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31 Oct 09

The power of tweets | From the Guardian | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...the-power-of-twitter - Preview

twitter politics liberalism future democracy power

Anyway, Pack's thought was this: since almost everyone who's written for this book is also on Twitter, many with quite a few more followers than me (Brooker, for example, has 86,000 people hanging on his every tweet), what if I asked them all to tweet about it, on the same day, just before it launches? So he did. And as a result, The Atheist's Guide "went from about 20,000th on Amazon's live bestseller list, to 14th. In a single day. We just sat there watching it move up the chart, hour after hour. And it hadn't even been published."
So Pack tweeted: "Vile piece of 'journalism' about Stephen Gately by some evil cow called Jan Moir". Ben Locker, a smart young copywriter with a very healthy 3,800-strong Twitter following, agreed: "Yes, that's a disgraceful article." Pack came back with "Can we get #janmoir trending?" (for the uninitiated, #before a word, known as a hashtag, is Twitter users' way of uniting their tweets around a particular topic; "trending" means it is on Twitter's list of the 10 most tweeted-about topics on the site).
Then things started to move fast (but not, Pack would contend, in any way that could remotely be considered "orchestrated"). Pack's followers re-tweeted his and others' posts, as did their followers' followers. Within hours #janmoir was topping Twitter's trending topics. Fry weighed in; Brown did likewise; Brooker stepped in – and a Twitterstorm was born.
It was every bit as effective as Pack's fully orchestrated bid to tweet his book up the Amazon rankings: by the end of the day, the Mail website had amended its headline, companies including Marks & Spencer had pulled their advertising from the offending webpage; and the Press Complaints Commission had received a record-breaking 1,000 complaints (it would later receive 22,000).
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- Now here's a third piece of Twitter power (which doesn't, amazingly, involve Pack). On 12 October, five days before Moir's Gately article was published, the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, posted a tweet referring to a super-injunction obtained by lawyers for the oil-trader Trafigura, which prevented the paper not only from publishing anything about a leaked report detailing the potentially lethal nature of waste the firm dumped in Ivory Coast, but also from mentioning the injunction's existence. Now, Rusbridger was saying (of necessity, somewhat allusively), the lawyers had warned the Guardian not even to report that MP Paul Farrelly had tabled a Commons question about the injunction. "The Twittersphere," Rusbridger later wrote, "went into meltdown." And once again, it produced results: within hours, Farrelly's question had been tracked down and the relevant links tweeted. By midday the next day, helped along by (guess who?) Stephen Fry, "Trafigura" was a trending topic across Europe. By lunchtime it had withdrawn its injunction.
- The implications, Levy writes, "were profound. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to apprise fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to launch new products … Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked around as its users invented baseball."
- "Probably the most useful business tool I use," says freelance writer and new media blogger Robin Brown. "Anything people want to disseminate, anything they want to 'crowdsource', they're going straight to Twitter. But it's only gained that kind of traction in the past six months or so. Somehow, Twitter seems to have captured the imagination. I think maybe it's to do with those 140 characters. A lot of people who find blogging hard love it."
- He goes so far as to wonder whether "the age of politics as we knew and loved it is now over". Do the two recent big Twitterstorms, he asks, mark a fundamental "shift in the very focus of democracy" – has "the Twinternet become the new Fifth Estate?"
- But he has spotted a potential danger. "Twitter," Fry says, "may seem to some to be dominated by bien-pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when those spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism?
- Locker believes people are "actually quite selective about the bandwagons they jump on", but he is aware that "Scott Pack started the whole Jan Moir thing off with the intention of it becoming a trending topic. He was explicit about it in those early tweets. I think he's to be commended for having the idea and putting it into action … but it's the first time I've seen someone hung out to dry with intent from the outset."
- But others are not quite so positive. The sheer weight of Twitter's collective voice, some believe, might even prove a danger to free speech. Of the Moir storm, writer Tim Brown has decried in Spiked Online "a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first-person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence". The danger of these "vast explosions of offence-taking" is that they create "a 'you-can't-say-that' culture in which one is scared to speak one's mind".
- Even Scott Pack concludes Twitterstorms are "alright if they're basically about pointing out that someone has written something really, really out of order, and wanting to tell people about it". But some Twitterers, he says, published Jan Moir's home address. Others were plainly every bit as out of order as the journalist's piece: "It wouldn't be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing an opinion."
  The bottom line with Twitter, though, Pack argues, is quite simply that "I've got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference." That, obviously, gives the site a mighty momentum – and be warned: a leaked internal document from Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013. With that many Twitterers tweeting, the document reportedly says, "we will be the pulse of the planet".

03 Jul 09

Abandon ID cards | Johan Steyn | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/...id-cards-lord-steyn - Preview

liberalism identity idea

even in the darkest days of the threats to the rule of law no attempt was made to establish a national identity card system in the US.
Liberty has correctly pointed out (most recently in its response to the Home Office of February 2009) that ID cards have no value as far as security is concerned. The attempt to justify the scheme on the grounds of the undoubted risk of terrorism is not sustainable.
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- whether an invasion of English civil liberties is justified on grounds of mere administrative convenience.
- All foreign nationals will also need a passport when in the UK which establishes their identity in the same way as an ID card. The immigration pretext is simply another way of getting the public conditioned to the use of ID cards.
- there is quite simply no evidence that the national identity register will serve to combat serious crime.
- A central concern about the creation of a national identity register must be the privacy implications that flow from holding the personal data of millions of individuals.
- Now I question whether the government's competence in running an identity card system has been demonstrated. Within the last two years there have been many serious data breaches, including one in which PA Consultancy, a Home Office contractor, lost a memory stick containing the details of 84,000 prisoners including unencrypted names, dates of birth and expected release dates – PA Consultancy has now been named as the Home Office's "development partner" to "work on the design, feasibility testing, business case and procurement elements of the identity cards programme".
- The Department for Work and Pensions has found that civil servants are colluding with organised criminals to steal personal identities on "an industrial scale".
  These data breaches do legitimately prompt the question: should the British public have confidence in the scheme the government proposes to introduce?
- One must also bear in mind the cost of an ID card system. The total cost of the scheme is apparently estimated at £3bn. I do not know what reliance can be placed on that figure. Given past experience I would not back it. One wonders whether, as we head into what may be a prolonged economic downturn, this is an opportune time for the introduction of an ID card system.
- In the recent debate in the House of Lords to which I referred, Lord West stated on behalf of the Home Office that the public by and large support an ID card system. He said that research showed that 59% of people absolutely supported it. It may well be that it is a sharply contested matter. It may also be the case the supposed research is based on Home Office information to the effect (as the previous home secretary recently said) that ID cards will deliver real benefits to everyone including increased protection against criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorism. If that is so, I would not place great value on such fragile strands of information. I would place the word research in inverted commas.
- In one of his English letters Voltaire said that the civil wars of Rome ended in slavery, and those of the English in liberty. He wrote that the English were jealous of their liberty. So they are. The commitment, by and large, of the British people to European constitutional principles and ideals does not require us to adopt an ID card system.
  In my view a national identity card system is not necessary in our country. No further money should be spent on it. The idea should be abandoned.

16 Apr 09

Boston Review — Joshua Cohen: Reflections on Information Technology and Democracy

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information technology liberalism democracy politics media

Democracy is a political system in which elections and other devices are intended to hold officials accountable to the people. But while elections and other institutions of accountability are essential to democracy, they are just part of the story. Their efficacy arguably depends on a complicated, dispersed, ongoing, relatively unstructured public discussion: communication in what Jürgen Habermas calls the “informal public sphere.” Elections focus the conversation, but public discussion enjoys a life outside the rhythms of formal politics: at work, in churches and parks, in families and at school.
while elections and other institutions of accountability are essential to democracy, they are just part of the story. Their efficacy arguably depends on a complicated, dispersed, ongoing, relatively unstructured public discussion: communication in what Jürgen Habermas calls the “informal public sphere.” Elections focus the conversation, but public discussion enjoys a life outside the rhythms of formal politics: at work, in churches and parks, in families and at school.
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- If you asked me to summarize everything that can be said with confidence on this subject, I would be done now: the technologies are changing too fast (Facebook and Twitter are too recent to have generated serious analysis of causal consequences, as distinct from illuminating descriptions of usage patterns), the phenomena are too amorphous, and the historical benchmarks for measuring improvement are too often lacking. Addressing this question is like asking an epidemiologist about the impact of a medical intervention on diseases of unknown etiology, in a migrant population with no medical records, living in an environment with a high rate of viral mutation.
- I want to distinguish four dimensions of concern that should occupy our attention when we think about information technology and public discourse.
- it would be deliberative (reasoned); it would ensure equal and low–cost access to information; it would provide equal opportunities for public influence, to present arguments to others; and it would be founded on information of high quality. My judgment, in a nutshell, is that the jury on deliberativeness is still out; that on opportunities for access to information and for public influence, things look pretty good, though with some concerns; and on high–quality information, we have serious reasons to worry because of the Internet’s impact on newspapers (in particular, on investigative journalism).
- First, deliberativeness: an interesting debate has emerged about whether the Internet generally and the blogosphere in particular fosters deliberation—mutual engagement and argument across differences of view—or instead invites people to cloister themselves by filtering information and opinions that do not ratify preconceptions.
- Focusing on the blogosphere, what are the basic facts about cloistering and polarization? First, that the likeminded talk much more to each other than they talk to people they disagree with: only 10–15 percent of links on a conservative blog will point to a liberal blog, and vice versa. But, second, it is not at all clear that this represents greater self–cloistering than we find elsewhere in informal discussion (as Diana Mutz and others have argued, the workplace is the big exception). Third, the reason for the self–cloistering is arguably that bloggers are a select community of strong partisans, not that blogging polarizes. And fourth, there is no evidence (not yet, anyway) of increasing self–cloistering and polarization. So on this first dimension, no reason to go out and celebrate, but not much to fear.
- Second, on access to information, the story looks good. The essential point is that costs of acquiring all sorts of information relevant to making public judgments have markedly diminished. Three more specific points: first, I am emphasizing access to information and measuring access by costs. I am not saying that there is equal access (work by Henry Brady, Kay Schlozman, and Sid Verba describes the degree of inequality), but that the costs of access have diminished for all. Second, opportunity to acquire information is not the same as being informed, and there is no evidence for the proposition that the Internet treatment has produced, on average, better–informed citizens. Still, greater opportunity is important. Third, some analysts wonder about the reality of improved access to information because they observe that Web and blog traffic follow a power–law distribution, with a small number of sites drawing the lion’s share of the traffic—from which one might conclude that this world is not really so different from the pre–Web world of a few dominant, relatively inexpensive sources of information (radio, television, newsprint). We should resist that inference: the power–law distribution matters, in a way that I will describe in a moment, but does not defeat the point about greater access.
- On the third area of concern, greater opportunity for public influence, the results seem not bad, but more mixed. The basic idea was nicely captured in an article that Mitch Kapor wrote for Wired and Boston Review in the early 1990s about the prospect of a Jeffersonian new information highway: “Ideally, any user of any network should be able to originate programming from the home. . . . it should be as easy to provide a service as it is to use one.”
- we have not arrived at Kapor’s Jeffersonian world, where it is as easy to provide a service as to use one. But we are closer, as the tens of millions of blogs indicate. That said, when we are thinking about chances for influence, the power–law distribution is important: although one–many communication is much easier, most of us languish in the long tail, with a high probability of being swamped. Still, there is a large difference between a world in which the costs of one–many messaging are relatively small and in which the costs are prohibitive, even if the audience distribution looks like a power law.
- it is true that with income from classifieds cratering, huge difficulties getting people to pay for newspaper content, and limits on online advertising income, newspapers lack a business model. That is not good news. Simply stated, we cannot have a successfully democratic public sphere without the kinds of information that newspapers have supplied. I am not thinking of weather reports, but of investigative journalism, local, national, and international. Here, the Internet treatment has been damaging, the damage is growing, and the consequences are potentially severe.
- Of course investigative journalism is not married to newsprint, but that is how it has been presented, and there is not yet a viable alternative: 15,000 journalists lost jobs last year, cuts at large newspaper are running at 20 percent. The blogosphere is no alternative in terms of investigative resources, access, legal–defense capacity, or training and mentoring. It lives parasitically off investigative journalism. Call me old–fashioned, but poetry, philosophy, physics, and investigative journalism cannot be blogged and crowd–sourced.
- There is a growing debate about the best successor model to commercial newspapers, with many contending proposals. I will mention three, each of which assigns a large role to an electronic public sphere: (1) private foundations or donors either provide endowment for newspapers or for nonprofits that employ political journalists (Propublica is the leading example, with editors and twenty-eight journalists who provide content to print and online media); (2) a public system that would extend the public broadcasting model to print media; and (3) a national endowment for journalism, with support tied to audience size (proposed by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres).
  This is not the time or place to explore these alternatives. But in this fourth arena, cyber–utopianism—a celebration of the dispersed, decentralized, egalitarian, Jeffersonian, participatory, deliberative electronic public sphere—is not only misplaced but dangerous.

26 Mar 09

Read me first: Google's surveillance is taking us further down the road to hell | Technology | The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/...finkelstein-google-advertising - Preview

surveillance privacy internet security liberalism google

recently took another step along the path of surveillance as a service, launching what it called "interest-based advertising", and which everyone else calls "behavioural targeting".
path of surveillance as a service, launching what it called "interest-based advertising",
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- Google has been taking pains to distinguish its new program from internet service provider (ISP) monitoring systems such as Phorm, which have drawn much criticism . Tim Berners-Lee has summed up the threat as: "To allow someone to snoop on your internet traffic is to allow them to put a television camera in your room, except it will tell them a whole lot more about you than the television camera". If Google can convince people its surveillance is merely a warm and fuzzy way of helping you shop, while ISPs' surveillance is akin to warrantless wiretapping, that gives Google an enormous advantage in collecting information to sell to advertisers. A Business Week article bluntly stated: "Phorm could present strong competition for the ad-serving platforms purveyed by the likes of Google and Microsoft".
- I'm continually impressed by how Google is able to influence press coverage of its initiatives, in a way many other corporate behemoths must envy. One strategy it seems to use is rather than simply issuing a boring statement, it wraps a policy announcement around a tech gimmick. The shiny part distracts the non-tech media, while the techie part captures the interest of experts.
- In the same way that "total personalisation is total surveillance", complete knowledge of one's interests entails complete monitoring of one's actions. At the very least, there should be safeguards and oversight that do not rely on the assurances of big businesses, which have every incentive to minimise any lapses or failings. No matter how benign the original intent, large collections of personal data, especially combined with the economic pressures of a deep recession or a government interest in data-mining for security purposes, are fraught with the potential for evil.