Unquestionably, blogging has encouraged greater political participation. Nonetheless, it appears that choosing to blog about politics remains socially stratified. I just did a quick and dirty re-analysis on some Pew figures from 2006 and found that not only is blogging in the US already skewed towards the college educated (39% of bloggers contacted had college degrees compared to 28% of the US population 25 and over at the time) but political blogging is even more so - 59% of those sampled who blogged primarily about politics (N=16) have college degrees. I believe the sample size makes it difficult to be definitive about this but the numbers are suggestive. Has anyone written up a ‘proper’ statistical study of how socio-economic status correlates with particular forms of weblogging use?

This week saw the launch of Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media - a collection of ethnographic studies in both white paper (58 pages) and book form - and the release of a draft literature review Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content (87 pages) both of which arrived opportunely as Sonia Livingstone and I are busy trying to finish off a short paper “On the rapid rise of social networking sites: Emerging findings and policy implications”. There goes the day!

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

If I were to be really cool I would say that I was among the first to join Friendster but moved to Myspace fairly early on when most of my friends-in-bands were totally ‘in’ to it (and ‘I’m here to help’). I would also say that I was invited to Joost beta (because I like to download stuff). I would also say that I’ve been ripping & burning lots of music and films from p2p’s early hay days (you have to get real about what you can take with you on the road). And although I brushed elbows with some big name record companies on this topic it didn’t refrain me from, all lovey dovey, r&b-ing. I would also say that I flirted with AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger but when a deceased friend kept reappearing on AIM it was time to go. I forgot my password for MSN (and gosh, I get fairly upset about Microsoft’s passport thing, so MSN got abandoned very fast) and Yahoo meant a blast from the past who kept on sending offline messages (’next!’ as they say in sheaux biz). I would also say that from the mid-1990s I taught myself some basic programming mambo jumbo and toyed with the idea of becoming a digital architect. It turned out that I had a short attention span. Never got into the hang of BBS. Yes, I do remember BBS. As a matter of fact, I stem from that period, from before when terms like ‘being networked’ and ‘digital’ seemed to become the norm for a lot of us; I know that there was no internet and no email for instance (well, for the common peeps like me). I guess these statements date me so to speak.

John Palfrey’s blog post on the Berkman Center’s project on Digital Natives raises the question who are actually these so-called Digital Natives? In his and Urs Gasser’s upcoming book ‘Born Digital’ (Basic Books, 2008) they explore and address an emerging global culture of connectivity, communication and content. Where the world is the network and the people the content… Where multi presence no longer differentiates between analogue players and the digital world. Are we then all Digital Natives? No. Are we all Born Digital? Heck, I’m not and even if I were, there would be no guarantee that I would be a Digital Native.

So, this is a discussion we’re having at the Berkman. What are the attributes? Age, culture, economics, etc. All of them? Who do they represent? What is its place in our day-to-day activities? I guess the main claim explored is the idea that connectivity and communal activities seems to be defining how people will live and work in times to come (a claim I’m critically assessing but will write about in due course). What are the implications for privacy? Safety? IP? Information quality? etc. And looking at sites like Google and Facebook where platforms are provided for us to connect (and create) we should ask ourselves how commonality here is really governed… And what that actually means from both user- and firm-centric perspectives.

So to tell you the truth: I have pimped my ‘all-features’ cell phone (truth be told that we usually lead separate lives). I would also say that I love taking pictures so possess more cameras than one might consider healthy, so transgressed into the bits & bytes of it (oftentimes end up with tears in my eyes and my good ol’ camera with real film in my hands). Aw my gawd. I’m an old fart (thank you, David Weinberger ;-).

Fred Stutzman blogged recently about the move from blogging to the use of “in betweenâ€? software tools for very short postings. I am struck by the extent to which the framing of software tools affects their use. Even when tools have quite similar functionalities they get used differently depending on what they are ‘supposed’ to be for. For example, as Fred noted, people could choose to blog about very micro events but now that twitter has come along they use that instead. Or in my interviews with MySpace users they say that conventional email is ‘looong’ (ie they feel they have to write formally on email) while they can send short messages using MySpace’s internal email system because the norms that have emerged on MySpace are different. Though of course there is nothing in principle to prevent them from simply writing shorter emails - it’s not like there’s a per-message charge (yet!)

Fred seems to suggest that these tools are used differently because of their affordances – particularly that tools like twitter are explicitly directed at friends while blogging is “cast to the etherâ€?. There may be an element of this by more sophisticated users but my research with personal bloggers suggests that many of them feel they are sending messages exclusively to their social network even though what they write may be visible to everyone.

PS apologies to our readers about the recent disappearance of the site - we hope we’ll be back for good now…

David Brake

Wikipedia in English has a couple of things working for it. English is the international language of science and a first or second language for most of those already connected to the Internet. The population of people from whom the core editing population is likely drawn - literate people in developed countries with good Internet access and enough time after their basic needs are met to devote to a volunteer project - are also largely English speakers. But it turns out according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (speaking at TED), only about 1/3 of accesses to Wikipedia are to the English language part.

When I heard him say this I immediately wondered (given the fact he admits that 600-1,000 people make up the ‘core’ of wikipedia’s editors) how many people are primary contributors in other languages? It turns out in the case of Swahili at least the answer appears to be just four, and only one of them is African (living in America).

When contributor numbers are low and when the big English language volunteer community at Wikipedia can’t keep an eye on things (because they can’t read the language) what is to prevent individuals or groups with an axe to grind exploiting the Wikipedia brand? Has anyone looked to see whether the entries on the causes of AIDS written in small African languages are consistent with current science or lean towards crackpot theories? What does the Chinese language version of Wikipedia say about the ‘June 4th incident’ at Tiananmen Square and is its ‘neutral point of view’ account significantly different from that of the English language version of the same event? I just checked on this and a Google translation of the Chinese language account seems to tone down the casualty figures, saying something like “specific figures are not known, there are hundreds of thousands of view” while the English version says “Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000″.

This is of particular concern given that it recently emerged that selected Wikipedia articles will be installed on the $100 laptops being produced by the One Laptop Per Child Consortium. Is there a danger that articles in non-English languages (selected by whom?) may not be produced to the standards held by the English-language Wikipedia and yet may be seen by impressionable children as the infallible wisdom of the Internet handed down in their magic boxes?

But I’d like to end on a cheerful note. If the students who receive these laptops are very lucky their teachers could use Wikipedia articles as a way to introduce critical media literacy. They might be told that these Wikipedia articles are written by ordinary people like them and can be edited by them. It would be pleasing to think that the dearth of Internet content aimed at developing countries could be tackled, at least in part, by those nations’ schoolchildren.

David Brake

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

David Brake

There is now an official site about the One Laptop Per Child project and the announcement of this prompted a small explosion of debate about their merits on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list . It has encouraged me to blow the dust off the collection of links I have been holding on to since November and to weigh in myself a bit on the subject.

Others’ Criticism:

• Institute for the Future of the Book: hundred dollar laptops may make good table lamps “it’s hard not to laugh at the leaders of the free world bumbling over this day-glo gadget, this glorified Trapper Keeper cum jack-in-the-box (Annan ended up breaking the hand crank), with barely a word devoted to what educational content will actually go inside, or to how teachers plan to construct lessons around these new toys.”
• Further criticism in more depth by the (competing) Fonly Institute. I agree with their issues completely, though I think they rather ‘over-sell’ the problems. I do fear as they do that if this device doesn’t fly it might make it more difficult to get any future interest in a better thought through ICT programme based on low-cost computing.
• Ethan Zuckerman also frets about one key aspect the Fonly Institute and others highlighted: the optimistic forecasts by the laptop’s designers that students will spontaneously fiddle with and create with them.

Description

• A week ago Ethan produced an excellent in-depth technology overview which reveals among other things that while the laptops will be human-powered the hand-crank has been eliminated from the design.
• An eight minute video tour of the device was the first I came across several months ago - it might be interesting to compare to the overview above.
• If you are interested in description of the project from its leader there is a 55 minute video interview with Negroponte about it (which I haven’t managed to listen to yet).

My thoughts on the AoIR debate

I would say most of the discussion on the mailing list has been critical of the OLPC project. Much of the criticism is for reasons I agree with but some seemed a little doctrinaire. This is not an ‘inferior’ technology as Christian Fuchs suggests - it is an appropriate one. Even if ‘conventional’ laptops costing ten times as much were made available in the countries where the OLPC will be trialled, they would arguably be less useful as they would be less durable and would rely on more expensive components and software. These laptops will not tie their users in to Western commercial technology and standards as Christian fears (at least not any more than they are already) because they are based solidly on open source software. And rightly or wrongly these are not aimed at the countries whose inhabitants live on $2 a day - they are aimed at middle-ranking developing countries like China, India and Brazil which have enough money to consider this kind of investment in their children (though I would still argue that this major sum spent in ‘conventional’ ways on teachers or books would yield a better result).

Lastly, Jeremy Hunsinger says there is no plan for teacher or student training to go with these devices. This would of course be a big concern if true. It is true that the designers appear to have weirdly utopian ideas about children teaching themselves using these laptops with little or no teacher intervention (as echoed by Wojciech Gryc). See for example the OLPC FAQ - note it does not even mention as a question the need for training kids to learn with them and it says, among other things:

While the younger generations who are affected by this project become more computer literate and technologically developed in a modern sense, they will begin to have a more profound social leverage than their elders. The formative years of childhood, and the education received during that time span contribute to a wholistic result, which will present a tremendous contrast between those who have been given a computer-based education and those who have not.

Which is techno-utopianism at its finest. I can only hope that (since the wiki is open to anyone to edit) this is the view of a OLPC ‘fellow traveller’ not the staff. It is true that there have been a few promising pilots that demonstrated even Delhi slum children will teach themselves how to use computers out of sheer curiosity given the chance but I would be amazed if there has been enough research on how this works and under what conditions to satisfy the academic pedagogical community (has there been thorough discussion of pilot projects like the ‘hole in the wall’ one yet in academic journals and conferences?).

In any event I am a little more optimistic - since pilot organizations will be investing a lot of money (relative to their budgets) on these devices I would hope some of them at least will devote some careful thought to the issues that Jeremy and others pointed out and turn deaf ears to the OLPC team’s assurances that these are pure ‘machines for learning’ - no teacher input required.

David Brake