Berkman Buzz: February 24, 2012

As some of my readers know, I’m finishing writing a book on cosmopolitanism in a digital age. There’s lots of ways to think about cosmopolitanism; in my case, I’m thinking of the ways in which people build ties of friendship and information sharing across borders of language, nation and culture. People who have a lot of these ties are cosmopolitan, by my definition, while those whose ties are more locally bound are less cosmopolitan. One of the central questions of the book is whether the rise of the internet is leading towards higher levels of cosmopolitanism. (The answer: not necessarily, and not automatically.)

All well and good, but can we quantify these ideas?

Op-Ed I've co-authored with @zephoria: Stop the Cycle of Bullying http://huff.to/wInBHV via @HuffingtonPost
—John Palfrey (@jpalfrey)

When the net competes with family, friends, school, and mass media, how do kids tell truth from the garbage? Researchers here at the Berkman Center sought to find out, and came back with some fascinating findings:

1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was created to prevent corporations from collecting data about children without parental permission. This law explicitly does not apply to public institutions, non-profits, and government agencies. Yet, many public institutions not only choose not to collect data about children; they forbid children from accessing information without parental permission. Much to my surprise, this includes many public libraries.

Does this level of documentation make it more likely that the international community will be compelled to react to atrocities–which will likely come with higher and higher levels of visibility? Or will this, too, become just background noise, similar to famines or disease in Africa have become for most of the world (except the victims, of course)? Does the level of documentation and surveillance –and thus, evidence– make it harder to establish processes like the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in places ranging from South Africa to Guatemala? Will this amount of documentation of atrocities make divisions even more likely and pernicious–as the ability to forgive often needs some level of forgetting? And the Internet, it seems, does not forget. Will this all make regime bureaucrats more likely to defect—as “I was just pushing paper and had no idea all this was going on” has become an even weaker defense? Or will they cling to power to the very end as much as they can, knowing their victims and survivors have much evidence as well as awful reminders of their crimes?

Solid work on history of propaganda and public diplomacy: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/about/bio_detail/nicholas_cull #civicmedia
—Sasha Costanza-Chock (@schock)

Host Steve Inskeep interviewed Shankar Vedantam, who was reporting on a study he attributed to Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto (only indirectly citing the paper, making any kind of responsible follow-up challenging; I think the paper he refers to is “Geography of Twitter,” in Social Networks, vol. 34, no.1, on which Wellman is a coauthor.) “The premise of Twitter,” Vedantam averred, “is that geography no longer matters…. A second premise is that Twitter is a truly democratic medium… a megaphone that is heard all around the world.”

Former Liberian first lady Jewel Howard Taylor has introduced a bill making homosexuality liable to a death sentence. Jewel is a senator and former president Charles Taylor’s ex-wife. Uganda re-tabled a similar controversial anti-gay bill recently. Homosexuality is outlawed in 38 African countries and it can be punishable by death in Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria.