Hundreds of us gathered last Sunday night in Prague, to conjure the spirit of Vaclav Havel at the first Forum 2000 conference in 16 years that he wouldn’t attend himself. Olda Czerny, who faithfully served in Havel’s cabinet and ran these conferences, also died last year. We were feeling sad about all this when Jan Urban, the journalist who taught us how hard it is to “teach old cats to bark,” introduced a video of Havel onstage, carrying a guitar. Havel was joking that he wasn’t really a philosopher, playwright or politician, he was just a “guitar carrier,” a “roadie,” he said, for Joan Baez. When the lights came back on after this video, a luminous Joan Baez stepped onto the stage in person, and we sang “We Shall Overcome” together.
The next morning the Dalai Lama was there, in a video, exhorting that “we should feel more sense of responsibility” now that Havel is no longer on this earth. “His spirit we must carry.” He and Havel were essential allies. “Good things must start from one individual,” the Dalai Lama said. “Develop new ideas. We must implement.”
How can we channel Havel’s philosophy about how to promote human rights in difficult places? People came from Burma, Venezuela, China, the Roma ghettoes of Romania, India, Egypt, Japan, Kenya, Morocco, Russia, Belarus and elsewhere to share their strategies and concerns about this. Hundreds of students also participated, asking penetrating questions.
“The still very rich western world got more deaf and blind than before,” said Czech foreign minister Karol Schwartzenberg, in the clearest voice I have ever heard him speak. But this only means we must work to open their eyes, he said. “The chances are bigger. In Burma, I saw the effect again…Use the power of the powerless. It works.” Madeleine Albright also offered hope and advice. “Modern technology has made it harder to conceal facts,” she said. “We need to use technology to educate, not to enflame.” My favorite Czech storyteller, Jiri Stransky, advised with Havel-like simplicity that we must “educate by telling stories.” Stransky, who served 10 years in communist prisons, including 6 1/2 years of hard labor in a uranium mine, said he was taught by the “best brains” of Czech society since they were there in prison with him. “I have a doctor of prison sciences,” he joked. Romanian Valeriu Nicolae showed a clip from the film he is making about his club for Roma children who want to learn how to read, write and do math.
The new supranational institutions, such as the European Union, make it “harder to demagogue,” and make nationalist appeals “less of a factor in harming the destiny of people,”
said Enrique ter Horst of Venezuela, former UN deputy high commissioner for human rights. While there was a spirit of grace and determination at this gathering of people who are working in the hardest places in the world, we also heard some urgent warnings. Ukrainian and Belarus opposition figures talked about how bad it is. A panel pondered “Is Hungary a Democracy” and had a difficult time concluding that it is. Chinese blogger Michael Anti said that Google should leave China because all the servers in the country are in Beijing, in the hands of the government. There are no independent servers, neutrally passing data through the networks. When Chinese people put emoticons on their Chinese knockoff social network pages and microblogs, the government is mining that information to learn their opinions and gauge public sentiments at all levels, he said. Not surprisingly, the best comments were from Havel himself, shared by his English translater Paul Wilson. Wilson said the Havel presidential library should have over its mantel, his simple summary of how they brought down Communism: “We did what we could, and that meant we could do more. So we did more.”
If everyone is now a journalist, thanks to mobile media tools, how can consumers create a nutritious news diet for themselves? How can they sort out what reality is captured and what is constructed and therefore presumably less authentic?
This was the question we were chewing over at Gerbaud’s legendary Budapest patisserie yesterday. I was with two of the most experienced and creative thinkers about global media: Rosental Alves of the University of Texas, who knows everyone and everything about Latin America journalism, and Behrouz Afagh, head of the BBC’s Asia and Pacific news coverage. The day before, we had all heard a terrific idea from Fred Ritchin, the USA dean of news photographers, now a New York University photography professor because he left as photo head of the New York Times in 1982.
Here is Fred’s idea: when you digitally publish a serious news photo you imbed a link on the left corner of the image, that when moused over, shows a “before” image taken of the same subject just before the selected image, and in the right top corner, a link that shows an “after” shot taken just after the main image. It’s a way of seeing whether the selected image was constructed or was actually taken–as authentic photojournalism is supposed to be– from a real flow of action. This process itself could be faked, of course, as can almost everything now. But there would be a low incentive to fake these contextualizing “before” and “after” shots, since the point is that they would be voluntarily included by those who are trying to hold themselves accountable to a professional standard of veracity.
This kind of device, which unfortunately didn’t capture the imagination of our colleague Ethan Zuckerman at the MIT Media lab when we posed it to him as something we would like to see his designers create, is related to my own long-fantasized authentication tool. I would like a tool that would enable those who want to be held to a veracity standard (a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”) The creators and spreaders of information would imbed a visible bug in any image, video selection or piece of text, that would carry its provenance. Where did this “fact,” image or story originate? We might also create a function to track where has it been since? It would automatically create a history like those we can access now for any given Wikipedia entry. The content that would be “bugged” would have to be fixed, like a pdf, which would make it difficult to remix or tweak. But that’s exactly the point. Its the raw material of fact, before it gets thrown into the great mixmaster of the web.
Of course, those doing risky communication would forgo using this history bug, in order not to be tracked down. This is sort of the opposite of Tor. (All tools can be used for evil. That doesn’t mean we should shy away from creating new tools.)
For those who are working hard to offer or find verified, authenticated facts and images, this little bug could offer a missing accountability factor. If people understand where a story (or image) comes from, they might know more about what credibility to give it. It could be introduced on a voluntary basis by the purveyors whose vetting is considered essential to their brand (New York Times, BBC.) This wouldn’t solve all the problems of critically evaluating the flow of content, but it would give us a tool we could sorely use.
If you add another feature—an automated or nonautomated micropayment feature that is tied to the authentification—then you might just have an interesting tool that would not only help people figure out what to take seriously, but would pay for this higher veracity stuff, supporting the often expensive production of investigative journalism and other hard-to-get vetted and contextualized news items.
Anyone like/hate these ideas? Your feedback is awaited.
Central European University is a unique place, a gem. It is fragile. What happens here is extremely difficult to do. CEU takes people from damaged countries and helps them work for a better world. It encourages critical thinking, and seeks an honest engagement with history. It has no dominant nationality; students and faculty are drawn from over 100 countries. They embrace change, but work to channel it in positive directions…
It is to the great credit of George Soros that he invests and cares about this, rather than just going for the high-octane, easier tasks of lining up stars from Princeton, Cambridge, LSE, Oxford, Shanghai and Singapore. People from these places came this week to help launch CEU’s new School of Public Policy and International Affairs, whose motto is “purpose beyond power.” These luminaries are doing something great in their own settings, but it is frankly less ambitious than what we are taking on at CEU. And no matter how brilliant they may be, the things they know are a shadow of what the CEU community knows and does.
I am seeing a Dalit woman and a Roma woman, both of whom came from utterly outcast families, growing up barefoot with no prospects, come to CEU and flourish, with inspiring contributions to make to the larger world as well as their own embattled communities. In order to build a university that takes advantage of their experiences and ideas, and equips them to contribute to society, there are people who are working around the clock, and on weekends, with every bit of genius and energy they can muster. These are people who could have had easier lives at other universities. I am talking about John Shattuck and Wolfgang Reinecke, Liviu Matei, Noemi Kakucs, Kinga Pal, Kati Horvath, Ildiko Moran, Janos the driver, Sybil Wyatt, Peter Almond, Stephen Fee. High and low, they give it absolutely everything, to the detriment sometimes of their own health and personal lives.
A film that captures some of these stories is in its final editing phase. It is complex, subtle, and wonderful. I look forward to sharing it soon with all of you.
So how far should real journalists go in saying that someone is “misstating” the facts, i.e. lying? This was raised recently by the NYTimes ombudsman. http://t.co/rn2GLZrx …Everyone came down on the poor fellow to say DUH, of course, that’s what real journalists are supposed to do! But it’s not so simple. Most politics is entirely faith-based. Why else would someone listen to those blow-hards on radio and tv, who lie day after day to paint a scary world full of conspiracies? Look for example at all the “documentaries” that claim the US government actually created the terrorist http://freedocumentaries.org/int.php?filmID=94 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Or on any day of the week, look at how Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter or Laura Ingram push their mythical versions of Obama and US history out to the public. Are they lying? Yes! Do they know they are lying? I’m not sure. Reality and fantasy have merged into a coherent political vision that has real traction out there. Just look at the Tea Party guy who didn’t realize the “government” that he hates provides the Medicare that he loves.
So maybe its time to organize some more effective journalistic fact-checking. We need to take the great fact-checking websites: http://www.snopes.com/ for urban legends, and http://www.politifact.com/ and http://www.factcheck.org/ for USA political assertions, and connect them with red and green hyperlinks from the news texts to their findings.
So if a story about Obama or Romney making assertions is filled with green words, that means the links will show those statements to be factually pretty good. But if they are filled with red words, that means the links will show how the statement is distorted or untrue. By clicking on each green or red word, you could read each reference (like a footnote) that would tell you why it’s demonstrably true or false.
If the journalism is presented in paper, rather than digital form, you could place the story in the middle of white space, and then have cartoon balloons going off on all sides framing the story, each telling whether the phrase is true, and on what basis we determined that.
I have long fantasized about having a tag on information that floats around the internet—kind of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” that would indicate transparently the story’s original source and verification. The food chain of a factoid would then be visible—we could see whether it started out as malware, or whether it really appeared in that official budget document.
The sad part is I don’t think proving something is false will automatically take away its power to appeal. I’m remembering the “Swift Boat veterans” lying about John Kerry’s role during the Vietnam War, in a tremendously effective attack that he failed to counter. A woman interviewed by the NYTimes was asked if she knew the allegations were false, and what she thought when she was shown conclusively that they were. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said; she still hated John Kerry.
Fairy tales would be fine if they weren’t the basis for going to war, and electing those who might choose do that again on the basis of other fairy tales. So we have to keep looking for ways to persuade people not only to figure out what is true and false…but to care and act on those facts.
It was a bit dizzying to have both Larry Lessig, who loves the Internet and social networks, and Evgeny Mrozov, who doesn’t, in town the same week. Larry held forth Monday on how money drives the legislative process in Congress, and Evgeny gave us some dark thoughts on Friday from his Net Delusion book about how slacktivism can divert us from genuine civic activity, even as dictators effectively nail folks down with heat-seeking propaganda tools and tracking technologies.
But the real star of the week, from my perspective, was Ahmad Gharbeia, an Egyptian blogger and digital activist who told us on Friday about how social networking communication and organizing tools worked during the Tahrir Square revolution. He said the struggle is not yet over, since the Egyptian Army is acting like the old regime when it continues to persecuting activists and bloggers, with military trials. The detention in jail of his colleague @Alaa Abd ElFattah was extended today for another 15 days.
Ahmad said that a turning point in the revolution came when the Mubarak’s regime actually shut down the entire Internet in the country. This required the activists for a time to resort to medieval catapults to lob their news bulletins out of the encampment on the square, to the periphery where theoretically people in the shadows would retrieve them.
Meanwhile, a rumored Occupy Budapest movement this weekend failed to materialize in nearby Szabadsag (Freedom) square. The police seemed to know in advance that something was up; a band of them were waiting just around the corner. A delegation of European press freedom advocates arrived Sunday night for three days, including meetings with government officials, to challenge the new Hungarian media laws. A study, to be issued this week by the Center for Media and Communication Studies where I am a fellow, will show that the Hungarian media laws are indeed out of line with European Union norms, despite the Hungarian government’s claims to the contrary.
So democracy is an ongoing struggle, with or without liberated media and communication tools. On the good news front, all of us—the Egyptian army, the embattled bloggers, the money bags in Congress and their critics, the Hungarian government and its critics–all of us apparently dodged an earth-crushing asteroid last week. To celebrate, I’m heading to the USA on Tuesday to see for myself how the home fires may be burning there as the winter begins.–Nov. 13, 2011
, who served 10 years in communist prisons, including 6 1/2 years of hard labor in a uranium mine, said he was taught by the “best brains” of Czech society since they were there in prison with him. “I have a doctor of prison sciences,” he joked. Romanian Valeriu Nicolae showed a clip from the film he is making about his club for Roma children who want to learn how to read, write and do math.
The creators and spreaders of information would imbed a visible bug in any image, video selection or piece of text, that would carry its provenance. Where did this “fact,” image or story originate? We might also create a function to track where has it been since? It would automatically create a history like those we can access now for any given Wikipedia entry. The content that would be “bugged” would have to be fixed, like a pdf, which would make it difficult to remix or tweak. But that’s exactly the point. Its the raw material of fact, before it gets thrown into the great mixmaster of the web.