Is imagination merely a talent, such as a good singing voice, the ability to “make things up: or “think things up” or “get ideas”? Or is it, like science, a way of knowing things that can be known in no other way? We have much reason to think that it is a way of knowing things not otherwise knowable. As the word itself suggests, it is the power to make us see, and to see, moreover, things that without it would be unseeable. In one of its aspects it is the power by which we sympathize. By its means we may see what it was to be Odysseus or Penelope, or David or Ruth, or what it is to be one’s neighbor or one’s enemy. By it, we may “see ourselves as others see us.” It is also the power by which we see the place, the predicament, or the story we are in.”

– From Wendell Berry, “God Science, and Imagination” in Imagination in Place.

Simply terrific.

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.”

Liveblogging begins at 10:45. Also, keep an eye on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, who is here and has marathon liveblogged many a conference.

Sharon Hom could not make it.

The Global Network Initiative is a cooperative effort between NGOs and the private sector devoted to “creating a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector”.

Colin MacLay focuses on corporate responsibility, and invites us to examine the issues of free expression and privacy in terms of Lessig’s four forces (law, infrastructure, commerce and norms). The problems of censorship and freedom of expression is not a China-specific problem but a global one. Governments are all recognizing the impact of Internet users, the role companies can play in furthering government interests. The goal of the initiative is that by learning from one another in creating a code of conduct, the groups involved could collectively move forward effectively. They found that no single sector alone, investors, companies, academics or human rights groups, could make things happen and so you found competitors and opposing groups sitting together discussing these issues.

Rebecca MacKinnon asks Leslie Harris what her response is to the assertion that GNI is a fig leaf providing cover for participating companies and organizations. Harris says there is always a tension to the group given their disparate interests, but they have struck some balance and would not be participating if they believed the effort was a fig leaf. The Initiative, unlike other multi-stakeholder movements in other areas, is very much focused on government power rather than corporate behavior alone.

Harris is then asked to clarify the nature of the code of conduct, and she says it is not simply a list of what is right and wrong, but rather best practices, internal safeguards, legal guidelines, how best to enter a new market while respecting these issues. It is more a way of doing things, rather than commandments of what can or can’t be done in country X. MacLay adds that no one yet knows precisely what should be done, no static solution, and so rather they created a community, platform and approach for these problems.

MacKinnon asks Bob Boorstin what impact GNI has had on Google and its work in China. Boorstin thanks Annenberg, and also says he’s the proverbial fire hydrant at the dog show – and a “technological idiot”. Boorstin just came back from Google’s China office, but has been there a dozen times since 1979 and appreciates the changes of the past 30 years. Why would Google join GNI? First is the albatross “Don’t Be Evil”. This is a government problem – if governments didn’t ask for censorship, Google wouldn’t bother. Second, there is strength in numbers. GNI is more than the sum of its parts in terms of leverage. Third, Google wants more approaches like The Millenium Challenge under Bush. Fourth, Google is in GNI as a defensive move against critics, though many of those will give no quarter. GNI is the first time that Google has decided at an executive level to allow outsiders to come in two years and judge them. As a non-Silicon Valleyite, Boorstin emphasizes that the Valley tends to say “look at our cool product. Buy it and leave us alone”, and so this is a big step for Google.

What difference has GNI made within Google? Googlers (what employees are called) have very strong opinions, and many would have never gone to China. GNI provides a certain baseline charter by which to discuss these issues internally, and raises the volume of such discussion. GNI language has been incorporated into the employee code of conduct, another difficult step. It also helps regularize Google’s process for dealing with these issues, whether its in China, Thailand, Turkey or Italy.

Boorstin asks why are there no Asian and European members in GNI, and can it expand to other sectors beyond the Internet, such as telecoms which handed over lots of data to the Justice Department.

Isaac Mao once wrote a letter to Google criticizing some of its actions in China. He points out that China is a complex and enormous space with various actors. Google was blocked in China in 2003, before it had a China office. By 2005, the Chinese government was upgrading the filtering and monitoring systems for the Internet. As an MNC, Google has more access to government officials than most of the rest of us. At Mao’s level, he sees more administrators and Internet entrepreneurs struggling to survive when their business model clashes with government restrictions. When doing business in China, Mao has three suggestions. First, when Google was first blocked, Internet users protested and this is even more true now when you could say there is an “Internet Republic of Caonima”. You need to interact more with Internet users. Second, they ought to find better, more creative solutions to satisfy both users and the government – a savvier middle ground. Third, he suggests that Google increase Adsense payments to Chinese bloggers to increase revenue and profile.

In response, Boorstin agrees that it would be great if Google could find more ways to deliver regular services (as found outside China). Google has promised never to have a “Shi Tao” moment. Second, Boorstin asks “how can a U.S. company compete with a Chinese company (in China)?”

MacKinnon asks Ang Peng-Hwa about criticisms that there is no Asian participation in this all-Westerner endeavor, and whether it can be truly global?

Ang: Yes.

GNI is not about what companies must do. What can be done in the U.S. can’t be done in Singapore. Trade is vital to Singapore, being 160% of GDP, so it works differently. So GNI is about process, which produces different results in different countries. You can’t publish Mein Kampf in Germany or step on a coin (with the King’s face) in Thailand, and no set of static rules (as mentioned by MacLay) can encompass this. Ang doesn’t see global censorship, but rather the Internet maturing and the realization that online and offline media function differently, like rules for riding horses would be inappropriate for the car at the turn of the 20th century.

When China censors, it has a strategic aim to support Chinese business, such as undermining Google to strengthen Baidu, says Ang. GNI does not seem appropriate for small business. He suggests that for some of Boorstin’s problems, such as the lawsuit in Italy involving YouTube, laws must be made to address third party liability (or lack thereof).

Colin MacLay points out that GNI is based on various international standards such as the Declaration of Human Rights and related covenants, and is not based only on U.S.-centric laws or platforms. Also, government can be bad, but also be confused and simply do things badly. Do we think we should be regulating the Internet as media, or as expression? Do we need to have a debate on this? Media regulation and human rights seem to be converging (along with privacy and transparency). And yes, there are no small companies in GNI and there should be.

MacKinnon calls on Michael Anti in the audience for a personal experience on blog censorship, as his MSNSpaces blog was shut down in 2005 and he spoke to Congress saying Chinese Internet users are not a doll for Westerners to dress however they want. Anti says that Google products such as Gmail and Google Groups are really vital to those who seek free and secure tools for civil society. Anti feels that Google and other large companies should have a social contract with civil society netizens, where netizens accept Google’s cooperation with the government and Google provides as many tools as possible to them. Boorstin, boringly, agrees. He also points out that Google has a program to give Adwords away for free to NGOs in different countries, including China.

Professor Michael Price asks if Congress has been involved, and other forms of approach. Second, he asks “what is the jurisprudence of the figleaf? What is their function? What is the positive side? They cover what we know is there. We should explore the function of figleafs.” Hilarity ensues.

Leslie Harris explains that GNI has not taken hold in Europe, where these are not seen as problems, while in America it has focused companies attention on the U.S. government, which has also increased the impression that this is a U.S. plan.

Ang Peng-Hwa brings up the movie Red Cliff II, that the generals can’t tell the prime minister about a problem because he’s busy with a woman. In the book, the prime minister is singing, asks an advisors frank opinion and chops off his head when his truthful opinion displeases him. Then the generals approach him – what would you say? Boorstin thinks Chinese netizens know whats under the figleaf and have no illusions.

Isaac Mao is asked what he would do if he ran GNI. He says that an Asian regional group could be formed, as many of these cultures are accustomed to being more controlled, and could find more common ground. But he feels that this should come after a global, universal framework, which could help especially in a country on the scale of China. Ang Peng-Hwa agrees about localization, and wants to start a Singaporean EFF called Committee of IT Experts, because you can’t use the word “freedom” in Singapore without being misunderstood. The stronger the censorship, the weaker the civil society, and so in Asia civil society is unlikely to create such a group.

Li Hongmei asks about skepticism that companies can balance profit-seeking and social responsibility, and why does Boorstin and others think Internet companies can do this while others cannot, especially given the reputation of Chinese companies such as Sanlu?

Boorstin hates the term “social responsibility” because it puts CSR aside and doesn’t integrate it into daily work. MacLay adds that it should not be about “do-gooding”, but about good practices. Boorstin points out that GE pitched its push for green tech as being about making money, not doing good, and that is more realistic, believable and effective.

Global Voices, the subject of my dissertation, has been doing a great job in providing us with information when the news about Mumbai broke. Immediacy is a crucial aspect of news coverage in crisis events and something citizen media in general and Global Voices in particular are well positioned to do. My colleague and friend Ethan Zuckerman points out that the well-connected social and technical infrastructure in Mumbai was instrumental in enabling bloggers and twitterers to provide a wealth of information upon an instant’s notice. In addition, Global Voices’ and especially Neha’s familiarity and insider knowledge of the social media space gave them a good sense of which sources to turn to and that had a reputation of being credible. This expert knowledge is particularly important for a quick response when one finds itself having to navigate amidst an explosion of information that erupts in a sudden crisis event such as the Mumbai attacks.

CNN International referred to Global Voices as the website to go to for further information when the news first broke. Global Voices is well positioned because it possesses this wealth of insider knowledge. That in turn can be attributed to the network structure of the Global Voices organization, where expertise, authority and responsibility is largely located in the edges, with the bloggers, much more so than in a command-and-control hierarchy of a traditional news organization. This fluid network structure based on volunteers allows them to act and respond much faster than other organizations in the case of events that are unpredictable and unscripted.

Furthermore, Global Voices quickly became a central hub in the network of social media. It set up a special coverage page indexing and linking to the different places to turn to for more information, while also as the first stop to get a constantly updated overview of what was going on. Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin was fulfilling a similar role as a key node in the blogosphere. Glynnis MacNicol of Fishbowl suggests that citizen media have become one step closer to mainstream media. Jay Rosen (through Twitter) thought it was notable that the reliance of the mainstream media on citizen journalism was without the “is this journalism?” hysteria this time around. 

Is this the coming-of-age of citizen journalism? CNN seems to think so. The fact that mainstream media no longer find it controversial to point its audience to citizen media websites such as Global Voices seems to indicate so. Both Clay Shirky and Vincent Mosco made the argument that technology only has become truly important when it has become trivial and banal. In other words, when technology’s so normal, so plain that we don’t even notice any longer that we are using it. Techcrunch, however, finds it noteworthy that news of Mumbai first broke on Twitter. So maybe it is not quite banal yet, but how long will this remain to be newsworthy? 

Where to go from here? Given the incredibly wired infrastructure and digital literate people in Mumbai, Gaurav Mishra suggests that there was really surprisingly little original reporting from citizens. Perhaps that’s the next challenge.

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.

Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. [They] are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say ‘yes’ when what they have said is ‘no.’ [..] many of these feminist insights into ways in which deliberation can serve as a mask for domination extend beyond gender to other kinds of unequal relations, like those based on class or ethnicity. They alert us to the ways in which social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions.

In: Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80.

Reading her quote reminds us how access alone often is not enough for equal communication. Access, of course, is a first prerequisite that is a necessary but not sufficient condition. In this light, one can think about to what degree citizen media empowers or emancipates; that is to say, how being able to blog alone is not enough, one also has to be heard in a voice that does justice to the speaker – a proper voice. This problem gets only more challenging in a global context, where not just social inequalities but also linguistic and cultural, not to mention basic human rights to freedom of speech, are often an immense barrier to any remote possibility for a healthy conversation between different people, groups, cultures in an age of growing interdependence.

I did the Dutch translation for this video that introduces Rising Voices, an amazing project spearheaded by my friend David Sasaki that “aims to bring new voices to the global conversation”.

Let me know if you find any errors in my translation. You can also watch the original video in any other language besides Dutch. If you know a language that this video hasn’t been translated in, feel free to contribute (dotsub makes it real easy to translate)!

Follow the Summit on twitter, irc (#globalvoices on freenode), liveblog, video stream, facebook, flickr, and slideshare (I am sure I am still missing some!).

why do i study what i study? the video tells you why.

first, because of the dichotomy we subconsciously create between the local and the global, we forget to consider how the global is often intertwined with the local, or how the boundaries between the two are blurring. while the world is not yet quite the global village as McLuhan has envisioned it to be, and I am not quite ready to argue that the local is the global, examples such as the images from the Burmese monks uploaded by cameraphones suggest that the global, while perhaps not the same, is often only one step away from the local.

second, citizen journalism needs to be considered in the global context because of our moral duty to listen to the other. the media is often the only way we learn about the rest of the world. where else would most of us learn about Burmese monks except through the media? but how many other voices have we and are we still ignoring at the same time? roger silverstone has referred to this as a notion of hospitality, understanding the media as a space (a polis in its ideal form) where certain actors (us) are more powerful than others (them), which gives us the obligation to at least listen. to take hospitality and thus the other seriously means that we need a better understanding of the dynamics of how geographically but also socio-cultural distant events are brought to our attention. citizen journalism in the global context gives the other the rather unique capacity to bring matters to our attention on their own terms, rather than ours.

third, to raise the issue of citizen journalism in the global context is to problematize the classic notion of citizenship as tied to the nation-state and suggests the possibility of practicing citizenship in a global civil society. it is an invitation to examine globalization from the bottom up. citizenship in a global civil society should not be confused with global or cosmopolitan citizenship. a large group of people might participate in global civil society with strong and explicit ties to the nation-state. a strong national identity does not preclude, and might even be a prerequisite, in order to participate in global civil society. examining citizen journalism in the global context will provide us with clues to the changing meaning of citizenship and participation.