 Hello, people. I'd like to welcome you to the first communications forum event of this semester. I'm David Forburn, professor of literature and the director of the MIT Communications Forum. I'm very happy to see you here. And I would like to make a couple of quick announcements. One is, if you look on the screen, you'll see projected there are forum projects for the fall term. I hope most of you will be able to attend them. Fuller descriptions of each event are available if you click around on the website. I also would like to make a particular announcement about the forum that is scheduled for Thursday, October 4th. It's the next forum on collective intelligence. What we're hoping for is a general, very wide-ranging discussion on the wisdom of collective intelligence, but also on the limitations of some aspects of collective intelligence. And in addition to the two speakers already listed there, one from the Harvard Business School, Karim Lakhani, and one from the Sloan School here at MIT, Tom Malone. There's a third speaker who isn't yet listed on our materials, but will be. I mentioned him especially because we're in his shop now. It's Alex Pentland from the Media Lab. We'll join in that conversation on October 4th, and I hope many of you'll be able to attend that. It's my happy duty now to introduce this forum, the first of a series of forums, under the collective wisdom and arrangements of the MIT Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies program. The communications forum is very pleased and excited to be a small collaborator in what promises to be a very interesting, enriching, ongoing project that CMS and the Media Lab have worked out with the help of a very generous grant from the Knight Foundation. My understanding is that this first session will be devoted broadly to definition, and then in addition to a second event in this series this fall, there will be continued, we will continue over the next few semesters to follow through on this theme. All that remains for me to do then is first to remind all of you that the format of our forums is fairly standard, and I hope you'll help us with them. As in most forums, the speakers talk for about an hour, sharing the space together for an hour, and the second hour is given over to question and answer session with our audience. My hope is that you'll be as lively and as passionate and as critical if you choose to be as many of our previous audiences have been. Let me remind you that we are being recorded, that your question will go out in the ether and will be preserved in audio and video formats presumably forever on the website. When you rise to ask your questions, it would be very helpful if you would identify yourself for the speakers and for posterity. My final obligation here is to introduce the moderator of tonight's session, my friend and colleague, Henry Jenkins. He's the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities at MIT, the founding director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, the author of more books than most people can count, most recently a remarkable and apparently continually influential book on convergence culture. Henry Jenkins. In the center, Chris, check something higher and higher going to sort of lay out our own takes on what we mean by civic media as part of this new center on future civic media and then turn it over to our esteemed guests to share some of their experiences and reflections on this category. As I think, I apologize that I was listening to podcasts because this is gonna be a very image-intensive presentation, but bear with me as I'll try to describe at least some of the images we're looking at as we go for those who may listen to this later. Here on the screen are two images and I'm sort of instinctively, I think you see the one of them, the black and white image as one that embodies civic engagement. There's a classic image of a group of men reading newspapers on the street corner engaged in dialogue about serious national issues. The second one may be much more debatable, right? There's a group of young Japanese women taking photographs with cell phone cameras with traditional cameras. We don't know what they're taking a photograph of. And it's sort of, I think it's very interesting first of all to think about the gender dimensions of it, does the fact that they're young women change the way we regard their activity? So who is engaged in this activity somewhat shapes our judgment about whether it's civic or not. Our assumptions about what their photographing matters, so if I said this was a political rally or a circus parade or a celebrity getting out of an automobile we might respond to that image of them taking the picture rather differently depending on what it was we imagine the content or context of it is. Similarly, whether we imagine them connecting the photographs they were taking back to some larger communal site would affect the way we perceive this activity. So the question is, is this civic media? What constitutes civic media? For me, the definition I'm working from is one that says civic media is any use of any medium which fosters civic engagement. It's intentionally an extraordinarily broad definition. It's intended to be broader than the phrase citizen media which would define a narrow subset or citizen journalism but includes both of those within its purview. But the point is that the use of the technology is as important as the technology itself in determining whether something constitutes civic media or not. It's what we do with the technology. Certainly the affordances of the technology make it easier or harder for us to use it for civic activity but how we use it is also very much part of that proposition and I'm sort of relying on the definition of medium that Lisa Gittleman has proposed which says a medium is a communication technology and the social protocols that grow up around its use and those two things together help determine what we mean by civic media. So the question I've been thinking about a lot lately is what does democracy look like? What's the image bank by which we represent democracy? And very often the images we have are those of the colonial American experience, the revolution, the sign of the declaration, Boston T. Barty, the spirit of 76. We might update that to some time in the 1930s and here's another whole image bank of what democracy looks like that was consciously constructed by the Popshuler Front during the 1930s so we have Capra movies, we have Norman Rockwell, we would talk about Aaron Copeland maybe, Fanfare for the Common Man might be what democracy sounds like but what's striking is when we get to contemporary representations of democracy they're almost always retro. So one of the sort of challenging things about a center for the future civic media is to imagine democracy itself having a future to reinvent the set of images we have for thinking about what we mean by civic engagement so that across the right and the left what we see is a return in the imagery we use to talk about democracy, to either colonial America or 1930s but rarely the present and almost never the future. So we as a center are trying to encourage people to think creatively about what democracy looks like now and what democracy will look like in the future. Now one classic account of this challenge of civic engagement is Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and those of you who read the book you know that his vivid image of civic engagement, his nostalgia, his retro image of democracy is the image of a 1950s bowling league where people gathered for a shared activity, conversations took place around it, some of them were publicly minded, some of them were personal gossip but the community felt a commitment to each other that was reaffirmed each time some subset of it gathered together the bowling alley to engage in this. Now his contrast to that is television in which he argues that television has made us less civic, less engaged. And I think he's wrong about this in two different dimensions. He collapses together two arguments. One is the privatization argument that we're more likely to stay at home in consuming television, which is an argument about the technology and then he tends to read television as valuing entertainment over news and assuming that entertainment can't be the basis for civic engagement. So first of all these images from the 1950s suggest that in the context of 50s American culture for a variety of reasons, television may have been used in a more social way because there were fewer sets because people got mythically gathered in people's living rooms, the civic culture engaged with television in a different way than we engage with it today. So we can't just look at the technology and determine what its properties are, we also have to think about the history of its use, the structures in which we engage with this technology. But secondly, if his example of civic engagement is the bowling league, it's surely not the news value of bowling that determined that civic activity or civic engagement took place around it. Recreation, you know, recreational activities can be the basis of civic engagement. It's what takes place around them again that I think determines the ultimate impact they might have. We may be, these images I thought are kind of interesting to think about what television means today as we move toward large screened televisions, home entertainment complexes. And one of the things that interest me, these I looked up Ultimate Entertainment Center on the web and these are some of the images I found. But what's interesting is they all contain more seats than this nuclear family. The ideal entertainment complex that's being presented to us today is one that does include inviting friends and neighbors over to enjoy the properties of the meeting. Whether we actually do it or not is interesting but the technologies are being designed for social use again rather than purely for individualized use. I think that's an interesting historical phenomenon. So if this is our image of civic engagement, then what do we make of this? This is World of Warcraft, right? This is a group of people gathered together in a guild structure to get their photographs taken or a virtual photograph taken to represent the social ties that exist between the members of this community. So whatever they're doing, they're not bowling alone. Now whether it fully constitutes the bowling league that Putnam romanticizes are not as open to discussion but in a sense that there's a kind of nascient civic engagement that could be seen as we look at these new kinds of social structures that emerge on the web. The problem is these are now communities of interest, not the local communities. It's no longer a face-to-face contact in this space. These people may be all over the planet but they may feel a very strong sense of social obligation to each other which shapes their behavior. Again, as I was getting this ready, I was just intrigued by the images of how media are used to create community to connect people together. And then another person who wrote about this further persuasively is Benedict Anderson who talks about the notion of an imagined community that is the degree to which civic media in the past, in his example in this case was the London Times, fostered a sense of shared identity which was central to allowing the members of the British Empire, at least those empowered members of the British Empire to feel a sense of social connection to each other. And our images of newspaper, which could have been represented as a solitary medium, frequently involved groups of people engaged in conversations with each other across those various medium. Now what he tells us is that these are imagined communities in the sense that very few of us will meet, none of us will meet every member of the nation, let alone the members of the British Empire. It's a larger social organization that is gonna be reinforced by face-to-face communication. Even what the nation means is constantly in the dispute. And I have here a variety of images, contemporary images of America or patriotism and conflicting claims about what it is to be an American, but that sense of being an American or that sense of being a Bostonian that's embedded in going to or being part of the Red Sox nation sort of is a kind of civic identity that is the beginnings in both Putnam's account and Anderson's account of a sense of social connection or of social obligation to each other. That is part of what we mean when we talk about civic identity. This could be fostered through social networks. These are some traditional images of social networks. Rockwell's picture from the 1950s, a more contemporary and playful re-evoking of it which says we're not gossiping or networking, but gossip became a vehicle in women's culture historically by which people exchanged values, made judgments, felt a sense of social connection to each other. Again, the challenge is we're moving as a country toward diasporic experiences of the community. The local, very important part of these traditional communities is maybe disintegrating, but an expanded sense of the local is part of what we experience. This is an image of the diaspora created by Katrina by a particular disaster as people from New Orleans have spread across the country, but if we talk to students at MIT, many of them read local newspapers from their hometowns, many of them were listening to web-based radio cast from the place they came from, our sense of an expanded local as that interacts with the physical local becomes very much part of this, and it's again about imagined community that can form the basis for other kinds of civic engagement. As these are images of technologies, again to make the point of some technologies which can be individualized in some use can be collective in other use. And I love this image of the phonograph as it becomes a shared media experience and the way that looks forward to things like iPod and Zoom commercials, which talk about beaming music between people as a kind of social practice. We could think about different ways technologies enable these kinds of civic engagement. From second life, where it spends a lot of effort building an online community to augmented reality games which are designed to foster a greater sense of engagement with the physical world around them. You know, this idea of communities of interest as they relate to the local is scarcely new, that if we go back to the coffee houses which were romanticized and Habermas's notion of the public sphere, it turns out many of them were themed. There were literary coffee houses, there were political coffee houses, so they were both communities of interest and local communities that manifest themselves through people gathering together to engage in community practices side by side. And the modern notion of the meetup functions in much that same way to be both a virtual community online and a physical community face to face, both physically local and virtually local at the same time and defined through a variety of communities of interest. This is the Minneapolis role-players meetup in the bottom image there. Is Flickr a civic in media in the sense that we're talking about? Is Flickr a local media? Jean Burgess, a researcher in Australia, has done work on the ways in which Flickr encouraged, at least in her work, encouraged people to find each other by geographic location. Since you take pictures of specific locations and those are identified as such, on Flickr, people in Queensland began to gather on Sundays to take picture of shared locations. They did meetups. They began to focus their cameras on their own cities. They began to see their cities in new light and that led to certain kinds of civic activism for this group of people. So the fact that it was a virtual network did not prevent it from simultaneously being something that was very involved at the local level. And we can imagine that passing itself off to Google Maps and Wikipedia and other kinds of projects which use media that are broad-based, networked media, to think about the local through new lenses. YouTube is becoming an important site for local activism, even as it becomes a national network. And we can think about the publicity this week over the tasering of the student. It's a recurring theme that YouTube has helped to identify and bring to national spotlight that it co-exist with stories like the one in the tech this week about why, or actually it was USA Today this morning, is about why campus police are being pressured to be more forceful in their relation to their students and the wake of Virginia Tech. So it was a big being had that's both national and local that uses YouTube. This is a machinima film made about the student movement in France. One of the first things when the movie games came out, it was immediately turned to, students used it to medium to explain within their own local community what was going on and use the web as a distribution point to explain to more people what's going on. Now, we might not ordinarily think of action figures as a civic media, but this is a protest that was in Singapore a few weeks ago where there are some restrictions on public gatherings and the way they signified support was to let people assemble action figures with signs in a public space rather than the physical bodies of people who could be disrupted and the police still came and broke it up, claiming this was a public gathering of action figures, apparently. So the point is that the action figure is not intrinsically a civic medium, but the ways in which it was used was used to express civic concerns and became a vehicle for shared experiences. So who's involved with civic media? As we began the project, we've been interested in a number of groups that we think have potential. Be part of it clearly. The blogging community is an important group right now. The citizen journalist is an important force in redefining micro-local news, local news, national news, so forth, but also the high school journalist. This is the classic image of the high school journalist. This is much more of what the high school journalist looks like today, but in some communities which have lost their local papers, we're very interested in what would happen if we trained high school journalists to play more of a role in reporting beyond the school and becoming part of the civic infrastructure for a particular town. We're interested in the ethnic news, and Alan Hume spoke to us, our research group yesterday, to talk about the important greasing role of ethnic sources, both print and online, in a community like Boston. They've mapped something like 80 different ethnic publications in Boston that play very important roles for those communities. And transgenerational communication becomes important. So in this case, I'm not suggesting the car is a medium, although Marshall McLuhan would have, but I'm suggesting that this is a shared activity, at least a romanticized image of a shared activity of a grandfather, a father, and son working on a car. There's no reason why that couldn't be a computer and a website or a live journal page or a Facebook page. A shared activity that's digital, and Gene Burgess again in Australia has written about digital storytelling groups in much this way, where people share knowledge across generations can become the basis of civic media. What historically, democracy was kept alive by micro rituals, local rituals, whether it's town pageants, whether it's state fairs, whether it's communal picnics, became the ways in which people reaffirmed their connection to that face-to-face community. So what we think about the future of civic media, we need to figure out what those social rituals are and how we create new social rituals that bring people together in powerful ways to enhance civic engagement. The challenge is to sort of move us from a culture where democracy is a special event bound up in the election that occurs every two to four years. To move it toward a lifestyle that we engage with on a day-to-day basis. That is as much part of our life as popular culture, where it's not about one decision, but many decisions that reaffirm our connections to the community. And this is not a new challenge. It's an old one, as this image from the 1930s suggests, that I sort of self-consciously am going back to those retro images. At the end, it suggests that from the very beginning, what democracy was, what citizenship was, was seen as a challenge, something that had to be renewed again and again, not something we simply had, but something we created. And so the question is, what are the technologies today that will create the sense of democratic participation and civic engagement? With that in mind, I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Chris Chicks at Mihai, who at the Media Lab, who is one of my partners in crime in the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media. Thank you, Henry. And I think you'll see that there's areas of strong overlap between how Henry and I conceived this. And I should also mention that there's a third person, the equation, Professor Mitchell Resnick, who I see his curly hair back there, is in the audience. And he isn't joining us today, but I'll try to show a little bit of his work later. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the logistics about what the Center is gonna be doing and to actually just start by thanking Jack Knight for starting the Knight Foundation, who have given us an initial $5 million grant to start the Center. The Knight Foundation, of course, comes from Jack Knight, the Knight Brothers, and by extension, Knight Ritter Newspapers, which was an interesting kind of model for how to run newspapers. It was a wire service that at least I grew up seeing Knight Ritter headliners at the beginning of an article. And, but what was interesting about Knight Ritter was it was really a consortium of many smaller papers, local papers from Minneapolis, from Miami, from San Jose. And what these papers realized they had to do in kind of the new media culture and Agence France-Prasse and AP and all these other wire services was kind of work together, essentially, to take their best journalists, send them to Washington, to the Washington Bureau, send them to Europe to cover events, and then bring people back. And, but the commitment was always to those local papers. They always said we need to circulate our journalists back so that they can remember the community that they came from. It's a kind of an interesting process. And if anyone's seen what's happened to Knight Ritter, in fact, they essentially went bankrupt a few years ago, were bought out by a couple of companies, including one called McClatchy. And McClatchy has kind of continued some of this approach, at least in their Washington Bureau. One of the reasons that's very interesting that Bill Moyers, for instance, talked about in his recent show, Selling the War, part of the Bill Moyers Journal, was that, in fact, McClatchy journalists were predicting what was happening with the Iraq War, what was happening with WMD very well. So well, in fact, that the local papers were no longer buying their stories, which I find absolutely fascinating, that you can have journalism so good that there's no market for it. And in fact, that's a little bit of what's been pushing the Knight Foundation to get into this arena, is that they typically have done a lot of their funding of journalists. And in informal conversations, I've gotten the sense that they love the idea that they're training the best kind of journalists around that they're funding really great journalism programs around the country. But the opportunities for those journalists to practice the kind of independent journalism, the kind of free press away from large kind of corporate, megapolis media consortiums has just declined. And so it's very difficult actually now for a good journalist to even find a job. And so the Knight Foundation created this Knight Challenge, which is a grant which they're actually in their second run right now. People should take a look because they're giving grants as small as a couple, you know, tens of thousands of dollars up to very large kind of leadership grants. But their point was that they want to take a look and kind of game what's happening next in the roles of new media technology in the way that people think about and report news. And so we applied and received a leadership grant. And part of the component of what that means is that all the other Knight Foundation grant winners are gonna be coming to campus this spring and every spring for at least a few more years to kind of show their work in a large kind of conference format to interface with each other but also people are interested. So we'll probably be announcing dates for that event in the spring sometime soon. So if you're interested in this, you'll get to meet a lot of very interesting people somewhere between where community journalism and computation meet. So that's my little introduction about where our funding came from and what the influence towards our doing this was. I just wanted to say that our goal is essentially to develop new technologies and social systems, as Henry described. And we come from very different backgrounds. CMS and the Media Lab have been neighbors, have collaborated for about 20 years, but we really come from different backgrounds on some level and the Media Lab's always thinking through problems from a technological standpoint. So if I can take another six minutes or so, I'll try to describe a little bit about what that process has been for my research and my group. And that's simply that Henry gave the example of the different modes of use of television, describing the process of still in rural and developing nations watching televisions and activity that a village does, even though in the United States, the majority of people watch television alone or with their nuclear family. And so what I feel is that I could take a television out to my block in Somerville and encourage people to watch it with me out on the street. And two things would happen. One, my television's smaller than any of my neighbors, so no one would watch. Second, the property values would go down. So what's interesting is that the use of technology is not just about a device. When we say technology, we often can be referring to an entire tradition of technical development or we can be referring to a device. And so you have to get a little bit specific when you talk about this. The device of the television doesn't prescribe who can use it other than at what point it becomes too small because you're in too large a room with too many people. But it's of course a device and a set of social and cultural constraints of how that device can be used. And so if I take the television out to the street, no one will watch it with me in all honesty or they'll spend more time watching me than the television. But you know, an interesting corollary of that is the fact that technologies get used in really strange and unusual ways in other places. Let me bring an example of this kind of device and what this device means. Bruno LaTour talks about technology, French theorist talks about technology as society made durable. In other words, devices and the culture of their use are co-produced and thus technology and their effects on culture are also co-produced. And so his point is that technology is in a sense a reification of society. And he gives an example in a kind of a long metaphor of one of these door closers. I use this example all the time but I still don't know what they're really called. But these automatic door closers. And so, you know, in the LaTourian analogy, you might work in an open plan office like an architecture office and you have a small desk and in the summertime people keep leaving the door open and you get very hot and it's hot outside and you're very uncomfortable. So eventually you do what everyone does which is put a little sign up on the door that says please close the door after yourself. And of course we all know those signs never work. So you've tried to inform people as to how they can help you but in fact information doesn't lead to action. So then you go to your manager and you say, well, I'm really hot all the time. Can you buy one of those door thingies that I can never remember what they're called but can you buy one of those to close the door so that I'm not as hot in the summer? And the manager says, oh no, that's way over budget, can't do that. And so maybe you work worse and you're keyboard short circuits because we were sweat. And eventually the manager decides it's cost effective to put one of those things in. He calls the janitor guy, the janitor guy comes, puts it up with his expert technical knowledge and the door now closes automatically. So you're much more comfortable but there's someone else on the other end of that open plan office who's right under the air conditioning vent. And he loved it when the door was open because of course that was the only time that he felt comfortable. So now he's cold all summer. And Latour's point is that even this very banal simple example is an example of how technologies are inherently political devices. What they do is they allow the world to become a little bit easier for one person or one set of people. And at the same time they might or might not make it more difficult to maneuver for a set of other people. So one of the things that my group has been doing research on is the idea that if the unit of consumption is the individual as it is for almost all contemporary consumer electronics then the device is probably going to better the situation of that individual. And that's a very important principle. And an example is I'll give an example of a project that one of my students did which was her noticing, could we have volume up on this laptop? Her noticing that cell phones were making people, okay interesting, we're getting an echo too, not sure what that's from. Technologies were making people kind of selfish. Cell phones were making people speak very rudely or talk during lectures. So she came up with a simple piece of jewelry that when you press the button on it disconnects any cell phones within about three meters. And so she can essentially create this bubble where loud, rude conversations don't have to happen around her. And this is a great example of in fact what all technologies are mostly doing. And it's absurd in the sense that it can and should be illegal. But it's also a strange situation where, but it's also shows that in fact you can never lose money selling a product that will empower an individual, but often it comes at the expensive community of public space or of groups. So society is a long way from neutral and society's durable goods are thus a long way from neutral as well. Some people have more power, some people can express themselves more than others. And technologies kind of reify or instantiate that on some level. And unfortunately the people who typically design technologies are serving themselves on some level. And the mechanisms by which the technologies get distributed essentially reproduce the inequity by which they're produced. So when you hear someone saying that a technology is neutral and they can be used for good and bad, which I hear every few days walking through the campuses of MIT, understand what that they've done is they've zoomed out of the situation to the point where everything looks like a tiny speck. Everyone looks like ants and it doesn't really matter anymore. Whenever I hear someone say the technology is neutral, I reach for my gun analogy. Which is that, and I borrowed this from Johannes Schott an SDS theorist who says that it's possible to kill someone with a toothbrush if you're really creative. And it's also possible to kill someone with a gun. But of course that's this really stupid way of looking at it because guns make it much easier to kill people and cleaning your teeth with a toothbrush is much better for your health. So technologies are only neutral when you've zoomed out to the point where it doesn't really matter. So if in fact there is this kind of lack of neutrality in the way that technologies are produced, distributed and the modes of their received youth use, then it's possible to imagine that a society where most technologies are designed for the individual to empower the individual is one where a lot of the technologies that come out will actually in many cases not benefit civil society. So as we go along and we think of that Somerville television example, one of the interesting corollaries of that is that when a technology goes somewhere where those same social and cultural mores don't exist, you get really interesting reuses. And in this case, I'm thinking of Trinidadian steel drums. Trinidad where a net importer of chemicals had all of these extra drums and figured out this beautiful way of making music with them. And you see that again and again in technologies in cultures that are on the technological margin. And it's a really interesting corollary to the fact that we have those same things. We just don't use them as well because we have received modes of use. So one of the interesting ways that this works is that technologies develop our sense of self and they develop our sense of what's possible. Melon scoop for instance that I grew up with suggests that in a good household you serve your guests melons and discreet biteable chunks. And they're very powerful in suggesting that. I myself have succumbed to their magic. Likewise, the existence of automobiles facilitates suburban and ex-serban living spreads us out on some level. And these are only the articulated intended behaviors of these technologies. Philosopher's technology Andrew Feenberg talks about all the things that technology do that aren't part of their intended effects, secondary effects. So nearly all American technologies, for instance, assume and thus consume cheap energy. You buy a leaf blower to clean your lawn not to put a hole in the ozone layer to wake up your neighbor. But actually a leaf blower does all three of those things quite well. If you wanted to wake up your neighbor you would probably want to use a leaf blower. So the point is that there's secondary unintended effects function equally well and they're really a part of what the technology is at a central level, not just as a kind of a side effect or an unintended consequence of them. And many of the assumed unintended consequences or side effects of those technologies are ones that are built in to facilitate an individual consumer, an individual kind of libertarian unit of society. So what does this have to do with civic media? It's simply this that it's much easier to produce a device and sell it. If you can sell it to every consumer at a one to one ratio like an iPod, then if you develop it as a public transportation system where you need to get a particular city or country behind you. And I'd argue that it isn't a coincidence that we consume media alone in a society so far along the path of kind of commercialization to individuals. And what happens as that happens is that these technologies on a certain level turn us all into competitors with each other. So an example that comes very easily to mind is the Hummer. This is from a website called FUH2 where people use democratic participatory media to show themselves flipping the bird at Hummers. But the point of a Hummer is that it's considered a safe technology, a safe car, SUVs are safe cars. People talk about them in those terms when in fact they're dangerous for the planet, they're dangerous for individuals, they're dangerous for our society. It's a great kind of nexus of where these conflicting interests kind of point out. I drive a beat up Jetta and it does on a global level exactly what a Hummer does at a local level. And I happen to know that Noam Chomsky is tooling around in an A4, very heavy audience. So what are our choices? Well, the choice is public transportation, right? But public transportation is a unit of technology that's consumed by communities, that's consumed by cities or countries. Most of what we have are made to be consumed by an individual. And so as long as we're kind of stuck in that, we run the risk of developing these technologies that aren't actually useful for communities or for civic engagement. So civic media and civic media technologies are ones that don't treat the world as a zero sum game. A government doesn't lose power if it releases information. A community that has open and creative commons, whether it's online commons or common spaces is a useful thing. And I think that one of the tricks as we start the center is to reimagine not just technology that increases civic engagement, but actually increases a particular kind of civic engagement that we would like to promote. And that's certainly possible. I'll just finally, Henry was mentioning Putnam. So I was thinking about Putnam. I was thinking of this really interesting example of thinking about if we could have the audio on the laptop up again. If we think about civic media or if we think about social capital, Putnam has this very, you know, boy, audio on the laptop, please. Putnam has this thing. This example of social capital, and I find it a very acquisitive approach towards society. You know, capital has its own set of baggage, and perhaps it helps to show the importance of capital, of the social to equate it to money, which of course we all care about. But, you know, social capital is also very strong in lynch mobs. So it's gonna be important for us, as we don't care this process, to develop the kind of society that we're interested in. Mob justice. Yeah, mob justice. And of course, Capra gives us great examples of that. So independently of that, we're gonna be showing Capra stuff that independently of that, we have other models of the kind of social capital we'd like to have. So as we go through this, you know, what we're hoping to do is to leverage on some of the research that we've done around civic media and technology. I'll give some examples. This is the Melrose Mirror project called Silver Stringers, which was about increasing conversation between different generational groups and giving senior citizens a chance to develop civic-based media, community journalism that was started in the mid-90s at the Media Lab. Mitch Resnick has also been running these computer club houses, which are excellent ways of reformulating the way that children are introduced to computers, not around productivity or profit, but around education and working in groups. There are over 110 of these in 20 countries working in community centers. You know, and my group has been working on radical technologies like autonomous boats to protest in Guantanamo, autonomous UAVs to keep track of Minutemen and other anti-immigrant extremists on the US-Mexico border, projects like government information awareness, the flip side to the NSA wiretapping scandal that we were just noticing in 2002, where we allowed any individual to report secret information about government officials and within seven hours we had the Department of Justice's internal phone directory and within 12 George Tenet's home address. And the most recent one, which is just launching now called Selectricity, which is a voting technology that allows you to vote on the most kind of quotidian boring things in your everyday life, but also incorporates really excellent voting algorithms. So we're hoping to kind of extend these and come up with new models, as Henry said, to develop technologies that kind of really game the system towards better civic space. Thanks, Chris. So our next speaker is Beth Novick, who is a professor of law at New York University, where she directs the Institute for Information Law and Policy, and she's the founder and organizer of the State of Play Conferences, an annual event on virtual worlds research. Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction, and I wanna thank both of you and Mitch as well. Congratulations on the grant and on the launch of the center. It's really an honor to be here to celebrate with you and to help launch this important new initiative by addressing this question of what do we mean by civic media, and I think it's wonderful that you've, in a sense, coined a new term and a broader term, which gives us a chance to reflect on what this research agenda might look like going forward. So I think we start, of course, we come to this, and I think this is sort of riffing off of things that both of you have said, with the fact that the foundation in our democracy, the sort of foundational concept that's enshrined very much in the First Amendment, and that is that the media plays a very central political role of helping to foster the kind of independent public discussion, I love this quote from Justice Brandeis, the independent public discussion is a political duty and is the fundamental principle of American government, and this notion that we have to have, we believe in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, and we have typically viewed the media in its traditional form as playing a central role in bringing about reason as applied through public discussion as the basis for democracy and the foundation for democratic self-government. So typically we've conceptualized the media, the Fourth Estate, as playing a role of bringing about specifically political accountability, and of course the First Amendment in its origins was essentially this protection for a free press, that is supposed to provide a check, a critical check on the work of government and on institutions of power, and in addition to bring into the public fray, a certain level of expertise, a certain level of information to help promote political accountability, to create greater transparency in our institutions, and to freely forge the basis of a democracy. I'd like to suggest perhaps a slightly provocative point, and it really is that we need to, as you suggested, reinvent what is a romanticized ideal, not only in our media culture, but in our political culture, and in our conception of the role that media is supposed to play, and that is namely that this deliberative ideal that we've come to ascribe to the First Amendment, and frankly to democracy more generally, is really to some extent has failed us, and hence our conception of media in its traditional form is failing us because the theory that we ascribe to it is that this notion of the public exchange of reason, the reasoned exchange of public discourse as the foundation of democracy, it turns out does not actually produce or lead to political participation. And Robert Putnam's examples aside, one of the things that both of you have picked up on is that the bowling league does not somehow translate into some impact on the world of power, does not translate into the kind of accountability into the action figures in Singapore that we somehow view as being much more powerful and therefore potentially much more interesting than what goes on in the typical bowling league. There's new data out in some recent work by Diana Mutts, very good empirical work that shows that traditional conceptions of deliberation of neighbors talking to each other does not correlate, not only into voting every four years, but frankly into political participation or civic participation more generally. We know that in terms of the political institutions and the way that we've set them up, that frankly the deliberative ideal that we're all gonna sit around and talk to our neighbors and therefore change the way our political institutions function, it simply doesn't work. We feel as disaffected and as distant from the workings of Washington or Brussels as we've ever felt, now more so than ever, and that these conceptions of deliberation when they do work on a neighborhood level, potentially such as a traditionally political meetup for example, don't work very well at scale. We haven't been able to bring technology to bear to really to realize this vision for deliberative democracy because frankly the issues that we're facing are potentially very complex, very complicated, requiring a great deal of highly expert information in order to solve the problems that we potentially face today. So I'd like to suggest perhaps a bit provocatively that the deliberative ideal that has to a large extent governed the law and the policy that have undergirded our vision of a media system has been not serving us well and hence it is important to have this moment of rethinking and re-envisioning what we mean by civic media. Traditional, our traditional conception of media of course does set this deliberative ideal rather than the participatory challenge that both of you have set out for us. It's also come to as Chris you've made the point very clearly and this is not only a problem for technology and technology markets but for the media to view the individual as the audience, the individual consumer of media and press rather than looking at the role that we can play as networks of producers of information not simply individual consumers of information. Our conception also tends to disregard the fact our conception of professional press and you know Ethan is the one of the people who's been working for years to debunk the conception of a professional press has this takes this view in fact that you need some kind of sociological boundary of professional rather than viewing the expertise that is distributed and that is available to us out there in the diverse knowledge communities that have come to be available to us today. So if you take any of these examples oh my news or news assignment the project that recently ran through NYU last year places that knowledge are emerging whether it's the volunteer database is created on the internet movie database or the illustration to the right of it is the Amazon Mechanical Turk project, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers, other technologies and projects that have emerged in order to gather aggregate knowledge and expertise that is out there in distributed communities not simply within the limited confines of the traditional boundaries of media or press as we have come to know it. So in fact if we think about reinventing we have to Tocqueville of course always had everything right when the right of every citizen to cooperate in the government of society is acknowledged every citizen every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between different opinions of his contemporaries and appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. So in fact what we're seeing as a result of the technology that is becoming available to us and the examples that both of you have shown already is that it is the right of every citizen and of all of us working together not alone exclusive of the traditional boundaries of media as we have come to know it. So as Henry wrote this morning on his blog civic media refers to any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement as we've been discussing. This kind of participation I would argue rather than simply the deliberation that has underscored and undergirded the way we have organized and thought about and theorized about our conception of the press to date. A conception which is much more about action than it is simply about Tocque. So what I wanna do is to give a few examples apparently more loudly I need to give my examples. It's actually my typing that's the problem rather. It's what I get for trying to blog on stage so. It's the sound of productivity in the background. It sounds very, it's like the newsroom going in the background, the teletype going. So we'll do this. So what I wanna do is to take the few minutes that are remaining to me to speak a little bit about what this call to action might look like. And if we take up this new idea of the civic media rather than simply a deliberative media rather not simply talking about Tocque but talking about action. As the basis for the First Amendment. As the basis for strengthening democracy not as voting every four years but as a lifestyle as something that we do every day. How do we begin to think about not simply the civic in the sense of relationships on a social basis among and between us in our local communities but how do we think about building the bridges between the technologies of civic media. What people refer to by the shorthand sometimes of web 2.0. I should have put that in quotes since I'm not too fond of it but it fits nicely on a slide. The building the bridge between web 2.0 the content that we're developing together in networks and distributed networks and the institutions of power. How do we think about building those bridges between the worlds of shall we say what we're doing every day now to create that content and the traditional worlds of law and politics. What are the new models by which we can begin to work with and develop these new open sources of information. So yesterday I was in Washington at a meeting about the energy environment and intelligence. So in other words the question was environmental crises are increasingly becoming crises of intelligence and security. And the mandate for the workshop was to figure out how we could bring distributed intelligence to bear how we could take Flickr and YouTube and you know all in the world of Warcraft and figure out how to do things like investigate or identify environmental hot zones before they become political crises. Because of course the intelligence and the information that we're gathering about the environment about energy translate into very important questions about how we spend resources. How we make policy and potentially the even more important question of where we send troops where we send people to live and to die to protect against potentially these natural disasters. So it was an interesting meeting simply because there was a whole group of very high level people talking in a language that I understood nothing of having to do with environmental policy but focusing on this issue of how do we take these new civic media and make these institutions of power better. And I'll tell you that the sponsor for the mean I know I'm being recorded here but I'm probably already being watched anyway since the real sponsor for the meeting was the CIA. Looking at since the question was this is viewed as an issue of security and how do we transit again how do we draw these bridges and what are the models by which we do this. What are the affordances of the technology that could enable us to create the new models for accountability, the new models for expertise and again not simply a deliberative vision of everybody talking all of the time but tapping the wisdom that is out there not just the wisdom of the crowd but the wisdom that resides in specific communities and bringing it to bear to make public life better and more effective. And I think as we begin to think about this and I would view this as not surely the project for the next 10 minutes in a PowerPoint but potentially the project and the questions that those of us who study and research in this area need to work on is to figure out both what works and also what doesn't work. For peer production and open models of collaboration are not the answer to everything. They're not the magic sort of as a friend of mine refers to the magic pixie dust that solves all of our political woes that will make democracy automatically better. We have a lot of hard work to do between now and January 20th, 2009, a date I'm looking forward to in order to make democracy better but there are things that we can do and they depend very specifically the answers, the models, depend very specifically on the questions. So let me just illustrate with a couple of examples, a couple of more visual examples to suggest the ways in which the new kinds of civic media might be brought to bear to affect the institutions of political power and as such to strengthen democracy. Well it turns out it's pretty good, what we're pretty good at is identifying gaps in information and finding information. So if the question is how do I figure out what is the next environmental hot zone or in this case the way I've been spending my time for the last two years, how do I find out what is the scientific information that is relevant to the examination of a patent application? It turns out the web is a pretty good way to do that and that we can organize the model by which we can get at very, very structured pieces of information. So the Peer to Patent Project has spent the last we launched on June 15th but we've been working on this for a little while now, trying to figure out the very, very specific process and structured process by which to gather the information that we need to answer this question of what is the information out there that will help to determine whether an invention deserves the grant of a 20 year monopoly right to exclude all others from practicing an invention. We know increasingly the patents play a very significant role in our economy that the rate of patenting has doubled over the last 10 years, that the rate of patent litigation has similarly gone up and patent litigation starts at a minimum of a million dollars a case. So we're talking about vast expenditures going into litigation instead of R&D, patents being granted at enormous rates because the patent office is so backlogged and so lacking in the information that it needs to figure out whether something deserves the grant of a patent or not and in turn is granting too many bad patents. So this is not a lecture about patent law. What I wanna say is that this is an example, this is a paradigm and the reason we took on this project was there's a way to experiment empirically with the idea of how do we use an open community, distributed community to find specific information. So I'll put up just some data about what the project is, which is essentially a year long pilot to develop the model for doing open expertise in government. A model which could equally be well applied in transportation and environment to other intelligence questions having nothing to do with the patent office but for the fact that the patent office of course particularly beleaguered by the lack of information and the need for good scientific information. One of the other things that it turns out we can do extremely well is we can bring diverse expertise to a problem. So if what we need to do, and this partly harkens back to the deliberative ideal is to get at really good information to answer a question, well it turns out that opening up the way that we get an information is a very useful way to do that. This is a survey that we did after one month into the project and what it shows us is a very diverse level of participation in terms of the variety of so-called experts. Not professionals in that these are not patent lawyers. These are not even all scientists. They're not even patent professionals. What they are people coming from a diverse array of a diverse range of professions but who all have expertise and enthusiasm to bring to a problem and diverse perspectives to bring on getting information. Now switching to other people's projects. What it turns out we can also do fairly well is to make sense of data. So where there's a large quantity of data and there are lots of examples of this I just picked the census project coming down the street from IBM Research. Some of you may have seen this. What they've been very good is providing the tools to help other people make sense, particularly visual sense of census data. And it turns out that the visual technologies and the visual affordances of the computer screen are enormously useful for helping us to connect the worlds of information, expertise and power. I mentioned another example up there, cpec.org. I often show slides from them so I don't wanna do it today but I wanna point it out to you because it's a wonderful example of getting communities involved, senior citizens and high school students together in making sense of local land use data in order to police the conditions of use in their own communities. What civic media, distinctly from traditional media also does I think is helps contribute enthusiasm to a problem. And perhaps more important than anything it's not so much information or expertise but enthusiasm, a sense of fun, a sense of engagement, a sense of willingness to work on a problem. And here are some examples of course from Second Life, the tax protests up in the upper left-hand corner. You'll see an example from our island, democracy island where a number of protests have taken place and other kinds of civic activism that have been spontaneously organized by people on the island. It's one of the best project I've ever run I have to say because I've never done anything on this project. All we did was open up the island, call it democracy island and invited as a result other people to do their work, to do their projects and to bring their enthusiasm to a platform that we offered. I like to refer to myself as a democracy slumlord because we provided essentially the real estate for other people to experiment with creating things like you can't quite see, maybe I have this somewhere in here, the floating deliberation room, the three-dimensional wiki for doing urban land use. I think I have a picture of that in a moment. Uncovering assumptions, smart vote coming out of Switzerland being used now for their upcoming election. Some of you may have seen this, lets you have fun if you speak French, German or Italian or even if you don't. You can go in and answer a series of political questions and then see a set of visualizations that show you the extent to which your political candidates actually match a set of assumptions about policy and politics. So what we can do very well using the tools that we might design and build and that are beginning to be built is uncover assumptions about often very opaque and very complex political data. Scenario planning, the kind of activity that I was called to do in Washington can be very well done using distributed media to bring together people who share the enthusiasm and can use the visual technologies available to themselves to engage in developing ideas about scenario planning, policy planning, all kinds of difficult and complex political questions. This enables us to do things like visualize linkages and connections by making the data readily available. This is again from, this is the smart spider tool that comes off of the smart vote site and it turns out the folks from the Berkman Center will be amused to know that by randomly answering a set of questions I am perfectly politically matched in Switzerland to the wife of the one of the Berkman Center Fellows who is running for political office. That is a total coincidence but I'm very pleased should I vote in Switzerland I would vote for her. In fact I answered the questions in Italian I don't even speak Italian so you know it's my horoscope is such that I am destined. I knew I liked her anyway. Very good also for doing things like what we might think of as breaking the government log jam and this is my transition of course to Ethan who will I'm sure talk about the Global Voices Project. The transparency breaking up corruption making people aware of political problems bringing attention to an issue and then of course doing things about it not just talking about it. Being able to take action by using the visual medium that's available to them and using the tools that are available to them to actually make things happen. So just a few thoughts and reflections on how we might revisit the deliberative ideal. This is my Jean-Jacques Rousseau picture in case you're wondering it is not Thomas Jefferson although it could have been. But what the potential is is for civic media to help us foster the First Amendment in new ways to really think about and I think you've already expressed this point well strengthen our democracy by doing not just by talking by making government more accountable not simply through a traditional conception of the press but through the new conception of media that we're inventing today through the technologies that we're developing the visual technologies, the group based technologies the network technologies that allow us to come together not to bowl alone but as I put it to click together to enable us to bring information to bear to make better decisions in government to make better decisions in institutions and ultimately to connect civic media to power. Thank you. Thank you very much. So our final speaker today is Ethan Zuckerman. He's a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School and he's the co-founder of the websites Global Voices which he created with Rebecca McKinnon and Geek Core. Well thanks and thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to spending more time here. I'm from the exotic far off part of town over that other little university on the other side of town but the same grant that's supporting the new Civic Media Center is also supporting some of the work that we're doing over at Global Voices so I think I'm going to be invited over here at least once a year for our roundup and I appreciate the fact that even before that roundup I got invited over. I did realize that I'd made a terrible faux pas sitting here which is that I didn't have a single Robert Putnam or bowling reference in my slide deck. So as I sort of sat here listening to the three previous speakers I tried to figure out what I could do to address the issue of bowling also in the context of the Civic Media site that I run. The problem that we have is that when you go onto a site like Global Voices which looks only at the developing world and you search for bowling you end up with endless stories about cricket and this sense in which you bring a technology into a different context and you get a different result is really sort of a theme in many ways of the work that I've been doing for the last couple of years because a lot of the technology that we're looking at is technology that to one extent or another has premiered in the United States or in Western Europe but is often being used in very, very different ways and often very innovative ways in the developing world. So when we think about citizen media and we think about this in a US context we often sort of start our history with Howard Dean and the Dean Scream or if we have a bit more history with Dave Weiner and screaming about various technology issues but it's basically white guys screaming and this generally found, we found ourselves sort of becoming politically important when it looked like this phenomenon of white guys screaming online might actually have some political relevance or at least some relevance in raising money. This sort of seminal moment within blogging and the developing world happening actually a little bit before not really in parallel but happening as early as 2001 is Solomon Pox's blog which many of you have probably heard of. This was a blog of an Iraqi architect who was writing about his experiences living in Baghdad as we were all getting ready for the US invasion and does anyone have any idea why this is so dark? Yeah, we'll get over it. Anyway, part of what was so interesting with Solomon Pox was that not only did you get sense for what was going on sort of politically where were the roadblocks? How safe was it? Was there electricity or not? You started also finding out very, very personal details of this young man's life where he talks about his sexual proclivities and his fondness for beer and essentially challenging a lot of the images that many of us had of what an ordinary Iraqi might look like. We began referring to this phenomenon as the phenomenon of bridge blogging. Someone using web 2.0, read, write media, whatever the heck we wanna call this to challenge your sort of assumptions about a part of the world. And one of the better examples of this is a blog called Mahmoud Zden. Mahmoud is an entrepreneur in Bahrain. He's a fascinating guy. I know over the course of sort of reading his blog for a few years, I found myself challenging a lot of perceptions that I have of the Gulf region. One of the most moving posts was him talking about bringing his 12-year-old daughter to the Formula One racetrack in Bahrain and encouraging her to become a race car driver if that's what she wanted to do, or maybe just encouraging her to be a race car driver. I'm not entirely sure. But on his personal statement on this blog, when he started it, he has this wonderful paragraph. Now I try to dispel the image that Muslims and Arabs suffer from mostly by our own doing, I have to say, in the rest of the world. I am no missionary and don't want to be. I run several internet websites that are geared to do just that, create a better understanding that we're not all nuts hell-bent on world destruction. I hope I will be judged that I made a small difference. And while a lot of the people who are involved with this phenomenon of bridge-blocking aren't quite as explicit about their intentions, there's quite a bit of overlap between it. We did a survey of people in our community about why they're engaged in this process of writing online and donating a huge amount of time to sort of document what's going on in citizen media in the developing world. And the biggest reason was patriotism, nationalism, people who desperately wanted to make sure that their nation and their culture was represented online in the digital media. And that's really the impulse with which we started this project, was attempting to take a look at a world in which there were 70 million people writing online in blogs, at least as many writing online in forums, a small set of people producing online in podcasts and video casts, and some small subset were not writing just for a personal audience, not just for family and friends, but literally to build some bridges internationally. Now, what's interesting is, as we get into it, we started figuring out that this phenomenon, this bridge-blocking phenomenon, was probably a minority. And that actually there was some really other interesting phenomena going on. And my guide to this phenomenon, to a large extent, is the guy on the left, that's Alec Abdel Fattah. This is shortly after his release from prison. We'll get to how he ended up in prison in just a moment. But Alec is sort of a fascinating figure in the Egyptian blogosphere. He runs a blogging platform that a huge number of Egyptians use. Many of them are activists involved with the kafaya movement. Kafaya just simply means enough. We've had enough of Mubarak. It's a very broad political movement. It brings together student movements, communist movements, Islamist movements. Basically, if you're against Mubarak, you can be part of kafaya. He's also a geek, and he's a Drupal developer, he's an open source developer. And so he's this really interesting nexus of this sort of activist blogging community. And one of the things that he and his friends found themselves doing was essentially creating an alternative media to the media that they were encountering in Egypt. Because generally speaking, no matter how big a protest he and his kafaya friends managed to get together, they didn't get any attention in mainstream Egyptian newspapers. And so at a certain point in the process, they realized that every time that they set out to do a protest, they actually had to do two things. They had to plan the protest, and then they had to plan their own media coverage of the protest. And so they ended up essentially building mobile newsrooms based around mobile phone cameras, SMS messages, back to someone who was at home typing on a laptop. And you found these guys providing extremely detailed coverage of their rallies, and in some cases, other people's rallies. One of the most moving examples of this was a movement by Sudanese refugees who were living in Cairo, protesting at their treatment by UNHCR. And the way that most of us found out about this particular protest was the fact that kafaya covered it. So they went and started covering other people's protests as well. Because again, they felt like there were movements taking place in Egypt that literally no one was reporting on. Now, what's interesting about this is that at one of these movements, Alec found himself arrested along with 800 other activists. It was a peaceful protest for an independent Egyptian judiciary, and Alec found himself in prison. And he started doing something very odd from prison. He started blogging. And by the way, there's a key to blogging in prison. I highly recommend this for anyone who's planning on doing this. You need to make sure that your spouse is a blogger because that's how you do it. You write or draw on paper. You pass it off to your spouse who scans it in, who posts it online. My wife is a blogger. I highly recommend that you find yourself a nice blogger to pair up with if you're planning on getting into trouble. But blogging from prison gave a very unusual perspective to what was going on in this otherwise uneventful protest. Alec ended up spending something like three months in prison much, much longer than anyone had expected. And it was in part because the fact that he was blogging online and that people started blogging in support of him drew international attention to this. So what would have been a tiny little incident in Egypt turned into this sort of global incident around the power of blogging and the phenomenon of blogging from prison. And he ended up being literally the last guy to be released from prison, but he also drew more attention to the situation than almost anyone else had. What this has meant, though, is that we now see Alec and some of these other activists as sort of lead users of web technologies and sort of adapting them to their own purposes. So this is in truth my least favorite web 2.0 technology. This is Twitter. This allows you to say in a very small number of characters what meaningless thing you're doing at this time. If I were Robert Scoble, I would be here with my mobile phone saying, I am on stage giving a presentation and everyone would know that I'm on stage giving a presentation. And while this is stunningly boring to read in most people's lives, it's actually pretty interesting when your friends are human rights activists because what they're able to say is, I'm going into prison right now being questioned. If not out in five hours, please start the free Alec site again. And this has actually been tremendously successful. A lot of people subscribe to this. You can get it via your SMS. And so what happens in some cases is that Alec has said things like, they're arresting this guy Monem, they're taking him from this square to this police station. And people reading the Twitters were able to actually get on the street and stop the police car physically from manifesting to block its progress. Now Alec is sort of an easy example to point to because he's generally writing in English but the real power behind this in Egypt is with the Muslim Brotherhood. And you say Muslim Brotherhood in this country and people sort of freak out, but Muslim Brotherhood is pretty much the best organized opposition party in Egypt at this point. And what's very, very interesting is that as there's been a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood it's focused disproportionately on Brotherhood members who are blogging online. And the most visible of those is a guy named Abdel Monem. And he has basically been training Brotherhood figures on how to use blogs to organize locally and also how to promote themselves. And as a result is now, recently was released, but it's now spent two terms in prison, two short times under detention, very much because he's become a figure of interest because this technology has made it possible to take something which is a movement which is really quite quiet if you're not watching Egypt closely and try to bring it to global profile. So one of my observations on citizen media and possibly civic media, although I've certainly thought about citizen journalism more than about civic media, is that it tends to show up in your moderately repressive nations. And we're gonna call Egypt for these terms a moderately repressive nation, by which I mean you are not in fact going to disappear by standing up and staging a public protest. It is not a North Korea, it's not a Turkmanistan. I should take Burma off this list because Burma actually looks like it's being significantly more flexible than it used to be. Citizen media doesn't appear to blossom at the same rate in low repression nations. And one of the reasons for this is that there's other paths into media. In Ghana, where I've done a lot of my work over the last couple of years, we keep waiting for blogging to take off. And one of the reasons that blogging doesn't seem to take off is that it's really easy to call into a talk radio station. And talk radio is actually a much better space for civic discourse in Ghana right now than it is to do it online. Online is really useful if you wanna talk to the expatriate population, but frankly the expats are listening to the radio on the web anyway and they're calling in as well. And in Ghana, on most morning shows, there's one of the ministers who is on Joy FM. And if you have a problem with your road in your district, you speak to the minister on the air. When you have a government that that's that high functioning, there isn't as much space for this. But in places where it's very, very difficult to get access to that media space, you see people moving in and using these tools. Now, you also see governments moving back and saying, let's find a way not to use these tools. Over at Berkman, we're involved with a project called OpenNet Initiative. And OpenNet Initiative is documenting what countries are filtering the internet and for what reasons. And one of the things that's become very, very clear is that countries that have a great deal of control over their press are starting to wake up to the notion that they might also need to control the online space. And we've seen at least two dozen nations significant control over what sites you can access. And this affects, in some cases, socially undesirable sites. It's tough to look at Playboy from within Saudi Arabia. That tends to creep into politically undesirable sites. It's very, very tough to read opposition websites in Ethiopia. The trend that really bothers me is that it's also crossing over into the tools of free speech. And it's getting harder and harder to access a tool like blogger.com in a country like Pakistan. And I see this as a very, very worrisome development. Even more worrisome is the fact that in many cases the corporations are in on the deal. Microsoft Spaces is the most popular non-Chinese produced blogging tool in China. And one of the reasons that Microsoft Spaces is able to operate so freely in China is that they built a service very much designed to make Chinese sensors happy. So this is a screenshot from my colleague, Rebecca McKinnon, who is conveniently fluent in Chinese, who tried to create a blog on MSN Spaces titled I Love Freedom of Speech, Human Rights, and Democracy. And the message that she got back reads, you must enter a title for your space that title must not contain prohibited languages such as profanity. Please type a different title. So once you bake censorship into the tools, you can govern certain forms of behavior. But one of the reasons we're really optimistic about these tools is something that I call the cute cat theory of web activism. Which is to say that we all know that the reason for web 2.0 is to share pictures of cute cats with or without captions. And the nice thing about this is that any tool that allows you to share cute cats also has a political use. So you could show a cute video of your cat, but you can also show videos of union protests. And the truth is there's a social cost for censoring these sites because people wanna look at cute cat photos. And so if you cut down access to flickr.com, people get really upset. But if people have access to flickr.com, in many cases they also have access to the pictures of the protests. And so it's a balancing act for governments that wanna close down these tools. So anyway, one of the hypotheses that I'm exploring right now is the idea that the level of online censorship is basically a function of how censorious the government is offline and how far it's proceeded along closing the digital divide. Which is to say that if no one in your country has access to the internet, there's really no reason to censor it. Someone should tell Ethiopia this, by the way, which has gone ahead and gone ahead and censored it very aggressively despite the fact that so few people have access. But this is one of the critical things that we have to consider in all of this. This is, incidentally, if you work in ICT for development, this slide is mandatory to put in a presentation. You have to throw in the NASA Earth at night slide because it's a very profound reminder that the space that we're working in is a space right now that connects at best about a billion people. And that a lot of the people that I'm working with are connected indirectly at best. If anyone is influenced by the internet, it's because a wealthy friend in a major city is able to get to the internet and might be able to pass some of the news along. And so civic media in these contexts can't just be internet media. We have to think about other methods. This is an amazing project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's called Interactive Radio for Justice. And the way that it works is it tries to make it possible for people in Congolese villages to ask questions of authority. And these questions get pretty basic at some point. One popular question is, hey, there's 10 soldiers sleeping in my house and they're eating all my cassava. They tell me that I'm legally required to give them as much cassava as I can and house them in my house. Are they right? Now, this is a slightly dangerous question to ask. And so you actually wanna ask it anonymously. Specifically, you wanna ask it via an SMS message because there's a good chance that if you're in Congo, you have access to an SMS phone. But then you wanna put the question in front of the right people. And in this case, it's the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Military of DRC and the Head of Monarch, which is the UN Monitoring Agency. And then you wanna spread out the message in an appropriate way, which in this case is AM Radio because AM Radio really is the universal technology nowadays. So citizen media, civic media, can't just be digital media. It's gotta be creative ways of creating two-way media. Great example in Zimbabwe right now. Most Zimbabweans at this point are desperately trying to figure out how to feed themselves in a country where literally people have stopped making bread because the government won't let them sell it at a profit anymore. And where the amount of money that would buy you that loaf of bread would buy you a four-bedroom house six months ago. But one of the few things that continues to work is the mobile phone system. And so my friends over at Kuba Tana are polling people via mobile phone to get their reactions to topics. Are you going to participate in the next strike or not? Is it worth doing or not? The web becomes the medium to press that message out to the general public, but SMS is the right medium to get that message in. And the reason for that is that we're now at a point where we've got over 100 million handsets in an African context, 300 million in China, 2.2 billion worldwide. For the vast majority of people in the world, this is not the content generation device that they care about. It's the mobile phone. Even in Tanzania, which is very, very poor, you've now got 97% of people saying not that they own a phone, but if they needed to access one, they could. And that's a remarkable statistic. That's a level of connectivity that's really unprecedented in human history. And this has really come about in the last five years or so. One of the other amazing things about mobile phones is that they let you become part of a surveillance network. Because in most cases, they've got a camera. And because you can take that image from that camera and spread it to the rest of the world, you can do what Steve Mann, who used to wander around here wearing computers on his head, used to talk about, which is finding ways to monitor systems of power. One of the ways that we're seeing this in the developing world is very literally elections monitoring. And this is from a Nigerian project that didn't work very well. But I'll tell you about a Ghanaian project that worked very, very well. In 2000, you may have remembered we had an election here in the United States. It didn't go so well. Ghana had won as well. And it went really, really well. And one of the reasons that it went so well was actually the first time that someone had taken power in a coup was voted out in a peaceful fashion. One of the reasons it worked so well is that people monitored polling sites. They would go to polling sites with mobile phones. And if they saw voter intimidation, they wouldn't call the police, because it's possible the police might fail to file the report. They would call radio stations. And they would read their reports out on the air. So suddenly something that one person is witnessing is then heard by thousands or tens of thousands of people. And there was remarkably little election violence in 2000 in part because everybody was watching. So one of the themes of my work, and particularly my work around this question of citizen media in the developing world is a question of what we're watching. And my assertion is going to be that one of the biggest problems, and one of the ones that we rarely look at is not these digital divide problems. It's not the censorship problems, but it's an attention problem. This is a map of media attention. This is a very quick and dirty analysis of Google News. This basically involves going to Google News on a given day and saying, how many stories do you have about France? And how many do you have about Greenland? And putting them up on a map. And you do this with different media sources and you get remarkably consistent looking maps. The red parts of these maps are high attention countries. Almost always North America, almost always Western Europe, the huge powers of the world, India and China and always the Middle East. I have literally never seen Israel anything other than bright red on this map. The blues are the countries that we're not paying much attention to. Always Sub-Saharan Africa, always Central America, always Central Asia, consistent over the course of four years. I have bad news for you. I've started doing this with blogs as well and the map doesn't get any different. It really doesn't change substantially. This is looking at Technoradi's most authoritative blog, same technique. Who wrote about China today? Who wrote about France today? Who wrote about South Africa today? And the answer is, as much as we would love to believe that this participatory media we're building suddenly means that we're gonna start paying attention to Madagascar, we don't. And we're not. In many cases we're simply reinforcing what's already out there in existing media. So this is one of the central challenges that I find myself wrestling with, which is how do we convince people to pay some attention to Madagascar? And what are the obstacles that we have to overcome in that process? One of the ones is language. They speak Malagasy. Who knew? I thought they spoke French. I only found out about this because there's actually a huge blogger movement in Madagascar at the moment, a very highly political blogosphere that we've started translating from. We've also started translating into Malagasy. This is one of the really interesting things about this project is that we're trying very much to be volunteer driven. We've done coverage of countries where people have stood up and said, there's blogging going on in my country, I wanna tell you about it. And we translate from and into languages where people have stood up and said, hey, I'll happily translate your side on a daily basis into Malagasy. It turns out that translation is only a tiny part of the problem. There's a much bigger part of the problem. If you're looking at Chinese blogs, this probably has become a fairly familiar image to you. And I'm guessing that it probably isn't a familiar image to most of you in there, but it is obviously a river crab wearing three watches. So the question then becomes, why is it a river crab wearing three watches? And the reason for this is the word heishi, which means to harmonize, has basically been the term that the Chinese government is using for censoring online speech. And bloggers are responding to this saying, oh man, my blog just got harmonized. And in fact, harmonized has become so popular in talking about censorship that the word harmonized now will frequently get your blog blocked. Now, fortunately, the word for river crab heishi, sounds, and I can't pronounce either of these words, so sounds fairly similar. And so people now on Chinese blogs talk about their blogs being river crabbed. Now the same thing sort of happened with a political philosophy called the three represents. That became very controversial, got blocked in many cases. Someone found a way to slightly rewrite the phrase, where's three watches? And you now see Chinese bloggers putting up this image of a river crab with three watches on it or making their own images of it as a way of essentially making visual puns about censorship. This is the challenge. Most of us within this audience can look at a map like this and say, geez, I would really like to know more about what's going on in the world. I have a genuine interest in it. The challenge in doing this is that by putting these tools of authorship into people's hands, you don't know what you're gonna get out of it. And you may not be the audience for it. And to have the capability of engaging with it, it requires a great deal of context and a great deal of translation to become part of it. So I've been giving this talk a lot lately and have been basically saying that this is a talk against cyber optimism. This is a talk against this notion that we're suddenly gonna have a network and we're all gonna be connected and we're all gonna hold hands and sing kumbaya. And the long version of this talk, by the way, talks about how badly people in the US and Nigeria treat one another between spams and between scam baiting and sort of back and forth. And that's the hour long version if you ever want it sometimes. But the point that I should make, particularly in this context, is that I'm engaged in this work because I'm profoundly a cyber optimist. I think this is possible by virtue of the fact that I am working with people in Madagascar right now to figure out what's going on politically in Madagascar. I am much closer, much more interested, much more connected to that nation than I have any reason or right to be. And that's the potential of this medium. It's just a whole lot harder than we thought it was when we started wiring everybody together in the 1970s. So I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, we have time for, we have about a little over 35 minutes for questions. If people would line up at the mics, we would appreciate it. This is not just for amplification, but also because we podcast and webcast these events. And we'd like to ask, and for that reason, if you'd identify yourself when you asked your question, looks like a steady, a fair number of people. So, but you're first in line, sir. So if you wanna... Hi there, Leon. Yes. Hi, my name is John Garfunkel. And thank you all very much. Thank you, especially Ethan, because the slide you had up for Free Alech, that's my name is on that slide. And that's one of the places I'm proud to have my name on the internet. So I hope that stays up a while. But I was a bit involved with that. And if Mary Joyce is here, she had helped me get involved last year on that. But I thank you all for the presentations. I have two questions to think about. I think you guys have like a year or five to think them over. One, just on Beth's comments, I was, in my own research on civic media, I've noticed there's one activity we do, which is the social aspect, which gets a lot of interest social media we all hear. But there's also the doing and the productivity. I've actually been calling that constructive media thanks to Seymour Papert's work inspired by it. So that's one thing to keep in mind as you think about technologies. Or I'm asking about how your program will try and balance those, both the social and then the productive or constructive as I say it. And just one other question to put out there, you don't have to, you can just think about it was, following civic media, citizens media, some of the things that don't get looked at as well are problems about ordinary people, especially with reputation and reporting network abuse, which happens with anonymous forums, with Google searches, et cetera. So I'm just curious if that's in your stew, your mix of things to consider going forward. Thank you. No, I was attracted to you, so I'm not. Oh, no, I wasn't. But I'm not sure. Well, it sounds both extremely good worthwhile for reflection. Let me just say to the first point, especially that by way of a bit of plug in some sense is I share your view about the need for constructive media, which is why that despite the fact that I not only play a lawyer on TV, but I am a lawyer, and I'm interested, and as a lawyer interested in the goal of problem solving and social justice, is that I view that the way that we bring that about is by a combination of technology, law, and policy all brought together and working in tandem. So part of the purpose in showing some of these tools, and I didn't have as much time as I would have liked today, I could have talked just about the design elements, the affordances of these tools that create certain, empower certain types of people. And Ethan talked, for example, about AM Radio, which is a wonderful example of empowering certain groups and how we disenfranchise other people in the way we design things. But I think that the project very much has to be about designing, and Chris made this point too, very much about designing for communities rather than simply designing for individuals, designing for these purposes, constructing for these purposes. And because if we view media in a social context, we're talking about not only designing software or media, radio, television, whatever the tool may be, but we're talking about designing the institutional, political, legal context that support these things. So, you know, search is one very good example of this in which, you know, and there are people, so this is, so yes, it's just to say it's a very good comment, an important reflection, and I think to my mind, the important need for interdisciplinary research and work in this area to have all of us collaborating towards bringing about, you know, complex solutions to increasingly complex problems. And that means it's not technology for technology's sake, which is why all of us are no longer cyber-optimists. What was the, were cyber-realists? What were we 10 years ago? I think we're techno-realists, also born up here in Cambridge, techno-realism. And part of being a techno-realist is seeing the technology in social context. So, in terms of the MIT Center, I think both sides of what you proposed are very much part of what we're thinking civic media is. That the definition I began with was intended to be broad so that we could support through the collaboration between comparative media studies and the media lab, you know, many different kinds of projects from many different groups of the lab, from many different aspects of what we've been doing in comparative media studies. And we definitely think of journalistic projects, social networking projects, tools that enable people to construct their own media. You know, those are all part of the spectrum of what we work with. So the goal is just doing a number of projects each year that are played out in a number of different kinds of communities across the country and internationally that will be testing grounds for new tools and new social processes. Next, yes. Hi, my name is Shava Niraad, and I'm Development Director for the Tor Project, which I've worked with Ethan and a few people around here. And I got involved in it because I'm a blogger and I have a blog at iconoclasm.gather.com which does media criticism about the stories behind news stories. Whoa, so, but I work with the Tor Project and I'm actually feeling a little bit of blogosphere fatigue right now because for three weeks in a row, we have had news stories that got slash dotted. And because they got slash dotted, misinformation got propagated through the internet faster than my 80 words per minute could keep up with common roles to try to tell people what was actually going on. So we got one week associated with a storm worm. We got associated with some guy in Sweden who sniffed embassy passwords. And this week it broke that one of our server operators decided to not be a volunteer for us and be a server operator because the German police knocked on his door at midnight and roughed him and his family up and arrested him and then said, oh, terribly sorry, it was all a big mistake. And what I want to talk to you about is I am an optimist about this, but I hear all of these people talking about deliberation versus the wisdom of crowds. And I wonder about how as the speed of information increases, we can keep civic media civil and non-historical and actually something approaching the facts. You want to start, Lucy? Well, sure, I feel your pain because one of the things that I've done is actually written a number of guides to blogging anonymously and posting anonymously, most of which rely on tour. And as the shockwaves sort of propagate out, I'm now getting the emails from the different corners of the globe and the Philippines checked in this morning. I'll expect Zimbabwe tomorrow to sort of find out whether they think I've sold them entirely down the river. I'm hoping that someone who works on information theory can actually conclusively prove that disinformation actually spreads faster than correct information. I actually think it has something to do with the signal ratio, but I think unfortunately this is reality. And I think the fatigue that some of us feel when the blog is for bites us back is precisely the same fatigue that people who miss the nice civil world of mainstream journalism where someone writes an article and you could call the editor and storm off and have a correction the next day find themselves when they suddenly find themselves in Wikipedia with completely inaccurate biographical details and so on and so forth. And unfortunately the only advice that I ever have from my friends who end up dealing with this whether they're in the NGO sector or whether they're in other sectors is, deal with it. I mean, this is unfortunately the reality of this world. It's an extremely quickly shifting landscape. The rules of it are I think still evolving and this notion that we're all so rapidly connected and so perpetually connected. And now I've got a great web browser on my phone and I'm gonna be connected even when I didn't think I was going to be connected. Radically changes how everyone has to do messaging. The people who work well within the space, I think are the people who simply realize that that's how the messages propagate now. And specifically on the tour case, Andrew Lee, I, a couple of other people are out there essentially saying no, no, no, don't worry and we're hoping that that somehow propagates at the same pace, but I don't think there's anything else that works other than figuring out how those tools work, figuring out how those dynamics work and trying to ride the same way. I don't see any other way out of it at this point. Yeah, it's very easy to romanticize the kind of misinformation contained in professional media. Right, any of us who are in academic and offer any sort of progressive critique of our society and have experienced what happens when you talk to the press on certain issues and see them reduced to sound bites and distorted could say that misinformation circulates even faster when you've got the power of broadcasting behind it or the power of a major newspaper behind it. My friend Alex Juha has been doing work on YouTube and teaching a class this term and has apparently been run through the ringer the last couple of weeks for teaching Lonely Girl 15 instead of Shakespeare. You know, with no attempt, no ability for most of the coverage to be able to express what she actually is teaching, what the goals of the course are, why you would teach a course on YouTube at the present time and so forth. So I think whenever we set up the dangers of participatory culture, we'd at least need to parallel it with an understanding of the dangers of the old system which also- Which is what I love about it. Exactly. I would just say keep the faith and keep doing the good work, so. Hi, my name's Tom Cooksy and I work for British Telecom and I'm a programmer. So most of what you've said kind of just pushed over my head back there. But I'm gonna ask a question anyway. Or not really ask a question. Have you ever heard of e-petitions? Sure, sure. Right. So how do you think that fits into the, this social media that you're talking about and do you think it's actually, do you think governments are actually gonna listen to these petitions that are being put forward? Nope. Well, I mean, I'll tell you about the e-petition that I ran. About a year and a half ago my North Asia editor, a young man named Wu Hao, got arrested by the Chinese government and detained in Beijing. Was never actually charged with a crime but ended up spending four and a half months in custody getting questioned every day. And as we started talking about Wu Hao's case, people were really insistent that they wanted to do something. And we urged people to call their legislators in the US and asked to have his name added basically to the list of people that we begged the Chinese to release every time we sit down with the Chinese. But most people don't wanna do that. Most people wanted something simpler. And something that they were very excited about doing was signing their name to an online petition. So we created an online petition. I'm sure we got a few thousand names and I'm sure it had absolutely no effect. And I think this is actually a very real danger in the sort of online activism space. I am finally, I've broken down, I'm on Facebook and every day five causes come to me and ask me to join their cause. And joining their cause means clicking the button that says join the cause. And then there's a list saying that there are 10,000 people who joined the cause. Now, there are causes that I'm part of but there are causes that I'm part of because I actually put time and thought and effort into them. When you make the barrier to participation that low, the value of that participation in my opinion approaches zero very, very quickly. Let me quickly agree and disagree with you. Where I would disagree is that I think that the fact that we have a higher degree of granularity of participation that there are causes which I can spend five minutes on and others that I can spend my life on is what makes the net and the opportunities for civic participation more pluralistic and more interesting potentially than it is in the before. And even in this is not just a net thing this includes radio and other things is the fact that I can call into that radio show or I can go to jail for something. I can have very different and varying levels of commitment that embed me in different social groups that create a different set of social belongings. So I think that is just important. So I don't think it's simply the fact that the granularity of participation is too low. My concern about e-participation and where I completely agree with you is I think it's a, well, I'm on camera, right? I think it's not included in the examples in my slide deck. Let me put it that way is because again, it's an example of a way of using the net that's completely disconnected from the actual institutions of decision-making. It's again another example of let's talk, let's sign a petition, let's voice an opinion that has no opportunity to go anywhere because there is no opportunity to get at information to structure information to supply any information in a useful way and to provide it to either use it to do something or to be useful to those who need to make decisions. So I think it's just the wrong, it's not a clearly defined solution to a clearly defined question. If there are ways of soliciting gathering opinion and finding out what causes people support and don't support, I think it's not necessarily the best designed, it just hasn't been designed or thought through very well in ways that it could be and where more can be done. Okay, probably should have been a bit more specific when I said e-petitions. What I meant was the e-petitions website that Majesty's Government runs. So if in the UK, if you go into 10 Downing Street, you can start a petition and basically anything that's got over 200 signatures, the HMG has to respond to you. And there's actually- I am actually speaking specifically about the British example because that's the one that I know as well. And I think that you're talking to that too. There is some, a kind of response required, but it's this is, we've seen examples where congressmen got email addresses that they started posting online or political candidates have put a, asked the candidate sort of link or email address and it's creating the appearance of opening up a dialogue but where in my view, there isn't the level of meaningful exchange of information that's useful for either side, neither for the public because they're being asked to do work that's not really relevant to decision-making nor is it as useful as it could be to those who are in government, who are making decisions, whether they're in government or other institutions or civic institutions, who really need and are desperate for useful information that goes beyond simply the asking of people's opinion. So in that sense, the sort of issue about the deliberative ideal is one of the things I wanted to mention is that we have for so long thought, frankly, that people are stupid and that the only thing they're qualified to do is express opinions, they're not actually qualified to provide useful information. What we're seeing in the era of civic media is that people are extraordinarily smart and that we need to actually leverage the intelligence that they have and the information that they have, not simply the opinions that they have, which frankly is much, much harder to make sense of in a complex world, but. Go over here. Thank you. My name's Rick Burns and I'm working on a local news project here in Cambridge. And my question's mainly for Ethan. It's pretty simple. Why is that map a bad thing? Why do we need to be involved in the weeds of the politics in Madagascar? And I mean, I say that as somebody who, I mean, I've been overseas and worked at it, done reporting overseas and it's something I care about, but we have a lot of problems here in Boston. So, I mean, what is the, why do we need to know about that? It's a terrific question. It's the center question that I've been wrestling with for the last four or five years. The sort of Rudy Giuliani answer to it is 9-11, which is to say. I can see the bridge blocks as that. No, no, no, literally, 9-11. And the reason for it is, suddenly immediately after 9-11, there was an enormous amount of interest in Central Asia. People who had been trying to sell a book on Uzbekistan for the last 10 years suddenly found that they had best sellers on their hands. One of the really interesting things about a highly globalized world, like the one that we're living in, is that our physical security, our economic security, our security of ideas, any of this has become interconnected to a degree that it's never been before. And so, suddenly, something that seems completely irrelevant, like politics in Uzbekistan, suddenly becomes incredibly important when it looks like we're in a global war against people who appear to be camping out in the Furgana Valley. In the same way that anyone right now who is looking at business opportunities and isn't looking and trying to understand what's going on in India or China or Brazil or Russia is probably making terrible areas. And I guess my feeling on this is that as we get more and more interconnected, a lot of these problems, a lot of these situations really demand global awareness. One of the reasons I picked Madagascar is that I actually find it really hard to answer the question of why you would care about Madagascar. My best guess in it right now is that it's actually the most biologically diverse island on the planet and actually has a level of species diversity that we literally don't see anywhere else, and particularly for people who are interested in the natural sciences and discoveries of new compounds and such. It's actually quite a fascinating place. But this is the same question people ask about the economists. This is the same question people ask about why the New York Times continues to put international news in that front section. My contention on all of this is that we're actually doing ourselves a tremendous disservice as we're interconnecting our atoms. We're making it possible to get water through Fiji. But most of us know very, very little about Fijian politics. Those atoms and those bits and those memes cross over at a certain point, and we've let the atoms go much, much further ahead than we've let the Madagascar. I would just answer in terms of the Center for Civic Media, which is a slightly different point, which is that what we're trying to do is develop, and as I said, game new technologies so that they help with civic space, help with civic media, civics rather than harm them. But we're also trying to generate knowledge about how that works. And there's this famous example of artificial intelligence neural networks where the DOD was essentially trying to train something that could recognize tanks. And they worked on a set of photographs of like 200 photographs with no tanks and 200 with tanks, and they trained the neural network so it could perfectly differentiate between the two and then they tried it in the field and it absolutely didn't work. And it turns out that all the photos of the tanks were taken on a cloudy day and all the photos without tanks were taken on a sunny day and that's actually what the system learned to differentiate. And we run a risk as we develop these technologies, if we just develop them in Cambridge side or Somerville, that they won't extend, that what we've come up with is knowledge that works in a particular venue, but maybe isn't very generalizable. So as we go through with this project, we're really gonna be looking at very specific communities, working with very specific community groups in particular locations and developing technologies for them. But we're also gonna be trying to understand and generalize what are powerful and consistent techniques and what only work in specific areas and what can we learn from that. Okay. I think Ethan was the only one who mentioned corporations. And there's a problem when we talk about consumers of media as journalists tend to do and not talk about citizens. There's another problem, which is talking about civics rather than the polis, but I'll leave you to reread Charles Olson to figure that one out. The nexus of power within our culture and our society, and I think probably increasingly in the world is less with governments and more with businesses and corporations and addressing them with e-petitions or even demonstrations or even legislation is a really difficult problem. One of the things that's happening now in the country is that people feel that they are powerless and they're right. We have no place for the edge of the lever. And I would suggest to you that thinking about businesses and corporations and structures of money, finance, legal systems, things like that has to be looked at. Don't just concentrate on governments, local, regional or national. I mean, I mentioned corporations too and one of the major parts that I was talking about was that the producers of consumer technologies are producing things that are in their own interests. I literally said that. So that is one aspect of what I was saying and you're absolutely right on many levels. The trick is there are some really interesting counter examples and one of them has to do with these constructive technologies that the questioner and a bunch of us were talking about. Right now when you go to a website there's a very good chance it's being served by the Apache server which is a beautiful example of a civic, constructive, collaborative project that essentially is bringing Microsoft much less market share than by any means it should have. And so what we're going to be doing is looking at different interesting prospects that allow communities to serve themselves in the same way that the open source community has served itself. But it's by no means clear that that will work in every situation. But it's certainly one of the very existing lanterns that were lighthouses that we're looking at on the horizon. Maybe I'll just say very quickly since I think first of all it's an important and well taken point and in an effort to focus I want to talk about democracy in the traditional sense but I absolutely agree with you and there was a comment there about governments are owned and that's who I was referring to. This is a very much more complicated question than who is government really if we wanna, you're getting at the heart of that. But I think my perhaps unfortunate attack on the British e-petition system is answered by your comment in that the fundamental problem with something like an e-petitions or just putting out an email address is that it doesn't really get at any kind of institutional change. Simply openness is not by itself it's not simply changing the institutions of power. It's not changing the way we make decisions. It's not fundamentally bringing about openness in any new way or really opening up that kind of log jam in the way that I think your point gets to and really signals the importance of why we need to start doing these things in all of our institutions, governmental, corporate and at the liminal space that goes across these different things is trying to which is why my own research and interest is on how we connect up these things, how we sort of begin to do this. Interestingly the patent project that we've been doing is a project that involves corporations, government and philanthropies and academic institutions and that's been a very important part to my mind of the experiment that we've been engaged in is looking at how to open up this community across those institutional boundaries as a way of bringing about some kind of change in the process. Not simply a more voices or more opinions. So anyway, it was an important comment. Thank you. Over here. Hi, my name's Emily Lin. I'm a master's student in the technology, innovation and education program over at Harvard. Go Harvard. So Ethan, I actually- I'm a Radcliffe fellow this year so I'm actually one of them. Working both sides. Despite our institutional connection, I actually take issue with your statement, just deal with it to your fellow bloggers who have problems with the speed of misinformation spreading. I know that you were talking about a very small facet of the speed of information, basically dealing with misinformation spreading and what do you do about that. But with relation to what Henry showed with the car in the three generations, obviously again romanticized, but that doesn't happen now because my grandfather has no idea what a computer is and it just happens too fast. So as far as substituting participatory media for the deliberative ideal, implicit in the idea of deliberation is also this idea of time lapse and reflection and like what happens to those people who are not in the culture of, as you put it Ethan, that's just how it is. That's how it is for a segment of the population is civic media supposed to be just for that segment. It's a great question and it's what I get for giving a flip answer. Look, that's how it is means we then have to figure out the solutions to it. An example of how one might try to solve this is a project that we've been working on for years over at Berkman and it tries to deal with the phenomenon of you try to have an online discussion and someone is always the fastest to the keyboard, so anyone says something and the other person just jumps in and gets another comment in there and Jonathan Zitrain who's not only a professor with us but is also a software developer decided, add a heck with that, we're gonna go in rounds and the way that this class discussion is gonna happen is that everyone has the chance to have one comment and around that round is closed, we crank and then everyone goes again and so it was a way of sort of adding in a technical fix to that sort of explosion of information. Now, I'll tell ya, that hasn't become a real popular classroom discussion system. It hasn't gone out and sort of conquered the world and I guess what I would say is that within all of this, these changes happen and then we try over some period of time to evolve our behavior and figure out what to do with them. Most people when they get onto email have a certain number of very predictable behaviors. They forward things all over the place, they use all caps, they reply very, very fast to something, they don't consider it, you'll always see someone put up their first retract email. I'd like to retract this email. There's actually companies out there that try to build retractable email by virtue of the fact that they don't actually send you text, they send you an image so you can take the image off the server later forgetting that of course it's digital and we can all make copies of it. My point in all of this is just that shift happens and then we try to figure out how to cope with it. I'm not real happy about the problem that Chava is talking about and I'm dealing with it as well but I think unfortunately there's no way to turn this particular one back. We have enough people with enough devices that connect quickly enough that as much as I'd love to put a proposal in front of IETF to slow every packet down by about half an hour, it's not gonna happen. So that's all I meant by it, not to dismiss the seriousness of the problem but to make the argument that it's gonna have to be a social adaptation to it. But to get to the heart of what I took to be your question about the transgenerational image that we were talking about, what we're talking about is what I call the participation gap, where it is for the last decade we've focused on the digital divide which was defined in technical terms in terms of wiring the classroom, wiring the library, ensuring everyone has access to networked communication but the participation gap is about social skills and cultural competencies in using those technologies to become a full participant in the society and that requires a different kind of educational intervention, a different kind of social practice that enables that to take place. I'm very interested in that transgenerational context. I mentioned Jean Burgess' work on digital storytelling where she describes young people going into old folks' homes, working with senior citizens, collecting their old photographs, collecting their stories, being facilitators that help them learn how to construct that into a different kind of representation that can be passed on, that can be shared, as a kind of ritual that they work together. The young person maybe knows the technology better, the old person has a different kind of knowledge that can be passed on along that way. And the analogy I often think about is the town pageants of the 19th century where you had strong face-to-face societies and continuities across generations, the telling of the founding of the town was staged year after year by different generations of young people. And in the towns that were relatively new, the people who were the founders or the family of the founders would pass that knowledge on to the new generation that were playing the parts, as were the older generation who played the part 10 years ago have a different, have a connection to the young person who's playing the part today. So it really actually turns out to be, without a romanticizing and a powerful mechanism of creating the exchange of knowledge across generations and the passing on of skills, history, local context across generations. And so I am hoping that one of the things that the Civic Media Center does is really take on this question of how we reconnect young and old and make that a central focus of how we build civic engagement in a new way to help combat the participation gap problem, at least as it affects aging Americans. Yes, over here. Gene Coo from the Berkman Center. It sounds like there's some agreement that here that you can measure the success of the Civic Media by the ability of the communities that use that media to then access levers of power that they previously didn't have access to. And so I really appreciate the framing of some of this discussion in terms of Putnam and then the shift from looking at individuals to looking at associations and associations at least in American politics as a basis of how we access power. Corresponding to that shift is I'm curious if there's also then a shift from looking at just information which a lot of you have talked about in terms of media and when we think about media there's, we often think about the information that flows back and forth to, and Beth I think first addressed it by what you, with the word enthusiasm. But ways in which groups come together and form, not just around information but when you think about Ethan's story about how getting information out about which police car is carrying the dissident to the jail there's also together with that the willingness of people to actually go to the streets now that they have the information in their hands and prevent that car from moving forward at risk of probably their own physical safety or freedom. So I'm curious to what extent you see also Civic Media as not just simply helping people share information across with each other but also help building that sense of group identity or enthusiasm or motivation to actually act. Sure, go for it. So thanks for the question and Gene of course is what he's being modest and not talking about his own interesting work on virtual world's research and on bringing technology to bear to actually help people to take action and to make sense of their legal rights and become more effective participants. And yes, I think it's exactly right is that one of the things, and it's why I took issue a little bit with Ethan's comment about the granular or what I took to be an attack on the granularity of participation is that one of the wonderful things that the new media afford the opportunity to do virtual worlds in particular is to make it easier for us to come together and to take action together about whatever it is that we care about. And I think the interesting thing is and one of the ways in which I would also I've moved away from, and you have to understand that I'm also was a very die hard deliberative Democrat, I mean I've come, you know I'm sort of like experienced this conversion that's ongoing so I feel like to confess this constantly is about this abandonment of this ideal or the refashioning of this ideal is that these ends no longer have to be purely political, political, aka dull and boring, is that when we come together to do things to share in a purposive ideal, whatever that may be including make money, build something, talk about something, do something, whatever it is that we care about, play a game in fact, then it has these wonderful civic externalities, social civic externalities more in the Putnam-Mesk sense but I think it also has a profoundly political sense in that as soon as we accomplish something in the world together we're powerful and that when we rethink, we open up the boundaries of what we define to be political power we encompass this much broader swath of political media which is why I think looking at the ways in which three dimensional interfaces like virtual worlds enable us to engage in collective action, something that you've been doing and enable us to be powerful in whatever the ways that we define power. So the other point I would just add is that it's about how we define it for ourselves in the groups and communities to which we belong is what makes it fundamentally interesting from a democratic perspective and a First Amendment perspective because it respects our values and our values. I'm sorry, that's the sound of Second Life's filling over to that. Yeah, I guess I would make an argument that the United States as Henry points out all the time is kind of unique in having an idea of local newspapers as opposed to kind of a national but political paper, several vying political papers in a country and I think that we've got this idea of journalism and a kind of neutrality that's embedded in journalism or kind of disinterestedness which makes when you think about journalism or civic journalism it makes you think that that disinterestedness has to maintain but one of the interesting things of one of my students who's a Wikipedia and brought to my attention was just how stale the Wiki News site is, they're doing something like at most a few posts a day at this point and the reason is because it's impossible to write news from the disinterested neutral point of view that Wikipedia is supposed to be using. They can't come to any kind of consensus about what's even a good story. So I think that one of the interesting things is we've shown that information doesn't lead to action. Having knowledge of your own situation doesn't necessarily help and this John Knight quote that I had at the beginning, thus we seek the Knight-Ritter newspaper is to besture the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests. It's that rousing part and producing technologies that will help them pursue their true interests that is really, really critical in this equation I think so. Well we have been profoundly uncivic and that the speakers occupied a bit more than our time today and you got less time because clearly there was a lot of interest from the floor in questions remaining. We hope that interest will motivate you to come back to future communication forum events this term. There are several others that are involved with some of the questions we've been discussing here tonight and we'll continue with a series in the spring in terms of the events we're gonna host, co-host for the communication forum through the civic media, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. So thanks everyone for coming. Thanks to Beth and Ethan. Thank you.