Respect, Niceness, and Generosity

According to these reviews from a popular apartment-sharing site, I am someone who is "nice" and "respectful" in person.  Perhaps a more substantive question -- for my future as an academic and scholar -- might be what kind of a person I appear to be online.  "Respectful" and "nice" can actually be contentious terms, I am going to argue, if they become valued by institutions and professional associations, so it may perhaps be better to aim to be "generous" instead.

Discussions about online speech and civility have decades of history in digital rights discourses.  This month many academics -- some of whom might be new to this conversation -- have been challenged to take unpopular (or popular) positions in the name of academic freedom and to explore their suppositions about how networked computational media function (or don't function) as a form of public sphere.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has finally offered a public explanation of their decision to retract a job offer made to Professor Steven Salaita, who was apparently punished for making comments on Twitter that were perceived of as anti-Israeli and allegedly antisemitic.  (See my first round of analysis of the Salaita story here.)

In a blog posting called "The Principles on Which We Stand" Chancellor Phyllis Wise has now broken her silence to purportedly defend academic freedom at her institution, which is now being boycotted by many faculty, but she also insists that respectful conduct is a fundamental precept as well.  According to Wise, participants in the university are supposed to be "learning from each other in a respectful way," to refuse to tolerate "disrespectful words or actions," and to conduct their debates in a "civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner."  (Wise had previously editorialized about abusive racist and sexist comments directed at her by disgruntled Twitter users in response to refusing a snow day for the campus.)

The Board of Trustees echoed Wise's emphasis on respect in a supporting statement that lauded "scholarship framed in respect and courtesy,"  wished to ensure that "students and faculty from all backgrounds and cultures feel valued, respected and comfortable expressing their views," and prohibited "disrespectful and demeaning speech."

Emails from students, parents, alumni, and even fund-raisers released in response to a freedom of information request reveal that respect was also a theme in these lobbying missives.  One student wrote, "If I happen to register for Mr. Salaita's course, how could I respectfully engage in conversation and learn material?"   As the reporter noted, many of these emails used the same language and may have followed a shared template.

On the blog of the American Association of University Professors, John K. Wilson mocked this sanctifying of respect at UIUC:

Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime. But it’s notable that Salaita really didn’t say anything personal about anyone. So here Wise greatly expands the concept, declaring that not only persons but “viewpoints themselves” must be protected from any disrespectful words. I am puzzled as to exactly how a free university could possibly operate when no one is allowed to be disrespectful toward any viewpoint. Presumably, Wise will quickly act to fire anyone who has ever disrespected or demeaned Nazism, terrorism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since all “viewpoints” are protected, then biology professors must be fired for disrespecting creationism as false, along with any other professor who is found to believe or know anything.

Although I would avoid citing Hitler in any online argument, I would tend to support Wilson's position for two basic reasons.  First of all, respect doesn't necessarily support a good education.  Having watched virtuoso teaching in the University of California for decades, I know that a willingness to overstep bounds of comfort and propriety often distinguishes a memorable pedagogical performance from a forgettable class session.  Second, institutionalizing respect makes all forms of protest impossible.  At my 1987 Harvard graduation I joined other advocates for divestiture from apartheid South Africa by carrying distinctive red balloons and wearing large lapel pins in solidarity.  My parents were horrified at the disrespect students were showing for the occasion, but I certainly don't regret my participation.  How many activists groups have been charged with disrespect in my lifetime?  The Guerrilla Girls?  Act Up?  Protestors in Ferguson have also been chastised for their supposed "disrespect for police."

Of course, Ferguson, Missouri, where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer has also been an important site of debate about the activist political stands that people take online.  The show of force by a militarized police force armed with anti-terrorism weaponry, the arrests of journalists and elected representatives, and blame-the-victim press releases and reporting has only stoked anger.  Among black Twitter users, the ability to control self-presentation and counter stereotypes of criminality has been just one of the issues playing out in the #iftheygunnedmedown hashtag.  Other hashtags emphasize proper names as a point of reference (#Ferguson, #MikeBrown) or the body at risk (#HandsUp, #HandsUpDontShoot).  The metadata matters, as Zeynep Tufekci points out in a posting on "Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson," especially when the code running on social media shields users from material that doesn't sell products or pander to personalization.

Just this week MIT Professor Noel Jackson staged what many saw as an over-the-top online rant about the absence of material about Ferguson on the Twitter feeds of prominent digital humanities faculty and about the supposed lack of concern among DHers about politics or race more generally.  (Although Jackson seems to feel that he is breaking new ground, this is actually not that new an argument. In Debates in the Digital Humanities Tara McPherson makes it in "Why are the Digital Humanities So White?" and I make it in "Hacktivism and the Humanities.")  In a  Storify created by Adeline Koh about "The Digital Humanities, Race & Politics (or the Lack Thereof)" Jackson's wrath about digital humanities "bullies" reaches bombastic proportions, as does his vitriol about his fellow white, tenured faculty.  He calls out people by name for unfollowing him and even reposts threatening-sounding text messages.

"Niceness" might seem to be an even more compliant, feminized, and passive stance in academia than "respect," but it does have its defenders.  For example, in "Why Digital Humanities is Nice," Tom Scheinfeldt claims that DH is concerned with method rather than theory and therefore is naturally less contentious in its interpersonal relations.  Recently -- in an article for Differences -- Koh has challenged this convention of niceness as a coercive social contract intended to police behavior.  (See resources at DHPoCo for more about the work of Koh and her collaborators.)

So what do we have left if we shouldn't settle for just being "nice" or "respectful"? In Designing Culture, FemTechNet co-founder Anne Balsamo lists the principle of "intellectual generosity" first among feminist virtues that include "confidence," "humility," "flexibility," and "integrity."  As Balsamo writes, intellectual generosity includes "the sincere acknowledgement of the work of others" that fosters "intellectual risk-taking and courageous acts of creativity."

As all this boils around the Internet, I've been watching the work of the other FemTechNet co-founder, Alexandra Juhasz, as a model for how to put the intellectualism and activism of that kind of generosity into practice.  For example, Juhasz has been sharing Palestine Docs and other resources for teaching.  I see this spirit of sharing among other FemTechNet participants, who are circulating different versions of the so-called Ferguson Syllabus, which began as #FergusonSyllabus on Twitter.    You can check out a Google docs version of the syllabus, as well as a version posted on About.com.

Is the Water Hot Enough for You?

The case of Professor Steven Salaita has recently become a cause célèbre among faculty who once felt comfortable airing their political grievances on social media.  What interests me about this story is why a particular set of issues about academic freedom, political expression, and digital communication is getting so much attention precisely now.  I would argue it has a lot to do with a specific alignment of empathy and personal risk on the faculty side and the fact that university administrations have reached a tipping point in their public relations strategies toward social media that involves both emulating and monitoring network-savvy professors.  

Salaita's use of Twitter to object to Israel's policies in Gaza -- often in hyperbolic or crude language -- has been cited as a key factor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's decision to rescind a job offer for a tenured position that was seemingly only waiting for the last pro forma approval from the Chancellor's office.  According to "Out of a Job," a story that broke in the blog Inside Higher Ed, Salaita had already resigned from his post at Virginia Tech and had made arrangements to relocate when he received the surprising news.

On the Internet there has been considerable outrage vented and analysis unpacked in the days since the revelations about UIUC's backpedaling.  Steven Krause notes Salaita had many more rights to digital expression than assistant profs, adjuncts, alt-acs, and anyone else on campus without tenure.  Ian Bogost contrasts "academic freedom" with the contractual tactics necessary for "academic paydom."  Roopika Risam writes a "love letter to Twitter" as a pre-tenure academic seeking networks and publication opportunities.  David Palumbo-Liu has been one of the most prolific critics of UIUC with blog posts about Salaita at Salon, Huffington Post, and Transformation.  Former MLA President Michael Bérubé weighed in with a castigating letter to the Chancellor warning that her campus would become a "fourth-rate" institution if the decision wasn't reversed.  The Illinois state chapter of the AAUP issued a formal protest.

One thing that's worth noting about Salaita's Twitter feed is the prodigious labor that he invested in maintaining it, apparently right up until just before he received the bad news.  Although he's picked up a few thousand followers since the controversy, the size of Salaita's audience was relatively modest in comparison to other high-profile academics, in spite of the energy and affect he obviously devoted to it.  After all, he composed almost ten thousand Tweets during his five-year period of activity and followed over three thousand other people to connect and stay current.  From all this effort he attracted about four thousand followers.

For scale, Juan Cole of the blog Informed Consent has about thirty thousand more Twitter followers than Salaita.  Certainly Cole has posted a huge volume of tens of thousands of Tweets to attract such a sizable following to his feed, but many of Cole's Tweets are reposted content, and he does not engage in context-specific debate about people's individual claims -- either agreeing or disagreeing -- to the degree that the micromanaging Salaita did.

I bring up Cole's name because he had a similar experience with the hazards of a having a noticeable social media trail for those on the academic job market.  Like Salaita he was also perceived of as an intemperate activist for anti-Israeli positions, and he failed to land a tenured job at a new institution as a result.  In 2006, a story in the Yale Daily News reported that Cole -- then at the University of Michigan -- had been denied tenure at Yale "in one of the final phases of the appointment process."  According to Yale's reporting, Cole had been characterized by fellow professors who had weighed in on his case as a potentially "divisive colleague"  Shortly afterward The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a forum called "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?" and invited seven prominent academic bloggers to expound on the crisis.    

Cole's travails ultimately didn't have the legs to stay a national story, and he didn't galvanize a movement of sympathizers to agitate for greater academic freedom in more digital contexts.  I would argue that there were a number of reasons that the firestorm of controversy around Cole's case was extinguished relatively rapidly.

For one thing, Cole was doing something that only a statistically small fraction of the scholarly population did at the time: academic blogging.  Even though academic blogging was actually in its heyday,  in retrospect, this activity might have made Cole seem like an outlier.  He was pursuing an enthusiasm for a rare form of hybrid writing and propagating an alien genre of self-sponsored op-ed with pretensions both to journalism and to short-form hyperlinked scholarship.  Today, in contrast, Tweeting is an activity that many more academics do than did blogging -- and if academics don't Tweet they are at least aware that the activity happens all around them at conferences.  Moreover, short-form and very-short-form digital postings by scholars circulate to a broader audience via Facebook and other social network sites.

In the eight intervening years faculty have also become much more aware of the contingency of their own appointments.  Fewer faculty members have tenure, legislative support for state-sponsored higher education seems more arbitrary and more dependent on political whims, and institutional governance structures are being eroded by risk averse administrations afraid of unhappy donors, bad press, and lawsuits.

There's also been a sea change in public relations for universities.  Every campus worries about its YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and other conduits of social media presence.  Every institution compares its social media profile to those of its rival institutions.  Social media "experts" (read "idiots") are hired to manage college messaging, and these drones from the public relations hive mind may find themselves directly vying for attention in opposition to faculty, students, and staff who might seem noticeably more human and appealing to the public.  Resentments build about "unofficial" messages getting out from challengers, and online behavior is policed by those who are both digital regulators and digital content-creators.

In The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University I discuss how students' digital rights to expression are often trampled, because faculty assume that their own privileged positions when it comes to the Internet could never come under attack.

Not surprisingly, current definitions of academic freedom already provide more rights for faculty than for students when it comes to free speech, and the leveling practices of digital culture seem to have relatively little effect on challenging divisions created by existing status barriers between teacher and pupil. As both consumers of web-based content and producers of it, students generally have fewer recognized rights and protections than faculty. Administrators loath to meddle with academic freedom often say little about faculty web pages, for example. Faculty content-creation on official institutional pages includes a heterogeneous collection of material that ranges wildly from the confessional to the satirical.  On university Webpages, one can find testimonials about personal trainers with links to their gyrating bodies, narratives about dieting that show shirtless faculty, heartfelt warnings based on personal tragedy about never leaving infants unattended, step-by-step instructions for destroying marshmallow peeps with lab equipment, and obscene mock-scientific acronyms. Ironically, political blogging and electronic civil disobedience may create more serious problems for faculty perceived as radical subversives than would more obviously off-topic or off-identity material. This might seem strange given how academic freedom is often defined in terms of political tolerance and the open marketplace of ideas, but the Internet has also generated cadres of students policing political utterances by professors. Otherwise, administrators generally do little to keep the online conduct of faculty in check.

Administrators didn't police faculty behavior online, because it was largely invisible to them, but now those days of mutually assured obliviousness seem to be over.

Recently I was interviewed by Henry Jenkins, who asked about how the University of Kansas Board of Regents had imposed new restrictions on the use of social media by faculty.

In the book I argue that part of the reason that faculty have been slow to advocate for their students when it comes to their informal learning practices and online knowledge networks is that faculty have been much less coerced than students by administrative efforts to police their computer use. Faculty bloggers might come under pressure for disclosing information that colleges don’t want shared, but they have been such a tiny minority that not many people took notice. Faculty hacktivists might be threatened for acts of electronic civil disobedience, but they are an even smaller contingent.

Twitter users like David Guth at the University of Kansas, who was suspended for an anti-NRA Tweet, are also still relatively rare among academics, but faculty see Twitter being used at conferences, and they know Twitter is part of a continuum that includes Facebook, which they might use to communicate with friends and relatives, so I am hoping that the water is finally getting hot enough that the frog might finally jump out and protest in good faculty fashion.

In the boiling frog anecdote it is supposed that an amphibian might leap out of hot water sensibly --  if dropped in -- but foolishly stay in cold water that is slowly heated to the boiling point because incremental change discourages prompt action.  Let's hope that the temperature doesn't get any hotter in these digital expression cases before faculty collectives finally intervene at the policy level

Not Your Mother's VJ

Recently Henry Jenkins has highlighted the work of Egyptian-American Laila Shereen Sakr, otherwise known as VJ Um Amel in a posting called "Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American VJ Um Amel (Part One)." Sakr uses certain alienation effects in her video remixes of political crowds that have drawn praise from Alexandra Juhasz:

I'd like to reflect on the differences between the video you made that is a more abstract data visualization and the mix tapes of live "realist" footage. I have written about how viral YouTube videos of protest move quickly because of their simplistic, iconic effect which is often easy to consume and as easy to misunderstand given that it flows without context and because of the strong associations linked to verite images. For this reason, I think your experimentation with non-verite renditions of revolution are really exciting (for communicating across difference, as well as to communicate more complex ideas then, say, "freedom," or "courage," or "arab" that iconic images can reduce themselves to)

(Juhasz was a guest in my online rhetoric class this week, and like me she seems to be struggling to keep up with fast changing social media events in the Middle East and North Africa.)

The Attackers and the Bystanders

In "Stars and Sewers," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd points to misogynistic Internet comments posted about the brutal gang rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Egypt's Tahrir Square, comments that appeared on Twitter, in blogs, and anonymously on Yahoo! For Doyd, this abusive online verbiage serves as more support for Nicholas Carr's high-profile anti-Internet argument that networked computer technology is "rewiring" our brains. Dowd also cites a number of other social media skeptics in rapid fire succession: Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, with whom she ends her editorial.

“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”

In "Adding insult to Lara Logan's injury," once controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte, whom I write about in the chapter on blogs and Photoshop in the Virtualpolitik book, focuses on a cast of conservatives in the blogosphere.

Popular rightwing bloggers Debbie Schlussel, Robert Stacy McCain, and Sister Toldja were among those who immediately used the attack to reinforce their anti-Muslim, anti-revolution arguments. But the real cause of sex crime is power, and its abuse, and that is a problem in all the nations on this planet.

Meanwhile, anti-Republican journalist Nir Rosen has been apologizing for Tweets that maligned Logan's character in "How 480 characters unraveled my career." From a rhetorical perspective, it is interesting to note that Rosen drops in a reference to WikiLeaks in explaining his lapse into Internet cynicism.

With 480 characters I undid a long career defending the weak and victims of injustice. There is no excuse for what I wrote. At the time, I did not know that the attack against Lara Logan was so severe, or included apparent sexual violence. Even so, any violence against anyone is wrong. I've apologized, lost my job, and humiliated myself and my family. But I, at least, don't want to go down looking like a sexist pig. I am not. I am a staunch supporter of women's rights, gay rights and the rights of the weak anywhere in the world. . . . So why did I write it? It was a disgusting comment born from dark humor I have developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon -- and a need to provoke people. I have a few think tank friends on Twitter, and we often banter about the morality of WikiLeaks, counterinsurgency and other issues. When I first heard the news about Logan, I assumed she was roughed up like every other journalist -- which is still bad -- but I was jokingly trying to provoke one of my think tank friends on Twitter, thoughtlessly, of course, and terribly insensitively. Stupidly, I didn't think the banter between myself and a couple of other guys would amount to anything.

Now, Twitter is no place for nuance, which is why I should have stuck to long-form journalism.

Logan's own journalistic practices have had a complex relationship to social media. As I write in this article, the cell phone footage that she used in her reporting on the Iraq war caused her story on the Battle of Haifa Street to be rejected for broadcast; subsequently Logan complained about having been exiled to the station's webcast as a result.

I might suggest to Dowd that online comments left last year on a 60 Minutes story done by Logan about Green Berets who shot two boys accidentally provide an example of much more substantive counter-discourse and civic engagement. Even if the tone of some of those postings was caustic and cynical, viewers were able to question the powers that be

The Social Contract

In today's White House press conference, President Obama credited technology for mobilizing dissenters in Tunis and Egypt to topple authoritarian regimes.

You can’t maintain power through coercion. At some level, in any society, there has to be consent. And that’s particularly true in this new era where people can communicate not just through some centralized government or a state-run TV, but they can get on a smart phone or a Twitter account and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people.

There are three things that immediately strike me about this response to a reporter's question: 1) It follows a discussion of "young people" and a "young, vibrant generation," which suggests a belief in a "digital generation" as central civic actors, 2) Twitter must be thrilled with being credited in so many news organizations with the overthrow of governments, particularly at a time when its own user base in the United States may be moving on to new technologies at the same time that the young seem not to have chosen to adopt this particular microblogging platform in the first place, and 3) Obama's use of the language of the social contract has its ironies, given that the actual user agreements of most mobile technologies and social media platforms require consent unconditionally.

This last point is important for understanding how the issue of "Internet freedom" has been championed this week by the Obama administration. In a speech given today by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she compared the divergent outcomes of digital activism in Egypt and Iran to argue for "the power of connection technologies" as both an "accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change."

Clinton presented a much more sophisticated argument than many cyberutopians, one that focused on how technology can service both liberation and repression. Unlike the President, she also seemed to mock associating particular Web 2.0 brand names with civic participation and political change.

Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

She then launched into a familiar Habermassian reading of cyberspace before defending the concept of a cosmopolitan, multinational structure of governance.

The internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs – these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the internet. And because the internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

When thinking about what "Internet freedom" might mean, however, Clinton draws limits on "access" and "transparency" to defend the "private" as well as the "public." What I find interesting is that much like the recording industry and how it defends intellectual property, Clinton focuses on the rhetorical figure of "theft."

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

The Flight to Cairo

In preparing for leading a workshop on "Remixing Human Rights: Rethinking civic expression, safety, privacy and consent in online and mobile video" for the Digital Media and Learning "Designing Learning Futures" conference, the seeming potency of Internet practices that have toppled authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunis during the past month make staying current difficult.

My workshop co-organizer, Sam Gregory of Witness has already weighed in on the situation in a posting on "Our Responsibility to Bear Witness," but as a more provincial educator who knows Egypt largely as the place where I once won a dance contest cruising down the Nile as a tourist, I am still trying to filter information to understand the role of social media in mobilizing protesters in the streets and to interpret how agents of dissent used multiple platforms, as in the case of Speak2Tweet, shown above, which fostered broadcasting on the World Wide Web via land-line telephone when the Internet was turned off in Egypt.

As Beth Coleman has pointed out, the Western press doesn't always locate the local flashpoints of conflict correctly, even with English commentary and crowd sourcing able to point the way. For example, although much has been made about the self-immolation of fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunis, Coleman claims that the dissemination of YouTube videos of civilian massacres outside the capital shot with cell phones also played a critical role in civic revolt. (See "Please tell the world Kasserine is dying!" and use "Kasserine" as a search term on YouTube for relevant videos.)

In Egypt there was a Google executive, Wael Ghonim, who organized protests and then disappeared for eleven days (with a final Tweet about preparing for death) before he reappeared in public triumphant at the downfall of his captors. Ghonim had become famous for creating the "We Are all Khaled Said" Facebook page, which commemorated a young man who was dragged from a cyber café and murdered for video recording corrupt, drug dealing police officers. A number of testimonies from witnesses were posted on YouTube after his death, which contested the official story of supposed accidental suffocation caused by Said from hiding drugs from authorities. Now Said's Facebook page shows a joyous illustration of patriotic celebration rather than the profile picture of the murdered witness journalist.

In thinking about "Hacktivism and the Humanities" in another project, I've also been thinking about how the digital humanities sometimes is willing to reorient itself in relationship to political change in rethinking its role of cultural preservation. For example, the Hypercities project, which documented election protests in Tehran and the otherwise ephemeral expressions from social media that accompanied them now has a somewhat similar Egypt Hypercities page.

For more on the Egypt situation, see the full rundown from David Parry which includes his postings on the subject at Profound Heterogeneity, background, what he calls "a useful framework," two postings (1, 2) from Zeynep Tufekci, two postings (1, 2) from Jillian York, explanations on how the Internet was shut down from Wired and OpenNet, and reflections from Ramesh Srinivasan.

Suspended Time

At my university the big campus story today made it all the way to the Los Angeles Times. Thus "UC Irvine seeks to suspend Muslim student union" describes how what has become an extremely controversial student organization is facing discipline as a result of disrupting a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

In a fourteen-page disciplinary letter, campus officials detail their case against the organization as a whole and draw on digital evidence from a Google Group, an online video, and the group's pro-demonstration blog, "Stand With The Eleven," to make the argument that MSU members collectively had engaged in an orchestrated obstruction of a core campus activity comparable to "teaching, research, administration" when they prevented an invited speaker from speaking.

In a difficult-to-explicate e-mail from last month, Chancellor Drake had also indicated his concern that "endorsement of terrorism" had been supported by the MSU at other campus events. Thus, the decision to suspend the group might not be terribly surprising, although the Muslim Student Union website also includes community service announcements and even information about campus tutoring.

Of course, I can't help wondering if the case would have been handled differently had it not been publicized by the viral video below, which received some three-quarters of a million views: "Uncivilized Tactics at UC Irvine."



This nearly identical version of the event received over 350,000 views, and there are many other similar videos with the same footage on YouTube, some of which are retitled with names like "Muslims Try To Silence Israeli Ambassador at UC Irvine" and "Jew Haters Protest Israeli Ambassador" and "Muslim Students Union at UC Irvine act like terrorst fascists - against free speech." All of these videos create a negative impression of the campus community, which was picked up by conservative media outlets arguing that colleges teach radical politics not constructive subject matter.

Since I am working on a new book about universities and digital content-creation, I have been thinking about this incident a lot, as I consider what to say about student activism and new media representations of it online. Looking at images of student protests from the past that have used conventional techniques for composition and editing in photography and film, my main question is how contemporary online images of student unrest are different. Certainly, they often aren't as artfully and professionally produced in the conventional journalistic sense, as the aestheticized iconography of campus demonstrations of the sixties certainly was. In other words, how do new ubiquitous recording devices make chaotic scenes seem even more chaotic?

Granted, in the case of the MSU heckling, the most watched clips aren't from cell phone footage and aren't shot without a tripod. However, the viral video frequently pans and zooms in ways that suggest amateur videography that is both more "true" and more difficult to watch and make sense of.

Shots from the Other Side

To shoot has two meanings: to use a camera and to fire a weapon. A few days ago I wrote about the use of Flickr by the Israeli Defense Forces and the relationship between evidence and testimony when it comes to the digital rhetoric of government agencies. So it was interesting today to see the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation/TURKEY's photostream and a number of images called "Israeli commandos' bloody raid on Freedom Flotilla to Gaza 31.05.2010" in the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza set. I found it particularly interesting to see a still from the same interview in both the IHH set and the IDF set, even though those posting the image represent opposing rhetorical sides. Before the ship was boarded by Israeli commandos, there are images of men fishing and babies with pacifiers. After the ship was boarded, there are a number of pictures of the wounded being treated, which included a dramatic photograph of an Israeli soldier being treated by doctors who were Palestinian sympathizers. I am struck by two other aspects of the IHH Flickr set: the quality of the photographs is often aesthetically more compelling than the IDF photos, and the IHH uses the copyright symbol, while the IDF uses a creative commons license. (You can see the official IHH website here.)

Alternative Reality

The Israeli Defense Force's latest posting on their YouTube channel is something of a mystery when it comes to its digital rhetoric . . . that is unless you play through the to very end, which few YouTube viewers would normally be likely to do.

In the video we see passengers disembarking from the Rachel Corrie ship, named after the deceased anti-Israeli American peace activist. These people, who include old women, pregnant women, frail men, and others who certainly don't fit the image of jihadist radicalism that the IDF has associated with other participants in the flotilla attempting to cross the Gaza blockade. Actually, the message is really in the applause at the end, which reinforces the idea that the soldiers are behaving chivalrously and courteously in their interactions. The sad irony is that this video represents a kind of alternative reality for which the crowd is clapping, in which the interaction between Israelis and Palestinian sympathizers never turned violent.

Evidence and Testimony in Social Media

I've been thinking a lot about how a Flickr photostream being used by the Israeli Defense Forces to bolster their case about the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, an incident on international waters that turned into a deadly confrontation in which nine pro-Palestinian activists died. The more I look at these images, the more frustrated I become. I've been lucky in recent months to have been given a platform for my 12 Don'ts in government digital media-making, but I wish that there were more people making the pitch about rhetorical sensitivity on the Internet and in more languages.

There is a designated Flickr set from the IDF called Weapons found on Mavi Marmara that is obviously intended to quiet the international outcry that resulted from the event and present the Israeli military's case that they had to kill protestors because 1) they had weapons that they could have used against the commandos or 2) they had weapons that they could be shipping to Gaza to support Intifada-related activities.

But I think the Israeli government is making a fundamental mistake about assuming that pictures speak for themselves . . . or more specifically that governments can speak for pictures. It has to do with a larger theoretical point about the critical difference between evidence and testimony and how they function both in courts and on the Internet.

In the U.S. justice system, which is based on the English Common Law that is also still used in many countries around the world, testimony usually carries more weight than evidence, even in a present in which scientific studies often show eyewitnesses to be terribly unreliable at accurately providing a true record of what actually happened. Part of this tradition has to do with fears of evidence tampering, but part of it has to do with how justice itself is imagined as being enacted in an unmediated public sphere.

Along somewhat similar lines, I would say that the Internet is often a place in which testimony is less likely to be challenged than evidence. Online presentations of evidence often inspire doubt and nitpicking, perhaps because it is even more difficult to establish an affective relationship with documents or objects that are represented by computational media on a screen. In contrast, stirring online testimony, whether it is an e-mail sent from Sarajevo or a blog posting written in Baghdad, is often perceived as movingly true. (Perhaps an exception to the evidence principle might be the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Something about their composition spoke powerfully to people in a way that discouraged second-guessing, perhaps because of the mute testimony of the prisoners' poses.)

So, I would say to the Israelis: the Internet is a terrible place to settle an argument. And this admonition has nothing to do with a supposed Israeli national character, since I've seen the same attempt at evidence-marshaling belligerently pursued by many countries and types of political actors. Even as they experiment with a variety of tones -- from hyperbole to tongue-in-cheek irony -- all of it comes off as tone-deaf in its delivery. Note that in the Flickr set, they are sometimes sarcastically called "peace activists." And there is sometimes downright overkill in the assortment of materials that they present as "weapons." For example, Palestinian neckscarves are shown in the arsenal.

In general the quality of the photography on the IDF Flickr page is shockingly poor, although it is interesting to see them using Creative Common licenses. Although the IDF has disallowed comments on their YouTube channel it is interesting that they allow them on their Flickr pages, even in connection with their most controversial Mavi Marmara images.

Official Channels

In an essay called "Official Channels" in the Video Vortex Reader, I wrote about the use of YouTube by national governments and the way that footage of dramatic scenes of conflict might be retasked and reevaluated by different parties. Now the Israeli government, known for imitating American web campaigns, is taking another page from the U.S. But in a recent talk I argued that it's a mistake to assume that "a picture is worth a thousand words," because images and video clips are inherently ambiguous and posting visual content always invites skeptical scrutiny by those searching for clues or conspiracies.



Obviously, the YouTube channel for the Israeli Defense Forces would like to prohibit what they consider to be misreadings and have added text and graphic elements that emphasize their rhetorical position. However, the mere fact of having so apparently edited the footage is now calling its authenticity into doubt, particularly since the Israeli commandos who stormed the Mavi Marmar, a Turkish ship attempting to charge through the Israeli blockage of Gaza, also seized digital photos and videos created by witnesses from the other side. As The Lede notes in Complete Video of Israeli Raid Still Missing, subsequent postings to the IDF channel continued to raise questions.

An article in the New York Times, "Videos Carry On the Fight Over Sea Raid," discusses how pro-Palestinian activists used a Livestream channel to show the convoy's progress. Right now the channel is largely devoted to news coverage about the aftermath in which nine activists were killed.

Update: The IDF has now posted new footage, which is actually taken from the demonstrators' cameras, called "Flotilla Rioters Prepare Rods, Slingshots, Broken Bottles and Metal Objects to Attack IDF Soldiers," which uses similarly obvious editing techniques. Note that the "demonstrators" in earlier videos have now become "rioters."

Of course, I have argued that there is a technique in digital rhetoric called "mediated transparency," which draws attention to shooting and editing in order to grant footage more transparency. However, Israeli message manages seem to be doing something very different. Perhaps the most noticeable cut in the "rioters" video is between 21:36 and 22:04, where it seems that the activists may have been gathered for prayer. What is striking is that the videos either use moving images alone, or they only feature sound, which gives a strange otherworldly effect to many of their videos. For example, this video with soundclips, which may have indeed included real dialogue, given the inflammatory speech habits of some political extremists, sounds like an unlikely assortment of accents that is badly edited together and does little for the credibility of the Israeli side.

Ball and Chain Letters

Yesterday's New York Times covered an interesting phenomenon in the online protest cultures of Iran, the circulation of letters on the Internet from wives to dissident husbands in jail. These digital documents, which use the conventions of the more conventional epistolary discourse associated with old-fashioned love letters, are intended to infuse political resistance with personal sentiment. According to the article "To Reza in Jail -- Love and Unity," these letters are frequently sent to sympathizers via e-mail or posted on blogs.

Anniversary Message

Now that I have started writing about how Obama uses YouTube for public diplomacy, I am struck by how different his address to the Iranian people this year is from last year's version. This year he talked somewhat less warmly to Iranian citizens and began to sternly address their leaders instead. Obama complained about refusals of "good faith proposals," the rejection of the U.S. "extended hand" with an Iranian "clenched fist," and the horrific spectacle of the Neda video on the Internet.

Pieta in Reverse

This graphic scene of Iranian protester Neda Soltani dying on the streets of Tehran as her father weeps, which was shot by a cell phone camera and uploaded onto the Internet, is been shown on network news despite its graphic content, and users are warning YouTube against takedown, although several versions of this clip now require over-18 authentication.

The Twitter hashtag #Neda is already recognizing reaction to the rhetoric of martyrdom that the iconic image of her death seems to represent.

Update: More on the visual rhetoric of the image from Bag News Notes here. The New York Times provides biographical background here. The video is already being remixed by admirers on YouTube.

Second Update: Check out this excellent essay by Lisa Nakamura about the Neda phenomenon.

Street Action

Many who are following #IranElection on Twitter complain that news of student unrest in Tehran isn't being broadcast on major news channels. As some argue, "The revolution will not be televised, It will, be Twitterized." A Facebook group is already devoted to urging supporters to "wear green," and the Twitterati in several American cities are planning to protest results. Many are also trying to verify postings that tell of dramatic takeovers and reprisals from those like @IranRiggedElect and @Gita.

Pictures from Flickr, Photobucket, and other sites are being posted to places like Iran News (or "Iran 101").

NowPublic is trying to keep up with the rapid proliferation of what Sam Gregory has called "witness journalism." These events aren't yet reflected on Gregory's the Hub, and may not be unless the main story becomes police brutality rather than street violence. But social media coverage of demonstrations in Tehran is being curated at Global Voices Online.

Turn Left at Tehran

The cyber-cartographers at the Berkman Center have been busy creating a map of Iran's online publics at the Interactive Persian blogosphere map, where computer users also don't slice up the same social network pie as the one served up in the U.S. See "Publishing and Mapping Iran’s Weblogistan" for details about the project. Constellations include "secular/expatriate," "Persian poetry," "reformist politics," and "religious youth."

Closing the Laptops

Iranian president Ahmadinejad denies calling for Facebook ban and claims that the blocking of the popular social network site that is being used heavily by his opponents to reach younger voters is merely coincidentally happening just before nationwide elections. Recently, the London Telegraph argued that "Facebook is the best hope for democracy in Iran," a claim that might sound strange to users of the site who have expressed dissatisfaction with the state of their digital rights as content-creators and private communicators.

AFP reports in "Iran blocks Facebook over presidential hopeful: Ilna" that lack of access was almost certainly politically motivated to thwart Mir Hossein Mousavi's ambitions for the highest office in the land. In addition to a Facebook page with over six thousand supporters, Mousavi's campaign has a YouTube channel that includes an animated pie chart video that challenges the government's prevailing view of majoritarian politics in Iran.

Iran seems to also have its own designated Facebook page, where government supporters can post YouTube information graphics videos that paint a positive picture of the Iranian economy or stories about sexual liberation enabled by the rise of the imams. Note that their blog does allow comments, where one reader pointed out that the number of deaths of children in the crackdowns prior to the Iranian revolution was dwarfed by the deaths of parents and grandparents in the cultural revolution of the fundamentalist aftermath.

Facebook Foreign Agents

Batsheva Sobelman, who has covered stories that reference the use of online video in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opines in the Babylon and Beyond blog at the Los Angeles Times that Facebook may pose a security threat to Israel by encouraging its citizens to aid and abet the enemy.

I had hoped that this argument had died a merciful death, but it appears that equating terrorism with social network sites continues to be popular with pundits and policy makers, just as it was in the Bush administration. It's an argument that I discuss in some detail in the Virtualpolitik book.

However, Solomon notes in "Loose lips on Facebook" that both sides in the conflict are using the popular social network site to recruit potential sympathizers.

This week, Israel's General Security Service took the unusual step of issuing a warning urging Israelis to be alert to terrorist activity on the Internet. Specifically, people were warned against unsolicited approaches on social networks by strangers offering meetings abroad or easy money and seeking information. Seemingly innocent contacts might be terrorist efforts to recruit or kidnap. (Presumably this works both ways: A few months ago a Syrian paper had warned of Mossad and CIA recruiting efforts on Facebook as well.)

Solomon also claims that the Israeli army is limiting soldiers' use of the site because Facebook members may unwittingly divulge sensitive information about porous checkpoints, lax monitoring, classified military procedures, and vulnerable concentrations of troop deployments. Concerned Israeli civilians now run a Facebook group that intervenes if Israeli Defense Forces soldiers make cyber-slips that seem to risk the secrecy that is essential for their military units.

Tartakovski opened his own Facebook group to form a neighborhood watch called "Protecting our IDF." It serves as a war room of sorts, a headquarters. Anyone identifying compromising information in the open is invited to contact the group; members approach the individual and point out the problem. Most people cooperate and remove carelessly revealed sensitive information. Those who don't are reported. In one case, Tartakovski wrote an uncooperative soldier with everything he knew about him. It was a lot. Stupefied that a perfect stranger could learn so much about him from his profile, the soldier got the picture.

Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute warns that such monitoring behavior could easily turn into "facebook vigilantism" as practiced by the twenty-eight-year-old Eran Tartakovski, who monitors Israeli soldiers and polices their friending, messaging, and updating practices.

Now, I am not sure which element of the story I find more disturbing: the panopticum-like transparency of online activities of Israeli soldiers or the heavy reliance on crowdsourcing by Tartakovski et al (I bet he would never succeed in policing every uploaded photo if he was doing it by himself).

Are we witnessing the birth of Facebook vigilantism? After all, this could be the logical counterpart to the citizen journalism practiced by those naive Israelis who upload their photos to social networking sites...

Royaltweet

In "An Interview With Queen Rania of Jordan On How Twitter Can Help Change The World," reporter Roi Carthy introduces the article's royal subject matter with a distinction between the "pages" of the past and the "streams" of the present that facilitate new kinds of online encounters. Looking at Queen Rania's Twitter stream, we see the Middle Eastern monarch boasting of her country's literacy rate and exchanging in lively discussions with Davos to claim a voice in the World Economic Forum. Although most of her traffic tilts asymmetrically toward being followed rather than following, the queen also follows pop culture streams from Oprah and The Onion. Queen Rania explains how she joined Twitter and became a participant as a fusing of her public and private personae.

I guess I first heard about it following the US election campaigns; there was quite a buzz around the creative use of social media in mobilizing people behind a common cause.

Since then, I’ve seen Twitter evolve into a dynamic and diverse medium for action as well as communication. Whether it’s raising money for malaria nets or promoting your company brand, Twitter answers much more than just “what are you doing?” It’s expanded to “what is the world doing, and what can the world do?”

Of course, I tweet. Tweeting is a very personal form of expression. Who else could talk about my son refusing to wear a suit to meet the Pope, my husband flying a helicopter, or take a twitpic from our home?

Tweetdeck was recommended by a friend, and that’s what I’m used to. And the same with Twibble; it works for when I’m on the go.

Of course, not everyone is pleased with celebrity students involving malaria nets, but Queen Rania's claim that these forms of engagement personalize philanthropy so that more people participate has been very persuasive to others.

In the interview, the queen says that her husband King Abdullah II is also supportive of her YouTube channel.

Smear Campaign

In the NPR story on how Women Take Their Place In Kuwait's Parliament, newly elected Kuwaiti legislator Aseel al-Awadhi complains that her political opponents used ubiquitous recording devices to capture some of her lectures and then post them on YouTube to discredit her as a representative who would be overly Western or opposed to Sharia law. Since in the United States college professors have expressed similar fears about vengeful students or conservative plants eager to catch faculty supposedly expressing outrageously biased liberal opinions in their classrooms and lecture halls, I thought it would be interesting to attempt to investigate the YouTube offerings about al-Awadhi, despite being obviously hampered by the language barrier.

I discovered that Middle Eastern news coverage focused on al-Awadhi's own use of YouTube, where she announced her candidacy and maintains her own YouTube channel.