Information Ecology

Wael Ghonim, Google executive by day, secret Facebook activist by night, famously declared right after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February: "If you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet."

Overthrowing a government is one thing. But building a sustainable democracy is turning out to be more difficult, and the Internet's role in that process is much less clear.

When the Open Technology Initiative presented at the Allied Media Conference in June, many of the participants documented it with posts to Twitter and Flickr. We used Storify, an online tool for compiling social media, to arrange those pics and tweets into a narrative of our workshop and a tour of local wireless networks.

What information is necessary in the 21st century?

On June 9, the Federal Communications Commission issued "The Information Needs of Communities," a report of nearly 500 pages. It was written by Steven Waldman, an accomplished journalist and Internet entrepreneur, and dozens of collaborators. It's a comprehensive, bird's-eye view of U.S. media that begins with a basic, given principle: news and information are essential to our democracy.

“Just Google it!” has become a common cyber-snobbish response to questions that seem too trivial to merit a human conversation. But is it really an answer? Now that more and more Internet sites are tailoring their services to the idiosyncrasies of individual users, queries for “climate change,” “stem cells” and even “pizza” may yield different outcomes for different people. This may be an era when we are increasingly entitled to our own facts — but should we also be entitled to our own search results?

"There is a saying that Chinese people are afraid of officials, and officials are afraid of foreign reporters," my friend Yang, a wily reporter for one of Beijing's city newspapers, told me as we were driving to dinner one evening. That was last spring, well before the government's recent efforts to intimidate foreign reporters attempting to cover calls for a "jasmine revolution," but it has been true a long time.

Last June, Khaled Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian, suffered a vicious public beating at the hands of Egyptian police. Several witnesses documented the assault with cell phone cameras. Said apparently died from his wounds, but the police claimed he had choked to death on illegal drugs. Outraged Egyptians posted contrary evidence on Facebook pages and on YouTube.

Early last year I participated in a Journalism that Matters conference in Seattle. From what I learned there, I focused on creating an information ecology of Seattle as part of work related to the FCC Future of Media enquiry.

Guest post by Rob McCausland

When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” to describe purported attacks on her and the Tea Party movement in the wake of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson, some were left wondering why the former governor would use a phrase historically associated with anti-Semitism.

At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015.