Undercurrent

Today Vox Publica launched, a new Norwegian web magazine with democracy and freedom of speech as its main topics. It’s the result of intensive work over the last couple of months by a small group of people, including me, at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at The University of Bergen.

I’m very happy that we could launch the magazine with a new initiative we’ve called “Wikipedia-stafetten” – the Wikipedia relay race, where the participants are scientists/academics. It works like this: Vox Publica’s editor professor Jostein Gripsrud started the race by writing an encyclopedia article about “offentlighet” – the public sphere. The article was published in Vox Publica, where it will remain in that form. Simultaneously we published the identical text as the article about “Offentlighet” in the Norwegian (bokmål) version of Wikipedia. And then Gripsrud challenged another academic, Erling Dokk Holm, to write the next article in the race. Hopefully the “competition” will go on for a very long time. As Nature wrote last year, “Researchers should read Wikipedia cautiously and amend it enthusiastically.” (quoted here earlier). We see the initiative as a practical way of supporting and enhancing one of the tools of democracy and free speech.

The Wikipedia community’s treatment of the article is very interesting to observe: The original version lasted five minutes on Wikipedia before the first edit. And the community has done an excellent job so far in adding links, list of contents and other editing. All the relay articles will also be presented on a special portal page.

Since the US Department of Defense issued a website alert in August about screening information before publication, several blogging soldiers and other military personnel (milbloggers) have shut down their blogs, Wired News reported a few days ago. Security concerns are growing, but:

…it also signals a growing culture clash between military traditions of censorship and the expectations of young soldiers weaned on open digital culture, according to current and former military personnel.

While doing research a few months ago – in preparation for being interviewed in a video presentation about blogging and other media topics for Norwegian soldiers – I was surprised at the open US policy. You would think that the military would be the most closed institution of all, the very last one to let its “employees” develop their own public voice. One reason to allow milblogs was that they often were very sympathetic to the military in general and to the US project in Iraq, I learned. Also they could bring perspectives that were missing in the media.

On my wishlist has been Norwegian milblogs from our troops in Afghanistan. I haven’t detected any so far, though there are some official-looking “diaries”. Better than nothing, but not with the essential personal touch of a blogger.

Although the Norwegian media coverage of Afghanistan is increasing, I think that the importance and graveness of that mission and the perception of it in the general public are separated by a big divide. Milblogs could help narrow that.

The Google founders’ purchase of a Boeing 767, the so-called Google One, must have had devastating effects on company morale. How else to interpret the bizarrely threatening tone emanating from the Google Blog “advising” you not to use “to google” as a verb? They have taken off now, those Googlers. “Our lawyers say”! Yes, but we’re not interested.

The Norwegian debate about debating culture on the web continues and coincides with an Online Journalism Review story on how reporters are learning how to interact with readers/users. This appears important to me:

Positive interaction can occur, but reporters must first cultivate a non-confrontational temperament and other subtle skills — such as interpretation of syntax and a level of transparency — if they are going to interact successfully.

However, it’s possible to argue that Scandinavian news sites are taking more risks in interacting with readers, such as allowing comments to articles, the pitfalls of which the Dagbladet debate is about. So hopefully we can also lead the way in establishing best practice…

Dagbladet.no has an important piece about how extreme views dominate their web debates (disclosure – I was interviewed for the article). This is of course exasperating for editors and journalists who want to involve readers in constructive debates. When it comes to sensitive and complicated issues such as immigration and minorities, moderate voices just don’t want to participate if the debate is dominated by extremists. On the other hand, there are many good reasons to allow even extreme views, so that they can be met with knowledge-based arguments. Public debate should never be a domain for “experts”.

By writing this piece, Dagbladet has challenged their readers. Shortly after publishing there were already over 500 comments. This is an all-important subject that I’ll return to, and hopefully also Dagbladet and other media.

I’ve stuck the irrepressible button on the site to support that excellent free speech initiative by Amnesty. Censorship can only be fought by being as persistent as the censors. See also Amnesty’s Free Shi Tao campaign – the man who was jailed when Chinese authorities were aided by Yahoo.

How to escalate a non-story and make a PR disaster for yourself: A blogger named Moni learns that her friend didn’t get her contract at the German chapter of Transparency International renewed. Moni doesn’t like that and writes a (very civilized) blog post criticizing Transparency for not living up to its own high standards. A couple of months go by, then Moni receives a strict e-mail from Transparency’s lawyers saying that if she doesn’t remove the post, they will take legal measures. Moni blogs about this (and removes the post – but it’s there in the cache), and of course this is what happens:

Bloggers in Germany and internationally pick up the story and it spins out of Transparency’s control. Moni storms up the blog charts. German media get interested – interview with Moni in Netzeitung.

Now the story seems to be over: Moni’s blogging lawyer just issued a statement saying Transparency won’t pursue the issue further. And Moni confirms. Transparency, meanwhile, wonders what hit them: “Whatever we do, it’s wrong… Maybe we shouldn’t have reacted at all”, says spokesman Bäumel.

The German press self-regulator, der Deutsche Presserat, has turned down a complaint against Die Welt’s reprint of the Danish Muhammed cartoons. According to the press council, the cartoons treat the current issue of “religiously motivated violence” with the “typical means of the cartoon” – in a way that does not mock the (muslim) religious communities.

UPDATE: The debate in Oslo yesterday turned out not to be very much about blogging vs. journalism at all – ref. the title “Cowardly editors or irresponsible bloggers?” – but about how mostly editors and journalists have handled the Muhammed cartoons controversy (arguably a more important topic than blogging, you might say…). Accompanying the debate was the result of an email survey among Oslo journalists (769 of 2600 responded). Here 70 percent said they wouldn’t have published the cartoons. Among different reasons given for not publishing, one wrote: “I want to live”.

Instead of a meticulous report from the meeting, a quote from a new Kenan Malik article in Index on Censorship:

In the real world, where societies are plural, then it is both inevitable and important that people offend the sensibilities of others. Inevitable because where different beliefs are deeply held, clashes are unavoidable and we should deal with those clashes rather than suppress them. Important because any kind of social change or social progress means offending some deeply held sensibilities. ‘If liberty means anything,’l George Orwell once wrote, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’l Not to give offence would mean not to pursue change. Imagine what Galileo, Voltaire, Paine or Mill would have made of Ian Jack’ls argument that one should not depict things that may cause offence. Imagine he’ld lived 700 years ago and had said, ‘In principle it’ls right to depict the earth orbiting the sun, but imagine the immeasurable insult that the exercise of such a right would cause…’l

There just might be a consensus emerging that the cartoon controversy shows that confrontation sometimes is very productive. Certainly the result is a much more diverse debate about integration and religion.