Gilad Lotan » news

The Algorithmic Newsroom

gilad — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:03:00 +0000

I just came back from News Foo, an un-conference for technologists, academics and journalists in Phoenix on the future of news. The following post details my thoughts, heavily inspired by the conversations and sessions I had the privilege to be a part of.

There are a growing number of algorithms that are deciding what topics people’s attention should be given to. Algorithms are taking over the historical raison d’etre of news editors, generating top news lists, hot trends and personalized recommendations. Algorithms have the perception of being neutral, yet they encode political choices and have cultural values baked in. At a time when audience attention has become a scarce commodity, an algorithm’s ability to command user attention is true power within our media ecosystem. As curatorial power is handed over to automated systems, we must make sure that the public understands the biases at play and that product engineers are optimizing for the wanted outcome – an informed public – not just what generates traffic.

Human vs. Algorithm

An algorithm is a finite list of instructions that a machine performs in order to calculate a function. From simple counting operations to complex information sorting, a good algorithm is thought through and well defined to give the wanted output in the least computationally complex manner. Algorithms are extremely good at scale. They can be used to efficiently classify text from millions of documents within micro-seconds, extract images of a certain type, and identify complex correlations between multiple data points. Recommendation systems such as the ones used by Netflix and Amazon employ algorithms that learn about user preferences through their actions, and personalize the information presented for every user, an impossible task to be completed manually.

Algorithmically curated, personalized recommendations have become popular within digital media spaces. “Most read articles” modules are based on simple math: the top 10 articles in terms of page views. On the other hand, “hottest articles” lists are more ambiguous and vary based on what the organization defines as “hot”. Is it new content? Is it popular? Spiking? How far back is the data being compared? Are there white listed or blacklisted topics? Whats hot is an intuitive and very humane assessment of an ecosystem, yet a mathematically complex formula, if at all possible to reproduce.

Yet humans are still unbeatable for many types of tasks. Journalists and editors drive agendas, made up of qualities that are difficult to determine in a formula: trust, excitement, impression and intuition. Humans aren’t always rational, and may trust a source despite a bad reputation. The intuition that an experienced editor or journalist brings to the table could never be replaced by automated formulas.

Algorithmic Bias vs. Perception of Neutrality

As soon as digital information providers add any form of curation and recommendation mechanisms (a common practice within social network spaces), the technology loses its neutrality. In some ways, “Twitter’s trending topics algorithm acts like a lot of human news editors, who are more interested in the latest news rather than ongoing stories”, says Tarleton Gillespie of Cornell University. Values are coded into the way these systems make recommendations:

Twitter’s trending topics highlight novel events rather than events that slowly grow, simmer, thus making it very hard for events like Occupy Wall Street to trend, in comparison to events like Kim Kardashian’s wedding or Steve Job’s death which easily trend.
Google’s search algorithm was recently adjusted (Panda update) to highlight fresh content, affecting some 35% of all search queries.
Facebook is known to promote content that references any brand that is also one of their ad partners on people’s personal “walls”.

As these systems grow, a single engineer or product designer may not fully understand the logic behind all of the pieces that make up the whole. We’ve seen a number of examples where uninteded consequences of algorithmically designed results led to awkward outcomes, such as Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 priced book about flies or Google’s past ‘Florida release’ which had a catastrophic effect on a large number of websites, causing SMEs to go bankrupt. Mike Ananny describes how the Android marketplace recommended the “Sex Offender Search” application for anyone interested in Grindr, a gay dating app. And most recently, Siri’s inability to find abortion clinics in New York city.

These are not Google, Apple, Amazon or Twitter conspiracies, but rather the unexpected consequences of algorithmic recommendations being misaligned with people’s value systems and expectations of how the technology should work. The larger the gap between people’s expectations and the algorithmic output, the more user trust will be violated. Liz Strauss eloquently describes why she quit Klout, feeling cheated by an algorithm that constantly changes under her feet. She wanted to trust the algorithm, even through initial doubts, but broke down and quit after multiple algorithm changes.

As designers and builders of these technologies, we need to strike a fine balance between making sure our users understand enough about the choices we encode into our algorithms, but not too much to enable them to game the system. People’s perception affects trust. And once trust is violated, it is incredibly difficult to gain back. There’s a misplaced faith in the algorithm, assuming that the algorithm should accurately represent what we think is true.

Ryan Rawson's tweet in response to claims that Twitter is censoring #OWS from trending

While it is clear for technologists that algorithms are biased, the general public perception is that of neutrality. Someone at News FOO brought up the famous Rumsfeld quote, adding that it is the unknown unknowns that we should be most worried about. When people don’t know that they don’t know how the algorithms that govern their interfaces work, they may get burned, angry and blame the technology.

Claire Diaz Ortiz leads social innovation at Twitter and is constantly managing the gap between people's expectation of its Trending Topics algorithm

The Augmented Journalist

We need to be thinking about hybrid approaches. On the news production side, how do we utilize algorithms for scale while using journalists and editors for compelling narratives and thoughtful judgement. Algorithmic Investigative Journalism may hold a treasure trove of possibilities for new types of stories, where journalists will use the output of a complex data query to feed their intuitions and draw conclusions from correlations in the data. Tom Lee at Sunlight Labs is doing an amazing job pushing projects that derive insight from big data, while Kris Hammond uses machines to write stories where automation is possible.

On the flip side, we need to make sure the general public has a better understanding of the algorithms at play, the algorithms that feed their attention, without giving away too much of the special sauce. We must come up with the right vocabulary to define editorial workflows, and work with engineers to code them into the algorithms. As danah boyd stressed during the session, it is important to be constantly thinking through what we’re optimizing for. The editor and journalist’s job is to inform the public. Is it possible to design and implement algorithms that optimize for an informed public? How do we even start to quantify a person’s level of “informed-ness”?

Pete Skomoroch raises a similar question. We need to strike the right balance between automated news personalization and curated, editorialized feeds. Advanced chess (or computer-assisted chess) is a relatively new form of chess, wherein each human player uses a computer chess program to help explore the possible results of candidate moves. The human players, despite this computer assistance, are still fully in control of what moves their “team” (of one human and one computer) make. What would the augmented journalist or editor look like? How can technology and algorithms be used effectively in the newsroom to inform both journalists and the general public?

The conversation should not be focused on humans vs. algorithms, but rather how we utilize algorithms to take our media ecosystem to the next level.

#Sidibouzid Twitter Hashtag: an analysis of the people spreading the news

gilad — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:53:53 +0000

There have been numerous articles and discussions on the role Twitter played during the recent Tunisia uprising. An excellent Techcrunch post by Alexia Tsotsis analyzed Twitter traffic over time (using data provided by backtype. According to their report, Tunisia related Twitter traffic peaked at 28 tweets per second, at 21:27:56 Tunisian time, a couple hours after the first reports that Tunisian president had left the country. At the end of the cycle, total tweets mentioning Tunisia were over 196K. Total tweets mentioning #sidibouzid (the provice where the protests started) were over 103K.

While this is great analysis on the content itself, I found little to no analysis of the participants on Twitter. Who are these people that chose to pass on and amplify messages? How did the information spread? Who were pivotal points that enabled this? By answering some of these questions can we reach a understanding on the role that Twitter plays in diffusing information to public attention around the world?

Participating Users

My dataset includes 170,000 Tweets all containing the term ‘#sidibouzid’, posted between Jan 12th and 19th by some 40,000 different Twitter users. This is not the complete dataset, but what I could grab using the public Twitter APIs. The following chart below maps out the distribution of Twitter users who joined the conversation by posting a message with the ‘#sidibouzid’ hashtag. We see a huge spike between Jan. 13th and 14th, reaching almost 12,000 new users at its peak. This is not surprising, given all the other analyses pointing to a huge spike in “attention” that the story received on Jan. 14th, when Ben Ali fled Tunisia.

Participation amongst users (i.e. – number of times users posted a message with the ‘#sidibouzid’ hashtag) follows a power-law distribution:

Top 10 participants of the Hashtag (in terms of volume posted) are:

Some of these accounts are broadcasting into the ether, like our top participant, griffinworks_3. This profile was only created on January 12th 2011, has since then posted around 4,000 Tweets, and has acquired only some 100 followers. From my dataset, looks like this profile got around 20 ReTweets between Jan. 15th – 18th. Not much activation, nor audience. The profile also doesn’t follow anyone else. Possibly a bot that auto-forwards content.

On the other hand, if we look at Dima_Khatib, an Arab journalist with Al Jazeera, we see an extremely active profile (over 9,000 posts) who is quite new to twitter (created mid October, 2010), but with a high following of almost 5,000, and a high rate of mentions/RTs (over 5,000 times).

User Bios

Using wordle to visualize the users profile information (the “write something about yourself” field), it is quite clear that as the events unravel and spread out to the world, we see a drastic shift in the kinds of people who are joining the hashtag. Dominating words that represent the initial Twitter participants are ‘Tunisian’, ‘journalist’, ‘politics’, ‘activist’, and a variety of French stop words:

Once the topic started trending, we see the people joining the hashtag represented by the following words: ‘news’, ‘twitter’,'music’,'marketing’,'media’,’student’…

Geographic Distribution

What can we learn about the spread of this topic by looking at people’s geographic location? If we had a precise indication of every profile’s exact location, this would be fascinating. My assumption is that we would see small discussions happening around the Middle East, France and Morocco in the days before the uprising. Relatives and Tunisian expats from neighboring countries sould be Tweeting about the events, much before they reach world headlines. Could we actually see how the conversation moves from being regional/local into global? And if so, what does that movement look like?

There are three profile attributes that can give us clues about someone’s location: 1) User inputed ‘location’ field 2) User inputed ‘time-zone’ field 3) geo-location. When a user creates a Twitter account, the Time Zone may be automatically updated to the current location (depending on browser and connection), otherwise it receives the default value of ‘Quito’. Tunisia and Paris share the same timezone (CET). If someone in Tunisia creates a new profile, their timezone may automatically be set to ‘Paris’. The location field has no default, while the timezone field receives a default value of ‘Quito’. This makes it extremely tricky to draw solid conclusions out of the timezone field.

Since only 15% of users enabled geo-location, I chose the location field as the best indicator. Since it has to be entered manually, it may not be the most updated location, especially if the profile travels, but at least indicates a solid connection between the user and a country. For this analysis I chose to look at all profiles who stated their location.

Its interesting to see how comparatively strong of a role Egypt and France play initially:

And then how Saudi Arabia, Indonesia the US and UK folks get heavily involved:

Social Graph and Connectedness

Knowing how an individual is embedded in the structure of groups within a network may be critical to understanding his/her behavior. For example, some people may act as “bridges” between groups (connectors or “brokers” of information). Others may have all of their relationships within a single group (locals or insiders). Some may be part of a tightly connected and closed elite, while others are completely isolated from this group. Such differences in the ways that individuals are embedded in the structure of groups within in a network can have profound consequences for the ways these “nodes” receive information or reach an opinion.

This is probably the most interesting part of the analysis, but also the most complex. I used the Twitter API to mine the publically available relationships between all hashtag participants. There are two important measures that I used to make sense of all this data:

In Degree: how many users who participated in the hashtag are following this person. Effectively, how popular/reputable this person is within the group of all those participating.

Clustering Coefficient: measures how closely clustered this person’s “neighborhood” is inter-connected. If all your followers and friends are friends with each other, your CC will equal one.

I chose two different participants so that I could map out their network and see what we can identify.

ifikra
The graph below represents Sami Ben Gharbia’s network. Sami showed up as one of the most prominent Twitter users on January 13th. He was one of the most central nodes within the group of people who were passionately posting the ‘#sidibouzid’ hashtag prior to the peak of events. Sami shares a large chunk of his audience with two key users: an Egyptian journalist (mfatta7) and a Channel 4 News foreign affairs correspondent (jrug). This is a mapping of only his first degree followers and friends:

Dima_Khatib
The following graph represents Twitter user Dima_Khatib’s network. Dima_Khatib was one of the most active participants, posting over 800 messages to the hashtag. Dima is a journalist at Al Jazeera, and as I mentioned previously, is quite new to Twitter (began tweeting in October ‘10). Dima shares a number of her audience with a fellow Al Jazeera journalist (Mskayyali):

SBZ_news
SBZ_news is a profile that functions as a typical broadcast media outlet, with a very high in-count, yet a very low out-count (has many followers, and follows almost none). Whats interesting here is that its community of followers includes a number of key players, who themselves have a fairly large audience. This seems to have been an important source of information from the ground in Tunisia.

What Next?

This post is merely touching the tip of the iceberg. There’s still so much that can be understood by slicing and dicing this data. As we start to grasp the power of Twitter as a worldwide information diffusion network, we must build tools that help analyze the structures that enable information to flow.

Understanding Information Flows: the True Power of Social Media

gilad — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:56:33 +0000

With all the excitement about Tunisia and the numerous debates on whether this was/is another “Twitter Revolution”, it was the perfect time to dig into Clay Shirky’s recently published piece ‘The Political Power of Social Media’ in the Journal for Foreign Affairs. I actually like the journal and usually buy a copy, but sadly there’s no existing text online, which means, the article is not part of the current debate (a shame!). Many agree that the revolution in Tunisia did not happen because of Twitter, nor did Twitter *actually* help much for those fighting in the streets of Tunis. While social media play an important role in easing the flow of information during and after the peak of events, Clay argues that there’s an important and usually overseen long-term effect that Social Media has in strengthening public spheres.

In the article, Shirky claims that the US government overestimates the value of access to information, particularly that hosted in the west, and underestimates the value of tools for local coordination. There’s a need to think of social media as long term tools that can strengthen civil society, and thus the public sphere. Clay argues that a strong public sphere plays a crucial role in social change. For example, communication tools during the Cold War did not cause governments to collapse, but they helped the people take power from the state when it was weak. They played a supporting role in social change by strengthening the public sphere. It is imperative for the US to rely on countries’ economic incentives to allow widespread media use. It should work for conditions that appeal to states’ self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, a way to create or strengthen countries’ public spheres.

Clay describes a fascinating study of political opinion by sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld:

in a study of political opinion after the 1948 US presidential elections, sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that mass media alone do not change people’s minds; instead there is a two-step process. Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well – it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.

The fascinating thing about Twitter, is that for the first time, we are able to actually SEE some of these psychologically triggered processes happen. We see the described first step happen all the time: media outlets and corporations tend to broadcast messages using their accounts. These messages may or may not be picked up by the general audience who follows their accounts. But the second step is where things get really interesting. Posts may be picked up and echoed by friends, family members and colleagues, sometimes bounced around so much that the messages turn “viral”.

This second step, the social flow of ideas and opinions between people based on realtime public data is at the crux of an emerging new field that fuses machine learning and statistics with the social sciences. Access to information is important, but understanding information flows is truly powerful in order to do in-depth analyses of people’s behavior and create systems that are smarter and substantially more effective. Clay talks about a notion of ’shared awareness’ – people who are part of intertwined networks, posting and consuming each other’s information. Shared awareness binds and strengthens groups, helping millions who are not part of any hierarchical organization spread messages and reach a common understanding. Understanding how people are inter-connected not only helps us build better systems, but also helps us get a sense for the strength of a country’s public sphere.

As the web continues to evolve into a dense network of social links, we need to focus on getting a better understanding of networked information flow. Additionally we must build tools that will help us slice and dice massive social graphs of nodes and edges. Whether a breaking news story, social coupon or a TV show, information flows are the underlying force powering the web, and affecting the DNA of our society. I am certain that making sense of them will bring huge rewards.

War is not just a Military Campaign, but a Parable

gilad — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:18:34 +0000

Towards the end of Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, there’s a detailed description of an hour long meeting that the author had with President Obama at the oval office. He recounts the scene with such detail, that I felt as if I was there in the room. The body language, attitude, charisma and humor.
At the end of their meeting, Bob hands Obama a passage from The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson, which I found both inspiring and saddening.

…for war was not just a military campaign but also a parable. There were lessons of camaraderie and beauty and inscrutable fate. There were lessons of honor and courage; of compassion and sacrifice. And then there was the saddest lesson to be learned again and again. That war is corrupting. That it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit. That even the excellent and the superior can be defiled. That no heart can remain unstained…

Obama reads this quote, and responds by pointing Bob to his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

No matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldiers courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing dedication to county, to a cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such. So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths.

That war is sometimes necessary.
And that war in some level is an expression of human falling.

War used to be such an dominant part of my reality. But now feels so distant. I’m not wishing for the stress, worry and fear that came along with that. What I am worried about is living in a country where there’s such a lack of concern and connection to where its own soldiers are fighting, or to the major fronts that see daily battles. From reading this book, I’m invigorated by Obama’s seeming concern to gather as much information as possible in order to make the best decision about the continuation of these wars. I see little hope in finding a policy that will not cost the US military many years and high involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make things right, they must work with local communities, build trust and a solid social infrastructure, using counter insurgency techniques. However, with the general public so disengaged, how the heck are they going to pull it off?

The Repercussions of Eden Abergil’s Actions: a country’s worst nightmare

gilad — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:43:33 +0000

Imagine a reality where for a day, Snookie from Jersey Shore becomes the single most visible representative of American military and foreign agenda around the world. A world where whatever she says, is taken as representative of an organization that she is not even remotely a part of. As frightening as that thought may be, this is exactly what happened last month in Israel when a clueless 20-year old ex-IDF soldier posted disturbing photos taken during her army service, on her Facebook page. She smiles and poses in front of a blindfolded and cuffed Palestinian detainee. Her friends comment and ‘like’ the photos. Unbeknownst to her, all this content is publically accessible because of Facebook’s December ‘09 changes in privacy defaults. The content is immediately picked up by a local Israeli blog, and within a day, through a world encompassing media avalanche, reaches the New York Times, Guardian, BBC and hundreds of front pages around the world.

Within a fortnight, Eden Abergil becomes an Israeli public figure, stamped on news articles slashing one of Israeli IDF core principles, its moral values, and Israeli society as a whole. All because a single, insignificant girl’s actions; a girl who has no connection whatsoever to the army anymore. Domestic and international news agencies turn against her. The IDF condemns her actions and releases her from reserve service. Yet Eden still does not really grasp why here photos are perceived as problematic. In a recent interview, when asked if she understands the world’s anger about the photos, Eden answers: “of course I understand! The whole world is against us. Its not a secret that the world hates us (Israelis)”. It was her army service, the photos were her souvenir which she posted on her supposedly private Facebook page, and had “private” conversations with her friends. She did not physically harm the prisoners. On the contrary, she claims that she fed and gave them water. “I don’t understand what all the fuss is about!” – she exclaims.

But the powerful fact still holds. With a tiny click of the mouse, by uploading these photos, Eden provided the world with ammunition against one of the most powerful armies in the world: a way to attack the IDF’s *prized* moral values. Compulsory service means that every Israeli is connected to the army – siblings, parents and friends. It is an integral part of Israeli society, making it difficult for one to criticize its actions. When you criticize the IDF, you’re criticizing your brother who might be serving, your father who is in reserves, and your friend’s family, whose son was killed in one of the many dangerous oprations in Gaza. The story of Eden Abergil hit one of Israel’s most sensitive spots – the IDF’s moral values. During the Lebanon and Gaza wars, as well as the Flotilla attacks, Israeli “hasbara” consistently uses the IDF values as its main defense reasoning. IDF soldier’s intent is to target militants and terrorists NOT civilians. IDF soldiers act to protect Israeli civilians, they react when attacked. Their values are aligned with what the western world would expect a truly valiant army.

The repercussions of Eden Abergil’s actions are a country’s worst nightmare, and a byproduct of the difficulties Facebook users have grasping issues of privacy on Facebook. When looking at Eden’s photos it is hard not to jump to conclusions and judge the IDF as a whole. “Finally the true face of the IDF has been revealed” – “see how they ruthlessly treat Palestinian prisoners”. But as we all know, the truth tends to be much more complex and multi-faceted. Yes, there are countless cases of detainee mistreatment by IDF soldiers. Hundreds of Palestinians are held without any legal justification. However in Eden’s case, there was none of that.

From blogs to mainstream media, Israelis disgusted by the sheer stupidity of this girl’s actions, horrified by the fact that within a day, Eden Abergil turned from being a nobody retired soldier chatting about shopping, parties and boys with her friends, to a world-wide symbol of “vicious Israeli occupation”; the face of the IDF, affecting people’s perception of Israel around the world.

The harm that Eden’s photos did to the image of the IDF will take a long time to heal, if ever. However, the damage done to her personal image will never be erased. Eden is mocked and publically slandered by media outlets as well as Isarelis across the country. The following youtube skit marks her as an “Arsit” (a.k.a. ‘white trash’) while numerous Internet memes have unfolded with her photo and name plastered all across. Eden will always be rememberd as that stupid girl who posted abnoxious photos on her Facebook account. She will have a hard time finding a job, and will always be the poster case for “people doing stupid things online”. Her micro-celebrity status will most likely drive her insane or to the extreme edge of society. When the waters settle, she will be forgotten.

But never forgiven.

im in ur army, corruptin ur valuez

Israeli-Palestinian bridging happening on Facebook?

gilad — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:59:47 +0000

We often experience the clash of contexts that happen on social media sites. We all have a different perception of what is funny or what is considered true. We are used to dealing separately with each of our friend groups. However, with many social media services, all of our relationships are classified within a single bucket. Personally, this has taken the fun our of my Facebook experience. I rarely post anything without thinking twice about the consequences. That said, something’s recently changed. I’ve grown to somewhat appreciate this clash. As the Flotilla event evolved, and things got politically charged, I realized that it might actually serve a constructive purpose.

This recently posted video of Israeli soldiers dancing to the beat of Ke$ha’s “tick tock” in the middle of their patrol in the West Bank is a great example of the clash of context. The video went viral extremely fast, as many Israelis re-posted and proudly emailed the link, naively thinking that “the world will finally see that our soldiers are humans who also like to have a little fun”. They could not have imagined just how offended people across the world would be from watching the video. Slogans like “It’s easy to laugh at the occupation when you’re the oppressor” were posted in response, causing lots of frustration and confusion all around.

Intentions were good, but were lost in translation.

Ethan Zuckerman has been writing about xenophilia and culture bridging for a while. He points at people’s tendency towards homophily (’birds of a feather flock together’) and sees this as a fundamental challenge, since with the web, we’re more able than ever to find people that are like us. He stresses the importance for us to seek out and understand people different from us, especially as cultures clash on global web services become more common. Ethan defines xenophilia as people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the breadth, complexity and difference of the world; “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country, but are “from” another. Bridge bloggers are xenophiles who have the capacity to connect both sides of a story, because they themselves are associated with both sides.

In his recent blog post, Ethan looks at data released by peace.facebook.com, boasting how many daily connections are made between pairs of battling entities. According to the site, 15,747 connections between Israelis and Palestinians have been made over the last 24 hours on Facebook. I find this piece of data incredibly hard to believe (especially since the number doesn’t seem to change over the course of the week). Even if a reciprocal relationship equals 2 connections, I can’t imagine such a high number of connections forming on a daily basis. That said, 20% of Israeli population is Arab, many with roots and family in Gaza or the West Bank. This fact could certainly explain the data.

Their notion of “connections” makes me wonder if they account for Facebook fan pages. Successful fan pages tend to be politically charged, and polarize the users according to their political agenda rather than bring those with different views together. However, if Facebook’s data is counting Israeli Arabs as Israelis (as they should!), I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d accounted for multiple connections forming via these fan pages.

I am extremely doubtful that much bridging happens through direct Facebook “friending”, nor that it is represented by direct Facebook “friendships” between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. So where does it happen if at all?

In order to answer this question, we must discuss the notion of a “safe space”, which I consider crucial for bridging to happen. A safe space makes us feel comfortable, almost at home. Its an environment where we are supported and validated; a place where we are willing to lower our defenses.

I am a huge fan of Global Voices, but wouldn’t consider it as a safe space for Israelis. The majority of readership on the Middle East section tilts heavily towards Arab articles, comments and opinions. One might say that is totally fair since it is representative of actual world distribution of population. But the outcome is an imbalanced environment, which for an Israeli, feels unsafe; a place where they won’t be supported, nor will they be identified with. Why hang out where everyone’s picking on you when you can easily go play with fun friends elsewhere? For the most part,like the Guardian or Al-Jazeera, Global Voices is not perceived as a safe space.

However I believe that Facebook creates new opportunities for safe spaces to form, especially as they are based on people’s familiarity with each other.

Facebook received massive adoption in Israel, easily taking over any other Social network or service. Israel is a tiny place, and people are inherently social – making Facebook a perfect place to interact with the “hevre” (Hebrew for ‘gang’ – also the name of one of the earliest Social Networks that saw light in Israel). Facebook is a place where my friends from Israel feel extremely comfortable. Even when someone lands on my profile page, there are always other friends a mere click away, in the periphery. One is never alone, in any given context.

The Flotilla incident triggered something I hadn’t seen before. Friends from different contexts don’t tend to communicate with each other, even when reacting to the same post. The flotilla events changed this.

When dealing with such a complex topic that has no clear “right” or “wrong”, I witnessed multiple “cross boundary” conversations happening on my own Facebook page, and also amongst my Israeli friends who are also living abroad. Our pages served as bridges, or safe havens, where contacts from “opposing sides” could have a conversation.

It would go something like this – (1) Facebook page owner posts link to article (2) Israeli friend/relative responds with a pro-Israeli message (3) European friend responds to that with a counter opinion (4) Another Israeli friend responds (5) another foreign friend supports #3 (6) profile owner mediates…

…you get the drift.

The interesting part here is that even if there are no direct links between those in Israel, and those with opposing perspectives wherever they were, a conversation could take place because of the personalized nature of Facebook. Because it felt safer to do it there, on a shared friend’s page. Much safer than on Global Voices, or other international news websites.

The more Facebook grows, the more I see these kinds of exchanges happening. In his post, Ethan claims that “we overestimate how many of our online contacts cross borders and underestimate how often these tools are used to reinforce local friendships”. While I agree, I’d add that we shouldn’t only look at direct cross-border connections, but rather try to understand and estimate the value that Facebook serves as a safe space for bridging to occur. I’m not sure how we quantify the amount of cultural bridging that is not represented by FB connections. We could only do this by analyzing public discussions happening on profile pages, between profiles who are not friends on Facebook.

To conclude, Obama argues that we suffer from an “empathy deficit”, as quoted from a speech to college students:

“There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room. As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier.”

Placing yourself in someone else’s shoes is much easier when the store attendant is your close friend. Facebook as a platform has the potential to host these conversations; be the store. Safe space.

But we the users, have to make the conversations happen.

From Pages to Streams

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:00:17 +0000

Thought provoking article on Techcrunch about the shift from dedicated web pages to real-time streams.

“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos and videos.

The author presents a coherent stream metaphor: “A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information – that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.” He claims that the stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them:

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

“The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.”

This is where I have to somewhat disagree. Yes, the average user must deal with information overload more than ever. Our emphasis must not be focused towards this notion of “giving up” or realizing that we can ‘never master the stream’. We need to build smart filtering mechanisms that help us navigate this overload and data-heavy information ether. We need to build systems that help us know when and where we *should* hop into the stream. We need to be able to set and identify levels of immediacy – I am not willing to miss out on any content from my closest friends, but will easily let other content slide by. Why can I not easily set preferences across the board and am constantly prompted to setup less-than ideal preferences within walled gardens?

“So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.”

The information overload “problem” is that of smart filtering, and in a way, the article’s last sentence portrays one of the most promising filtering mechanisms – social & collaborative. By letting people you trust around you do some of the work, it becomes much easier for users to take the plunge and step into the stream.

So start classifying y’all. I want to be able to finally deal with all my feeds!

[tags]filtering,overload,web,rss[/tags]

Journalism Will Not Only Survive, It Will Thrive

Thu, 07 May 2009 18:55:54 +0000

On May 6th, Arianna Huffington presented the opening remarks for the Senate Subcommittee on Cummunications, Technology and the Internet’s Hearing on “The Future of Journalism”. She began with a clear statement: Journalism Will Not Only Survie, It Will Thrive! She added that we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers, who access stories from countless sources around the world, up-to-the-minute, enabling conversations and direct comments to the author and between other readers, enabling communities to form around the topics.

Even with the staggering numbers that we have seen over the past year (the newspaper industry shed an estimated 15,970 jobs in 2008, and 8,484 through April of this year), it is important to remember that the future of quality journalism does not depend on the future of newspapers. People have gotten used to getting the news they want, whenever, however and wherever they want. This change is here to stay. The discussion needs to move from “How do we save newspapers?” to “How do we strengthen journalism — regardless of which platform it is delivered on…”

We must not act as if we are still operating in the old content economy, as opposed to the new link economy. The survival of the industry cannot be found by “protecting” content behind walled gardens. The future is a linked economy – it is search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation supported investigative funds.

Arianna firmly believes in a hybrid future:

where old media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism). The emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now, but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.

Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists who, like Pontius Pilat, wash their hands of finding the truth and instead are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth can be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found lurking in the shadows.

[tags] huffington, news, senate,arianna[/tags]

Israeli IDF Soldiers Testimonials Taken Out of Context

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:25:07 +0000

Several weeks after the Israeli operation in Gaza, Danny Zamir, director of the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory academy at Oranim College, organized a meeting of his graduates. There they chatted behind closed doors and shared their experience from the operation. A transcript of their conversation was initially published in the College paper, but was picked up by Israeli mainstream newspaper Ha’aretz and sensationalized on the front page.

The soldiers’ testimonies described cold-blooded murder of Gaza civilians and unreasonable commands passed during the operation. This lead to a promise by the military to form an investigation which was recently concluded, resulting in no file charges against any of the soldiers as their descriptions were based on hearsay. Their names have not been released in order to protect their identity, and the military investigative police did not publish any more information about the case.

Zamir’s efforts haven’t sat well with a certain patriotic constituency within Israeli society. The IDF is seen as a sacred national institution that is beyond reproach. I’m sure Zamir didn’t expect to be lionized for his efforts, he probably didn’t expect to be vilified either. Not only have Israelis accused him of smearing the IDF, they’ve accused him of aiding and abetting the nation’s enemies who are only waiting to pounce upon such stories to justify their hatred of Israel. The IDF itself initiated this campaign by revealing that Zamir had been imprisoned briefly in the 1990s when he refused to guard a settler group holding a provocative religious ceremony at Joseph’s Tomb. They attempted to shoot the messenger. (link)

While doing research for my Global Voices Online post, I scoured through Israblog, Tapuz and other Hebrew portals, trying to find posts from soldier first-hand witnesses who wrote about their experiences in Gaza. To my dismay, I could not find any. It is such a taboo topic; an Israeli must not help those haters validate their claims against our country. We were all soldiers. We all realize that these situations are not black and white. And even if these stories are somewhat true on a micro level, it is certainly not an IDF-wide phenomenon. But when they are taken out of context and amplified to the masses, it is easy to forget the source, while letting our emotions play out. Especially when messages are rapidly amplified through Twitter, the effects can be devastating ( a.k.a. what we saw last week re: #amazonFail)

Ever more often, we are witnessing the implications of living in a society with fast-paced, worldwide media coverage that can easily spin stories out from their original context. This is precisely how a closed door session between school colleagues turns into a worldwide news sensation against the reputation of one of the most powerful armies in the world. We must remember that the truth usually lies somewhere in-between, and make an effort to fact-check before letting our emotions passionately take over our logic.

Here’s a link to my GVO article:

[tags]Israel,global voices oline,testimonials,context,idf,soldiers,war,palestine,gaza[/tags]

Analog Blogging

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:03:04 +0000

In Monrovia, Liberia a unique form of journalism exists where the news is written out daily on a chalk board for everyone to read as they pass by. Alfred Sirleaf established his chalkboard news service called “Daily Talk” in May of 2000, when he saw a need for direct, free and accessible reporting. Because of his provocative style of reporting the truth, the Daily Talk was destroyed twice before he finally fled into exile in Ghana. As peace returned to the region, so did the Daily Talk, and today it is one of the most read News Sources in the capital with thousands everyday taking the time to stop as they walk or drive by to get the breaking news. The Daily Talk in not only a board, but includes a small news room in the back, where he works on the next set of “articles” as viewers read the current set (using a rotating double-sided chalk board). (link)

Alfred Sirleaf is the managing editor of The Daily Talk, a white plywood shed trumpeting the latest headlines along Tubman Boulevard, one of Monrovia main thoroughfares. “Those who don’t have opportunity to buy newspaper, go on the Internet, who can’t afford to buy generator to buy TV,” he said, describing just about everyone in this battered city, “I do all the dirty work for them, and I just give them exactly what they want.”

Alfred’s solution to dispersing information to the people around him is simple yet highly effective. He also seems to have made a business model out of this board, charging for advertisement space on the bottom. Alfred wants to make sure every Liberian can keep up with the news and play a part in the country’s young democratic government, but in a way that wholly depends on what type of information he displays.

But there are so many advantages to providing “analog” news:

Alfred serves as a reminder to the rest of us, that simple is often better, just because it works. The lack of electricity never throws him off. The lack of funding means he’s creative in ways that he recruits people from around the city and country to report news to him. He uses his cell phone as the major point of connection between him and the 10,000 (he says) that read his blackboard daily. (link)

[tags]mobile, development, blogger, analog, africa,news[/tags]