Cross-border Swarming

Cairo youth didn't act alone in using social media to depose Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the New York Times says today in a front-page story. Their Facebook and YouTube activism was part of a sophisticated, two-year, online collaboration with Tunisian youth activists that used social media to reach across national borders to commiserate about torture, trade tips on evading tear gas, and plot how to use technology to duck surveillance.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons," Times correspondents David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger wrote, describing the anatomy of the movement that led to protesters' successful face-off in Tahrir Square against less tech-savvy Egyptian authorities.

"What we discovered in reporting this story was that what's happening in the Middle East now is more than just a contagion in which one group inspires the next," Sanger told WNYC Radio this morning on The Brian Lehrer Show. "There was, thanks to Facebook and other social networking elements, a lot of communication back and forth across borders, but of course there are no borders (on the Internet). ...Imagine what a shock that was to Egyptian authorities -- to discover that the entire security system they had spent billions to build and focus on the inside never even considered this other (cross-border technological) threat."

[Wael Ghonim -- the Egyptian Google executive whose Facebook page is credited with helping to catalyze the crowds in Tahrir Square -- told CBS 60 Minutes last night that "Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google and without YouTube, this (revolution) would never have happened." CBS Correspondent Harry Smith, in this blog post today, quotes Ghonim as saying that the revolution "is like Wikipedia, okay?" Social media enabled everyone to be contributing content, Ghonim told Smith. "Everyone was contributing small pieces. No one was the hero but everyone was the hero."]

Sanger agrees that social media were critical to Cairo's youth revolution, which used online social networks to help destabilize the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, forcing him to resign from his 30-year reign on February 11th. "But what was really remarkable" about the Egyptian youth movement, Sanger told WNYC, is that it used both high and low tech to organize support:

"While social media were used to organize ringleaders, once they got going, they also used some of the oldest forms of communications -- putting up leaflets and fliers and walking through some of the poorest sections to reach people without Net connections. They shouted their message in the streets and picked up a following, liked the Pied Piper. This was a combination of extremly high tech organization and extraordinarily low-tech organization."

And now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt, Sanger says. He and Kirkpatrick quote Walid Rachid, 27, one of the members of the April 6 movement in Cairo -- an Egyptian Facebook group -- as saying that "Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world." At a meeting of youth movement leaders last night in Cairo, Rachid told Kirkpatrick: "...If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes." According to the Times story, the members of the Tunis and Cairo youth movements are talking about sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.

But Sanger cautions that the movement's success in Cairo doesn't insure its success elsewhere, especially in countries where authorities are far more sophisticated in the use of the Internet to organize protest. Sanger told WNYC: "I'd love to say Facebook was protection against the military, but had the military decided it was going to open fire on protesters and round people up, this could have looked more like Tiananmen Square, then I think we would have had something very different here." Sanger added: "...Just because social networks can be organized doesn't necessarily mean they will be successful at overcoming a regime." Sanger said that some regimes, like China, "are extraordinarily adept at using the Internet and social media to follow dissidents and punish them." Mubarak's regime, he says, "was clueless" about the power of social media and the Web -- but not every regime is, nor will be in the wake of what happened to Mubarak.

Meanwhile today, The Associated Press is reporting that the U.S. State Department has begun sending Twitter messages in Farsi to reach social media users in Iran, with some of the Tweets accusing Iran's government of "illegalizing dissent" while at the same time praising Egyptian protesters. The State Department's Farsi Twitter account had 60 followers within two hours of its launch, the AP was reporting. The AP also is reporting today that the State Department launched an Arabic Twitter feed last week in an effort to communicate with the Egyptian protesters and signal its support.

For more on the role of social media in political activism in the Middle East, see Cairo's Facebook Flat, below:

(Photo of Egyptian Facebook activist Wael Ghonim by Getty Images)

Googling China

Google's relationship with the Chinese government has been tenuous, at best, in recent months, ever since Google announced it would stop censoring Chinese search results -- even if it meant having to leave China. Yet even after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for Internet freedom in China some two weeks later, Google has been able to retain a foothold in China; its status there, however, remains iffy -- at best.

At the South by Southwest conference in Austin this weekend, Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based author and political commentator, spoke to attendees about Beijing's complex relationship with the Internet and why he thinks that most of China's more than 384 million Internet users "are too busy enjoying the Internet they have, to worry about the Internet we think they ought to have." Kuo also talked about what he called "public misperceptions" about Internet censorship in China, the reason for Google's announcement and the likely road ahead.

Kuo's remarks were called Google in China: Context and Consequences. What do you think of his take on the state of free speech in China via the Net?

For more on China censorship, see The Spinternet and Peep Show, Cause Global reports on the subject that ran previously on this blog.

Are We Still Here?

Last week in Maine, at PopTech's annual thinkfest, America Reimagined, writer Anthony Doerr read aloud an essay he wrote for the January/February 2009 issue of Orion Magazine called Am I Still Here?—about our always-on, Web-centric world. Neither too sentimental nor apocalyptic, it's a pitch-perfect reflection of this moment in our culture; Doerr got a standing ovation.

[Go ahead. Take the five minutes away from your BlackBerry to read it. Guaranteed it will free up some time for you later.] Here's the text of it, from his reading:

I HARBOR A DARK TWIN INSIDE. He’s a sun-starved, ropy bastard and he lives somewhere north of my heart. Every day he gets a little stronger. He’s a weed, he’s a creeper; he’s a series of thickening wires inside my skull.

Call him Z. I like weather; Z survives in spite of it. I like skiing; Z likes surfing the web. I like looking at trees; Z likes reading news feeds. I pull weeds in the garden; Z whispers in my ear about climate change, nuclear proliferation, ballooning health-insurance premiums.

Last week I flew into central Idaho on a ten-seat Britten-Norman Islander to spend five days in the wilderness. The plane’s engines throbbed exactly like a heartbeat. The sky was a depthless blue. Little white clouds were reefed on the horizon. Slowly, steadily, the airplane pulled us farther and farther from the gravel airstrip where we started, over the Tangled Mountains and the Tangled Lakes, big aquamarine lozenges gleaming in basins, flanked by huge, shattered faces of granite, a hundred miles from anything, and the ridgelines scrolling beneath my window were steadily lulling me into an intoxication, a daze—the splendor of all this!—and then Z tapped me (metaphorically) on the (metaphorical) shoulder.

Hey, he said. You haven’t checked your e-mail today.

“I THINK,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,” “that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Ha! Four hours! Clearly Thoreau did not own a BlackBerry.

Yesterday—and this is embarrassing—I checked my e-mail before leaving for work and after I got to work, and I checked it every now and then during the day at work, and, after bicycling home from work, a total distance of two miles, I checked my e-mail again. Just in case a few e-mails flew over my head through the rain while I pedaled home.

It’s disconcerting, it’s shameful. I tell myself: e-mail is work-related. E-mail is work-related and anything work-related is family-related, right? Because work makes money and money feeds the family. Money justifies all. Doesn’t it?

What my evil twin Z knows, and what I am loath to articulate, to even contemplate, is that checking e-mail or tinkering around on Facebook or reading snippets about Politician A on Blog B is not about making money at all but about asking the world a very urgent question.

That question is this: Am I still here?

Each time Z makes me guide the little mouse cursor to the Send & Receive button, he’s hollering into the impossibly complex snarl of underground and aboveground fiber linking every computer to every other: Am I part of this? Am I still here?

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Eddie Sloan re: Enlarge Your Penis 3+ Inches (100% GUARANTEED). You’re a part of it.

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Mark J. Silverman from legal, you’re here. Now forward me that memo.

Yes, you’re here, Z, says Matt Torrington from requisitions. You’re here all right, right here in last place in our football pool.

Since purchasing a little glassy machine called an iPhone, I’ve started checking e-mail in classrooms and in coffee shops. I’ve read news articles at stoplights, at my sons’ swimming lessons, at restaurants, and yes, once or twice in the bathroom while I peed.

Tap, tap, tap. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Paul Krugman, baseball scores, tide tables, http://www.edge.org, Immanuel Kant, blender-eats-camcorder, the tour schedule has changed, click here to watch a venomous snail paralyze a goldfish. Information, information, information—it’s all sustenance for that rawboned, insatiable, up-to-the-second twin of mine. I can stand in a river with my little sons beside me pitching pebbles into a deep, brilliant green pool with a flight of geese flapping along overhead and the autumn sun transforming the cottonwoods into an absolute frenzy of color—each leaf a shining, blessed fountain of light—and Z will start whispering in my ear about oil prices, presidential politics, the NFL.

What, Z wants to know, are we missing right now?

Addiction, neurologists say, changes the physical shape of our brains. Each time old Z finds another text message, another headline, another update, my brain injects a little dopamine into a reward pathway.

“You’ve got mail!” squeals the computer and—whoosh!—here comes a shot of dopamine.

I feel stronger, says Z.

Five minutes pass, the dopamine fades.

I’m weak, hisses Z. I’m hungry. I need to see a picture of Joe Biden.

WHAT IF, while you read the last few paragraphs, something in the world has changed? What if, during the past five minutes, someone, somewhere, sent you a text? Shouldn’t you go and check?

Being addicted to the wired universe might be perfectly healthy, of course, and it’s certainly defensible beneath the triumvirate of technology, curiosity, and progress. I’m the first to admit that there’s something enchanting and invigorating about my computer. There’s magic in reading a note from a friend in Rome and clicking through Halloween pictures from New Jersey and verifying John Steinbeck’s birth date in two clicks. The Internet is indeed its own strange, blessed fountain of light.

But sometimes I think Z’s demand to feel connected is tilting us both toward derangement, especially when we rise together at three a.m. and stare for a half hour into the black vacuum of the backyard and drink a glass of milk in the doorway of the kitchen before walking over to the computer and waking it up and finding out that while we sweated and twisted in the bedsheets, BeachReady Body had been preparing a totally unique and groundbreaking Body Transformation Formula for us, as well as for Leslie in New Mexico and Ben in Des Moines.

“We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.”
Do we like sitting by the fire?

We do.

Does it make us happy to think? It does. For a while. But pretty soon don’t we start worrying, now that we’ve stepped away from the world, that the world is slipping past without us? Don’t we wonder, when we come back, Am I still here?

Oh, the strange mix of revulsion and pleasure Z and I felt when we returned from five days under the sky in the middle of Idaho and watched the e-mail counter piling up: 21, 32, 58, 74 e-mails! Z has 74 e-mails! Z is indeed part of it all! Z was missed! Z exists!

We’re not the first to wonder about all this, Z and I, not the first to sense that maybe our shared life is rushing by too quickly, too feverishly. We’re not the first to feel as if we are scrambling to make our voices heard against an infinite and obliterating silence.

During the five days Z and I spent in the mountains, we saw lots of Shoshone pictographs, paintings made in caves mostly, and under overhangs: finger-painted elk and owls and dogs and triangle-bodied hunters with bows. Many of the pictographs in that area include hash marks, like rows of fence posts scratched downhill, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what these marks originally meant. Maybe they were offerings to the spirit world, or tallies of successful hunts, or records of vision quests. Maybe they were the consequence of someone sitting beside a fire and thinking happily away.

Whatever they once meant, they mean something else now. They mean memories are fragile, beliefs are tenuous, contexts are temporary. They mean nothing is stable—not mountains, not species, not cultures, not e-mail. The only quantities that ultimately persist are gravity and mystery. Uproar, as Keats said, is our only music.

What did I do today that will still retain its original meaning two hundred years from now? Might it be better, and more lasting, merely to walk home right now, and open the backyard gate, and lie down in the grass?

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you were dazzled? When was the last time you lay down on a block of granite and fell asleep beneath the sky? Our few remaining pockets of unconnected, unwired time—walks, airplane trips, camp-outs, reading a novel on a beach—are dwindling fast. And yet: The Earth is 4.5 billion years old! There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy! What could be wrong with shutting down the computer some afternoon and sauntering for four hours through the woods and over the hills and fields?
“Dad!” calls my four-year-old son, Owen. He runs inside; his hands are cupped; his eyes are wide open.

“I found a grasshopper leg!” He flexes it back and forth; he wants to know if he can keep it.

I throw my phone onto the couch. I lift my son into my lap.

“When I am in the country,” wrote the old English critic William Hazlitt, “I wish to vegetate like the country.”

Z hates vegetating. Z wants LinkedIn, Twitter, Google. Z wants me to pick up my phone and finish reading my e-mail. Instead I take my sons on a walk. Clouds are blowing into the valley, big and dark and full of shoulders, and the light is low and golden. The sage, blooming in the gulch beneath our house, billows and shines.

We try to be quiet; we try to be diligent; we try to breathe.

Am I still here?

All I have to do is look into the eyes of my children, walking beside me through the evening.

Yes, Daddy, their eyes say.

Of course you’re here, Daddy. You’re right here.

***

(Anthony Doerr's essay appears here with permission)
(Photo of Dorset countryside, top, by Black Beck Photographic)

Machine Rule

In his just-released book, Delete, author Viktor Mayer-Schonberger explores the surprising phenomenon of perfect recall in the digital age and makes a strong case for reintroducing the capacity to forget.

To be sure, Mayer-Schonberger isn't suggesting that all of the bits and bytes about us be subject to erasure. But he is one of the first privacy advocates to assert that "the balance between what we remember and what we forget has been unsettled" by the always-on, data-hungry machines we have created to help us keep track of each other. But much information, Mayer-Schonberger asserts, is better left ungathered—or, at the very least, allowed to escape digital eternity. "We need to be able to delete," he says. Part of being human is to consistently re-contextualize the past as it relates to the present; machines rob us of that choice.

Cause Global caught up with Mayer-Schonberger recently to talk about how unbridled digital recall is reshaping society and human behavior. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

A number of books have been published recently about the limitations of human memory, including Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. But you argue in your book, Delete, that the capacity to forget serves a human purpose and must be integrated into our data-rich culture. You say our personal freedoms are at risk.

I’ve been interested in privacy for better part of the last two decades, and have been working on both sides of the Atlantic on information privacy issues. Privacy always has been dear to me, and this culture's perfect recall problem became clear to me when I started thinking about our digital world’s ability to record a lot more data than the analog world. The threat that eminates from this problem is not just of a privacy nature, but there is another type of danger that is at least as threatening and as problematic. Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget. We've developed tools to lighten this biological limitation, like books and videos, to help us remember things and they've proven to be extremely helpful to us. But until a few decades ago, these tools did not unsettle the balance between remembering and forgetting. To remember was the exception; to forget, the default. In the digital age, this balance has been altered fundamentally. Today, forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy. With the help of digital tools we—individually and as a society—have begun to unlearn forgetting, to erase from our daily practices one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of humankind.

We're forgetting how to forget?

It’s becoming real for most of us extremely quickly. Maybe 20 years ago or so, if a politician made a gaffe on live TV, it was played over and over again and we laughed and it ruined a political career. These days, it's not just public officials who might experience this. It's pretty much everybody now. Just consider this: in 2007, two out of three young Americans created or uploaded digital content onto the Internet or to some social networking site. So two out of three people partook in the weaving of this thick digital blanket and this, for many, was able to impede or destroy our careers. You have more and more of these examples coming up as YouTube and many other portals function as hubs, where you can upload everybody else's information, gaffes and outtakes and laugh about them. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of the South Korean person who has been laughed at and criticized hundreds of thousands of times online because her dog pooped on the subway and it was recorded on YouTube.

This kind of permanent memory will lead to bullying?

It has already for some people, but more troubling is how the fear of such behaviors might be influencing large numbers of people in society. It would be horrible if we were to stop expressing ourselves because we start fearing that 20 years from now, or sooner, our utterances will be held against us. What does this do to free speech? Our democracy, our nation, our culture, will be much poorer and much more impoverished. So I'm suggesting that we create new legal and social tools not to encourage self-censorship, but instead create ways of choosing how long we want to preserve the information we put online. Inherent in this, of course, is an acknowledgment that some kinds of information loses validity over time, and therefore it needs to be discarded—or labeled, at least, as being past its expiry date.

This suggests that the facts don't always serve us. Why is the capacity to forget an advantage?

Researchers have found that perfect human memory is actually not an advantage but a disadvantage, because it disables people from deciding, over time, to move on. Perfect recall locks and anchors everything that has ever happened to the present. People who cannot forget feel they are always tethered to the past; they remember all of the wrong decisions they made in the past, which makes them afraid to decide in the present. Perfect digital memory, then, not only creates a power imbalance between the past and the present but impedes on our ability to decide and act quickly in the present.

Further, it's about information control. Perfect digital recall gives us no choice or control over how accessible our information is, or how long-lived it is in the public sphere. Much of what is online about us at any given time is accessible to anyone, will live forever, and occur out of context. In the past, we could control who 'saw' us and when and under what circumstances. We had a better chance of being able to explain.

Moreover, human remembering has not been a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as Daniel Schacter so eloquently argued, the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present. In other words, the past as we remember it is constantly evolving. The past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. It is likely these two visions will clash, yet neither is an accurate and complete depiction of what or who we are.

What can we do about it?

It’s a collective action problem; my 'expiration date' proposal is meant to say there is a way we can start to introduce some selective forgetting into our digital world. We can start a movement by introducing new technologies. A number of companies, from Microsoft to ask.com, all offer the ability to forget, to allow expiration dates on certain kinds of data. In fact, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced they will delete some things after nine months so they will have selective forgetting implemented.

Have you gotten any pushback on the book?

Most pushback has come from people who run the large search engines. Others, of course, have said it is ridiculous not to be able to delete. Other pushback comes from people who accuse me of wanting to destroy archives and libraries. That is not at all what I want to do. I don't want forced forgetting. I want us, as a society and as individuals, to be able to choose what to remember. If nothing is done—if the status quo persists—we will lose a lot of the democratic and open, robust debate we have in society. That would be horrible. Equally horrible would be a world in which we become so locked to the past that we become frozen in the present, afraid to take risks and innovate, and to simply live for the moment.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, top, by Peeter Viisimaa for istock.com)
(Photo, middle, of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, courtesy of Princeton Press)

Sightings

(Wheatpaste remix rendering of Michael Jackson, above, photographed by Ivan Corsa in Manhattan's Soho district and uploaded to globalgraphica.com on November 6, 2008. The image is being shared widely today across the blogosphere via Flickr, Twitter, and other forms of social media)

Excerpt from a Friday post by Fast Company blogger Clay Dillow:

"Upon rumors of Michael Jackson's death in Los Angeles, fans flocked to the Web for confirmation, resulting in an avalanche of searches, Tweets, and page views that crashed Google and brought Twitter to a standstill as the number of Tweets per second doubled in an instant. The online fiasco was a fitting testament to Jackson's legacy: He was beyond famous. Michael Jackson: He played the Berlin Wall. He invented Pop. He beat the rap. He crashed Google."

Detente 2.0

Who is Google's Katie Stanton, the person named today to be White House Director of Citizen Engagement, a new job on Barack Obama's social media team? Here are some bits to add to the emerging picture on the blogosphere: she told attendees at last month's Alliance of Youth Movements Summit at Columbia University, co-sponsored by Google, the U.S. Department of State, Howcast, Facebook, and Access 360 Media that "the Internet is potent fuel for democracy, more than any war or troop surge or invasion." [The summit was organized to respond to the recent, sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations around the world.]

Watch this summit video, below, of Stanton and others discussing how new digital media platforms can be leveraged to affect social change. Stanton [in red] didn't say much, but called the attending youth activists—each of whom had used some form of social media to help bring about social and political reforms in their home countries— "the new United Nations."



For more on Stanton, see Nancy Scola's report on techPresident and Peter Kafka's piece on Mediamemo.

(Photograph, West Virginia Series 4, by James Pauls for istock.com)