blog de notas de juan freire

Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media, by David Bamman, Brendan O’Connor, and Noah A. Smith. First Monday, Volume 17, Number 3 - 5 March 2012

Abstract: With Twitter and Facebook blocked in China, the stream of information from Chinese domestic social media provides a case study of social media behavior under the influence of active censorship. While much work has looked at efforts to prevent access to information in China (including IP blocking of foreign Web sites or search engine filtering), we present here the first large–scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, i.e., the active deletion of messages published by individuals.

In a statistical analysis of 56 million messages (212,583 of which have been deleted out of 1.3 million checked, more than 16 percent) from the domestic Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, and 11 million Chinese–language messages from Twitter, we uncover a set a politically sensitive terms whose presence in a message leads to anomalously higher rates of deletion. We also note that the rate of message deletion is not uniform throughout the country, with messages originating in the outlying provinces of Tibet and Qinghai exhibiting much higher deletion rates than those from eastern areas like Beijing.

Back to the “wall”: How to use Facebook in the college classroom, by Caroline Lego Muñoz and Terri Towner. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 12 - 5 December 2011

Abstract: The evolving world of the Internet — blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks — offers instructors and students radically new ways to research, communicate, and learn. Integrating these Internet tools into the college classroom, however, is not an easy task. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided. Specifically, we show that multiple types of Facebook course integration options are available to instructors. It is concluded that SNS, such as Facebook, can be appropriately and effectively used in an academic setting if proper guidelines are established and implemented.

A critical part of any ethnographic/design research project is recruiting the right participants for the study – they are the foundation on which the research is built. The default way of recruiting in the commercial research space is to use recruiting agencies to help connect the researcher with relevant participants – generating a list that is often fleshed out by contacts from the team’s extended social network. The ideal recruiting agency list-of-potential-participants contains hundreds of millions of entries and document every aspect of potential participant’s lives – what they are doing, who they are doing it with, the causes they feel passionate about, the brands they connect with, the music they listen to, the places they go – and all updated in real time. Thanks to social networking sites like Weibo, Facebook, Orkut and Mixithis ‘ideal list’ already exists, and comes with a built in mechanism – their advertising platform to engage participants and proximate participants to opt into the study.

The ability to recruit through extended social networks has always been an important part of the researcher’s toolkit – with varying degrees of success depending on the focus of the participants’ profiles, the physical and spiritual distance between the study location and the team, and the breadth of the team’s extended network. The internet has made the planet smaller, social networks more apparent – making remote studies that much easier to run. Today the tools to rapidly and consistently reach and screen participants in any part of the globe are in the hands of every internet connected researcher. My estimate is that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house. This internalising of an otherwise outsourced practice has a couple of costs, which in most cases are easily outweighed by numerous benefits.

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Sharing ‘Low-Cost & High-Value Ideas for Cities’ / Ideias ‘de baixo custo e alto benefício’ para as nossas cidades

http://ruadasideias.blogs.sapo.pt/

http://globalcity.blogs.sapo.pt/

http://noeconomicrecoverywithoutcities.blogs.sapo.pt/

http://www.facebook.com/CidadespelaRetoma

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Twitter no modera contenidos como lo hace Facebook, que cierra cuentas y páginas en base a su política de identidad y las denuncias de otros usuarios, dejando a quienes utilizan la red como herramienta para el activismo sin su espacio de comunicación en momentos clave de las movilizaciones, como sucedió con la página “Todos somos Khaled Said”, con la página del Observatorio de la Mujer Siria y muchas otras. Twitter no obliga a los usuarios a compartir su verdadera identidad pero el motor de búsqueda prioriza los mensajes de usuarios que comparten su nombre completo, imagen y biografía y penaliza ese tipo de automatización. Esto ha hecho que la etiqueta #Syria haya dejado de estar inundada de ese tipo de contenidos automatizados…

Today, without warning and without comment, Facebook deleted the pages of fifty predominantly left and student-run organizations in the United Kingdom. Having forged an uneasy relationship with Facebook, activists, culture jammers and revolutionaries around the world now face a tremendous dilemma. On the one hand, it is true that Facebook’s social networking platform has served revolutionary organizers well in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. The speed by which a call to protest can snowball into bodies on the streets intent on toppling a regime is awe inspiring and for the foreseeable future, Facebook will continue to play an important role in organizing protests and insurrections. And yet, Facebook is, in its essence, a capitalist business venture whose raison d’être is the commercialization of human relations. It is terrifying, and ultimately self-defeating that a commercially driven enterprise has insinuated itself into the soul of global activism. On a deeper level, however, beyond all self-recriminations and angry tweets against Facebook’s latest #zuckup the question remains: How will we, culture jammers, escape this dilemma? What are activists and revolutionaries to do in a world where a for-profit company has a near monopoly on social networking? Would thousands of us committing Facebook suicide wake Zuckerberg up? Could we jam Facebook into submission? Or must we develop our own non-commercial platform better suited to insurrection? What is the solution to this dilemma? How do we break the Gordian knot?

… Juan Freire, que disertó sobre la libertad en la Red o, como él mismo precisó, sobre cómo se ejercen las libertades desde la Red, que deben librar cinco batallas. La primera de ellas es “contra nosotros mismos”, para huir del “tecno-determinismo y la tecno-utopía”, porque “la tecnología no cambia nada”, son los usuarios los que deben usarla, apropiarse de ella, para llevar a cabo cualquier cambio. La segunda batalla debe librarse contra “nuestros gobernantes”, que suelen tener “principios que venden al mejor postor” y que han llevado el debate sobre la legislación en internet a un planteamiento industrial que se está abordando como una cuestión de telecomunicaciones (en Europa), de contenidos(en EEUU) o de hardware (en Asia) según el territorio, porque los gobiernos piensan en la Red únicamente como un producto y como un mercado. Según Freire, internet ha propiciado tanto “cosas buenas” (WikiLeaks) como algunas malas (la posibilidad de que quienes gobiernan puedan monitorizar la actividad de sus ciudadanos).

La tercera batalla tiene dos flancos: por un lado, la propia industria y, por otro, lainhibición de las administraciones públicas. Ambas dan lugar, por ejemplo, a lo que Freire llama “el caso Facebook”, con sus extensísimas condiciones de uso y de privacidad que los usuarios aceptan sin leer y que los gobiernos ni conocen ni se interesan por ellas. Los periódicos cambios en las condiciones de la red social no son, pues, fruto de la intervención de ningún poder público, sino de una “negociación difusa entre los usuarios y la industria”. La cuarta batalla tiene lugar entre loscolectivos marginales en sociedades democráticas, que, obviamente, tienen problemas más acuciantes que las condiciones de uso de Facebook. Por último, la quinta la lucha la ciudadanía en las sociedades no democráticas. El caso paradigmático es China, donde el Gobierno emplea a decenas de miles de personas para controlar on line la actividad de los disidentes. Freire detecta ciertosparalelismos entre el caso Facebook y el chino, y piensa en lo que ocurre en ese país como en “una especie de laboratorio de lo que podría ocurrir en cualquier parte del mundo”.