1. I think the fact that our final paper is to be submitted via the Twiki rather than as a conventional paper is going to comprise much of my motivation for doing it over the next few days. I've taken to messing around with formatting and stuff on the Twiki, and having written three papers in as many weeks, I really never want to use Microsoft Word ever again.

2. Does it annoy anyone else that the way the Twiki software is constructed makes it impossible to use single words as links? It always has to be AtLeastTwoWords or SomethingLikeThat. I know this standardizes links but when all I really want to link to is Blog or Appendix, I get really frustrated at having to add an extra word to that in order to make it a link.

"Yet many analysts agree that screening the Internet and cellphones is far more difficult than the practice of simply ordering state-controlled newspapers or television stations to censor a subject.

One reason is that a growing number of young Chinese have multiple e-mail accounts, including some with providers based outside China that are not filtered.

In an informal test last week, the words "anti-Japanese protest" were typed into an online messaging service. The response was: "Your message contains sensitive or uncivilized words. It cannot be sent. We are sorry." Similar problems arose with Chinese e-mail accounts. Yet the same phrase went uninterrupted via cellphone text messaging.

About 27 percent of China's 1.3 billion people own a cellphone, a rate that is far higher in big cities, particularly among the young. Indeed, for upwardly mobile young urbanites, cellphones and the Internet are the primary means of communication.

'If people can mobilize in cyberspace in such a short time on this subject,' said Wenran Jiang, a scholar with a specialty in China-Japan relations, 'what prevents them from being mobilized on another topic, any topic, in the near future?'"

More information on privacy concerns here:
Google Personal-Search Tracker Raises Privacy Concerns

And on the flip side, a more balanced article about the pros and cons of My Search History on ZDNet:
Google search gets personal

In research news, I've received three interview responses so far... hopefully the rest will come in within a week or so and I can start putting things together and doing followups if necessary. I sent out the questionnaire over the weekend (I wish I'd managed to get it out by Friday afternoon instead of Saturday though) and hoped that maybe that would encourage people to fill it out more quickly. We'll see how that goes...

"Excellent mix of flattery, salesmanship, bonding (via Singapore) and appeal to my sympathy for penurious graduate students. And, as a former penurious graduate student, I can sympathize."

I think it also helped that I gave them my full name and Professor Norvell's email contact information for verification purposes. I have a stat counter on this site that allows me to see how people get to my site, and after I sent out my preliminary emails I found that a lot of people had googled "fiona chan harvard" and this blog came up as one of the hits, so hopefully it helped allay any fears that I might be some random spammer struck with the brilliant idea of posing as a student researcher.

So I finalized the questionnaire today and sent it out to all of the 16 respondents, and hopefully I'll be getting answers soon. I foresee the need to conduct some follow-up interviews because I was forced to make the first questionnaire as broad as I could in order to cover all the bases. At least it's progress, though!

I'm also thinking of splitting the blogs into two categories: those that have primarily political/news content, and those that are more social/cultural/personal. I'm not sure if this will be a significant divide or not, though, so we'll see as the project progresses.

Next up: a finalized list of questions I'll be asking my interviewees over email. So far I've contacted a few of them to see if they'd be interested in being interviewed in the first place (with all the requisite disclaimers and warnings as stated in the Human Subjects Approval). Haven't heard back yet... but hopefully there'll be some responses over the weekend.

Give it a try... as the site says, "You'll get this wonderful feeling that it's off your chest and you've finally told someone about it"!

Enjoy!

White House Approves Pass for Blogger
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: March 7, 2005 in New York Times

Another signal moment for bloggers is to occur this morning, when Garrett M. Graff, who writes a blog about the news media in Washington, is to be ushered into the White House briefing room to attend the daily press "gaggle."

Mr. Graff, 23, may be the first blogger in the short history of the medium to be granted a daily White House pass for the specific purpose of writing a blog, or Web log. A White House spokesman said yesterday that he believed Mr. Graff was the first blogger to be given credentials.

He is being given a press pass as the editor of FishbowlDC, a blog that is published by Mediabistro.com, which offers networking and services for journalists.

Increasingly, bloggers are penetrating the preserves of the mainstream news media. They have secured seats on campaign planes, at political conventions and in presidential debates, and have become a driving force in news events themselves.

Mr. Graff said he was inspired to try to seek access to the White House by the controversy over James D. Guckert, who used the alias Jeff Gannon. Mr. Guckert was granted daily passes to White House briefings while writing for a Web site run by a Republican operative in Texas. The episode raised questions about who was a legitimate journalist and how access to the White House was granted.

White House press officials and others said it was relatively easy to get a day pass, prompting Mr. Graff to test that premise. He set about trying to get one and chronicled his attempt on his blog.

He made 20 phone calls and got nowhere. Bigger blogs picked up on his saga, and traffic on FishbowlDC increased tenfold, he said. But it was not until the traditional media joined in, Mr. Graff said, that the White House relented.

"USA Today started making calls on Thursday. CNN mentioned it on 'Inside Politics,' and Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents Association, raised the issue with the White House Press Office," he said. "I think a combination of all of that made the White House pay attention and decide to let me in."

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said he had met with the White House Correspondents Association and they had decided to let Mr. Graff in. "It is the press corps' briefing room and if there are any new lines to be drawn, it should be done by their association," he said.

Mr. Graff said he was surprised at the help he received from "real" reporters covering the White House, given what he described as the animosity between some bloggers and the mainstream news media.

Mr. Graff is something of a bridge between those two worlds. Although he is a blogger, he has old-media genes: his father, Christopher Graff, is the chief correspondent in Vermont for The Associated Press; and his grandfather, Bert McCord, was the drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune.

Mr. Graff himself was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He said he became a blogger because "it's the newest trend in journalism."

In any case, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and specialist in blogging, said Mr. Graff's odyssey was significant for two reasons. First, he showed that it was harder to get a pass than the White House said it was after the Guckert case.

Secondly, he said, Mr. Graff was expanding the definition of what constitutes the press, just as radio and television once pushed those boundaries.

I find it hard to agree with this view. Empathy, while potentially helpful to certain kinds of understanding, cannot possibly form the basis for understanding in general. The notion of "meaning" is interpreted differently, with different intended consequences, to every single person; someone who grew up in middle-class America, for instance, no matter how immersed he became in rural China - even to the point of "doing what the native did" - will never be able to "understand" what each nuance of rural life signifies to its "natives". Thus I doubt the importance (and indeed relevance) of "participant observation" in anthropological reporting. What the anthropologist and outsider observes is deciphered in the only context in which it would make any sense to him, i.e. a context determined by the combination of background and knowledge peculiar to him. Perhaps this is being simplistic, but I always thought anthropologists attempted to leave the narration of "meaning" to their subjects, concentrating instead on the accurate reporting thereof.

Geertz's argument, therefore, of comparing different "sets" of perceptions to bridge the gap between participant (the subject) and observer (and his audience) makes more sense. "In short, accounts of other peoples' subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow-feeling... whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of one's informants are "really like" comes not from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one's own biography, not of theirs, but from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work towards developing."

The importance of social contextualization as envisioned by Geertz, however, seems to lay a path for the conception of individual (or, more often, group) identity through exclusion, i.e. the definition of "person"/"people" by contrasting him/her/them to other individuals/societies. In the emphasis on sorting, hierarchy, and public relationships (as opposed to personal, individual, private selves) lies the danger of an inclination towards relativism rather than absolutism, towards the group rather than the individual, and towards public labels rather than intimate knowledge. Conceiving of people as inextricably attached to their backgrounds causes a definition of identity that lacks not in customization but in personalization (as Geertz puts it: categorization but not type; placing but not portrayal). "Selfhood is never in danger because, outside the immediacies of procreation and prayer, only its coordinates are assured." But in online communities (using this word in its broadest sense), the conceptualization of "selfhood" is completely opposite to what is outlined in Geertz's article. There is a marked lack of categorization and of situation (save for IP addresses, which can be blocked) -- one's portrayal of oneself is purely individual and deliberate, rather than an accident of birth or circumstance. Why do we, then, think that this is a more evolved communication of selfhood?

For reference:

verstehen: German for to understand. 1. To perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of, to know. 2. To know thoroughly by close contact with or by long experience of the phenomenon. 3. To grasp or comprehend the meaning intended or expressed by another. 4. To know and be empathetic toward. Weber used the term to refer to the social scientist's attempt to understand both the intention and the context of human action.

einfuhlen: German, meaning to try and become what you're studying and look at it from the inside.

The New York Times, March 7, 2005

At a Suit's Core: Are Bloggers Reporters, Too?
By JONATHAN GLATER

In the physical world, being labeled a journalist may confer little prestige and may even evoke some contempt. But being a journalist can also confer certain privileges, like the right to keep sources confidential. And for that reason many bloggers, a scrappy legion of online commentators and pundits, would like to be considered reporters, too.

A lawsuit filed in California by Apple Computer is drawing the courts into that question: who should be considered a journalist?

The case, which involves company secrets that Apple says were disclosed on several Web sites, is being closely followed in the world of online commentators, but it could have broad implications for journalists working for traditional news organizations as well.

If the court, in Santa Clara County, rules that bloggers are journalists, the privilege of keeping news sources confidential will be applied to a large new group of people, perhaps to the point that it may be hard for courts in the future to countenance its extension to anyone.

"It's very serious stuff," said Brad Friedman, who describes himself as an investigative blogger (his site is bradblog.com). "Are they bloggers because they only publish online? I think you have to look at what folks are doing. And if they're reporting, then they're reporters."

Apple has long had a devoted following, and leaked information about new Apple products has appeared on Web sites for years. To combat this, the company filed the suit late last year against the sources of these leaks - people the company assumes are employees or contractors.

Apple has asked the court to compel the Web sites that displayed the product information to disclose their identity. Bloggers are fighting Apple's efforts, which it has focused on three Web sites - Thinksecret.com, Appleinsider.com and PowerPage.org.

The judge in the case, James Kleinberg, is required only to interpret a California statute that recognizes a privilege protecting reporters in keeping news sources confidential. A ruling could come as early as this week.

On its face, the lawsuit brought by Apple has to do with theft of trade secrets. But Susan Crawford, a law professor at Cardozo law school of Yeshiva University (and a blogger herself), says that the steps Apple has asked the court to take open a broader question.

"Under what circumstances should an online forum be forced to disclose a source behind information that they're posting?" Ms. Crawford said. "There is no principled distinction between a New York Times reporter and a blogger for these purposes. Both operate as news sources for wide swaths of the general public."

Blogs, she added, are already becoming more and more powerful, and some have readerships that exceed those of small-town newspapers. "We've seen it with Rather being brought down by bloggers," she said, referring to the CBS news anchor, who came under intense scrutiny by bloggers after a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment on President Bush's National Guard service was broadcast .

Judge Kleinberg is likely to try to decide the case on the narrowest possible grounds, perhaps reading the text of the California law at issue to cover only people who work for traditional newspapers and magazines or television news programs, and to avoid deciding if bloggers are indeed journalists, Ms. Crawford said.

Whatever the judge's decision, it is all but certain to be appealed. But the question of who is a journalist is to many a matter of deeper concern.

Some bloggers want any protection available to journalists at traditional media companies to also be available to them, and journalists at those companies want to make sure that the reporter shield privilege is preserved.

Yet if recognizing a privilege for bloggers means that everyone online can maintain that they are journalists, judges may conclude that rather than giving everyone the privilege, no one should have it. That possibility worries reporters, who could find themselves at new risk for what they write or broadcast.

Apple has not sued the Web sites for damages for publishing the trade secrets, but it could try, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A. He is considering filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on the side of the bloggers, saying that the privilege should extend to them.

"This turns out to be an unresolved question of First Amendment law," Mr. Volokh said, referring to the issue of liability for the Web sites.

Attempting to draw a distinction based on the medium used by the blogger or reporter is misguided, said Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School (also a blogger). "In 15 years, there may be no clear distinction between reporters on the one hand and bloggers on the other," he said. "It won't just be an either-or, where you have a reporter for The Chicago Tribune on the one hand, and a guy sitting in his pajamas drinking beer on the other."

Not all blogs are equally influential and not all blogs even try to report, in the usual sense of cultivating sources, actively gathering information and then organizing and presenting it to the public, Mr. Balkin added. "There are millions and millions of blogs, and most of them are for gossip."

Many states have privilege statutes like the one in California, and others may consider enacting them. To determine who should be able to claim any kind of privilege against disclosing news sources, he said, courts and lawmakers should look at exactly what the would-be reporter does.

"It should be extended on a functional basis," he said. So a blogger who interviews people and spends significant amounts of time gathering and organizing information could claim the privilege; a blogger who wrote about good and bad recipes, and who one day stumbled onto a copy of the Pentagon papers and printed them, might not.

Such a functional definition could prove elastic, and an enterprising blogger would have every reason to assert any available privilege. Mr. Balkin - asked whether he would assert the privilege if a former student leaked information to him about a Supreme Court justice that then appeared on his Web site - did not hesitate to claim it for himself.

"I would be willing to claim that if you look in my blog, what I'm doing is so similar to what Lewis or Krugman or Safire do," he said, referring to Anthony Lewis, Paul Krugman and William Safire, current and former columnists for The Times, that "although it's done more informally and it's about a much narrower area, that I could claim that I was in the functional definition. That's what happens when you start taking a functional approach."

Mr. Friedman, the blogger, said that ultimately, bloggers' role as purveyors of important information that traditional news organizations might ignore made online journalists more important than before, and so more deserving of protection.

"As the mainstream media has become more and more corporate and more and more like the governmental and corporate bodies that mainstream journalists used to report on," he said, "a lot of this stuff has fallen now to the bloggers - to do what mainstream folks used to do. It's still serving the exact same purpose: keeping the bad guys honest."