Quick take: BBC’s Nik Gowing on new media

The BBC’s Nik Gowing writes an excellent piece in the Guardian on how new media is subverting traditional media’s vice grip on news and information. As Nik notes in Real-time media is changing our world,

Institutional assumptions of commanding the information high ground in a crisis are from a different era. The instant scrutiny created by the new digital media landscape subverts their effectiveness and leaves reputations more vulnerable than ever in a crisis. It usually does so with breathtaking speed.

A good example of this in Sri Lanka was the atrocious use of wikipedia by the Sunday Times recently, and the Editor’s inane responses to my article that flagged it.

Noting that the primary difference between new and traditional media is the ability to add value to news, I note in a recent column that,

A bastion of ageing, and worse, pompous journalists commanding what Nik Gowing calls news regimes from a different era pose a challenge to media freedom equal to the government’s censorship and repression. Conversely, voters unable or unwilling to realise and leverage the potential of mobiles, PCs, the web and Internet to strengthen democracy will get the media and government they deserve.

Are we all writers now?

Image from Agile Thoughts

I post this in response to an interesting essay published recently on the More Intelligent Life website by the Economist group. In We are all writers now, Anne Trubek avers,

Yes, we need to darken the line between what is verifiable and what is hearsay. The financial downturn and its disastrous impact on print publishing has led some to think we can do without trained reporters and editors–professionals who know how to check facts and strip the gloss off hasty pronouncements. We need this work, perhaps now more than ever. But not at the expense of silencing the new voices–an exciting new crop of self-possessed scribes–ringing all over our screens. There may be too much, but that does not mean it is unworthy.

Many would agree with me that content aggregated on Kottu today, while more varied than two to three years ago, is qualitatively poorer. Some of it is rank drivel, suggesting that the democratisation of publishing is also, too often, the production of content of very limited value at best. Well written esoteria have their niche audiences, but the proliferation of bad writing questions Trubeck’s assertion that “it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels.”

Computer models for predicting conflict outcomes

From Bill Waters came a great heads-up on a paper that informs a model to predict the outcome of conflict. Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses rational choice theory as the basis of this tool, which I would love to see with a dataset populated with Sri Lanka’s conflict metrics.

Bill also points to a detailed paper entitled Game Theory, Political Economy, and the Evolving Study of War and Peace by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s that is well worth a read.

Question is, even if (and this is a big if) war is based on rational choice theory as expounded here by this political scientist, can the same be said of peacebuilding?

Google wants to make the web faster

Hurrah! Who can argue with such a noble cause?

Google’s new Speed site points to tools and techniques designers and coders can use to make web services and websites more efficient and effective, especially over limited bandwidth and high latency connections.

But as many agree, it’s not just the code that needs tweaking. It’s the pipes that need widening. Many agree that broadband provisioning for all citizens is what makes most sense when talking about a more pervasive web and making the world a better place.

War and war games

Image courtesy IGN.

Great article on More Intelligent Life on why war games based on (recent) history foster so much of controversy. As I noted in response to the post,

I would not be surprised if the identical game, with some new ahistorical maps based loosely on the Iraqi war theatre goes into production. The mistake seems to have been made in marketing the game as a re-enactment of a complex, violent chapter in the Iraq conflict. If one were to have called this something else, the controversy would be non-existent.

War games, much like Summer blockbusters, are films to escape from, not engaging with war. One aspect you’ve not dealt with are the so-called Serious Games and how they are being used to help promote conflict resolution.

For an article published about two years ago in the media on how serious games are helping conflict transformation, click here.

The rise of Skynet?

Take over the world? Yes We Can!

Reuters reported this week that the US Pentagon had approved the creation of a cyber command for defending U.S. military IT systems.

The rise of Skynet?!

But seriously, just wish that there was equal emphasis on R&D into how ICTs could be used for peacebuilding.

Hate speech discussed at the UN in New York

On the 16th of June, the UN discussed the growth of hate speech online.

This is an issue I have looked at repeatedly from international and local perspectives. I was also part of a group that attempted to draw up some basic guidelines for respectful online communications, echoing those I drew up to frame the discussion on Groundviews.

I was sad to miss it by a day, but both the participation and speech of the UN Secretary General suggest that this is now getting the serious attention it deserves. The discussions seems to have been american centric, but the issue is global and multi-lingual.

Calling it digital demonisation, the UN SG went on to note that,

“… we have seen it time and again targeting innocents because of their faith, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation. Here at the United Nations, we understand the power of words. Words can hurt or they can heal. They can rupture or they can repair. For young people, electronic harassment and cyberhate can have a searing impact. We must be aware. We must remain vigilant. Protecting children is a top priority for the United Nations. And we have taken a number of steps to make cyberspace safer for young people.”

The UN SG’s full speech can be read here. UN Radio has a related podcast here.

HTC Sense and mobile phone user interfaces

My first mobile phone in 2002 was a Nokia 3310. It was a hardy beast and hands down, the most reliable mobile phone I have ever owned. I don’t remember playing the in-built games that much, but its screen was easy to read and the phone was dead simple to use.

I recently bought two Samsung i780’s for friends and upgraded them, after purchase, to Windows Mobile 6.1. I use a Blackberry Bold and have a Apple iPod Touch at home, which is the same UI as the Apple iPhone, which I’ve toyed around with a lot but never had the inclination to buy. I’ve also used the Nokia N series and the Symbian operating system in addition to Nokia’s own OS for its other phones. And for a short time, I also had a Sony Ericsson phone – that I hated enough to forget the model – and a Samsung X820, at one time the world’s thinnest phone.

Each of these phones came with a different operating system and UI, some with more bells and whistles than others. Not a single one of them were as stable as my Nokia 3310. In my experience, the greater the complexity of the OS and features on the phone, the more unreliable and unstable the OS was.

This is one reason I support device agnostic SMS as the best way to send and receive mission critical information – like election monitoring reports from the field. With the exception of apps for the Apple iPod Touch, which ran well, I have not encountered a single J2ME app or app for Symbian that has not at some critical moment just crashed and buggered the phone’s OS to boot.

If only because I know I will not be able to resist buying it, I really hope the recently announced HTC Sense UI in their new Hero phone works as well as it looks.

On another note though, with my Blackberry Bold, I hardly ever use my laptop when I travel long-haul or when I am in the field in Sri Lanka. Even basic phones today are capable of photo and video recording, some even voice. Phones like this new HTC model blur further the distinction between a mobile phone and features traditionally associated with the PC.

Nokia Siemens in Iran: Shame or all’s fair game for telcos?

Deep packet inspection is bad under any regime, no matter how benevolent. When a regime such as Iran today gets access to technology with the potential of DPI, you have a justifiable uproar on far more serious and urgent implications than delayed music downloads.

Global media over the past week pointed to Nokia and Siemens as having provided the Iranian regime with technology to detect and filter information they found inconvenient. According to a widely republished and quoted Wall Street Journal article on 22 June that the newspaper stands by, a system installed in Iran by Nokia Siemens Networks provides Iranian authorities with the ability to conduct deep-packet inspection of online communications to monitor the contents and track the source of e-mail, VoIP calls, and posts to social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. As quoted by Wired, the newspaper also said authorities had the ability to alter content as it intercepted the traffic from a state-owned internet choke point.

Commenting on the story was Ben Roome, a spokesperson for Nokia Siemens Networks who noted in a blog post that,

I do want to say to the people commenting here if we’re (I’m) aware of the situation in Iran. We are (and I am), and it is mainly because of mobile phone video, photos and calls from across Iran, communicating events first hand as they happen, that we are so aware. As I said above: we had a choice as to whether we bring the Iranian people this mobile connectivity, in the knowledge that telecoms networks in Iran are required to have the ability to monitor voice calls as they do all over the world. We made that choice and believe there is a net benefit to the people of Iran.

The point made is that the world is angry about Iran, and sees horrific videos such as the murder of Neda Soltani, because of the ICT networks and foundations facilitated by Nokia Siemens Networks. The over one hundred comments to date on Ben’s blog post reveal the frustration and anger of people who point to the culpability of Nokia Siemens Networks in the violence that has gripped Iran today.

I suggested to some colleagues this morning that one can look at this issue from the perspective of power and accountability. The power of these DPI systems in Iran pale into insignificance with the capacity of what, for example, the US and its allies can monitor and intercept domestically and globally. But there is, at worst, retroactive judicial oversight in the US even when the Executive runs amok combined with the enabling Freedom of Information legislation. What can and should business do when this accountability and oversight is not present, and yet government’s ask for powerful technologies that can be used to undermine human dignity and human security?

But let’s not kid ourselves – you don’t do any business with a regime like Iran expecting them to give a free reign to rights, dissent and democracy. Is that a reason to not do any business? Not. Is that a reason to be up front to consumers about the business one does? Perhaps. Is that a reason to brush away a moral responsibility for the death of Neda Soltani?

Definitely not.

Mobile phone movie competition on women in Sri Lanka

The last time someone came up with a novel idea on the use of mobile phone in Sri Lanka, it was the Inspector General of Police, who said that women could use them to video themselves getting raped.

A new blog and initiative by Women and Media Collective does something less adventurous yet far more meaningful. To celebrate 25 years, it’s organised a mobile phone movie competition on how women are changing minds about others, how others are changing minds about women and how women are changing minds about themselves.

This is the second mobile phone based movie competition I am aware of in Sri Lanka. The first was run by Dialog Telekom a while ago. Sadly, I can’t find any of the winning videos online.

Women and Media Collective posts the rules of the competition here, and guidelines for filming through a mobile device from Dialog’s competition are relevant and useful too for budding filmmakers.