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Google’s Stand on Uncensored Search: Irrelevant to China’s Internet Experience

I’ve been living in China for two years, but before I’d even seen the news, I noticed something had changed. My familiar Google.com homepage had been transformed into Google.com.hk–a web page, despite its distinctly Asian extraction, bears a strikingly resemblance to its American older brother. Having thought I’d made some mistake, I clicked my browser’s ‘Home’ button a second time and in a moment found myself back on Google’s Hong Kong-based search platform. Getting a bit annoyed, I deleted .hk from the URL and attempted to twist my browser’s stubborn arm into taking me where I wanted to go; “Why do you care that I live in Shanghai? I’m American! Take me home!” A moment later, Google.com.hk smiled back at me again.

Momentarily giving up, I manually navigated to Google Finance where the familiar-looking U.S.-based version of Google’s financial information service greeted me with the headline: “Will Google’s China Move Set a New Tone?”:

…..Google said Monday that it’s decided to re-direct traffic away from its google.cn search engine to Hong Kong-based google.com.hk, where Chinese speakers may access unfiltered search results. It remains to be seen how long Internet users in mainland China will retain access to google.com.hk. The site’s servers are based in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China……

So now Google is doing me a favor by providing me “uncensored” search results via their Hong Kong based search platform? Pardon my confusion, but does that mean that my three years of search results using Google.com in China, rather than the local China-based Google.cn, was had been filtered the entire time? For now, I’m going to assume that if Google’s Hong Kong platform will provide uncensored search results to Mainland Chinese netizens then the U.S. platform has provided the same in China all along. The only difference now is that Google is automatically forwarding Mainland Chinese traffic attempting to access Google.com or Google.cn to its homepage to its Hong Kong platform. Until today, anyone looking for unfiltered search results could have simply used Google.com or any of Google’s dozens of regional platforms except Google.cn. The only benefit of Google.cn was that it provided a Chinese language version of the service, which was also always accessible via Google.com.hk.

My Google experience from within Mainland China, upset today by the impasse in tenuous negotiations between Google and Chinese authorities, is almost interesting as a new episode in the ongoing feud for freedom of information and an uncensored internet in China. Besides, I’m sure Google’s execs are proud of themselves for following their own mantra of “Don’t be evil” and taking what appears to be a stand on an uncensored internet experience in China.

My only qualm with all of this fussy posturing, that’s now even gotten the Obama administration officially “Disappointed” with Google and China’s failure to agree to disagree, is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual internet experience in Mainland China! Just because Google now automatically helps any would-be Google.com or Google.cn users along by forwarding us to their Hong Kong site for the glorious experience of “uncensored search results,” that doesn’t mean that these Mainland Chinese netizens can actually few any of the content on those pages! What benefit is my unfiltered search result when I click on it and the Great Firewall of China just blocks me from looking at it anyway?

There are several more reasons why all of this fuss over uncensored search results is irrelevant:

1. Censorship isn’t News: Anyone in China scouring the internet for politically sensitive content that might have been snuffed out by Google.cn’s filters already has no illusions about how manipulative, hypocritical, and controlling China’s internet authorities are–not to mention China’s entire government. In other words, they aren’t anywhere near getting duped into believing China’s official “Harmonious Society” tag line just because several items are missing from their Google search.
2. Circumvention Options Already Exist: Anyone in China who is genuinely serious about uncovered all of their missing content and actually being able to access it once they find it on their search engine of choice has options. For anywhere from USD $8-15 per month, VPN (virtual private network) software is available for subscription, which instantly unblocks all search results and real content in China.
3. There are Already Pockets of Free Speech on the Chinese Web: I don’t think Google.com or Google.cn were ever confused as a platform for political change in China. While I do applaud Google’s ethos of free information for everyone, people in China have many other places to go if they actually want to exchange politically sensitive ideas. Just take a look at Kaixin001.com! Here is an unblocked, easily accessible website on which hundreds or thousands or articles, videos, and photos are exchanged daily across China. Some articles are amusing distractions or mindless celebrity gossip, but many others are full of highly “controversial” content that blisteringly excoriates China’s government policies and the gaping holes in the face of its “Harmonious Society.” Read more »

Digital Activism & the 4Cs Social Media Framework

The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

The second reason is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community. Different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices. Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, web 2.0, and even crowdsourcing and wikinomics can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it. Journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, software vendors and academics approach the space from their own perspectives and have their own preferred terms. Used precisely, these terms can mean very different things. However, very few people use these terms precisely and almost nobody agrees on the exact definition of these terms.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework

My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.

Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

The Second C: Collaboration

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The Third C: Community

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

Although I designed the 4Cs framework to explain how I see social media, I have also found it to be a useful tools to evaluate specific social media initiatives. The best social media initiatives leverage all these four layers, but I have seen that most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between. It’s important to note, however, that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Collaboration layers.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

What About You?

If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

If you are a journalist, analyst or academic in the business of understanding social media initiatives, you’ll find the 4Cs Framework really useful. What are the boundary conditions needed to succeed at each layer? What are the boundary conditions needed to move from Content to Collaboration, from Collaboration to Community, and from Community to Collective Intelligence? Can you think of other digital activism or social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers?

Do share your thoughts.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

R@D: Case Study on Vietnam’s Blogger Movement

Note: Although this article was not produced for R@D, we found it to be an excellent overview of the digital activism context in Vietnam and are publishing it here with the consent of the authors.

The purpose of Research@DigiActive (R@D) is to produce applied, thought-provoking, actionable research at the cutting edge of Digital Activism. It seeks to highlight and disseminate studies in the new academic field of digital activism by publishing short papers by promising scholars. To submit a paper or get more information, please contact our Director of Applied Research, Patrick Meier, at Patrick AT Digiactive.org.

Title: Vietnam’s Blogger Movement: A Virtual Civil Society in the Midst of Government Repression

Authors: Duy Hoang, Cuong Nguyen, and Angelina Huynh
of the pro-democracy organization Viet Tan

Abstract: Despite the increasing popularity of social media in Vietnam, government persecution of online political activists have put significant limitations on digital activism in that country. The paper begins by discussing popular technology platforms and summarizing the success stories of online citizen journalism. However, the actions of the government to curtail online activism – blocking of critical sites, collaboration with foreign companies to create a censorship mechanism similar to the Great Firewall of China, and imprisonment of digital activists – has made the overall outlook bleak. The paper ends with policy recommendations for those outside the country who wish to support the human rights of and online freedom of expression of those in Vietnam.

Read the publication…

Tool: Iranian Google bomb to support Gaza

Description: The Gaza crisis and Israeli attacks have been a top story around the world, and it seems the story will not be over soon. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak referred to the situation as “all-out war” and told lawmakers the country’s military was prepared for more intense action in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in order to weaken Hamas’ ability to fire rockets into Israeli territory. Iranian islamists demonstarted in Iran against Israel and Iranian leaders are calling on Muslims to support Palestinans in any way they can. Islamist bloggers are fighting a virtual struggle too.

Tools: Google bomb

How tool is used: Iranian islamists are hopeful that people who are googling Gaza find their page, Gaza.Ir, on the top of the list. The site reads:

You oppressed people of Gaza know that we Muslims in Iran and all over the world haven’t forgotten you and will not cease until complete cessation of the blockade of your city. Along the path to Gaza’s freedom and our common goal, which is the freedom of Palestine, we will not cease and we will go on.

Impact: Google bombs can attract a lot of attention if they are able to climb to the top of reserarch results. So far this has not the case of Islamist Google bomb.

Tactic: Online Video Protest in (Virtual) Tunisia

You can see a larger version of the video on the Nawaat site.

Description: In 2007, the Tunisian government, led by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, blocked the video-sharing site DailyMotion.com, in part because the site hosted video testimony of Tunisian political prisoners. In response, the human rights organization Nawaat has created an online video protest on Google Earth. If you visit the Tunisian presidential palace on Google Earth, you will see that it is covered with links to the same videos of political prisoners which President Ben Ali was trying to block (see video above). Now, at least online, evidence of Tunisia’s political prisoners are right in the President’s front yard!

Organizer: Nawaat (“the core”), a Tunisian human rights site, co-founded by Tunisian digital activist Sami Ben Gharbia, creator of the video above.

Purpose of Action: To show President Ben Ali that he cannot censor the truth about Tunisian political prisoners, that the truth will come right to his front door.

Organizing Tools: Google Earth, YouTube

Outcome: Unknown.

Ease of Replication: Pretty easy. You can add the Google Earth video geo-tags through YouTube. when you upload a video to YouTube you have the option to specify the date and the location of the video. When you click on that option, you will find a Google map which you can zoom in on. Then you place the geo-tag marker on the location you want the video to be associated with, in this case, the Tunisian presidential palace in Carthage. You can also place the geo-tag marker by inputting the longitude and latitude of the location. There is such easy interactivity between Google Earth, Google Maps, and YouTube because all three applications are owned by Google.

Tool: GTalk

Tool Description: GTalk is Googles version of Internet telephony. I allows you to talk online for free with other people that use GTalk.
Activist Application: Burmese democracy activists used GTalk to tell people around the world what was happening in their country. According to Maung Maung, a Burmese activist and trade unionist, “There are about 50 Internet cafes all over Burma, and young people were able to log into GTalk and say to the rest of the world, ‘Here’s what is happening on this corner; here’s what is happening on that corner.’ Quite a lot of young activists have been trained in how to use Gmail. It is extremely helpful to the movement.” GTalk is available in Burmese (see below) and many other world languages.
Ease of Use: Easy. You can download it here or use it without downloading it by clicking here. You do need a Gmail account and a microphone to use GTalk.

Tactic: SMS/Map Mashup Protects Human Rights in Kenya

Description: Ushahidi.com is a Kenyan web site that records reports of violence sent by SMS and e-mail on a Google Earth map. It provides living testimony to the atrocities committed following the recent presidential elections in that country. (“Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Kiswahili.)

Organizer: The idea for the Ushahidi web site was created by the bloggers behind KenyanPundit.com, WhiteAfrican.com, MentalAcrobatics.com, AfroMusing.com, and Skunkworks and was built by developer David Kobia.

Purpose of Action: To create a visual map of human rights abuses.

Organizing Tools: SMS, Google Earth, web site

Outcome: A political resolution to the election crisis has not yet been reached.

Ease of Replication: Replicating the Ushahidi map is rather difficult, as it is actually a mash-up of SMS messages and a Google map. You will need a developer friend to make it. However, other digital map applications, like Frappr, are quite easy to use.

Read more »