The talk will be webcast live. Hope you can join me on the interwebs.

Here’s the teaser:

This project attempts to help us understand the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that brings together and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to, “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”

Drawing on Global Voices as an exemplar, I argue that we need to move beyond objectivity towards “hospitality” in pursuing the potential of journalism in a networked world. Roger Silverstone defines hospitality as the “ethical obligation to listen.” Indeed, in a world where the internet makes it so much easier for everybody to speak, Global Voices asks us: “The world is talking. Are you listening?” What is ultimately at stake is perhaps best described by Silverstone, who argues that, “it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity.”

Global Voices shows us that we would do ourselves a disservice by limiting our imagination to the ideal type of journalism from a previous era. Without expanding our imagination, we cannot hope to understand how the internet might alter the constraints of the relationship between journalism and democracy for the better. Indeed, communication scholar James Carey helped us understand that “the meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change.”

(Live blogging from the “From Social Network to Social Movement” conference)

What is the role of narrative in mobilizing people? Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Kennedy School starts with Alexis de Tocqueville and tells how he was so impressed with the rich associational life here in the United States, and how participation in associations drove people into relationships with each other, so they could learn about their common interest. Common interest that was the result of learning about each other, not as an aggregation of individual interest – there was a synergistic quality to association. The promise of democracy is an equality of voices for distribution of resources – and while this does not always happen in practice – it does highlight the importance of people coming together with common interest so they can act on it, and thus exerting power. It is crucial that associations are voluntary – they participate not because of coercion.

What makes social movements different from fashion and trends? They are different because they are collective and organized.They are efforts of purposive action, of mobilization, of translation power into action. They are not only about winning the game, but also about changing the rules. They are a hopeful response to conditions being intolerable. They make moral claims. Throughout history, they have been major drivers of political reform.

There is no social movement without leadership. Leadership is to accept responsibility to create conditions that will enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. Key here is uncertainty – there is no leadership needed if things are routinized and going their way – leadership is needed when things break down.

There is the idea that social movements are about one charismatic leader that everybody follows. That is far more myth than truth. Leadership does require a critical density. Marshall believes that command and control organizations require less leadership, as opposed to what he calls commitment organizations, where distributive leadership is crucial. Social movements are models of distributive leadership. What they do? They do five tasks: 1) bring people together around shared values; 2) bring people together in the form of relational commitments – people make commitments to each other; 3) it provides structure for collaboration; 4) it provides strategies – to turn power into outcome and 5) there has to be action on the ground.

Social movements exist in the face of injustice, but there is also a requirement for hope, otherwise no action is possible. People just don’t act and make change without hope. They also don’t act without provocation – people often remember the dream part in Martin Luther King’s speech, but forget the nightmare part he talked about. It is when nightmare and dream come together that action happens.

But what has narrative got to do with this? The subject of narrative is agency. The core mission of narrative is to teach us how to exercise agency. Agency is exercising choice in the face of uncertainty. It’s in conditions when we don’t know, when things are unclear, in novel times of challenges – that’s when agency matters, that’s when we can exercise choice, which is both exhilarating and frightening.

Narrative teaches us how we become agents. The exercise of intentionality occurs under certain emotional conditions – we don’t begin to exercise agency until we experience anxiety, when we have to deal with something but we don’t know how. Anxiety causes us to pay attention.

In the context of social movements, urgency and anger are often stand-ins for anxiety. To get attention, to provoke indignation. How we respond is the next question. If we respond in fear, we will withdraw, freeze, strike back, in general we will not have productive responses. On the other hand, if we are in a hopeful state, we will explore, get more information, learn how to deal with this novelty. So it is crucial whether we experience anxiety from a fearful or hopeful state. Whether we experience it from a state or alienation or empathy, from self-doubt or confidence. Emotive conditions are what facilitate intentionality (Marshall makes a reference to George Marcus’ book, the Sentimental Citizen). Narrative does the emotional work to exercise agency. This is especially critical, when conditions of uncertainty are great or when your agency is in question.

Plot, what initiates plot? Not surprising, it is uncertainty. What makes a plot is the unexpected. That’s when we get engaged – the reason why we get engaged is because we as agents, as human beings, the texture of our being is to cope with uncertainty – big or small. A plot recreates this.

The protagonist allows us to emphatically identify – we therefore get emotive affect, so that it is not just conceptual content – but instead we enter the affective reality of the moment, thus we can learn affectively, not just cognitively. Stories teach not just the head, but through the heart. The moral lesson that comes out – is through experience, and it is not just conceptually. We use stories – to make a point – to cause something to happen.

Stories are not true or false, but they work or not. The affective meaning you try to convey occurs in different kinds of settings. In the context of social movements: they are about creating agency where there have been none. Change does not occur without risk or uncertainty.

Public stories: Moses. Moses asked: Why me? Who are these people? Can’t this wait? Really, right now? Marshall compares this to the first 7 minutes of Obama’s speech – explaining why he has been called, where he comes from, choices his parents made that influenced him. He remind what we as a nation are called to and confronts us with challenge of action required now – through a series of small stories – and couples the challenge with hopefulness so people know what to do.

Stories are about reflection on choices one has made in the past. Retrieving these moments so listeners can experience the significance these stories had for you. Going through specific episodes – this is episodic memory rather than semantic memory – and it’s enhanced by visualization, because it raises affective reality. If you are in public life, and you don’t tell your own story, well, see what happened to John Kerry.

The story of us – is about what constitutes collective identity, and is a shared experience. Social movement leaders tell stories of us, and often draw on established stories to do so. Social movements are not simply a set of relations, nor strategies, nor a set of practices or actions, not just structures – they are narratives. They do the work to craft new identity – and are transcending – they are not just about changing the world, but also changing ourselves – what connects the two is narrative.

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Please also see the impressive liveblogging of this talk and other panels at this conference by my friend and colleague Corinna di Gennaro

Finally, you can also track this event on twitter with #HLSsocnetworks

Professor Charles Nesson is defending Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum against the RIAA. The RIAA is suing Tenenbaum for illegally downloading a few songs many years ago. This is how it usually goes: People get a scary letter from the RIAA saying they have been downloading songs illegally and are going to sue them in an expensive lawsuit; people often settle for a few thousand bucks to get the RIAA and their formidable litigation team off their back. This is a tactic that they have been effectively using against many people. What is the point of this? According to Nesson:

“The plaintiffs and the RIAA are seeking to punish [Joel Tenenbaum] beyond any rational measure of the damage he allegedly caused. They do this, not for the purpose of recovering compensation for actual damage caused by Joel’s individual action, nor for the primary purpose of deterring him from further copyright infringement, but for the ulterior purpose of creating an urban legend so frightening to children using computers, and so frightening to parents and teachers of students using computers, that they will somehow reverse the tide of the digital future.”

The part where Professor Nesson is arguing that these actions are neither to recover compensation nor to deter the person from future copyright infringement, but rather that their purpose is to send a signal to frighten everybody else: we will find you if you dare to download even a few songs illegally.

In writing a paper on Chinese internet control and censorship a few years ago, I often came across a Chinese proverb that would describe tactics like this. “Killing the chicken to scare the monkeys” (殺雞警猴) is a Chinese saying that illustrates how setting an example can be a very effective way of scaring people and deterring behavior you find undesirable. It was a particular powerful way of illustrating how a few well-placed and properly timed, not to mention highly publicized arrests, of dissidents would let the Chinese online population know that they were being watched and that those who would use the internet for “undesirable” purposes would have a less than desirable fate. Analogous, what Nesson is saying is that what is happening right now to Joel Tenenbaum is the RIAA way of resorting to the age-old “killing the chicken, to scare the monkeys” tactic.

We can debate about whether downloading songs from peer to peer networks should be illegal or not, especially when millions of kids do this, whether the music model is just broken, or whether this is really the only way to protect future innovation and creation of music. Let’s accept that it is illegal for now. Professor Nesson is not arguing that downloading songs should not be illegal – his argument really is that this should not be criminal. If downloading a song would be like speeding, this is how the current system would compare:

• a $750 fine for every mile over the speed limit, escalating to $150,000 per mile if the speeder knew he was speeding;
• the fines are not publicized and few drivers know they exist;
• enforcement not by the government but by a private police force that keeps the fines for itself

Professor Nesson furthermore argues that a system like this

• has no political accountability
• can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim
• can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

I wonder how the relatively young legal system in China would compare to the system as perfected by the RIAA?

If you want to read more, the case has been getting some amazing amount of press so far.

Ethan warns us that machine translation will never be up to the task completely by itself. It will take a combination of tools and communities to achieve better conversation through translation. Current examples I was thinking of include the Lingua project by Global Voices. Lingua seeks to translate the blog posts by Global Voices from English to many other languages, including but not limited to German, Spanish, Malagasy, Farsi, Bangla, Hindi, Chinese, and some others, creating an infrastructure that allows people who can only read Farsi to know what is happening in the Chinese blogosphere and vice versa. Another project that came to mind is Yeeyan. Yeeyan is a community consisting of people who translate content from around the web into Chinese – people can submit posts they want translated, express which posts you want to see translated, give ratings and comments. Are these models we can extrapolate? 

One way forward to think about this is whether we can learn from the most succesful peer production (as coined by Benkler) and apply them to translation. Yeeyan and Lingua are two budding flowers that can hopefully grow into a collection of well-maintained gardens. A few questions arise: Who will maintain the quality of translations, especially once work scales up? It is easy to maintain quality when there are only a few articles to be translated, but how will we oversee translations once they hit thousands or even millions in number? Can we also peer produce the kind of editing that is needed to maintain quality? Or peer produce the kind of filtering that is needed to be able to filter out the quality?

And can we rely on pure peer production based on volunteerism to scale this up? Do we need to monetize translation in order to scale up to a polyglot internet? With monetize, I don’t mean having a system in place that can pay professional translators who work for profit, although that certainly wouldn’t hurt. Instead, I mean being able to compensate volunteers for their time. Viviana Zelizer talks about the crowding-in and crowding-out effect – sometimes once you start paying money, people actually get offended and start leaving the community. Imagine going to a friend who invited you over for dinner and offering him/her to pay for the meal after you finished eating. Also, by paying some but not others, you might have people leaving, although sometimes it is okay to pay some if they do the kind of work nobody wants to do but which is necessary to keep the community and project going. Some people volunteer to translate because they love translating, others do it because they see it as contributing to a greater good. People have different reasons to translate; we will need to understand what motivates people to contribute, and learn how we can encourage these people, with and without money. 

Finally, even once we have translation in place, there still remains a lot of work to be done to overcome cultural distance. Context, recognition and responsiveness are only a few things we would also need beyond (linguistical) access. My Masters degree is, of course, in China Studies – essentially a bridge discipline that seeks to teach and educate students how to serve as the connector between China and the rest of the world. Greater funding for language and area studies, particularly in the United States, is another key component that would go a long way towards the realization of a polyglot internet.

I also found a place to stay at in Boston, signed the lease, and will move there around mid August. Looking forward to share my research with the people at Berkman and if you are around in Boston and want to grab a coffee together, drop me a note.