Recurring Theme: Cell Phones Are Good for People

Now that cell phones and SMS might save Africa, save your life, take down Estrada and cost a fortune (thanks, Peter), I'm finding a theme:

There's a lot of power in that little pocket machine.

In the OpenNet Initiative's study on China's Internet filtering, we learn once again of China's overall scary censorship of the Internet. [Of course, the class blogged a lot on China's friendly government-registration policy for websites earlier this semester, so I won't pile on the hate.] The little detail that the government forgot to take a stab at: the cell phone and SMS.

When SARS broke out worse than new lines of Coke products, the ONI report says that the government tried to quell the panic by simply lying to its people: "Oh, that's not an epidemic...that's the weather changing!" Well, you know the saying: 1 billion can't be (collectively) stupid. SMS technology spread the truth and preserved a tiny bit of freedom for the Chinese people.

The (Chinese) Man might win most of those battles over freedom, but I -- for once -- am heartened by the hope that perhaps technology won't allow technology to stifle technology (and humanity).

Let's keep our figners crossed.

OK: Let's Draw a Few Lines (with Erasable Pen)

Carol Darr made one thing very clear last night:

The line needs to be drawn. Or else.

Or else we can say goodbye to preventing corporate influence over our electoral system (well, not really -- more like, we'd be giving them more potential areas in which they can corrupt us all).

In my interpretation, here are the two conclusions I come to:

1) Political activism blogs deserve to exist freely. The First Amendment preserves our right to assemble freely, discuss whatever we choose, etc. The FEC steps in to say, "OK, if you're going to assemble and do political stuff, you can't advocate someone's election or defeat and spend more than $X." The problem is, the big blogs need to spend more than that to operate -- and "to operate" often means to advocate the election or defeat of the candidates they discuss, sometimes explicitly fundraising for candidates.

2) The big political blog aren't mainstream media entities and shouldn't be treated as such for one main reason: a lack of accountability. The New York Times can editorialize against Bush all year long, but in the end, they can't liberal fundraising links on their website and advocate you donate to them. The Nation, for one, is very explicitly liberal. But their journalistic integrity keeps them off the campaign payrolls. Daily Kos, on the other hand, is unabashedly liberal, advocates regularly the election or defeat of candidates, organizes political activism (including fundraising for candidates), and has been on candidate's payroll. In many ways, it is no different than a political action committee with people power.

3) The media exemption has been abused to a great extent, making the line that would keep blogs from receiving it very blurry.

In the end, I fall somewhere between what Carol Darr says and what Kos says. First things first: either make the media exemption mean something and keep people like Paul Begala from acting as both a paid campaign consultant and news commentator and corporate investors from influencing the editorial decision making (which would seem incredibly hard to do, much less enforce); or, just give up already and give it to the blogs, too. Perhaps you can ask blogs to register as PACs or PAC-lites if they're going to engage in spending money to influence elections. Perhaps you could just have the big ones disclose their funding.

Where Darr is right is that the real solution comes in the rewriting of campaign law to catch it up to speed with the times.

Preserving our Demographic Boundaries Online

Sometimes you have to read the comments.

I was clueless about the wordy, convoluted point Antigone was trying to make in the African American Blogging Thing until I read in a comment that this was apparently a pretty obvious satire of a similar post on another blog, called "The Woman Blogging Thing," which bemoans the lack of prominent women political bloggers and even attributes it to the "male"-style writing that dominates blogs and the top-down structure of the feminist movement.

What Antigone does is prove that, sometimes, you have to take a step back.

The Internet, as a candidate for savior of the world, has been given the burden of erasing racial lines and tearing down demographic boundaries that have characterized the offline world for centuries. When the apparent racial disparities persist online (such as the alleged lack of diversity among prominent bloggers), the believers have started to question this barrier-breaking premise and decry this lack of immediate social upheaval.

And then they get caught making sweeping generalizations as the "Woman Blogging Thing" author did. I'll try not to make that mistake.

Sure, the Internet has changed so much about life. It has created a form of human interaction that is faceless, nameless, raceless, gender-less, etc. Online, the spread of ideas need not necessarily be connected to the demographic boundaries that divide us offline. The hope should not be that there will be more women or black bloggers to balance out all the white men (One could say, "How do we know there aren't already many non-white males out there?"). Rather, the hope should be that these demographic factors never even enter the equation. That, after all, is within the realistic abilities of the Internet.

What posts like the "Woman Blogging Thing" do is perpetuate this mindset of breaking the online community into demographics, which might help us figure out where the need is in funding to bridge the digital divide, but help us little in assessing the debate going on in the blogosphere.

If it's online diversity we're after, the movement might have to begin offline.

A Bit Off-Topic: World Maps on the Internets

While Google has a new program, Google Earth, which proves once and for all that it has conquered the world by inviting you to "fly from space to your neighborhood," a competing view of the world has emerged at Zen-Style.com.

Both are well worth your time and consideration. Trust me.