I’ve mentioned the Global Voices Project a number of times thus far. Less-often mentioned (if at all, it’s hard to remember after all this blogging) is the Global Learning Portal (GLP), being developed by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) with USAID funding.

My final paper for this class will argue for policies which will continue to fund projects like the GLP as a means of bringing education and democratic values to underdeveloped countries around the world. This is directly in line with the goals of organizations such as USAID and even the U.N.. Furthermore, I will argue that projects such as Global Voices should recieve increased funding for the same basic reasons:

1. Communications through such “global blogs” bring a greater level of transparency and understanding between peoples around the world.
2. Greater levels of transparency and understanding created at this grassroots level are FAR more effective at encouraging open and honest discourse on a variety of subjects ranging from politics to the environment to the development of science and technology than the traditional “top down” methods of going directly through foriegn governments.
3. Democracy and even Democratic Republics like our country are inherently grassroots afairs. You will NOT achieve stable democratic regimes through force… the recent debacle in Iraq has taught us this lesson.
4. Thus, my newly termed Global Blogs should be encouraged through a variety of policy measures in both the public and private sectors (as will be discussed in detail within my final paper) to promote these lines of communication, open discourse, the spread of ICTs, and eventually: the spread of democratic values.

Finally, it will be argued that thus far, Western / Modernized democratic regimes have only seen Internet-based technologies such as Blogs as enablers of increased control (check out any NeoCon political Blog, or for that matter, the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 to see examples of this), or in some cases, disruptive forces that break down control (hacking being the most obvious).

Why can these technologies not instead be pursued as agents of grassroots change to advance American ideals and in fact our basic stated foreign policy agenda of Democritization? They can be. They should be. I will show you the way :)

Haha. Sorry, last blog entry… had to wax cheesy at the end, can’t help myself.

Let’s see, we have 3 major players:

1. Cable Companies: They can offer Internet, Video, and Voice services at a slightly reduced package deal to customers, but in turn making them millions in new subscriber fees. I personally see these folks as being the strongest player in the telecom market.
2. Phone Companies: They can offer Voice services, and substantially inferior (in most areas) Internet services in package deals, but so far have been given no FCC go-ahead to offer high-speed Video. More on this in a sec. I personally see this group as being the fastest-shrinking group in the telecom market.
3. VoIP Companies: They can offer both Voice and Video over the Internet… however, they do rely on one of the former players for their connection to your household. This would seem to be the most unpredictable of players, especially since most VoIP companies are still privately held.

Why my vague assertions in regards to market power between these 3 players you might ask? Well, take a look at this recent article in the Washington Post: Here.

As you’ll see, there is a pretty fierce debate brewing in regards to the future of “legacy” telecom. Companies such as AT&T and Verizon (the two remaining “big boys” in traditional telecom) are actively lobbying for a bill in Congress which would allow them to offer video and higher-speed Internet over their current lines.

Why such a hubub? Well, they are losing money… hemorrhaging it in fact. Check out their stock prices for the past 5 years, and you’ll see losses of almost 40% for both companies. That’s harsh, even for telecom “post bubble”. Of course our old friend Universal Service comes into play once again and is acting as a spoiler for the telecom companies. Whereas competitors like Skype (a major VoIP company) and Comcast do not have to deal with Universal Service restrictions currently, AT&T and Verizon still do.

So I pose the question to you the reader: is it fair to have a public policy in place which allows an industry’s major competitors almost complete freedom of access limitation rights, while still imposing the notion of Universal Service on the more traditional companies such as AT&T and Verizon? Far be it for me to stick up for big telecom… but in the face of stifled competition, I could easily see Comcast developing a virtual monopoly if policies are not put in place to hold their power in check. These policies could take the place of reducing restrictions on traditional telecom, legitimizing the fledgling VoIP business, or placing the same Universal Service burdens on Broadband Cable providers.

I’d personally love to see what their net profits would be like if they had to wire all of North Dakota with fiber-optic cable for broadband.

No matter how much I loved taking advatange of this arrangement, I still can’t help but think of all the PCs, network applicances, and “personal security firewalls” which are shipped with all the most open settings. I can’t think of a single non-techgeek I know who bothers to read the manuals which would help you configure such things. I still fear for the day when my luddite father finally decides to ask me to get him a computer.

The Less You Know… cue NBC theme tune

• 40,000 BC: Spoken Language (**)
• 4,000 BC: Written Language (***)
• 1041 AD: Movable Type (no, not the blogging software)
• 1453 AD: The Printing Press
• 1844 AD: The Commercial Telegraph
• 1870’s AD: The Telephone (Sorry Alex Bell… not going to credit you with this one)
• 1944 AD: The Electric Computer (Mark I and Colossus)
• 1969-1995 AD: The Internet
• 1995-2006 AD: Forums, Blogs, and Chat
• 2010: THE FUTURE???

** Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo-habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. (Wikipedia)

*** The original Mesopotamian writing system was initially derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using imprints of a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform). (Wikipedia)

This would just be a pointless graph to plot… it is pretty easy to see how quickly the development of ICTs has progressed over the course of human history. I would further argue that the development communications technologies are in fact, still accelerating. New ideas such as WiFi, VOIP, and Blogs have all taken flight within just the past 5 years.

So where can we go from here? Ahhhhh… good question, self. Well, I’d put money on globalization and ICT proliferation continuing throughout the near future. When these two powerful forces intersect, there will be an unprecedented need for global communication and understanding as our planet continues to be environmentally flogged by the forces of overpopulation, hydrocarbon energy usage, deforestation, etc. Our only available choice will be to work together to solve these truly global issues.

Perhaps we had best start developing these communications channels today? AND that leads us back to my final paper for this class… and back to Global Voices… and perhaps, just perhaps, back to reality ;)

Look for the conclusion of the riveting “Connecting the Dots” mini-series extravaganza some time later this week, when I will bring you: “Connecting the Dots (Part 3): Drawing the Lines”. I’m sure you are waiting with baited breath ;)

Thomas Edison DIED. In 1931 none the less. Unless anyone here knows a really good Necromancer (or perhaps Miracle Max?) he won’t be coming back. Rest his prolific inventing and patenting soul.

The point here being folks, the Age of Invention has long since passed. The Information Age began to replace it as technologies got more complex. You may ask yourself here: which came first, the proverbial chicken or the egg? Well, I would argue that the reason we don’t see prolific singular personalities who invent amazing new technologies with little outside support is simply because it can’t happen. As a species, we have broken the ice on such amazingly complex principles as Special Relativity, Quantum Physics, and even the basics of Nuclear Fusion. Edison would be shocked… Einstein is still rolling around in his grave over the fact that we may be drawing near to a grand unified theory.

Without the information technologies of expedient data processing, storage, and retrieval, coupled with efficient long-distance telecommunications, we would not be able to explore these more complex inventions. These enablers are going to see themselves emphasized even moreso in the future. Singularly powerful research labs at such monoliths as AT&T (Bell Labs), Oakridge, and MIT have all increasingly seen the need for further collaboration. I need to do some more research on this to pin down hard numbers, but I believe we are seeing an increasing trend (I wonder of what scale and rate of growth? Damn you primary research!!!!) which will eventually lead to entire countries needing to collaborate on solving scientific and technological problems.

RIP Edison, welcome to the future of invention.

Google Inc. continues to take advertising dollars from traditional media such as television and print classifieds and is doing so in greater amounts than online rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, the company reported yesterday as it posted a 60 percent surge in profit.

The company is capitalizing on what it says is a broadening shift in the advertising industry toward marketing on the Web. Its quarterly revenue reflected that with year-over-year growth of 79 percent.

Internet advertising increased more than 30 percent last year over 2004, to $12.5 billion, as broadband gaming, video and television consumption increased, according to a recent study by trade association Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

So whatever happened to those doomsayers who promised us visions of the Internet slowly dying off as advertising revenues dried up? Back in the 1990’s, banner ads were discarded as “dead” business models, and the idea of the website which doesn’t “sell” anything quickly was dismissed as never having a chance of working in the real world. The Internet “bubble” had been “burst”… or had it?

Well, that business has been resurrected… certainly in the case of the ever-more-profitable Google Web Portal and Search Engine. Businesses have realized that the Internet can even more easily than ever before specifically target demographic groups with advertisements and information… and can filter it right down to knowing what your favorite groceries to purchase at Stop and Shop are by simply placing a “cookie” on your PC and then checking that information against the database which is updated every time you use that card to discount a purchase at the supermarket. Those products can then be directly marketed to you on the Internet.

This unprecedented “web” of information has spread between multiple companies, countries, products, and industries and shows no signs of weakening. As stronger technological ties are formed, these companies will be able to communicate your personal preferences even more easily to each other, thus resulting in what businesses are calling a “value-added product for our customers”.

My question is… how much value is added, and conversely, how many personal freedoms are taken away?

However, in addition to the problems facing our ever-flattening world, there are many positive motivations not only for creating a project like Global Voices, but for expanding it as well. Incentives for these “global interaction” projects may often be negative in nature… such as the need to figure out what the average person in Iraq is thinking about during the mainstream media blitz of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that pervades American and European coverage of the rebuilding efforts following the 2nd US-Iraq War. Perhaps though, more encouraging rationales exist for creating and expanding projects which seek to allow persons around the globe to communicate something about their lives in a meaningful, interactive, and positive manner.

For example, there is the very complexity of this planet… the ever-changing face of our diverse populations… our propensity for creating ever more complex and powerful technologies to assist us in our everyday lives. To utilize all the resources of Information, Knowledge, and Technology that we have available to us, these all require a certain level of understanding, cooperation, and finally collaboration. The Internet, and projects which allow peoples around the world to come together in understanding, will both be vital tools in future endeavors. In fact, the very most basic instincts of human-kind: exploration, curiosity, and the desire to create may all be served by these facilitators of information and knowledge transfer.

Here are just a few complex “missions” which will require further understanding and collaboration in the world:

• Looking for microbiological life on Mars
• Feeding our planet’s starving people, while still controlling our rising population
• Repairing the damage done to our environment and finding methods of production which aren’t dangerous to our own health
• Extending the human lifespan through technology and improved basic healthcare
• Avoiding nuclear holocaust or other self-inflicted plagues upon our race
• Removing words like racism, classism, nationalism, and hatred from our vocabulary

All of these issues are huge. They will not be “handled” in a single generation, not to mention 10s or even 100s… but we MUST start somewhere. Communications and understanding are key to beginning this process. NONE of the major problems facing our entire planet and in fact the entire human species will be “fixed” by one person, region, or nation. The collective knowledge and information of the human race is an awesome concept to even begin to think about… untapped power that could literally change the face of life as we know it.

But it ALL begins with communication. The man who first invented fire and started cooking his food with it had to communicate this idea to other Paleolithic peoples… this early “inventor” knew that this basic concept was an absolute necessity: an invention is not of any use if no one knows how to use it. The same holds true for any technological or sociological advance of today… no matter how complex.

However, just as a game… guess how much we have progressed since the formation of the League of Nations and later, its decendant: The United Nations? Welp… here’s the UN’s Comments and Questions page, in all it’s low-tech completely non-interactive glory. We can do better folks. We can communicate better as a the peoples of a single planet of self-aware intelligent entities. Again, perhaps Global Voices is a place to start.

Comming up next: Connecting the Dots (Part 2): Where Can We Go From Here?

I suppose that as far as I am concerned, Privacy is a very important thing to have in life… even just a certain measure of personal privacy and aloneness can be beneficial to people. Well, in my case, I take certain steps to assure that this can still happen in the digital age.

Every day at some point as part of my routine I sit down and meditate for around 30 mins or so… more if I can get the time. But cellphones ringing, emails being downloaded, and even more often: IM’s being recieved are all not very conducive to meditation. Personally, I think everyone should have to turn off all their connections to the outside world at least once a week… just to remember what it was like for 95% of our parents… you drive somewhere for the weekend and people can’t get in contact with you. Ohno, it’s the end of the world!!!

I guess my issue here is something we have already raised in class… as an enabling technology for “enhancing” human communications, the Internet can often lead to a certain degree of dependance. We can often end up using it as a crutch instead of as a tool.

Speaking of which… off I go.

All is not perfect with these new international online communities, but some are forming along distinct parallels to other widely successful Internet portals and websites. In the case of Global Voice, the “filtering structure” for content is formed much along the same lines as Wikipedia… however, with a smaller community of “experts” from which to draw upon blog data. The network is expandable, and should be able to handle vastly more traffic than it currently does. Conversely, the Academy for Educational Development’s (AED) Global Learning Portal (http://www.glp.net) works based upon a peer review structure very similar to those used for scientific papers and journals around the world.

These communities stand in stark contrast to a vast wasteland of Internet communities which have recently been gobbled up by large multinational corporations. MySpace, once an “underground” website for users wishing to share hobbies, ideas, and blogs was bought by Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. just last year (2005). There is an obvious commercial market for blogging communities, however, how well can these communities be trusted? Given the scope of the GAO report on the government’s use of 3rd party contractors to inadequately protect citizens’ information and the number of scandals which have recently plagued online banking and credit card sites, how advisable is it to trust a large multi-armed corporation with your most private thoughts?

People need alternative and free methods of communicating with one and other. This basic human neccessity has been seen time and again with recent examples such as MP3 (music) piracy and VoIP… and even moreso throughout the history of the Internet (see my “Blogs I Barely Knew Ye” entry for more on this). I believe that if corporate entities continue to prove to consumers that they cannot be trusted with our data, then more and more people will move to open-source or community-driven solutions for their blogging needs, be they as “important” as global political issues, or as mundane as a good recipe for chocolate fudge.

First off, Global Voices is a non-profit global media and cultural relations blogging project, supported by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It is located online at http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/.

Why is Global Voices so interesting? Well, in my mind, it brings together people interested in telling “their side of the story” around the world, and gives them a centralized forum for increased globalized discourse on issues affecting all of our lives. As the world increasingly becomes connected through ever-cheaper commercially-available communications technologies such as Internet-enabled computers, I believe projects like Global Voices will find themselves of increasing importance.

As an American, I can “connect” to bloggers around the world to get their perspective on both local and global issues affecting their lives. Currently, a blogger from Ghana can keep me apprised of his reactions to events of the week in the nearby sub-saharan African “superpower”, Nigeria. An Isreali journalist in Tel-Aviv can write about her perceptions ofthe recent victory of Kadima in the Israeli elections, and I can learn about some of the cultural values and norms in Chile.

If the Internet is truly going to be one of the factors which “flattens the world” and brings us all closer together in a globalized economy, we must first learn more about each other. How much do I truly know about the world around me? Are traditional filtered news sources like the AP and Reuters going to be the only view of the world which the general public is interested in hearing from in the years to come? Perhaps projects like Global Voices will be able to help bridge this “cultural information gap” which is currently keeping most peoples’ of the world from truly understanding anything about their far-away neighbors.

Here’s a little more “official” stuff on Global Voices:

How Global Voices Works:

A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.

Our global team of regional blogger-editors is working to find, aggregate and track these conversations. Each day they link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions in the “daily roundups” section. A larger group of contributing bloggers is posting daily features in in the left-hand Weblog section, shedding light on what blogging communities in their countries have been talking about recently.

Washington Post Article: Agencies Not Protecting Privacy Rights, GAO Says

So the GAO examines the digital identity theft protection capabilities of the agencies designed to protect us from terrorism, and what do they find? Millions of unsecured data files, saved by “… agencies [that] often do not limit the collection and use of information about law-abiding citizens, as required by the Privacy Act of 1974 and other laws.”

The Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and two other agencies examined by the GAO spent about $30 million last year on companies that maintain billions of electronic files about adults’ current and past addresses, family members and associates, buying habits, personal finances, listed and unlisted phone numbers, and much more.

The 83-page report, the subject of a congressional hearing yesterday, was spurred in part by massive security breaches reported last year by ChoicePoint Inc. and LexisNexis in which sensitive files involving almost 200,000 people were sold to fraud artists.

It highlights a difficult truth about the government’s increasing reliance on information services: By outsourcing the building of rich dossiers, the government is sidestepping checks on surveillance approved in the wake of domestic spy scandals involving the FBI, Army and other agencies in the 1960s and 1970s.

Your tax dollars at work folks. It seems to me that as a law-abiding American citizen, I should have a right to know when the government is paying some 3rd-party company to gather information on me for my “own good”. Gee, I hate to throw around the term, but does this not sound just a bit “Orwellian”?

Old news of course, but it bears revisiting under the light of this class I think.

The CAN SPAM act… oh you congressmen, you witty, witty people. Part of me wonders if they spent all their time thinking of the name for the bill instead of actually writing the bill. Seriously though. The act was passed into law back in 2003… have you seen a reduction in the SPAM in your inbox? OK, well maybe if you’ve taken the pro-active approach as I have, you’ve gotten some nice filtering software for yourself. As far as I know, the federal government did not buy that software for me. Anyone get a tax credit I didn’t hear about? I personally still have one unfiltered email account myself, and its truly amazing how much spam I get there. So how did the act fail? Well:

“The bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it contains all of the following:

* an opt-out mechanism;
* a valid subject line and header (routing) information; and
* the legitimate physical address of the mailer.
* a label if the content is adult”

1) Those opt out “mechanisms” normally just serve to put your email address on an even bigger list to receive more spam. How can you track those communications in IPv4 without a huge infrastructure and manpower investment? Oh, you can’t.
2) Valid routing information in IPv4 is again extremely easy to fake… and to make look good enough to the average user that they often give away their credit card numbers, thinking that their Paypal account information is lost.
3) I’ve never seen a valid physical address on spam in my life.
4) At least they seem to do this… although those labels can be pretty grotesque in and of themselves.

So how could we ever possibly legislate the end of spam? I’m not sure that we can. Perhaps the market balance between spam and anti-spam is the best we can hope for in the U.S.

Spam is to the Internet what commercials are to television, what bulk mailings are to the US Postal Service. I certainly don’t see us being able to legislate those inconveniences away. Of course, bulk mailings and TV commercials are also most often produced by more centralized companies than the traditional domestic spamming operations, making Internet spammers even more difficult to regulate. Here’s some interesting discussion related to the topic I think: Wired Magazine 12.08: “The Lost Boys”. I think this argument applies pretty well to TV ads, and I’m not wholly sure it doesn’t apply to Internet ads either.

LA Times: Man Pleads Not Guilty in Voting Device Case

Diebold Whistle-Blower Charged With Felony Access

So let me get this straight: If you catch someone tampering with official United States elections processes, don’t tell anyone, because we’ll send you to jail. Are these the core values of our Republic? Well, obviously there’s no direct evidence yet that anyone at Diebold did anything willfully wrong when voters were disenfranchised due to the malfunction of many of their voting machines. Still though, free and honest elections are theoretically the cornerstone of what we like to call a Democracy. You should reward someone that blows the whistle on the mishandling of elections, not threaten them with prison time.

Not that voter fraud is anything new in this country either, but with the talk these days of Internet-based voting as a way of getting “the vote out” more easily, one has to wonder if an enabling technology like the Internet won’t just enable more fraud. We already seem to be seeing enough problems and technical glitches (or at worst, outright fraud) with stand-alone electronic machines. I shudder to think what would happen if you got IP data packets involved. Gives me the willies.

But the historian in me wonders if perhaps there aren’t some parallels which can be drawn to the evolution of the Internet itself that eventually brought us the blog. Growing up in suburban America, the first multi-user online communications tool I experienced was the BBS (Bulletin Board System). Back home in Rhode Island we had such services as the Ocean State State FreeNet (which still exists in a form today: http://www.osfn.org/), RINet, and a few others. These early systems of allowing many people to come together to form a “community” based upon shared interests and ideas served much the same purpose as blogs do today, albeit with some limitations. BBS’es ran on a dial-up infrastructure that was sketchy at best… communications were slow (My first modem transferred data at a whopping 9.6Kbps, as compared with the 1,500Kbps cable modems of today, haha), they were also completely text-based, were generally local-access-area only, and were often prone to failure. Still, there was a foundation laid for the multi-user interactions over the Internet for the future. For those that are interested, there’s a pretty comprehensive history of BBS’ing located here: http://sysopscorner.thebbs.org/bbshist.html

After major interest in BBS and the similar text-based USENet (Newsgroup) systems fell to the newly unleashed power of the World Wide Web, new communities took their place. Communities like AOL, Yahoo, Geocities (*shudder*), and others allowed Internet users to connect to a vastly larger audience to once again discuss hobbies, political beliefs, or whatever they really wanted to… in fact, probably too much of “whatever they wanted to”, given how many completely useless personal sites and communities there seemed to be back then. There was a lack of cohesion or organization, as hyperlinking was the only method of maintaining any network of communities which shared similar interests. Of course, the largest problem with these forums is that someone out there had to actually build the website. I built many back then, almost none of which still exist in any form I’d recognize them. Knowledge of HTML, the coding language of the Internet, was a valuable resource to be sure, as the supply of effective WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, or graphical non-code-based) website editing software severely lagged behind the demand curve for more websites.

The advent of the Weblog and the software that was built around it to enable such features as trackbacks and easy-to-use templates changed all this. These days, a server administrator (our own Dr. Farrell) can basically get a site up and running, and then leave the rest to the users with very little interference. Blogs are more interconnected than the BBS’es and Web-Based Forums of the past, and have allowed users to bridge distances and cultural barriers that were never conceived of as possibilities before this. A decent and very brief history of blogging is available at: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp another much more in-depth analysis can be found at: Rebecca Blood’s History of Weblogs.html

So where will the next evolution take us? We have already seen revolutions that have allowed greater and greater numbers of people to come together on the Internet to discuss common or disparate views. We have seen communications technologies within major industrialized nations expand to form an Information economy with infrastructure which is able to carry a tremendous load of data. We have also seen the software that allows us to communicate over this medium evolve from a simple local bulletin board to a complex web of interconnected and tracked communities worldwide. I’ll leave it up to Futureman to predict the future… I’m not so good at that. But I do believe I see a historical trend which could take us to some very interesting places. Perhaps more on this later.

Particularly relevant to our discussion in class last week, eh? So it would seem that the Internet in China is not quite as well-controlled as their government would have the rest of the world think. One man was able to post information to a network of some 111 million Chinese Internet users, information that the government was unable to use its vaunted filtering technologies to prevent from disseminating.

It just goes to show that perhaps the argument that the Internet inherently has the potential to democratize a nation holds more weight than some might think. If just one person can stand up to an authoritarian dictatorship (and lose his job in the process) using the power of the Internet, what is to stop others from doing the same? Well, losing their job I guess, but here’s hoping that other opportunities will arise. The free and transparent exchange of information is one of the cornerstones of any free nation with a participatory government. In this new age of technological revolution instead of violent uprisings with muskets (the American Revolution) or even rifles (Vietnam)… information, and the free spread thereof becomes the new catalyst for change. I believe that history has shown us: new times require such new paradigms for change. Apartheid was not ended using the methods of the past, nor was the idea of mass propaganda ignored during World War 2. This will not be an overwhelmingly fast (some would say “violent”) change, but as the article points out: this has happened before, and it will probably happen again.

As we have previously said in class, there is an argument to be made that the Internet is inherently a Libertarian system. Its very structure is a distributed one, with no massive concentration of singular power. This allows a single voice to be both lost in the noise, but also to be amplified with a power more than a million times greater than that of its own. That is the power of the Internet, and I am not at all surprised that a country even as powerful as China can’t contain it. Furthermore, I believe that the debate over the practices of Google, Yahoo, and other American companies overseas becomes increasingly irrelevant if the free-market structure which the Internet itself embodies continues to pervade countries like China. Hopefully our own government will stand up and take notice that immediate and forceful action is not always required to solve an international situation we disagree with.