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Rushes Sequences - Sherry Turkle interview - USA (Video)

Post categories: Brains,听Changing humanity,听Programme four,听Programme three,听clips and rushes,听interviews,听privacy,听relationships,听rushes,听video

Dan Biddle | 14:55 UK time, Saturday, 28 November 2009

is Abby Rockefeller Mauxe Professor of the at . She met with Aleks Krotoski to discuss the issues of privacy, communication and identity in the web-connected world.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

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Rushes Sequences - Danah Boyd interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 14:49 UK time, Saturday, 28 November 2009

Danah Boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research. She met with Aleks Krotoski to discuss the changes in young people's behaviour when online, their attitudes to privacy and the importance that might be placed upon building their identities online.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Alex 听听听听听Danah, are the kids behaving differently on line?

Danah 听听听听听You know, it's not so much that they're behaving differently as much as that we have a sense of visibility that we've never seen before. 听So we're used to having, you know, we'll see a certain group of kids in certain places right. 听The mall we can see kids hanging out with their friends that way. 听But as adults we don't typically have a, a really good sense of all the kids and a good sense of where they are and what they're doing when they're with their friends. 听What's going on on-line is it, in many ways it's youth space. 听So they're there, they're goofing around as through it, they're there just with their friends. And so what ends up happening is you can get a sense of what's going on really in, in broad sweeps. 听And it isn't just the kids like the kids in your community but the kids who are in different communities all around the world with all sorts of different ideas of what is normative behaviour. 听Right, and that what, what is ......... or what is common really differs and so we see these behaviours on line and we're like oh my gosh it's radically different today than it ever was before. 听That's not really. 听Its.

Alex 听听听听听Well yeah I, I was going to ask that actually. 听How different is it from like when I was a kid I'd come to the mall and I'd do stuff at the mall or I'd go to the movie theatre or whatever. 听How different is this?

Danah听听听听听Think about what happens when you were doing that with your friends right? 听You were there, you were joking around, you were gossiping, you were flirting you were kind of consuming culture and consuming merchandise. 听But it was part of this all, all encompassing social experience. The same thing is actually happening fully on line right. 听So all of those everyday practices, the gossip, the flirting, the joking around that's taking place on line. 听And it's taking place on line with the same kinds of friends that it took place in the mall right. 听You met up with all the kids at school but you also saw the kids at the neighbouring school and you're like hey who are you what's that about? 听That same thing is, is where we're seeing it play out. So young people who are engaged on line they're primarily engaged with the people they already know; their friends, their friends from school, their friends from after school activities, their friends from around the community.

Alex 听听听听听And of course it's that visibility though that's freaking people out.

Danah Oh yeah.

Alex 听听听听Because there's this longevity associated with that. 听You know, you put something up on I don't know, you put something on Facebook like a social networking site or you put something on My Space or any of these spaces and it's there, it's there for life. So are there ways that the kids are starting to protect themselves? 听How do they, how do they stop what they're putting up there?

Danah 听听Well they're not going to stop what they put up there because the, the trick with on line material is everything is persistent by its nature right. 听That's one of the powers of the internet. 听And we think of, it, it really is a useful ............ right because if something is persistent that means you can get access to it at a different time. 听That's the opportunity of ......... synchronicity. 听But it's also how this material is available 10, 15, 20 years later. And right now we're in that moment of, of transition, that point of absolute confusion. 听Um, the uncertainty of you know, what does it mean that you have everything up there? 听Down the road it just becomes the way things are you know, and it's interesting to see the individuals for whom that's already part of their story. And that's' the power of the early adopters right. 听So you, you know, I think about it, I've been blogging since you know, 1997, that's a really long time at this point. 听And sure, you can go back and you can read all sorts of things about me as a teenager working out all sorts of issues. 听Hopefully you won't um, but more importantly it's, it's about constantly moving forward. 听And so if someone wants to engage with that level of stalking and see my teenagedom they can. But you have to read it in the light of the whole shift. 听And so I think for the teenagers today they're going to be living out their teenage lives in this very persistent, very searchable manner but 10, 15 years from now it's going to be part of a longer trajectory and the people are going to be looking at the things they're doing as 20 something's. 听And sure, we look back and go oh that was stupid what I did when I was you know, 14 and it was, it always was. Um, but when you have this cultural element where everybody's got this track record it's not going to be as shocking as it is right now for the people who are you know, learning that and figuring it out.

Alex 听听 That's interesting you say that cos I've heard a theory that you know, some, that people won't trust people in the future. 听Say they run for political office, if they don't have that exposure, if they haven't thrown themselves all up on line because they won't have that track record people will say well why not, what were you trying to hide? 听And do you think that that's, that that is an aspect of naivety? 听Do you think I'm na茂ve because I'm part of this, this culture that I think well our privacy is, our concepts have shifted so much?

Danah 听听 The concepts are shifting but we all, always have to take in to account privilege. 听Who has privilege in this system and who doesn't? 听I, I have the great privilege to be able to say this is who I am you will deal with me like it or not. 听When I'm in a very particular position you know, professionally, socially etc. 听Now a lot of people ......... that's not true. 听And the classic example that everybody can reach out er, can make sense of is the teacher right. The teacher we think of is a perfectly reasonable character in our lives but the teacher is supposed to have a big boundary between what they do in the classroom and what they do elsewhere right. 听And for example sex is not supposed to enter the classroom and yet teachers have a right to have a sex life. 听They you know, they're old enough to be allowed to drink and it not be an issue. 听Um, and so what happens when their students get to see access of their personal lives in another context, how does that use, how is that used to shift the power roles in the classroom? And for many teachers it's a point of deep struggle and frustration right. 听What does it mean to be in an on line dating site and your students track down your profile that was never meant for them where no name was ever explained? 听But it was meant to try to live a life outside of the classroom. 听And what happens when it gets interpreted by you know, those, those teenagers parents of like what are you doing, why do my kids have to see you dating? You know, and that becomes a really interesting boundary problem. 听And so for all of the ways in which yes we're going to expect people to be online for certain roles right. 听If you're building um, credibility in public um, in the future, that will include public on I, on line. 听Just like if you're running for you know, to be a politician, you should have a track record of TV of you know, newspaper articles of all of this material, that's your track record, that's your story. 听Um, but not everybody wants to be in public at that level and what are the different boundary issues for those who being in public is actually very costly?

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Danah 听Yeah we're seeing, we're seeing patterns and a lot of it has to do with their particular social positions right. 听So the popular kids are using the technologies to try to maintain and reinforce popularity in very particular ways. 听And that's when we see social status becoming really critical. 听So it's no longer the Nikes that are the particular status. 听With markers it's the way of actually maintaining certain kind of friendships and getting certain kinds of you know, responses from certain celebrities, all of that play goes on. Um, we also see marginalised kids who, who are desperately seeking some sort of support um, and who are often at loss um, you know, out in more traditional senses of schools or what not. 听Finding a community on line and this is one of the more powerful narratives of the internet right. 听Your, your queer kids who can actually find people like them who can support them. 听They're much more willing to be public in a traditional sense because they're desperate for somebody who might be like them. For the, the popular kid it's much more about being public to the school; people who will give them credit, that will give them status. 听And so we see these different groups contending with it differently. 听We also see the power of certain public figures you know, in negotiating with teenagers. 听So if you think about which teenagers are using Twitter in the, in the earliest of stages a lot of it comes down to who's talking to celebrities? 听And you know, this wasn't that different from when I was growing up you know, and the idea of writing to the New Kids on the Block right, the, you know, the Boy Band of the day you know, in a hopes that you would get a letter um, you know, in response right which was inevitably a form letter. Um, was the possibility of, of reaching out and getting, getting a response you know, feeling as though that person really existed and they really recognised your existence. 听This, the Twitter is a modern day incarnation of that for a lot of the celebrity teenager relationships right. Can I get validation from you know, Miley Cyrus who's now left Twitter or even Demi Levado or any number of these particular celebs? 听Um, the idea that you know, may be I can actually get to meet Shakil O'Neil in person cos he'll announce where he is. 听I mean all of that possibility. 听So you see that as another component. 听So there's always these publics, these publics keep coming back. 听But the same practices are there.

Alex 听听听听听The, one thing that keeps coming up is this idea of the exchange of private information you know. 听How is, how are kids exchanging or using private information as currency in a different way than perhaps adults are using private information as currency?

Danah听听听听Well again what, what constitutes private information? 听Right. 听From an adults perspective it's identifying information is their absolute fear right. 听The idea that it's your name, your address, your phone number, anything that will identify you. And this has to do with the idea of physical risk. 听But for young people it's about the you know, alright fine you can call me by my name why is that a big deal? 听It's more about the things that make you vulnerable. 听And so when we think about privacy and private information it's really a question of vulnerability. 听And so from adult perspective we're really concerned about physical vulnerabilities. 听Um, and increasingly about psychological vulnerabilities. And for a lot of young people it's about social vulnerabilities. 听So you know, how do I make certain that I don't get teased, harassed, bullied um, because of the things that I make available out there? 听How do I make certain that what I put out there makes me seem cool and not, and not lame? 听How do I balance that? 听So the social vulnerability is the privacy fight for young people. 听The physical and psychological is the fight for parents. And so we see these two constantly at odds. 听Because part of putting things out in public is to achieve status you need to actually make yourself a, vulnerable at a certain level. And how do you actually do that in a way that balances the risk and the benefits?

Rushes Sequences - Gina Bianchini interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 14:30 UK time, Saturday, 28 November 2009

is CEO and co-founder of . She met with the programme four team to discuss online social networks and the changing nature of relationships and human interactions in the connected world of the web.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Gina 听听听听So, regardless of whether you think, you know, social technology and the internet is good or bad, it is. This is what, you know, the genie is out of the bottle, and I think that's an amazing thing. The social web can do more good in the world than it can do bad, and it's the choice of people and the people who are using it as to what they want to do with it. It is the most empowering generational shift that has ever happened, and I think that that is what makes it so compelling and so inspiring, and so much fun. When you look at the fact that you can be sitting in your pyjamas on your couch and help-, help drive, you know, world peace, that is actually happening today, that's possible in a way that it was never possible before, and I think that that's something that is incredibly important. So, you know, does it mean that people have shorter attention spans? Yes, but is that a bad thing? Maybe, depending on what your point of view is, but in terms of what it can actually enable socially, economically and politically, I think that we should embrace and welcome social technology, not fear it.

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Intv 听听听So basically we're saying, can we judge the social networking revolution as good or bad?

Gina 听听听So when I look at whether social technology and the social web is a good thing or a bad thing that's horrible for society or wonderful for society, I think the reality is that it's here. It's not going away. And so, it's up to people who use it to decide whether it is going to represent the best of human nature, or the worst of human nature. And realistically, it's probably going to be a little bit of both, but what is possible today with social technologies is profound. Namely, you can be sitting at your house, in your pyjamas, and you can actually impact the lives of someone sitting in a country hundreds of thousands of miles away, that is wrought with political strife. You can say, 'I'm here, I'm listening to you.' One of our-, one of our Ning networks is er is the Congo Wall, which was created by Eve Ensler who had just gotten back from the Congo with her V-Day organisation, where women are being brutalised as a-, as a means of fighting war. And the fact of the matter is, they feel alone. And with social technology women from all over the world can come to this-, this Ning network and leave a message for the women of the Congo, 'You're not alone.' And those messages, over 2,000 women and men around the world actually contributed one of the-, contributed a message, they printed them out and took them to the hospital in the Congo where women were recovering. No one is alone anymore, and I actually think that's a really powerful thing. You can sit at your house and make change. And we're talking about social change, and political change, and economic change, in a way that was never possible before, and I think that that's something that we should embrace and that we should look at what are the ways that we're going to make it the best of what people can be, as opposed to the worst of what people can be.

Intv 听What have we just seen, particularly in light of, say, the last presidential campaign now, Barack Obama being in office, this sort of transformation of social networking, sort of, coming out of the playtime and actually influencing institutions [and convincing people]?

Gina 听听听So fundamentally, again, social technologies are reflective of human nature, whether it's, you know, connecting you to the people that you know, or connecting you to people around the things that you care about. And when you look at it in that context, everything that people are doing in terms of learning how to connect with other people online, is towards a common goal. So whether that common goal is sharing news articles for fun, or, you know, entertaining themselves by listening to amazing music in the context of a artist fan site, or an artist website, or a MySpace page or a Facebook fan page. All of those skills can actually be used for anything, so we have-, we have a Ning network, the Pickens Plan, which is er here in the United States T. Boone Pickens, who was a-, has been a big oil entrepreneur over the years, is passionate about wind energy. Over 200,000 organisers across 91% of the congressional districts in the United States have come together in a social activism network and changed the course of wind energy policy in the United States. The same exact foundation, the same exact technology is being used for people to express themselves around their tricked-out cars and DUB pages, which is a social network name for people who love to trick out their cars. So as people are actually learning how to use social technologies, they are using them in all sorts of ways, so of course, social technology is going to have a massive impact in terms of how people organise politically, what they do economically, and how they express themselves as being unique individuals in a social way. So I actually think and really look at it as, the skills people are learning across all of these facets of the world um it's not a surprise that they're using them for political activism. And I think that the part about it that is just amazing is the fact that it is global. Ning, when we launched, in 2007 we launched Ning Networks, we had registered users in over a hundred countries, day one. The internet is global, the world is global, and I think that when you look at, you know, the fact that media is global today in a way that it never was before, it is going to have a fundamental impact on the way the world works, and I think that's a good thing.

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Gina 听听听I almost wonder if on some level the problems that we have to tackle as a human race, you know, have presented themselves at the exact same time that the technology to actually address them in a compelling, global way, has also appeared. So, if you look at it, you know, that the kinds of things that we have to solve, as global citizens, we actually have the tools to be able to solve them, in part because of the-, what makes people so special, which is the fact that we're innovators and we are people who can change the world. So, we now have tools, I mean, 25 years ago we didn't have a way to impact the world in one single instant. Today we do, and it's through the internet.
听
Intv 听听Going back to web natives, the people that have only grown up knowing online, is this generation going to be alright? Are the kids going to be doing okay?

Gina 听听 Kids are alright, the kids are alright. No, I absolutely believe that the possibilities and the opportunities for people to live a rich, passionate life that allows them to express themselves in all the ways that they want to, regardless of where they live geographically, I don't think it gets any better than that.

Rushes Sequences - Master Shortie interview - London (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 15:47 UK time, Friday, 27 November 2009

is a nominated British rapper. He's 20 - the same age as the web - and has fully embraced the digital revolution. He constantly promotes his music online, connects with his fans on , Facebook, and , and releases his music virally as well as through mainstream outlets.

Here he talks to Aleks Krotoski about social networking and music piracy, explaining why it's wrong to crack down on fans for downloading music and suggesting other ways for musicians to make money in the digital age, such as touring and merchandise.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Master That um, how I've started out, I did quite a lot of shows like that, I did one at the Roundhouse in Camberwell, just issued an invitation off facebook to a lot of friends that were into my stuff, and then on MySpace as well, and then just kind of spreads out. And then the first one you know, there's X amount of people there, they go off and tell their friends, and it's just you know, it's slow and it's long, but or I could have just gone, loads of money marketing, posters everywhere, I'm performing here at this time, you know I've got that amount of people to go straight away, but it's um, it's more real I suppose if you do it yourself because you know that they're coming to see you cos they want to see you, not because it's been forced in their face.

Aleks 听听听Well there's something else like you, you mentioned before that you use the web to work with producers, you use the web to work with music makers, and do you think that's, that's a part of the personal aspect of the web, I mean are they, are they fans or are they people who are seeking to produce music on record labels

Master On both man like I'm loving that the internet is full of you know the fact that it's music lovers in general and just because you work in music it doesn't mean you stop love, loving music. I'm also a music lover and I'm a fan and I go on as a fan online, as well as an artist and with me doing that, I've helped people to do the same thing with other artists, so it's like a big community online with up and coming R...... rappers, singers, musicians, producers and you know if you, you can literally just bond with a lot of these people online. i.e. with the kind of style of music that they're doing. And then you know with my producer um, labyrinth, I met him um, via a friend, but we really made a connection online and kept in contact online, and from then on you know it's history. We made an amazing album, really created a sound together.

Aleks听听听听there's some people who would, who would like criticise this whole idea that they would say that they'd want you know, go down the traditional route, that this is just a flash in the pan type of thing, that this is you know that, that fans are gonna get tired of this, it's just something that's new, that's not resilient. How do you respond to those kinds of criticisms when it comes to what you're doing, which is essentially marketing and promotion and all that kind of stuff?

Master I don't know maybe they are, it's, to be honest I can't, I can't say anything to those people because um, they're living in the past realistically because um, the, the internet adds, pays a big part in not just music but in more aspects of the media. And that's obvious to see and if you see the statistics prove that you know singles sales you know they dominated by, by iTunes, and not you know physical releases. People have gone to top ten without actually having CD's out, so I, I would love to see them come up with a, a um, a kind of a thing to say to them about, facts are facts, and they just need to you know, move with us.

Aleks 听听听听听 It was amazing actually we were holding your CD before and I couldn't figure out, I'd forgotten how to open a CD case, like that, that nearly freaked me out, this idea of like a jewel case, that somebody...

Master But at the same time I compromised, it's nice to have a CD, it's nice to have it physical in your hand you know of a sleeve and lyrics. Cos in my album I make sure to put the lyrics in there, so again um, if you do go out of your way to spend the extra money in the CD, and the actual time and effort um, I want to make an effort back. So put all the lyrics in there and some wicked pictures, and also with the CD you get bonus tracks which you may not be able to get online, and loads of stuff like that, and also I went down and signed a lot of CDs at a lot of the record stores. And um, I think that there should be a way of you know making something more physical, more you know tangible for a person to be able to hold. But um, until then I think people just don't have the time and life is moving so quickly that, that actually to come out of a busy schedule to go to a record store, spend money on a CD, go, then have to find a CD player to um, play it on, it is, it does work out a bit longer, whereas iTunes is for online, it's download, listen straightaway, whereas HMV, bus home, bedroom, electricity on, put it in, press play, then you listening. And then so you randomly want to listen to it again, you can't it, it's hard man, but I do like CDs because it's, it's nice to have that physical product, at the same time I understand that it is a bit time consuming.

Aleks 听听听听听听听听Well it's also a different craft like in terms of how you produce it, but that's a whole different conversation.

Master yea definitely

Aleks 听听听听Um, the CDs, like you're talking about signing it and you know you're talking about adding a little bit of presence, you're talking about adding that little bit of rarity, that people wouldn't get if they download on MP3s.

Master yea definitely

Aleks 听听听听听so what other ways because there's so much plenty that's available I mean not only is it well, I'll go into that in a second, there's so much plenty when it comes to online content, when it comes to downloading movies or ......... whatever, that people aren't really making as much money are they really?

Master no definitely not

Aleks 听听听So like is a CD, like actually having a physical thing, still where are we going to move back to that as a way of like getting cash flowing through the music industry?

Master I hope, I hope, I hope there is a way to you know go back into having something physical, people also want to buy alongside downloads, I don't think downloading should be abolished or that people should be punished for downloading music because I think that um, it's played a big part within the media, within music and I think um, a lot of the positive things that have um, come out of music in the last you know, ten, twenty years, would never have come about. And you wouldn't be able to watch award ceremonies on TV, wouldn't be able to find out information relating to ...... every five minutes, you wouldn't be able to really um, you know what I mean buy gigs at hotels for every single show of an artist that you like and stuff like that, so um, but I do think that there should be some kind of way of making it physical, maybe not a CD because like I said, like I said that's time consuming, that's only ...... or something, like um, like you may get a free USB key like I, I'm trying to come up with an idea now where with the CD like you, you get like a EPK pack with it or um, if you download my album like we you 听get sent an email with an EPK pack and in that EPK or that kind of media um, package, you get free music you get um, a token which gives you free refusal, first refusals of gig tickets when they come out and the best seats. And you get um, like a free poster, but you can only get it if you buy a download, and little stuff like that, which kind of um, I suppose, persuades people to um, want to buy the actual CD.

Aleks 听听听Well that's I mean that's...

Master Or the actual down, paid download

Aleks 听听听听听听Exactly and that's, that's something that's, that's a real challenge, that the music industry is totally fallen over on because they, they're being overwhelmed with piracy, essentially. You're talking about downloads, are you talking about legal downloads, are you talking about illegal downloads?

Master It's hard because at the same, and also if you give away something free with your um, with your CD for example, or you do a little extra to give back to your fans, you're not liable for chart positioning because you're giving away something free. So it's like then what you don't chart and you don't really get the respect from media, radio to help promote you, and then it's like, it's like you're fighting a losing battle.
But if you, it's, if you're sure of the way that you want to go and you keep going, you can actually really...

Aleks 听听听 Do you think we should crack down on piracy though?

Master Um, no I think, I think um, er, to be honest I think if some, if you're gonna buy the CD right now in, in terms of people that are buying music, if you're buying music, I think they're going to buy the music if they're going to download it, they're going to download it. It's like, it's not gonna persuade the people that want to benefit free or not, because I doubt they'd do it online ........ and it wasn't there, they'd go oh man now I've really got to get on a bus and go and get the CD because I really want that music now, it's like they'll just wait for it to come online right, cos that's, it's not their fault. It's the part of the generation that they've been brought up, you know they've been brought up where it's the norm to just go on lying and quickly download music, so it is not online they'll just wait rather than go get music, so cracking down isn't really going to help. Just, it's just going to um, damage relationships between artists and their fans.

Aleks 听听听 Well you're losing money though aren't you?

Master Yea but then you can make money in other areas by them having your music quick and easy and it's accessible means that they er, also it's easy for them to buy um, merchandise and ........ kits and stuff like that.

Aleks 听听Well music is all about reinventing yourself anyway

Master exactly听

Aleks 听 to stay fresh and all that, so this is, this is basically the internet has offered an opportunity for people to reinvent themselves don't they?

Master Yea definitely yea, you can see, you 听can stay um, relevant as well with um, with being online and stuff like that. And if you're not necessarily putting out music, you can still put out music. And by that I mean you don't need to put music out in the charts and play on the radio, you can just put out a little you know little fun tracks for your fans, and that's automatically building the momentum and you know building fans.

Aleks 听听 Well with all that content that's out there, I mean everybody and their uncle it used to be a lot harder, I mean the bar used to be set a heck of a lot higher because you'd have to get that record contract, if you, you couldn't, there wasn't this as much of an underground vibe, so how do you make yourself heard in this absolute din of everybody and their dog, who's putting out a track on MySpace of facebook or whatever?

Master First of all I believe it has a lot to do with luck um, you know cos um, yea luck plays a big part, and also being different and relating to people for example there's X amount of people that relate to me personally, worry about dress, what I'm talking about, and are into the same kind of music, music as me, and then kind of that's, that makes it a lot easier as well. But if um, loads of people are doing the same kind of music, it becomes saturated and then that's when it's hard. But um, I believe I'm unique enough and I, I'm myself and I'm different to everybody, for it to you know stand out amongst the rest.

Aleks 听听听How often do you talk with your fans, cos you're talking a lot about you know, how, I mean, how often do you tweet, cos you're on twitter as well.

Master Everyday like I'm, I'll twitter in a second, before I came here, twittered for, I'm always twittering and always you know, trying to reply to some of them, obviously sometimes I can't cos sometimes they're just like hello, and it's just like, if I say hello back, and they say you know but um, you know asking important questions and stuff like that and concerns that they may have ..........I'll always, I always reply back to them cos it makes it that more personal you know and they remember you know what I mean um, it's like when musicians, it's like when back in the day when people used to take pictures of somebody, somebody who was nice and ........ that time, they can always remember that moment, and I believe they'll be a fan for longer and really support them, so that's what I'm trying to do.

Aleks 听听 How you are promoting yourself, you're marketing yourself?

Master yes

Aleks 听听听 How has the internet made that possible in a way that you wouldn't have done before?

Master I think that is, that is what the internet is what made it possible. Um, um, I remember um, I'm able to reach loads of people at one specific time quickly, at the drop of a hat. whereas if not I'd have to do you know, promoting, word of mouth, phone calls and stuff like that, whereas I could just put out a message and send it to about you know four hundred to four thousand people in like, like that. So that's good, it's a lot easier, and also um, in terms of like videos and the visual stuff as well, like I can put online videos, I can put online not just music.

Aleks 听听听 And what about collaborating not just with producers, but maybe with other artists, do, have you, have you been stretched by the web in terms of being creative?

Master Yea definitely well um, that's, that's originally that's how I was getting into studios, it was hooking up with people that had a studio that was available and that would normally be collaborating with artists that actually ..... MySpace. Now that my profile is a bit, you know is a bit um, a bit larger um, I can also talk to other artists that are also in the same limelight as me and collaborate with them.

Aleks 听听So if it's okay for people to download your stuff for free, you're losing money?

Master Um, yea correct but at the same time um, I can gain money in other areas, i.e. merchandising, touring, it means that people that would never have been able to hear my music because they didn't have the money or the know, know abouts of where to buy my album, can still hear my music, and still get involved in my projects.

Aleks 听听听听 now that's you individual entrepreneur, you know self made man, but those people, like record companies, who are losing the grip on this thing because of piracy you know, they're out there and they're suing people. They're trying to you know, they're trying to take down people like me or other people who would download music for free. What do you think about that heavy handed approach?

Master No I think it's definitely wrong, I think um, this is you know um, taking it a little, a little bit too far, cos at the end of the day the people that, if you're gonna download music, I think that you're gonna download music. If you're gonna pay for it, you're gonna pay for it. Um, for example if you go out to, you're online and you search a track that you like or any kind of illegal um, website, um, and it's not there, people aren't going to go running to the shops that very moment and really, really try and get their ten pounds together, so they can go and buy the album. They're pretty much just gonna wait um, for the track to go, to become available online, and still get it for free, and if you're gonna buy it, you're gonna buy it. But um, again I, it's, another thing is that it could, it's, could, maybe not even down to the people that download for free because, the generation that are listening to music now, part of the whole internet um, generation, and therefore they don't know any better, like it's just their norm, they don't, they haven't you know grown up, their mums and dads haven't brought them into HMV to go round and by CDs so, it, it's the norm, like everybody in their school class, everyone that they, they're with on a day to day basis will download music and they just think that's the way. But I'm finding that because it means that my music gets to more people and that will in the long run, they will hopefully end up buying my product but in you know, much more of a vast amount. And you know punishing people for doing it, for you know liking your music and you've damaged the relationship between the artist and your fans.

Rushes Sequences - Nicholas Carr interview - USA (Video)

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Post categories: Brains,听Changing humanity,听Distraction,听Programme four,听clips and rushes,听interviews,听learning,听rushes,听video

Dan Biddle | 17:32 UK time, Thursday, 26 November 2009

( is author of several acclaimed books on technology, writes for numerous publications (including the article ) and . The programme four team met with Nick to expand upon the concerns he voiced in his post on this very blog: the loss of the contemplative mind to the new 'skittering' mental processes encouraged by the web's way of thinking.听

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Nick 听听听I think the price we pay for having easy access to so much information usually quick access to so much information is is we sacrifice some of the depth of our of our engagement with that information. 听So the kind of jumping hopping from bit to bit to bit clicking on links takes the place of what used to be a more er contemplative I I think approach to thinking about one thing. 听Er whether its one piece of information or the argument or the narrative of a book erm it becomes much harder I think when you're bombarded by information and other stimuli as you are all the time on the web to sit down and really focus on one particular thing. 听Erm an' so we g' we gain kind of a breadth of engagement with information but the cost is I think a certain superficiality in our relationship to that information.听

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Nick 听听 Yeah erm I - you know throughout my life I've - books have played an important role in them and I've always found it easy to immerse myself in a book and get engaged in an argument or a narrative but a few years ago as my use of the web kind of picked up I found it much much harder to sit down and engage with a book. 听After a page or two my mind would start wandering - I'd er kind of loose the focus - have to go back a coup' - er go back a page to to to reconnect with the argument and at 听first you know I thought ok may be this is just general you know age or something that that's causing this. 听But what I noticed is that the sensation I had when I tried to read or really concentrate on anything was that my brain my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I'm at my computer or online. 听It wanted to check email it wanted to click on links and jump from page to page er 听so it really - I began to make the connection that you know in in in really in a unmistakable way my use of the net was changing the way I think er in changing my ability to do things like concentrate or or or contemplate one particular er piece of information or or read through 100 pages of a book. 听An' I I began talking to the other people an' many of them - not all of them but many of them had a very very similar - were suffering from a similar type of affliction. 听They they felt that they were - had increasingly scatterbrained an' an' they wanted to be online and they wanted to get information very very quickly and they didn't want to sit still an' an' concentrate on anything.

Intv 听听听听听听You mentioned that if you were to design the perfect vehicle for brain distraction it would be the internet - it would be the web - can you illuminate that - tell me that and why that might be?

Nick 听听The human brain like any animal brain is attuned to distraction. 听In a sense it wants to be distracted - it wants to see what's going on in its surroundings so you know its not - it doesn't miss some source of food or isn't attacked by you know a tiger or something. 听Erm and if you look at the way the internet bombards us with stimuli not only hyperlinks and different pages of information but alerts you know from face book updates to twitter alerts to er you know incoming email and even our phones going off all the time - it creates in in a sense an environment of information that plays to our desire to or our need to be distracted. 听And so it becomes very difficult to keep a focus on anything when you know five different things are happening at once on your screen or or you know between your screen and your smart phone and so forth an' and its just its just all sorts of environmental stimuli that come through you know this this information medium an' keep us pretty much permanently distracted when we're online.

---------------------听

Intv 听听What's the argument - what is this link between possibly you and some of the other people think that - deep reading and deep thinking - what's the link between those two things and what is a good quality of deep reading and deep thinking?

Nick 听听 What reading did for us in particular book reading is it slowed us down - it it took us away from our natural distractedness and forced us to focus on one thing - on a book on a line of argument on a line of text literally often from hundreds of pages in in hours on end and that's a very different er type of thinking that w' than we're kind of naturally used to. 听So so the book promoted a kind of in depth engagement with ideas - a kind of 听very deep thinking concentrated thinking contemplative introspective thinking which er in many ways is kind of a unique aspect of that particular medium - the the print on page medium that we that we'd never saw before at least not broadly until the book became popular 500 600 years ago.

Intv 听听Tell me why people think it's a good thing to think and to think big - why is that a good useful tool for humans to engage?

Nick 听听I think I think the great value of thinking deeply an' reading deeply an' concentrating in general is that we begin to develop a unique personality a unique intellect that's ours and ours alone and that requires I think deep thought an' an' in the ability to make our own associations and our own connections about things we understand deeply inside our own minds rather than 听relying on you know the the the associations and connections that might be out in the world and that we might access through hyperlinks for instance. 听So er I I I really think that the the human self and the human personality becomes much richer when we can slow down and when we can think deeply an' and engage with information in more than just kind of a cursory manner.

---------------------听

Intv 听听听听听听What are the worries is the first generation have may be grown up online have only used the web - what are our big worries as they enter the workplace - do we think we're going to see these traits?

Nick 听听 Well I'm I'm a little nervous about drawing a sharp distinction between what we call you know generation web or digital natives in older people adults because what - I think that's too too - that that lets adults off the hook an' they can say oh you know as they always say oh this younger generation they're you know going to hell or whatever. 听An' an' really the effects of the internet I 听think are the same on adults as on younger kids an' an' younger adults an' if you look at the statistics its people in the twen' later 20s 30s 40s 50s who are online much more er of the time than say teenagers. 听Erm so so I would hate to to have the focus on generation web you know make it seem as though though older people aren't affected by the internet because I think they are. 听And I think what we see in young people - the the distractedness the inability to you know read more than 2 pages at a time is probably coming to to characterise older people in in every generation as well. 听Having said that you know I think obviously the - the brain is is - the human brain is malleable throughout the 听course of anybody's life but it's particularly mal' malleable of course when you're young. 听So if if a person is brought up looking at screens an' an' an' using the web and being bombarded by information then then the question is will the brain circuits circuitry necessary to do things like deep reading deep thinking - will those circuits ever 听even come into being - will they be wired for that kind of thinking or will they be wired completely for internet type of thinking for for er taking in lots of information very very quickly. 听Erm an' I think that's the big fear is that w' we'll end up er with with a generation of people who are very good at using the net and very good at finding information and and processing information very quickly but don't really have any capacity for 听contemplativeness or for concentration er for deep engagement with information.听

Intv 听听听听听听Is there this big distinction or should we be making a big distinction about information and knowledge what the web provides is information for what we're using is our ability to know what to process that information in a knowledgeable way.

Nick 听听Well people always get into semantic discussions about what's information what's knowledge what's wisdom and I think those are important discussions but I think what the what the web does - what the net does goes much deeper than that. 听It's not just the form of the information we're taking in it's our ability to make sense of that information to process that information. 听So it's it's - I think it's at a very deep level in our brain that an' the more we use the web the more we train ourselves to skip very very quickly among many pieces of information er an' we lose the ability to stop an' concentrate and so you could say that the the the outcome of that will be - will have you know access an' an ability to process huge amounts of little snippets of information but we'll we'll kind of begin to sacrifice the ability to er create the associations ourselves among those bits of information that I think lead to er true knowledge an' an' ultimately wisdom

Rushes Sequences - general views - aerial shots of San Francisco (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 17:21 UK time, Thursday, 26 November 2009

GVs (general views) of San Francisco from the air, taken by the Programme Three team filming on location.

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Rushes Sequences - Lee Tien interview - USA (Video)

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Post categories: Advertising,听Programme three,听clips and rushes,听free,听interviews,听privacy,听rushes,听video

Dan Biddle | 14:26 UK time, Thursday, 26 November 2009

is Senior Staff Attorney at the specialising in Free Speech law. He met with the programme three team to discuss the costs of 'free' services on the web, and the potential dangers of the increasing amounts of personal information we share online and with mobile devices.

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Intrv 听听 How might we give up personal information.

Lee 听听听 One way in which you'll give up personal information is obviously erm, by clicking on one thing or another that reveals the sorts of things you are interested in, but er, how would they get from that to actually figuring out, for instance, who you are. Erm well its well know in the.............. that er, things like your birth day, your gender, erm and your postal code or zip code, er, will allow people to figure out who you actually are, what your true name is. Now how might a website get that information from you, er, well lets say you want to sign up for a horoscope, then you are going to give them your birthday, and probably tell them whether or not you are a man or a women. Then maybe you want to find out what your local weather is erm, probably the easiest way to do that is to put in your postal code or zip code, and bingo they have got 3 pieces of information that are going to make it really easy for them to figure out exactly out who you are.

Intrv 听 And how do they actually do that, they can use that to cross reference.

Lee 听听 Well that's right I mean there's an enormous amount of, of public record data that's available about people, erm, and certainly in the United States for instance, erm, there are lots and lots of records. Some of these are voting er, ......, erm other kinds of public records that will contain peoples true name and address and gender, so what they can do is they can figure out erm, by cross linking those records with the information they have and say oh, well you know, this is the only person in this postal code erm, who is of that age erm and of that gender, and that way they will be able to figure out who you are.

Intrv 听听Is personal information more valuable than cash.

Lee 听听 Its hard to say just how valuable personal information er, on the web is. I think that most companies would rather have cash to start with but the information is coming to them almost for free. Erm, that is the er, your quick stream data just comes to the website, comes to advertisers er, without your, without your actually having to do anything other than just going er, going and clicking on things. So it's a very, very cheap and unobtrusive erm, 听form of ............. I mean probably the best thing about it is that its so unobtrusive, you don't know er, you're giving it up and so its seems entirely free to you. And then the consequences of it, maybe you get certain kinds of ads, maybe you get er, telephone solicitations. 听 But you have no way of knowing that that's because, you know you clicked on 17 things on these 5 websites, and 听so whatever it 听is that you are paying for you don't really make a connection to the er information you are giving up. And I think you know, frankly people see cash, individuals see cash differently because its something that comes straight out of their pocket, erm, the information they give up, they don't see it leaving and they don't know what anyone's doing with it.

Intrv 听听How do we pay when we visit a free website.

Lee 听听听Well when you visit a supposedly free website, its sort of like a sophisticated version of watching free TV, erm, you know, there is content that's being presented to you, erm, somebody's paying for it, how do they get paid back. Well in the, you know, the old TV world, at least in the United States where its, you know, based on ads, erm, what's really happening is the content is a product that's sold to advertisers, and what are advertisers buying, advertisers are buying audience, and so they pay to be able to put their advertisement in front of you. And the same thing is happening on the web, advertisers pay websites in order to put ads in front of them. The main sort of extra dimension on the web is that they're also paying for the information that they get from when you visit websites, to help them decide which ads they want to target, they want to put ads. And you know, TV is a non and interactive media, right, they don't know you are watching, erm, with the web its, the information stream goes both ways. When you pick, click on something they know you spend a certain amount of time on it. They may know you spent more time on an article about erm, er, contraceptives than about er, er, breast cancer, and all this kind of information about what it is that you're interested in gets used by advertisers to figure out how they are going to target erm, then it goes a step further right, I mean because they're building up, essentially profiles, they are building up dossiers and files about the people who visit various websites. Erm, and they will be able to glean that, you know, you are a person who likes to travel, you are a person who er, likes to cook and so on and so forth. And being able to target you as a person for those kinds of ads is again something that advertisers are worth paying, are will to pay for. Because advertising in the ordinary world is an extremely inefficient media that you are sending an ad to lots and lots of people and what percentage of those people are actually likely to or willing to you know, buy your goods or services. The amount of information that's available about people's preferences on the web enables them to be much more precise in how they advertise and therefore how they, how they sell.

--------------------------------------------听

Lee 听听 The rise of, of mobile applications and location based services is, is going to be a huge privacy nightmare. Erm, because very simply you know, your place is a sensitive thing, you know, there are many, many places that seem innocuous erm, but there are many others that actually again like what you read, er, say things about you, you know, the er, if you go to an alcoholics anonymous meeting, erm, if you visit an oncologist for, who specialises in, in cancer, erm you know, if you visit a bar, you know, these are all places where you are simply being there says something about you that might be viewed er, as stigmatising or at the very least, something that you don't want others to know about, and in a way I think that, that this sort of 听goes under peoples radar, they don't think about erm, the, how meaningful er, location can be, you know, then you add in that you know, its not just location er, parse but its location combined with time erm, you know, staying at a hotel you know, overnight is one thing, going to that hotel er, regularly er, during the lunch hour er, is yet another thing, and the ability to gather data about 听location over time you know, creates the possibility of seeing erm, these patterns in your behaviour, er, and making some very strong inferences about what you do and what kind of a person you are. And then of course you know maybe an additional wrinkle is not just about you right, its also about the people that you are with, because if my mobile phone is being tracked and another persons mobile phone is being tracked, when you connect those dots on a, on a more grand 24-7 basis, you'll see when you know, these dots are together and er, where they're not. There's a great example from a, a several years ago, researches in Cambridge I believe were doing a study of what were calling ambient Blue Tooth activity. They want to know back in the day before Blue Tooth devices were really common, you know, well just how may Blue Tooth devices are there. And so all the folks worked in the lab, erm, had their Blue Tooth devices on in promiscuous mode. Well when they were analysing the data they were able to see that two of these devices were always sinking together erm, Friday evenings and Saturday evenings, erm, and they could see from the data that you know, that one of these was a man in the office, and the other was a women, and so they were easily able to infer that these two were a couple outside the office, even though no one knew, or would have guessed from their in office behaviour. Erm, you know the potential for location tracking to reveal not just information about yourself but about the relationships you have with other people, is, is er, unparallel and that's one reason why we are so concerned about location privacy.

Rushes Sequences - Terry Winograd interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 13:47 UK time, Thursday, 26 November 2009

is Professor of Computer Science at , USA. He specialises in .听He met with the programme three team to discuss the way in which search engines work, determine page rank and deliver results to our queries online.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Alexi 听听听听Terry what was the idea behind the research, this notion of page rank?

Terry 听听听听They started doing the research in an era when people had just begun to do search engines on the web. 听The web started off, erm, really the idea, there was a bunch of interesting stuff and you browsed, you surfed. 听You went from page to page saw what was there and that was fun. 听Erm, and then people realised that there was enough interesting and serious stuff, they might want to actually go somewhere, where they could find something they wanted. 听So a number of people at different places erm, created what were called search engines. 听Erm and the basic idea was that you create an index that let you find where things are in the web. 听So if you have here, and this is sort of a sketch of what it might be, web pages, each of these boxes is a page, a, b, c, and d. 听Each one has certain words in it, television, computer, circuit, whatever it is. 听And each one can have links, where the links point to another page. 听So, this page on computers and net's may point to this one for televisions and computers and so on. 听Now, what they realised, this is before Google, with the people doing the original 'spiders' they were called on the web. 听What the spiders could do, is they could give them the address, give the computer the address of this page. 听The computer could make a list of all the words that were on that page and also, find this page, cause there was a link. 听Then it would go to this page, make a list of all the words on that page and then it could follow the links there. 听And computers had gotten fast enough and powerful enough and the web was small enough, that you could actually build a complete index. 听So you'd end up with something, think of the index in the back of a book, so the word computer appears in pages a, b, and d, the word television appears on this page and so on. 听So I went to AltaVista let's say, which was one of these early search engines and I typed in computer, it would look in the index it had made and it would give me a search, a list of results that said, a, b, d, and so on. And this made it possible to go find something on the web, instead of just browsing around and seeing where you got to.

Alexi 听听听听But the problem of course is that, if somebody said computer a thousand times, because that was the key word that was being searched, it would push the result up and it wouldn't necessarily be the most

Terry 听听听听Exactly, so they have to decide, if there are three results, it's not problem, but if there's a hundred results or a thousand results, which ones do you show? 听And how do you know that a, is more interesting than d, or be is more interesting than d? 听So the question of what was interesting, what was irrelevant, wasn't addressed by having just a regular index like this. So, the problem really, here's where Google, the founders of Google came in, Serge and Larry decided, that they could do a better job of, finding the interestingness, the relevance, what makes a page something you want to see, other than just that it happens to have the words that you search for.

Alexi 听听听And how did they go about identifying interestingness, because that's a very subjective idea, isn't it?

Terry 听 So interestingness is of course subjective, and there is no, what plays things like Yahoo did, is, had human beings go through and say, here's an interesting page, here's an interesting page. 听That was the, the people, Yahoo was the most famous now, but there were a lot of people in that era, who would go through and check out pages. 听And again that worked when the web was very small.

Alexi 听听听听Exactly that would not scale

Terry 听 And as the web gets bigger you can't have higher people to go out and look at all the pages. 听So the question is, how do you get people who you don't hire, to in some sense give you judgements on which pages are interesting. And they had a very interesting sort of metaphor for this, which is, imagine a crowd of people all surfing the internet. 听So you take millions of people, start them out all over the internet, and they get to a page and they'll follow a link and from there maybe they'll follow another link. 听Now if you could actually get millions of people and all the paths they take, you would see that traffic would end up concentrating on certain places. 听A lot of people would end up here on this page and only a few people went on this page. 听Then when you've got around to giving your search results, you would give the ones that got a lot of this virtual traffic. 听Now this is not actual people going, cause you don't have millions of people, you don't have data on that. 听But you can imagine, where would they go.

Alexi 听听听So in, so if we kind of take this outside of the web, this would be like places in a City, that have a lot of people driving through it, for example, it's a particular junction, it's an important building or something like that. 听That's what these websites, that's what the search algorithm identified?

Terry 听听听That's what would decided what's the most relevant, what's the most interesting. 听So, there's no, there is no simple way to actually get that data. 听Because the people who know where other people went on the web are only the service providers and they don't give that information. 听But what they realised is, if they used links, they could get an approximation of how interesting pages were. So they built a second index, which, not only kept track of what words were on each page, but were, it was linked from, so, you might here say that page b, has a link coming in from a, and a link coming in from x. 听

So they actually had information that gave them the full link structure of the web, where does every link go from and to. 听Then they could take this and they applied a mathematical algorithm, it's called the page rank algorithm. 听Which was intended to basically simulate in some sense, the result of what would happen if you had an infinite number of monkeys. 听If you put thousands, millions of millions of people on the web and let them just start browsing. 听And the result that they can get out of running this algorithm, which of course didn't require millions and billions of things going on, erm, was a good approximation that page b, lets say is the one that would get the most traffic of a, b, and d. 听So then when you search for computer, it brings b to the top of your listing.

Alexi 听听听听So if a page had a lot of people going to it or referencing it, then that would increase its interestingness, it would increase its reputation?

Terry 听 It's a little bit like in academics, were you have citations. 听So I write an academic paper and I say, see so and so's paper from such and such year. 听That indicates that, that's an interesting paper. 听And it's sort of the same thing here, if you have lots of links pointing to you, that indicates that a lot of people have decided you're interesting enough to put in a link pointing to you. 听So that's really the basis of the algorithm.

Turning the tables: Digital Revolution interviewed by the interviewees

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Dan Biddle | 14:29 UK time, Friday, 20 November 2009

Digital Revolution has spent the last few months interviewing some of the most influential, inspirational and engaged individuals on the web today, asking how the web is changing world economies, nation states, human behaviour, and levelling the media.

Only natural, then, in this connected company, that the production teams wouldn't be able to cling to the 'old-media' film maker's听luxury of the camera pointing only at the documentary subject; and certainly folly to imagine that the interviewer would retain a monopoly of the questions.

Here are a few examples of these moments where the film crew and Aleks have become the subjects of their subjects' own films and, of course, put them on the web for the world to view.

1 - Tim Berners-Lee 'Ghana Aleks Krotoski: turning the tables'

travelled to with the programme one team, during which he gave an interview to the team (you can find a rushes sequence of that interview here). But not before he'd had some fun of his own and put Aleks on the spot to explain her thoughts on the web and its effects on the world.

from on .

2 - The 成人快手 visit my place for the 'Digital Revolution' documentary

The programme four team find themselves discussing camera lenses and 听in the light of the camera's eye as they prepare to interview 's .

3 - 成人快手's Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk) is a 'Woman of Mystery'

At the same shoot, presenter Aleks Krotoski is caught tweeting in the kitchen by her prospective interviewee,听听and faces her own moment in Ben's spotlight.

Is this a glimpse of the future of open source documentary - an infinite feedback loop of camera on camera study and interplay? The new age of the '' and 'interviewerees'?

The big web test - UCL - 14 November 2009

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David Nicholas | 09:25 UK time, Friday, 20 November 2009

(Professor David Nicholas is the Director of the at , a group which specialises in evaluating behaviour in the digital environment using deep log analysis techniques. The group has evaluated behaviour in the news, health, charity and scholarly fields and, perhaps, is most widely know through its work in evaluating the behaviour of the . The following post is published with kind permission and represents David's views; this does not necessarily reflect the views of the 成人快手 or the Digital Revolution production.)

Image: the groups taking part in the experiments 14 November 2009, outside UCL, London. Click to view full size image.

Saturday 14th November saw a unique experiment take place at UCL. The CIBER research group at UCL, experts at evaluating human behaviour in cyberspace, together with the 成人快手 Digital Revolution team ran a scientific experiment with the general public, which we believe has never ever been undertaken before. The experiment sought to characterise and evaluate information seeking behaviour by tracking what our volunteers did online and relating it to demographic background (age and gender), memory and multi-tasking ability. Nearly 100 people of various ages and backgrounds took part in the experiment, which required them to undertake a number of cognitive tests and Web searches. The test was filmed and will appear in the final programme of Digital Revolution in 2010.

The experiment will be rolled out to the nation in the New Year via the 成人快手's LabUK. The findings of the experiments will help us understand the meaning of the millions of digital 'footprints' which people leave behind them every time they use the Web and which have been captured by CIBER researchers using a technique called deep log analysis. We have a detailed understanding of the footprints, they tell us for instance that we skitter or bounce along the surface of the Web very rarely penetrating very far or dwelling very long, but we do not know why and this is what the 成人快手 experiment will tell us.

Image: the groups taking part in the experiments 14 November 2009, outside UCL, London. Click to view full size image.

Rushes Sequences - Chris Anderson interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 17:47 UK time, Thursday, 19 November 2009

is Editor of 听and author of several books exploring the economies of the web. He joined Aleks Krotoski and the programme three team to discuss the nature of the web's free content, and the bargains we make, explicit or otherwise, while enjoying the web's apparently gratis services.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Chris 听听听 One could definitely argue that Google is an advertising company, it's you know, lots of people do search. We can argue that Google search is significantly better or worse than, than Microsoft's or anybody else's. Um, but its hold over advertising is unmatched and it's not, it's not just its model that the sort of pay per click, the matching of content and advertising that's so relevant. But the fact that it has a critical mass of growth. Um, what you, if you have a critical mass of search terms, in other words, people using Google as a search engine and, and you know the largest pool of ads against which to run. To run against these search terms, you're able to match them better. And um, and if you can match them better, advertisers are inclined to use you more and it becomes a sort of self reinforcing, positive feedback route. Um, what Google does, it has is not such a monopoly on search. its switching costs of search are pretty, you know one click away. What it has beginnings of a monopoly over internet advertising?

Alex 听听听听听听Are people aware of what they're trading when they contribute to the Google machine?听

Chris 听听I think people are on, whether explicitly or implicitly, pretty aware of what the trade off is, and um, I don't think that, that's explicit, I don't think that's necessarily just for Google. I think you know as we go online, um, the deal is relatively straightforward. So when you go on Amazon and you click, and as you click through from product to product, you start to see the recommendations appear, either based on your past history or more typically your sessions. You know as you start looking for cameras, you start to see people who click who, who looked at this also looked at that, people who bought this, er, people who clicked at this, bought that. Um, you know in this, the course of your clicking, the service becomes more useful to you. They ex, the implicit, and for many people the explicit trade off is that in exchange for watching over your shoulder, as you shop, we will help you shop better. And no one seems to have any problem with this because, because you know this is, they trust Amazon, and this is the you know, if you go into a store and er, the store assistant says can I help you. And if the store assistant is good, and you're feeling like you need help, er, you know you'll go through this little communication, here's what I'm looking for, what do you think of that, what do you think of that, and a little bit more of this, the advice will get better and better and better and eventually you will get what you want. Amazon does this exact same thing, so there's nothing new about this trade off. In the same way that you don't, that um, you know that in the stores as, as the assistant helps you shop, you are choosing to give up information about your preferences for the sake of a better experience, you do so as well in Amazon. 听if you don't want to give up personal information you just don't have to log in to Amazon, you can do it anonymously. Um, Google um, works the same way um, er, you type in your search term, Caribbean holiday. And Google will give you a useful set of results and they will also give you some ads um, on the site. and as your term gets more and more specific, you know maybe a date range, a price range and things like that, um, the ads will get more and more specific and more and more relevant. Um, you know presumably at certain points not only are the search terms what you're looking for, but the ads are what you're looking for as well. And so you now have two sets of results to choose from. Now you can, if the one on the right side, the ads, is actually even better than the one in the middle column, you will choose that one, and you will click there, it's your choice. And so you know Google knows what you're interested in right now, do they know who you are and do they have a profile of you. Not in any real sense um, but they are watching as you, as you click and but they, but because we trust Google to, to watch for the right reason, which is to give us better results, we're okay with this.

Alex 听听This implicit or this explicit trade, suggests to me听

DIRECTION听

Alex 听听This implicit and explicit relationship, this trade off that we have with Google, with Amazon, suggests that actually the web isn't free, is that, would you say that would, would you say that the web is free?

Chris 听听So there's two ways to look at this, um, there's the pure monetary definition of free, and then there's the sort of the broader definition of free, of an exchange of value. Um, the web is for you know, for, you know if you choose to make it so, 听 the web is very much free from the monetary perspective you know, once you've paid for access, once you've paid your way in the door, your internet service provider whatever, um, you can pretty much get what you want at no additional cost. Um, that's from a strictly monetary perspective in terms of you know, just taking out your wallet and paying cash. Um, but I think that the, looking through, looking at the world through the lens of pure monetary value is not the right way to do it anymore. I think we now realise that there are other forms of value that we, we sometimes actually value even more. there's time, there's attention um, there's, there's reputation um, when I, you know a, I can get music two ways. I can go to bit torrent sort of like I know that all music is out there for free um, I can go to bit torrent and I can hunt around and find it and download it, and it will be free. Or I can go to iTunes and pay ninety nine cents. Um, which so er, because I'm older, I have more money than time, so I'll go to iTunes, it's faster, it's convenient. I'm paying for a convenience fee. 听I'm not really paying for music, I'm paying for convenience.听

Um, my kids are younger, they have more time than money, they'll, actually they don't, but just project that they might go to bit torrent and download and download for free. So um, the time, money calculus is two dimensions of value. um, we know that time is money right, this is not an original idea but it's quite explicitly manifest on the internet today. Um, you know most of human activity is done without an exchange of, of money. You for the record are not paying me for this interview; you know I for the record am not paying you for this publicity. Um, you know when my, I have my children do not pay me to drop them off at school, my you know, I do, I, my wife doesn't pay me for washing the dishes um, you know most human activity is done er, to cement social bonds of, of various sorts. Now these social bonds turn out to be more important to us than money. If um, you know if my, if, if um, my wife paid me for doing the dishes, it would actually devalue our relationship, it would undermine the social ties that hold us together. If the only thing holding us together is payment for services rendered then we don't have a marriage. We have a contractual relationship um, so the difference, you know this has always been true from the time immemorial, the difference about the internet is this is now being done on a global level. so you know when I tweet for free, I am exchanging information um, for the sake of reputational credits, people will follow my tweets, I'll get more followers, I may be able to then use that celebrity of some sort, to achieve my own ends, whatever, whatever they may, may be. So I give away content to acquire repetition or attention credits, which I then store until I want to spend them.

Rushes Sequences - Chad Hurley interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 16:38 UK time, Wednesday, 18 November 2009

is co-founder and Chief Executive of . He met with the Digital Revolution programme three team to discuss the rise and empowerment of the amateur online, YouTube as an outlet for people to self-broadcast their content, and how they made that into a successful business.听

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Intvr 听 User Generated content, I know you kind of describe it as things like a mass amateurisation of culture or something, erm how do you respond when you hear something like that?

Chad 听听听Well its great, that means everybody has a chance to be seen, erm I, I think in the past erm again the, the traditional models would survive around scarcity, which I don't think necessarily is healthy for society, for ultimately a few people to have the control of the creation of all the content within the world, and then have the control of all the distribution of the content in the world. 听Now with the Internet erm people have access to create and distribute on they're own, erm people can share they're own thoughts and feelings, experiences, talents, erm which I think is a great thing, erm ultimately, again kind of comparing where we were in the past with where we are today and moving into the future, erm even within that, you know previously kind of controlled environment, you had hundreds of organisations, thousands of organisations, creating 听 a massive amount of content, with only, you know potentially a handful erm of, of that material being erm I guess erm quality, the, you look at the amount of movies that are produced on an annual basis, and the ones at the end of the year that end up winning an Oscar, erm you know relatively small. 听Erm, you know now when you take this erm model and you empower the rest of the world with opportunity to create they're content, of course, your going to have a lot of stuff that you know potentially is being produced, erm it isn't meaningful to anyone in particular, erm but aga, again your gong to have a small amount of the, the content or individuals having opportunity to rise to the top, so its just the numbers are different, the numbers are much bigger and you know you can point to, and always try to stereotype what You Tube or other services are all about, that its just amateur, you know its about funny cat videos, erm these types of things but they loose sight of the fact that we have you know a factor of a hundred thousand time more, more people and actually creating quality content than we ever had in the past.

Intvr 听听听听听 Platforms is that some of they're exploiting people's labour, you know they're creating the content and erm your monitising it, so somehow our kind of they're being turned into free labour for you, is that I mean is that fair?

Chad 听听 Well we wouldn't exist if people weren't creating content. I mean that's the bottom line, that's I always tell people we're the stage erm they're the performers, erm but I don't look at us as, as a service that's trying to exploit that. 听What we're trying to do is just provide the opportunities, erm that didn't exist before, free opportunities for them to do so, erm if they don't want to post to You Tube, or if they, you know have existing content that they want to take down, they're always free to do so, we, we're not 听 trying to control them or they're content or they're experience, erm but we're ultimately always just trying to give them access to the, to the platform, to cost effectively distribute they're content, and get in front of a global audience, erm that wasn't I guess aggregated before.

Intvr 听听听听听 What characterises the best videos on the web, what makes them go viral?听

Chad 听听听I guess that's the, the big million dollar question is the you know what's the secret formula, erm but again, I, I guess it has, its not any different than what it was in the past, you know what's the formula to creating an Oscar winning movie. 听Erm, you know Emmy winning TV show, its, its always going to, you know people looking for that same solution, but ultimately there is no, you know magic answer, erm to that question, its erm its giving people the tools, erm and a select few having the talent to, to create, creating something compelling, erm but I guess it depends on what your looking for, like again people always like to stereotype what You Tube's all about, or what's popular, and of course some of the, you know natural kind of human element stuff is always going to rise to the top, you know humour and other things that are outrageous or shocking, erm there's something that people want to pass around and share with one another, but you, from time to time just have inspirational stories, you have erm political candidates leveraging the system. You have, you know people just capturing moments, erm be it you know a local event happening within they're town or you know protests or what's happened in Iran erm, people capturing these moments and having, now a chance to share them with the world and erm people using it as a resources to be informed and, and what I think it does, you know when 听you see the personal side of people just capturing everyday life is that it, it breaks down cultural barriers. 听Erm in the past I think people have just kind of consumed they're knowledge, or I guess they're, they're perception of the world just through media, which erm again isn't always erm unbiased, erm but when you start seeing everyday life, from everyday people on the streets, no matter what country they live in erm I think it adds a very 听 personal element erm to that, that people can connect with. 听And they start understanding that they have families, they have feelings, they have dreams, erm just like I do erm and not hearing just the erm the bias stories that they would tune in and see on the, on the news. 听Erm, so in that way I think erm, that's 听 really what erm has surprised me through this process, beyond just looking for that, you know special formula of what makes a video popular, I just, I love to hear about the powerful examples of how You Tube's been able to just affect culture in general.

Intvr 听听听听听 Can I move on them just to think about erm sort of social, I mean do you think you've seen kind of I don't know how many hundreds or thousands or millions of You Tube videos.

Chad 听听听听听听A few.听

Intvr 听听听听听 Yeah a few, erm has you know what we're calling that kind of generation web are they more in sophisticated in they're understanding of media, that kind of viral culture, you know erm do you think you know do they see the world differently to you know a generation, you know probably my generation?

Chad 听听听Yeah I, I think its going to be pretty amazing to see how the next generation erm like evolves, if you want to call it that. 听Erm because of they're access to technology, but ultimately they're, they're access to information, erm I think education is being re-defined, its not necessarily about memorisation its about erm finding, searching for answers erm you have an infinite amount of resources available to you, erm or information available to you, and I think, people with this next generation erm I guess are much 听 more knowledgeable about any topic erm that you can think of, that also erm sometimes people think of, of I guess the, the dangers of people trying to trick individuals with the erm deceiving them with information that's not correct, the posting rumours and. 听But again I think erm 听this next generation is potentially more wary, or I guess conscious of that, that they, they are making they're own decisions, they understand if they're you know reading a post or, or you know about to click on a link you know, where that's going to take them. 听So I think everyone's now is kind of, of conscious of how of maybe people are trying to shape they're thoughts or feelings, erm but erm again that's not any different than what has happened in the past. 听I think erm different news organisations have different takes on you know just even one particular event, especially when you talk about the, you know the political system. 听Erm, so when you, when you pick up a newspaper or turn on the television, you know news programme at the end of the day, erm they're trying to represent they're point of view, which people would always have to kind of take with a grain of salt, I guess if you will. 听But now people are I guess more conscious of that happening across the web.听

Rushes Sequences - general views - San Francisco (2) (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 15:31 UK time, Wednesday, 18 November 2009

GVs (general views) of San Francisco, taken by the Programme Three team filming on location.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Rushes Sequences - general views - New York (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 13:24 UK time, Wednesday, 18 November 2009

GVs (general views) of New York shot by the Programme Three team filming on location.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

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Rushes Sequences - John Battelle interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 16:38 UK time, Tuesday, 17 November 2009

is a journalist, a founder of , and Chairman of . He joined the Digital Revolution team to discuss the power of adwords, the paradigm shift imposed upon marketing and businesses by the web, and what he describes as 'the conversation economy'.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Intv How important was Ad Words in bringing money to the web?

John Um, I think Ad Words was the single most important economic milestone of the internet um, to date. 听I think there'll be others that are more important in the future um, but and you know, and you're, and you're speaking as, to someone who worked on the team that put the first banner on the web so I'm, I'm giving quarter. 听Um, more important than that, than the AT & T ad on Hot Wired in 1994. 听But um, it, it provided a platform and inverted the model of marketing and forced marketers not immediately, but over a number of years to recognise the power of the internet. And to have to shift the ay they thought about how they had conversations with customers. 听Because the model was you didn't pay until someone clicked. Completely opposite than the model of almost all the rest of dollars in marketing which were you paid and hoped someone called. 听You, You paid for impressions not for actions. 听Um, and when people did click you wouldn't be successful unless you had something on the other end of that that delivered value. 听So now you are not only had to understand someone's intent, you then had to offer a service that would deliver on that intent. 听Um, which meant that marketers had to start seeing the internet as something that was essential to their business as opposed to another marketing channel. So it really shifted you know, it, it augured a very important shift of all of business to using the internet as a platform for business as opposed to oh it's that thing over there where we buy some ads and put some banners on. 听And I think we're only beginning to see that shift truly take you know, fruition. 听I think it was a pivot point in, in, in the history er, of how the internet economy works. 听Um, and I, and I think we're kind of in a second inning really. 听But it was a very big first step.

Intv Expand on that second point?

John So this is something that I call um, the, the, the conversation economy or you know, the economy of conversation but if you imagine a search as the opening er, salvo of a dialogue you know. 听And I say to the machine right, which I increasingly don't see as a machine, I see it as a er, intelligent agent or something of that nature. 听And I say um, mortgages, Greenbrae. 听OK I am, if, if you're an intelligent marketer I am declaring my desire to either refinance and mortgage in a, in, in, in a town 听called Greenbrae or I'm buying a house in a town called Greenbrae or something in that general neighbourhood. 听So you unpack that sentence I have just spoken as an opening salvo of a conversation. And you respond back saying something back to me which is your ad that says you know, lowest mortgage rates, Greenbrae California or whatever it is. 听Um, if I hit on that ad um, and I, where I come next and what I do next you better be ready to engage with me in a, in a deeper dialogue. 听I want to tell you more. 听Well I just bought this house and I'm looking for a good mortgage or you know, my sister bought a house and I'm researching it for her or whatever the you know, but you need to be able to go back and forth and instantly know how to be in a dialogue with a customer who you've never met, know very little about except they said these two word right. That will change over time. 听The, now you may know their Facebook profile and you may know a lot more about them and technology platform is getting much and mu, and we'll get in to that conversation. 听But in essence as a business you need to understand how to go back and forth, have a conversation. 听This is not something that most businesses are very good at right. 听I mean just call and 800 number and get someone you know, half a world away who you know, doesn't know who you are and is reading a script right. So this shift to understanding how to leverage a technology platform to have a conversation with a customer at scale is a huge shift in business. 听It's, we, we don't yet really understand how big a deal this is. 听It changes how you think about marketing from a vertical practice to a horizontal one. 听It chi, it shifts how you think about product development, it shifts about you know, the kinds of er, er, approaches you take to pricing in real time. 听I mean there's just, it makes my head hurt to think how big a shift this is in business. 听And it all starts with the blinking cursor and a sentence you know. And before that we didn't have any way to demand a, a brand or a marketer hey we want more, we want to hear from you right. 听And now if I put in something like you know, Chevy Camero mo, you know, lease and I don't get results you know, if, if, sorry, did I kick that over? If you put in Chevy Camero lease and, and, and, and I don't get results that, that create a universe of possibility for me around a lease for a Chevy Camero I'm upset right. 听And if I click on one and it's a site that doesn't deliver to me some value that brand, whatever that brand might be perhaps its Chevy Financing or GMAC or whatever it is, is dead to me right. And, and that is a, a pretty cruel environment. 听And so if you're good in that environment you can win bug time. 听And we've seen huge wins where companies get very good at understanding how to have a conversation on line. 听Amazon. 听Very good at that right. 听And, and what do they do? 听Well they pretty much displaced I don't know, 10 to 15% of the retail business in the United States right. 听That's' pretty good right. 听So it's a er, it's, it's understanding how to have that conversation with customers at scale and leveraging a technology platform to do it. And leveraging the fact that as a culture we've shifted how we ask for things and what we expect in return when we ask. 听The, the speed with which, the fluidity, the um, expectation that, that whoever we ask will know enough to give us a smart answer. 听Its' all Google's fault right. 听Because in, in essence if you looked at the interface of computing prior to the internet and prior to Google you'd take a mouse and you'd hover it over something and click on it and, and, and something would open. And then you'd click again and then something would open and then you got in to a spreadsheet or a word processing and then you're like disconnected working like this. 听Now you speak and expect a response. 听And you don't use your spoken word yet although you can with a new, er, an IPhone Ap but generally you speak through typing the words. 听But it's natural language. 听It's a big shift in, in interface, and, and, and we expect the world when we speak to completely reorganise around what we say in point 2 seconds. Cos that's what Google does. 听And so now you're Wal-Mart and you're supposed to do that. 听That's a huge business challenge and, and Wal-Mart has thousands of people on that business challenge right now and they have for the last well, since Google came out. 听And, and they're not alone. 听Every major company is focused on this and that's a huge story. 听Its' a story I find compelling, it's a story I started a business in er, it's a story that you know, I think will have legs for a few decades anyway.

Intv All the information we now give these online retailers.

John That come with us that we're unaware of that are telling wherever we are things we've done in the past that we had no idea that they know but somehow they knew right. 听The, the, there's, there's more of this than we could possibly describe.

Intv Does this matter?

John It does. 听So a metaphor that I use and, and I don't know how successfully but I'll give it a go is um, this is a societal shift not unlike when we moved from the farms to the village, from the village to the, to, to London right. 听And, and all of a sudden we had to develop a social system that understood how we lived cheek by jowl in crowded areas. 听And we needed a system of social etiquette, we needed a class system, we had to understand roles and responsibilities that were being redefined. 听Um, and er, you know, anthropologically it, com, we, we remade society when we shifted over several generations, hundreds of years really from an agrarian lifestyle to an urban lifestyle. 听Um, we didn't at the beginning or even in the middle of that declare that the clothes we wore said things about us that other people judged us by and therefore we became certain people in other people's eyes. 听But that is what we're doing on line. 听We are clothing ourselves in data unawares and we are being judged as we are walking around the internet by who the cookies say we are um, and who we declare we are by our Face Book profile or our Twitter Stream or um, you know, er, what information we put in to whatever website we might go to. Some of us are more aware than others that this is occurring. 听Most of us honestly have no idea. 听And if it got turned off tomorrow we'd be upset because all of a sudden the services we had wouldn't be as good because Amazon wouldn't know what they know about you and EBay wouldn't know what they know about you. 听And er, for whatever reason when you went to your favourite news site the er, content you got wasn't customised to who you are er, and so on and so forth. Um, we're not aware of the information shadow that we cast and the response to that shadow that, that occurs automatically now. 听Um, but as a culture we are going through that process right now and it's fascinating. 听I think it's as important as, as important as an agrarian shift to urban, I think this is as big a deal. 听And, and it's accelerated right. 听So we have, we have done 10 years of this so far really of the commercial, commercial web and 20 years of, of the web generally. 听And yet you know, generationally it's one generation right. 听A, and, and, and what's happened in those 20 years I think is extraordinarily er, fast. 听You know, we've gone form it being open to the, to the public, commercialised; you can buy a domain right to um, you know, people buying domains for millions of dollars. To I don't think there are many people left on the planet who have access to electricity and computers who would ever go back ever go back to not having the internet right. 听And, and, and in, in 20 years. 听And, and we have a whole cultural you know, set of morays that, that have to catch up with the fact that we've all kind of logged in. 听And we, we, we're not there yet and we, and we don't understand the implications of it but we sense it. I mean we're not dumb, we're social beings and we want to be out there. 听We just don't' have a clear picture of where we are you know. 听And, and we're going to get there and we're going to, I think the way we get there er, is through some tragedies and some successes. 听You know, the successes look like Twitter, the tragedies look like people who are murdered because someone stalked them on line. 听Or you know, someone's information is stolen and they lose their credit and they lose their life savings. Um, but as a culture I, I really think we haven't had the conversation and I find that fascinating and a huge opportunity like to tell a story right. 听Because there's er, there's so many good stories er, to be told about what this all means. 听Um, matter of fact talking to you just makes me want to go write again. 听It's like what am I doing running this company I got, I got to go write. 听Um, God!

Rushes Sequences - Kevin Kelly interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 16:06 UK time, Tuesday, 17 November 2009

is an author and ; he founded and played an integral role in the . He met with the Digital Revolution team to discuss young people's experience of growing up with the web; serendipity and playfulness online; and the issue of feedback loops.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Kevin 听听听听I think one of the things that has happened to the first generation of kids to grow up always being on line, which by the way are my kids, they have never experienced dialogue or anything like that, they've always had, always on. And what I have seen is they have a global awareness that was not present in my generation. They really feel as if this is one world. They also deal as if they are always connected to everyone else, there's a feeling of being connected that I did not have in my generation. And I think the third thing is that there is a sense of movement forward, the sense of going somewhere, of maybe, you might call it progress, but I think was not present in previous generations.

Intrv Theorists like Robert Putnam have suggested that the idea of social capitalist, social glue that holds people together is impossible on line.

Kevin 听听 I think that the idea that Robert Putnam had of bowling alone, that the kind of social clubs and volunteer efforts that was really kind of a part of America he suggests has gone. I think has been replaced by a different kind of social networking, a different kind of clubbiness. So its true that those old versions have gone and are missing, and I think we can regret that, but at the same time there is

a new variety, a new dimension of social interaction that was not present before and that is the dimension that we are exploring now. That has not really be possible before, its not been possible to have a 100 friends dedicated to one really obscure little fascination and now that's everyday occurrence. And so for many people this kind of new club, this kind of bowling is really a revelation and a great gift.

Intrv What glue is it that you think holds people together?

Kevin 听听听I think one of the things that the web is doing, the kind of glue that its brought to us that we haven't had before, is the glue of obsession, the glue of fascination, the glue of passion about something in particular. And so I think people who maybe before were lost or felt alone in their own little interests, now are able to really connect with people who share what they share. This fascination with something in particular and that particularness has been amplified and magnified and that is the glue that I think brings a lot of people together that was not present before.听

Intrv ..... talks about these communities of practise and all that. What examples do you have of how hyper linked thoughts going from one idea to the next, what examples do you have of how this has been good for us and how this is different from a more linear way of thinking from the 19th century.

Kevin 听听听听One of the differences that we have with this kind of hyperlink thought is that we have a really a way to dream while we are awake, if you think about the kind of sequence of web pages that you have in the morning when you are skipping along, its almost like a dream, there's kind 听of a weird association that goes on a guy in front of a chop board to a lady in a veil giving a confession, to a boy and a balloon, and its, its sort of almost non irrational, but that dreaming, that playfulness is a think the aspect that were recovering back into the culture, its become in general a very efficient and extremely optimising productive and I think one of the things that's beautiful about the web is that it wastes time and that, we can bring that kind of playfulness back into that kind of hyperlink, lets see where it goes, and ill wonder and get lost, and I think that's beautiful.

Intrv This idea of the term playfulness something I'm very passionate about, yet even the term playfulness as if the web is not a serious enterprise.

Intrv I love this idea of playfulness. Erm, yet I think that word, even the fact that it says the word play in it would put some people off.

Kevin 听 I don't think I would even counter the argument that playfulness is a wrong attribute to assign to the web because the web is so much bigger than just business and making money and governing it is really culture at large, it's a new form of culture and the culture will range from playfulness and inefficiency and just playing around, to the most serious accomplishments and achievements of humanity, so it has the full range, and I think we should embrace that, the fact that it can be trivial, that the web can be a waste of time, that it can be nonsense and at the same time its probably the greatest thing that we have ever done.

Intrv The ideal of trivial in our actions suggests that it's not possible to generate serious relationships between one and other.

Kevin 听听听So you know, on first impression people were very suspicious of the ability of the web to actually really enable serious relationships and trust, and er when Pierre Olivier invented EBay, this was one of the arguments against his start up, was nobody is going to buy a car on line. No ones going to buy anything from a stranger they have never seen. But Pierre said no, actually the things that we call trust are really forms of communication, and if a wire can carry electronic charges it can actually carry trust as well. And so not only that but the basic premise is that people want to be good if there allowed to give them the means and the mechanisms to, and so he was able to make a way in which to re-trust electronically and I think we've seen from the success of eBay that this is really something that the web can do.

Intrv 听听How important is the concept of the feedback loop.

Kevin 听听听Erm, there, there is this notion of a, of a cyber netting feedback loop where tiny singles are amplified and made larger, and that's actually the foundation of almost all the systems, including ........ evolutions. And in, in the web its really critical, infact one of the key inventions er, which is page ......, which is the foundation for Google, revolves around the fact that there's a feedback loop. That there wasn't just so much what people were clicking on that made things but the, the other feedback loops of er, links connected to the page that you were linking to so that in effect it was, this feedback leads to capturing a larger and larger feel of inputs and I think the power of the feedback loop, which is electronics and micro circuits give us, is, is the ability to amplify small things into large things. Its very similar to compound interest, which I think was Einstein who said that there was no greater force in the world than compound interest. Well there's sort of no greater force in the world than feed back loops which can amplify small things into big things, and so what this feedback loop has given us a way to amplify small goods into large goods and the danger of feedbacks is they can amplify decent and bad things, and negative things as well. So we always have to balance it, but feedbacks are the great amplifiers, so Atlas talked about moving the earth with just one board and a lever in the right place, and that's what feedback is, it's a very long lever that can move mountains and move things in the earth.

Intrv How would you argue that feedback loops help to generate diversity.

Kevin So, so there is a danger in feedback loops where you were only going to be delivered what you want and the leads to kind of a dumbness and stupidity. But I, but I think what, what happens is that while we like to have things that are the same, we also have an insatiable appetite for new things and feedback loops also propel that, so its really kind of a matter of education of, of bringing people the news that they have the ability to see new things and one of things that the web does very well is random encounters and stracatic impulses and serendipity and so they also get us out of our little ruts and deliver us things that we'd never thought about before. And I think that's er, one way in which feedback loops can actually propel diversity. 听

Intrv You mention serendipity and often people say that the web does not allow for serendipity because one is active, one is explicitly seeking.

Kevin听 Well erm, I think the web is almost nothing but serendipitous, I, I find it hard to believe that anybody could say that there was no serendipity in the web because you don't have to, you can miss your mouse by one inch and your somewhere completely new. I, I think erm, it propels serendipity because it is gathering everything. I mean one of the things that's really, what we don't appreciate right now is the fact that the web is gathering everything, all people, all computers, all documents, and when you have everything that's qualitative difference so its, its like the difference between having a few, for knowing a few of the chemical elements and then knowing all the elements, when you know all the elements you can do chemistry. Its like, its like seeing only a few of the stars versus all the stars. Its like having only a couple of the letters of the alphabet and having all of them. When you have all it changes everything, and that's what were really doing with the web is that the serendipity comes from having all things on it.

Rushes Sequences - The Web Is... (part one)

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Dan Biddle | 11:47 UK time, Monday, 16 November 2009

A part of the Digital Revolution production process has been to collect films of various people from around the world telling us what the web means to them.

Here is a selection of the clips we have recorded so far. More are coming so, as ever, check the site for updates and new releases.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

Digital Revolution music tracks - HAL (audio)

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Dan Biddle | 18:18 UK time, Thursday, 12 November 2009

As part of Digital Revolution's continuing open production process we are offering some of the music tracks being composed and produced for the series. These tracks are being released to give users a feel for the music currently being produced for the series. They are not guaranteed to be used in the final programmes. The composer is .

These music tracks sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

Track 1 - Hal

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download this track.

Rushes Sequences - graphics - visualising the web - early draft (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 13:34 UK time, Thursday, 12 November 2009

In our continuing efforts to share as much content with you as possible, we present this graphics sequence from Digital Revolution production created to help visualise the web and how it works.

At several stages throughout the open production process we have discussed the challenge of visualising the web - describing the way it works; the way it can be illustrated. These graphics are one of our attempts at this. Therefore please bear in mind that they are a work in progress and may not be the final graphics used in the programme.

This graphics sequence is part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this graphics sequence.

Rushes Sequences - graphics - packet switching (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 13:21 UK time, Thursday, 12 November 2009

In our continuing efforts to share as much content with you as possible, we present this graphics sequence from Digital Revolution production created to help explain packet switching. These graphics are a work in progress and may not be the final graphics used in the programme, but we are releasing them for you to download and reuse under the Digital Revolution licence.

This graphics sequence is part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this graphics sequence.

Digital Revolution music tracks - Pulse (audio)

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Dan Biddle | 11:55 UK time, Thursday, 12 November 2009

As part of Digital Revolution's continuing open production process we are offering some of the music tracks being composed and produced for the series. These tracks are being released to give users a feel for the music currently being produced for the series. They are not guaranteed to be used in the final programmes. The composer is .

These music tracks sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

Track 1 - Pulse

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download this track.

Rushes Sequences - general views - Ghana (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 10:03 UK time, Wednesday, 11 November 2009

GVs (general views) of Ghana from the Programme One team filming on location.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

Rushes Sequences - general views - Estonia (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 10:01 UK time, Wednesday, 11 November 2009

GVs (general views) of Estonia from the Programme Two team filming on location.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

Rushes Sequences - general views - London (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 09:18 UK time, Wednesday, 11 November 2009

GVs (general views) of London from the Programme Two team filming on location.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

Help us test the web's effects on us - Saturday, 14 November 2009

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Dan Biddle | 10:05 UK time, Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Fancy a chance to take part in an experiment to examine the effects the web is having upon our brains? Well, this is your chance to be the very first participants in a test that will be rolled out across the nation as part of the Digital Revolution series.

The 成人快手 is backing a major new piece of scientific research to find out if the web is rewiring our brains. In collaboration with the Research Team at University College London, we're launching a test to see how people think when they're using the web.听The test will be filmed and will appear in the final programme of Digital Revolution, featuring alongside web luminaries such as Bill Gates, Al Gore and Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook).

The experiment takes place 9am-11am at University College London, , on Saturday 14 November 2009.

We are looking for participants from the following age groups: 17-18, 25-34, 45-54 or 65-74 years old.听

If you fit into one of the age ranges above, and live in, or can travel, to London, contact Cathy Edwards: tel 0208 008 3985 or email cathy.edwards@bbc.co.uk

Please give your name, age range, a contact phone number and if possible your email address. This is a great opportunity to take part in a historic piece of research, while enjoying a fun, exciting morning!听We'll also be taking a group photo outside the Portico at University College London, which you'll be able to download or have emailed to you as a souvenir of the day.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Rushes Sequences - Lee Siegel interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 09:19 UK time, Friday, 6 November 2009

is an author and a recipient of the for Reviews and Criticism. He is a frequent contributor to the , , and . Lee wrote a blog post for Digital Revolution in which he questioned the faddish and foolish nature of the excitement surrounding the web. The programme two team met with Lee to follow up on his criticisms - discussing the hype around the web's influence upon US politics, the Barack Obama election campaign and freedom of speech.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

-------------------------------------------------

Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

INT: Do you have an issue generally with the amateur content that fills the web?

LEE: Well I only have an issue with it when it influences more respected outlets. 听You know, when CNN had some 12 year old blogger in there commenting on the election or something like that, it's, I find it very [inaudible 1:02:09] and it's a waste of time and they're doing it strictly for commercial reasons. 听It doesn't annoy me that there are amateurs out there, I think to be an amateur is a, is a very rich contribution to culture. 听Amateurs do things for love, professional often do things for money and a lot of good can come out of doing something for love, but it's when it's, when amateurism means [inaudible 1:02:34], when it means sloppiness, when it means self indulgence, no I find it very annoying.

INT: Was President Obama's new media strategy a radical new departure in your view?

LEE: I think it was a radical new assimilation in a way, but as I, as I said earlier, I think Obama would have won anyway. 听I think that even as he was keeping in touch with his millions of followers through, through the media with the internet, through Twitter and so on and so forth, the opposition was using the internet to hamstring him at every step of the way. 听So if it was a step forward for politics, it was a great step backward as well and I think it left us [inaudible 1:03:22] in that sense. 听I don't, I don't think that the internet has contributed to the democratisation of the political campaign. I 听think it's made the political campaign perhaps more in-balanced than it's ever been before.

INT: So to what extent and what part do you think the new media played in getting Obama elected?

LEE: I, I'm going to say something very unconventional and say I don't think it played a role in him getting him getting elected at all. 听I think the conservatives were using it with as much skill as he was. 听I think what got him elected was the kind of perfect storm of an economic crisis and a two knuckle head ticket in the opposition. 听I think it was Sarah Palin and the economic meltdown that got Obama elected, not Twitter.

[CHATTER]

INT: Did the new media get Obama elected?

LEE: No, I think what got Obama elected was the perfect storm of calamities. 听The economic meltdown on the one hand and these two knuckleheads in the oppositions, on the oppositions ticket on the other hand. 听It was [inaudible 1:04:39] and Sarah Palin, not Twitter that got Obama elected.

INT: And in terms of the new media aspect of Obama's campaign, was it born out of a genuine ground swell of support, or was it a carefully orchestrated device and campaign?

LEE: Well both. 听I think there was a ground swell of support of Obama, I think there was an exhaustion and a revolution at the end of eight years of Bush's reign and I think that created a ground swell of support, which was then organised very shrewdly and effectively by Obama's people, using the media of the internet among other means.

INT: Do you find it ironic that the whole Obama and new media story played so well in the old media?

LEE: Well I find the old medias are sort of un [inaudible 1:05:30] an enthusiasm for new media ironic. 听It's like someone putting a gun to his head and just shooting it again and again. 听I find it spineless, I still don't understand it, it's possible to criticise new media, whilst still adapting to new media. 听It's possible to be sceptical of it, while welcoming it with open arms. 听So I'm just not, my mind boggles when I, when I read the old media's enthusiastic effusive embracing of the internet.

INT: How do you see the web's future? 听Do you think it will continue to empower ordinary people?

LEE: No I think, I think the web will really take on the contours of what culture has always been. 听There will be hierarchies, there will be elites, because we live in a democratic vigorous society, there will be many doors open to people. 听Democracy, the democratic vitality will still rule American culture, but there will be the same restrictions, the same exclusive nitches that there have always been. 听There may be more, there may be fewer of them, that remains to be seen. 听I'm sure that the internet will look nothing like it look, it looks like now, nothing like it is now. 听But certainly the democratic vitality of American culture is going to be counter balanced by the same old greed and myopia and short sightedness, the same old greed and myopia that it's always been.

[CHATTER]

INT: And now just a final question, this is for our second programme, which is about the relationship between the internet and the nation state. 听Devices, the kind of freedom the internet provides ordinary people with, through things like blogs and social networking sites, how much of a threat do you think that kind of freedom presents to the nation state and the idea of governmental control?

LEE: Well no more than what the radio and what television have presented. 听You know or the free press. 听What, you know newspapers are an authoritarian regime's worst enemy, so what happens when an authoritarian regime comes to power? 听They take, they close down all the newspapers, they take on the role of the TV and the radio stations. 听Look what happened in Iran, you had this ground swell of popular support, expressed on Twitter for example and through blogs, it was just crushed and the regime [inaudible 1:08:19] began using Twitter against his opponents very effectively. 听Spreading horrendous lies and mis-information, bites of mis-information by the thousands. 听So again, it's a double edged sword and I also want to go back to the way you phrased your question, you spoke of the freedom that blogs present to the individual. 听I don't, I don't know what you mean by freedom in that sense. 听If getting on line and being able to write down your thoughts and being able to say pretty much whatever you want and having a certain number of people read it, if that's freedom, I don't know if that is an effective or even听

rich kind of [inaudible 1:09:07] freedom. 听I don't know if being able to express whatever you want to express at the moment you want to express it, it counts as freedom. 听I'm not sure about that.听

INT: So in that kind of struggle between the internet and the nation state, would you say that the internet empowers Governments as much as it empowers the people?

LEE: I think the internet empowers anyone who can use it and it empowers the people who can use it most effectively, even more. 听It can empower a Government to repress [inaudible 1:09:37], it can empower the insurrection itself. 听The 成人快手 played a great role in the second world war in occupied countries and yet during, without radio, you would not have had the, you would not have had hundreds of thousands of people killed in Rwanda so quickly. 听The people were [inaudible 1:10:03] by means of radio very fast. 听So like all technology, the interent, it's not a cure for human nature, like all technology, the internet is not a cure for human nature, it's a amplification of human nature about the good and the bad of [inaudible 1:10:18].

[CHATTER]

INT: The internet empowers Governments as much as it empowers the people that use it against those Governments. Is that, do you think that's the case?

LEE: Absolutely, it's a double edged sword. 听The media of radio was used by the 成人快手 to empower people in occupied countries during the Second World War. 听At the same time, without radio, hundreds of thousands of people would not have been killed so quickly in Rwanda. 听The [inaudible 1:11:32] to violence was spread from, by radio throughout the population. 听So like all technology, it's a double edged, triple edged, the sword has many, has multiple edges, despite what the boosters of the internet say. Technology, no kind of technology is a cure for human nature. 听Technology is an amplification of human nature, an amplification of all aspects of human nature.

[CHATTER]

LEE: The web is pleasure, relaxation, thrill, annoyance, oppression, exhilaration of the web, like any piece of technology is an amplification of human nature, every aspect of human nature.

Rushes Sequences - Ross Anderson interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 08:56 UK time, Friday, 6 November 2009

is Professor in Security Engineering at , and an author and specialising in computer security and cryptology. The听programme two team听met with Ross to discuss the security issues arising from the success of the web; whether the cyber attacks upon Estonia in 2007 were really of such a proportion as to warrant fears听that cyberwar will emerge as a听new form of warfare; and just how much our online data, links and relationships might tell others about us.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

INT: 听听Do you think it's quite a difficult balancing act for Governments like China, on the one hand the internet presents them with great business opportunities and on the other hand, it results in information being leaked out that they wouldn't otherwise want the world to know?

ROSS: 听听听听听 Well is internet security in China a balancing act you say, well whenever I hear civil servants in Whitehall using the word balance, I become distinctly uneasy. 听Often it's used to justify doing half of a wicked thing, rather than not doing wicked things at all and in fact there is that kind of thing for the Government in China. 听They can't simply turn off the internet, because Chinese businesses live by export and they need to talk to western customers. 听Chinese universities live by getting information from western universities, by reading research papers, downloading lecture notes and so on and they can't block that. 听They do want to block [inaudible 00:33:24], they do want to block stuff related to the Dalai Lama. 听So it's hard. 听Ultimately I think it's undoable and all they're succeeding in doing is raising the bar for a little while, in the end though I believe that China like everywhere else that develops, will become open and democratic like the west.

INT: 听听And just on that subject, how close do you think Chinese authorities or any Government for that matter would ever come to fully controlling the web and censoring it, in a way that they desire?

ROSS: 听听听听听 There have been unceasing attempts, even in the west to control the web. 听During the 90's we had the crypto wars, where GSHQ and the NSA said that we all had to give them copies of our crypto keys. 听We then had various child pornography scares, we now have an initiative in Brussels for example, that would require all member states to require that their ISP's put in blocking services, or sensibly to stop child pornography. 听Of course, the music companies are waiting in the wings and as soon as these mechanisms exist, they will be in parliament and they will be in [inaudible 00:34:29] demanding the use of these mechanisms to stop file sharing. 听There are all sorts of people you know, who see the internet as a threat and who want to control it using whichever excuse will work in the politics of the day. 听Ultimately I think this is [inaudible 00:34:45] because the world is just becoming so connected, that in western countries, you know there's nowhere you can put the censorship anymore. 听The networks are too dense, floors of information are too great, that censorship is basically a lost battle.

[CHAT]听

INT: 听听 Just going back to the origins of the internet, what is in the kind of architecture of the internet and the thinking behind the creation of the internet, that makes it so difficult to censor and to really get to the centre of?

ROSS: 听 The critical thing about the internet that makes it censorship resistant, is the end to end principal. 听This is the idea that the network at its core, is a dumb network. 听It just forwards packets from one address to another. 听The intelligence, the programmes that act on this information, are at the end points. 听The end points might be web servers, they might be individuals, people's pc's who are talking to each other and therefore it's difficult to create a point in the centre, where you can do the censorship. 听Now with some applications, there are virtual centre arise and a good example is Google, because although at the network level Google is an end point of the network, from the point of view of search, it's a core component and so if you're the Government of China, you can say to Mr Google, right, you censorship your search or you can't do business in our country and that's a persuasive argument, at least for large and powerful Governments to use. 听But for the majority of applications, the end to end principal remains extremely important, if not paramount and 听therefore the information can flow from one end point to another end point through all sorts of different paths. 听It can be encrypted from end to end, so that if you monitor the network in the middle, you just simply don't know what traffic is coming past and in short there's no real point of leverage, there's no real point of control in the centre.

INT: 听听听听听听So in comparison to other media, would you say that the internet is relatively de-centralised and because it's got different pathways, that is what makes it more difficult to control and censor?

ROSS: 听听That's also an aspect to it. 听In addition to the end to end principal, the principal that the intelligence lies at the edges of the internet, rather than in the core, which just forwards the packets from one computer to another, there's also the fact that the internet is a many to many medium. 听Most of the media that we had previously, at least the technological media, were many to one or one to many. 听The 成人快手 broadcast system for example, is one to many. 听You've got one company broadcast content to tens of millions of users, but with the internet you have millions of people creating their own content and millions of people consuming this content and for the most part, they're communicating fairly directly with each other. 听Now there are some virtual centre points like Google and Facebook, but apart from that, the communications are basically many to many in an end to end network and that makes it fundamentally difficult to censor.

--------------------------------------听

ROSS: 听听听听听 Cyber war is an interesting concept. 听At one level it's just a re-marketing by agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA of stuff that they've been doing for decades anyway. 听Listening in to other people's phone calls and being able to do jamming attacks for example, against their air defences and where cyber was first supposedly deployed in Gulf War One, that was basically what was involved. 听It was jamming the Iraqi's air defences and their communications networks, to ensure that the first wave of bombers got through. 听There's been an awful lot of hype about the concept of cyber war, particularly in the past 10 years and particularly since 9-11, as organisations such as the Department of 成人快手land Security has sought to build huge empires, imposing often unnecessary security controls on industries such as the electric power industry. 听None the less, it is clear that as the world becomes more connected, there will be the opportunity for nations to do bad things to each other. 听We haven't seen very much of it yet, but it's something that we have to think about for the future.

INT: 听听 What are the most common techniques used to attack a country's internet system and how do they work?

ROSS: 听听听听听 Well we haven't seen attacks on country's internet systems so far, by other nation states. 听So we've got a shortage of examples.

INT: 听听 So you wouldn't say Estonia was a Government sponsored attack?听

ROSS: 听听听听听 People who are knowledgeable about such matters, generally don't believe that the attack on Estonia was an act of Russian State Power. They caught and convicted some ethnic Russian youngster for doing it with a small [inaudible 00:48:02] and basically the problem in Estonia was that their internet infrastructure was really, really ropey. 听It wasn't put together with any real resilience or band width and almost any attack could have knocked it over. 听Had the attack that had been done on Estonia by those kids, been tried on say the 成人快手's website or the Microsoft website, then it probably wouldn't even have been noticed. 听So the lesson there is that if you've got critical infrastructure, you should engineer it properly and size it properly, so that it can withstand minor botheration.

INT: 听听Can you just briefly explain how Denial Service Attack works?听

ROSS: 听听听听听 How the Denial of Service Attack typically works, is that the attacker gets a few hundred or a few thousand machines, which he has subverted using Malware and gets them to send lots and lots of messages to the target. 听We for example got one of these on one of our machines in the lab, after we had come to the attention of a [inaudible 00:48:57], a Russian criminal network that we were attempting to monitor and measure and they got something like three or four hundred machines, sending something like six megabytes per second off our machines and of course being a university, we had proper infrastructure and were able to completely ignore that. 听We've got two gigabytes of connection into the lab. 听Whereas if that had attacked a private individual at home, with a two megabyte ADSL connection, it would have completely saturated the link and denied them service to the internet.

INT: 听听So is it a case of bottlenecks being created, i.e. lots of computers being appropriated and those computers channelling traffic to one particular site, overwhelming it and then brining it down that way? 听Is that how it works?

ROSS: 听听听听听 The idea of a, denial, distributor denial of service attack is that you've got a few hundred or a few thousand computers and get them to all send traffic to a target site, which if it is somebody's computer at home, overwhelm it so it can't go on line anymore. However if you try that with a big website, university system for example, the 成人快手 system, then it's just thousands of time bigger and it won't work. 听Now the problem Estonia is that they had parts of their critical national infrastructure, which were you know sized like domestic systems, with only a few megabytes of connectivity, rather than size like professional systems with gigabytes of connectivity and this meant that it was easy for an attacker to bring them down.

INT: 听听So what do you think can we learn from the Estonia experience?听

ROSS: 听听听听听 The main lesson to be learnt from the Estonian experience is that if you've got critical national infrastructure, you should engineer it properly and you have some capable geeks who take part in the International networks, or people who are interested in such things, who keep up to date on what's going on and what techniques are available to count all the bad stuff that happened.

INT: 听听How serious is the threat that cyber attacks present to national security? 听You know, how much of an impact does it have on a country when in the case of Estonia, banks were brought down and you know institutions, internet sites were brought down?

ROSS: 听听听听听 The Estonian example I think was very much an out [inaudible 00:51:15], because the Estonians were incompetent, they just hadn't paid attention to the possibility of being attacked in this way. 听Somewhere like Britain, I think the threat level is very, very low. 听The idea that we would be attacked online by terrorists for example, is something I have never really lost very much sleep about, because terrorism functions by shedding blood, by killing people, by inspiring terror. 听You know, by pressing all the buttons that the, in the animal part of our brain, that cause reactions to go off and we feel we're personally under attack, when we feel that our lives are at threat, when we're reminded of our mortality and pushed towards loyalty to our tribe. 听Now none of these buttons are pushed, if there is a 30 minute power cut, because somebody hacked a sub station. 听That's just an annoyance, it's just one of those things that happen in life. 听It's not going to give anything like the impact that a political militant would want in order to bring attention to his cause.

INT: 听听Can you see the day when cyber warfare becomes an integral part of military combat, when it accompanies you know for example, the invasion of Afghanistan or you know some [inaudible 00:52:34] things where hand to hand combat is accompanied by cyber warfare, to bring down an internet system in a country?

ROSS: 听听听听听 Well when we invested Afghanistan, we blew up one of the two telephone exchanges in Kabul, we blew up the old fashioned electro-mechanical one and we left intact the modern digital one, presumably because we had the means to hack into the digital one and wire tap such communications as were still going on. 听So this sort of cyber war has always been part of the mix, since people started using electronic communications and well you know so what's different. 听If we get attacked by a substantial nation state actor, you know if we ended up in a war in the Far East with China, or a war in the [inaudible 00:53:21] with Russia or whatever, then sure there's the possibility of bad things happening. 听But there's a possibility of other bad things happening too, in air attacks, nuclear attacks and compared with the possibility of a nuclear attack, cyber attacks are penny anti stuff. 听What you can typically expect cyber attacks to be used for in modern warfare, is as in Gulf War One, where these were used basically to see to it that the first wave of bombers got in and got back unscathed and then the first wave of bombers were able to blow up the critical telephone exchanges and air defence radars and so on, which crippled the Iraqi air defence capability and meant in turn that second and subsequent waves of bombers had, had a much safer and freer experience over Baghdad.

INT: 听听Just moving onto, Islamism, what role do you think the web has played in fostering extremist beliefs?

ROSS: 听 It's reckoned that online resources have been used by people who are spreading Islamist ideas, with some moderate effectiveness, in whipping up support worldwide. 听But then it's only part of a mix, because you know part of that is recruiting people through mosques, spreading information by you know face to face contact, by preachers spreading information by circulating books and pamphlets. 听It's only part of a bigger mix and it's also important to realise that the web makes available great resources of surveillance and it's well known in the trade that organisations such as the FBI, have the main Islamist websites very thoroughly instrumented and they pay an awful lot of attention to who goes there.

INT: 听 So in as much as the web is facilitated, re-grouping together of different extremist groups, it's also provided the authorities with a mechanism to watch these groups and find out what they're up to?

ROSS: 听听听听听 One of the biggest innovations in surveillance, in the past few years, has come about as a result of the spread of social networking sites and of social facilities on all sorts of other sites, because once people make visible who their friends are, it's possible to do a clustering analysis and start looking for covert communities. 听Now in the old days this was difficult, you had to send out your field intelligent staff to live in the villages and ask who was friends with whom and who was related to whom and so on and you would then, if people had phones, you'd look at their itemised phone bills and you'd look at which households were phoning who. 听But nowadays, information on who is whose friend is available on sites like Facebook and the 40 other sites that there are worldwide. 听For example, there are some researchers at MIT, tried to figure out if they could use Facebook to find out who was gay and who wasn't, so you they crawled the MIT part of the Facebook web and then they marked as gay, those people who declared themselves to be such on their Facebook web pages, and then looked at the clusters of friends and marked as tentatively gay, those people who are friends of a whole lot of gay men and worked outwards from that and by means of this, they managed to identify ten of their friends whom they knew were gay, but not out about it. 听Simply because of their pattern of acquaintanceships. 听Now exactly the same sort of thing works with Islamism or with stamp collecting or butterfly collecting, or playing the Irish pipes or any other human activity, it's possible by mapping social networks, to figure out affiliations that people aren't necessarily overt about and this is an enormously powerful tool in the hands of the Police and intelligence services, in finding out who adheres to some particular dislike to belief. 听Be that Islamism, or in China, a love of democracy or whatever.

Rushes Sequences - Biz Stone and Evan Williams interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 17:50 UK time, Thursday, 5 November 2009

and are the founders of the micro-blogging tool . They met with Aleks Krotoski and the programme two team to discuss the rise of their 140 character communication phenomenon and the role it has played in the politics of nations and freedom of speech.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit 成人快手 Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Aleks ok, erm we're seeing businesses, we're seeing politicians communicating with the public with they're with they're public by Twitter. 听How do you think that this, that it's a different, or rather than the web, how do you think that communication via the internet is different than communication that they would do, traditionally via television, radio, newspaper?

Biz The one most, the biggest thing is its two way, its not broadcast.

Evan There's an engagement there, that you don't get from watching TV, you can't talk about. 听Erm that, and that's the big thing we're seeing with like ............. Of companies is, and we were surprised, because they jumped in to Twitter and they started engaging immediately, the one of the first examples that we saw was this large cable company, here in the U.S. 听They erm, there was a popular blogger and he also had a Twitter account and he was complaining that his cable was out, and he was I'm going to write about this cable company, Compass and how terrible they are and its going to be the number one search result in, in search engines for year to come. 听And they were monitoring Twitter search for any mentions of they're brand name. 听And they saw that within a few minutes and they replied to him on Twitter, and they said what seems to be the problem, they were going to send a van out to your house. 听And they had his cable fixed in like 30 minutes, so the next day the blog post was, Compass has great customer service, and it was like a, you know a complete reversal and we were like wow, they're really smart about it, and so over and over again companies are just jumping in, engaging with customers and its great for the customers too. 听So they can.

Aleks Are they actually engaging though, cause your seeing more and more cynical, erm cynical attempts to use these tools for marketing and people just not getting it?

Evan There is cynical but there's engagement.

Biz Yeah and the, basic way Twitter works is people opt in information they want and there are many, many of the most popular accounts on Twitter are commercial accounts, and there are people just selling stuff and people want to know, because people you know get into commercial transactions and information is helpful. 听And whether its I want the daily Tweet about the special at the caf茅, so I can know whether to go there for lunch, or I wasn't to know as soon as erm, there's a great deal on this airline, then that's helpful information. 听If they don't want it then they shut it off.

Evan And if the, if the companies aren't trying to provide useful information they'll get shut off, its not like a, its not we call it recipient driven communication, so its not up to the sender to say you will see this in your in-box whether you like it or not. Unlike e-mail.

Biz Yeah basically.

Aleks that's a really interesting concept, I haven't heard of that recipient driven information. 听Erm, kind of riffing off the back of that and this is now for programme 3, you mentioned opt in, how aware are you, or how aware do you think people who use twitter, the account holders are of the privacy implications for what they put up on they're public accounts?

Biz I think that's, I think we're still .......... That out, I mean like I said, before, we're, we're 10 years into this idea of open the open exchange of information, first with blogging and now its Twitter. 听 And people aren't trying to figure out and discover what the right amount is still. 听There are still, there are some people like over and then you know get burned and realise ok well that wasn't the right way. 听And then there are people who do it sort of just right and they get all these great opportunities presented to them that they hadn't erm thought of before. 听So I, I think the short answer is, we're trying to explore and figure out with our electronic communications, we're trying to add nuance, subtlety, things we don't have right now in e-mail and iam erm and that's what we're seeing not just with Twitter, but all over the web, all this great stuff that, that's emerging in social media is people trying to find new, interesting ways of communicating. 听To become more efficient, become more engaged, become more informed, erm and I think it leads ultimately to, to having more empathy, to understanding more about what other people are, what's happening with other people and sort of putting yourself in they're shoes more often because your, your engaging with them. 听So I don't know if that answers the exact question but I think the answer is we're still figure out, we're still evolving, so we'll still make some mistakes.

Aleks Do you think that, that people are re-calibrating they're notions of privacy?

Evan Erm yes, certainly in, it, it's a clich茅 but erm people are learning that putting stuff out there in, in the world as Biz was saying, has some great effects, and things that were private, a lot of things that

were private, just because it wasn't profitable to share them. 听And so it was strange to share them, so it may be strange to say to the world I am having lunch at this place, erm because I mean they would have never have done that before, but that doesn't mean I care, or that it needs to be private. 听And so people are understanding that in, in big numbers and as Biz says its been a process, its been happening when, when blogging started which we were involved in 10 years ago, this crazy notion why, first of all why would you have the audacity to think anyone would care what you read. 听Erm and secondly why are you, you know not all blogs are private by any means they're personal information, but even like writing the sort of a journal on line .......... Its like why would you, and now it's a much more accepted idea that, that people would share parts of they're lives. 听And, and I think it'll become just obvious.

Aleks Then of course, I mean on the flip side there's the, the .....................

General talking

Aleks You mentioned this idea of empathy, you mentioned this idea of reconfiguring almost how we do relationships. 听How do people, how do you feel people form relationships in a 140 characters?

Biz Well its interesting because they, they're doing something again, something we didn't expect which is they're forming these tweet ups that they do, and you know and a lot of the criticism of on-line communication is like ............... always communicate on line and then we're going to loose all of this interpersonal erm all of our interpersonal skills and then the reverse is true. 听They are meeting, they're wires are crossing on the Internet, and this is how Evan and I met in the first place, we, we discovered each other's blogs. 听And we ended up working together. 听Erm the, you know and so they're organising these Tweet up's and stuff so that they can meet new people and engage. 听So, erm it's definitely having an impact in that, in that regard.

Aleks But what do you think it is, I mean what are the tells that you can trust somebody, you know because why would you, why would you meet up with somebody off line?

Evan Whether you meet up or not you definitely get to know people over Twitter or electronic communication in general. 听With Twitter in particular because its very light weight to share something and to breed something, then its about sharing details that you wouldn't necessarily share but they give you insight to people, whether you know them or not. 听Its not just meeting new people, it's staying in touch, in a very lightweight way that just isn't practical. 听Erm it's not practical to you know pick up the phone and call all of your friends that are across the country every day. 听But you can hear from them on

Twitter every day, and it provides a real connection that you otherwise wouldn't have.

Biz And it keeps you much closer that it's not as awkward. 听If you haven't talked to a friend in a month, it doesn't matter you can pick up the phone and you can, and you can immediately do like so how or you know that run, it sounded like a good run you had the other day. 听You're immediately caught up on like the chitchat, you don't have to be like so how's it are you still married or is that a weird subject or.

Evan Yeah and if you end up talking, you end up having more interesting conversations because normally, if you don't talk to someone very much you only talk about the really big stuff, or like well I got a new job and how's that, its ok. 听 But its like hey it sounds like your running now or whatever.

Aleks but you go from I mean that's focusing on people who are existing friends, you know which is a different kettle of fish, that's you know you've got Facebook for that as well, I mean Twitter.

Biz You get to know people on, you don't get.

Evan I think the key to your question is you don't really get to know somebody from like Tweet. 听You get to know them from a bunch of them.

Biz Right.

Evan And, and you get to know them over time in, in ................. and you start saying like that guy's really, I think that's, I like that guy he's funny. 听Like I think I want to, if there's an opportunity to like and then you reach out and you start small, like maybe your favourite a Tweet by somebody and then you, and then you get engaged and you at reply them and suddenly your like communicating and it starts from there.

Aleks Do you think that there is a shift, that there's a seismic shift as it were in the development of relationships, or even that there will be a generational shift in how people do relationships now that we have the web?

Biz I think it's more about maintaining relationships than the relationships. 听I don't actually there's, my personal experience I don't meet a lot of people and become real world friends with them through the Internet, that much, even though most of my friends I met through the Internet somehow. 听But its, you know the real world contact is important and you know school and work and, and social life and hobbies are still going to be the main way people meet each other. But, but it can turn a chance meeting into a relationship, cause now when I meet someone at a conference or wherever, and if I get they're Twitter user name then I have, I have like a string back to them that otherwise there, there was no connection at all. 听Even if I have they're e-mail address that I have to prompt them, that's, that's a big, much, much bigger step than following them on Twitter. 听Its even a, a bigger step to engage with someone on a social network where you have to say now, now that I've met you once we're friends, your not really friends, but I might want to keep up with you. 听And, and you don't even have to reciprocate, but that could eventually lead to a relationship that otherwise would not exist.

Rushes Sequences - Mitch Kapor interview - USA (Video)

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Post categories: Changing humanity,听Nation state,听Programme four,听Programme three,听Programme two,听breaking the web,听clips and rushes,听interviews,听privacy,听relationships,听rushes,听video

Dan Biddle | 17:21 UK time, Thursday, 5 November 2009

is a computing and internet pioneer. He was a founding member of the 听and is on the board of , creators of the virtual world, . Mitch met with the programme two production team to discuss virtual communities, anonymity and privacy online and the internet's response to censorship.

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Mitch 听 The question of anonymity on the web is pretty interesting one. If you spend any time in political discussions or any kind of lifestyle discussion on the web, forums and postings and so on, you could see that the conversation typically degenerates to a very uncivil level quickly particularly when and as the people who are posting are anonymous. You don't know who they really are. They lack accountability, people feel free just to say whatever they want and that's one downside to anonymity. Um, there are others.

Mitch 听At the same time, in the American tradition, protections for anonymous speech are, er, pretty solidly entrenched in first amendment law. And in a way, the ability to speak and be heard separate from your identity is important especially in extreme political cases. Especially where there could be repercussions, er, to free speech, the ability to speak in a way where, who, who you are, is not known is valuable. I would even say precious sometimes.听

Mitch 听 So there's a kind of a balancing act of social interests that I will frankly say different countries draw the line in different places and I don't think one size necessarily, er, fits all. So, but, personally I come down on the side of wanting to protect rights to anonymous speech even though it's, um, unpleasant and difficult, it has a lot a negative consequences, and it, people, it's much easier, er, to, you know, libel someone or be slanderous and as I said, like in the, in the UK I know, not, not in cyberspace, I'm sure you'll cut this out though I wanna say it, I'm fascinated by this.

Mitch 听听You know there are these whatever they're called, ASBO听

Intv 听听Yeah听

Mitch 听听er, laws that you could never have in the US. They would just never, they would be deemed unconstitutional because it'd be too vague about what constitutes antisocial behaviour. And we just draw the line in a different place here and, as I said, I don't think there's a right answer. It's, these are hard things, they're all trade off's, so that's, that's, that's the deal with anonymity too.听

Intv 听听 What is the greatest threat to privacy online and what can be done to protect it?听

Mitch 听听Well, there are a variety of threats to privacy online. The worst case scenario would be when information about a person is collected by a large powerful institution, whether public or private, whether government of corporate, in a way that is, is used profoundly to their disadvantage, and where the individual has no control over the usage of that information.听

Mitch 听听听 Um, so it could be to, er, conduct surveillance on people, er, and in fact, er, it is so much easier now to collect, so much more information about what people do, what they read, what they see, what they buy, er, that in the hands of a government that has no respect for civil liberties, if you can imagine the sorta post-nine eleven world run amok, there's an enormous threat that it would be used to silence political opposition and political, er, you know, opponents and enforce a kind of authoritarian regime. That's the scenario I worry about.

Intv 听听 Programme Four which is about how the web has re-wired us as human beings. This is a couple of questions about Second Life.

Intv 听听Why are people drawn to virtual communities such as Second Life?听

Mitch 听听听 One of the reasons people are drawn to virtual communities like Second Life is people are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods. Buy more stuff. I mean, it doesn't make people happy. I know this sounds like a gross over-simplification and in some ways it is. But when there is an alternative to be able to reach out and to find kindred spirits who have come in interest or share a common perspective on life and to feel fulfilled by that, people will do that even if it is a somewhat, er, low resolution version of reality. I would call a virtual world like a very low-res version of real reality. People are hungry for meaning, hungry for contact.

Intv 听听What's so liberating about being involved in a virtual community like Second Life?听

Mitch 听 Well, it's a funny thing which is the experience of connecting with other people in Second Life in a virtual world, it is experiential, in a certain sense, so that it is, it become difficult to describe it except by appeal to having had a similar kind of experience. So if you ever felt really connected, you've come to some place, I'm not talking about computers, technology or network, and you found some people, and you go, I like it here. I feel like I belong. This is new. This is interesting. I can be who I really am here and I can't in other places. I want more of this. I wanna invest in this, I wanna become known here, I wanna contribute to it, this feels good. It's that kind of experience that is sort of missing in people's lives. So when they find that in a place like Second Life, they get hooked.

Chat 听

Intv 听听The web interprets censorship routes around it, it's a famous quote by John Gilmore, can you explain how and why that happens?

Mitch 听 There's a famous quote that says, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." And when John Gilmore said that, he actually wasn't being metaphorical, he was literally describing the communication protocols of the internet. So if you're trying to get a message from Point A to Point B on the internet, it's sort of like driving from place A to place B.听

Mitch 听 You got a network of roads, there's multiple ways that you could drive, um, but one of the roads, er, you know, could be damaged, er, closed, maybe there was an accident, I don't know, maybe there was a problem and so, as a driver you find another way to get there, you find a different road. The internet works the same kind of way, er, it has these routing tables that determine how, how things move, if it can't go from A to B through Path 1, it finds a Path 2.听

Mitch 听 Well censorship is a kind of a blockage in a road so it's like putting up a wall so messages can't get through, er, you know, at a certain point, on a certain path. It's in the very protocols of the internet that if that happens, that condition is detected, and it goes through a fallback, it says, OK I can't get through this way, is there another road by which I can get there? And, er, because the internet is an interconnected network of many different paths, er, just like the highway system, it generally can do that. So censorship is treated as a kind of a damage, as a kind of damage to the, er, the information highway and the internet's protocols find other ways to get through.

Rushes Sequences - Vint Cerf interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 17:01 UK time, Thursday, 5 November 2009

is , and is often referred to as 'the father of the internet'. Here he discusses how the internet was designed; the importance of '' and the human experience of the internet.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Vint 听听So let's err talk a little bit about how one comes to the design of the internet. This wasn't something that err you woke up one morning and said ahh, ha, I know how to build the internet. 听It was more a question of being forced in the right direction by the basic problem statement. So the problem lies multiple packets switch nets each of which different in detail the packets were different sizes, the rate at which they could move was vary depending on whether it was an optical fibre or a satellite link or a normal radio err so we had speed and size and the wave variations too. 听Because when we had to all the way up to the satellite and down it took a quarter of a second one way and another quarter of a second back the round trip time on the satellite system was a half a second compared to micro seconds on a Ethernet which is a piece of .......... cable. Erm at the time so err our problem was how to link these various nets together without changing any of the nets and the tactic that we decided to use is called encapsulation err we have the first problem was that the networks each of them did not know about the others. So there was no wave for sound on, one network we you'd send this packet this little postcard to another network cause you couldn't even say what the other networks name was or it's identifier. So we had to invent an address space that would work across and arbitrary large number of networks. Then we had to decide exactly what the procedures were for end to end communication between two computers on these different networks. So we would take these internet packets and we would encapsulate them in the format of each network and as they went through err, the underlying network they would pop out at a place we would call a gateway. That's a computer that knew how to talk to each of the two nets it was connecting. And as it got to the 听听gateway this internet packet was popped out of it's err, network envelope so to speak and examined by the router to say where is it supposed to go next and it would look at the internet address and say oh it needs to go that gateway on another network. It would re encapsulate this internet packet err in the protocol of the next network carry it to the next gateway and pop it out and, and continue until you got to the last half where you delivered the packet to a computer at the end. 听So err fine, the best analogy I can think or for explaining how this works is really seriously think about what you know of postcards. Postcards have a from address and a to address, and then they have some content. 听That's the same as the truth is, the same is true of an internet packet. When you put a postcard in the post-box there is no guarantee that it actually comes out the other end. The post office doesn't guarantee delivery but it tries really hard. It's 听called best efforts communication. If you put two postcards in the post-box they don't necessarily come out then in the same order that you put them in. so that means that there's potentially disorder with your delivery and that's also true in the internet. Err in some cases the internet might deliver two copies of the same postcard because 听it might replicate how it needs to go and different paths because it re transmitted one of them. So you may be more than one copy err you know you would think err that this, this is a, terribly inefficient way of using a system. Why would you ever want an unreliable non guaranteed service? And the answer is well you really don't, what you want is something that makes them all flow smoothly and get err delivered in the right order. So the TCP protocol which is on top of the internet protocol puts things back in order, re transmits in the ........... that's kind of like, what would happen if you were sending a book to a friend. And the postal service only would do it with postcards. So you would ask yourself how do I send this book to my friend? 听Well first of all you have to cut the pages out of the book and then cut them up until they fit on the postcards. Then you'd notice that the postcards may not be delivered in order so you'd number every postcard, 1,2 ,3, ,4 5 then you'd remember that some of the postcards may be lost so you keep copies. Then you start sending postcards and then you wonder how do I know if I should send another copy of a postcard, how do I know if one has been lost and you get he idea that your friend should send you a postcard every once in a while saying I got all the postcards up to number 420. at that point you can throw away the copies you have because you know your friend got that far. Erm but if you hear nothing err, at all err then you'd say well you know it was his response must have been lost I'm going to start transmitting postcards that haven't been acknowledged yet and so that's how the basic system works, TCP and IP discipline the network into a nice smooth stream. 听Erm that's, there's more to it than that but that's sort of the basic idea.听

Intvr 听 00.16.35 听听听听In terms of the open architecture what why did that happen?听

Vint 听听00.16.40 听听听听The openness of the internet in part was a consequence of not knowing what application it was going to be supporting. We were very careful to make as few assumptions as possible, so that new ideas and new ways of using this technology could be injected into the system without having to change every single network, that made it this gigantic global network of networks. 听That's turned out to serve us extremely well. So that network itself doesn't know what each packet is carrying 听it doesn't' know whether the bits it he packet are video or audio or a piece of a web page or part of an email and the packets themselves have no idea how they're being carried though the system so they don't care whether they're being carried in an optical fibre or a satellite link or a radio connection. The nice thing about 听 that internet protocol layer is that it isolates the application from the underlying transport. And that has kept the internet open and able to ingest new technologies and able to support new applications for the last 30 years.听

Intvr 听听听听听 Were you aware as you worked on the development of the internet that it would have no central control erm, and ultimately be quite difficult to shut down?

Vint 听听Well part of my motivation when I was working at the internet was exactly to err build a system that did not have any central control recall that this was being supported by the US defence department, and one of the things that the defence department wants is highly reliable and resilient systems. One way to achieve that is to not have any central place that could be attacked and destroyed in therefore interfere with the operation of the net. So the consequence of this err this, err I would say decentralised architecture is that it is highly resilient to a variety of impairments and in consequence of that it's very hard for anybody to shut the internet down entirely.

Intvr 听 Governments all over the world for lots of reasons like to control the flow of information erm, did you foresee the way in which the internet could be a threat to governments and to authority?

Vint 听听Erm, I don't know that at the time that we were developing this we were thinking in political terms err certainly while I was at Darper during my six year tenure there, I was thinking of terms of how to build the system I the military could use and thinking in war time conditions erm, the politics of the situation are quite distinct from making sure the system works no matter where it is, physical components are. So the internet was designed with a non national structure the addressing is not based on national boundaries at all. It's simply based on topology. Err however as the internet evolved 听and as it became available to the general public which didn't happen 听really until the early 1990s err it became more and more apparent that the internet's s, style of operation was the ........... of what most 听countries had been accustomed to. 听in fact in the early days telephony and telegraphy there was only one network and it was often advantaged 听by and operated by the government giving it substantial control. So I rather liked the idea, that the internet didn't have that let me call it deficiency and therefore open a platform up it's probably the most democratic, opportunity for people to express themselves and to get information that has ever existed. 听

Intvr 听And you're erm, 2006 submission to the senate, what was the gist about erm, maintaining that neutrality what did you mean by net 听neutrality?

Vint 听听 Net neutrality is a term which is created a considerable amount of debate and controversy of my erm, intention in using that term was simply to say the network erm, access by users and by providers of applications should not be in any way erm, constrained except possibly erm, by capacity. 听We understand that you .......... available but I don't think that the supplier of a broadband service, should be able to interfere in some anti competitive way with the users ability to get to any application anywhere on the internet. 听That's the player of broadband access should not favour his or her own applications in err, err in competition with others. Everyone should have equal access to the, facilities, erm, it, it's the possibility of discriminatory 听behaviour that raised my concern in the term net neutrality refers basically to a, erm, a non discriminatory access to the internet. Some people have twisted that around to say well you don't to err charge more for more use of capacity or you don't want to allow us to err filter out err deny our service attacks or you don't want us to filter out spend, those are all false assertions, they're ...........all that I'm interested and most of my colleagues, are, interested in is 听to make sure that any one who has new idea had the opportunity up on the internet try it out whether other people get access to it. you think about Yahoo and Google and err eBay and Amazon and Skype and many others they didn't have to get permission from every internet service provider in the entire world before they brought up their applications. They simply got it a, acquired access to the internet through an ISP and then made those services available and anyone was free to try them out. 听That's what net neutrality and none discriminatory access is all about.

Intvr 听 What did you think when you first encounter Tim Berners Lee's world wide web?听

Vint 听听 Well interestingly enough I did not know about Tim's work. 听Until erm, after he had done erm, the original implementation if I remembering right it was something like Christmas in 1990. that his first implementations of the world wide web were available from ........... err I didn't know much about that at all or anything until err Mark and Greeson and Eric Beno built their version which they called mosaic from the national centre for super computer applications and the university in Illinois, and .............. this got everyone's attention because it was a graphical interface it was quite eye-catching err the imagery that we got from the, from the internet at that point was not just text but we received erm, images like a magazine. 听That turned everyone on, because it changed the nature of the medium from a purely text err system err to something that involved 听err images as well. Err my, recollection is that there were a million downloads 听of the mosaic's software almost immediately you know within the first couple of weeks. 听so err all of us got very excited about that. Of course Tim's working out how we can become extremely visible err then err the general public still they didn't know anything about this. Until 1994, and that's because Jim Clark who was one of the founders of Silicon Graphics err took Eric Pernar and err Mark and Rhys went out to the west coast to start what was called net scape communications. 听And in a, a bit of erm, irony erm, this, this all happened in 1994 that's the year I joined MCI in order to build an 听internet service for them. We also built and err what we call the MCI mall basically was an internet shopping mall. In 1994, we went out to Netscape communications in order to use their browser and server software to build our MCI mall application. This is 1994, and frankly I think we were about 10 years ahead of our time. 听In terms of the erm, err available community out there, that was using the internet. Err none the less erm, Tim's work has had a dramatic effect on people's interest in pushing information into the net and sharing it with everyone. In fact it was such an avalanche of information 听that you couldn't find anything out there any more and so you needed err search engines like AltaVista and WAYS the wider information service and eventually err Yahoo and then Google and of course many others since then.

Intvr 听听听听听 It is just human nature that hierarchies and elites emerge on the web?听

Chat听

Vint 听听 Err the internet invites a great deal of collaboration and in most people are free to introduce err content where, whenever they want to. of course a web site can resist that if it wants to but the an example of Wikipedia is a, is a good one. Erm, it, it's a essentially invited anyone who had a piece of information to share or to make an entry into Wikipedia to put some content in but it also allowed anyone else who wanted to err edit that to augment it to correct mistakes and so on to do so. I don't see this as a, as the creation of a hierarchy as much as I see this as a highly collorative err environment. And recently Wikipedia has decided to put some controls on content particularly for people who's err 听biographical information is on line. I mean we're still alive and I think part of the reason for that is that err some people might be erm, err tempted to err, err say enhance their biographical content erm, erm, and perhaps not to err to be fully accurate. Now on, on the other hand we do see, err an interesting spiral effect that shows up. When something 听becomes popular on the internet it often spreads very, very quickly we some of this happened with u tube for instance. 听It started out as a very small operation with a couple of guys with that wanted to help people upload video. Now I'm told that 23 hours of video are uploaded per minute into the U Tube system and I have no idea how many hours per minute are being watched by everybody else. But the same sorts of phenomenon show up and you see 听erm, a, a kind of rapid spiral twitter is another example of that. Once and idea gets popular on the net it grows very quickly because it's so easy to get access, to those new applications. 听And that's probably one of the most important erm, aspects of the internet it's easy for people to get access to 听new applications. Google believes that and I believe that our platforms the internet, mobiles and others should be as open as possible to allow exactly that phenomenon to exist.

Intvr 听听听听听 IN the long run do you think the web, the internet will make governments redundant with cause people are using to take power into their own hands?

Vint 听听 Some people might worry that err, there is too much freedom, to individuals using the internet, that err somehow governments will disappear because people will be able to do whatever they want to. I don't think that's a likely outcome frankly err the internet exists in the real world. it exists in a society that we all inhabit and a multiple societies, multiple cultures err it's absolutely you know essential to understand that the 听internet and the notion of cyber space is not divorced from the real world. 听we live in the real world the internet lives in the real world, our direction is with each other, we're not in some fictitious erm, you know strange planet somewhere else they are a part of the world we live in. it's essential that we live in a world of love because energy is not a good (laughs) path for civilisation to pursue. I don't think the internet will contribute to energy I think it will contribute to collaborative development of our civilisation.听

Rushes Sequences - President Toomas Ilves interview - Estonia (Video)

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Dan Biddle | 16:43 UK time, Thursday, 5 November 2009

is the President of the 听- a country which, in May 2007, was the . President Ilves discusses these events and the nature of Estonia's online infrastructure.

These rushes sequences are part of听our promise to release content听from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under听a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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Aleks 听听 I want to touch on some of those issues in a little while but before we get to that er, I think it's a very interesting modern phenomenon certainly um, and it'll be, it'll be interesting to look at Estonia within the context of the global openness and transparency. 听But before we go on to that I'm interested in how you feel the, the cyber attacks in April 2007 may have affected um, Estonians beliefs in the internet whether it's the transparency, whether it's the trust?

President Ilves 听听 Well OK the er, I mean the cyber attacks um, in 2007 I guess er, I mean if you, you know, um, because of my own personal interest I mean the, in the 90's you could you know, people speculating that in the future people could use cyber attacks and cyber warfare and. 听Um, no Estonia first of all was much better prepared than I think er, almost any other country would have been because er, we had just two months earlier in fact war gamed or gamed cyber attacks because we had our first national, our general elections in which people could vote um, on the web. 听And since we um, since er, everyone anticipated or we anticipated that every hacker worth his salt would as a matter of pride and honour attempt to, to sabotage the elections we actually went through what would happen if we got distributor denial of service or DDOS attacks. 听Er, and figured out well if we got these things then we would er, there are a number of strategies to follow, a number of er, partners in the European Union with which we sort of er, cooperated or, or in the process of the war gaming, or the gaming decided we will if this happened we would do that. There were no real, no er, noticeable attacks on er, during the election. 听Now when the, these attacks took place er, contrary to at least some of the spin given to it, it was quite organised in that if you actually look at the er, the level of attacks er, er, they drop off immediately at er, 2400 Greenwich Mean Time on the 9th. 听Er, no ............... little bit about math and generally how things run I mean it wasn't a galcean normal curve. 听Er, I said why is that? 听They said because the money stopped. Er, basically you can treat the cyber attacks in that, in that case as a er, a public private partnership involving at least on one part the Mafia or the, because er, I mean generally er, DDOS attacks are against um, well are, are, are, they're bought. 听I mean you rent er, bots, robot networks which then use to spam computer spam servers, knock them out. 听Um, it's use er, they're used or had been used previously mainly in extortion cases with um, saying well you know, you pay us $200,000 and we wont' shut down the server er, that you need to run your business. Er, so er, the clear deduction was that this was paid for er, you know, the amount of money is not insignificant. 听I mean someone paid for er, paid these illegal bot nets to do this. 听Um, and what did, how did it affect us? 听Well I mean it affected us mainly er, in that um, the er, government sites were shut down um, bus er, businesses were shut down, banks were targeted. 听Um, all in all er, they were fairly primitive in that um, and if you talk to er, cyber er, crime, cyber war experts today they said well OK that was nice but er, generally we're much more worried about other things. Today that was er, in fact the first time we'd seen this used as an instrument or political or of policy. 听Er, but these days' things can be much worse which I agree. 听I mean um, I guess it was more that the, there had been er, DDOS attacks er, previously um, against er, certain ministries. 听Um, in fact the UK, the German, the French er, and the US Ministries of Defence or the Pentagon had all been attacked but this was sort of you know, all out.

Aleks 听听听听 And, and their tactics were fascinating given well two things. 听Given um, their approach to attack the finance system and the communications system and then also and the, the government websites as well. 听Although they didn't do things like transport and justice and some of the other elements of a nation state. 听But also secondarily because it was associated with physical riots because of what was happening on the street here and ultimately what was happening in Moscow as well.

President Ilves 听 Right.听

Aleks 听听 Did you at any point er, get the sense that there could potentially be an escalation because of the combination of the cyber war and the physical riots that were going on both here and in Russia?

President Ilves 听听Well I was not worried about a escalation er, we were a member of NATO I mean so. 听Er, there are a couple of issues. 听I, I mean I, when I said things were mo, had moved beyond that I think if you look at the er, the report done by the er, cyber consequences unit in the united States which analysed the Georgina War and how er, the er, how cyber attacks were used there, it was far more sophisticated because it wasn't just sort of a blanket approach to sites. 听Er, places the, er, the first time ever we saw something that could only have been in the minds of sort of science fiction writers.

Aleks 听听听听听 Absolutely.听

President Ilves 听听Which was that you have military installations or you would put up in a er, on a site that not, I mean very few people knew but you put up where you would be attacking in half an hour and post the, the URL. And then people around the world would er, would sort of start er, sort of their DDOS sort of programmes to take down the sites. 听Now that is a, that is a, that was a major step in er, sophistication that you coordinate through using people around the world to coordinate military, the physical military attacks with cyber attacks. 听Um, that's interesting. 听Now this moves on to sort of some very serious issues er, regarding things such as NATO. Because um, I mean we, we, we are at a point in which a um, in NATO we have Article 5 that says, and it's the 3 Musketeer clause; an attack on one is an attack on all and all for one. 听If you er, shoot a missile at a er, a sort of a, a, a NATO country's electrical plant er, that is an act of war. 听Article 5 says OK we have been attacked we all now go and attack the country that, or whoever attacked the electrical system or whatever. OK um, but if you take out the same electrical system with um, with a cyber attack so you don't know who did it, you can have a, you can have a guess but you don't really know who did it. And secondly what is the response? 听Because in the case of er, say a missile attack well basically the idea is a proportional response. 听So you don't start a nuclear war because someone's blown up your electrical plant in one small place. 听But what is the appropriate response? 听You don't, you don't have responsibility, you haven't been able to ascertain responsibility and what do you do back? 听Um, so er, the whole issue of deterrents come in; how do you, what do you do I mean? And these are the kinds of philosophical strategic issues that er, I think people are grappling with today. 听Because er, it's quite clear that um, you can do er, basically all of the bad things that a war does without using dynamite, TNT, missiles. 听I mean there was the case in um, er, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal in the spring about er, malware found in, in er, in an electrical grid where any system controlling that one third of the west's electrical grid. Um, and there have been a number of other things that have, I mean there have been suggestions that a number of electrical failures have been due to cyber attacks. 听Intentional, unintentional we don't know. 听In any case it's a whole, it's a whole new, brand new area and that's what for example here in Tallinn er, we are, are er, are er, our people and our various allies from different countries are working on at the NATO Cyber Security Centre.

Aleks 听 This two pronged attack though, many of the people we have spoken with have, have emphasised that you know, it was, it was, it was a joined up manoeuvre in that you know, stuff has gone on outside, people who didn't' access say banks or didn't' have that constant update of communication, there was a real kind of um, well there is not a lot that people could really do. 听They weren't able to figure out what was going on and that has a, a real psychological effect on a population if more and more of us are relying upon online information, on line networking to do our daily businesses.

President Ilves 听听Well I mean you couldn't er, I mean if you take down the newspapers you, you don't know what's going on in, in the country. 听Er, if you take down the banks your business or basically economic activity is paralysed. 听I mean we had a fairly, I mean we had a, the first line was to simply isolate the country from domestic, I mean the dome, er, the country from outside attacks which you know, considerably eased the problem. 听Er, however, er, well if you're a country like ours er, which is so dependent upon foreign trade. 听Er, I mean if you're a large, you're a big country that you have a huge domestic market then, then you can maybe ti, tolerate it a little longer. But I mean we have a country in which you know, one of the highest er, export to GDP ratios in the world. 听So I mean everything is based on transfers of funds to here and out and all that stuff because you know, you can't get messages in. 听People from outside the country couldn't read the Estonian newspapers I mean all of that was a serious problem. All that of course has been fairly well now studied in terms of um, er, I mean what it means for a country's security. 听Because this was er, sort of a, the first case of it happening on grow er, as I said the kinds of attacks were nothing new. They weren't sophisticated, is was just massive and, and, and, and er directed at a lot of different kinds of er, institutions. 听I think that we've become much, all of us er, have become much more sophisticated regarding at least our understanding of the dangers in all of this. 听Er, and, and I think that er, now for example NATO is taking this issue much more seriously than it did before these cyber attacks.

Aleks 听 How er, I mean there are several theories about how this was perpetuated and, and who was responsible for this. 听Um, the prevailing one is that this was a, a state associated, Russian state associated er, and organised um, attack. 听How has Estonian's relation, Estonia's relationship with Russia changed or how has it been affected by the events in 2007?

President Ilves 听听 I don't think they really have been. 听I mean I think it's, since there's no proof um, I mean everyone has their own opinion and er, you know, well I mean. 听 Er, there is you know, it goes back to David Hume. 听I mean events happened in close temporal correlation you think there is a causal relationship. 听That's not necessarily true of course; that was Hume's point. 听But that er, just because the sun rises every day doesn't mean that it will rise tomorrow and so forth. 听Er, all this philosophy 101. 听But the fact that you have one event or another event er, does not necessarily mean they're related. 听听But on the other hand it probably wasn't organised in Uruguay or probably wasn't er, organised in um, Mali.

Aleks 听 We've spoken about the psychological effects on the Estonian population um, and also we've spoken briefly about what was happening within the country. 听But how do you feel the Estonia's reputation has been affected by the attacks er, diplomatically, when it comes to people's perspectives of the security of the networks system er, the, the success of the network?

President Ilves 听听Well I mean I, I think that er, how did it, immediate effect was the er, the, the decision that had not been made because no one was, I mean people weren't quite sure whether it was a necessary thing to do or not. 听Er, but the immediate consequence was the establishment of the NATO Centre for Excellence here. 听I mean this was. 听So I think in terms of long term political planning it, well whoever, whoever planned it er, sort of shot themselves in the foot. I mean er, er, because the immediate consequences had actually have a centre to deal with. 听Just for a background I mean we'd been actually arguing this for a number of years and NATO say well this is an area, we know, we know a little bit about it, you know, we should be dealing with this, we need a NATO centre. 听People said well yeah that's an interesting idea but you know, we're not there yet. And then, then it's. 听So I mean that was a, that really backfired on whoever wanted to harm the country and um, and I think it's made us more secure as well. 听I mean I think people feel, feel um, feel good about it and um, er, we are, well I mean why are you here? 听Oh well you come and ask us what, how it was? I mean in fact Estonia without ever planning to be has become a place er, with expertise on issues that er, we never wanted to have expertise on but now we have it. 听Er, and er, it's kind of odd that you see I mean er, I mean just because of my own intellectual interests I mean you know, there, there are conferences and people who I've, whose work I read before. 听I mean before the cyber attacks. 听And now there's an interesting piece and, but I never thought I'd meet them because it wasn't really my area. 听At the same time you know, sort of ............ deal with this every day unless I go to a place that someone says you know, I'm this person and I wrote you know. 听I go oh you're that, I read your article 10 years ago. 听So that's kind of funny. 听Er, but I don't think it really has affected much except um, except perhaps in a positive sense of er, alerting people to the fact that er, there is a degree of er, IT sophistication here in this little corner of Europe that er, they didn't know about. Um, because why else would you use I mean turn around, I mean there are a lot of countries that are very unsophisticated when it comes to government solutions er, or public er, public services on the, on the web. 听Er, now if they ............ no one would notice. 听I, I mean you notice it if you're vulnerable and you're vulnerable if you're, you're at a high level. 听Um, and er, er, and I would say you know, the negative side is that in fact countries that are less developed even within Europe er, their politicians have a hard time sometimes understanding what it is that I'm talking about. 听Because it's not, I mean I remember when I, when I was elected to the European Parliament and I had to switch offices and I went to a computer, I mean I went in to t new office and there was no computer in the office. And I said well I mean why is there no computer? 听Well the previous person didn't have a computer, a very prominent European politician. 听I said er, well how does it work? 听I mean no computer? 听It's, well the secretary would you know, print out all emails and er. 听I said oh and what about his letters? 听Well he would dictate to the secretary. I mean it's, it's 1930's style doing things. 听And um, it's changed. 听Er, I mean it's, for us it seems bizarre but in er, er, that anyone would not have a computer. 听But it's still fairly, fairly wide spread in Europe even today that people eschew the use of computers or at least er, in the generation of politicians my age still. 听I think when you go, when you get, get in to people in their 40's then it's already er, it's. 听And then when you get to people in their 30's and 20's then of course there's a difference. 听So I think it's a generational thing. 听I just happened to have a bizarre childhood so I started using computers very early.听

Rushes Sequences - Xiao Qiang interview - USA (Video)

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Post categories: Nation state,听Programme two,听clips and rushes,听interviews,听rushes,听video,听world-wide web

Dan Biddle | 16:17 UK time, Thursday, 5 November 2009

Xiao Qiang is听 at the . He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of , a bilingual collaborative China news website. Here he discusses the Chinese Government's approaches to the internet and the phenomenon of the '50 cent blogger'.

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Xiao 听听听Because China has never had a independent media and the free public speech, over time under the Chinese Communist Party rule, internet is the first time that as an alternative of the public media space ever since 1949. 听Again Chinese internet is not a real free space, its still heavily policed, however it is much freer than what you can say and what you can hear of official media. Especially when there are millions, millions of internet users who can express themselves with a very low threshold, anyone can have an internet connection and then can publicise something, and it is easy to be copied and pasted and circulated through this low ............ networks, ................, network structure, it is extremely hard for the authority to complete, absolutely control any type of information. SO in that background the rights of the Chinese public opinion only emerges as a real power in the last few years, when the Chinese internet users base getting large enough. 听Now what we see is the internet actually driving the media agenda about covering events, particularly of the issue of social justice. The police brutality, corruption or even natural disaster. Many of those areas that the government used to control information completely, many of these areas government used to have the complete control of the information but now internet break that. 听The one good example is last year 2008, when the China's Szechwan region had a enormous earthquake, 80,000 people died in such a tragedy. 听There is a particular tragedy that had a human factor to it which is there are thousands, almost ten thousand of the children, school children died because almost all the major school buildings collapsed during the earthquake. Well its not that the earthquake was that strong they wiped out every building, the most part of the buildings - particularly government buildings are stands fine, because they just simply had a better quality in their construction. 听And why all the public schools that have been constructed so badly. 听One was the reason behind, not an exceptional cases but many of them and cost some thousand of Chinese childrens life, and that is a question if we dig into it, will find some very deep rooted ........... in the Szechwan province that will probably make ................ 听Therefore, the Chinese authority issued a censorship order so that no Chinese media could cover this issue. 听They don't want the media to dig deeper then it becoming a systematic problem of the government. 听In the case of no official media can investigate the school collapse issue, many bloggers picked out their calling, particularly there is on Chinese artist ............ who is also a very known blogger, he bravely started a project of compiling all the names of the dead children of the school collapse, putting out 听these blogs, he has his research assistant doing that and then his action inspired hundreds of volunteers that actually went to the earthquake region, did an investigation and compiling those children names on their blogs. 听And that action alone generated a national attention of this issue, even defying all the censorship that of taking down some of the blogs, closing down his writings. 听However, there are hundreds and thousands of other volunteers are keep on putting 听those information on line, eventually driving this agenda back to the national media. And even the Chinese national newspaper had run a front page editorial sort of recognising this is the issue of human rights, that Chinese government must do something to it. 听So this is one good example of the online activism actually can do something even when the official media cannot do it.

Intvr 听听听听听 ??听

Xiao 听听 Chinas internet censorship is very pervasive, sophisticated and actually technologically advanced. What we are talking about is a multi layer from the central level to every provincial level the internet control system. There are over 60 laws and regulations regarding to the online contents and information flow, with a very vague language such as subversive information, endangering state security. 听Without any detailed definition and that any information and on line activity can be put into that category. 听And then China has a entire new police division called internet police, which is now based on every single police station as large as there is an internet connection to that region. 听From the central level all the way down to provincial level and to the city level, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of personnel. 听And then the old parties propaganda system again are working on controlling the internet censorship. 听The whole parties propaganda system are working on controlling the online messages. They have surveillance teams, they have a monitoring teams and they are monitoring the on line contents from blogs to forums, from news portals to social networking sites real time, and with the support of the best technology, data mining, surveillance, sniff packing and many other advanced technology to help them to go through the information to find out who did it, and what kind of information they are on a field trip. 听What's most important is they put this burden of censorship to all the internet companies, whether you are a Google or Yahoo or all those internet giants, or you are a small start up trying to hold some blogs or starting a new tweet like micro blogging services. 听You all have to censor your information that, or use this information as long as they are on your servers, so they all to have hire personnel who will provide the technology to do the censorship to fit the instruction of censorship orders. 听And that being said the biggest piece of the internet censorship is not just by police, its not just by the internet ............ providers and service providers, its also at the national gateway what we call the great Firewall, and this is a layer of technological defence to prevent the Chinese internet users to access all these what government call 'undesirable information' from the foreign sites. They block and over block hundreds of thousands and 听millions of sites and constantly update their key words filtering, the URL addresses, the IT addresses and sometimes they even maliciously attacking the foreign websites if they do not like what they are saying about China.

Intvr 听听听听听 Can you say what effect this has on blogger听

Xiao 听听 Well on the Chinese internet the netizens are very familiar with the following terms听

Intvr 听听听听听 What effect has this on the blogger?听

Xiao 听听In Chinese internet people are very familiar with following terms. One is a code name Rivercrab, one term is Rivercrab its really a code name of internet censors, because in Chinese language a Rivercrab is pronounced the same as harmony, which is the Chinese government official slogan of building a harmonious society. 听Then all the internet censorship has done under the name of building a harmonious society so the internet netizens often called that 听 any censorship 听being done is that when a blog posting deleted听

Intvr 听听听听听 What is a 50 cents blogger?听

Xiao 听听 There are several internet cultural, regarding to internet censorship there are several of those Chinas unique phenomena. 听One is a 50 cents blogger, a 50 cent party, what it is, is the government has paid, trained those what they call internet commentators, essentially government paid people that go on line to spin the on line opinion or expressing the messages, giving the messages of government saying but without their real identity, they pretend to be the ordinary netizens, but they are there in government term pro quote, influencing the public opinion. But there are so many of them in a different level, different government agencies hire them for their own PR purposes and they all together get a nickname by Chinese netizens 50 Cents bloggers. Its making fun of each of them working so hard that each of their post are only worth 50 cents. But this is a real Chinese on line phenomena. 听You go to the major internet ............... or all the visible places, many of those on line contents, it looks like its generated by the user, but actually they are those, belongs to those 50 cents bloggers. The people who are familiar with the Chinese internet politics can tell a lot of those contents are simply coming from those 50 cents bloggers. 听But if you are just doing a computer survey you wouldn't tell what is the real public opinion on line.听

Intvr 听听听听听 Has the part of using 50 cent bloggers been successful?听

Xiao 听听Its actually very questionable whether the 50 cents blogger had a real impact in terms of what government really want it to be. On the one hand with all these sort of 50 cent bloggers effort your looking at the major Chinese portal, your looking at their rigorous comments, and it looks much more flattery and makes the government feel comfortable, less critical of public opinion. However, the Chinese movement has recently admitted that the internet caused a deeper credibility crisis of the government. 听People do not believe what the government authority are saying on line and in official media. 听SO even the 50 cents bloggers has been employed in the last few years the on line content looks better, but it seems like the government credibility is going down. The people are not stupid, simply just believe those what's been created by the 50 cents bloggers, and that's just created a deeper credibility issue the trust issue for the government, and the government has to face and that is all their own doing.

Intvr 听听听听听 You mentioned that people realised that the government are using 50 cent bloggers to get their message across, what is the governments response to that?

Xiao 听听Well the Chinese government is really determined to control the on line with all the cost, the Chinese government is really determined to control the on line content with any cost. 听SO the more internet users are out spoken, the more internet form public opinion to opening up the Chinese press system, the more effort of the Chinese authority put it, whether resources, personals, new laws, technology and more sophisticated propaganda efforts to try to control on line. SO the Chinese internet is really a contested space. 听Regarding to the public opinion, the Chinese governments new measure is to force the internet users, at least in the major news portals, register with their real identity before they can comment on news or current affairs. In other words in the several major Chinese news Portals now require to be registered with their real ID number before anyone can publish the commentaries about current news, and that is a big step. 听Apparently the next step is Chinese Government, apparently the Chinese authority is pushing for the next big step which requires more services, more internet posting companies that require their users to do anything on line must have a real identification number, and this is called real name registration nationwide. The government brings up the South Korea as an example, saying that if South Korea the real name registration system can be implemented then China should do the same. This is a big way of through the, force the ........... to aware their real identity is under the governments surveillance, by that the government hope to control the online public opinion.

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