Home Seminars Events Media Landscape Newsroom Media News Resources About EJC

Search the website

European Bloggers (Un)Conference “East meets West”

Asides


Overview


David Weinberger, redux

David Weinberger warmed up for his debate with Andrew Keen at the start of Picnic with a solo presentation on Wednesday night of Picnic. Many of the participants of the European Journalism Center’s (Un)Conference attended this rather informal session.

The societal value of the World Wide Web lies within its disorganization and its increasingly implicit forms of expression (by way of its ad hoc linking of knowledge) Harvard University’s Weinberger says.

Weinberger argues for the reinvention of basic organisation principles.

Weinberger, the American author of “Everything is Miscellaneous,” is a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He argues that the web, which allows for users to organise content themselves, is by its reliance on links a solution to the problem of sifting through the overload of information on the Internet.

“Its architecture is from the beginning designed to prevent us from drowning in this sea of crap,” he said in front of about 100 people at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam on Wednesday evening – and again, during a debate with Andrew Keen on Thursday morning.

Keen is the author of The Cult of the Amateur, which laments the so-called Web 2.0 revolution. He is regarded as the leading contrarian to the waves of amateurs providing content for the web.

Weinberger suggests that the web was intended by creator Tm Berners-Lee to be a solution, a means of linking knowledge. Most of this knowledge, Weinberger says, is most aptly classed as ‘miscellaneous,’ that most nebulous of categories. In the miscellaneous box, all content is unlike.

And Weinberger argues against the forced, unnatural classification of this knowledge online. Taxonomies, hierarchical lists, have their place, he said, but they’re not useful for classifying information. Even the definition of a ‘planet,’ he points out, depends not upon nature but upon the perceptions of scientists. Pluto, for example, was for years classified as a planet; but in 2006 scientists voted it was not.

It can be a very good strategy, Weinberger says, to let the miscellaneous box gobble everything else. In the digital world, this ‘miscellaneous` category is a super-saturated, rich collection of links.

Society is at the moment a paper-based culture in the process of digitalizing everything, encoding our knowledge. In his eyes, this will allow societies to move away from hierarchical organisational structures and the power structures that have accompanied this. Newspapers, for centuries relegated by the size of their pages and organised by processes of exclusion, are now going online where they are unbound, unrestricted by the size of their front (and inside) pages.

Weinberger points to traditional library systems to show how this process is taking place - and the differences between data and metadata.

Metadata, Weinberg says, is always the ‘known’ information – search terms in Google, for example. Data, then, is the ‘unknown’ information; what Google is trying to find for its user.

Essentially, data is what you don’t know and metadata is what you do know. And the two are always changing.

What’s interesting in a Web 2.0 world is that data and metadata are irreplaceable; they can occupy the same space.

“Metadata is just a lever to pull up knowledge,” Weinberger says.

In libraries, for example: Books, representing data, are organised onto shelves. Metadata is found in card catalogues. But when card catalogues go online, the data and metadata become digital – and thus able to occupy the same space at the same time.

In this way, information is like…

Leaves on many branches – The miscellaneous pile includes a lot of ‘stuff.’ And there are a lot of connections between this ‘stuff.’ So content creators would be wise to postpone their traditional organization process, to let users organize information for themselves. In this way, the ability of the web to permits two items to occupy the same space, unlike the real world, is taken advantage of.

In this way, messiness is a virtue

As a result, ordering processes now belong to users, and not exclusively to those who once were the masters of the hierarchies. For example, someone shopping online for a camera can search by brand name, megapixels, cost, etc. The ordering process is no longer constrained by what owners think is important.

One tenet of this emerging digital culture is that information is no longer rare or uncommon – it’s a shared, free asset.

“Not only does information want to be free, it wants to get together and MATE with other information,” Weinberger quips.

And information can do that quite successfully. For example, on Wikipedia. This online encyclopedia is made particularly popular by not only its crowdsourcing, but its willingness to add warning tags, to be open to change and fallibility.

Wikipedia, Weinberger says, is therefore “on our side.”

There is a great value in a Wikipedia-style of social knowing. Children, for example, are often today do their homework online in groups, via instant messaging and e-mail.

Yet, they’re still tested individually – which is contrary to how they’ll be asked to function in a working enviornment. In this way, Weinberger points out, the education system is ‘behind,’ is a place where the old ways of knowledge management are clashing with the new.

Continuing his discussion of the classification processes happening on the web, Weinberger calls for a more “loose” and “messy” organization system, one which takes advantage of the implicit rather than the explicit.

So, on the web, topics and knowledge are made more complex; thoughts and information are included rather than excluded – as they would be on a newspaper page.

Weinberger describes this as a more natural process. For example, he says, people in their everyday conversations are always discussing their differences more than their similarities.

The richness of the human experience, he continues, lies in implicit meanings.

“We go terribly wrong when we try to make things explicit that should be implicit,” Weinberger said.

Meaning and relationships are inherent to objects, however “inanimate” they may seem. Weinberger brings up German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s classic example: To know the value and/or function of a hammer, one must understand the concept of ‘nails,’ and ‘wood’ and ‘trees’ and ‘forests’… and so on.

The web now allows for these relationships to be documented by all of its users, and not just by those formally “in the know.”

Menu



Video interview with David Weinberger


Ending Speech by Wilfried Ruetten


A weblog timeline



A look at Internet censorship in Europe

Internet censorship is a valance issue: one which is not divisive, one on which the electorate typically agrees. Rare is the man who stands up to support online censorship.
Still, it happens.
As the EJC prepared to host its first (Un)Blogger’s Conference, intern Rina Tsubaki set out to find out how Internet censorship works in Europe. Is it happening? And if so, how?
In addition, Tsubaki – who is majoring in European Studies at the Universiteit Maastricht – explored how the European Union harmonizes, to some extent, the national laws of its member states in the field of Internet security.
Here’s what she found:

What is Internet censorship?

Four major technical approaches to controlling access to information on the Internet:

  1. Technical blocking
    • Blocking access to the targeted sites
    • Usually three techniques are being used: IP blocking, DNS tampering & URL blocking using a proxy.
    • Keyword blocking became a popularly-used filtering method throughout the world
  2. Search result removals
    • Omitting illegal or undesirable websites from search results.
    • This method makes it much harder for the browsers to find the sites when compared to the technical blocking method.
  3. Take-down regime
    • Regulators demand the removal of or shut down accesses to websites or weblogs with illegal/ inappropriate content.
  4. Induced self-censorship
    • Self-censorship in browsing and selecting contents to be online.
    • Under the circumstances of 1) the treat of legal action, 2) the promotion of social norms, or 3) informal methods of intimidation.

Sources:

Why censor?

Although the resources that one can obtain through the Internet are substantial, it is true that the Internet is used in various criminal activities. Since many issues hold marginal questions, national regulations greatly differ from each other. Get to know the historical background of censorship.

Does the EU promote Internet censorship?

Yes. But just in fields such as racism, child pornography and materials that promotes terrorism or hatred. Yet, most cases allow the member states to act voluntarily so that each country can establish their own Internet filtration policy within the EU regulatory scheme.

Some legal documents:

  • Council Recommendation 98/560/EC: Of 24 September, 1998, on the development of the European audiovisual and information services industry by promoting national frameworks aimed at achieving a comparable level of protection of minors and human dignity
  • Directive 2000/31/EC: Of the European Parliament and of the Council on 8 June, 2000, on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce.

Safer Internet Action Plans:

  • Decision No 276/1999/EC: Of the European Parliament and of the Council on 26 January, 1999, adopting a multi-annual community action plan on promoting safer use of the Internet by combating illegal and harmful content on global networks.
  • Decision No 1151/2003/EC: of the European Parliament and of the Council on 16 June, 2003, amending Decision No 276/1999/EC adopting a multi-annual Community action plan on promoting safer use of the Internet by combating illegal and harmful content on global networks.
  • Decision No 854/2005/EC of the European Parlament and the European Council of 11 May 2005 establishing a multiannual Community Programme on promoting safer use of the Internet and new online technologies.

Why did the EU decide to take actions to protect Internet Safety?

To halt international networking on the part of criminal communities and to help promote economic integration within Europe(http://opennet.net/research/regions/europe).

What does the EU try to eradicate from the Internet?

  1. Illegal Content and conduct
    • Definition varies among the Member States
    • Consensus among the Member States on child pornography, trafficking in human beings, racist materials promoting terrorism, and all forms of Internet fraud to be circled as illegal contents and conducts.
  2. Harmful Content and conduct
    • material which might offend the values and sentiments of particular group of people (Ex. Adult content)
    • The Commission considers that parents, teachers or other adults are responsible to watch out for children.

Sources:

 

What sort of Internet censorship do the member states apply?

United Kingdom
The biggest Internet service provider in Britain, BT, launched Project Cleanfeed in 2004. It filters Internet content with the images of child abuse as defined by the amended 1978 Protection of Children Act, and content which implies criminal or racial hatred. They track down the websites by using a blacklist which is compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation. The take-down measure of BT is now being used by all broadband consumers of Internet service providers in Britain. Until today, many Internet service providers in Britain have removed websites that contains controversial or suspicious elements from their service engine although they had not received any warnings of legal action. Similar systems are now used in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy. In short, the British model allows Internet service providers to erase websites from the Internet.

Germany
In Germany, censorship is prohibited under the national constitution. Yet, there is increasing interest in enforcing law to tackle Internet crimes. This is initiated by the BKA, the Federal Police Agency in Germany, and there have been a number of meetings between the agency and the German Internet service providers. The BKA recently established the ZaRD to monitor Internet contents. Yet, it is usually argued that the German system can hardly tackle the problem since the BKA does not have enough competence to collect data. In addition, ISPs are considered under the multi-media law in Germany as not liable for the content of websites on their Internet engine. In short, the German model is voluntary or self-regulatory so that in many cases websites are removed from the search results but not actually from the Internet.

Sources

Are there any cases in Europe of national governments filtering political opposition online?

No big cases are known. However:

Switzerland
In December 2002, a local magistrate, Francoise Dessaux, commanded several Swiss Internet Service providers to block access to the websites originated in the USA which strongly criticised Swiss courts(http://www.nrg4u.com/abuse/canton-de-vaud.pdf). Two associations, the Swiss Internet User Group and the Swiss Network Operators Group complained to the Dessaux’s order through their joint press release, and most Internet service providers refused to comply with the request at first. However, the court has ruled that those who did not obey failed to act. Hence, they were charged of disobedience.

Turkey
On 7 March, 2007, Youtube was temporarily blocked by the Turkish court order. Those contents in question were seen as derogatory to Mustafa Kemel Ataturk, a founding father of Turkey, and Turkish nationality. The order was carried out under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code which states that insults towards Ataturk and Turkish nationality is a crime.

Censorship in the East - Commonwealth of Independent States

According to the ONI study on Commonwealth of Independent States, due to the limited number of access to information, it is hard to conduct a research to understand the overall trend of the Internet usage in the region. Yet, it should be mentioned that overt Internet censorship found in China and the Middle East is unlikely to occur in Commonwealth of Independent States.

A brief look at how Internet censorship works in the post-Soviet states:

Russia
In 2000, Russia adopted "Doctrine of Information Security" which has influenced the way other Commonwealth of Independent States handle the Internet problem. It holds a monitoring system called SORM-II which requires Internet service providers to submit statistics about all Internet traffic that goes through the providers by applying special software or the Federal Security Service. In this system, Internet service providers are obliged to provide the all users' data including the time of an online session, the IP address of the user and the data transmitted on the Internet.

Belarus
In Belarus, a similar system as the Russian model was adopted. It is still the situation where independent journalists, editors and political opposition leaders are seen dangerous to the state. As a consequence, defamation and slander laws deter bloggers from submitting contents which criticize the national government or government officials.

Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan has adopted a similar law to the Russian example. As a consequence, it has power to deregister websites which is considered unacceptable in the national media space.

Ukraine
The security service in Ukraine monitors Internet traffic. It targets the websites with high national security concerns to be considered for censorship.

Tajikistan
Tajikistan pursues a temporal suspension of websites which are detrimental to public order.

Uzbekistan
The law on mass media has caused bloggers to practice self-censorship. All Internet service providers need to rent channels from the monopoly providers where the National Security Service monitors and imposes censorship on the national segment of the Internet.

Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan was unsuccessful to adopt a similar system to the Russian model. Internet censorship yet occurs but relatively with a less rigid control.

It should be mentioned that there are two other kinds of censorship that seem to exist in Commonwealth of Independent States. The first is "event-based" interventions where, for instance, censorship on the Internet occurs around the time of national elections. This was observed in Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. The second is "upstream" filtration where non-Russian websites collectively become inaccessible in the region.

Source

Video interview with Sami Ben Gharbia



Case study: Italy

Genoese comedian turned blogger Beppe Grillo mobilizes nationwide protests of the deadlocked Italian government

One popular Italian comedian-cum-political activist is using his blog, the most-clicked in Italy, to draw attention to the not-so funny business of political incompetence.

About 300,000 people put their names on Grillo’s petition on 8 September, or ‘Vaffanculo Day’ – so named after a particularly vulgar Italian expression – a day which saw public demonstrations in piazzas across Italy.

Such civic participation has only added to the popularity of Grillo’s Blog, created in the 2005.It is at the moment one of the most visited and discussed sites in Italy. It’s also the No. 10 most popular blog on Technorati, the foremost blog search engine.

Grillo, 59, organized ‘V-Day’ to shine the spotlight on problems in the Italian multi-party system. This initiative, linked to the campaign "Clean Up Parliament", mobilized nearly 1 million people and was for days at the core of the Italian public debate.

Grillo also blames the apathy of the Italian mass media for this malaise of inaction prevailing in the country’s political arena.

"We are in the middle of the third world war: the information war,” Grillo says on Blog. “The only way to be safe is to know, to know the news. We have a means, the Internet, that allows us to arrive directly to the news, without mediators…. Internet is one of the few gleams of hope to… give back to the politics the space that the economy has stolen it.”

All the public debate sparked by V-Day gave prominence to Grillo’s rallying cries: Saying, ‘No,’ to politicians with definitive guilt sentences (there are 24 felons in the Italian Parliament, according to Grillo’s reporting), ‘No,’ to those deputies and senators who have reached more than two legislative terms, ‘No,’ to direct election of the parliamentary body instead that through the party’s secretaries. And finally, ‘Yes,’ to giving citizens control of the political process with a direct democracy.

Grillo, discovered by an Italian showman, entered the popular Italian consciousness in the 1980’s, while working for Italy’s state-owned television company. He became known for amusing monologues rife with political satire. He became known for grassroots-level activism and holding politicians accountable when their inactions affected citizens, employees, shareholders and environment.

When his television performances began to inhibit his ability to dissiminate his message, Grillo dedicated himself to live performance in theatres all over Italy, where his aggressive humour evolved into a more aggressive style of confronting the parliamentary political class.

He gained credibility when anticipated the Parmalat financial crash, the confrontations over business politics at Fiat and his intervention with the Telecom board of directors.

In the last instance, Grillo’s style had won him the favour of the company’s minority shareholders. He represented these shareholders of the first Italian telephone company, when he asked the board of directors for the resignations of all the company’s top executives. He staged this bottom-up feat with striking showmanship.

Grillo was the first comedian invited to speak to the European Parliament and Time magazine elected him "Hero of the Year" in 2005.

He uses his blog as a tool to promote all his initiatives, thus fostering a forum for discussion. Comments are posted on his site from all over the world, left at all hours of the day.

On the Blog, Grillo’s persists in his battles about pollution, water management and the promotion of alternative and renewable energies. One initiative saw him sending around 800 000 emails to the President of the Republic for the withdrawal of the Italian soldiers in Iraq.

Grillo has a long track record of being socially committed.

The Interne and blogs then are for Grillo simply the last frontier for democracy, an essential resource, one with infinite potential, for citizens to use when they plan for a collective future

More Information:

Daniel Paone is an Italian citizen interning at the European Journalism Centre. When he’s not contemplating various forms of communication, he can be found playing table tennis or travelling in his camper.


 



Case study: Bulgaria

 Bloggers, environmentalists and citizen journalists sparked enough civic participation this summer to prevent a national park from becoming trampled upon by developers

 When the Bulgarian government decided to allow real estate developers to build a resort in a mountain region known for flourishing ecosystems, unspoiled seaside and small scenic villages this summer, the Bulgarian blogosphere burned with purpose.

They wrote, petitioned and used mobile technologies - Internet and cell phones - to arrange demonstrations.

In the end, the civic participation these citizen journalists sparked - even in the face of intimidating police tactics - was enough to persuade the parliament not to allow the developers to break ground in the Strandzha Nature Park.

“The Internet nowadays in Bulgaria has became a major information tool and many people (especially young and intelligent) are using it as a main source for information,” said Milena Bokova, the executive director of BlueLink, a 10-year-old environmental NGO, in an e-mail interview.

“The blogging community and the recent environmental events influence not only the decision makers and the citizens, they also attracted the mainstream media, which covered extensively all events.”

In late June, the government used a legislative loophole to revoke the ‘protected area’ status of the Strandzha Nature Park.

The Supreme Administrative Court, the judiciary of the Republic of Bulgaria, canceled the region’s protected status on 29 June when municipal officials in the seaside town of Tsarevo - the seat of Burgas Province - partnered with a developer to propose construction of an upscale resort just outside Varvara. Varvara, a fishing village with about 300 residents, is located in the Nature Park, directly on the Black Sea.

This mountainous Strandzha region, part of which encompasses the Black Sea coast, is the largest nature park in Bulgaria. In addition to numerous plant life, it includes several ruins and home to villagers who perform Nestinarstvo, traditional fire dancing in which locals walk on burning coals.

Environmental groups and bloggers reacted strongly to the threat of development. They wrote about what was happening. They wrote their representatives, signed petitions, organised demonstrations and sparked flash mobs.

The online community utalised in particular aggregated, blog-heavy sites - like BlueLink. They used BlueLink’s existing infrastructure of daily news feeds, events calendar, video and photo uploading tools and discussion lists to help translate citizen journalism and blogging into civic participation in the form of spontaneous street protests.

“Nowadays many [young people] don't use the mainstream media (radio, TV, newspapers) as a tool for news and information at all,” Bokova said. “The blogging community reaction is happening as a response to the flash mobs and other actions of environmental activists and citizens for protection of Bulgarian nature from over construction and other non-environmentally friendly business development.”

Some bloggers - and a quick Google search turns up many writing about this issue - like Michel Bozgounov, a web designer and blogger at BlueLink - were questioned at the Sofia Metropolitan Police Department, and investigated by the National Service for Combat against the Organized Crime.

“It seems that the Bulgarian police is more hesitant to pursue journalists, for instance, than bloggers and activists,” Bokova said. “The latter have no protection from a media that stands behind them or any other type of protection (political, financial, whatsoever). Bloggers are easier victims.”

These bloggers and demonstrators did not relent until the country’s parliamentary body, the National Assembly, on 19 July decreed that the protected status of reserves, national and natural parks could not appealed or challenged.

Like BlueLink, the World Wildlife Federation had been working with the case since it recognized the loopholes that were exploited by the developer.

 Konstantin Ivanov, a communications officer at the WWF, said it was not until the street protests that the government decided to take action.

“The proposal for this amendment of the Protected Areas Act was submitted to the Parliamentary Commission on the Environment far back in June 2006,” he wrote in an e-mail interview. “Right after the Supreme Administrative Court declared invalid the designation order of another protected area, again at the Black sea coast. This is Kamchiiski Pyasatsi. Despite numerous letters and petitions, nothing happened for a year and three months, until the court decision against Strandzha Nature Park and the street protests that followed.”

Bokova said the parliament’s decision is a victory, one that could not have been won without the work of activists who utalised her site and others to organise.

“The MPs decision to keep Strandja Natural Park as a protected area is perhaps one of the biggest victories of the environmental movement lately,” she says. “An opposite decision would have made a very bad precedent which would have opened the door for similar removal of protected statute of many other natural areas.”

Kathlyn Clore, an associate editor at the EJC, first read about this topic at GlobalVoices.

 



Interviews with bloggers

 



PICNIC perspective

When she wasn’t busy setting the table for the EJC’s own Picnic event, Elisa Delaini fluttered around Westergasfabriek visiting other media presentations.

Picnic time, again! I so enjoyed the first helping that I thought, ‘Why not go back for seconds?’
Sadly, though, I am not gifted with ubiquity, so I couldn’t simultaneously follow the whole conference programme. But I did check out some partner events and organise the European Journalism Centre’s own event, the European Bloggers (Un)Conference. Plus, of course, capped a few days with dessert at Picnic@Night!

It was at times exhausting, but Picnic comes once a year, so I had to manage and simply do it.

Feeling committed and full of energies, I started with a workshop about the openness of the Internet. Of course, the web gave us a space that seems infinite. It seems everybody blogs.
But what happens when instead of posting pictures of your kitty you blog about political prisoners in Tunisia and build a mashup showing where they are kept? What if you wake up in the morning and you find out that Youtube is blocked and your government officially declares that technical problems are making social networking sites inaccessible?

Back to the main conference on Wednesday.
I didn’t know that somebody was collecting emotions expressed in weblogs and visualising them in colours and frequencies. Jonathan Harris uses what he calls ‘passive observation’ to map happiness, anger and every feeling that people decided to share by posting something in the blogoshpere. I am curious,
I open ‘We feel fine’. A lot of small colored dots floating on the screen. I click on a blue one. ‘I’m working on an anti corruption project in Russia, so it’s not I feel like I am in a position to pay anyone bribes.’ Well, that makes sense. Along with other posts containing ‘I feel’, or ‘I am feeling’, that person’s emotions are stored and arranged in murmurs, metrics, montage, etc. Discovering the different visualizations is pure pleasure. Harris’ latest project, Universe, explore news in a constellation of words. ‘It’s a new metaphor for organising information rather than a web page,’ Harris tells us.

On Thursday, a strongly anticipated speaker at Future technology trends, Jeff Han, unfortunately cancelled. To fill the gap, hacker and futurist Pablos came on stage. In a both informative and hilarious session he explained that most people have a false sense of security in this age where cars, phones and many other gadgets are computers in disguise. Pablos designed devices that automatically hack into Wi-fi signals and discover passwords giving them the shape of robots and guns. He helped create the world’s smallest PC and even managed to change Cory (Boing Boing) Doctorow’s voicemail message live on stage through Skype.

On Friday, the tracks Feel, Make and Play anticipated the Ultimate PICNIC Show, which wrapped up the 4-day experience with videos and round-table discussions of what happened at Picnic ’07.
Monique van Dusseldorp, the programme director of Picnic, enthusiastically thanked the participants of the European Bloggers (Un)conference for travelling to Amsterdam and invited the EJC to host the conference again next year.

At the end of Picnic ’07, 8700 people are part of its network. The interactions that started in Westergasfabriek can continue virtually, until the third edition of the event in 2008 will give people another opportunity to gather. For those who couldn’t participate, most of the sessions are now available online in the Picnic Archives. A Twitter page for the event was created and the Picnic Aggregator brings together in a crowd sourcing experiment blogs, pictures, videos taken during the week.