lot of time on the internet to write some essays for this conference. And we've started to publish them online. It's called the Publius Project. It's at publius.cc, which you can pull up on your computer. And the idea was basically to say, at the time of the American founding, there were a group of relatively small number of white men in a single space who were trying to figure out how we should govern the new republic that we had created for ourselves. And we wanted to do, roughly speaking, the same thing, but in a different way for this space. We're not all federalists, nor are we all anti-federalists, nor is that exactly the right mode. Nor is it about a few white men in a single room in a single moment. But rather, our idea is that the decisions about governance on the internet are rolling all around us, that it's not a single constitutional moment, but a rolling constitutional moment, and that the decisions are made by people in lots of different venues in lots of different parts of the world. So these essays started with one by David Weinberger on tacit governance, to which David Johnson and others respond. Esther Dyson is in the mix. We've got one just up here from Wendy Seltzer. It's our own attempt, and we encourage others to write forward and to participate in having a similar conversation that the federalist authors did back then, but in a way that reflects the real challenges in the future of the net as well. So we encourage you to explore these essays, to respond to them, to submit to them, and continue the conversation in that venue as we go ahead. Much of our work in this particular area is animated by the framing effect of Yokai Banker's book, The Wealth of Networks. In that book, Yokai, as everyone who has read it knows, has asked a series of questions of whether or not in a networked public sphere democracy is in fact being enhanced in various ways, or is the pushback from states and others leading us in the other direction, and that's the central topic that we have here today. So one example that is from our recent experience is the protests of a group of monks in Burma, in Myanmar, if you're the military. These are images that were presumably possible in any era, images of monks protesting in the streets in a country that is not particularly wired up to the internet. But one thing that happened that set it apart in some respects is that the images that were within that country, not just still images, but also videos were captured by people who were on the network in some fashion, whether they were using cell phones, or they were using cameras, or they were using Facebook, or using blogs, and brought out into a broader sphere. One of the more interesting things that happened to us in the past year is the extent to which the phones rang at the Berkman Center from reporters, eager to know how to get in touch with people in Burma. And why were people calling the Berkman Center to get to people in Burma? It was because a group of people at the Berkman Center, Ethan Zacherman, Rebecca McKinnon, and others had formed something called Global Voices, which we'll call on Ethan shortly to describe to us. But it was because of that project that people thought that we could get to people on the ground in Burma, where the internet had been shut off by the military regime. But somehow images were getting out, whether it was still images or videos, and getting out to the world beyond. And the net effect is that people all around the world not only had these images and knew what was going on in a way that might be different, but started back in real space to rally. This is Trafalgar Square in London, where powered by these images and the knowledge of what was going on, and by these internet-inspired protests came out and made a stink in public about what was going on. So one question is whether or not this is the whole story. Is it the fact that everyone at Pamphletier, everyone able to take these images, share them in these network public spaces results then in greater rallies around the world? Or is that an incomplete story? So that's roughly where we wanted to go. So Ethan, I'm coming to you in a moment, but here's one of the arguments that we've heard and that we test all the time here at the Berkman Center, which is the internet allows more speech from more people than ever before. The notion being that people can have more effect on the narrative of their times. Last night we heard at the IOP from West Hill and Jesse Dill and about the Yes We Can video that they created and many responses from it. This was something that is distinctly internet in a way. People who took the speech of a single candidate for public office and turned it into something that at first a few hundred people watched and then a few thousand people watched and then many millions of people watched and in a way that really was distinctive and different here in our republic. The example in the global sphere that I think makes this case better than anything else is the work of the distributed community of global voices. So Ethan, coming over to you from the audience, would you mind telling us the story of global voices and how it fits into the trajectory we're talking about here? Whether or not internet is likely to have a positive or negative or different effect on democracy going forward? Well, thanks JP and thanks for opening this up. Let me just take the opportunity to explain that I'm keeping my eyes closed for most of this conference not because I don't wanna see your beautiful people but it's really the only way that I'm able to be here at the moment post-surgery. Global voices is something that literally came about at the Berkman Center in late 2004 sort of reacting to some of the really powerful forces that we've been talking about really for this last 10 year period. And sort of going back into Jay-Z's talk, we've seen the very generativity of the net, the fact that it's become so easy for people to create content. And with that I'd like to explicitly shout out to Dave Weiner who's work on web logging and RSS and sort of promoting that medium, lowered the barrier to entry for so many people around the world. Rebecca McKinnon and I in late 2004 were discovering that not only were you seeing voices of people from the developed world, technology people, students, so on and so forth using these tools but you were seeing people in the developing world, you were seeing people literally all over the world finding a way to speak online. And now that number is somewhere probably north of 100 million people creating some sort of content online outside of North America, Western Europe. So one of the questions is how do you pay attention to this stuff? And we had the opportunity at Berkman in late 2004 to bring a bunch of pioneers in this field together in a room. And it was a really interesting and sort of odd group. It ranged from people who were doing activism in China. It included military bloggers who were writing from Iraq. It included people, one gentleman who was writing in Polish from Hungary, a wide range of people who were trying to use this new medium as a way of saying here's what's going on in my world, I want to share it with people in a different part of the world. And what Global Voices has tried to do is organize those voices together, put them in a central place and make it possible for a story like the Burmese monks to get a lot more attention than it otherwise would have gotten. What's basically happened with this generative shift that Jonathan Zittrain is talking about is that we've gone from international news being a supply problem to a demand problem. You've now got tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people around the world talking about what's going on in their own communities. And the real issue is, first of all, how do you find these people? How do you understand these people? Who's gonna translate it for you? Who's gonna contextualize it for you? But to a certain extent, do you choose to pay attention to it? How does it fit within the rest of the fabric of what you're doing? And so that's really what we've been trying to do over the last several years with a network of people in 70 different countries trying to figure out how we take advantage of this moment in time where people are using the net to communicate about what's going on in their communities and try to figure out how to make that relevant to a global audience and find a way for them to connect to it. So Ethan, two follow-ups to that. In the School of Full Disclosure back in 2003 and 2004 when Dave Weiner was here as the Pied Piper of blogging, you were something of a skeptic off the bat, right, about this blogging thing. So I'd love to know how and why your tune has changed. Well, let me say that the first blog post I ever put up was titled Guilted by Google. And it was essentially complaining about the fact that this web-logging system that Weiner and others were promoting was so good at generating Google juice that my one lame-ass post on my blog was the highest hit for me. And had I been any smarter, I would have realized how powerful that medium was rather than essentially pushing back against it. But I think everyone who ends up adopting a new system, whether it's Second Life or Twitter or so on and so forth, I think healthy skepticism and pushback until the system proves itself is a really worthwhile thing to do. For me, the moment at which I understood what blogging could do was solemn pox. And this was a young Iraqi architect who was writing from Baghdad as US forces prepared to move in. And so suddenly we had a voice in English giving a profoundly different view of events than most people were getting from American mainstream media at that point. And so for me, that was sort of a realization that this medium was really something different and special and that it wasn't just gonna be about people talking about the programming projects they were working on. It could literally be a tool for international understanding and it could give someone who you would literally never hear from otherwise a voice to an international audience. So looking forward, Ethan, on your crankiest days, heard you be not that sanguine about the future that we have on the net and in democracies more broadly than that. The first assertion here is that one of the things the net makes possible is more people able to tell more stories in more ways that are heard by more people basically for free on these things like blogs and global voices. Is that the punchline of the story or do you think it should be told a different way? Well, given my reputation for crankiness, I have to push back, right? So let me say there's two things that I would push on. The first one is that as you see people using these tools to generate content, you also see governments and also sometimes corporations, other entities, sometimes universities alas, pushing back and trying to cut down access to the tools. And certainly this is something we've seen with OpenNet Initiative. It's something we see with filtering around the world. As people realize just how potent these tools are, there's a temptation to find a way to shut them down. In Ethiopia, there's not a lot of political debate in the mainstream media and there's been a tremendous amount of debate within blogs. When the Zinawi government realized that they couldn't control that debate, they simply shut down access to blogger.com. And it's essentially nip that community in the bud. That community doesn't exist except outside of Ethiopia nowadays. So censorship is remarkably effective. Even if we can find ways around it, it's remarkably effective. That's not really what I'm worried about. What I'm really worried about is much more on this demand side. We are able with global voices to give people insight into a lot of situations around the world that are worth watching closely. One of the things that we found in the last three years of running the project is that people pay attention when mainstream media tells them to pay attention. The reason that you had all those people calling to talk to us about Burma was that Burma had already made headline news. What's interesting to me at least is that we don't seem to have found the way to shape the news agenda from citizen media yet. And obviously, there's exceptions to this. You can find counters to this. But in the international space where we're working, stories that we've been pushing, like food riots in Egypt, we've not been able to get people especially excited about. So one place where there's been a fair amount of headlines and excitement is Iran. I'm gonna move the mic away from you, Ethan, my body language is saying it, but it's hard to know that. And we've got up on the screen a map of the Farsi blogosphere. I'm gonna go in a moment to John Kelly, our friend from Morningside Analytics and a partner of ours on the Internet and Democracy Project. One place that this story has been told over and over again by virtue of anecdote is that the Iranian blogosphere, the Farsi language blogosphere is the, who goes fourth largest blogosphere in the world. It's got hundreds of thousands of people blogging. It's changing the dynamics of politics in Iran. And one of the things that we're seeking to do in this conference is, first of all, to ask what the state of the net and the state of these questions are, but of course looking to the future. And we've been working with John Kelly and Bruce Settling of our Internet and Democracy Project commissioned this map here to say hello, Rebecca Nesson. What a great thing. A new generation of the Berkman Center has just walked into the room. So John Kelly, can you explain to us the map that we're seeing up here? It's very pretty, lots of colors and so forth. But does it shed light on this question of whether or not more people are telling more stories and more ways through the blogosphere? And whether that's actually an empowering thing from a political perspective. What is it that you learned by doing this analysis? Well, first let me just describe the map. So this is a social network map of the Farsi language or Persian language blogosphere. Oh, and it's gone to screensaver. Uh-huh. It's top secret. They don't want you to see it. So in this map, every dot represents a blog and the size of the dot is the number of other bloggers that are linking to that blog. So kind of a measure of how prominent or A-list it is, if you will. And then the position is a function of looking at the interlinking relationships among blogs. So imagine there's a general force like a wind trying to blow all the dots off the map. But there's a specific force like a spring or a force of gravity that's pulling together any two blogs that are linked to each other by having linked in the blog role or, and so what happens is you get these network neighborhoods that curdle up around communities of bloggers that are densely interlinked. Now this linking happens, you can think of that gravity if you will, between interlinked blogs as kind of an attentive gravity. These are people that are paying attention to one another and so they end up in the same network neighborhood. The color is a different analysis. With the color, we look at what these bloggers link to over a long period of time. So in this case, a year. And we look at everything they link to in their posts. And a lot of that is not blogs. Most of it is news, NGOs, online petitions, things like that. And then we cluster those bloggers by these linking histories. So the color represents what they're looking at in common that they're attentive to the same streams of information. And then we went and had a team of Persian language speaking bloggers go and read hundreds of blogs and tell us what was going on so we could interpret this network. So the network formation represents things that are, the fMRI of the social mind, if you will. It's what are the groups in society? How are they formed? What are they interested in? So in the Iranian blogosphere, we found a big group around poetry, which was unusual. A group around mixed networks, which is popular culture and minority cultures and things like that. And then we found also in that lower left hand quadrant what everyone in the press talks about as the Persian blogosphere. So the young Democrats that oppose the regime, the secularists, et cetera. And that's normally thought of as the Persian language blogosphere. And in this analysis we can see that it's only one quadrant among many. And on the lower right we have three distinct subgroups of conservative, very religious bloggers. So challenging the common wisdom, what we end up seeing is that you've got a very wide range of points of view and things that are bringing people together in the Persian language blogosphere. And politics is salient. Both politics in the cultural sense of secularism versus religious ideas about politics, but very specifically in the red bloggers and those green bloggers that are attentive to the hard matters of politics. We think therefore that in these shapes, which every language that we're studying, this is just the first of a number that we're looking at, you will find these structures around politics that demonstrate how this online network public sphere is forming. And you see a much greater diversity of opinion than you would otherwise know about. So the diversity of opinion, the strength of discourse and argument among the religious conservatives is as vibrant as it is among the secular expatriate folks. So what you see is a picture of a population speaking about politics and other things online that is incredibly vibrant and much richer than the cartoon visions that we're presented with in normal political discourse. So this is just too good a map not to let people ask questions about. It's lovely data. So let's pause for a moment. I'm a Dina Jot. I remember being Dina Jot in the book. You see that kind of pinkish dot towards the lower end? It's even better than a laser pointer, right? Yeah, that's it. There we go. That's how I'm a Dina Jot. And that's Katami, the former president. And what does that tell you that the former president and the current president are there and there? Is it just nice little dots with pretty colors? It tells you who's paying attention to them. It tells you which groups of bloggers are linking to them more frequently. There's kind of an emergent dimension of political organization there. So you can read the politics of someone in what part of the network pays attention to them. In fact, you probably find out more about them from their network position in a sense than they reveal about themselves and their own behavior. Because bloggers can link idiosyncratically. They can link to things that they personally find interesting. But if you wanna analyze them, it's much more telling to see who links to them. Because individual bloggers can be idiosyncratic, but the network, the collective intelligence that this represents is very good at categorizing people and giving you information about them. Excellent, so just pause. Yes, please. And we'll bring a mic over if that'd be okay. And please do identify yourself. But it'd be great to have a mic for posterity because we're recording, I'm sorry. Thank you. Ellen Hume, Center for Future Civic Media, MIT. John, have you managed to do a map like this of the voters in the Democratic Party in the United States for 2008? So, well, most of my work has actually been on American politics and the American political blogosphere. So, there's a lot to say there. It's actually most of what I study. That's about half of it and the other half is this global study where we literally are mapping the entire global blogosphere. And we've got teams already coding Arabic. They're starting on Russian as soon as next week. We're doing Hungarian and a whole bunch of other languages. Do you wanna give us a headline or two from your American study just since Ellen has brought it up? Well, the headline from the American studies is that American politics organizes is the largest structural feature of the entire English language blogosphere. So, the largest clusters in all of English blogs are around American politics, liberal and conservative. You have two, I wish I could show you this map. It's actually a really cool map. But you have these two very big clusters around conservatives and liberals. And they're made up of distinct subgroups. So, what we do with this type of analysis we can drill down into those groups and see what kinds of liberal bloggers, what kinds of conservative bloggers. You can find the ones that care more about foreign policy. You can find the ones that are more worried about the influence of Islam or a possible culture war. You can find the ones that are more interested in feminist issues, et cetera. So, we do a very good job of actually parsing out the blogosphere into these subgroups. A very interesting thing, if I may for a moment, considering where we are, is that there are a couple of very interesting groups that straddle the divide between liberal and conservative. These are more communities of practice or knowledge and the biggest ones are on law. Excellent. So, one of the features, not bugs, of this conference is that tomorrow is really quite unscripted. There are the map that you see in your program offers the ability to create sessions tomorrow that anybody can propose and then self-organize and fill in. So, Ellen, if you wanted to encourage John Kelly to show some Morningside Analytics good stuff on the American blogosphere, I suspect that he might go along with this, but I leave this to the self-organization of the net community. Great. Any one other question for John about the map? Yes, please. And do you mind if we just pause to bring you the mic? That'd be great. Renee Lloyd is on her way over. Sorry, this is stilted, but there are other people who might enjoy your comments. I'll make it quick. George O'Connor, Chai Media. What's the yellow dot up on the top, right? That's a great question. So, keep in mind that there are two different analyses here. The color represents looking at everything they link to over time. Blogs and non-blogs alike, most of it non-blogs. And the position represents what other bloggers link to them. So, the yellow dot in the upper right is somebody who is in that community of bloggers, but who what they pay attention to, what they link to in their posts is more like what one of these folks in this secular expatriate area links. So, would it have a disproportionate influence if you draw this as an influence map with mixed media so you get broader distribution? Well, the way that I like to look at influence in this environment is to look at degrees of separation and reading patterns. So, one thing you're able to do that's, that's a very interesting thing can of worms to open because what you can do is look at the chains of links to figure out what any individual bloggers, footprint or shadow is, what informational world, what part of the network are they informing? So, we already pointed out Katami, for instance, on the left of those kind of three big dots and Amidinajad on the right, they are more closer to one side or the other. They are going to get a lot, they're gonna light up the people paying attention to them more one cluster than another. That big red dot in the middle is a really interesting case. That's a blogger who is, he was one of the leaders of the conservative right wing groups that would go and beat students that were demonstrating. So, he's, has a long history as kind of a super right wing Islamist guy, but he's turned into a documentary filmmaker and he's gone out and made these documentary films about, for instance, prostitution, drug abuse on the streets of Tehran. Things that the government really doesn't want anyone to know. So, you've got a historical right winger doing serious criticism of the government, but from and still nonetheless committed Islamist point of view. One of the most interesting things going on there is that the conservative bloggers do not all support Amidinajad. There's intense criticism of the government from totally committed religious conservatives. But if you look at where he is, his informational footprint is much bigger and even though he's a right winger because of what he puts out there, because of what his content is, he actually lights up most of the map if you go to one or two degrees of separation. So, we're gonna do one further question from Dr. Nash back there and then I will push ahead a little in the story. Renee, I'll bring you the mic. Sorry for the pause in the programming here. Thanks, John. Sorry, I know you wanted to move on. I thought maybe I could just bring the discussion of John's work back to the discussion you were having with Ethan. Yes, please. About the impact of the internet on democracy. And I just wonder what John would say about Cass Sunstein's hypothesis here. Namely that although we have more voices reaching more people on the internet, maybe all we actually get is more people reading information about things they already like and already know. So John, what do you think this says about Cass Sunstein's hypothesis? Well, it's funny because I actually started out my graduate work at Columbia and going after Cass's theory but looking at chatroom discussions. And you find there that people actually engage the enemy, they don't go into silos. But in the blogosphere, yeah, it looks like they go into silos. However, I think the thing to realize is that these networks are complicated and they are densely interlinked. If you look at that, it is nonetheless a densely interconnected network. Even though there are these clusters, they're still knit together. They're conservatives linked to the liberals and liberals linked to the conservatives with great frequency. Simply not as much as they link to each other. I actually prefer Yochai Binkler's way of thinking about this that what you have is a kind of vast collaborative system or lens, a kind of social cognition where you have committed sub-networks. Parts of this graph are formed around people that care intensely about one thing. It might be a social issue. It might be a certain point of view. They're going to ruminate about that. Some component of what they find most interesting is going to get picked up by other parts in the network. So you've got this kind of giant collaborative filtration process that floats things up to the top. So it's a different way of forming something like a public agenda that's not what editor do you know and can you lean on them. It's this sort of collaborative kind of, much more in the spirit of Jay-Z's work, bottom up way of forming structure and bringing things to the attention of the central players, but through this big collaborative network. So very helpful. Victoria and Ash, as always, thank you for that. This was one of the two or three main pushbacks on the story that says what the internet is about in politics is the ability of more people to tell more stories in more places. One of the pushbacks to that is Cass Sunstein's argument. Republic 2.0, the book, The Daily Me, one of the arguments that we just listened to one another, to whom we would otherwise listen. In fact, maybe it's worse than that, that using RSS feeds these wonderful abilities to tailor news environments to ourselves. We just listened to those voices who reinforce our own views. So it's one of the things we're seeking to do with empirical data such as this is, can we tell where on that spectrum we should be as we move ahead and are there ways to architect the technologies that direct us in one way or another. A second argument though that in fact suggests that maybe it's not quite as rosy as we thought it was previewed by Ethan, a moment ago, which is that just as more people are able to have more ability to tell, the story states have further ability to restrict the things that are said, the things that are heard within each state, and then to place ways to surveil the network, ways to listen in on these conversations, making it not just a better thing for activists in the way that Yochai Venkler's work makes clear or the map we just saw, but also that there are dangers to participating this way. Is there anyone who works on the open net initiative here? Is there any of our partners? Got some wonderful partners from around the world. The open net initiative as Jonathan mentioned earlier is a second set of data that we're developing which is a collaborative for university study with Toronto, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Harvard Law School to show empirically where blockages occur in the network, where states are blocking through technical means what people can say and what people can hear. So Dr. Ferris, I'd love to put you on the spot a little bit. We have up here a map of the most recent set of studies that we've come up with showing where in the world we see internet filtering. For those who've seen this map, many times it's online, opennet.net. This one shows when political speech is blocked. So you see at the top left, there's political, social, conflict security and internet tools. This shows that in at least three regions of the world, in the Middle East, North Africa, and certainly Iran is lit up there, in the central Asia and CIS region, and then in East Asia with the 800 pound gorilla being China, we see restriction of political speech. Another way to look at it, here are the places in the world in the last study where states are blocking some kind of speech in this diagram, those which are blocking all of the types of speech we've tested are squarely in the middle, and those that just block political speech, for instance, in different parts of the diagram. But Rob Ferris, you've been studying as the research director of the Berkman Center and leader of this empirical study over several years, this question of the pushback. It's not just the go, go, go side of global voices and more voices in Iran and so forth, but it's also a crackdown at the same time by states. What should we take away from this and click another slide in a moment to show what happened when we put these two data sets together? I guess thinking in terms of... Is that on, actually? Maybe flip on the bottom there? It says on, maybe it can be brought up in the back. Number four, do you guys have me? Okay, I'm on now. That's good. Thinking in terms of the blogosphere that John showed, this presents a dilemma for countries around the world, dilemma in an authoritarian context has been called the dictator's dilemma. Do we let this conversation go? Do we let it run out in order to take advantage of the generativity, innovation, and the potential economic benefits associated with it? Or do we close it down and remain as the daily us as in you're gonna listen to us and what we have to say every day and not take advantage of the other things? And the answer to this, of course, lies in the middle for many states. And here's a sample, 25 states that we tested and found filtering in. The number is higher and keeps growing. There's over 36 countries there. And I think a take-home message from here is it's a struggle for these countries. There's an intense political impetus. It's very, very tempting to seek to block content on the internet. But technically, it's a very imperfect way to go about things, how you target things, how you select things is just next to impossible. You're gonna be able to do it but with a lot of errors in the process. And the legal side is, of course, very, very problematic. So when we said about taking the work we've done in internet democracy to show the Farsi blogosphere and how it's emerging and to overlay it with internet filtering data, what did you expect to see? Did you expect to see the government sensors against the backdrop of what we've known them to be able to do would be very good at blocking the things they didn't want people to hear? Or did you expect them to be letting a lot through the internet as it's been set up today? Speaking in colors, I expected to see the yellow and the green on the map disappear. And what were the yellow and the green? That's the secular and reformist and the expatriate blogs. And based upon our kind of accumulated knowledge our understanding of this is that these blogs were heavily blocked and that they would disappear and that the rest would be left alone. Okay, so maybe could you describe this? I'm gonna bring the lights down again. So say what we did and what this tells us. What we did is we tested all the blogs that John Kelly so beautifully mapped out and asked the question, which of these are blocked and which are not. And not surprisingly found a lot of that yellow and green is blocked. I think the few things that are somewhat surprising is not more of it's blocked. And as I think about it more it makes sense. And also that things outside of that range were blocked well, I mean a lot of these are blogs that are saying things such as life was better when the Shah was in power or perhaps wouldn't it be better if our religious leaders didn't have as much political power as they do and that's understandable. But they're also blocking feminist blogs and they're blocking some of the poetry blogs that are a bit too romantic or even delve into the erotic. One of the things that John and Bruce and the study team have done is gone back and looked at the individual blogs and asked the question, why is this blocked? And some of the most interesting, more nuanced stories are coming out of that. I think one of my favorite anecdotes is the blocking of the cleric who is espousing the virtues of temporary marriages and that is not gonna pass muster either. They got them blocked. So let me just flip also to this slide. So the last one here is what was blocked of the blogs in Iran. And this is the slide of what gets through the government's filter. So which slide should we be looking at Bob? Where is the, what's the slope of the freedom curve as Charlie Nesson would put it? Well, you have to look at both of them. One of them is the things that, I guess I see a push and a pull in filtering that I didn't appreciate before this work. I think that the government censors, if not restrained, will censor whatever they want and as much as they want. And the person whose job it is to add to the list wants to make sure that when called into the office and saying, why is this not blocked, that they have a good answer for it. But we also, in this, we see that it's painful to block things and they're not blocking perhaps as much as we want to. And that every time you block a site or a blog, it comes at a cost of legitimacy for the government. And this is kind of, for me, as a legitimacy and pushback test here, which I think is substantial in Iran. Let me pause again with pretty pictures on the screen. There may be questions about the data and what it means. We've got one in the back. And please do tell us who you are. Phil Han Baker. When we were building the web in CERN, we were certainly talking about censorship and how to stop it. But if you look at the real dynamic of how political movements that are working in these countries, okay, so they may be using the web, but why is it for us in the West in an uncensored environment? If it's not on the net, it doesn't exist. In those environments, Cuba, Iran, the biggest issue for them is USB memory sticks. That's how the web gets around. And once you have that SAMISDAT moving around outside the control of the net, it's off the net, you've got the private circles that are circulating yet. That's the real danger. If I was a Cuban dictator, that's what I'd be afraid of, the fact that Alice and Bob and Carol are sharing that information and meeting and discussing it, and the fact that it is censored gives it legitimacy. If you can see the same effect in the Western blogs, I mean, like, if something is said on Fox News, there's a certain part of the liberal media that will then, sorry, the liberal broadsphere then it immediately assumes that it's untrue. So Philip, if you were trying to tell this story, the trajectory of where we're going, would you simply make the point that censorship can be routed around by technical means? And frankly, that's things that are not at all on the net. The use of flash drive, for instance, in these environments will prevail. Are you sanguine about our prospects in this way? Well, actually, as an engineer, I'd say let's design technologies to make it easier to route around. I'm like, one of the things I would like to see is, I've been talking to the tour folk, that's great, but if you really want to cause the Cuban dictators' problems, let's have a flash drive version of tour. I want you to move your data, go into an internet cafe, download exactly what you want and be out of there in 10 minutes, and have it all encrypted on the drive-in. So. Is anyone in the room designing a flash drive version of tour? Could well be, yeah? Yes, all right, we have a flash drive version of tour, right here, let's have it. Renee, please. I learned, in fact, about some of the flash drive democracy from this gentleman right here. Tell us about Cuba. I'm actually not a software expert, so I don't work with it. But tell us who you are, if you would. My name is Joshua Kaufman, and I'm one half of regional, and we've actually recently spent two months in Cuba looking at emerging technologies and specifically alternatives to the internet as a means for social organization. And so we've actually designed a flash drive. The first aspect of a flash drive that we've designed is a better way of copying, because copying a flash drive usually necessitates the ownership of a computer. So we've designed a device that allows for flash drive copying in public spaces, such as taxi cabs or public parks. And the second dimension of flash drive is that it usually needs a computer to actually display the information. And so we've used a lowly and ubiquitous television to display that information through RCA jacks, which is about 90% available on most televisions in Cuba. And so we're actually now working with foreign embassies and other partners in Cuba to distribute it. The timing may not be right, because they're just now proliferating the computer and the mobile phone, but the same technology would be potentially very helpful elsewhere. So we're actually, if anybody in the room has expertise developing either the software or the encryption on that, I'd love to talk to you after if anybody has any questions. So are we setting the wrong thing here by looking at what's blocked on the web if you've got this sneaker net version of a flash drive flash mob going on? I think that what really enlightens the point that you're asking about is Ethan Zuckerman's talk at E-Tech early March was about largely how different resources of national governments provide for different techniques for censorship. So China, for example, with many resources and a lot at stake in terms of losing their stability and what losing stability historically has done to civil strife within China, can censor on the keyword or the URL, whereas in Cuba, the censorship actually happens through blocking access to the actual internet. So I think that what you don't see on this map is the censorship that happens through poverty, through lack of technology, through other sorts of exclusion, children, women, handicapped people. You're not looking at access, you're looking at the hyperlinking predominantly. So within Cuba, what we were looking at was a situation where essentially censorship is done through lack of access. You're essentially a crony or somebody largely sponsored by the government if you have access in Cuba. And so how do you then design a distributed and decentralized system for sharing information to act contrapuntally and as an alternative to the internet as we have it where we live? So this is one of the great fun parts of studying the internet and one of the great frustrations, right? Which is over five or six years, we've now figured out how to get empirical data about whether an HTTP get request is in fact blocked by states that want to do it. And then all of a sudden, mobile becomes this big deal, right? Or flash drives become the big deal. And we've just caught up to this story and now we've gotta go on to another one. So hopefully through this conference, you will help us do it. Esther Dyson. Yeah, I just wanna add one point to this. The noted Russian politician once said, the question is not freedom of speech, the question is freedom after speech. That's true, that's true. The point of that is in many cases, the government doesn't need to censor it. You mentioned social censoring. There's also, I can post something about Putin and they don't really care because someone else will disagree with me. If I post something about the local police chief, the next day some policemen will come and remind me that I've broken some law. So again, it's the social environment around it that makes a lot of the censorship unnecessary if you're living in a tightly controlled enough community. Absolutely. So Esther, you've been telling us about the future of the internet for years and years and years. What should we be looking at as scholars of this most broadly and where are the key interventions as we go ahead if we want, in fact, internet to have a positive impact on democracies? We need to fix the people. Uh-huh, uh-huh, which people should we fix? It's, the internet is simply a tool and so it will help democracy if people want to strengthen democracy. It will help the authorities if the authorities want to increase their power which is so tautological it's not worth saying. The one thing people need most of all is role models of courage so that they're not scared to get online and say things. And the other is this whole virality which is now turned into completely an economic business thing. There's also a virality of protest. People who alone grumble quietly into their soup together can start a revolution. All right. Which is why they're so scared of censorship. Absolutely, just two down from you and please tell us who you are. Yes, my name is Catherine Antoine. I work for Radio Free Asia and I'm very pleased to have just heard these comments because I was kind of getting fidgety in my seat even since the earlier presentation. We cannot rely on people doing the right thing to fix the troubles of the internet. There is now more internet users in China that there is in the United States. And these people think it's okay to have censorship on the internet. They think it's okay for the government to control the internet. They think it's a good thing. And your domain is blocked in Vietnam as well? We are blocked everywhere in Burma, in China, Vietnam, North Korea, everywhere. North Korea, they don't even have access but if they wanted they couldn't. We inform our users with putting tor on a flash drive and we send them proxy addresses. But the technology is not the problem. The people are the problem and the manipulation of information by dictatorship is the problem. And yes, maybe if we give people the information they will know how to push their government to do the right thing from our point of view. I'm not so sure. We're not going this way right now. Great. Well, let's talk about people then. There's a second argument that is made in this scholarly debate is that one thing the internet does is give greater autonomy to the individual. This isn't exactly responsive to ESSERS just fix the people because the people who we may need to fix may be the ones you don't want to give greater autonomy to exactly. But this is a theory number two, worth testing. So Ethan, I'm coming back your way. We've put on the screen a picture of Jeff Ui, friend of yours and a friend of all of ours. Does the story of Jeff Ui give you any insight into whether or not individuals have greater autonomy in the network public sphere or not? Well, let me first figure out, oh, good, it is live. So Jeff Ui is someone that I also met at Harvard. And this goes back to the conference that I was referring to when John called on me earlier, where we brought together some astounding figures here at the Berkman Center and at the Law School as a whole. And Jeff had sort of emerged in late 2004 as one of the most prominent bloggers in Malaysia. He's a photojournalist. He's sort of a local activist. And he'd really emerged as a powerful figure in local politics, sort of documenting what was going on in community politics and getting a great deal of readership from it. I got to figure out just how deep Jeff's story went when I introduced myself to him for the first time. We were actually both washing our hands in the men's room. I said, Jeff, you don't know this about me, but I was one of the founders of Tripod. And this man who'd never met me before threw his arms around me. And the reason for this is that the small web hosting company that I helped run from 94 to 99 ended up being the nexus for Malaysian opposition politics. When Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was thrown out of power, thrown into jail on blatantly falsified sodomy charges, the only space that the Malaysian opposition could find to express themselves was an online space. And so on our little web hosting site, we found ourselves hosting Ui and hundreds of others who were essentially building the Malaysian opposition party online. So this is someone who's been in this game of sort of finding ways to carve out political speech online literally since 1995. Now, it's cost him at different times. And Jeff has found himself dealing with maybe the other sharp side of the sword. At one point, Jeff found himself in very serious legal trouble because someone had used the comment thread on his blog to defame Islam. And he was charged by the Malaysian government with defaming Islam because he permitted this comment to be posted. Now, truth was, Jeff got rid of it almost immediately condemned it, but interacting in this space has its risk, particularly in a government that has serious restrictions on speech. The interesting upside of all of this is that Jeff was recently made a parliamentarian. And the reason he was able to get elected was almost solely due to the fact that he has this incredible reputation as an online muckraker and that that reputation has turned into sufficient political reputation to allow him to become part of the Malaysian government. So here's someone in an environment which is quite restrictive to speech where someone, by taking a great deal of risk and speaking online, has managed to take a position of substantial political power because of his bravery in using the medium. So Ethan, is this responsive to Esther's comment after all? If the point is, change the people, what if you change the people in power? What if Jeff Ui, becoming one of five bloggers in parliament, then changes the dynamic in parliament? Maybe you look to what's happened in Kenya, our friend Ori Akola and others, using the net to put more transparency on what's happening in that parliament for the first time ever. Is this the way to do it, which is go to the halls of power and make them more responsive, either by getting Jeff Ui's elected or more transparency in the process? Well, the most important thing Esther said is change the people. And this is the thing that we tend to forget about the internet. We tend to assume that it's about routers, or it's about protocols, or it's about PCs. I refer to this as the Soylent Green theory of the internet. The internet is people. That's all it is. It's people linked together in one fashion or another. And so as people find ways to exert power in this new networked fashion, we're going to find people who can navigate a new space. Jeff is someone who first of all figured out how to navigate this new space of network power and then was able to leverage that power into real world political power. We're going to see that happen more and more over time. Whether or not that means that you're going to see an Obama election, whether you can blame that on net roots, or whether anything is quite that obvious of points from A to B, people are learning how to interact in this new world network organizing. And as they find ways of taking political power, they're going to start changing the political structures that are in place. The internet over time is going to slowly force a certain amount of evolution to political structures, or at least to political structures that don't actively fight that change. So is Beth Kolko out there somewhere? Where is Beth? She's over here. Beth Kolko, fellow of the Berkman Center and a professor in her own right out on the West Coast. Beth, a lot of your work is focused on what individuals do with information. Do you buy this theory that the way we should think about the network public spheres, that it gives greater autonomy to individuals and then turn that's a good thing? I think this is on. Yeah. There you go. So by nature, I'm a skeptic of the claim, but I would address it in a way that actually makes me sound more like an optimist. But part of that comes from the fact that I talk about democracy with a little d, not a big d. And so the work that I've been doing in primarily the Central Asia region for about the past eight years, but with some work in other parts of the world as well, focuses on patterns of technology, adoption and usage, and then also adaptation. So the way that people take things that are not necessarily designed for them and somehow make them work in their context. And that seems to me to be indicative of an assertion of a particular kind of autonomy. But what we also see is that these technologies change the nature of information flows. And I think that that is really consequential. And it's not necessarily in terms of explicit political movements, but it's the way that information flows through everyday life and how it helps people accomplish those tasks of everyday life and navigate worlds that are challenging to them. So I want to just contextualize this by saying I sort of categorize myself as if I'm talking about the future, kind of a cheating futurist. And I believe pretty strongly that any time you want to think about the future of the internet, it's very useful to think about the developing world, think about emerging markets. Because a lot of the social trends that we've pinpointed here as perhaps tied to increasing usage of emerging technology, so say the emergence of social networks, the ability to route around conventional institutions like media with information, and even the do-it-yourself community was a great little story about maker fair in the New York Times and the Science Times this week. Those are all social trends that pre-exist technology adoption in the emerging world or in emerging markets. So if you go to the developing world and you look at what are people doing with technology once it reaches their world, you get a kind of futuristic view of what we're seeing here. So it goes back and forth there. But the two stories that I would want to tell, which do lead me to sound much like an optimist. And one is about the Kyrgyz Revolution, which was three years old now. And it was a very quick turnover. And the rate of internet adoption is quite low in that country, but mobile phone usage is pretty high and was even in 2005. And what you saw wasn't so much a usage of the technology in order to facilitate the protest for people on the streets, but you saw it as a way for people to galvanize to protect against the looting. So the government as an institution was completely incapable of stopping the looting. But people were able to socially organize informally and route around that institution using the technology. The other example, which is also from Central Asia, which will sound a little bit frivolous to many, perhaps, particularly in the context of a conversation about democracy, is about computer games and is about the extent to which people play computer games in developing regions and they find a way to make this technology work for them. So whether it's a cyber cafe or it's kids in an apartment building figuring out how to wire up a local area network so they can play games because they can't access the internet or it is local ISPs running city-wide servers for World of Warcraft, the computer game hobby becomes a way for young people to gain experience with technology. So here the educational institution is failing them. There isn't necessarily coursework you can't major in computer science, but there are these informal organizations or informal associations that organize around this in some sense very frivolous activity but allow people to gain access to information, gain expertise and gain resources. Great, so let's take your challenge here of looking at a developing country context for a moment and take also the challenge of what people might do with information in one context and put it in another using these network tools, game-like tools. One of the ways to describe what's happened in the 2008 political cycle is videos become very important. Again, the Jesse Dillon and West Hill video clearly having a major role in the timing and trajectory of the presidential election. Sally, might you show us a video and I'm gonna turn maybe to our resident Cuba expert to tell us the context for it. Do you wanna say anything before we play it or should I? Okay, if we can pass the mic back to Joshua and then we'll play the video in a moment. So this is, we spent some time in Cuba and this was the first time in recent memory that people felt a sense of participatory political engagement in a totalitarian state. This is about late February or so. Does it have the date on February 11th? And what you'll be seeing here is an event in the top secret information science school outside of Havana where 10,000 students are being trained in the informationalization of the fatherland. That's the official title of what they do there. And this is not meant to be shown to the public. It's a CCTV system. Somebody had the wherewithal to tap into it and to record from the CCTV cameras. And then it leaked to be a flash drive via a network of people that we know there. And what you're gonna see here is the president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon. He's one of the top six people there and a very famous public official because he spent a lot of time in the United States in New York City. And you'll see the prized student leader of the government-backed surveillance team that looks at internet surveillance within Cuba, lambasting him for about 20 minutes about everyday injustices. And what he's talking about, although it's incredibly brave, is nothing new at all. What's most significant is that a lot of people in Cuba actually got access to this video. And so our project actually was about the acceleration of the viewing of the video so that if another thing like this were to happen again, it would reach a wider amount of people. All right, Sally, QSF, if you would. The Cuban students grilling the speaker of parliament about their grievances. These images were probably shot by Cuban students. They're spreading fast on the internet. Why do the people of Cuba, and when I say people of Cuba, I mean workers and their families, why do they not have a realistic possibility of going to hotels for tourists or of traveling to certain parts of the world? The students are also wondering about the last general election, which left no opportunity for surprises. The number of candidates, almost exclusively Communist Party members, exactly equaled the number of available seats. Fidel himself, a man with great vision, we all know about his vision, Fidel himself called for a united vote. But what if your conscience tells you to reject his demand? I believe that the victory of Cuba's revolutionary ideology will be complete, definitive, and crushing when Cubans see the world as it is. That's when they recognize the differences between one society and another. Students feel encouraged to question the government since Fidel's brother, Raul Castro, launched an open debate on Cuban society. He's been de facto leader of Cuba for a year and a half and could take over officially after February 24th, when parliament is to decide whether the ailing Fidel should remain Cuba's head of state. It's a... So Josh, is this historic? This is the story, and we talked about changing people, and that's actually true. That student was criticized in the government in direct response to an invitation to criticize the government from Raul Castro. So things are changing, although structurally things are largely the same. What is potentially more interesting is the video on the bottom right. And it's great that you have this because that's the same student, Elisara Villa, and he was arrested and detained. This is Esther's story of it's not about the free speech, it's the speech after the free speech. That's correct. So the top left video was not meant to be shown, it was decentralized, it was spread via flash drive. He was arrested about two weeks after he got up on stage. And he was arrested so late after because that was the kind of critical point at which people saw the flash drives and then the government realized that the video had leaked. They then leaked their own video via flash drive, which is the one on the bottom right of him where they essentially forced him to rescind his comments. He tells a lie in it where he says that, oh no they didn't arrest him, they just picked him up because his throat was hurting and he needed to go to the hospital. But you'll see, I don't know if in this video you'll see, but just watch his knees, he's shaking, he's nervous. It's quite a long video, so I think, do you have a short version of a Sally there? The knee shaking. There you go. It's probably all you need to say of that. And just one more thing, it should be noted that a lot of foreign embassies can't really do anything because of their economic connections to the United States, but one thing they do is pass out flash drives like candy. Reactions to this? Sir. I am Ashok Junjunwala from IIT Madras in India. I'm not reacting to this, but I want to just add another point of view to this whole discussion. I can clearly see that in situations where there is a huge bottleneck of information coming out and somehow a lot of censorship and suppression that internet or whatever other means can be found out has often found to be a very novel way of protest and novel way of getting the information out. But at the same time, we should not lose track of the fact that internet in itself in societies like ours is currently available to a very, very small fraction. And Professor Junjunwala, you're talking about India, the world's greatest democracy, yes. Yeah, I'm talking about it as being available to only a few percent. And therefore, the kind of views that you often get seem to be limited by the experiences of a certain kind of people. And in itself, therefore, it becomes often a tool for a certain set of people as opposed to others. I'll give you one example of something that happened recently. There is a certain social reform that is taking place in India in terms of reservation for students belonging to what is called backward cast in educational institute. Now, while that may be a debatable issue, the way if you look at the blocks in India and if you pretty much scan through the whole internet, what you actually get is a view that this all is preposterous, something like this should not even be attempted. Leaving out the views of those who have been deprived for very large number of years and have no voice on internet. And so there, one has to really see that it can be a double-edged sword, especially in a situation where internet reaches only a small sections of people. Extremely helpful. So a third critique of each of these theories is in fact the notion that only one billion of six billion people have access to technology to begin with in the world. And a variant of that, which I think very helpfully advanced, is it's not just about the digital divide in terms of access to the technology. It's about a participation gap as Henry Jenkins and Esther Hargitay. Esther, are you here somewhere? Has made extraordinarily clear. It's about the literacy and the skills as well as the access to the technologies itself. So very helpful. All right, one last argument and discussion of it if we go to the right. The third argument that's been alluded to a few times is it's not just about more people telling more stories. It's not just about individuals having greater autonomy, but it's the ability of those individuals to use the internet for collective action. It's actually the formation of groups and the ability to do things together. As one example, Ellen Miller, are you over there and Mika Sifri? There's an extraordinary experiment going on, mostly in Washington DC as a node, but as a distributed network of people. Would you tell us about the sunlight foundation's work and whether or not you think the real story here is the aggregation of all of these arguments into what people can do with this information if in fact they're able to give some sunlight on it as a disinfectant and then work together through the net for collective action? Well, this is certainly the arena that the sunlight foundation is experimenting in and how do you give a voice to a community to engage themselves in the process of democracy? So we've experimented in a number of distributed policy making research type projects, most recent of which is called publicmarkup.org in which we put a bill that we drafted about government transparency online and then invited the community at large to come in and tell us what they thought of the legislation section by section. It's technologically not very advanced, it's just a simple comment system, but we had over 150 people who've come online to comment in ways that we, with the expertise that we really did not have and so it has improved this product dramatically. We even had one complaining lobbyist who said, well, if they start by community drafting a bill on government transparency, who knows where it will go? And we asked the same question. In fact, we had a request from a member of Congress as to whether he could use the exact same platform for a bill that has nothing to do with government transparency, but another policy issue. And we're inclined to say yes, as long as Congress doesn't regard it as a gift to them. Other experiments have been just distributed research projects that have involved anywhere from dozens to hundreds of people. And it seems like there is a community in which online or groups are self-organizing and involving themselves in these technologies and we're quite pleased with our early experiments. Other things that Sunlight has done has been to digitize existing political information, put it online and see whether people are interested in it. One of our early experiments was to create a website called fedspending.org. It's existed about 20 months now. It's a database of all government grants and contracts. And this website has had to date over about 20 months of its existence, seven million searches. That's seven million pieces of information people were looking for that they had no real access to before. So again, a huge success, not to mention the fact that the government then purchased the license for that database to put up their own government mandated database. So Ellen, you guys are doing extraordinary work with the Sunlight Foundation. It's a great story and may, in fact, lead to stronger democracy here and abroad. But there might be downsides to this greater transparency. Go back to the end of Jonathan's speech this morning. He ended with the Star Wars kid, the extent to which when so much attention is given to one person in a weird context, it happened to be true, but it also happened to be hurtful to him. You might say, this is government that they deserve to have the sunlight shone on their activities and so forth. But what if, in fact, through collective action, not just your work, but generally speaking, people are harmed without the kind of recourse that we have in other settings. Are you worried at all about total transparency of the sort that might be the logical extension of what you're doing and the power of collective action if, in fact, it's unleashed in its fullest? Well, the simple answer to your question is not yet. I mean, I think in terms of government... Would that we had this problem, huh? Yeah, would that we had this problem precisely. I mean, in terms of the US Congress and facilitating that information, putting it online, or take it into the larger sphere of government in general, we are just nowhere in terms of even changing, I mean, we're beginning to change the culture, but nowhere in terms of the level of information being made available to even begin to worry about that. I think as you look down the road, yes, you do want to worry about it. And so in terms of our own advocacy, when we suggest that members of Congress post their schedules, for example, online, so their constituents know who they're meeting with, the part of that plan was posted online the day after the meetings take place to provide some level of security for members of Congress who are worried about that. So we do think about it, but I think we're not anywhere near a danger point at this point. What we see that has happened is with respect to government information, the burden is now on citizens to request the information about what their government is doing and how it's doing it, rather than the government having a proactive responsibility to put that information in the hands of citizens. And we've seen very little, there are one or two examples and they're good ones of how government has engaged citizens in the practice of policy making. So we see ourselves as a model at this point. That's great. And this is a little bit of an advertisement for tomorrow, but the Sunlight Foundation has one of the breakout sessions which I much encourage you to participate in. Yes, welcome. So I'm gonna send the mic back to Professor Benchler in the back. Yes, he's gonna be called on. In the meantime though, let me just give you a couple of other quick examples of the same story. One we heard last night at the Institute of Politics. Jeff Friese, Jeff, are you here still? The National Youth Coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign. This is a campaign that used internet in a way that gave far greater impact to a candidate than one might have imagined was gonna happen. It happened in part through people outside the organization, individuals working through collective action. And this is one of the theories that comes out of the internet and democracy study that in fact what internet does is it helps the fringe candidates the most. Those who have the least in the way of resources, though the Paul campaign raised so much money that at one point they had more on hand than the McCain campaign through internet, an astonishing fact. But the marginal benefits to candidates in this position is greatest. And maybe if you click one more, there's another example of the FARC in Columbia. And we won't go into it in detail, but the use of the technology even in places like Columbia leading to extraordinary rallies in real space. But Yochai Bencler, much of what we've framed here is reaction to your book, The Wealth of Networks. It's organized around a series of questions that you raise, you ask and answer there. And where we're headed in the last few minutes is to get a sense of what are the questions we should be asking going forward in our next 10 years as a principal here in the internet and democracy project. I'd be very curious what your reactions were to this sort of take on your work in large measure and where we should be headed in terms of empirical and other research in this field. I'm sorry, Professor, I didn't do the reading. You did the writing, that's the thing. I think we're moving to a point and I think the work you and Jonathan and the OpenNet Initiative and now the Internet and Democracy Project are doing are beginning to build a new generation of actually looking at the world. I think we've moved generationally from a 90s let's imagine what the world will be like and projecting fears and hopes on it to a moment where I think we have the first new tool, Link Analysis, which is so beautifully used and so productive here and now increasingly seeing more detailed analysis on large scale text analysis, the work that Ethan is now doing on media cloud is I think exemplary in this regard. Beginning to move beyond hoping to organizing our research, getting large scale data, getting new modes of analysis, getting much more detailed, the kinds of mapping of qualitative content analysis on Link Analysis that Esther Hargitay recently did with a couple of collaborators, munching in on understanding that we're not really in a all is great, all is terrible, there are certain things that are more productive and certain things that are less and building those both technical platforms to do large scale analysis of the kind that you've been doing as well as making it richer and more contextual. I think we're gonna have to find out beyond visibility through linking, we're going to have to find out how agendas really get set. We're going to have to develop ideas about what is an idea? What is a position? How it develops? We're going to have to account for the fact that the social and political phenomena we're looking don't stand in one place. So what we might have thought about the blogosphere in terms of its relative flatness three or four years ago may be very different. We're going to have to deal with are we really talking about democratization in the sense of general democracy? Are we looking at the emergence of something that's a more elitist form of democracy where instead of having a few thousand people will have a few million, but it's still going to be a few million out of hundreds of million who have disproportionate power and how do we think about that and how that affects on the theory of democracy side how that works. And so I see those as the primary areas of research really refining our more detailed empirical knowledge about how things are going being able to follow as the subject of study basically recurses on itself and start saying, well, let's take advantage of distributed production for fundraising in the Obama campaign context for watchdog function in the sunlight foundation context. We're as we're seeing now, what does it mean to have to be in contact with dissidents around the world less about telling about more about building tools. All of these things I think are quite central as we move toward adoption change, adoption change and rapid, rapid rate of change in techniques and practices and as well as our understandings of how ambitious we can be about our understanding of the net. That's great. This is we're recruiting Jonathan Citrin to return. I just want to say what a great treat you okay it is that you've joined us in the last year. It's extraordinary to have you here as a colleague which is really a fun thing for Harvard for sure. So everyone's been very patient. We've got lunch in a few moments. I did want to make one last call for questions though. Are there comments at the end? David Reed. This is one of the people who wrote the key essay on end-to-end network and the design. It was amazing to have you responding to Jonathan and great to have you again here. Do you need to call it up back there? Just keep, okay. Hello. Oh good. So the other thing that I am somewhat famous for writing is something that relates to group forming networks and their capacity and I was just and no that's okay because both things have been slightly misunderstood because in both of them when I wrote about them I talked about both sides and there's a very interesting misunderstanding of the power of groups which is that when you talk about group forming in a political and you don't have to go into the math of this. When you talk about group forming it's a very powerful mechanism. It creates lots of options in the space around you to connect in new ways that are more powerful than just peer-wise connection or small-scale activities but there actually is an upper limit to that which I also wrote about which is there's a saturation phenomenon how much each group that you're a member of demands attention. In fact it demands that you attend to a zillions of other people in that space and there's an attention economy and maybe a dollar economy as well that limits this and if you think about that in the political space the problem with this powerful mechanism is that the way to starve it out is to starve out attention so the reason, and this is known for many years the reason that politics doesn't take off in subsistence world is people are too busy paying attention to feeding themselves and until they can get a mechanism where as a group they can feed themselves more efficiently so you've gotta turn the group into something and I think the key thing is it's not just the ability to form political groups it has to be about the ability to form political groups that actually work to make those groups useful and it's the impact of the group not the existence of the group that needs to be measured and needs to be understood. Fabulous, so it's a great note to end on with this extraordinary group. Sir, do you want a last word? We've got one more comment and then, Charlie? Yeah, good, all right. Okay, I'm here from Jamaican pretty much what I'm looking for is just to kind of get some ideas I think the whole idea of taking a look at the internet and see where we can actually get a voice and have people who don't have a voice get a voice through that medium is an amazing thing. I do a lot of my work in Jamaica in the prisons and to be able to give those people a voice is an amazing thing because right now Jamaica is a beautiful place. It's a place that is so free but at the same time it is so captive and yet still we keep on putting people in prison for smoking weed and those kind of things when the prisons are bursting at the seams in terms of, there's just no space. Cells that are built for two persons are housed in six and seven persons so to be able to give that kind of voice we've had some kind of a breakthrough where right now we have a radio station that is up on the internet that broadcast directly from one of our prisons but one of the things that I wanna be able to meet with people over the next few days and to talk about is how can we, I heard about the flash drive situation because a lot of people just don't have computers and the people that we really need to hear from are the people that don't have computers. We have situations also where there's people that are trying to fix the problems that don't understand what the problem is so I just wanna find somehow a better way that we can collaborate with the persons on the ground to see how we can get people with lack of resources, lack of the technology to actually be able to have them have their say. Right now we have a rise, we've collaborated with Global Voices in the Rising Voices Project where we have prison diaries so we're able to tell some stories through that medium but at the same time I would still like to see how we could really take that to the next level where more people can get involved and how we can promote that and have more comments and more even assistance in a sense from persons who are in this room that can help us to drive this process because we are a developing country still only probably around, I'd say not even 20% of the persons have access to the internet right now and just, yeah. So a great word to end on. We're headed to lunch but let's take Kevin Wallen up on this challenge to go out of this room and figure out ways to collaborate yet more perhaps in Jamaica or in hundreds of other contexts around the world. Thank you all for this great session. Thank you.