Berkman Buzz: Week of January 10, 2011

What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Ethan Zuckerman discusses the media and Tunisia
* Dan Gillmor offers suggestions for protecting anonymity online
* ICT4Peace releases a report on peacebuilding in the information age
* Jonathan Zittrain discusses the issues surrounding the IPv4 to IPv6 upgrade
* The OpenNet Initiative tackles the new Saudi blogger licensing law
* Weekly Global Voices: "Tunisia: Tweeting Ben Ali's Speech-Change 2.0 or Just a Show?"

SPECIAL NOTE: The Berkman Center is now accepting applications for its 2011 summer internship program.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The full buzz.

"My hope is that we’re getting collectively smarter about concluding that social media will or won’t act as a catalyst for social change. There are complex economic forces at work in Tunisia – a demographic bulge, increasing economic inequality, a reduction in government subsidies, shrinkage in the tourism and textile sectors. Was social media the catalyst that helped frustration turn into protest, or helped protest spread from one corner of the country to another? It’s the kind of question that keeps scholars busy for years, as my colleague Henry Farrell wisely noted in a reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s dismissal of the power of social media for protest. In the case of Tunisia, we need to understand whether information about the protests in Sidi Bouzid helped convince other Tunisians to take to the streets, and to understand how that information reached them – I’m far from ready to declare this a victory for social media, but I’m looking forward to studying it and understanding it better."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post "What if Tunisia had a revolution and nobody watched?"

"Conveners of online conversations need to provide better tools for the people having the conversations. These include moderation systems that actually help bring the best commentary to the surface, ways for readers to avoid the postings of people they find offensive and community-driven methods of identifying and banning abusers."
From Dan Gillmor's article for Salon.com, "Fix for anonymous sleaze is in our attitudes, not laws"

"Unlike other papers on innovative technologies (crowdsourcing, social networking etc) dealing with crisis response, reconstruction and humanitarian aid, this collection of thought provoking pieces by esteemed writers, including former Finnish President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Martti Athisaari and a younger generation of cutting edge practitioners and scholars in this fast moving space, aims to encourage meaningful debate and action on how to solve the serious challenges that still exist in the effective use of ICTs"
From the abstract for ICT4Peace's paper, "Peacebuilding in the Information Age: Sifting Hype from Reality"

"The system has an Achilles’ heel: there are a limited number of numbers. It might seem that you could add 1 to whatever the last number is and keep going, but there’s a hard cap in venerable Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4): 4 billion IP addresses, which the Internet is outgrowing in much the same way that applications outstripped the original 64K of memory expected for a PC running Microsoft DOS. There is now general agreement among Internet technologists that the end days are upon us: the last block of fresh IPv4 addresses will likely be allocated to the Internet’s North American address warehouse in early 2011, to be passed out to Internet Service Providers here by mid- to late-2011."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post, "Number Crunch: The Struggle to Upgrade the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6"

"According to the Al Arabiya News Channel, the Culture and Information Ministry now requires licenses for any domestic "e-publishing" site that wishes to register for a domain. The conditions include an age minimum (20 years), an education requirement (at least a high school diploma), and a clean record. The same article reported that traditional news organizations in the country, such as al-Wi'am, are in support of the government's decision to further regulate the Internet. Bloggers are more skeptical of the change. But according to a spokesman for the Ministry, the newly implemented law aims to supervise organization, not to increase censorship of Saudi websites."
From Qichen Zhang's post for the OpenNet Initiative, "Saudi Arabia Requires Licenses for Bloggers"

"One of the focal points of Ben Ali's speech was his pledge to free the access to the Internet. Within hours after the speech, reports were already pouring in confirming the unblocking of some previously censored websites. Nawaat.org, is an independent collective blog which played a key role in dissemination information and multimedia material about the protests in the country, delivering a daily dose of content to citizens and mainstream media."
From Hisham's post for Global Voices Online, "Tunisia: Tweeting Ben Ali's Speech-Change 2.0 or Just a Show?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects and sometimes from the Center's wider network

Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to jyork@cyber.harvard.edu