Revolution and “inside-outside-inside” communication

Burmese monks and other digital activists within Burma used an “inside-outside-inside” communication cycle to spread information during the 2007 uprising, according to the first in a three-part report from researchers at Digital Democracy.

This cycle essentially worked like this: a limited number of dissidents inside the country gathered information and transmitted to a limited number of friends and followers outside the country who shared it with others, including media outlets. Once the news roiled a bit and new developments became known, they were sent back into the country to the same limited number of dissidents who would spread them throughout the population.

I remember the events in Burma and the use of technology to detail the violence as one of the “new media moments” of the last few years. There have been others since – Iran, Mumbai etc. These moments stand of as flashpoints of insight into the use of new technologies during times of crisis. They have for years.

This inside-outside-inside cycle has played out in many forms of media for centuries. Dissident newspapers in London and New York performed the exact same function during the Russian Revolution in 1917, for example. Radio Free Europe, which hired native speakers with contacts in the target countries, to broadcast information back in during the Cold War.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the events in Burma were crucial to help us better understand how this works – how communication move back and forth across borders and seep out of cracks in authoritarian regimes. Maybe we have enough of these compiled over time to come up with some sort of theory about how this works.

On participatory culture…

An informative interview with Nicholas Reville of getmiro.com. He talks about open-source and video – important as television goes online.

The newspaper as an afterthought

If you are at all interested in the fate of the newspaper industry, check out this blog entry from a Tampa Tribune intern. She describes a staff meeting during which layoffs were announced and the editor-in-chief described the newspaper as an add-on to the the company’s website. Wow indeed.

The tribe

Here’s a link to some remarks by Jay Rosen on “the tribe of professional journalists” from the opening day of the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in New York. His panel included Mayhill Fowler, the famous (or perhaps infamous depending on your vantage point) blogger who touched off “Bittergate“  after publishing remarks Barack Obama made about working class Pennsylvanians and who also published remarks Bill Clinton made about Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdham during a rope-line walk in early June.

Report on blogger arrests

The World Information Access program at the University of Washington reports that the number of blogger arrests are rising. Unsurprisingly, Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog. The report also includes data on political party websites and media ownership int he Middle East.

A summary of the report on bloggers:

INTERNATIONAL ARRESTS OF CITIZEN BLOGGERS MORE THAN TRIPLE
Publication Date: Jun. 10, 2008

Authoritarian regimes around the world are dealing with troublesome citizen
bloggers by arresting them, and they’re doing it more often, according to
researchers at the University of Washington.

“Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as
many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog
about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since
blogging became big,” said Phil Howard, an assistant professor of
communication. With his students, Howard prepared the World Information
Access Report, which documents sources and consequences of social inequality
in the information age.
In response to harassment, a significant number of political bloggers are
going underground. They are blogging anonymously, and using other online
tools such as MySpace and YouTube to post critical commentary.

Since 2003, 64 citizens unaffiliated with news organizations have been
arrested for their blogging. Topics of these blog posts vary, as do the
kinds of criminal charges and punishments.

But these arrests are probably just the tip of the iceberg, Howard said.
“The real number of arrested bloggers is probably much higher, since many
arrests in China, Zimbabwe, and Iran go unreported in the international
media.”

Altogether around the world, bloggers have served 940 months of jail time in
the last five years, the researchers found. During those years, the average
prison term for citizen journalists was 15 months. “Many countries have
political bloggers, and many persecute journalists,” Howard said. “More and
more citizens are expressing themselves online, and being punished for it.”

Jail sentences varied from blogger to blogger, the least amount a few hours
and the longest eight years. Nine of Egypt’s 14 known blogger arrests
occurred in 2007, an election year. In 2005, Iranian blogger Mojtaba
Saminejad was arrested for writing about the arrests of other bloggers.
“Some people blog about their arrests as soon as they get out of jail,”
Howard said.

Media Mobilizing in Philly

Here’s a new project started in Philadelphia called the Media Mobilizing Project. Philly has become an interesting center for participatory media. In addition to the Media Mobilizing Project, the city is also home to the Prometheus Radio Project and Media Tank.

Wikipedia, secrets and war

Here’s an interesting new twist on Wikipedia: Not only is it partially responsible for the decline in academic research skills it is also apparently undermining military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A Canadian general says that Wikipedia is among the most dangerous public-access websites because of the speed and ease with which it can be updated. People (we’re not quite sure who) are uploading information on casualties and damage from battles and insurgents are using this information to assess their success. Presumably much of this information is coming from soldiers themselves.

The story goes on to say that this ease of making sensitive information public is the reason behind an increased secretiveness by the Canadian military, which includes the unwillingness to release details on prisoners of war captured during battles.

The rhetoric makes sense if you simply take it at face value: soldiers shouldn’t be giving out secrets. My fear is, however, that basically they just want people to have fully sanitized version of what is going on there.

What would you cut in your paper?

Jeff Jarvis has a little test drive of Google’s new forms app. His survey is asking what parts of newspapers – sports section, critics, foreign news, etc. – you think should be eliminated. This could get interesting and is a no-brainer for media outlets looking to get a little closer to their audience. Of course, surveys, particularly online, are fraught with validity problems etc. But it could be a good conversation starter.

Kindle-icious

Tomorrow in my media and society class we are going to pull apart the digital-Internet-online-new media revolution in a segment of the class I am calling “evolution vs. revolution.” We will spend three classes in total talking about, among other things, the evolution of “delivery technologies” and how that history may inform us (or disinform us) about the current changes in the media landscape.

We’ll start tomorrow by talking about the book as a form of media and as a delivery technology and where it may be headed. The reading is “Books are Dead. Long Live Books” by Priscilla Coit Murphy. I will also show the lengthy ad for Amazon’s kindle, which I have included below and a clip from a November, 2007 episode of On the Media which is about our affinity for paper.

The key at least inititally is for students to understand that delivery technologies have always come and gone, but the media – the printed word – has stayed. Talking about paper helps them I think see the connection between media and culture. We like paper for lots of reason, one of which is that it holds ink nicely. The On The Media piece compares it to the door hinge. Doors in the future were never supposed to have hinges, but we still use them. There’s more to it than technology. One of the reasons is that hinges make doors slammable. Sometimes we like to slam doors.

Facebook for Journalists, Faculty, Students etc.

A great new site is up and running with the goal of linking up a wide range of people associated with journalism. Wired Journalists is kind of like a Facebook for industry. It includes a bunch of groups, such as “Social Bookmarking for Journalists” and “Audio Techniques,” many of which are aimed at beginners.

This to me is the most exciting part of this site – there is little pretense as far as I can tell. Lots of people on the site are taking their first tentative steps into the wired journalism world. One smarmy quip about inexperience with technology is liable to send them running back to the newsroom or the classroom, defeating the whole purpose of the site. But so far it seems incredibly welcoming. Lets hope it continues.