Internet

Consider two recent postings on the state of Web 2.0 discourse.

The first, optimistic one comes from Tyler Cowen on the utility of the blogosphere: 

Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it.  They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program.  People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives.  The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing....

Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.

Now let's consider FP's own Evgeny Morozov's revulsion response to the twittering about balloon boy yesterday:

The amount of energy that had been exerted by the Twitterati to save the now infamous "balloon boy" would probably be enough to prevent at least a few dozen African genocides. They even started their own campaign with its own hashtag: #savetheballoonboy, which for a while was a trending topic on Twitter. That is, it was a trending topic before it turned out that the boy was hiding in his house and had not had any relationship with that balloon....

[T]his all-pervasive cynicism with which members of the slacktivist generation treat extremely serious social problems is very off-putting and disturbing. What was the reaction to the #ballonboy story after the boy's whereabouts were disclosed? Humor. Some of it the jokes were mildly funny; most of it them were in bad taste. For example, the most popular joke - which also became a trending topic on Twitter - was making fun of Anne Frank, of all people (implying that she had a much better hide-out space in the attic - all phrased to sound as it was coming from Kanye West).

Well, if a tasteless joke about one of the most dramatic symbols of the Holocaust becomes the most popular topic on Twitter, there is something fundamentally wrong with the taste and norms of that community.  

So, blogs are better than Twitter, yes?  Um, no. 

The blogosphere can be a powerful learning mechanism -- but that hardly guarantees that it will be.  In this way, the blogosphere -- and the Twitterverse, for that matter -- are simply alternative mediums, like television or radio.  The content, or the consumption of that content, can be either good or bad.  To use a famous constructivist turn of phrase, the blogosphere is what people make of it. 

Tyler Cowen's blogosphere?  I want to go to there.  But I'm not sure everyone else does.  And, just because a lot of people want to go to Morozov's dystopic depiction of the Twitterverse doesn't mean that everyone will. 

Blogs have been around for a decade now, and Twitter has been in operation for a few years.  Can we dispense with the broad-based characterizations of social systems that are way too variegated for such simple characterizations? 

One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously.  That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post.  In reality, it's kind of like circuit training -- each activity exercises a different set of writing muscles (that said, journal articles require way more reps than other forms of writing).

I bring this up because I have now joined Twitter, in a desperate, far-too-late-effort to catch up to my FP colleague Mark Lynch -- who is securely ensconced in the FP Twitterati Top 100.  Right now he's crushing me in terms of followers, so I warmly encourage all my readers to start following me on Twitter -- and then feel free to ignore my tweets. 

Somewhat more seriously, my Twitter postings will mostly be on matters that are other off-topic for Foreign Policy or things I don't have time to develop into the long, nuanced sentences required for blogging.  So, just to clarify for those academics in the audience, here is the official Hierarchy of Drezner Publications -- from highest degree of effort to lowest degree of effort: 

1. University press books
2. Peer-refereed journal articles
3. University press book chapters
4. Editor-refereed essays
5. Non-university press books and chapters
6. Op-ed essays
7. Commentaries for Marketplace
8. Blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies
9. Other, lesser blog posts about trade, finance, etc.
10. Twitter tweets/Facebook status updates
11. Comments on friend's Facebook pages
12. Mutterings under my breath while waiting for airport security
13. Things I shout at the television during Red Sox-Yankee games
14. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting after I have three vodka tonics in me.
15. Things I say at the bar on the third day of the American Political Science Association annual meeting when completely sober. 

Also, just an FYI -- usually you can write off a technology the moment I embrace it.  So if tech stocks go down today, that's on me. 

Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting."  We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers. 

Here we go....

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

Translation:  "I read everything about me on the Interwebs.  Everything.  And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes.  I'm brave for putting up with it, though.  Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd:  'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.' 

Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right?  Right?"

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter." 

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Translation: "Hah!  Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!" 

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?" 

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Translation: "A judge is on my side!  I'm going to quote her at length!"

[Side note here:  will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Translation:  "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today.  God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning." 

Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:

This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.

Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere. 

In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. 

If only that were still true of New York Times columnists. 

UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post. 

Your humble blogger has occasionally prided himself as something of an authority on the intersection between celebrities and international relations.  Which brings me to Jessica Biel.   

Sure, the woman in the picture above these words seems pleasant enough, but according to McAfee security, she's not what she seems.  This Reuters story by Belinda Goldsmith explains: 

Actress Jessica Biel has overtaken Brad Pitt as the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace, according to internet security company McAfee Inc.

For the third consecutive year, McAfee surveyed which A-list celebrity was the riskiest to track on the internet after Pitt topped the list last year and Paris Hilton in 2007.

Biel, 27, who shot to fame in the TV show 7th Heaven and most recently starred in Easy Virtue, was deemed the most dangerous, with fans having a one-in-five chance of landing at a website that has tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing and viruses....

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, who have featured on most celebrity list this year, were not at the top of risky public figures to search.

The Obamas ranked in the bottom third of this year’s results, at No. 34 and No. 39 respectively.

You can access the Top 15 list here.  Some interesting tidbits: 

• Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie are tied for 8th.  Read into that what you will. 
• Celebrities jump the shark before they lose their utility to cybercriminals.  My proof:  Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian remain in the top 15. 
• Declining soft power of America, my fanny:  13 of the 15 celebs on the list were American -- Gisele Bundchen and Rihanna were the only non-American celebrities on the list. 
• In yet another justification for her unparalleled status as Your Humble Blogger's Favorite Online Crush, Salma Hayek is not on this list. So there -- go ahead and search her out on these interwebs. 
• Flavor Flav did not make this list... exactly. 

A question to readers:  if this were a truly just world, which celebrities should be at the top of this list?

Events in Iran have led to a lot of talk about how this is a Twitter revolution, and that Twitter has been the go-to source on real-time developments in Iran.  Stepping onto FP's Evgeny Morozov's turf, however, I have to wonder we're exaggerating its effect juuuuust a wee bit here. 

Twitter is serving two different purposes in Iran right now.  Its first role is as a coordination device for Iranian supporters of Mousavi -- much like events in Moldova from a couple of months ago.  On this dimension, to be sure, it would seem that Twitter has facilitated coordination. 

Well, except for one thing -- the absence of Twitter does the same thing.  According to the press accounts I read, Mousavi wanted to cancel yesterday (Monday's) demonstration because the Iranian authorities had refused to grant permission and warned of bloodshed.  The thing is, since Twitter and other methods of quick communication were down, there was no way to communicate the cancellation messaage to supporters.  In other words, had Iranian authorities not interruped mobile services and the like when they had, Monday's demonstration might have fizzled out.  One wonders if the same dynamic will play out today. 

Twitter's second role is as a source of information for outside observers -- indeed, if Dan Nexon's post is correct, that seems to be the more important function.  It's not the only or even the primary source, however. Kevin Drum gets at this point: 

I followed the events of the weekend via three basic sources.  The first was cable news, and as everyone in the world has pointed out, it sucked.  Most TV news outlets have no foreign bureaus anymore; they didn't know what was going on; and they were too busy producing their usual weekend inanity to care.  Grade: F.

The second was Twitter, mostly as aggregated by various blogs.  This had the opposite problem: there was just too much of it; it was nearly impossible to know who to trust; and the overwhelming surge of intensely local and intensely personal views made it far too easy to get caught up in events and see things happening that just weren't there.  It was better than cable news, but not exactly the future of news gathering.  Grade: B-.

The third was the small number of traditional news outlets that do still have foreign bureaus and real expertise.  The New York Times.  The BBC.  Al Jazeera.  A few others.  The twitterers were a part of the story that they reported, but they also added real background, real reporting, and real context to everything.  Grade: B+.  Given the extremely difficult reporting circumstances, maybe more like an A-.

This matches my assessment as well. 

Which, again, is not to diss Twitter.  It's merely to suggest that life is a bit more complex than simple memes of "this new information technology is supplanting all prior forms of information technology!" 

UPDATE:  Over at The Monkey Cage, John Sides and Henry Farrell offer further ruminations on Twitter. 

Earlier this week Facebook VP of Global Communications, Marketing, and Public Policy Elliott Schrage gave an interview to cfr.org that's worth reading.  As you would expect, Schrage was pretty upbeat about the use of social networking technologies as a means for political action: 

So, do I see Facebook as being an incredibly valuable tool for public diplomacy? Absolutely.

Some of the most interesting uses of Facebook have been for the purpose of social action, which is essentially political action, whether it's an extraordinary rallying of support by the Colombian community around the world to protest the terrorist activities of FARC-the Colombian militants-or whether it's students protesting bank fees and bank charges in Great Britain, or whether it's the Obama presidential campaign generating almost six million supporters on Facebook as a means of communicating his policies, his positions, and his campaign activities....

Frankly speaking, some of our greater successes are in countries where the means of distributing information have not been easy or without friction. So, for example, in Colombia we have remarkable market penetration. In Indonesia we have among our fastest-growing market share. Chile, I believe we have close to 50 percent of the online population now on Facebook. In Europe we're doing extremely well. And in the Middle East we've achieved very interesting degrees of penetration, and in fact just recently announced that we are launching right-to-left languages in addition to left-to-right languages.

There's an obvious PR element to Schrage's spiel, but then again, let's wander over to the Financial Times' Najmeh Bozorgmehr on how Facebook is being used in Iran's presidential elections: 

As they struggle to compete against an Iranian president who enjoys the support of a powerful state apparatus, leading candidates in June’s election are resorting to Facebook to spread their messages....

“We are using new technologies because they have the capacity to be multiplied by people themselves who can forward Bluetooth, e-mails and text messages and invite more supporters on Facebook,” said Behzad Mortazavi, who is in charge of Mr Moussavi’s campaign committee.

He said the wireless technology of Bluetooth would be used “extensively” to send out speeches and photo slideshows. The supporters of Mr Moussavi have opened about 20 Facebook pages calling on others to vote for him and have attracted about 7,500 members so far.

Although Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponents on Facebook are not yet campaigning against his re-election, their posts may help strengthen the anti-incumbent mood among the elite.

A page called “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad” has so far attracted more than 35,000 members, the highest number in all pages related to the president.

Yeah, the thing about that Facebook page is: 

• 35,000 is still pretty small;
• The site has been up for 18 months as an experiment to see of Ahmadinejad is lss popular that George W. Bush.  So far, the numbers don't bear this out;
• The site is administered by someone from Sweden;
• I'm willing to bet that not everyone who's joined is registered to vote in Iran (they all do seem to be quite attractive, however).

Question to readers:  is the power of social networking real or exaggerated in "countries where the means of distributing information have not been easy or without friction"?

There's not a lot to laugh about the politicization of civil service hires at the Justice Department.  OK, I lied.  There is one thing that seems pretty funny to me.  If Al Gore invented the Internet, then it appears that the Bush administration has invented the concept of searching the Internet.  At least, that's how Eric Lichtblau's story in the New York Times on the hiring scandal at the Justice Department reads: 

According to the report, officials at the White House first developed a method of searching the Internet to glean the political leanings of a candidate and introduced it at a White House seminar called The Thorough Process of Investigation. Justice Department officials then began using the technique to search for key phrases or words in an applicant’s background, like “abortion,” “homosexual,” “Florida recount,” or “guns.”

Whoa!!!  That's way too hi-tech for me to understand.  The text of the report provides more detail.  Apparently, White House liaison Jan Williams deployed (and then relayed to Monica Goodling) the following string for Nexis searches for DOJ candidates: 

 

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

 

As the report later reveals, however, the darned Internet can trap the searchers as well as the searchees: 

When we showed Williams this e-mail and the attached search string, she said she did not recall sending it to Goodling. She also said she did not recognize the search string, and that she did not know where the list of search terms came from. At the end of her interview, we raised the issue again and Williams repeated her assertion that she did not remember using the search string.

The day after her interview, Williams sent us an e-mail stating that she “thought about the research string and have some information that I want to share with you.” She wrote that there had been a political vacancy in the Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division in December 2005, that a law professor was a candidate, and that Sampson asked her to research the law professor’s writings.Williams stated that she “called the researcher in the White House Officeof Presidential Personnel to get some research tips.” Williams said theresearcher sent her a “Lexis Nexis research string,” and that she edited the string to remove “words like homosexual” and then used it. Williamsclaimed that she only used the search string that one time, “never everused it to reach Immigration Judges,” and that the string she sent to Goodling did not contain “words like ‘homosexual.’”....

[W]e obtained information from LexisNexis that Williams used this search string multiple times on 3 days in November and December 2005 and January 2006. Williams used the search string to research 25 people, of whom 23 were candidates for the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. One of the other two candidates was the person Williams referred to in her e-mail to us after we interviewed Williams. We could not determine the identity of the remaining person Williams researched using the search string. None of these people were candidates for IJ or BIA positions. All of the searches Williams conducted contained search terms such as “gay!” and “homosexual!” When we asked Williams about the LexisNexis searches, she stated that she did not recall researching the candidates for the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women or using the string search other than the one time discussed above.

 

 

 

For those readers concerned about what information the Interwebs possesses about you -- and whether you can remove it -- go check out this Alex Beam article in the Boston Globe.