The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

Why he doesn’t get it:

The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house … For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.

Arendt argued that plurality is the quintessential condition for an active and autonomous human life. It is the recognition that we all share a world, that we are different, and that what we have in common are our differences.

For Zuckerberg to dismiss plurality and fault those who demand it for a lack of integrity …

Facebook’s bottom line seems to be: “If you’re using our service to share intimate details of your life with friends and family, you’ll take whatever we give you, and we’ll change that whenever we want without warning“.

Like I said earlier, this is not so much about privacy, it is about freedom.

I finally decided to leave Facebook.

I won’t lie, that was not an easy decision. In fact, it was really hard. See, Facebook is the only place where all my friends are together. Leaving Facebook is not just quitting a website, but it also means saying goodbye to all my friends. I am afraid I will no longer be invited to birthday parties, see cute pictures of their babies, or be able to find out that they have graduated and congratulate them.

But I have also seen Facebook slowly change over the years, for the worse, a decline that is beautifully documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There are many good reasons why you might want to consider leaving Facebook. One of them is that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, apparently says that he “doesn’t believe in privacy”. Well, he just happens to be the guy who is in charge of the website where I hang out pretty much all the time with my friends. I compare this to being invited to a house party with all my friends, but where the owner secretly records everything we do and say, and tries hard to sell it to advertisers. When he gets caught, we rage, and he says “oops, sorry”. Again and again, like an abusive partner, he promises to clean up his act. At what point do we say “enough is enough”? Should we trust him never to do it again? Not if it is clearly against his financial interest. Why not leave?

Facebook effectively holds our friends as hostages. The ransom is not our privacy, but our freedom. Let me explain: I do have (some) privacy on Facebook. Most of my information on Facebook was not exactly secret. The problem is not privacy: it is not being in control of your own life. Facebook might give us privacy, but always on their terms. They make it incredibly hard to leave. They make it almost impossible to save your messages, photos and profile. We are talking about them refusing to give back our information, our photos, /our/ life! It is almost impossible to leave, so we stay and they will continue to take whatever privacy they feel they can get away with. How much do they feel they can get away with? Let me ask you: how much privacy are our friends worth to us?

Dear Facebook, freedom or friends? That’s not a choice. So I quit. Instead, I plan to write on this blog, twitter, and longer e-mails to friends. It will not be a perfect replacement, but it will have to do until a better option comes along (psst there was life before Facebook!).

Allow me to make a wild analogy, one I believe is not entirely out of left field. Many people know that there is censorship in China. Many people also tell me that 1) the poor Chinese must feel really repressed or 2) they must be okay with it. But if that’s the case, who in their right mind can be okay with censorship? They must be brainwashed.

Ask yourself this: if I decide not to leave Facebook, yet I know they do not care at all about my privacy, what does that mean? How is that different from the people who continue to use the internet in China day in day out despite the prevalent and prolific practices of censorship? This is not a rhetorical question. Of course I realize Facebook is not the Chinese government, but I do think there are similarities between them, in kind although perhaps not in degree. Are you still on Facebook, and if so, why?

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

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.”

Do you want to know how Wikipedia was able to become such an incredible success? Who the people behind its success are? The best book to learn about the history and the culture of Wikipedia is Andrew Lih’s new book “The Wikipedia Revolution“,  launched last week. He was at Harvard last night to give a talk and do an interview with Berkman Fellow and distinguished internet scholar David Weinberger.

Andrew shares with us his story of how he first came across Wikipedia – in many ways, it was a very different experience from most people. On February 9, 2003, Andrew was looking for his next research project – he has been studying online journalism and new media for a long time – and has been instrumental in creating the new media program at the Columbia J-school – he was told that he should take a look at this new site called Wikipedia – this amazing site that “anyone can edit”. Contrary to most people, he heard the principle first, before he saw the actual website. When he took the time to explore the site, he was immediately taken away with it, thinking “the crowd could not have written this” He looked at more pages, started using Wikipedia in class assignments, and became so fascinated with the project that he wanted to study it full-time.

“It works in practice, but not in theory” is often said of Wikipedia. And that’s definitely true if you consider its origin. Wikipedia started out of a project called Nupedia – in many ways this was projected to be a conventional encyclopedia. Started by Bomis, it envisioned a 7 step rigorous peer review – it would recruit volunteers to write its articles – and the hope was that most of these volunteers would have a PhD degree. That is, the original vision of an online encyclopedia was one with very high stringent requirements.

The big problem: after one year, Nupedia had the grand total of twelve (count ‘m) articles. Even worse, they were written by someone on the payroll. This was clearly not sustainable. Larry Sanger decided to intervene – realizing they needed something radical to at least get seed material. He turned to this thing he saw called wiki software – created by Ward Cunningham – wiki was a way for programmers to share best practices – it would be an online resource for programmers. The name came from the wiki wiki bus in Hawaii – meaning ‘quick’. The wiki software indeed produced quick results – as of recent, there are over 2.8 million entries in the English Wikipedia alone. So why does Wikipedia work? Andrew suggests five key factors: it was free – open – neutral – timely and social.

Andrew describes the piranha effect – the idea that one change in one corner can inspire other changes and create a torrent in the community. For example, in one particular week, 33,800 (count ‘m) articles were added in Wikipedia. This was largely from a huge body of census data from the US – a software robot was written to extract relevant information from this data and inject every possible town and city in Wikipedia. One such town was Apex, and it just happened that on one day SethIlys visited this page. It was a dry article – what he decided to do was – hey, why not put a map on there? A few keystrokes later, he had added his own handmade map – and in his own way, was able to contribute his knowledge to the world. Useless perhaps? Perhaps, but if he visited this page, why not someone else as well? This experience was really empowering to him. Once he started with one map, he figured, why not add others? And once he started, it did not make sense to stop – so like Forrest Gump – he kept on running. The strange thing was, others started running, too. Nearly all the US census location articles now have maps.

There’s a famous saying: “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Andrew adds to that: “If there was ever a project that had lots and lots of unhammered nails, it was Wikipedia.” The dot map project was an inspiration – an exemplar – encouraging people to do things they never thought possible. And in many ways, Wikipedia itself is such a project as well – an exemplar.

David starts his interview with Andrew.

David: Let’s get this out of the way first, are you neutral about Wikipedia?

Andrew: No I’m not. I analyze neutrally. But I’m a big fan. I believe Wikipedia is one of the most fascinating creations man has ever made. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve scrutiny.

David: You think it was important enough to write a book about – an endorsement in itself. But let’s go to its origin myth – as all super heroes have one – the myth is often that idealists came together to do this democratic experiment and that the world’s greatest encyclopedia is the result. Is that right, where did it go wrong?

Andrew: Telling Nupedia’s story helps debunk a lot of this. It started as a failure. There was no way anyone knew how to do this. Even though the founders were very internet savvy and big fans of open source, it was not apparent that doing an encyclopedia in that style was the way to go. Only after a full year, did they decide to try it this way.

It’s also interesting that Wikipedia is always cited as an example of democracy, but the community itself never uses that word. It assumes good faith, it likes consensus, but it never ever uses the word democracy. As a matter of fact, a key thing in wiki is NOT to do voting. They discourage voting – they rather decide through discussion, not to rely on hard measures like voting.

David: What’s wrong with hard measures?

Andrew: The problem of gaming the vote without having meaningful discourse. One of the most contentious issue was the Danzig/Gdansk edit war. An edit war is what happens when you don’t converge on a neutral point of view – the result is that there is a constant flipping back and forth between different revisions of one article. This edit war was the catalyst of a lot of policy change – for example, the Three-Revert-Rule. But in this case, after a year of brutal edit war, voting was inevitable – it was a defining edit war in English Wikipedia history.

David: Can you talk about the flatness – that supposedly every voice is equal and there is no hierarchy – and its rules, the anti-rules and emergence of rules?

Andrew: The rule is that you shouldn’t have that many rules – having too many rules, you start to game the rules. There are rules nevertheless – neutral point of view, assume good faith, – the idea that your next contributor could be the most prolific one, so don’t bite the newbie. But these rules are soft ones and established during the early days – the community has changed quite a bit since 2001.Today it is no problem to get people to contribute. The problem is to get rid of bad stuff. The concern: is the community is still as vibrant as the early days?

David: There is an antipathy towards rules – the idea that rules tend to breed bad behavior – yet at the same time it is a warm-hearted community – assume good faith. To what extent is Wikipedia free of a certain political mindset in the structure of Wikipedia as an emergent community?

Andrew: The English Wikipedia, it’s a liberal progressive community, or libertarian. It is reflected in the early roots of Wiki – they met on Objectivist mailing lists. Jimbo (Jimmy Wales) is a straight forward libertarian – common in the geek community. The articles are generally of good quality nevertheless. But if you disagree, you can fork. One such response is Conservapedia.

David: Is it built along the same principles?

Andrew: No, but I wish it were. Articles are often written in direct opposition to Wikipedia articles.

David: Is it open to edit?

Andrew: Hmm, hard to say. More people are in control, they are not as inclusive.

David: What I like is the pragmatism of Wikipedia – a general dislike for rules, but if you need a rule to build an encyclopedia, then it’s fine.

Andrew: There are really five pillars, one of them is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That might sound silly, but that wasn’t so in 2004. Wikipedia had grown as a community with lots of social aspects – there was a gaming lounge for example where people were playing virtual chess games. We had to shut that down – it was pretty cruel – but we are here to write encyclopedia articles and not to support MySpace activities.

David: It’s also a discussion about which articles are deleted – that Wikipedia is not an art project. It’s an encyclopedia, but sort of different – so the question becomes what an encyclopedia is in a digital age? It’s a sharp edged debate between the deletionists and inclusionists – what side do you fall on?

Andrew: The inclusionists’ argument is that wiki is not paper – why not have articles about anything under the sky? An article on an obscure issue does not take away from your general experience. The deletionists, also called exclusionists, argue that the value of an encyclopedia is that it is a set of articles. It’s no good to have an article where every single word is cross-linked, or that are not reliable – the key test here is – should we have an article on what we had for breakfast?

In the early days, I was considered an exclusionist. I argued that it does matter how selective you are – that articles need to be verifiable, high quality. Over the years, the community standards have shifted, to the point that I don’t think I have changed my stance that much, but where I am now being considered an inclusionist.

Now it is crucial to keep out the bad stuff – Wikipedia is now high profile – and recent policy changes are all about restrictions, restrictions, restrictions. It provides a much more different atmosphere than the early days – now much more stringent.

David: What gets people so passionate about this particular issue?

Andrew: It’s not just within one language – it’s across cultures as well – for example, the German Wikipedia has 900,000 articles – a long way to go before you hit the 2.8 million articles of the English Wikipedia. But the Germans are very happy with their 900,000 articles – they generally have a much more stringent standard. Wikipedia used to be known as the definitive guide to Pokemon – that would not fly in German Wikipedia. That’s their style. The German Wikipedia is more traditional – but also has a great reputation – the German government, libraries, and universities are all interested in working with Wikimedia Deutschland because their quality is so high.

That is to say, the inclusionist/exclusionist argument also varies widely depending on the cultural lens you use.

David: Is it a problem that neutrality happens only if there is enough homogeneity in the community? Or they will have to break off? Does Wikipedia reinforce a prevalent domain of discourse that everybody agrees on? And thus excluding other views?

Andrew: Certainly in some languages – the first twenty languages – the largest languages – are fairly well educated and multilingual – especially contributors for the English Wikipedia span the whole world – and there is diversity of view points. But after the twenty languages – the drop off is bigger – and people are more homogeneous.

David: Isn’t this the case in English Wikipedia as well? That is, neutrality hides a fork – people fork.

Andrew: Yes, but they create meaningless forks, that nobody links to, they fade away.

David: That is exactly the price that it exacts – marginalization of points of view out of mainstream – that they cannot get on the same page – lots of groups accuse Wikipedia of this.

Andrew: Jimbo said once that Neutral Point of View is a term of art – most things that work are not razor sharp. There is a lot of faith in the actual ground troops – that they stay within directive – and that hopefully the diverse community will take this in account and create reliable content.

David: Lets talk about the changing roles of authority. Being a big prof doesn’t matter – its bad form even if you say this.

Andrew: Editorial authority is even more interesting in Japanese Wikipedia – most are anonymous – this is because the dominant internet culture in Japan is based on anonymity. You could be discussing with anyone, a housewife or a prof, what matters is the quality of edits.

David: Let’s talk about Essjay.

Andrew: That was one of the bigger crisis. Essjay was a pseudonym – and on his user page it said that I can’t tell you who I am but I have a PhD in Theology and I work at an academic institution but would get into trouble if I tell you my real name. Was an incredible prolific contributor – over 10,000 edits and everybody generally accepts that they were good quality. He eventually got access to admin privileges – that is, he could check IP addresses of users behind the scenes, and only a dozen people can do that, had access to private data.

What happened was that the New Yorker was doing an article – by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer award winning reporter – she did an interview with Essjay – wrote a long piece. Then Essjay took a job with Wikia Wikimedia Foundation (EDIT: Andrew corrected me: he took a job with Wikia, the for-profit firm founded by Jimmy Wales and another Wikipedian Angela Beesley) – and to do so, he had to come clean – that he was a 20-year old with no PhD degree. This was a huge embarrassment to the New Yorker – it seemed that Stacy never even asked Essjay’s name just to fact check it.

Some people argue that Essjay lied to a reporter but had good contributions. Others pointed to the fact that he sometimes used his credentials to win arguments. It was a real soul searching for the community – a prized Wikipedian would lie to the outside world, to a Pulitzer award winning reporter, and raised issues with regard to having faith in each other in the community.

David: The increasing use of credentials – or the German system that now allows for the marking, a flagging of pages that are considered reliable – is this a trend that will continue?

Andrew: Germans lead on quality issues – they have a tighter community of admins, who almost act like a council – whereas the admins in the English Wikipedia function more like janitors. So why not have a flagged version – you could flag the last version of an article that is stable – and you show people the latest checked version. You get better quality but you lose that they are instantly updated. The Germans implemented this last year – quite a success – flagged 89% in first year. The English Wikipedia has interest to implement this but it is hard to get the community to reach consensus on anything at all. Right now it’s a total stalemate – it had a surge of initial support but now trickled down.

David: The common complain is that students go to Wikipedia and simply believe what is there. What is it that readers need to do not to be fooled by occasional vandalism? How scared should we be?

Andrew: Wikipedia should be the starting point, but not ending point. It should not be in citations, just like entries from the Britannica should not be cited.

David: How confident should we be when we use it to look things up>

Andrew: The critique that it is dangerous when 14 year olds take it as gospel is not fair. Most people are media savvy. And then there is a whole range of things the community implemented – for example, requiring sources – in 2003, 2004 you never had any article that was tagged ‘citation needed’, now you do everywhere – there is a team called the ‘citation needed patrol’. Standards have improved – but ultimately I think flagged versions should be put in some way – right now it looks like it will be used for entries of living persons – this is for libel reasons. We start there and see what happens.

Audience Questions

Question: Can you discuss failed Wiki projects?

Andrew: The battlefield of failed wikiprojects is vast. Wikitorial from the LA Times was a real disaster. There is an assumption that you put up a Wiki and the Wiki Magic will happen. The LA Times learned the hard way – if you have no robust community with admins that fight vandalism, it’s a recipe for disaster.

What you realize after all this failed projects – wiki is perfectly suited for encyclopedia. It’s like a bento box of writing.
Very structured writing and lends to crowdsourcing. Very modular. This is not true for a novel, for example. Penguin had a contest where they put up a Wiki and expected that the magic wiki crowd would write a novel – did not happen.
Those that do work: lots of sharing, step by step, modular structured style of writing. Certain type of content are like this, but lots don’t. A lot of other organizations learn the hard way.

Question: Why not make people use full names?

Andrew: There is always talk in community – now do we don’t need anonymous people anymore – they give us more problems than they are worth – lets start requiring higher standard. In the beginning – the original culture dominates – Wikipedia tends to be inclusive – anonymous users are the core value of “anyone can edit”.

David: What about pseudonyms?

Andrew: It makes you to be able to converse with this person, it allows interaction, although you don’t know the authenticity. You can still see all the edits. Interestingly, pseudonym users give less information than anonymous users – with anonymous users, an IP address is recorded, and that often provides geographic location, what organization you are part of, etc. The Wikiscanner used this to its advantage – found out that people in Congress, Ogilvy, all kinds of organizations were editing articles they probably should not be editing. It was a typical example of sunshine being the best disinfectant – it was a kind of watchdogging the crowd.

Question: If Wikipedia would have been run by company, would it have been different?

Andrew: If Wikipedia was a commercial company, no way it could have been successful – people contribute because it is a free license – same like with Linux – people know it wasn’t making a company rich. Example is the Spanish fork – in the early days, there were some rumours about the possibility of advertisements – the Spanish community went ballistic on the mention of ads – they literally took the ball and went home – started Encyclopedia Libre – convinced all contributors to leave. This incident set the tone for the community since then.

Question: Is the bulk of content made by a small number of people?

Andrew: The idea behind the 80/20 rule is that 80% is done by 20% of the people. But this is not necessarily true for Wikipedia – Aaron Swartz’s research shows that there is a wide swath of people that edit Wikipedia. While the distribution is still non-linear, it’s just not the case that there is an elite crowd who edits over hundred hours a week.

David: Aaron’s work shows that the creation of new articles, the bulk of it is done by a broad range of users – which makes intuitive sense.

Andrew: As far as where the community is now, we don’t have good numbers. Since October 2006, there is no authoritative dump of Wikipedia anymore – it takes more than a month to do a monthly dump. This leaves Wikipedia vulnerable – and you also can no longer do statistical analysis.

David: We should each download one page!

Question: Can you talk about Larry Sanger?

Andrew: Sanger has an odd role – he did set up most of the basic rules of Wikipedia – but over time also encouraged Wikipedia to be more elitist over time – and some started seeing him as a pariah, as the anti-Wikipedian. Citizendium is supposed to be Wikipedia done right – with a layer of expertise but still largely open. His main criterion seems to be maintainability. He thinks a lot of what is going on in Wikipedia is just bs – trying to turn vandals into productive members – he is saying, cut that out, work with experts who can cut through the junk. We’ll see what history will say about that.

(Question about the vote on license migration – got lost in the details)

David: Wikipedia experienced exponential growth – but what got us there may not be the right set of tools to move ahead.

Andrew: That’s why flagged is inevitable – not to grow further, but to maintain quality.

Question: How did the power structure evolve?

Andrew:  The number of privileged positions have grown but tend to be technical rather than editorial oversight. As an admin – you can block users – but only in narrow situations. You can lock articles – but only temporary – for combating vandalism. Promotion is community decision, there are no hard metrics. Things considered include the number of edits, activities you engage in, social capital – these are all intentionally left vague – the decision is made on an interaction  human human basis – it’s not like there is an eBay rating or Amazon ranking.

Question: Why are there different forks and how do they exist – is there a possibility to have one global Wikipedia instead of all these divides?

Andrew: You’re right that it is too easy to see the 2.8 million English entries as the super set from which other Wikipedia languages should be translated from. This set is missing lots of things on Chinese arts, history – things the Chinese Wikipedia has. But the problem is, you need bilingual folks, tools to discover which article is good in one language and has a bad counterpart in another ..

Question: Will the WikiMedia foundation do this?

Andrew: They are a great engine to raise funds.

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.

In quite-to-the-point style, he asks: are newspapers doomed? He points to the newspapers’ continuing decline of circulation and advertising revenue and argues that one phenomenon, among many others, is a driving force: the unbundling of the newspaper. In other words, whereas the newspaper in the past was a collection, a package of content sold to you – a set of daily comics, weather forecasts, classifieds, domestic news, foreign news, sports news, book reviews etc – the newspaper is now being disassembled and sold as separate parts. Think of a stolen car – instead of being sold as a whole – it is often worth more to sell the parts separately. This trend of unbundling has caused advertising revenues to drop – as the audience scatter around the different disassembled, unbundled parts, so do the advertisers.

Unbundling also gives rise to another concern that Carr does not mention: the public no longer is served what I call ‘serendipitous’ content – content that you don’t know you would want or could not know in advance that you find interesting. We should not overstate this – many people selectively skim the newspapers or only turn to the sections that they are interested in (sports section ..). But still, if you were bored or had more time, it was only a page turn away to see what the rest of the newspaper had to say. Related, reading the frontpage and other sections of the newspaper often fueled the so-called water cooler conversations – those conversations you have when you run into someone and that creates what Putnam has called social capital.

Carr’s story pretty much ends here and it is a stark and dreadful story. But does the story really ends with the unbundling of the newspaper? I suggest that we should consider the many ways a trend of re-bundling is taking place. We can ask on what principles these acts of re-bundling are taking place. Personal interest is one of them – and it is this principle of self-interest that most people turn to when selecting blogs and other online feeds for their RSS reader. Serendipity can be another principle – and this is the principle that guides Global Voices – how it selects the news it produces. It is trying to give you a story you would not have heard about, or a perspective you would not have considered. In many ways, it is that foreign news section in the newspaper – but instead of a page turn away, it is now a click away. While Carr is painting a depressing picture, the good news is that the potential for serendipity is certainly not much worse off than in the past – is it less effort to click than to turn a page? The bad news is that even that one click might be too much – how do we get people to click? What drives serendipity? Is this something public policy should be involved with and/or be concerned about (one can think of public media taking an active role in this, a la BBC)? One thing for sure is, the story does not end here. Exciting times ahead.