Fond returns, interesting times in Beijing

BEIJING — After assisting during a timely meeting of U.S. and Chinese experts across the Chinese capital, I am enjoying some time here. Just short of the five year anniversary of my first trip to China, after which I lived in Beijing for 364 days, this trip has been full of reunions, reminders, and reckonings.

Reunions. I’m delighted to see friends after a year and a half away. Some people have moved on from their former lives, and others have driven further along on interesting pursuits.

Reminders. It’s easy to forget just how good-humored and helpful most people are in Beijing. At the risk of great controversy, I still believe there is something special about northern Chinese culture and the particular energy of the capital. — Despite all manner of reporting and continued reading, it’s easy to forget the difference between a pollution-choked day and a truly clear sky here. Today has been the latter, but I’ve seen both.

Reckonings. Economic forces cross borders and manifest in different ways in different places. Here, the economy has led to considerable inflation, and the rhythm of life has been affected. Perhaps most vivid to me, as I’ve had to blast across town far more often than usual, is that taxis have become harder to find. One potential cause: Despite a 3 RMB surcharge on each ride, the rates have barely risen since 2007; meanwhile gas has become far more expensive. For some drivers, more time on the road may not be worth it.

There are additional positive notes. As I hope to describe in greater detail later, the Beijing subway system has grown by leaps and bounds, and it has become a viable way to get to large parts of the city. Five years ago, three lines served select districts. Today, 15 lines (or more, depending on how you count) reach a great diversity of urban regions.

This is not the time or place or me to comment on the recent developments in U.S.–China relations, but I am struck by the remarkable efforts from both sides at maintaining a stable working relationship. These countries are tied together in deep ways—economic, political, and personal. Despite all differences, I am optimistic.

I return to New York May 9.

Blogs on the left and right use different tech, study says

An academic paper based on analysis of blogs leading up to the 2008 election finds that U.S. political blogs on the left and right use technology in different ways. Aaron Shaw, a Berkeley sociology Ph.D. candidate, and Yochai Benkler*, a Harvard law professor, analyzed 155 blogs during a two week period in August 2008 and coded technological characteristics of the blogs along with “left,” “right,” and “center” political orientations.

The paper was first published almost two years ago, reminding us all just how slow academic publishing can be. It has just appeared this month in American Behavioral Scientist, where it’s available free for now. I hadn’t gone beyond a quick skim until now.

The results suggest that “the left adopts technologies that make user-generated diaries and blogs more central to the site to a greater degree than does the right.” The authors “find no difference in the use of comments or forums but a significant difference in user blogs, which are more widespread on the left than the right. This technical affordance, in turn, makes it easier for left-wing blogs to generate secondary content containing sustained writing, reporting, and opinion and make this content a part of the front page of the site.”

On the left, they find more reporting and in-depth analysis, while the right tends to give more punchy copy and links to outside content. Moreover, blogs on the left tend to have more calls to action than those on the left. The following figure, published under Creative Commons at the Berkman Center website, summarizes the left-right differences on the key variables:

Click for full size.

For the authors, this suggests that the “networked public sphere” (a Benkler term) is differentiated across communities of users. In this interpretation, technological affordances are adopted in different ways and to different degrees depending on which community is being watched.

The paper does have its limits. The analysis is based on a two-week period, which might not be representative (though it was selected to avoid big campaign news). It also looks at less than 200 blogs in a world of millions, and selection (based on online directories, a common method in similar research) could introduce further bias.

More context and a list of blogs are available in the authors’ online appendix, but I can’t immediately find much of the raw data, which calls into question the problem of outliers in a relatively small sample (at least for statistical purposes). As always, a bunch of scatterplots could tell a clearer story.

Finally, Twitter was coming into its own as an important political space at the time. Though the authors are careful to limit the scope of their arguments, a full comparison of right and left online political practice should cross media.

Nonetheless, there’s something interesting here, and I would be very curious to see how Republican and conservative efforts to amp up online political engagement have might have affected things since the last election. Has the Tea Party movement introduced more analysis, calls to action, and group-governed sites? Has a Democratic White House consolidated discourse on the left? Here’s hoping for a repeat study, perhaps looking at multiple time periods.

*I promise this site is not just a Benkler fan blog, but this is the second time in a week that he has released something interesting.

Why are ‘national interests’ still everywhere?

After reading Kenneth Lieberthal and Wang Jisi’s new paper on U.S.–China “strategic mistrust,” I found much to like and (predictably) something to question: Why do we keep sticking with “national interests” in foreign policy conversations when interests are so obviously diverse within nations and intertwined across borders?

Read my post at Transpacifica.

Benkler on Anonymous and why the ‘threat’ frame fails

Yochai Benkler, the legal and political scholar of the internet best known for writing The Wealth of Networks, offers a refreshing view of Anonymous, the group organization movement… well, I’ll let Benkler describe it:

Anonymous is not an organization. It is an idea, a zeitgeist, coupled with a set of social and technical practices. Diffuse and leaderless, its driving force is “lulz” — irreverence, playfulness, and spectacle. It is also a protest movement, inspiring action both on and off the Internet, that seeks to contest the abuse of power by governments and corporations and promote transparency in politics and business. Just as the antiwar movement had its bomb-throwing radicals, online hacktivists organizing under the banner of Anonymous sometimes cross the boundaries of legitimate protest. But a fearful overreaction to Anonymous poses a greater threat to freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation than any threat posed by the disruptions themselves.

Benkler argues that the view from parts of the U.S. government that Anonymous is a threat, and the tendency of journalists and others to use the language of extremists or terrorists in describing it, presents a misleading frame.

‘Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen.’

Instead, he argues, Anonymous should be understood in the context of protest: against online regulations that threaten an open internet (such as ACTA), against authoritarian regimes under attack in the “Arab Spring,” and just recently against more stable authoritarian governments such as that of the People’s Republic of China.

Seen as a protest phenomenon, Anonymous then needs to be assessed in the view of the yet undecided limits of legitimate protest online. Benkler notes what Charles Tilly et al. might call a repertoire of contention:

Four techniques constitute the bulk of its direct actions:

  • distributed denial of service attacks;
  • document disclosures;
  • defacement of Web sites;
  • and non-cyber action, ranging from pranks, such as sending targets unwanted pizza deliveries, to street protests.

This is a fairly novel collection of tactics from the perspective of the study of contentious politics, but then Anonymous (neither an organization nor really a movement, etc.) doesn’t nicely fit the popular models of a contentious actor. Perhaps individual incidents have somewhat coherent actors with specific claims against governments or other powers, but the thing we call Anonymous is not discrete, well bounded, or persistent.

I’m not sure what Benkler would think of this tie to contention, but these activities have a lot in common with contention, which raises several questions:

Political scientists and sociologists who study contention often spend a lot of time analyzing trust among people engaging in protest or contention together. Anonymous, with its distributed, decentralized, and indeed largely anonymous mode of practice would seem to present a puzzle. How do people gain each other’s trust to collaborate? How do they calm fears of infiltration by government authorities (who often treat the group as a high-priority criminal network)?

Perhaps my biggest question is: What if anything of substance have people working under the Anonymous banner gained in terms of desired change in government or corporate action? Even asking this question raises the question of what the people concerned wish to accomplish, and I’m not sure there’s an answer. But if Anonymous is imagined as part of a distributed, uncoordinated contentious action, it can contribute to a variety of causes—even potentially opposing ones. Especially with data disclosures, Anonymous can help fuel other forms of contention: documents they release can be used to make claims and demand change, whether in agreement or disagreement with the original hackers.

If the contentious politics framework offers anything, it’s a non-threat narrative that allows governments and others to view Anonymous as opposed to some government action but not in the same way as terrorists.

Read Benkler’s full article at Foreign Affairs.

Blogifying gwbstr.com

My website gwbstr.com is getting a blog. This is a temporary post while everything gets set up. There will be more to say once things are complete, but for now:

There will be more to see here in the near future. For those so inclined, comments on the new site are very welcome.

–Graham