I am getting increasingly interested in studying the role that new media plays in shaping social memory (e.g. how do blogs and social networks  impact how societies remember and forget? how will historical narratives be written in the age of data abundance). Needless to say, this proves to be a very exciting and intellectually-challenging subject of inquiry (expect a long essay/review sometime in January!).

This is why I am very excited about an experiment which is now underway in Poland. Deutsche Welle has more:

A young boy in shorts and a white T-shirt, with black hair, dark eyes, and a mischievous grin - that is how Henio looks to his friends on his Facebook page.

"My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin," he writes on his profile. His birthday is March 25, 1933. He is no more than seven or eight years old. As a young Jewish boy, he was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp.

Henio has been signed up to Facebook since August 18, 2009. "On that day, I wrote my first entry," said Piotr Buzek. The 22-year-old works in the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, and he is responsible for bringing Henio back to life in the virtual world. He imagines how Henio felt during his life and writes as though he were him.

"Here at the center we have collected a lot of information about Henio's life, and then I tried to imagine how this young boy experienced the world around him," said Buzek.

...By now, Henio has more than 1,700 friends on Facebook, and more are being added every day. Henio doesn't chat with them - he only writes short sentences about his life. His friends comment on what he writes - empathetically and honestly. They tell him what war means. And sometimes they can only explain to him that for many things in life there is simply no explanation.

This very brave experiment in what I dub "social media remembering" may not be "historical reenactment" the way Collingwood envisioned it but it does raise a few very interesting questions. Could Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter function as "places of memory"? How will we come to remember events in Iran last summer given how much digital content has been produced? How will future historians make sense of it all? Lots of questions but very few answers...

We need more projects like this:

An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push to doctors' iPhones retinal images collected from patients in remote locations.

Doctors can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones, said Anand Vinekar, project coordinator and pediatric retinal surgeon at the Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore.

...To improve its reach in rural and semi-urban areas, the hospital trained people to take eye images using a wide-angle retinal digital camera, with 130 degrees field of view. These people, who were not doctors or technicians, were also trained to make a preliminary diagnosis, Vinekar said.

Once the hospital started using images for a diagnosis, the doctors did not have to go to the rural locations every time for diagnosis, he added.

I've been taking quite a lot of heat lately for a somewhat promiscuous use of anecdotes in my quest to push against "Internet helps democracy" meme (see, for example, David Sasaki of Global Voices here and Patrick Meier of DigiActive here and here - Patrick's are responses to my cover story in the December issue of Prospect; I also responded to him already on my blog).

To summarize, in his two responses Patrick vehemently attacks me for basking in "anecdotal heaven" - as opposed, of course, to the "data hell" that he finds himself in - and does this probably a dozen times (and I do feel sorry for him - I hope Tufts, where he's completing his PhD, will compensate him adequately for this struggle against anecdotes).  

Let me make a confession first: I love sound and informative data as much as the next guy. However, when the data is missing, I don't bite my lips - like some academics do - and strive to stimulate and enhance public debate instead. Why? Because it doesn't really matter what I decide to do in the end - CNN, FoxNews and others would invariably jump to conclusions about the "Twitter revolution in Iran" or the brave Chinese bloggers taking on the government. Normally, they would also completely disregard whatever complexities and local nuances are usually present in authoritarian countries.

My choice is to step into the fray, take the risk of being wrong (as I have been - for example, on the question of the Twitter revolution in Moldova), and try to introduce a more nuanced perspective on the role/use of technologies. This way, the public can at least hear a more nuanced perspective. Do I feel happy doing it without having the perfect data to support my talking points? I don't - but then again, I do know that I've made the best effort to acquaint myself with what is out there, both data and anecdote-wise. I can't say the same of many other people talking about the Internet & democracy.

The major problem with Patrick's criticism of my methods - which I think is representative of the new media academia in general -  is that he believes in a world where not taking a public position - however flawed your data or arguments are - is a far better option than joining the public debate with imperfect data and arguments. On some issues, it probably is - many issues simply would not be discussed were it for people pushing them onto the public agenda - but to let much of the digital hysteria over the Internet's impact on democracy to go unchallenged, unchecked, and unverified is simply too demanding of a thing to ask , because decisions taken by funders, governments, and NGOs have repercussions far beyond their control.

Had Patrick decided to drop his numerous extracurricular activities and instead get us his magic data two years ago, I would have been perfectly happy to quote it when I got on television or the radio to discuss Iran or Moldova. Unfortunately, neither television nor radio would wait until Patrick completes his PhD to inform their viewers and listeners about what happened in Iran and what role the Internet played there. That's simply how public debate works in democracies and I frankly do not understand Patrick's problems with it.

If my critics want me to shut up and cede the microphone to some pundit-robot from a DC think-tank, well, I am not going to do that. And it's not just the media; it's also the government and the foundations - all of those need to quickly digest and interpret the situation to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, they can't wait for 10 years for some academic to tell them the exact role that new media played in Iran. Academics should either step up to the challenge and join the public debate - with data or not - or risk marginalization otherwise.

Would I feel more comfortable getting someone to pay me to spend the next 10 years to build a model that would tell me little that is new, interesting, or explanatory - just to be on the safer side in a public argument? Probably yes - especially, if I was an academic looking for a cool research gig. But I am not. I am not trying to build a model nor am I trying to test anything. My only function in this debate is to serve as a critic, i.e. take someone's argument, engage with it and spot holes and inconsistencies in its structure. And yes, finding inconsistencies in arguments - at least as far as Karl Popper is concerned - involves finding examples that would disprove the initial hypothesis.

Why don't I produce any data? Because I wasn't trained to do it, don't want to do it, and don't believe that gathering/testing data on most issues connected to digital activism is going to get us far ahead in this debate. I do not collect data for the same reasons that orchestra conductors do not fly planes. I can, of course, further push the argument that much of the data that is gathered by academics is to a large degree useless and doesn't really tell us much  - but hey, I'll pass on that opportunity here. It's a bit silly to think that having over a gazillion data points from a gazillion countries gathered over a gazillion years would illuminate what really happened last summer in Iran. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply spends too much time in academia.

I doubt that Patrick is the first person to get hurt by my criticism of the field. I can even sense and understand a growing backlash against my ideas because I am attacking many of the key premises on which the very field of digital activism - and much of its philanthropic support - is based. My criticism is certainly not good news for many people working in this field, both from academic, professional, and financial perspectives. But it's their problem not mine. As long as the mainstream media keep producing drivel about the Internet and academics continue shying away from the public debate, I think my role is justified and safe.

 I can only guess what Bill O'Reilly has to say about this. Probably, something along the lines of "Ban all phones!"

From a group calling themselves Electronic Civil Disobedience comes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a simple mobile application intended to aid and abet border-crossers from Mexico to the United States by mapping the safest routes to take.

This GPS app is built to work on the cheapest cell phones available. It brings to mind every petty-but-illegal transgression the casual user could commit and stretches the boundaries of the permissibility of tech's uses for plausibly illegal means. The next time you use P2P or bit torrent clients to download media or use an iPhone app to detect police radars, think about this mobile application and how it reflects on American law and the Internet.

The app seems to originate from a hacktivist group out of UCSD - hardly a historical hotbed of technological innovation, but close enough to the US-Mexican border to have a significant impact on the politics of technology in that area. The group also advocates DDoS-like digital sit-ins to bog down the resources of websites it deems offensive.

Oman has just joined the club of  what I call "Skype-paraonids": countries that think that allowing people to talk to each other over the Internet - using what is known as VoIP technology - is undermining their national security (Russia, India, Cuba, Germany are all proud members). From the Times of Oman: 

The Royal Oman Police (ROP) raided 121 cyber cafes throughout the country and arrested 212 people for providing illegal Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoiP) service, a senior police officer said here yesterday.

Many cyber cafes and individuals were found using VoIP technology to provide cheap international phone services to customers, resulting in huge losses for local telecommunication providers, the officer said. ...Providing telecommunications services (international phone calls without a licence through Internet Protocol) is illegal in the Sultanate as per provisions of Article (20) of the Telecommunications Regulatory Act. Officials point out that violators of the telecom law will have to shell out RO50,000 or spend two years in jail or both.

 

Cheap international calls? Forget it. They are bad for your mental health, according to the Omani sultanate. Looking deeper into this reveals a whole trove of tricks and tips how to unblock VoIP in Oman - this must be a real pain not to be able to use Skype and other tools because of some state monopoly on communications...

And while we are on it: you should also forget about buying prepaid SIM cards for mobile service in Kashmir. They have been banned too - for the reasons of national security, of course. From AP:

A government ban on prepaid mobile phones to prevent rebels from using them to clandestinely plan attacks has stirred resentment among Indian-controlled Kashmir's impoverished residents, who depend on prepaid connections for inexpensive communication.

The move has led to angry protests amid warnings it put thousands of jobs at risk and jeopardised peace efforts in the disputed territory between the Indian government and Muslim separatists.

Authorities believe rebels use fake documents to obtain the phone cards to evade detection and detonate bombs. The Indian government announced last month that no new cards would be issued beginning November 1.

 

That preventing extremely poor and angry population from earning a living via mobiles may have even worse national security repercussions doesn't seem to be other anyone in Kashmir. It's as if rebels won't be able to get mobile phones through some other means...

p.s. Posting has been light here - and will remain so for the next few weeks:  I am working on my book!

If you are like me, you were probably also bothered by the lack of virture on Facebook and other social networking sites. Well, fear not: the Saudi religious police are here to help us. Al Arabiya has more (h/t Chanan Weismann):

A group of Saudi's launched a group on a popular social networking website called The Facebook Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and have so far to attracted more than 500 members.

The group, named after the kingdom's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice also known as the religious police, aims to introduce people to the religious police, the London-based al-Hayat reported Friday.

The group's administrators have set several conditions for membership, including, no foul language or slandering officials, only serious topics open for discussion and posters should be tolerant and open-minded.

If members insult Islam they will be allowed three warnings before they are deleted from the group.

Many Saudis were keen to join the group and a large portion of members praised the role the committee plays in the Saudi society and the way they protect citizens and imposes order.

So anyone feels that Facebook now is a more virtuous place these days?

Next time you go to Russia, you may want to take it easy on the Twittering front. According to this article (in Russian), a senior spokesman for the Moscow police admitted in a recent interview that the police are avid readers of "the Internet" and particularly of Twitter. What a telling quote this is:

"Citizen journalista are twitterting from all the latest rallies and gatherings. The folks we detained during the rallies on Oct 31 were twittering even from the buses and the police stations - what was happening, who was saying what, etc. We are constantantly on the look-out for what they are saying, what they are playing. We are reacting immediately - including on issues that deal with human rights".

The spokesman added that they are also looking for ways to "raise the profile" of the police in the blogosphere. To that end, they are considering organizing debates and roundtables with bloggers; this seems to be the new preferred way of co-opting dissenting bloggers.

The police may really need it after a recent viral video confession recorded by a disgruntled Russian policeman - where he accused his bosses of being corrupt - got him fired, triggering lots of discussions on the Russian Internet (see this BBC article, for example).

If you read this blog and are in DC on Nov 17, you may want to come to this event, to hear me, my FP colleague Marc Lynch, and a whole bunch of other excellent people talk about social media, authoritarianism and free expression. Full announcement below - RSVP via Georgetown's web-site

Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and the Mortara Center for International Studies invite you to a lecture on

THE INTERNET, FREE EXPRESSION AND AUTHORITARIANISM

Please join us to discuss the evolving nature of authoritarianism in the age of social media and digital communications. Our speakers will assess the impact of new communication technology on regime stability, free expression and civic engagement, and discuss the changing political environments in Russia, China, and Iran.

2:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Tuesday, November 17th 2009
Mortara Center
3601 N. St. NW

Session I: 2:00 PM  3:00 PM

Evgeny Morozov
Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University

Coffee Break

Session II: 3:30  5:00 PM

Andrew Carvin
Senior Strategist, Social Media Desk, National Public Radio

Arvind Ganesan
Director of Business and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch

Shanthi Kalathil
Co-author, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

Marc Lynch
Professor, The George Washington University