revolution round-up: week five and six
Post categories: Nation state,ÌýProgramme one,ÌýProgramme two,ÌýWeekly round-up,ÌýWikipedia,Ìýbreaking the web,Ìýworld-wide web
| 11:20 UK time, Friday, 21 August 2009
What with diatribes from painting us as children peddling nonsense, eBay denying the eNation status granted it by Aleks, and organising a crowdsourced filming of footage at Wikimania 09 in Buenos Aires next week, it's been a busy week.
Add to that interest and analysis and comment on blogs such as and Ìýand it's a tall order to synopsise activities with any justice.
Programme one - power on the web:
Director Philip Smith's requestÌýfor Wikipedians with video camerasÌýgoing to Buenos Aires has yielded a number of people offering to capture footage of the event and share the video with us.Ìý
If you are going to Wikimania but haven't contacted us, it's never too late to take part. Philip's wish list for shots at the conference are:
Useful shots:
- people working on Wikipedia at the conference - informal editing of pages etc
- sense of social life around the conference - Wikipedians having fun together
- Jimmy Wales / other senior Wikimedia figures
- anything that gives a sense of the organisation functioning as a whole - how it self regualtes etc.
- establishing shots of building where conference held and Buenos Aires etc.
- occasional sound idents on the above explaining where we are and what happening could be useful (may or may not be featured)
Not so useful:
- Long talks and speeches at the conference. Ìý(Brief extracts of Jimmy Wales or other key figures would be ok, but we won't be featuring long speeches/conferences etc.)
Many thanks - Philip
Programme two - the fate of nations
A request from the production team:
The summit takes place in . As part of programme two's look at the relationship between the internet and the nation state, we'd like to show how the web has become a vital tool for gathering people together in the name of protest.
Are you part of a group who plan to protest at the summit? Will you be relying on social networking sites to gather your members and get your message across in the run up the the event? Will the likes of Twitter form an integral part of your protest during the event itself? If so, the programme two team would love to hear from you.
***
In response to the notion of emerging eNations @epastore introduced us to the Ìý- working towards 'a world where every person, without exception, is able to substantively participate in any governance structure in which they have an interest.'
@EnglishFolkFan suggested internet P2P technology could create and altruistic world without boundaries of nations
@TaiwanChallenges askedÌýWhen borders mean nothing, and identity is a matter of preference rather than geography and birth, how does a government define it's remit?ÌýOnly a part of a comment full of interesting ideas and links, including that,Ìýwhile the news has been filled with the ,Ìý
Another question raised by the production and users alike is whether the web a pervasive western influence upon the world? Is it a form of soft imperialism?
Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee emphatically rejects thisÌýand @TaiwanChallenges makes a point that, in chasing this idea, we're 'asking questions about the whole thing, focusing on averages, instead of the different cultures and 'ecosystems' existing within the whole. What's wrong with accepting the net as an essentially infinite new playground in which there is room for everyone to do their own thing and find/found communities that meet their own needs.'
And later reiterates from their experiences in Taiwan: 'The internet as a western entity? People forced to use English in code? It's only westerners who believe that the internet is a western entity. In Asia it's part of the fabric of many people's lives, and anyone who's familiar with the Japanese mobile model would laugh at the idea that the west is leading or being culturally dominant.'
This said, a couple of comments have noted that if you are of one nationality based in the geography of another nation, some major services, such as search, have a tendency to assume they know you by your location rather than your presence. And that while a western web service may offer to break down the boundaries of language and nation's borders, it may still feel the influence of a nation's government.
@GaryGCCC wonders whether language barriers are eroding as people all make effort to communicate from across cultures (often in English) will eventually lead to an emergent international weblanguage - websperanto.
The potential fragility of the web and the underlying internet was discussed, as Aleks asked the Digital Revolution community for examples of the web being broken or hacked. Obviously there was the most recent and hampered Facebook, but @wisepacket reminded us of the inadvertentÌýYahoo take-down by Pakistan in 2008Ìýand the 's potential destructive power.
Although, @Nevali's response to this suggests that the internet would be considerably harder to destroy than would be worthwhile making an attempt at: 'Destroying the Internet less so; it'd require dismantling, piece by piece, and doing it more quickly than dissenters put it back together again. Good luck with that.'
Our brief -like quest for the Mysterious 14th Root Server led to a healthy tech sanity check from @nevali on our blog and further .
And offered this picture as evidence of having found said all-powerful server:
Image: ZX80.2 by
/
The search for the 14th server goes on...
Elsewhere on the web:
The global andÌý suggests the 'great levelling' of the web flattens both ways (from )
for the Digital Revolution project, but suggests the 91Èȱ¬ Blogs' comments system is flawed in its requiring sign up to contribute. I replied on his blog, but if there are people enjoying the Digital Revolution open production but feel the comments system is inhibiting for whatever reason, please do take Patrick's approach and make comment on the platform of your choice - let us know via twitter or the contact us form and we will (providing it's appropriate) link to you and reply there.
Coming next week: Programme three - the cost of free
Aleks Krotoski blogs the programme's themes, on 'free' and 'freemium', on the secret benefits of a click online...
Comment number 1.
At 21st Aug 2009, Mike K wrote:Something for next week, if you need something that free or unlimited equals a service of > 30KBps - as in shared backhaul if all online, then more detail at
Complain about this comment (Comment number 1)
Comment number 2.
At 23rd Aug 2009, TaiwanChallenges wrote:I guess this may be more relative to Programme Four, but I'll throw it in here because it's partly inspired by the talk of tribes and partly by SheffTim's (was it he?) comments about the impossibility of creating products that are universally appealing.
Links are to 91Èȱ¬ articles where possible because that presumably makes it easier for the team to research more deeply.
I teach, ie I try to commnicate new ideas and knowledge, to people who belong to a different tribe than me. As the web is all about communicating and tribes, I started wondering about something that few people seem to consider - although I think someone did mention it in one of the replies to this blog recently - which is the effect of the web on the human brain.
The issue is how people collect, or filter, information and how they process it. I find that many language text books written in western countries make assumptions about the students that are not valid in Asia. For example, students are expected to master the past simple tense in just one chapter (say, eight pages) and the past continuous in the next. The Chinese language doesn't have different tenses for past, present and future so students usually forget to use them. One chapter is not enough to change the habits of a lifetime, but we go that route because that's what works with students from France or Germany - people with a similar culture. We're trying to impose a systematic 'method' of communication on people who don't see language as a system.
Chinese-language speakers describe the time by saying 'yesterday I go', and in their language the right choice of words is essential to convey meaning clearly. Time is inferred from context, to stay with this example. So locally-produced books focus on vocabulary-learning instead of basic grammar. People try to learn English in the same way as they learn Chinese, and it doesn't work. Their approach to language is not systematic, because systematic thinking is not part of their culture/language/neurology.
So what does this have to do with the web? Well, aside from engineers in the west displaying the same cultural ignorance when they designed the DNS system to only work with the latin alphabet, for instance, there is a deeper relevance.
For starters, it appears that Chinese-language users are right-brain thinkers to a much greater extent than westerners.
There was also a recent article I can't find now about how learning languages stimulates the growth of neurons in the brain. Specifically, the left side of the brain, and specifically European languages.
So, westerners are more likely to be left-brain thinkers and Asians are more likely to be right-brain thinkers.
Dr Scott puts this down to the tonal nature of Chinese, but that's because she has never tried to teach Chinese speakers to write an academic paper. A much better insight comes from Dr Richard Nisbett's research -
"East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations.
"Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning.
"In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context.
In other words, western people process information systematically using the left side of the brain, whereas Asians process things contextually, using the right side of their brains. Now compare the above to this quote from Bill Thompson on the impact of the web on our thought processes:
"Today's internet presents information in bite-sized chunks, linked together into a rich tapestry where the connections often carry as much meaning as the words themselves.
The article mentions that 'we' no longer process information linearly, which is what I struggle to teach my students to do, although it doesn't encourage the idea that new neural pathways are being built. So what does this article, if correct, mean for Asian people when they get online? Does it change the way they experience the web? (And, if Bill is right, is the web changing the way 'we' experience the world?)
It seems that people from Asian cultures process information very much differently than people from western cultures. This is not genetic, it's learned, and it's not a wholly east-west thing. I've been talking to Dr Nisbett, and this from a recent email:
Naturally I agree with everything you say. I didn't dwell on the lack of rhetoric skills on the part of East Asians in my book, but it is certainly a big and importance difference. We do have some data on Asian Americans brought up on English. They look more like European Americans for most of our tests than like Asians.... You might be interested to know that we are finding Eastern Europeans to be more holistic than W. Euros., southern Italians to be more holistic than northern Italians and mainland Japanese to be more holistic than residents of the individualistic island of Hokkaido. So it's not really just an East-West thing. The mediator of the cognitive differences appears to be interdependence vs. independence.
There's a lot of language in use there that is of great interest to anyone involved in building systems to communicate information: holistic, cognitive differences, interdependence, independence, lack of rhetoric skills. Basically, people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds see the world in different ways, they attach importance to different things, and they narrate their experiences differently. And their brains work differently. Do they also respond to different stimuli?
Take a look at this site, which is supposed to be the primary information source for foreigners visiting Taiwan and needing a visa.
Notice the annoying graphics? The clutter? The irritating and pointless music you have to listen to? The notice telling you that if you are not an obedient user of Microsoft products (and only Microsoft) then the site may not work? The extreme difficulty in finding any useful information?
This is how people want the web to be in this part of the world. The most popular blogging site is this one - - but I can hardly bear to look at it. Compare and contrast to Blogspot, which nobody here uses.
This means that a website, or other application, built to please people from one culture are not going to be attractive, useful, or interesting to people from some others. But there is the possibility that using the web - the western web as it is today - will make 'us' become more like Asians in the respect that we learn to process information more contextually, more holistically. The web is an interdependent entity, and interdependence encourages holistic thinking. It also is being blamed for making us stay in our comfort zones, which is the accusation I hear levelled at Asians almost every day.
Complain about this comment (Comment number 2)
Comment number 3.
At 23rd Aug 2009, TaiwanChallenges wrote:Oops. Forgot to post the link to the TW site.
Complain about this comment (Comment number 3)