Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

A Cyber-House Divided

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • A Cyber-House Divided

    A CYBER-HOUSE DIVIDED

    The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/node/16943885?story_id=16943885&fsrc=rss
    Sept 2 2010

    Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually
    suspicious groups-and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle

    IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace,
    the social network, as "like ghetto or whatever". At the time,
    Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought
    it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went,
    just as they tired of shoes.

    But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher
    at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than
    whimsy might be at work. "Ghetto" in American speech suggests poor,
    unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their
    online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from
    the physical world-separation by class and race.

    A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect
    groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to
    transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research
    suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what
    they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.

    This summer Ms Boyd heard from a scholar in Brazil who, after reading
    her research, saw a parallel. Almost 80% of internet users in Brazil
    use Orkut, a social network owned by Google. As internet use rises
    in Brazil and reaches new social groups, better-off Brazilians
    are leaving Orkut for Facebook. That is partly because they have
    more friends abroad (with whom they link via Facebook) and partly
    snobbishness. Posh Brazilians have a new word: orkutificacão, or
    becoming "orkutised". A place undergoing orkutificacão is full of
    strangers, open to anyone. Brazilians are now the second biggest
    users of the micro-blogging site Twitter; but some wonder whether
    the dreaded o-word awaits that neighbourhood too.

    Facebook's architecture makes it easy for groups to remain
    closed. For example, it suggests new friends using an algorithm
    that looks at existing ones. But simpler, more open networks also
    permit self-segregation. On Twitter, members can choose to "follow"
    anyone they like, and can form groups by embedding words and shortened
    phrases known as "hashtags" in their messages. In May Martin Wattenberg
    and Fernanda Viegas, who research the display of social information,
    looked at the ten most popular hashtags on Twitter and discovered that
    most were used almost exclusively by either black or white authors. The
    hashtag "#cookout" was almost entirely black; the hashtag "#oilspill"
    almost entirely white.

    With ideology, the pair's findings were a bit more hopeful; liberals
    and conservatives at least communicate-by trading taunts. They do so
    by appropriating hashtags so as to surface in each others' searches.

    By now, only one keyword in American political discourse remains
    unaffected by such games of tag: #NPR, or National Public Radio,
    used only by liberals.

    All this argues for a cautious response to claims that
    e-communications abate conflict by bringing mutually suspicious people
    together. Facebook has a site called "Peace on Facebook," where it
    describes how it can "decrease world conflict" by letting people from
    different backgrounds connect. (The optimism is catching; this spring
    a founder of Twitter described his service as "a triumph of humanity".)

    Peace on Facebook keeps a ticker of friend connections made each
    day between people from rival places. Israelis and Palestinians,
    the site claims, made about 15,000 connections on July 25th, the most
    recent available day. That is hard to put in context; Facebook does
    not make public the total number of friendships in any country. But
    Ethan Zuckerman, a blogger and activist, used independent data to
    estimate that these links represent roughly 1-2% of the combined
    total of friendships on Israeli and Palestinian accounts. Using
    the same method for Greece and Turkey, his estimate was 0.1%. That
    understates the role of Greek-Turkish friendship groups, or groups
    dedicated to music or films that both countries like. Among, say,
    people from either country who are studying outside their homeland
    (and have a better-than-average chance of becoming decision-makers),
    the share of trans-Aegean links would be far higher. And their mere
    existence sends an important moral signal.

    But Mr Zuckerman frets that the internet really serves to boost ties
    within countries, not between them. Using data from Google, he looked
    at the top 50 news sites in 30 countries. Almost every country reads
    all but 5% of its news from domestic sources. Mr Zuckerman believes
    that goods and services still travel much farther than ideas, and
    that the internet allows us to be "imaginary cosmopolitans".

    Peace on Facebook offers data for India and Pakistan, too. That
    is even harder to put in context. Pakistan has banned Facebook in
    the past, and offers too few users to qualify even for independent
    estimates. John Kelly, founder of Morningside Analytics, a firm that
    analyses social networks, examined links between blogs and twitter
    accounts in India and Pakistan and discovered two hubs that link
    the two countries. South Asian expats in London who self-identify as
    "Desis"-people from the sub-continent-link freely to each other and
    to their home countries. And cricket fans in both countries link
    up spontaneously.

    Mr Kelly believes that clusters of internet activity, when they do
    cross national borders, flow from pre-existing identities. Ethnic
    Baloch bloggers in three different countries link mainly to each
    other. Blogs in Afghanistan show some ties to NGOs and American service
    members, but a far greater number to Iranian news services and poetry
    blogs. That reflects old reality, not some new discovery. There is
    also some hope in Morningside's data. Four websites most consistently
    account for links between countries: YouTube, Wikipedia, the BBC and,
    a distant fourth, Global Voices Online. The last of these, launched at
    Harvard University in 2005 and mainly funded by American foundations,
    works to create links between bloggers in different countries,
    and to find what it calls "bridge bloggers": expats and cultural
    translators, like London's Desis, who help explain their countries
    to each other. (This newspaper has a loose editorial collaboration
    with the site.)

    Onnik Krikorian, Global Voices' editor in Central Asia, is a British
    citizen with an Armenian name. He couldn't go to Azerbaijan and had
    difficulty establishing any online contact with the country until he
    went to a conference in Tbilisi in 2008 and met four Azeri bloggers.

    They gave him their cards, and he found them on Facebook. To his
    surprise, they agreed to be his friends. Mr Krikorian has since
    found Facebook to be an ideal platform to build ties. Those first
    four contacts made it easier for other Azeris to link up with him.

    But the internet is not magic; it is a tool. Anyone who wants to use it
    to bring nations closer together has to show initiative, and be ready
    to travel physically as well as virtually. As with the telegraph before
    it-also hailed as a tool of peace-the internet does nothing on its own.




    From: A. Papazian
Working...
X