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- Technological Determinism
A Borderless World In 1984, a remarkable post caught the attention of users of Usenet, the distributed bulletin board system that served as a public square for the early Internet. Posted to one of the most active discussions, net.general, and to a small number of politics-focused newsgroups, it began, "Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody." The post was signed by "K. Chernenko" of Moscow Institute for International Affairs and came from a machine called "kremvax". It was a joke – the fact that it was posted on April Fools Day should have given readers a clue. Piet Beertema, a Dutch internet pioneer, perpetrated the hoax, changing the routing tables on his network's computers so that he was able to receive email sent to Kremvax and so he could forge the address and routing information in the article's headers. Beertema revealed the joke two weeks later, publishing snippets from the hundreds of messages he received. Some caught the date and got the joke. Many didn't, and their reactions spanned the gamut from cordial greetings to their Russian online counterparts to denunciations of the use of the Internet to transmit Soviet propaganda.xx There was a good reason to take the hoax seriously: it could very well have been true. Connecting to the net then – as now – didn’t require the permission of any central authority, just the connection from another connected computer. It was certainly within the realm of possibility that a sysadmin in Finland had connected to Kremvax and ushered in the age of internet detente. Six years after Beertema's hoax, that's exactly what happened. The DEMOS cooperative, a group of technologists at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, hooked Russia's nascent internet network, RELCOM, to a computer at Helsinki University using a leased voice telephone line. A few months later, DEMOS upgraded their systems and, showing both a sense of humor and a sense of internet history, administrator Vadim Antonov named the computer now responsible for connecting the Soviet Union to the global internet Kremvax: "We choosed the 'historical' name because this VAX was turned on at his new place at DEMOS at the 1st April 1991 (hm, could you call it by other name if you were me?)"xxi Not only was Kremvax evidence that Russian internet users could laugh at a Dutch geek's joke - it became a key platform for citizen media during the coup of August 1991. Michael Gorbachev's ambitious Perestroika and Glasnost reform programs alienated key members of the Soviet government, who feared the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A "gang of eight" declared Gorbachev unfit to govern due to illness and seized power, shutting down newspapers and independent radio stations and using the stations they controlled to distribute their messages. Kremvax was flooded with eyewitness reports of demonstrations in the streets of Moscow and transcriptions of Boris Yeltin's defiant speech from atop a tank in front of the White House. For three chaotic days, Kremvax served as a key gateway for reports from within Russia to reach the wider world.xxii I was too young to see the Kremvax hoax firsthand, but I came online in 1989, in time to follow the coup unfold on Usenet, logging on from a VT-220 terminal connected to a creaky old VAX at Williams College. Watching a government fall through first hand accounts translated by volunteers seemed part for the course for that peculiar space. Usenet in the late 80s and early 90s has no clear parallel in today's internet. Discovering it was a little like stumbling into a vast cocktail party where cliques of people around the room talked passionately about all sorts of obscure topics, the putative subjects of their conversations floating over their heads. In one corner, people talked about politics in parts of the world I'd never heard of; in another, they argued the heresies of obscure religions. (And in a darkly lit corner, people were sharing stories and photos of sexual practices that left me reaching for a dictionary to figure out what they were talking about.) For a small-town kid far away from home, reading Usenet was far more mind-blowing than going off to college. If you used the Internet in those pre-web days, learning obscure command-line syntax rewarded you with admission to an apparently global club of thinkers, writers and dreamers. In this club what you said and what you could do with a computer were far more important than what you looked like or where you were from. And your fellow correspondents might be anywhere in the world. When I received a grant to study in Ghana in 1993, I went straight to Usenet and posted on soc.culture.african to see if I could meet someone who lived in Ghana. While the only response I received was from another American college student – who I met up with in Accra a few months later – the ability to connect to Africa online only confirmed my suspicions that the Internet was a magical place beyond the rules of ordinary, physical reality. I was far from the only early netizen seduced by the post-national promise of the early Internet. In February 1996, John Perry Barlow authored "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" and declared: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."xxiii Barlow was in Davos, Switzerland at the meeting of the World Economic Forum when he wrote those words. Surrounded by the wealthy and powerful of the physical world, he experienced the uncomfortable realization that these folks hoped to control the chaotic online world he'd grown to know and love. His declaration, for all its hopeful bombast, is at heart an assertion that there was something unique and new in this online space beyond the conventional jurisdiction of corporations and governments. Barlow's experience of this new world was shaped in large part by his time on the WELL – the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link – a pioneering online community organized around "conferences" that functioned much like a more exclusive (and less anonymous) version of Usenet. Howard Rheingold, a WELL dweller, drew on his online experiences to publish a seminal 1993 book, "The Virtual Community". With chapter titles like "Real-time Tribes" and "Japan and the Net", it’s a celebration of the post-national Internet. His chapter about IRC – internet relay chat – begins: "Thousands of people in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States are joined together at this moment in a cross-cultural grab bag of written conversations known as Internet Relay Chat (IRC)." Rheingold wonders, "What kinds of cultures emerge when you remove from human discourse all cultural artifacts except written words?" A few months ago, I was talking to Rheingold over Skype, coordinating presentations we were both giving at an upcoming academic conference. I mentioned that I was working on a book chapter about cyberutopianism and that I'd planned on including him in the discussion. On being linked to the term, Howard got flustered, and I briefly thought he was going to hang up on me. Instead, he conposed himself and offered the observation, "The Abolitionists were utopians." In a later email he explained further, "I am enthusiastic about potential for tools that can enhance collective action, but as I stated on the first page of Smart Mobs [his 2002 book on technology and collective action], humans do beneficial things together and they do destructive things together, and both kinds of collective action are amplified... So although I recognize that Communism and Fascism were sold as utopias, I like to reverse my logic - not only do people do really bad things under utopian banners, they can also do things like move for the abolition of slavery."xxiv Howard's comment is a reminder that it's a mistake to let your opponents frame the debate for you. "Cyberutopianism" is an uncomfortable label because it combines two ideas worthy of careful consideration into a single, indefensible package. Believing that linking people together with the internet (or telegraph, or airplanes) leads inexorably towards global understanding and world peace is a stance not worth defending. Arguing that technologies drive social change - technological determinism - is a much more complex assertion. And as Howard suggests, believing that people can use technology to build a world that's more just, fair and inclusive isn't just defensible - it's practically a moral imperative. Technological Determinism Karl Marx often gets blamed for reducing theories of history to an analysis of technological progress. Aphorisms like "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist" help explain why.xxv That contemporary political theorists have jumped to defend him from charges of technological determinism - explaining that Marx saw the social and economic arrangements associated with the rise of the steam mill as shaping society, not the technology itself - help give a sense of just damning the label has become in contemporary academia. In its strongest form, technological determinism looks a bit like Sid Meier's influential computer game, Civilization. Your goal in Civilization is to build a society that stands the test of time, growing from a Bronze Age village in 4000BC to a space age nation. Your main ally in the quest is technological process. Acquire a new technology like "sailing" from the "tech tree" and you can discover the compass and later navigation, allowing you to build ships that can sail out of sight of land. That ability allows you to expand your influence beyond one corner of the map, to trade with other societies and to discover other civilizations. The tech tree is fixed - only your progress through it varies - so technologies like nuclear fission (and the accompanying atom bomb) will inevitably be discovered. What your society is capable of depends on what technologies are available, and so your success depends heavily on moving rapidly up the tree. Critics point out that such theories don't hold up well outside video games. Societies reject some technologies as being so counter to social values that their development is held in check (stem-cell research in the United States) or developed and then scaled back (the proliferation and reduction of nuclear weapons.) At the extremes of challenging technological determinism, the "social constructivist" theory of technology suggests that society shapes technological progress, not vice versa. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker use this theory to explain the success, for a time, of the penny farthing, a bicycle design that appears to us as primitive, dangerous and absurd enough to be improbable.xxvi But the design makes more sense in consideration of the market for bicycles at the time - young, well-to-do men who valued the speed, danger and flamboyance over the more technically advanced, chain-driven “safety bicycles” that eventually won out. As with most academic debates, it's probably wisest to avoid the extremes, concluding either that society determines the development of technology or technology the development of society. Langdon Winner offers a compromise: the idea that artifacts have politics. Whether the person who created a technology intended the effects or not, a technology makes certain actions easier and other actions harder, empowering some people and thwarting others. It may not be inevitable, Winner argues, that the factory leads to a particular model of capitalism... but it's hard to imagine a technology like a plutonium reactor without also imagining a government capable of very tight social control and the ability to protect fissionable material from being stolen. Winner's best-known example is that of the highway overpasses on the parkways of Long Island, NY, explored in his essay, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?". Designed by urban planner Robert Moses, Winner tells us, the overpasses were built deliberately low to ensure that buses couldn't use the parkways. "One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Hones Beach, Moses' widely acclaimed pubic park." This is consistent with many analyses of Moses' impact on New York City: he made the city more accessible for middle-class automobile owners at the expense of existing communities.xxvii It's a great story - the biases of a powerful individual are manifested in a subtle but powerful way, shaping societal behavior in a way that's invisible to all but the skilled commentator. It's also wrong. A pair of scholars offered a refutation of Winner's essay that consisted in part of reprinting a bus schedule showing regular service to Jones Beach on the parkways Winner references. Not only can you reach Jones Beach by bus, the evidence for Moses' deliberate lowering of overpasses is very thin - it's the recollection of a single Moses associate in a popular biography that critiques the master planner at every turn.xxviii The low overpass example persists - and is still widely taught - because its philosophical point is sound even if its facts are wrong. As two of Winner's critics in the Science and Technology Studies field put it, "...if Winner's bridges didn't exist you would have to invent them. Our subdiscipline depends on them." It's possible to embed an agenda in a technology, intentionally or otherwise, and unpacking the politics of a technology is often a key step to understanding a social change. The mistake is concluding that the technology mandates or necessitates such a change. The persistence of the debate about technological determinism shows how seductive reducing change to technology can be. In 2000, President Clinton spoke about US relations with China and suggested that the rise of communication technologies would transform Chinese government: "In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.... We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China. Now, there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet - good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall. But I would argue to you that their effort to do that just proves how real these changes are and how much they threaten the status quo."xxix Chinese Jello-nailing technology has gotten quite sophisticated as of late. By filtering a great deal of international content through a system critics call "The Great Firewall of China" and encouraging Chinese netizens to use domestically-hosted tools, controlled by sharp-eyed censors, China has brought the internet to more than 400 million users and become the world's largest mobile phone market without substantially changing its political system. The spread of libery by cell phone and cable modem was kept in check by leaders determined to ensure that technological change didn't lead to a specific set of social changes. What's emerged instead is a system internet scholar Rebecca Mackinnon refers to as "networked authoritarianism", where certain types of discussion and dissent are permitted much more widely than in previous days, while other sensitive discussions are still tightly controlled.xxx While the Chinese example is deeply discouraging for those hoping for a technological shortcut for social change - "Instant democracy! Just add connectivity!" - there's a hopeful side as well. With sufficient incentive, interest and effort, it's possible to control and influence the development of a technology as transformative as the Internet. If China is able to architect the internet in ways that limit dissent, it's possible to imagine ways we could shape the Internet to build societies that are more free, fair and connected. Overconfidence in the inevitability of technology linking and connecting us leaves can leave you looking as silly as Clinton or Marconi. But while it's irresponsible to assume that technological change leads to positive effects, it's equally irresponsible to offer only critiques of technology's negative effects, as has become fashionable with thinkers like Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Evgeny Morozov. It's incumbent upon us to try to understand how technologies and societies interact and try to shape both in ways that bring people together instead of pushing them apart. In other words, utopias are hard work. Rather than dismissing the hopes of Barlow and others as dated and unrealistic because they didn't come to pass, there's another way to consider their words: not as prediction but as prophecy. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a leading scholar and civil rights leader, began his academic career with a vast study of biblical prophecy. While "prophecy", in modern parlance, has become associated with forecasting the future, in biblical times, prophets brought God's voice to the people to encourage them to change: "The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism." Read as prediction, the hopes of Marconi, Tesla and Barlow are clearly wrong. Read as prophecy, they challenge us to take control of our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather than the world we fear. A helpful prophet for understanding the connected world is English philosopher and occasional humorist Douglas Adams. In an essay titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet" published in the London Sunday Times in 1999, Adams offers this hope and challenge: "We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing."xxxi That change is happening just in time. In an interconnected world, we can be affected by phenomena that unfold far from our back yards. In his exploration of networked phenomena like epidemics, fads and financial crises, _Six Degrees_, mathematician Duncan Watts suggests that many of the phenomena that affect us directly have causes that are geographically distant from us. "Just because something seems far away, and just because it happens in a language you don't understand doesn't make it irrelevant," he argues. "To misunderstand this is to misunderstand the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each other's burdens as well." For centuries, hunters in southern Cameroon and northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo have fed their families whatever meat they're able hunt. Their prey includes the chimpanzees native to the region. Because chimps and humans are so genetically similar, diseases endemic to simians can sometimes pass to humans, especially through contact with blood. That's what scientists believe happened with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus around 1908, manifesting in human hosts as HIV. For most of the 20th century, these affected hunters weren't able to travel very far. Isolated in dense jungle, they contracted the disease, likely spread it to sexual partners and probably died from infections that ravaged their damaged immune systems. By 1950, at least one hunter traveled down the Sangha river to Leopoldville - now Kinshasa - and the disease started to spread more aggressively through humans. Scientists have found tissue samples from 1959 and 1960 that contain samples of HIV that have significant genetic variation, suggesting that several strains of the disease had come into the city from different populations of hunters, and that the disease was well established in the city by 1960. As Kinshasa became more connected to the rest of the world, HIV spread wherever people spread. Long-haul truckers became a major vector for infection - they contracted the disease from prostitutes they met on their routes and spread it to families in their home countries. But the most explosive growth of HIV outside of Africa likely came via air travel. When Patrice Lumumba took over a newly independent Republic of Congo from Belgium's colonial rule in 1960, the new nation had fewer than 200 citizens who were university graduates. Unlike Britain and France, whose colonial rule provided educational opportunities for some citizens, Belgium's rule over the Congo provided very little framework for a future independent state. Several nations stepped to Congo's aid, providing doctors, educators and managers that the nation lacked. Haiti was a dangerous place for educated professionals under "Papa Doc" François Duvalier, and hundreds of Haitian professionals came to Kinshasa in the early 1960s, aided by comparatively inexpensive transatlantic air travel. Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobe has found evidence that suggests a specific strain of HIV - HIV-1 group M subtype B, the one that became an epidemic in the US and later the world - likely spread first to Haiti and then to the United States. Once the disease took hold in the US in the 1970s and early 1980s, the high degree of international mobility Americans enjoy allowed the disease to spread globally.xxxii It's taken researchers decades to trace HIV back to its roots in West Africa, in part because very little medical information flowed from clinics in Africa to research hospitals in the US in the 1980s. Had information traveled more frequently from the African medical community to global researchers, it's possible that research on the wasting disease Ugandan doctors began calling "the slim" would have led to the discovery of HIV before it reached epidemic proportions in communities in the US. Instead, individuals carrying HIV spread across the globe more quickly than information about the disease spread. Epidemiologists have learned key lessons about the importance of ensuring that information moves more quickly than people to stop the spread of contagious diseases. SARS - Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - is a coronavirus that crossed from palm civets (a spotted, tree-dwelling mammal sometimes called the "civet cat"), commonly eaten in southern China, to human populations in the city of Guangzhou. Within a few weeks in early 2003, the virus spread to 37 countries, killing 774 people. But the disease was contained with a few months, and the last human case was seen in June 2003. One of the reasons SARS didn't do more damage is that the World Health Organization rapidly coordinated response across the globe, sharing information on the disease, even over the objections of affected governments. China initially suppressed reporting on the disease and resisted calls to cooperate with epidemiologists. Two weeks into a major outbreak, Chinese authorities realized the scope of the problem they were dealing with and joined a network of scientists and doctors who were able to stop the spread of the disease by surveilling hospitals and airports, identifying individuals who were likely affected and rapidly quarantining them. The spread of information allowed doctors to restrict the flow of people and stop the spread of the disease. In the midst of a global emergency, bits moved faster than people and doctors around the world were able to get ahead of the disease before it became a pandemic. Some of the lessons of SARS and HIV have proved easier to internalize than others. Faced with a potential pandemic like bird flu, experts rapidly share information across national borders and prevent people from traveling and exposing more people to disease. Ideally, though, we'd like to know about infectious diseases before they're threatening large populations. The majority of infectious diseases that affect humans are animal diseases. People who have lots of contact with wild animal blood - hunters - are likely to be the first infected with some of these new diseases. If we could watch what diseases those hunters contract, we'd have an early warning system for global pandemics. That's the logic behind the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, a project run by evolutionary biologist Nathan Wolfe. His teams collect blood samples from hunters and their prey in Cameroon, detect new diseases and rapidly sequence their DNA. They determine how likely the diseases are to spread using models that consider population density, travel patterns and interactions between hunters and other groups around the world. The Initiative hopes that timely data from very remote parts of the world could help contain the next pandemic outbreak.xxxiii When we realize a need for information from remote places, we can be remarkably resourceful in obtaining that information. Without motivation and knowledge about what we need to know, we remain disconnected from key information. Fear is an excellent motivator to pay attention to information from around the world. In our highly connected world, a financial crisis that began with revaluation of the Thai baht led to the collapse (and government bailout) of Long Term Capital Management, a massive US hedge fund. Terrorists trained in Central Asia and funded from Saudi Arabia struck targets at targets in New York and Washington DC. If our worldview is too parochial, we are perpetually surprised by the threats that come, apparently, "out of nowhere". To forecast and forestall disaster, we need a global view of possible risks, be they medical, financial or political. More critically, we need global views and global cooperation to tackle the most pressing challenges of the day. Problems of pandemic, terror and financial panic are functionally borderless because they spread across international infrastructures. These infrastructures are too embedded in our everyday lives for us to easily disconnect from them. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, the US and Canada shut down their airspace for less than three days - the US government was under heavy pressure to resume flights not just from airlines, but from businesses whose "just in time" inventory systems meant they didn't have parts in stock to continue manufacturing until supplies arrived via air freight. The alternative to shutting down global infrastructures is to distribute responsibility for monitoring and securing them. A recent plot involving bombs sent from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago was foiled with cooperation from authorities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, UK and the US. Despite the presence of live bombs on two aircraft, air travel was not suspended and the main reaction from the shipping carriers who'd carried the bombs was their decision to temporarily stop accepting packages shipped from Yemen. Commenting on the response to the plot, UK Prime Minister David Cameron remarked, "In the end these terrorists think that our interconnectedness, our openness as modern countries is what makes us weak. They are wrong - it is a source of our strength, and we will use that strength, that determination, that power and that solidarity to defeat them."xxxiv It's easier to rally international cooperation when the threat is literally a ticking bomb than when threats are less immediate. It's hard to imagine a solution to climate change that doesn't involve substantial behavioral changes by citizens in wealthy nations, who currently emit the lion's share of carbon dioxide, and those in rapidly developing nations like India and China, who are on a path towards emitting the majority in the near future. Much of the current debate on climate change involves apportioning of blame - developing nations reject fixed emissions caps, pointing out that the growth of industrialized nations involved massive CO2 emissions. In turn, the US and other large emitters use China's unwillingness to curtail emissions as justification for inaction. Any viable solution to stabilizing CO2 levels is going to come from long dialog between very different nations, and compromises that reflect deep understanding for the needs and priorities of other nations. The case for connection isn't just about avoiding tragedy. Connecting with different cultures is historically one of the great sources of creativity and inspiration... though those encounters aren't always initially comfortable. In the spring on 1907, Pablo Picasso was visiting Gertrude Stein in her apartment in Paris when Henri Matisse stopped buy to show off an sculpture he had purchased from Paris dealer Emile Heymenn, a mask made by the Dan people of western Côte d'Ivoire.xxxv Picasso was fascinated by the piece and soon after dragged his friend André Derain to the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology. Initially, Picasso didn't like what he saw: "A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately." Three decades later, Picasso described himself as haunted by the sight and smell of "that awful museum."xxxvi Fortunately for the future of painting, "I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."xxxvii His visit to the Trocadero marked the beginning of what Picasso called his "periode nègre" - his African period. Later that year, Picasso produced one of his masterpieces, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", a striking portrait of five female nudes, two with faces that closely resemble west African masks. Picasso became a collector of African art, lining the walls of his studio with masks and figurines, and including African themes in paintings like Musician (1973) produced shortly before his death. Scholars track Picasso's technique of reversing concave and convex lines in faces, and the transformation of smooth surfaces into geometric solids - the basis of cubism - to his African inspirations.xxxviii Connection is a double-edged sword - exposure to the world leaves us open both to infection and inspiration. The idea that the world is becoming more interconnected is inspiring to some, a caution to others, and a confusing mix to many more. As we'll explore in the next chapter, globalization is nowhere near as thorough or complete as we may think it is. There's less trade, less migration and, perhaps most surprising, less movement of ideas and information than most of us imagine. The telegraph made it possible to transmit text across oceans. The radio, and later the telephone, brought voice, sound and music across continents and oceans. After a century where broadcast media, a small group of people broadcasting sounds and images to a large audience, dominated the media landscape, the internet has brought interactivity back to the fore. Billions of individuals - not everyone, but a vastly larger set of people than in a broadcast era - have the ability to create images, text, sounds and videos and share them with audiences that are potentially global. They can engage in conversations in real-time or asynchronously with people in the same room or on another continent. The internet is potentially the most powerful tool we've ever created for connection across borders of nation, language and culture. But in practice, it can divide, isolate and separate us, surrounding us with what and who we already know, insulating us with our preexisting prejudices. Facebook, the wildly popular social network, helps illustrate just how challenging rewiring could be. On its surface, Facebook is a tool for connecting with those you already know - and as we'll discuss in Chapter 3, most relationships on Facebook are local and physical, not virtual and international. But one of the ambitions for Facebook is to act as a tool for connection between people who've historically had difficulty connecting. "Peace on Facebook", an official Facebook site that promotes the use of Facebook for international connection announces, "Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term." The most striking aspect of Peace on Facebook is a graph that tracks connections between groups with historical differences: Albanians and Serbs, Muslims and Jews, Conservatives and Liberals. The numbers are large, and many of the graphs trend upwards. But discovering that 13,000 Greeks and Turks have connected on Facebook in 24 hours doesn't tell us much unless we know how many Greeks and Turks use the system and how many friends they have. More than 22 million Turks are Facebook members. If we assume they've got 130 friends each (the mean number of friends Facebook reports for users of the system), 13,000 friendships a day isn't a very big number - if no Greeks and Turks are friends at the beginning of a year, one in ten Turkish users will have a single Greek friend, on average, by the year's end. That Facebook falls short in bringing Greeks and Turks together isn't a reason to dismiss their good intentions. It's an indication that a new technology, by itself, is unlikely to create the changes we want all by itself. Peace on Facebook is a challenge to use Facebook for peace. Like many Armenians, activist Onnik Krikorian didn't know any Azeris growing up. While tensions between Armenians and Azeri date back to pogroms at the end of the last century, Krikorian's generation remembers the Nagorno-Karabakh War, where the countries fought over a disputed province from 1988-1994. The tensions around this stalled conflict mean there's systematic mistrust between Azeri and Armenians - in a recent survey, members of both groups overwhelmingly condemned the idea of making friends with people from "the other side". The problem, Krikorian believes, is that there are so few spaces in the physical world where Armenians and Azeri actually interact with one another. He writes movingly about teahouses in Tblisi, the Georgian capital, where Azeri singers perform Armenian songs for a clientele that spans the Caucuses. Zamira Abbasova, an ethnic Azeri whose family fled Armenia when she was four years old, encountered dozens of Armenians as a student in the US, but it took her years to "check the expiration date on her hatred" and to begin making friends, though her anti-Armenian stance was baffling to her fellow students in Boston. Since most youth in the two countries aren't able to travel or study abroad, Krikorian is encouraging connection in the one space they have in common: Facebook. "Two years ago, an Armenian befriending an Azeri on Facebook would have been unthinkable," Krikorian says. Through a set of online workshops, video chats between members of the two communities and endless online and offline diplomacy, Krikorian has helped encourage contact between youth in the two countries. "We're seeing simple things - an Azeri wishing an Armenian friend happy birthday. But this would have been impossible until very recently." "The difficult step is often to get people to acknowledge and display the contacts that are taking place. When Zamira posted about losing her hatred for Armenians, she was flooded with abusive email. Another participant received a death threat, complete with a picture of a bloody corpse," Krikorian explains. While the internet enables contact between people who've historically been in conflict, it doesn't guarantee that they'll interact, or interact in a positive way. What Krikorian and friends are doing in turning Facebook into a Georgian coffee shop is made possible by the internet, but its success is by no means assured. The promise of Peace on Facebook is that the ability to connect online with people from another race, religion or nation will inexorably lead to a rise in these connections. Krikorian's work shows us that this promise isn't impossible - it's often infrequent and difficult, as connection requires hard work. Peace on Facebook is less a reality to be documented than a possibility to be pursued. If we reject strong technological determinism, the idea that the tools primarily shape society, and read our "cyberutopian" predecessors as prophets, not prognosticators, we are left with a challenge: How do we rewire the tools we've built to let us maximize our impacts on an interconnected world? The problems we face demand global inclusion to seek global solutions. And those positioned to thrive, commercially, politically, creatively and artistically, are those who can move through a wide range of digital and physical spaces. The web, the graphic-enabled view of the internet that was the introduction to the digital world for most readers, is only in its early twenties. Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are even younger, created late in the last decade. The people creating these tools resemble Marconi and his hopes more than Winner's vision of Robert Moses, creating digital overpasses to block corners of the internet to undesirables. The ways which the internet falls short of our hopes isn't a function of evil intent on part of the designers. (I proudly count myself as one, with my work on Tripod, an early social media platform.) Instead, these shortcomings are a function of our failure to understand the politics of the artifacts we've created and the shallowness of our efforts to push back on those unintended effects. Accepting the shortcomings of the systems we've built as inevitable and unchangeable is simply lazy. As Benjamin Disraeli observed, "Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter." The premise of this book is that a future of connection across lines of language, culture and nation is made more possible by the rise of the internet. Indeed, my core argument is that future economic and creative success depends on our becoming digital cosmopolitans. The goal, in the chapters that follow, is to understand the ways in which we are disconnected and how the internet can mask those disconnections. We also want to understand the "physics of connection", what's necessary to build connections in a digital space. To begin, we need a better understanding of what we actually do, and don't do, using the internet. We need to take a close look at how connected we are, not just how connected we imagine ourselves to be. Directory: papers papers -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization papers -> The Tragedy of Overfishing and Possible Solutions Stephanie Bellotti papers -> Prospects for Basic Income in Developing Countries: a comparative Analysis of Welfare Regimes in the South papers -> Weather regime transitions and the interannual variability of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Part I: a likely connection papers -> Fast Truncated Multiplication for Cryptographic Applications papers -> Reflections on the Industrial Revolution in Britain: William Blake and J. M. W. Turner papers -> This is the first tpb on this product papers -> Basic aspects of hurricanes for technology faculty in the United States papers -> Title Software based Remote Attestation: measuring integrity of user applications and kernels Authors Download 0.54 Mb. Share with your friends:
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