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Protests Around the World: Take Note of the 2011 List So Far

The following is a small excerpt of a much larger text I’ve been working on for the past few weeks:

To refer to the worldwide protests of 2011 as the Arab Spring is to mark a serious misnomer. In fact, I would argue that it all began in November 2010 with the student protests in central London against the government’s increase of school tuition fees. Though the hike in tuition narrowly passed, the protests were seen as largely successful in holding politicians to a far greater level of scrutiny and accountability than they were accustomed to.

As the media repeatedly emphasized, the protests were organized almost completely using online tools. Just as the UK student protests began to wind down, a new movement was building in Tunisia, where well organized opposition groups took advantage of escalating protests against youth unemployment and high food prices to ouster long time authoritarian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Once again, social media were cited as instrumental tools in the protest movement and, predictably, Andrew Sullivan quickly dubbed it a “Wikileaks Revolution,” ignoring years of on-the-ground constituency building by groups like Nawaat.

The successful movement to ouster Ben Ali inspired similar opposition groups throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Most famously, Egyptian protesters were able to force out President Hosni Mubarak in just three weeks after nearly 30 years of dictatorial rule. Major protest movements also took place — and continue to take place — in Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.

Meanwhile, in Europe, austerity measures provoked the so-called “Desperate Youth” of Portugal and “May of Facebook in Greece.” In nearby Spain tens of thousands of mostly youth protesters camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, demanding their very own “Spanish Revolution.” The movement was rooted in the “Real Democracy Now” online platform, which called for the evolution of political representation to catch up with the pace of technological innovation. The acampadas, or “camps,” of protesters throughout Spain then inspired similar youth protests in Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador — all of which were organized on Twitter and Facebook.

The protest fever also spread to Sub-Saharan Africa. Gabonese activists both inside the country and abroad used social media to draw attention to the human rights abuses of President Ali Bongo Ondimba, son of long-time strongman Omar Bongo. In Senegal the Twitter hashtag #ticketwade was used to organize successful protests against a proposed constitutional amendment that would change electoral rules.

In Uganda the government went so far to request that internet service providers block access to Facebook and Twitter as anti-government protests built up amid rising food and gas prices. In Latin America social media have been instrumental in organizing protests against: violence in Mexico, a university tuition hike in Puerto Rico, and a proposed hydro-electric dam in Chile. Even in the United States, long free of traditional protest movements, social media have helped bring together students and unions in opposition to proposed legislation that takes rights away from workers. As I write this, a streaming video of student protests against the privatization of education in Chile hangs in the background of my desktop. Tech savvy activists taped an iPhone to a balloon and live-streamed the day’s protests to thousands of viewers across the world.

Just halfway into 2011, the protests of 1968 (“the year that rocked the world”) look minor in comparison. But what will all of this go on to achieve? How will future historians judge the lasting effects of 2011?

I’ll let you know when the full text is published.

The Military and the Homicide Rate in Mexico

With clearly presented statistical  analysis, José Merino’s article for this month’s Nexos magazine shows that the deployment of the Mexican military in the so-called “War on Drugs” has led to a sustained increase in the homicide rate in those places where troops have been deployed.

I hope that José publishes a followup analysis with a closer look at municipal-level data. For now we can play around with a handy timeline map that Diego Valle-Jones created with Google Fusion Tables and compare the increase in homicides at the local level with military operations that have taken place in those areas.If you are a data geek interested in public security in Mexico, I also highly recommend Diego’s “Statistical Analysis and Visualization of the Drug War in Mexico.”

On June 15 at noon GMT Sarah Drummond of MyPolice.org and Making a Difference with Data will lead an online discussion about using open data effectively to improve public security policy. Unfortunately, no matter how much evidence is shown to Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, there is no way that he’ll adjust his security policy. Calderon often is not held accountable for his actions because there is no presidential re-election in Mexico, a legacy of its 1910 – 1920 revolution. The following article is meant to be read together with Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez’s excellent think piece, “The Root of Violence,” which I won’t have time to translate into English, but hopefully Insight Crime will.

Here is my translation of Diego’s article:

For the first time ever José Merino brings together the three statistical sources of information that measure the number of homicides in the country: INEGI, the National Public Security System, and the database of homicides related to organized crime. Merino finds that the spiral of violence has grown disproportionately in states where the federal government conducted joint operations (between the police and military).

Here’s what we can’t question: in the last three years we see a substantial increase in the number of homicides in Mexico, with monstrous increases in a few, specific states. That’s where the unquestionable ends. But when we ask for the specific increase of homicides, we can only respond with the opportune, but little sexy, “well, it depends.”

There are two sources of information about homicides in Mexico: the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), which bases its numbers on death certificates, and the National Public Security System (SNSP), which is based on police investigations. And no, they do not match. Which is better? That depends on who you trust, the forensic experts (INEGI) or the state prosecutors (SNSP). According to INEGI’s data, in 2009 we had the highest homicide rate in Mexico’s recent history. According to the SNSP, the homicide rate was actually higher in 1999 than 2009.

In January of this year Nexos published an article by Fernando Escalante titled “Death With Permission: Homicides 2008 – 2009.” Escalante concluded that the spike in the homicide rate – following years of its gradual decline – “can be explained by the deployment of the army, marines and federal police throughout a significant portion of the country.”

To support his argument, Escalante offered a series of descriptive graphics that show the evolution of homicide rates in states with joint operations between the military and police versus those without them. The difference was drastic. These graphics can show a pattern in the data, which could or could not implicate a statistical correlation or causal relationship, but nothing more.

I was surprised that the conclusions from the article were quickly echoed by other media as facts, as if they confirmed what everyone already suspected: military presence leads to an increase in the homicide rate.

My intention in this analysis was to use statistical methods that examine causal relationships in order to conclude that Escalante was mistaken, that there was no causation between the joint military operations and the rise in the murder rate. But that’s not how it turned out. Instead, the central conclusion of my analysis is that, using the appropriate statistical methods, Escalante’s conclusions are confirmed: the military operations have caused an increase in the homicide rate in the states where they have taken place.

Finding the Link

We can’t analyze the effect of joint military operations on the level of violence without understanding the trends in homicide statistics in those states with operations compared to states where operations did not take place. In order to do that, we must aggregate the sources of relevant information from INEGI and Secretary of Public Security along with the Associates of Organized Crime (ACO) database from the federal government. I will use all three in my analysis for one simple reason: we’re interested in understanding the relationship between phenomena, rather than defending which source of information is the best or most exact.

According to the statistics in the three databases, in those states with joint military operations, there were also homicide rates much higher than the rest of the states. The difference among states with joint military operations and those without increased dramatically beginning with the implementation of the operations: Michoacán (December 2006), Guerrero and Baja California (January 2007), Nuevo Leon and Tamualipas (January 2008), Chihuahua (April 2008), Sinaloa and Durango (May 2008).

Among those states with joint military operations, Chihuahua’s homicide rate increased 10 points (per every 100,000 citizens) compared to the national average. But even without taking Chihuahua into account, the other seven states with joint military operations have much higher homicide rates than even the most violent states without operatives (I will call these states violent states without operations the G5: Nayarit, Coahuila, Morelos, Quintana Roo, and Sonora). As you can see in the table below, the rest of the country has a much much lower homicide rate than these 13 most violent states.

[Translater's note: It gets confusing, but to review: Mexico has 31 states and one federal district. There are eight states with joint military operations. Of those eight states, Chihuahua is by far the most violent - mostly due to Ciudad Juarez. There are five states that don't have joint military operations but still have a significant homicide rate. Jose calls these states the "G5."]

To put it into an international perspective, some of the states with joint military operations have homicide rates along the lines of some of the most violent countries in the world, such as Colombia and Venezuela. Those states that are violent, but without joint military operations (the “G5″) are along the lines of Russia. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is more like Costa Rica or Lithuania.

Now, if we look at the only source of information with complete data for 2010, the homicides of the Associates of Organized Crime database, we see a dramatic increase both in states with joint military operations and the G5. In fact, the increase was so high in the ACO database, that it exceeded the number of 2009 homicides from the INEGI database [which takes into account all types of homicides; not just those related to organized crime].

What happens, then, with the homicide rate after the deployment of joint military operations? (See graphics 2 and 3.)

There seems to be a shared pattern (Nuevo León and Tamaulipas are exceptions): an immediate increase in the number of homicides after the start of a joint military operation, then a plateau for the next few months, followed by yet another rise. Once again, Chihuahua is the outlier; even among the most violent states, it has a far higher homicide rate. One could jump to the conclusion that the high correlation between joint military operations and the increase in homicides is fundamentally explained by Chihuahua. But that’s not how it is.

We can start by recognizing that the joint military operations did not occur randomly or by chance, but rather, they took place precisely in those states where violence and organized crime was the most visible. Therefore, if we want to measure the effect of additional violence that was provoked by the operations we have to isolate the operations from other influences, such as the trends of the homicide rates prior to the operations.

Let’s imagine an experiment in which we can compare two states with identical homicide rates for a particular year, but in one state we introduce a joint military operation and in the other we don’t. If there are differences in the homicide rates the following year, they could likely be attributed to the operation. There is a statistical method, propensity score matching, that allows us to do exactly that. It brings together groups of observation (in this case, entities) that are based on a particular variable (the homicide rate from the previous year), and compares the application or not of another variable (the joint military operations). When we use this method based on the three sources of homicide statistics we obtain the following results (see the methodological note at the end).

From this exercise we can reach three conclusions. First: there is a causal effect between the deployment of joint military operations and the rise in the murder rate in all three data sources. Second: the relationship still exists even when we exclude Chihuahua from the data, although the effect is largely reduced using the INEGI data. Third: the effect increases and strengthens when we use municipal data, given that it increases the variance of the data. In order to make comparisons, however, we’ll use the state-level data.

What would have happened if the joint military operations never occurred?

According to the data from INEGI, between 2008 – 2009 we would have had 7,063 fewer homicides (with a confidence interval between 4,170 and 11,328). See graphic 4.

According to the limited data from the National Security Secretary (SNSP) between 2008 – 2009, the number of murders would have fallen by 5,289 (with a confidence interval between 2,166 and 9,368). See graphic 5.

In the case of the Associates of Organized Crime database, which covers the entire period between 2008 – 2010, there would have been 11,477 fewer homicides. See graphic 6.

To say it another way, between 2007 and 2009 INEGI reported 42,064 homicides in total and the SNSP reported 39,563. Without joint military operations those numbers would have been 35,001 and 34,174, respectively. For its part, the Associates of Organized Crime database reported the widely cited and tragic sum of 35,000 related murders between 2007 – 2010. Without joint military operations this total number would have been 22,954. This is the size of the effect of the joint military operations in the states where they occurred: according to all three sources, clear statistical significance. The analysis presented here measures the effect in those states where there are military operations. Of course, it would be naive to think that the impact is merely reduced to these states and doesn’t extend to other areas where drug trafficking cartels are also present.

Behold the numbers of the war on drugs; those which we can attribute to joint military operations with the information that is available to us. What remains to discuss and debate is the violence in Mexico, its causes, and the pertinence of the government’s strategy to combat organized crime.

Letting the Great World Spin

The world spins by ever faster, a phenomenon not just of growing older — accumulating our own extensive, personal archive — but also a product of every generation leaving behind more for us to chew on, despite the same amount of time to chew.

We mostly survive by keeping our heads down, locking out the rest of the world, isolating ourselves in our earbuds, screens, and living rooms. When Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest classical musicians, pulled out his Stradivari violin to play for free at a Washington DC metro station, most passerby were incapable of snapping out of their morning daze to stop and pay attention. Extraordinarily few events are truly cathartic, not for a single individual, but genuine collective catharsis.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the freedom of Nelson Mandela, the Cuban Revolution, 9/11. They are events rooted in emotion, they change our worldview, and they seem to actually change the world around us, even as the initial moment of catharsis is inevitably circumscribed by the determined shortcomings of human nature.

The  100-page collection of stories mentions Philippe Petit, a 61-year-old mischievous Frenchman who on August 7, 1974 walked a tightrope from one World Trade Center Tower to the other. Writes McCann:

Shortly after 9/11 everything in Manhattan seemed to have intimate meaning … A car on 85th Street sat collecting parking tickets at first, but they soon became flowers: On the dashboard was a fireman’s parking permit … Somehow each thing was linked with the next and the last.

The question, as a writer, was how to find meaning at all when there was, in plain sight, a world charged with meaning:

The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later.

McCann immediately began researching New York City circa 1974 and Let The Great World Spin is a testament to his due diligence, but it doesn’t get bogged down by historical trivia.

As McCann continued his research, the famous high-wire walk became much more visible to my generation. Petit himself published an autobiographical account in 2002, which was then turned into a stunning 2008 documentary (available via streaming on Netflix).

 

 

But wait, that’s not what this novel is about at all. Rather, Petit’s daring walk becomes an anchor, a single event with which to examine a single year in a single city from multiple perspectives as lives criss-cross with little consideration of all that leads to our every interaction.

This is what makes McCann’s writing breathtaking. It takes one hell of a ballsy novelist to have a go at narrating from the first-hand perspective of a neurotic Park Avenue housewife, a late-career prostitute in the Bronx, a burned out city judge, a Guatemalan nurse. But he does all of this and much more with seemingly little effort.

And from the lives of the characters we begin to piece together some of the emerging trends of 1974: the soldiers back from Vietnam and desperate for sex and drugs, the creeping understanding of the eventual impact of ARPANET, the epidemic of housing fires in the South Bronx, the boom of liberation theology.

This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly two years now. I’m not sure what inspired me to finally pick it up this month, but it made for fortuitous companionship.

When a character narrated her experience on 53rd and Lexington, there I was, at a hotel just two blocks away. When another character was mugged in Harlem near 5th avenue and 120th Street, I was once again just a few blocks away, reading myself to sleep at a friend’s apartment.

New York City today is so different from the New York of 1974 that it was at times difficult to believe McCann’s portrayal. And yet I know that his descriptions are grounded in impeccable research, that the city really has changed so radically in such short time (even if today’s subway rats are the very descendants of their 1974 forefathers).

It is difficult to compare 1974 with today and not come away with some sense of optimism. The world — or at least New York City — has become a more tolerant, more respectful, safer place to live.

I traveled to New York, in part, to see if I could ever live there. I gave myself a full seven days; from SoHo to Harlem, Newark to Brooklyn, all the way over to Long Island. I wanted to consume and digest the entire city, to let it envelope me, to make it my own, to see it from the eyes of a resident.

But quickly I realized that I came with a fundamentally flawed strategy. New York City is too much of an experience for any one person to understand. Residents quickly learn to break it down into its comfortable, component parts.

“You can’t treat New York City as a single entity,” one friend tells me as I complain about sensory overload and exhaustion. “I’ve got my weekly dinner friends and my community garden … you know, you learn to find your spaces, your routine.”

And by necessity, you begin to shut the rest out, turn your senses off, hide in your iPod, magazine, and private world of private thoughts.

Literature is still a wonderful trick to break down those component parts we all create and tie it all together again. “One of the points of this novel,” writes fellow Hunter College professor Nathan Englander, “is that, no matter how many worlds New York contains within it, it’s really a wonderful, singular, unified city.”

McCann begins the novel with a quote from Aleksandar Hemon: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

The concern, of course, is that literature becomes our escapism, our excuse to see individuals and communities unlike our own without ever actually interacting with them. That literature becomes an isolated end in itself rather than an inspirational beginning to a fuller, more satisfactory life.

I have recently begun reading three “anti-armchair” guides to Mexico City that set out to inspire readers to cross their ordinary social boundaries. All three, beautifully designed guides are available in their entirety online. They are a starting point for me to piece together my own urban tapestry, even if I could never reach the eloquence and ambition of McCann.

Writing So Open It Hurts

A nini ethnography

In 2009 the word still did not exist in Mexico. Yet by August 2010, it was nearly impossible to watch the nightly news without suffering through yet another segment, interview, or monologue about the country’s nini phenomenon. Nini, ni estudian ni trabajan, they neither study nor work. The first mention of the term I am able to find in the Mexican press comes from the February 2010 edition of Proceso magazine. In his article, The Mexican Ninis, José Gil Olmos says he first heard the term from National Autonomous University rector, José Narro Robles.

In Mexico there are at least seven million, and worldwide many more. They are young people with no future, or, if they have one, it is hopeless, bleak, and shameful. This is a generation marked by disappointment. They are now called the “Ninis,” and previously were the “emos” and generation X.

In September 2010 alone, there were at least 161 mentions of the term “ninis” in mainstream Mexican media. It became a favorite buzzword by politicians and talking heads. Unemployed Mexican youth were blamed for the country’s insecurity, its slow growth, and the pervasive pessimism that hangs above the metropolis like the ever-present, yellowish layer of smog. César Duarte, the governor of Chihuahua, even proposed mandatory military service for all Mexican youth who are not enrolled in school or employed. Kent Paterson of the Center for International Policy declared 2010 the “year of the nini.”

The February 2011 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek – “The Kids Are Not Alright” – internationalized the alleged nini phenomenon:

“In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt, who on Feb. 1 forced President Hosni Mubarak to say he won’t seek reelection, are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths. The hittistes and shabab have brothers and sisters across the globe. In Britain, they are NEETs—”not in education, employment, or training.” In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000 euros a month. In the U.S., they’re “boomerang” kids who move back home after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China, where labor shortages are more common than surpluses, has its “ant tribe”—recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying work.”

The current protests in Spain have brought the buzzword back to the Op-Ed pages of Mexican newspapers, but among all the punditry of just what to do with these typically over-educated and under-employed youth, very few Mexican journalists or anthropologists have shown any interest in actually trying to understand them. Daniel Hernandez is one of the few, and in many ways Down and Delirious can be read as an ethnography of Mexico’s so-called ninis; youth who have not found meaningful employment, but have managed to create meaning through self-expression.

Alain de Botton reminds us that just 100 years ago it was rarely expected that we would marry for love. As little as 20 years ago work was still seen as work — a sacrifice we made in order to seek pleasure and leisure during our time off. Now an entire, global, connected generation wants to find meaningful work that creates pleasure in itself. But the market has not yet produced those jobs in sufficient quantity. And the youth keep waiting.

The Donald Draper Complex

There were moments – plenty of them – when I felt undeniable envy; not so much of Daniel’s writing, which is beautiful, but rather the seductive aesthetic that seems to shape around his every waking day.

It is what first drew me into the novels of Henry Miller, Kerouac and Bukowski as an 18-year-old: the romantic revelry with hobos, drugs, prostitutes, starving artists, and sexual experimentation. While the rest of Mexico City’s expats are sipping fashionable mezcal and making their way around the museum and gallery circuit, Daniel and his indie cinema cast of friends “find an untouched watering hold and make it [their] own:”

“The little building looks both dead and drunk, unused, and at least two hundred years old. Around the corner, next to a permanent mound of fresh garbage and behind a metal grate, with no sign and no fixed name, sits our spot. It is just one room big and the bathroom is revolting. Nothing decorates the walls but a sticky film best left uninvestigated. Roaches the size of small rodents sometimes amble across the tile floor, giving me the frightening impression that they have large and complex brains. Old prostitutes, gangly old gay men, transvestites or transgendered ladies with saggy chins, gangsters, women with only a few precious bits of teeth hanging from their gums, dealers—it’s their spot, too. We get to know the “owners” and become quite acquainted with the running melodramas of the place.”

Daniel’s Mexico City is mythical. Somehow he is able to find a little Charles Bukowski wherever he goes. Each night, as I flicked through another chapter on my iPad, my own life began to feel increasingly sterile, predictable, institutional. More meetings, more proposals, more white papers, more conferences.

Half way through Daniel’s book I read a discussion between two old-school allies, Antonio Lopez and Erik Davis, which was yet another reminder of how far my life had drifted from the West Coast, wannabe Bohemianism of my younger days.

There were nights when I felt a nearly uncontrollable urge to surround myself with the “artists, writers, punks, filmmakers, druggies, psychonaughts, Bohemians, and homeless crazies,” in the words of Antonio. Other nights I nearly hopped in my car to seek out a bag of mushrooms and some hippie encampment outside of Palenque. I reflected on where this urge came from. A lasting vestige of my need to rebel against the monotony and sterility of Southern California’s suburbs? An early onset of a midlife crisis?

I’m not sure. Nor do I know why Daniel celebrates the hunger of the starving artist and the lunacy of the sobbing transvestite prostitute. Is it the life of the writer? Seeking out the esoteric underground to become its literary ambassador for the intellectual class? Or is it actually an aesthetic choice, our daily actions and discrimination wrapped up in fashion, photographs, waiting to be pinned down by marketers and magazines?

It is impossible to write about Mexico and not identity

This is a book about identity on multiple levels. First, and most obviously, Daniel’s own struggle to see himself through the eyes of other Mexicans:

“One day a roommate brought a friend over to our apartment. The friend was a young, redheaded, blue-eyed native of Mexico City, dressed like a gutter punk, who was “hanging around” California. I told the young Mexican girl my parents were Mexican and that I was born in San Diego, that we’re from Tijuana. “But you’re not really Mexican,” the girl responded. I was not? Until then I had always been under the impression that the world perceived me as Mexican, like it or not. I felt Mexican—stuck between a dominant American culture that shunned the “Mexican” within its society, and contemporary Mexicans back in Mexico who found it so easy to dismiss our mixed heritage as somehow unrelated to theirs. Around that time films such as Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También were opening up radically new conceptions of Mexican life for people north of the border. The same should have been true in the opposite direction. But no. As a Mexican American, born in gringo territory, I was still excluded from the national narrative in Mexico.”

But it is also a dissection of the many identities of Mexico City’s urban tribes. Emos, hipsters, cholos, punks, rappers, graffiti artists, neo-indigenist peace-pipe passers, fashionistas, cult worshippers — he tries to understand them all; at times by reviewing the literature, but usually by inserting himself into their circles.

There is one last, more subtle, layer of identity meditation, and that is Daniel’s own coming of age from 2002 when he graduates from Berkeley and books a one-way flight to Mexico City, and the end of 2010 when he finishes the book’s manuscript. Throughout the book the references to homosexuality and sexual liberation are both subtle and pervasive. Daniel’s relationship with the entire world seems to take on an erotic androgyny. From a conversation with a friend (boyfriend? we don’t know, it doesn’t seem to matter) about Mexico City’s fashion scene:

You can see it in other designers here as well. they are merging the global with the local, applying the austere lines and geometries of international couture with the playfulness and surreal qualities of everyday life in Mexico. They are also disciples of the power of androgyny. Among independent young labels, garments are offered as unisex, expressing in a simple article of clothing a belief in the idea that the male and female exist equally within the self.

Down and Delirious complicates how we think about sexuality among Mexico City’s youth. I have no idea if Daniel is heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Those categories simply don’t seem relevant, and the careful reader senses a deliberate effort to transcend them completely.

It struck me that, perhaps, Daniel could have only achieved such transcendence of the usual notions of sexuality here in Mexico City. Back in California the genres of hetero and homo are too well defined, while Mexico City is still exploring its first sexual revolution with daily improvisation.

So open it hurts

In 1970, Boston Globe magazine editor Bill Cardoso first referred to Hunter S. Thompson’s unique style of journalism as “gonzo,” and so emerged a new sub-genre of narrative reporting that inserts the observer into the observation. Today another, new sub-genre of writing is upon us — a slightly forced marriage between the frantic hyper-connectedness of the web and the reflective, iterative re-writing that eventually leads to a book.

There is no shortage of blogs that have become books (there is even software to automate the process), but Down and Delirious strikes me as much more ambitious than an edited aggregation of Daniel’s excellent blog, Intersections. Spanish speakers can get a better sense of what he is after in this video to introduce a workshop Daniel will be giving on digital journalism at .357.

The characters in Daniel’s book are also the same avatars leaving comments on his Facebook wall as I write this. It is impossible to separate the book from the blog, and impossible to separate the blog from every passing day, comment, conversation. We are witnessing a new genre that represents a generation that has grown up over-sharing, that has never been timid to offer an opinion even before learning all the facts, that can frequently share its deepest secrets with the wider public more easily than with its closest friends. It is a generation and a genre of writing that has learned to be so open it hurts.

Why I Still Read Novels

A friend asked me how and why it is I find the time to still read novels, despite the fact that none of us have time to do anything these days.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, A.O. Scott penned an interesting meditation on Susan Sontag’s consideration of photography as a fine art and today’s democratization of photography — with the ever-increasing plethora of iPhone apps, the lowering cost of dSLRs, and the one-click transformation of what used to be an entire afternoon in the dark room thanks to free Aperture and Lightroom presets. But it was a supplementary “block quote” from Sontag that caught my eye:

Virtually all the important aesthetic, moral and political problems — the question of “modernity” itself and of “modernist” taste — are played out in photography’s relatively brief history. William K. Ivins has called the camera the most important invention since the printing press. For the evolution of sensibility, the invention of the camera is perhaps even more important. It is, of course, the uses to which photography is put in our culture, in the consumer society, that make photography so interesting and so potent. In the People’s Republic of China, people don’t see “photographically.” The Chinese take pictures of each other and of famous sites and monuments, as we do. But they’re baffled by the foreigner who will rush to take a picture of an old, battered, peeling farmhouse door. They don’t have our idea of the “picturesque.” They don’t understand photography as a method of appropriating and transforming reality — in pieces — which denies the very existence of inappropriate or unworthy subject matter. As a current ad for the Polaroid SX-70 puts it: “It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look.”

Those of us who call ourselves photographers (and these days who doesn’t?) are announcing a kind of visual appreciation, a palate of the eye. We look at life through a frame of colors, contrasts, background lighting, and geometric juxtaposition.

For someone like me – who tends to lean toward portraits – it is a way to study the play of light as the 52 or so facial muscles work their magic each and every millisecond to reveal or betray some deeper significance that is rooted in emotion.

In a slightly more complicated form, it is this same filter of we how observe that which surrounds us that keeps me reading novels despite all the hubbub about the end of literary fiction. I don’t know how else to put it — literature is a magical, mental language through which I record observations and reflections that are rarely shared in conversation, but yearn to be placed properly in print. The more actively I read novels the more vibrant this magical interpretation of the world around me.

Weekly Events To Fill Your Calendar

News

Turkey’s 138 Forbidden Words

The Turkish Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) has sent web-hosting companies a list of 138 allegedly offensive words, urging them to ban the hosting and registration of all Internet domains that include such words. “Gay,” “breath,” and “homemade” are among the words on the list. Activists and lawyers are challenging the legality of the request.

Africa’s Facebook Explosion

In just seven months the number of Facebook users has doubled in many African countries. In Senegal, for example, Facebook users have increased from 229,340 to 477,840 since August 2010. Russell Southwood examines what the trend could mean for the development of Africa’s online market.

British firm offered spying software to Egyptian regime

Documents shared by Egyptian blogger Mostafa Hussein with The Guardian reveal that a British company offered to sell software for 300,000 euros to Egyptian security services in order to surveil email accounts and hack into computers.

US Supreme Court Weighs Whether To Limit Data Mining

In a two-part series, Nina Totenberg offers context into a current US Supreme Court hearing about the data mining of prescription information from pharmacies which could set precedent for other cases related to the collection of personal consumer information. In part two Totenberg dissects the legal arguments made by the justices and lawyers.

New Government Body to Control Online Content in China

China has set up a new government body, the State Internet Information Office, to keep a tighter grip on the content available to Chinese internet-users inside the country.

Features and Analysis

Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking over the World

The Hindu interviews UK-based science journalist Angela Saini about her first book “Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking over the World.” Saini cites the Open Source Drug Discovery project, “a revolutionary project to collect research into tuberculosis from small-scale researchers across India, pool it on an open-access website and use this to come up with a possible cure.”

Alarm over EU ‘Great Firewall’ proposal

Broadband providers and anti-censorship activists have voiced alarm over an EU proposal to create a “Great Firewall of Europe” by blocking “illicit” web material at the borders of the bloc.

(Your) Information Wants to Be Free

Mozilla cryptographer Ben Adida recalls Stewart Brand’s famous utterance that information wants to be free and juxtaposes the original stick-it-to-the-man enthusiasm with recent news of compromised user data by Epsilon and Sony. His conclusion: “Every company that dabbles in user data should assign a dedicated security and privacy team whose sole responsibility is to protect user data.”

Buying Copyrights, Then Patrolling the Web for Infringement

The New York Times takes on the issue of so-called “copyright trolling,” in which contracted companies opportunistically seek litigation to make money from copyrighted works that have been widely posted online. The Media Bloggers Association has filed a brief accusing the US-based firm Righthaven of singling out defendants who can not afford legal help.

Toward an Open Wireless Movement

In a classic tragedy of the commons, open wireless networks are becoming increasingly rare. Peter Eckersley of Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes a call to action in order to reinvigorate the sharing of Wi-Fi. Two obstacles, notes Eckersley, are that we need better routers to control how we share our bandwidth and a new Wi-Fi protocol to ensure privacy and security on shared, open networks.

The Global Information Technology Report: Transformations 2.0

The World Economic Forum has released its 10th annual The Global Information Technology Report with the theme “Transformations 2.0.”

Facebook, Google, and the Future of Privacy and Free Speech

Jeffrey Rosen of the Brookings Institute imagines future technological developments by Facebook and Google, and reflects on their potential impact on privacy and free speech through the eyes of the law and society.

Diary

Cyber-surveillance in Everyday Life: An International Workshop

May 12-15, 2011
Toronto, Canada
This international workshop brings together researchers, advocates, activists and artists working on the many aspects of cyber-surveillance, particularly as it pervades and mediates social life.

1st Global Conference on Transparency Research

May 19-20, 2011
Newark, New Jersey, US
This conference will bring together governmental transparency scholars from a range of fields including sociology, anthropology, political science, public administration, economics, political economy, journalism, business, and law.

The Future of Islam in the Age of New Media

May, 2011
Online
Dubbed “the world’s shortest conference on Islam ever,” 60 speakers from across philosophical and political spectrums will each speak for 60 seconds for a one-hour discussion about the future of Islam in the age of hyperconnectivity.

Agnotology: Ways of Producing, Preserving, and Dealing with Ignorance

May 30-June 1, 2011
Bielefeld, Germany
Philosophers, historians and nuerobiologists aim to come to a better understanding of that which we don’t. The aim of the workshop is to map out a new ignorance-centered terrain in an effort to determine just what and where it might add to knowledge-centered terrains such as pistemology and philosophy of science.

Federated Social Web Europe

June 3-5, 2011
Berlin, Germany
A workshop designed to bring together communities working on federated social networking with those involved in privacy and identity.

Mobile and Web Technologies in Social and Economic Development

June 4-5, 2011
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This conference aims to understand the challenges associated with using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver sustainable services for underprivileged populations in developing countries.

Personal Democracy Forum

June 6-7, 2011
New York, NY, US
The 8th annual personal democracy forum will continue to explore and analyse technology’s impact on politics and government and includes speakers Sami Ben Gharbia, Vivek Kundra and Susan Morgan.

Computers, Freedom & Privacy

June 14-16, 2011
Washington DC, US
Influential conference now in its 21st year which hosts discussions about the information society and the future of technology at the intersection of policy, technology and action.

CEU Summer University

June 20 – July 1, 2011
Budapest, Hungary
An intensive summer course entitled “Communication policy advocacy, technology, and online freedom of expression: a toolkit for media development” and designed to help researchers and activists gain new insights into the role which civil society can play in advocating for online free expression and communication policy change.

CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7)

June 22-24, 2011
Geneva, Switzerland
This international workshop aimed at those involved in developing open access repositories will mix practical tutorials with presentations from cutting-edge projects and discussion groups.

6th Annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)

June 30-July 1, 2011
Deadline for call for proposals: May 1, 2011
Berlin, Germany
OKCon brings together individuals and organisations involved in open data, open access, open educational resources and many more issues from across the open knowledge spectrum for two days of presentations, workshops and exchange of ideas.

The Information Program of Open Society Foundations.

iPhone Stalking

My moments as recorded by default on my iPhone and available to anyone with access to my computer.

How to Read Google Earth Like Proust

It is said that Marcel Proust preferred to read train timetables as he fell asleep. According to Alain de Botton:

The document was not consulted for practical advice; the departure time of the Saint-Lazare train was of no immediate importance to a man who found no reason to leave Paris in the last eight years of his life. Rather, this timetable was read and enjoyed as though it were a gripping novel about country life, because the mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust’s imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields. Proust argued that enjoyment of such wayward reading material was typical of a writer, someone who could be counted on to develop enthusiasms for things that were apparently out of line with great art.

While I have my doubts that Proust would have been enthusiastic about social media (it would take at least 80,000 Tweets to narrate In Search of Lost Time), I do think he would understand why I lately have been “reading Google Earth” before I fall asleep each night. Google Earth for the iPad is an opiate for the geo-curious. Some nights I spend in Yemen, others in Siberia. I spent one night re-tracing a day-long walk I took over ten years ago along the southern coastline of Easter Island – from Hanga Roa to Orongo to Ahu Vinapu and then cutting back through the barren hills that overlook the island’s airport and its weekly departures to Chile and Polynesia. I return to Caracas and Sao Paulo and spend hours exploring all the neighborhoods that I am forever told to never enter.

From the organic chaos of Caracas’ hillside Barrio Villa Zolia to the rectangular blocks of Los Carmenes.

Most nights, however, I spend right here in Mexico City, levitating from one neighborhood to the next, clicking on Wikipedia links as I go.

The view toward downtown Mexico City from Tacubaya in 1836.

The view toward downtown Mexico City from Tacubaya in 2011.

I am sure that Marcel Proust was not the only Frenchman who read train timetables as he fell asleep at the turn of the 20th century. As he himself claimed, “such wayward reading material was typical of a writer.” Today there are vast online communities of Google Earth users that share their imaginary explorations with one another. The official Google Earth Sightseer Newsletter is probably the best place to start. There is also an active community at The Earth Explorer. Some of the best blogs are Google LatLong, Google Earth Blog, and my personal favorite, Ogle Earth by Stefan Geens.

Geens writes with Proustian enthusiasm and curiosity. Last month he mapped the travels of Freya Stark’s 1968 Land Rover expedition from Kabul to Herat when Afghanistan was still a major segment of the infamous Hippie Trail of the 1960’s and 70’s. The result is an awe-inspiring piece of geographic storytelling; perhaps more rewarding than Stark’s own account.

Some of the major locations from Freya Stark’s “The Minaret of Djam.” Each location links to the relevant excerpt on Google Books, and often to other websites with more information and context.

Eventually, after an hour or so of exploration, my eyes grow heavy and I start to doze off. I drift in and out of consciousness, climbing up mountains to reach deserted minarets or following deep blue rivers along the vast expanse of Siberia or searching for mysterious bodies of water in Yemen’s arid moonscape. It is a wonderful, Proustian way to fall asleep.

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