Digital Cosmopolitans in

the Age of Connection

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON
 DEDICATION

For Drew,
who will grow up in a world
as wide as his dreams.
Epigraph

It is hardly possible to overstate the value in the

present state of human improvement of placing
human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar
to themselves, and with modes of thought and action
unlike those with which they are familiar.

—John Stuart Mill

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic

telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas,
it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

—Henry David Thoreau

 CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph

Introduction SECRETS AND MYSTERIES

DISCONNECT
Chapter 1 CONNECTION, INFECTION, INSPIRATION
Chapter 2 IMAGINARY COSMOPOLITANISM
Chapter 3 WHEN WHAT WE KNOW IS WHOM WE KNOW

REWIRE
Chapter 4 GLOBAL VOICES
Chapter 5 FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Chapter 6 TAKEN IN CONTEXT
Chapter 7 SERENDIPITY AND THE CITY

THE WIDER WORLD

Chapter 8 THE CONNECTED SHALL INHERIT
Notes

Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
 SECRETS AND MYSTERIES

THE SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOmeini had been

exiled from Iran for fourteen years. His relentless critiques of Shah
Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s autocratic leader, had led to the ayatollah’s
expulsion, but had not silenced him. In 1977 he was living in
neighboring Iraq, where he found a new way to share his message.
Late in the evening, usually around ten, after the masses of pilgrims
who’d come to visit the shrine of Imam Ali had left for the day, the
ayatollah presented long lectures to anyone who would listen. The
speeches were anti-shah diatribes, filled with conspiracy theories
that tied the shah’s Westernizing reforms to “the Jews and the
Cross-worshipers” who sought to humiliate and subjugate Iran.
A few Iranians—no more than twelve hundred a month—were
allowed to visit Iraq to worship at the shrine, and a small number of
them returned home with an unusual souvenir: a cassette recording
of the ayatollah’s sermons. These cassettes were copied and freely
distributed in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities.
Pressured by President Jimmy Carter of the United States to live up
to his promises of reform, the shah instructed his secret police,
SAVAK, not to seize or destroy copies. The tapes were marked
“Sokhanrani Mazhabi”—religious lecture—and sold next to tapes
from the popular singers of the day. Parviz Sabeti, head of SAVAK’s
“antisubversion” unit estimated that more than 100,000 sermon
cassettes were sold in 19781 and that millions of Iranians might have
heard Khomeini’s anti-shah invective.
Amir Taheri was editor of the pro-shah newspaper Kahyan when
the tapes became popular. Two of his reporters brought him a
recording they had bought in the market, and the three listened
together. They quickly concluded that the voice on the tape was that
of an actor, hired by SAVAK to imitate Khomeini and discredit him.
After all, Khomeini was a respected scholar, if a political radical. Why
would he stoop to conspiracy theories, telling listeners that the shah
had commissioned a painting of the Shia leader Imam Ali with blond
hair and blue eyes, signifying the shah’s hopes that American
Christians would dominate Iran? If this wasn’t a joke, then it had to
be an attempt to frame and discredit the cleric.2
A few months later, Iran’s minister of information, Daryoush
Homayoun, published an editorial in Ettela’at, the country’s oldest
newspaper, titled “Black and Red Imperialism.” A wide-ranging
smear of the ayatollah, the article accused Khomeini of colluding
with the Soviets (the “red” to conservative Islam’s “black”), of being a
British spy, and of homosexuality. But Homayoun had
underestimated the popularity of the exiled scholar. On January 9,
1978, four thousand students took to the streets and demanded
retraction of the article. Iran’s powerful army quickly quelled the
protest, but killed several students and wounded more in the
process.3
The death of the students opened a cycle of protest and
government overreaction that rapidly destabilized the country. Shia
custom requires memorial services, called Arbaeen, forty days after
a death. Protests accompanied the services for the dead students,
and the shah’s troops shot more protesters; that provoked more
services, more protests, and eventually general strikes. Scholars
estimate that as much as 11 percent of Iran’s population participated
in these protests, a higher percentage of the population than
participated in Russia’s or France’s popular revolutions.4 By January
1979, it was the shah who had gone into exile, and a triumphant
Khomeini returned to Iran, where more than three million Iranians
took to the streets to welcome him.5 Four months later, a referendum
with wide popular support declared Iran an Islamic republic.
Khomeini’s quick rise surprised the shah’s supporters, who had
seen Iran moving away from Islam and toward a secular state, where
women had the vote and Iran had strong ties to the West. Khomeini’s
subsequent brutal consolidation of power surprised students who
had supported him, taking seriously his promises of freedom and
anti-imperialist democracy, only to see hundreds of the ayatollah’s
political opponents summarily executed.6 And the exiled Iranian
politicians who had flown from Paris to Tehran with Khomeini were
certainly surprised when, two years later, many were dead or in exile
again.7
But perhaps no one was more surprised than Jimmy Carter. On
New Year’s Eve 1977, days before students took to the streets of
Qom, he had toasted the shah, declaring, “Iran, because of the great
leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in a turbulent corner
of the world.” Carter’s analysis was echoed by the CIA, which
dismissed the protests of 1978 in August of that year, asserting, “Iran
is not in a revolutionary or even ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”8
How did the intelligence service of the world’s most powerful
nation misread the Iranian revolution so badly?
In the waning years of the Cold War, the job of America’s
intelligence analysts began to shift, becoming vastly more
complicated. In earlier decades, analysts had known who the
nation’s main adversaries were and what bits of information they
needed to acquire: the number of SS-9 missiles Moscow could
deploy, for example, or the number of warheads each missile could
carry. They focused on discovering secrets, facts that exist but are
hidden by one government from another. But by the time the Soviet
Union completed its collapse in 1991, as Bruce Berkowitz and Allan
Goodman observe in Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age,
the intelligence community had a new role thrust upon it: the
untangling of mysteries.9
The computer security expert Susan Landau identifies the 1979
Islamic revolution in Iran as one of the first signs that the intelligence
community needed to shift its focus from secrets to mysteries.10 On
its surface, Iran was a strong, stable ally of the United States in a
conflict-torn region. The rapid ouster of the shah and the referendum
that turned a monarchy into a theocracy under Khomeini left
governments around the world shocked and baffled.
The 1979 revolution took intelligence agencies by surprise
because it was born in mosques and homes, not in palaces or
barracks. Even if the CIA was watching Iran closely, it was paying
more attention to troop strength and weaponry than to cassette
tapes sold in the marketplace. Analysts missed a subtle change in
Iranian society: the nation was becoming more connected, both
internally and to the outside world, through the rise of new
communications technologies.
In their book analyzing the events of 1979, Small Media, Big
Revolution, Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi, who both
participated in the Iranian revolution, emphasize the role of two types
of technology: tools that let people access information from outside
Iran, and tools that let people spread and share that information on a
local scale. Connections to the outside world (direct-dial long-
distance phone lines, cassettes of sermons sent through the mail,
broadcasts on the BBC World Service) and tools that amplified those
connections (home cassette recorders, photocopying machines)
helped build a movement more potent than governments and armies
had anticipated.11
The ouster of autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in the 2011
Arab Spring protests has reopened a conversation about the role of
technology in enabling social change. Did cassette recorders
overthrow the shah? No more than Facebook ousted Mubarak. But
in both cases, the technological, political, and social fabric shifted,
and old ways of anticipating what changes might occur were no
longer applied. Looking for secrets—the missing information in
systems we understand—we can easily glide past mysteries, events
that make sense only when we understand how systems have
changed.
As we enter an age of ever-increasing global connection, we are
experiencing vast but subtle shifts in how people communicate,
organize themselves, and make decisions. We have new
opportunities to participate in conversations that are local and global,
to argue with, persuade, and be persuaded by people far from our
borders. And we have much to argue about, as our economies are
increasingly intertwined, and our actions as individuals and nations
affect one another’s climate, health, and wealth. And as these
connections increase, it should be no surprise that we will also
experience a concomitant rise in mystery.
 The mysteries brought to the fore in a connected age extend well
beyond the realm of political power. Bad subprime loans in the
United States trigger the collapse of an investment bank, which
tightens interbank lending, pushing Iceland’s heavily leveraged
economy into collapse, leaving British consumers infuriated at the
disappearance of their high-yield savings accounts at Icelandic
banks. A family wedding in Hong Kong leaves the World Health
Organization tracing a deadly epidemic from Toronto to Manila, the
disease spreading as fast as individuals can travel. Not all mysteries
are tragedies. Political revolutions, broadcast live from Tunisia, send
students into the street in Gabon to demand lower tuition, and inspire
labor activists in Wisconsin to seize the state capital. A Korean pop
song mocking the materialism of a neighborhood in Seoul, PSY’s
“Gangnam Style,” becomes a global dance hit in an instance of
unexpected and convoluted connection.
Uncovering secrets might require counting missile silos in satellite
images or debriefing double agents. In order to unwind a banking
collapse or combat SARS, we need different skills. Landau suggests
that “solving mysteries requires deep, often unconventional thinking,
and a full picture of the world around the mystery.”12
The popular embrace of the Internet means we have a wealth of
new ways to learn what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s as
easy to access the front page of a newspaper from another continent
as it is to read one from the next town. In fact, sometimes it’s easier.
A free online encyclopedia offers background and context on events
that would have been hard to obtain ten years ago without visiting a
good library. Google promises to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible, and we’ve grown used to asking
it and other search engines to discover secrets: just type “How many
SS-9 missiles does the USSR have” and hit “I’m feeling lucky.”
These tools help us discover what we want to know, but they’re
not very powerful in helping us discover what we might need to
know. What we want to know is shaped by what, and who, we think
is important. We follow the news in our hometowns more closely
than news an ocean away, and the lives of our friends in more detail
than those of distant strangers. Our media tools, ranging from our
newspapers to our social networks, embody those biases; they help
us find what we want, but not always what we need.
What do we need to understand a complex and interconnected
world? That’s not just a question for intelligence agents.
Epidemiologists and CEOs, environmentalists and bankers, political
leaders and activists are all trying to tackle challenges of global
scale. We all need ways to access perspectives from other parts of
the world, to listen to opinions that diverge from our preconceptions,
and to pay attention to the unexpected and unfamiliar.
We move from unearthing secrets to unwinding mysteries not just
through the force of will. Our understanding of the world comes to us
through the tools we use to learn about the world around us. Some
of those tools are hundreds of years old, whereas others were
invented in the past decade. And all of them can be changed to help
us better understand and explore the world.
We can build new tools that help us understand whose voices
we’re hearing and whom we are ignoring. We can make it easier to
understand conversations in other languages, and to collaborate with
people in other nations. We can take steps toward engineering
serendipity, collecting insights that are unexpected and helpful. With
a fraction of the brainpower that’s gone into building the Internet as
we know it, we can build a network that helps us discover,
understand, and embrace a wider world.
We can, and we must, rewire.
 CONNECTION, INFECTION, INSPIRATION

DR. LIU JIANLUN WASN’T FEELING WELL WHEN HE CHECKED into room 911 of
Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel. On February 21, 2003, the sixty-four-
year-old medical professor had arrived in Hong Kong to attend a
family wedding, but he was feeling exhausted, not festive. For the
prior three weeks, he’d been working long shifts at Sun Yat-sen
Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou, where an “atypical pneumonia”
had sickened hundreds of patients.1
Dr. Liu went sightseeing with his brother-in-law, but returned to the
hotel early. The next morning, he walked down Waterloo Road to
Hong Kong’s Kwong Wah Hospital and checked himself in. Gasping
for breath, he warned doctors and nurses that he was carrying a
highly infectious disease and needed to be treated in a pressurized
room.2
Ten days later, Dr. Liu died from severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS). His brother-in-law died soon afterward. Dr. Liu
was not the first person to die of SARS, but his case was the first to
reveal the potential for the disease to quickly spread over long
distances; it eventually claimed a total of 916 lives worldwide during
a global epidemic that had the potential to infect billions.3
By the time he was isolated in the hospital, Dr. Liu had already
infected twelve other guests staying on the ninth floor of the
Metropole. The infected guests hailed from Singapore, Australia, the
Philippines, and Canada, as well as from China and Hong Kong.4
One of the unlucky ninth-floor guests was Johnny Chan, an
American businessman based in Shanghai. He left the Metropole
two days after Dr. Liu checked in, and flew to Hanoi. A few days
later, he fell ill and was hospitalized at the Vietnam France Hospital.
When Vietnamese doctors weren’t able to diagnose his illness,
they turned to Carlo Urbani, director of infectious diseases for the
Western Pacific Region of the World Health Organization (WHO). An
expert diagnostician, Dr. Urbani quickly determined that whatever
was killing Chan was highly contagious. He immediately met with
Vietnamese authorities to ensure that the country’s hospitals took
strenuous precautions. But by the time Dr. Urbani was called in,
Chan had already infected eighty other patients and health care
workers at the hospital.
On March 11, the Vietnamese government quarantined the
hospital. Urbani was on a flight from Hanoi to Bangkok to attend a
medical conference. During the flight, he developed a high fever, one
of the few early symptoms of the disease. After getting off the plane,
Urbani isolated himself and called a colleague from the US Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Scott Dowell, who met him
at the Bangkok airport. They talked for almost two hours, sitting more
than eight feet apart, before Thai authorities could equip an
ambulance and medical technicians with sufficient protective gear to
transport Urbani to a hospital.5 While Urbani was in good health,
doctors believe, he was exposed to the virus dozens of times from
the patients he was treating, overwhelming his system with a
massive viral load. Urbani died on March 29.
If you were in the United States or in Europe when SARS was
discovered, you may have vague memories of travel restrictions and
the sudden appearance of hospital masks on foreign travelers. But
only twenty-seven US residents were infected with SARS, while over
seven thousand Chinese contracted the disease. In other parts of
the world, the psychological impact of SARS was pronounced. The
global health scholar Laurie Garrett notes, “Though most American
soon forgot SARS, for many Asians and Canadians the period from
November 2002 to June 2003 remains as starkly memorable as the
date 9/11 for residents of Washington and New York.”6
Their concerns were not misplaced: SARS is terrifying. No
physical contact is required for disease transmission; you simply
need to share airspace with an infected person for an extended
period of time. People may incubate the disease for up to ten days
without showing recognizable symptoms, which means they can
spread the infection over vast distances as they travel, and a single
person may infect dozens or hundreds of others. And for roughly one
of ten persons infected, SARS was fatal.
During the 2002–03 outbreak, the disease spread with such speed
that conspiracy theories formed in its wake. An idea put forward by
an obscure Russian scientist became popular in some Chinese chat
rooms: any disease this virulent and fast-spreading must be man-
made.7 The truth is weirder, and possibly more disturbing. By April
2003, WHO scientists had discovered that SARS was a virus native
to the masked palm civet, a catlike carnivore common in southern
China. Like ebola, anthrax, and hantavirus, SARS is zoonotic; it
spreads from animals, who may carry a disease without suffering
from it, to humans. SARS likely crossed the species barrier through
the blood of civets, sold for meat in the markets of southern China,
and then passed human to human from the civet eaters to Drs. Liu
and Urbani.
With its long incubation period and ease of transmission, SARS
seemed custom-made for a connected world. “Super spreaders” like
Dr. Liu and Johnny Chan, mobile professionals who traveled by
airplane between major global cities, took the disease with them. On
a single flight—China Airways 112 from Hong Kong to Beijing on
March 15—a single passenger infected 22 of 126 fellow
passengers.8 As fear spread, people grew anxious about the
dangers of airplanes, public transportation, and the other shared
spaces of global megacities. Anonymous copresence with thousands
of others—a routine experience of modern urban life—suddenly
appeared unreasonably risky. Like Edward Lorenz’s butterfly, whose
wing beats in Brazil set off tornadoes in Kansas, someone’s dinner in
China suddenly had the potential to cause hospitalizations in
Canada.
SARS eventually reached thirty-two countries and every continent
save Antarctica, but only 8,422 people fell ill. And although it spread
explosively from November 2002 to March 2003, by July 2003 the
WHO could confidently declare the epidemic contained.9 In the end,
the most interesting thing about the SARS outbreak was not how fast
the disease spread but how quickly it was stopped.
Contrast the SARS numbers with an earlier epidemic, the Spanish
flu. From 1918 to 1920, one-third of the world’s population, roughly
half a billion people, contracted a deadly form of influenza, and an
estimated 50 million died.10 Case for case, the Spanish flu was less
deadly than SARS. About 2.5 percent of Spanish flu cases were
fatal, though many persons caught it more than once. SARS killed
9.6 percent of those it infected and was especially deadly for the
elderly, who had a mortality rate of more than 50 percent. The
Spanish flu, like SARS, was mobile; outbreaks occurred on remote
Pacific islands and above the Arctic Circle. But the Spanish flu
sufferers who carried the disease to these far corners traveled by
steamship and train, not transoceanic jet. Why did SARS, a disease
so deadly, so well positioned to spread globally, kill so few people?
One big part of the answer is the Internet. Global cooperation and
communication stopped SARS, and the ability of doctors around the
world to connect and collaborate online made the Internet the front
line for stopping the disease.
When Dr. Urbani, the Italian diagnostician, put the Vietnamese
government on alert in March 2003, he triggered a global effort by
the WHO to identify, diagnose, and contain SARS. Six days after
Urbani landed in Bangkok, the WHO rolled out a secure website that
hosted videoconferences to coordinate the efforts of researchers in
labs around the world. They shared lung x-rays of infected patients
to develop a diagnostic protocol, which they then disseminated to
hospitals around the world, along with guidelines for isolating
infected patients. The alerts proved remarkably effective—90 percent
of all the SARS cases occurred before the WHO’s advisories were
issued. To identify ongoing or new SARS outbreaks, the WHO used
the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), a software
tool developed by Canada’s national health ministry that scans
newswires and Internet sources for mentions of possible SARS
outbreaks or other unexplained health events. More than one-third of
the rumors identified by GPHIN led the WHO to identify and isolate
cases of SARS.11
 The WHO monitored newspapers and social media in part
because not every national government issued accurate reports
about the spread of the disease. China was profoundly affected by
SARS and, not coincidently, was also the country that was most
reluctant to share information about infections. More than two weeks
after the WHO’s global alert, Chinese officials were publicly claiming
that Beijing had experienced only twelve cases of SARS. Dr. Jiang
Yanyong, a Beijing-based doctor, had personally treated fifty SARS
patients and knew those numbers were artificially low. He emailed
TV stations in Beijing and Hong Kong with his concerns, and his
email was passed to reporters at the Wall Street Journal and Time
magazine, who brought international attention to his claims.12 Less
than two weeks after Time published a cover story on SARS in
Beijing, the Chinese national health minister and the mayor of Beijing
were fired. The new mayor closed schools, discos, and theaters,
following instructions from the WHO. International attention and
scrutiny had brought China quickly onto the global team combatting
SARS.
The ability to share information without sharing the same air
helped minimize the disruptions that SARS and resulting quarantines
caused. Singapore, one of the nations first affected by SARS,
isolated SARS patients in a single ward, then released them after
treatment into home quarantine, monitored by government-installed
videoconferencing units. In a truly inventive turn, the Singapore
government also discouraged the local Chinese population from
celebrating Ching Ming, a holiday in which believers assemble in
cemeteries and clean their ancestors’ graves. Anxious not to create
crowds in the city’s cemeteries, the government encouraged
residents to buy offerings through an online service that arranged for
a uniformed attendant to clean a grave and make the offering on
their behalf.13
Writing about the WHO’s success in containing SARS, Dr. Shigeru
Omi, regional director for the western Pacific for WHO, speculates
that SARS would never have expanded beyond a small, regional
outbreak if not for international jet travel, and that the WHO wouldn’t
have fought it off so successfully without the Internet as an ally. If
international connection through air travel helped spread infection,
digital connections—local and international—helped spread the
ideas required to fight it. Whether through doctors on different
continents jointly examining x-rays, or officials in Toronto and
Singapore discussing quarantine strategies, connection can inspire
crucial collaborations just as well as it can spread infection.
Epidemics unfold like mysteries. We don’t know where in the world
they will emerge, or what previously harmless and commonplace
practices will spread them across the globe in a single day. To
diagnose and stop epidemics, scientists like Dr. Omi need to follow
leads locally and globally. A broad view of the world is essential if
they are to identify potential threats and embrace creative solutions.
The GPHIN network that helped WHO researchers collect tips and
rumors from newspapers and online media was powerful precisely
because it was looking for SARS not just in China and Hong Kong
but in all corners of the world.
SARS offers one example of the global-scale challenges we face
today. There are many more, including a rapidly changing climate,
interconnected and teetering financial systems, and competition for
arable land and other scarce natural resources. Optimism permits us
to imagine a wave of networks like GPHIN scanning the horizons for
threats and opportunities and speeding out responses but one still
unfolding mystery suggests that the view of the horizons that we
need remains obscured.

HAD YOU ASKED A GROUP of experts on the Middle East in 2010 what
changes they thought were likely to take place in the following year,
almost none of them would have predicted the Arab Spring
movement. Certainly not a single one would have chosen Tunisia as
the flash point for the events that followed. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
had ruled the North African nation virtually unchallenged since 1987
and had co-opted, jailed, or exiled anyone likely to challenge his
authority. When the vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself
on fire in December 2010, there was no reason to expect his family’s
protests against government corruption to spread beyond the town of
Sidi Bouzid.14 After all, the combination of military cordons, violence
against protesters, a sycophantic domestic press, and restrictions on
the international press had, in the past, ensured that dissent
remained local.
Not this time. Video of protests in Sidi Bouzid, shot on mobile
phones and uploaded to Facebook, reached Tunisian dissidents in
Europe. They indexed and translated the footage and packaged it for
distribution on sympathetic news networks such as Al Jazeera.
Widely watched in Tunisia, Al Jazeera alerted citizens to protests
taking place in other corners of their country. The broadcasts also
acted as an invitation to participate. Ben Ali took to the airwaves,
alternately begging protesters to disperse and threatening them if
they didn’t. As his regime trembled and fell, images of the protests
spread throughout the region, inspiring similar outpourings in more
than a dozen countries and the eventual overthrow of Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Although the impact of Tunisia’s revolution is now acknowledged,
at the time they occurred the protests that led to Ben Ali’s ouster
were invisible to much of the world. The New York Times first
mentioned Mohamed Bouazizi and Sidi Bouzid in print on January
15, the day after Ben Ali fled the country.15 The Lebanese American
journalist Octavia Nasr had followed the story from early on and
expressed her frustration in an interview with PBS: “For four weeks,
Tunisia was ignored in our media. They didn’t pay attention to the
story until it was so huge and in their face, they couldn’t ignore it
anymore.”16
Some observers suggested that the silence of American and
European media reflected government support for Ben Ali: so long
as the United States considered Ben Ali a useful ally, media outlets
weren’t inclined to report on the story. While thoughtfully cynical, this
scenario fails to explain why the movement to overthrow Mubarak, a
close ally central to US interests in the region, received widespread
coverage in American media, whereas the Tunisian revolution
registered only when it was over.
Here is a simpler, conspiracy-free explanation: most Americans
and Europeans missed the Tunisian revolution because they weren’t
paying attention. The protests gained real momentum over
Christmas and New Year’s, a time when many people focus their
attention on family and friends instead of news of the world. Tunisia’s
government-dominated press didn’t report on the protests, and
independent media sites tracking the events were largely unknown
outside the Tunisian diaspora.
As it turns out, the US intelligence community wasn’t paying much
attention either. President Obama later confronted National
Intelligence Director James Clapper and told him he was
“disappointed with the intelligence community” for its failure to
provide adequate warning of the ouster of the Ben Ali and Mubarak
governments. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the US Senate
Intelligence Community, wondered why protests that had spread in
large part because of social media escaped the scrutiny of military
intelligence: “Was someone looking at what was going on [on] the
Internet?”17
Whether we’re concerned with fighting epidemics like SARS or
reacting to geopolitical shifts like the Arab Spring, we need a broad,
global picture so that we can anticipate threats, seize opportunities,
and make connections. The existence of mobile telephony, satellite
television, and the Internet suggests that information should be
available from throughout the world at unprecedented volumes. Yet a
central paradox of this connected age is that while it’s easier than
ever to share information and perspectives from different parts of the
world, we may now often encounter a narrower picture of the world
than in less connected days.
Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, reporting from the
front lines involved transporting exposed film from Southeast Asia by
air, then developing and editing it in the United States before
broadcasting it days later. In our era, an unfolding crisis, be it a
natural disaster or a sudden military coup, can be reported in real
time via satellite. Yet, despite these lowered barriers, US television
news today features less than half as many international stories as
were broadcast in the 1970s.18
With more than two billion people connected to the Internet and six
billion people with access to mobile phones,19 weather reports from
rural Mali or reports on the local politics in Bihar are more easily
retrieved today than at any time in the past. Our challenge is not
access to information; it is the challenge of paying attention. That
challenge is made all the more difficult by our deeply ingrained
tendency to pay disproportionate attention to phenomena that unfold
nearby and directly affect ourselves, our friends, and our families.
In Six Degrees, his exploration of networked phenomena like
epidemics, fads, and financial crises, the mathematician Duncan
Watts argues that our lives are affected by phenomena that are
geographically distant from us. “Just because something seems far
away, and just because it happens in a language you don’t
understand, doesn’t make it irrelevant,” he argues. “To
misunderstand this is to misunderstand the first great lesson of the
connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not,
we must bear each other’s burdens as well.”20
This task of bearing one another’s burdens forces us to reconsider
how we learn about the rest of the world, how we plan strategies and
make decisions, how we build our businesses, govern our nations,
and educate our youth. None of these changes are simple, but all
start from a simple premise. We must begin to understand ourselves
not just as citizens of a state or a nation but also as citizens of the
world. This is not a new idea, of course. One of its earliest recorded
expressions can be found in the life of a Greek man born in the
fourth century BC.

Cosmopolitanism

For a guy who could travel only on foot or by ship, Diogenes

managed to see a large fraction of the world known to his people.
Exiled from his native Sinope (on the Black Sea coast of
contemporary Turkey),21 Diogenes found himself living penniless on
the streets of Athens, and later in Corinth. Following the teachings of
Socrates’s student Antisthenes, Diogenes became an ascetic, which
was probably an excellent career move, since he had already been
relieved of his earthly wealth. Accounts of his life are sparse and
resemble legend as much as history, but most classicists agree that
Diogenes was homeless and slept in a wooden tub under the
awnings of Athenian temples.
In his Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers,22
Diogenes comes off as a cross between Woody Allen and Old Dirty
Bastard, delivering memorable quips and behaving inappropriately.
Found masturbating in the agora, Diogenes didn’t apologize for his
behavior, but noted that he wished it were similarly easy to relieve
his hunger by rubbing his belly. Termed “the dog” by some
contemporaries (the Greek word for dog, κύων, is the root of the
term “cynic”), Diogenes reacted to being tossed food scraps at a
banquet as any dog would: by urinating on his benefactors. While
many historians see him as a philosophical innovator and an
important critic of Plato, others view him as a colorful madman.
For all his outrageous behavior, Diogenes is best known for his
refusal to identify as an Athenian or a Sinopean. Instead, he
declared that he was a citizen of the universe, a cosmopolitan:
(κóσμος, universe, πóλις, city). Diogenes’s declaration of
cosmopolitanism was hardly representative of mainstream classical
Greek thought. Instead, it was a radical assertion. Virtually everyone
in Diogenes’s universe identified closely with the city-state in which
he was born and resided. Diogenes was probably not embracing a
global identity as much as he was rejecting the key social identifier of
his age: a man’s place of origin.
Challenging as Diogenes’s statement was to his contemporaries, it
has always been easier to declare ourselves cosmopolitans than to
actually live in a wide world.
We are 2,500 years removed from Diogenes, but it’s still only in
very recent times that the majority of people have had the
opportunity to interact with people from different parts of the world. In
1800, some 97 percent of the world’s population lived in rural
areas.23 While some people may have had contact with cultures
through visiting merchants or other travelers, most never met anyone
who spoke a different language or worshiped a different god. The 3
percent who lived in cities like Athens before 1800 had the rare
opportunity to talk to, trade with, and worship alongside people who
had different origins, languages, and gods. Although those early
cities were the first spaces where lived cosmopolitanism was actually
possible, we probably overestimate the degree of cultural mixing that
occurred in them.
The historian Margaret Jacob recently studied eighteenth-century
descriptions of the stock exchanges in Europe’s most cosmopolitan
cities. Jacob observes that though in contemporary accounts traders
from throughout Europe and beyond participated, divisions between
groups were definite: “A 1780s manuscript sketch of the floor of the
London exchange made by a visiting French engineer suggests that
by then national identities competed with professional as well as
religious ones. The sketch of the floor plan shows the familiar
groupings—‘place hollandaise,’ ‘place des Indes Orientales,’ ‘place
Française’—but also new ones: ‘the place of the Quakers,’ ‘the place
of the Jews.’…” The traders may have been Londoners working in
the greatest global marketplace of the time, but their origins and
faiths formed their primary identity.
As described, the eighteenth-century London stock market sounds
curiously like today’s multicultural cities. Consider New York, where
residents know that Brighton Beach is home to thousands of Russian
speakers, Flushing to a large Chinese community, Borough Park to
Orthodox and Hassidic Jews. The promise of our contemporary
cities is that it’s possible to encounter different foods, customs, and
ideas through incidental encounters with neighbors or through the
conscious decision to take a subway ride to a different corner of
town. But how often does this happen? “Lived cosmopolitanism,”
Jacob notes, has always been more difficult than merely building
spaces where people from different backgrounds come together.24
In 2006, the celebrated social theorist Robert Putnam shared
results from his Social Capital Benchmark Survey, which suggest
that contemporary Americans have a long way to go before they
embrace the multicultural promise of a city like New York. In
Putnam’s study, “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
‘hunker down.’”25 They are less likely to vote, work on community
projects, give to charity, or volunteer than Americans in less diverse
cities. They have less confidence in government’s ability to solve
problems, fewer friends, and a lower perceived quality of life.
Earlier sociological theories suggested that contact between ethnic
groups led either to improved social relations or to conflict between
groups—“contact theory” versus “conflict theory.” Putnam believes
that survey data from American cities point to a third possibility:
“constrict theory,” a tendency to shy away from contact when
presented with diversity.26 If Putnam’s constrict theory is right, and if
it also underpins our behavior online, it raises uncomfortable
questions about the potentials and realities opened by the Internet.
Connecting with people from other backgrounds is hard, even when
they live next door or in the same city; paying attention to the
problems and concerns of people in the rest of the world is harder
still.
The Ghanaian American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has
had to think through the possibilities and challenges inherent in
cosmopolitanism. Raised between Kumasi and London, the child of
a British art historian and a Ghanaian politician, Appiah has
explained the intricacies of Ashanti belief systems to Western
philosophers and his identity as a gay man to his relatives in Kumasi.
Cosmopolitanism, Appiah argues, is about much more than learning
to tolerate those who have values and beliefs that differ from ours.
We might tolerate practices that offend us by ignoring or turning
away from them, but merely tolerating other practices could lead to
the hunkering down Putnam warns us about, in which encountering
difference makes us constrict our encounters with the world. Instead,
Appiah celebrates cosmopolitanism, which, by contrast, challenges
us to embrace what is rich, productive, and creative about this
difference.
For Appiah, cosmopolitans have two essential qualities. They take
an interest in the beliefs and practices of others, striving to
understand, if not accept or adopt, other ways of being. In his words,
“Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we
neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should
converge on a single model of life.”27 Cosmopolitans also take
seriously the notion that they have obligations to people who are not
their kin, even to people who have radically different beliefs. We
have obligations to witness and document harms that others suffer
from, to lend what assistance we are able, and to treat the people we
encounter, no matter how different they are, as part of an extended
family.
This two-part definition means that my taste for sushi and my
fondness for Afropop are insufficient to make me a cosmopolitan.
Appiah saves the label for those who take seriously, and presumably
those who act on, their obligations to the people and peoples
responsible for the food and the music. Nor is cosmopolitanism a
simple universal love of humanity, especially when expressed as a
desire to “save” others through Christianity, Islam, democracy, or any
other proselytizing faith. We are challenged to take seriously the idea
that other possibilities are worth our time and consideration, not our
immediate opposition and rejection.28 When we embrace these, the
effect can be uncomfortable and disconcerting. At the same time, it
can also be a powerful force for those seeking insight or inspiration.

How We Know the World

In the spring of 1907, Pablo Picasso was visiting Gertrude Stein in

her apartment in Paris. Henri Matisse stopped by to show off an
African sculpture he had purchased from the Paris dealer Emile
Heymenn, a mask made by the Dan people of western Côte
d’Ivoire.29 Picasso was fascinated by the piece and soon thereafter
dragged his friend André Derain to the Trocadero Museum of
Ethnology, Paris’s first museum dedicated to anthropology. Initially,
Picasso was put off: “A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the
throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave
immediately.”30 Three decades later, Picasso described himself as
haunted by the sight and smell of “that awful museum.”31
Fortunately for the future of painting, Picasso overcame his initial
aversion. He recalled, “I forced myself to stay, to examine these
masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred,
magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the
unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to
overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I
understood what painting really meant.”32
His visit to the Trocadero marked the beginning of what Picasso
called his “période nègre”—his African period. Later that year, he
produced one of his masterpieces, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a
striking portrait of five female nudes, two with faces that closely
resemble West African masks. Picasso became a collector of African
art, lining the walls of his studio with masks and figurines, and he
included African themes in paintings like Musician with Guitar
(1972),33 produced shortly before his death. Scholars track Picasso’s
technique of reversing concave and convex lines in faces, and the
transformation of smooth surfaces into geometric solids—the basis
of cubism—to his African inspirations.34 Picasso’s appreciation of
African art led him into dialogue with leading African intellectuals,
including Léopold Senghor, the first president of postcolonial
Senegal. Senghor recognized Picasso’s showcasing of African
themes, and his support for African independence, with a poem
dedicated to the painter, “Masque nègre,” in his first collection of
poems, Chants d’ombre.35
Picasso found his connection to African influences first through an
encounter at a distance, mediated through a museum in France.
Only after wrestling with his reactions to African media did he begin
a dialogue with individual Africans like Senghor.
It’s tempting to imagine Matisse, projected into the present day,
sharing pictures of the Dan mask he’d just bought on Facebook,
leading Picasso to frantically search Google for related images. We
are less likely to find our connections to the unfamiliar—the
infectious and the inspirational—in the physical world. We will likely
find them on the screen.
The University of California at San Diego researchers Roger Bohn
and James Short calculate that Americans receive information 11.8
hours per day, once we consider information received by broadcast,
video, print, telephone, computer, electronic games, and recorded
music.36 Some small fraction of that time is spent encountering
news.37 We spend an increasing percentage of our time on social
media, keeping up on the minutiae of friends’ and family’s lives and
movements. Facebook alone now claims 13 minutes per day of a
user’s time, on average. The remaining hours are spent entertaining
ourselves, with music, television, and YouTube videos of cute cats.
Our encounters with these three types of media—news, social
media, and cultural media—shape what we know and value. If we
keep hearing about a person, place, or event, we register that what
we’ve learned about is important, and we’re predisposed to pay
attention to the topic. And while one of the great promises of the
Internet is that we might encounter anything online, in practice much
of what we encounter comes from much closer to home.
We’ve built information tools that embody our biases toward
events that affect those near and dear to us. Our newspapers and
broadcasters pay more attention to local and global matters than to
international ones. We lean toward television and movies in our
native languages, and toward keeping up with high school friends on
Facebook instead of using social networks to befriend strangers.
Even though Nigerian films and Indonesian news are available
through powerful indexes like Google, those tools suffer from another
bias: they give us the information we want, not necessarily the
information we might need.
What these biases mean, cumulatively, is that we must work hard
for our Picasso moments, the moments when an unexpected
encounter with the unfamiliar leads to inspiration. And we must work
equally hard to build tools that warn us of the dangers of connection,
whether it’s an incipient epidemic, a financial crisis, or an
inflammatory video. The Internet will not magically turn us into digital
cosmopolitans; if we want to maximize the benefits and minimize the
harms of connection, we have to take responsibility for shaping the
tools we use to encounter the world.

It Was Supposed to Be So Easy

In 1993, Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community,

reflections on the time he’d spent in early electronic forums,
including Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text-based, real-time chat
system created in 1988, but still popular today in technical circles.
With chapter titles like “Real-time Tribes” and “Japan and the Net,”
the book offers the hope that online dialogues will be more fair, more
inclusive, and more global than those we’ve known before.
“Thousands of people in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland,
the United Kingdom, and the United States are joined together at this
moment in a cross-cultural grab bag of written conversations known
as Internet Relay Chat (IRC).” Rheingold wonders, “What kinds of
cultures emerge when you remove from human discourse all cultural
artifacts except written words?”38
Rheingold was not the first to hope that an emerging technology
would transform the ways distant strangers relate to one another. In
his book The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, the Economist’s
technology editor, offers a compendium of optimistic predictions for
the telegraph, or “the highway of thought,” as one contemporary
commentator called it. In one of Standage’s many examples, the
completion of a submarine cable linking the United States and the
United Kingdom moved the historians Charles Briggs and Augustus
Maverick to assert, “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities
should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for
the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.”39
The arrival of the airplane inspired similar rhetoric. Commenting on
Louis Blériot’s crossing of the English Channel in 1909, the
Independent of London suggested that air travel would lead to peace
because the airplane “creates propinquity, and propinquity begets
love rather than hate.” A similar logic led Philander Knox, US
secretary of state under the president Howard Taft, to predict that
airplanes would “bring the nations much closer together and in that
way eliminate war.”40
Interviewed in 1912, the radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi
declared, “The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible,
because it will make war ridiculous.”41 Even after the Great War had
rendered Marconi’s pronouncement absurd, the inventor Nikola Tesla
saw an even grander future for radio: “When wireless is perfectly
applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain…. We
shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective
of distance.”
As befits a man of his genius, some elements of Tesla’s 1926
vision were surprisingly accurate. “Through television and
telephony,” he said “we shall see and hear one another as perfectly
as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of
thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be
able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present
telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”42
These and other observations will sound familiar to anyone who
witnessed the rise of the Internet. As the historian and technology
scholar Langdon Winner suggests, “The arrival of any new
technology that has significant power and practical potential always
brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise
of a utopian social order.”43 Technologies that connect individuals to
one another—like the airplane, the telegraph, and the radio—appear
particularly powerful at helping us imagine a smaller, more
connected world. Seen through this lens, the Internet’s underlying
architecture—it is no more and no less than a network that connects
networks—and the sheer amount written about it in the past decade
guaranteed that the network would be placed at the center of visions
for a world made better through connection. These visions are so
abundant that they’ve even spawned a neologism:
“cyberutopianism.”
The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of
critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has
an unrealistic and naïvely overinflated sense of what technology
makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that
govern societies. Curiously, the commonly used term for an opposite
stance, a belief that Internet technologies are weakening society,
coarsening discourse, and hastening conflict is described with a less
weighted term: “cyberskepticism.” Whether or not either of these
terms adequately serves us in this debate, we should consider
cyberutopianism’s appeal, and its merits.
In a Skype conversation with Howard Rheingold, I mentioned that I
planned to include some of his thoughts in this book’s discussion of
cyberutopianism. On being linked to the term, Rheingold was
flustered, and I briefly thought he might hang up on me. Instead, he
paused, composed himself, and offered the observation that “the
Abolitionists were utopians.” In a later email he explained further,

I am enthusiastic about the potential for tools that can enhance

collective action, but as I stated on the first page of Smart Mobs
[his 2002 book on technology and collective action], humans do
 beneficial things together and they do destructive things
together, and both kinds of collective action are amplified…. So
although I recognize that Communism and Fascism were sold
as utopias, I like to reverse my logic—not only do people do
really bad things under utopian banners, they can also do things
like move for the abolition of slavery.44

Rheingold’s comment reminds us not to let our opponents frame

the debate. “Cyberutopianism” is an uncomfortable label because it
combines two ideas worthy of careful consideration into a single,
indefensible package. The belief that connecting people through the
Internet leads inexorably to global understanding and world peace is
one not worth defending. Believing that technologies influence whom
and what we know and care about is a more complicated idea, and
one worth our close consideration. As with Appiah’s concept of
cosmopolitanism, it’s not enough to be enthusiastic about the
possibility of connection across cultures, by digital or other means.
Digital cosmopolitanism, as distinguished from cyberutopianism,
requires us to take responsibility for making these potential
connections real.
If we reject the notion that technology makes certain changes
inevitable, but accept that the aspirations of the “cyberutopians” are
worthy ones, we are left with a challenge: How do we rewire the
tools we’ve built to maximize our impact on an interconnected world?
Accepting the shortcomings of the systems we’ve built as inevitable
and unchangeable is lazy. As Benjamin Disraeli observed in Vivian
Grey, “Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are
the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful
than matter.”45 And, as Rheingold suggests, believing that people
can use technology to build a world that’s more just, fair, and
inclusive isn’t merely defensible. It’s practically a moral imperative.

Building for a Wider Future

Cyberutopianism offers us the reassurance that technological

innovations will lead to social progress, to positive connections
between people with different perceptions and beliefs. But the case
of SARS suggests that connection is a double-edged sword, opening
us to both the danger of infection and the potential of new solutions.
A recent YouTube video helps demonstrate just how hard we might
need to work in order to turn encounter across culture into the
positive force that digital cosmopolitanism suggests it could be.
In the summer of 2011, the filmmaker Sam Bacile recruited actors
for a film titled Desert Warriors. Wearing turbans, flowing robes, and
sandals, the actors performed in front of a green screen, in an
industrial space in Monrovia, California, far from the studios of
Hollywood. The convoluted plot involved battles between warring
tribes, provoked by the arrival of a comet. The script was so poorly
written that the actors made fun of it between takes, and the director
didn’t seem to care if the actors flubbed their lines, moving quickly
from scene to scene.46
On July 1, 2012, Bacile posted a fourteen-minute trailer for his
movie, now titled Innocence of Muslims, on YouTube. Watching the
trailer makes it clear why the director wasn’t concerned with the
actors’ delivery: the film was obviously dubbed, and the actors now
delivered lines about the Prophet Muhammad, portraying the
Prophet as a sex-obsessed, violent pedophile. The film attracted little
notice among YouTube audiences, garnering only a few thousand
views, but caught the attention of two vocal opponents of Islam,
Pastor Terry Jones and the Coptic activist Morris Sadek.
Jones and Sadek both have long records of anti-Islamic
provocation. Jones is best known for launching “International Burn a
Quran Day” on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
His plans to burn Islam’s holy book led to protests in the United
States and abroad, widespread media coverage and meetings
between Jones and senior US officials, who persuaded him not to
carry out his threats.47 Jones promoted Bacile’s film to his followers
as part of his September 11, 2012, “International Judge Muhammed
Day,” a sequel to his earlier Quran-burning plans. Sadek, known to
the Coptic community for his frequent emails denigrating Islam,
posted Bacile’s video, with Arabic subtitles, to the website of his
group, the National American Coptic Assembly. He also sent
hundreds of emails promoting the video to colleagues in Egypt.48
 The Innocence of Muslims film eventually came to the attention of
the Egyptian TV host Sheikh Khaled Abdullah. Abdullah appears on
Al-Nas television, a satellite channel based in Cairo, known for its
conservative Islamic stances. For religious reasons, Al-Nas has no
female presenters, and when Abdullah aired the clip on September
8, condemning it as an American attack on Islam, the faces of
women in the video were blurred out. The video had been dubbed
into Arabic, which made it impossible to tell that the English-
language audio had been cut and pasted together, and Abdullah and
other commentators implied that the film had been sponsored or
supported by the US government and shown on “state television” in
the United States.49
Al-Nas is watched throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and
audiences in Egypt and Libya responded to the broadcast by
protesting at American embassies in Cairo and Benghazi on
September 11, 2012. In Cairo, protesters breached the outer wall of
the embassy, tore down American flags, and hoisted black flags with
text declaring, “There Is No God But God and Allah Is His Prophet.”
The damage in Benghazi was much more serious. Angered by the
video, the Islamist militia Ansar al-Shariah attacked the US consulate
and set it on fire, trapping Ambassador Christopher Stevens and
others inside. Stevens and four others died of smoke inhalation.
Despite strong condemnations of the video from President Obama
and security crackdowns across the Middle East, protests against
the film erupted in Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and locations as far
flung as Australia and Belgium.50
Violent protests were, of course, what the filmmaker had wanted.
“Sam Bacile” is believed to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an
Egyptian American Coptic Christian with a criminal past. Nakoula’s
initial target audience for his film was Muslims living in Los Angeles.
He screened the film in a rented theater in Hollywood on June 23,
2012, as The Innocence of Bin Laden and tried to attract an
audience by running an Arabic-language advertisement in local
newspaper, hoping those inclined to believe in Bin Laden’s
innocence would attend.51 Nakoula failed to provoke a reaction from
local Muslims, because few, if any, attended the screening. But
Jones and Sadek worked to make sure that a wider audience would
see the film and take offense. And given that Jones and Sadek argue
that Islam is a dangerous religion, the burning of the Benghazi
consulate represents a victory, proof positive for their equation that
Islam equals violence.
In web parlance, Nakoula, Sadek, and Jones are trolls, persons
who try to hijack a discussion with harassing or inflammatory
content, hoping to provoke a response. The Internet scholar Judith
Donath notes that “the troll attempts to pass as a legitimate
participant, sharing the group’s common interests and concerns,” but
his ultimate intention is not to engage in discourse but to incite.52
Because trolls need to disguise themselves, it requires some skill to
troll a discussion successfully. Immediately posting insults ends a
conversation quickly, while morphing from a legitimate commentator
to a provocateur yields the anger the troll desires. Over time, Internet
users have developed some resistance to trolls. “Don’t feed the
trolls” is a standard admonition—in other words, if someone is trying
to incite you, don’t bother responding. The broader media
ecosystem, however, has yet to develop robust troll defenses.
It may be obvious to a Western viewer that the sole purpose of
Innocence of Muslims is to provoke, but it’s less obvious when
dubbed into Arabic and presented as a new film made for and aimed
at mainstream American audiences. We can think of the movie as an
infection designed to exploit the predispositions of our media
systems.
At the same time that some media players in the Middle East are
actively searching for evidence that the United States is persecuting
Muslims, the US media since 9/11 have paid disproportionate
attention to violence committed by Muslims. The protests played into
an existing narrative for American news outlets, a narrative best
illustrated by the cover of Newsweek’s September 24, 2012, issue,
which features an image of bearded men in turbans yelling, under
the headline “Muslim Rage.”
The trolls behind Innocence of Muslims exploit both of these
narratives. They provide Middle Eastern Muslims evidence that
Americans misunderstand and disrespect Islam so badly that
hundreds of people were willing to get together and make a film that
insults the Prophet. The ensuing protests play to American media’s
focus on the sudden and violent, at the expense of processes that
may be more important, but are hard to portray visually: the
authoring of a Libyan constitution, peaceful elections in Egypt.
Newsweek’s cover invites us to see the Libyan protest the way
Nakoula and Pastor Jones see it, as evidence that Islam is
unpredictable and violent. Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism
suggests we look more deeply and see whether the situation is more
complex than it appears at first glance. With a little work and a wider
view, a very different narrative emerges.
Marc Lynch, a leading scholar of Arab media, points out that the
protests, while sometimes violent, “were actually quite small—vastly
inferior in size and popular inclusion to the Arab uprisings protests
last year, and small even in comparison to the ongoing pro-
democracy or other political demonstrations which occur on a weekly
basis in many Arab countries.” One protest that wasn’t widely
covered took place on September 21, ten days after the US
consulate in Libya burned, “where tens of thousands came out in
Benghazi in an inspiring rally against militias and against the attack
on the U.S. consulate.”53 A day later, similar rallies ousted the Ansar
al-Sharia militia, which is believed to have set the US consulate on
fire, from their base near the city.54
While dozens of op-ed writers picked up their pens to opine on
Muslim rage, Lynch notes, few have been inspired to write about
these massive rallies in support of the United States. The op-ed
writers Lynch is waiting for may find inspiration in a YouTube video
that offers a very different window on the Libyan protests. Shot by
the Libyan activist Fahd al-Bakoush, it shows a dozen men carrying
Ambassador Stevens, unconscious from smoke inhalation, out of the
burning consulate to a car, to take him to the hospital. When the men
discover Stevens is still alive, they chant, “God is Great.”55
While tens of thousands of Benghazi residents marched against
one manifestation of “Muslim rage,” American Muslims reacted to the
Newsweek cover in a more subtle and snarky fashion. To
accompany its story, Newsweek invited people to share their
thoughts online, using the Twitter hashtag #muslimrage. Hundreds of
Muslims in the United States and elsewhere did so, posting pictures
of themselves looking mildly annoyed, with captions that show their
“#muslimrage” at the frustrations of ordinary life. A collection of these
images, at http://muslimrage.tumblr.com/, features captions like
these:

My bookmark fell out and now I’ma have to page through to find
my spot. #MuslimRage

kebabs burning! why my timer didn’t go off? #MuslimRage

3-hour lecture tomorrow at 8 am. Why. #MuslimRage

The #muslimrage tweets point up an obvious truth: the violent

protesters represent an infinitesimal fraction of the nearly two billion
Muslims worldwide.56 Most Muslims don’t look like the scary men on
the cover of Newsweek; rather, they look like friends, neighbors,
colleagues, and classmates, and their frustrations, for the most part,
are the petty, everyday ones we all share.
With marches in Benghazi and tweets in the United States,
Muslims are trying to fight a simplistic narrative that obscures the
larger transformation taking place in the Middle East—a move from a
world of oppressive autocrats and suppressed religious movements
to representative governments that try to balance moderate Islam
and electoral democracy. Our inability to see the smiling and
sarcastic #muslimrage because we’re blinded by the overblown and
violent “Muslim rage” suggests that we’re getting a distorted picture
of the world. This limited view, attuned to some narratives and not to
others, makes it hard to anticipate and understand major shifts like
the Arab Spring.
We cannot escape a connected world. Governments will block
access to YouTube in the wake of the Innocence of Muslims trailer,
just as they grounded planes during the SARS outbreak. But ideas,
both the ugly and the inspiring, will spread across borders.
To succeed in a connected world, to fight infection and embrace
inspiration, we need a wider view. We need to encounter unexpected
influences, like the masks that shaped Picasso’s career. We need to
put events like the Benghazi attack in proportion, and we need to
discover what’s missing. We need to take a longer and wider look,
approaching the first explanations of a mystery with skepticism,
probing for a fuller picture. We need to find guides who can help us
translate and contextualize what we’re seeing so that we can
understand what’s really going on in the world.
A future of connection across lines of language, culture, and
nation is made more possible by the rise of the Internet. Our
economic and creative success depends on our becoming digital
cosmopolitans, on embracing inspirations and opportunities from all
parts of the world. To build the tools we need to thrive in this
emerging world, we must understand how we’re connected and
disconnected.
We need to move toward a physics of connection, an
understanding of what’s necessary to build real and lasting
connections in digital space. Our first step toward that goal is
establishing a better understanding of what we actually do, and don’t
do, and whom we hear, and don’t hear, when we use the Internet.
We have to take a close look at how connected we are, not just at
how connected we imagine ourselves to be.
 IMAGINARY COSMOPOLITANISM

MIT’S PROFESSOR NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE HELPED BRING the Internet into

the public spotlight with his 1995 book, Being Digital, which
celebrated a near-future world in which digital technologies
transformed every aspect of our lives. For a book that touches on
holographic video, virtual reality, and other as yet unrealized aspects
of life on the net, it starts in a surprisingly mundane place. Attending
a conference on American competitiveness, Negroponte noted the
irony of being served Evian water, shipped in glass bottles from the
French Alps. America’s future, he declared, was not in manipulating
these heavy, hard-to-move atoms, but in weightless bits.1
There’s no Evian water for sale at the convenience store around
the corner from MIT’s Media Lab, the interdisciplinary technology
research center that Negroponte founded in 1985 and where I now
work. Instead, discerning drinkers can choose between domestic
and imported bottled water, including Fiji Water, offered in its
distinctive rectangular bottles. The name is not a marketing gimmick:
the water is bottled in Yaqara, Fiji, 8,100 miles from Cambridge.
How the water got from Fiji to Cambridge illuminates the logistics
of our global economy. The Canadian businessman David Gilmour
used the fortune he’d made from a Nevada gold mine to purchase
Wakaya, Fiji, an uninhabited 2,200-acre island ringed with white-
sand beaches. Originally intending to use the island as a family
retreat, Gilmour eventually realized its potential as an exclusive
resort. Flown in on Gilmour’s six-seat plane, guests paid thousands
of dollars a night to stay in thatched-roof villas, eat gourmet food
prepared from “native venison, vegetables and herbs,” and sip
French champagne and Evian water. Gilmour tells reporters that he
saw a guest guzzling Evian as he played golf and realized he
needed a local alternative.
Gilmour’s next steps suggest that his ambitions were a bit larger
than providing ecofriendly bottled water to the occupants of his nine
villas. In 2003, he leased fifty acres on Vitu Levu, Fiji’s largest island,
obtained a ninety-nine-year lease on the area’s underground aquifer,
and invested $48 million in building a state-of-the-art bottling plant.
He then hired Doug Carlson, an Aspen, Colorado, hotel executive, to
build Fiji Water into a global luxury brand. Carlson introduced the
water to the American market through gourmet restaurants,
persuading chefs to serve the bottle in a silver sleeve and sell the
water for $10 a pop. Early adopters included movie stars and
musicians, whose patronage helped turn the bottles into a popular
fashion accessory, and an “aspirational brand” affordable to a
mainstream audience.
In 2004, Gilmour sold the company to the American entrepreneurs
Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who had made their fortune selling
collectible knicknacks marketed by the Franklin Mint. The Resnicks
promptly rebranded Fiji as a green company, buying carbon offsets
for the environmental costs of shipping bottle blanks to China, empty
bottles to Fiji, and filled bottles to the United States and beyond.
Concerns about the carbon footprint of the product have had little
impact on sales; by 2008, Fiji Water had outpaced Evian as the top-
selling “premium bottled water” brand in the United States.
The Danish shipping giant Maersk routes shipping containers from
Suva, Fiji, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, via Auckland, New
Zealand, and Philadelphia’s Packer Avenue Container Port.
Maersk’s online shipping calculator tells us that the voyage takes
thirty-three days and that transporting a forty-foot container costs
$5,540.30, including trucking the box from Philadelphia to
Cambridge. These containers can hold over 30,000 kilograms, which
means the shipping cost for a liter of Fiji Water from Suva to
Massachusetts is roughly eighteen cents. Atoms may be heavy and
hard to move, but transporting them halfway across a planet is
shockingly inexpensive.
 It’s surprisingly easy to move atoms from Fiji to the United States.
Moving weightless bits along the same route is more complicated.
Fiji has had a rough history in the years since Gilmour bought his
private island. Tensions between Fijians of Melanesian descent and
Indo-Fijians led to two coups in 1987, and in the new millennium
Commodore Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, commander of Fiji’s
military forces, has taken over the government twice, first in 2000
and again in 2006. In 2009, Fiji’s supreme court ruled Bainimarama’s
2006 coup illegal and demanded he step down. His political allies
responded by abolishing the constitution, sacking the judiciary, and
replacing the fired judges with rented judges from Sri Lanka.
Concerned about negative publicity Bainimarama ordered foreign
diplomats and journalists out of the country and instructed remaining
reporters to practice “the journalism of hope,” and report only
positive stories, lest their publications be shut down.
The government of Fiji hasn’t needed to threaten US journalists to
prevent negative reporting. Commodore Bainimarama’s recent
address to the UN General Assembly, where he apologized that his
country wouldn’t be able to hold elections until 2014 at the earliest,
received no coverage in New York newspapers. Fiji Water’s efforts to
go green, on the other hand, merited two features in the New York
Times.
Fiji Water is apparently more mobile than Fijian news. And it’s safe
to say that more people have sipped the nation’s well-traveled water
than have sampled the music of Rosiloa, one of Fiji’s leading pop
bands, or watched The Land Has Eyes, Fiji’s first locally produced
feature film.2
Could it be that atoms are more mobile than bits?
Fiji Water offers a glimpse of a possible future, in which we are
free to encounter the best the world has to offer, not just products,
but also people and ideas. But our ignorance of Fijian politics and
culture suggests that this possible future is far from realized. We
need to take a close look at the reality of globalization, not just the
promise, to understand the challenge we face: we are increasingly
dependent on goods and services from other parts of the world, and
less informed about the people and cultures who produce them.
 What follows isn’t an argument for or against globalization.
Instead, it’s a portrait of incomplete globalization, a confusing world
where some globalist aspirations are realized and many are not. Our
challenge is to discover the information and the perspective that
allow us to thrive in this incompletely globalized world. A good first
step is to establish a map of the territory.

Reconsidering Flatworld

In the last decade we’ve witnessed the rise of a view that “the world
is flat,” popularized by the New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman in a book of the same name. In a flat world, we are told,
communications technologies allow companies to build global supply
chains, outsource work, and collaborate across international borders.
A US business might manufacture in China, offer customer service in
India, and rely on the best minds of Japan and the Netherlands to
produce new products, because it’s easy to discover the best talent
all across the world. As a result, American workers should think of
themselves as competing with the best and the brightest from every
corner of the globe.
Not everyone finds this vision especially accurate. It’s certainly not
a new one.
The economist John Maynard Keynes offered a similar view of a
communications-enabled globalization in 1919:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his

morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth—he
could at the same time and by the same means adventure his
wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any
quarter of the world—he could secure forthwith, if he wished,
cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or
climate without passport or other formality.

What’s particularly striking about Keynes’s vision is that he was

looking not to the future but to the past. The quotation is a
description of life in London before the First World War closed an era
of rapid globalization.3
Two massive wars and a worldwide economic collapse not only
disrupted flows of atoms, people, and bits across national borders.
They also bred strong skeptics of the idea that political
interconnection, through organizations like the United Nations, would
protect sovereign economic interests. In her “maiden speech” to
Congress in 1943, the playwright, journalist, and representative from
Connecticut Clare Boothe Luce urged her compatriots not to cede
control over international air travel to the United Kingdom and
lambasted Vice President Henry Wallace’s view of an
internationalized, interconnected post–World War II world as
“globaloney.”4
In his 2011 book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve
It, the business strategy professor Pankaj Ghemawat offers a flood
of statistics designed to combat contemporary globaloney. To take
one atom-based example, exports represent about 20 percent of
global production as determined by GDP, and Ghemawat maintains
that this figure overcounts the real impact of trade. The components
that make up your mobile phone are double-counted in international
trade statistics: once when they’re sold as components and again
when they’re sold as a finished product. Money prefers to stay at
home: venture capitalists invest 80 percent of their capital in home
markets, and less than 20 percent of stock market shares are owned
by foreign investors. Even apparently interchangeable commodities
like rice are surprisingly immobile—only 7 percent of rice is sold
across international borders. We are facing a flattening world,
Ghemawat concedes, but we should not accept Friedman’s vision of
a flattened world. Globalization is an incomplete, changeable
process that’s still unfolding.
The flat-world view looks at infrastructures of connectivity and
conflates what could be with what will be. It blurs three separate
phenomena—the globalization of atoms, people, and bits—into a
single trend. The infrastructures that it celebrates—container
shipping, air travel, and the Internet—quite obviously have the
potential to shrink distance and integrate economies and cultures.
But they are held in check by social, legal, economic, and cultural
forces that make the blurring of international borders a slow, gradual,
and uneven process. Understanding the current balance between
forces that connect us and those that disconnect us allows us to
consider our blind spots and determine whether we’re getting what
we want and need from the wider world.
In this chapter, we look first at the globalization of atoms to
understand how the visibility of internationally mobile bits can blind
us to the locality of most of the objects we encounter. Next, we look
at human migration, where even small amounts of mobility often lead
to fierce political debates. Our tendency to overestimate the
movement of atoms and people should give us pause when we think
about the world of information, as we consider the idea that bits can
be less mobile than atoms.
When we focus on the infrastructures that make globalization
possible—the ports and routes of container shipping, the hubs and
spokes of air travel, the routers and cables of the Internet—it’s easy
to imagine a level of connection that’s higher than what we currently
experience. Understanding how atoms, people, and bits flow—and
don’t flow—through the world requires less speculation and more
observation, including close observation of how bits flow through our
computers and our minds.

How Flat Are Atoms?

The Monday after Christmas 2004, Sara Bongiorni, a business

reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate, decided that her family
would spend the following year boycotting China. The trigger for her
decision was the discovery that twenty-five of the family’s gifts under
the Christmas tree came from China, and fourteen from the rest of
the world. Her book documenting their experiences, A Year without
“Made in China,” chronicles the small crises a China boycott creates
for Bongiorni and her family: shoes for her toddler made in Texas
cost seventy dollars rather than ten dollars for shoes made in China;
buying an inflatable pool for her kids became impossible without
violating the boycott.
 Had Bongiorni’s rule set required her family to forswear products
with components made in China, the task would have bordered on
the impossible. Today’s manufacturing supply chains span the globe,
and apparently simple products include inputs from many nations. As
a student at MIT’s Media Lab, Leonardo Bonanni developed a
platform called Sourcemap that helps customers and companies
document the global origins of everyday objects. A pair of denim
jeans “made in Indonesia” includes cotton grown in the United
States, processed in China, woven in Thailand, cut in Singapore,
and sewn together in Indonesia, using thread from Malaysia, rivets
from Taiwan, and a zipper from Hong Kong.5 Unpacking the origins
of these simple objects reveals the power and pervasiveness of
global sourcing, low-cost shipping, and “just in time” inventory
systems.
Six months into her experiment, Bongiorni visited Walmart to test a
claim made by Mona Williams, Walmart’s VP of corporate
communications. Williams, in a letter to Newsweek magazine,
asserted that Walmart purchases vastly more from US suppliers than
from Chinese suppliers. Bongiorni, wandering the aisles of Walmart,
found the numbers hard to believe. After all, Walmart sources as
much as 70 percent of its nonfood inventory in US stores from over
five thousand Chinese suppliers, which makes the American retailer
China’s eighth-largest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia,
and Canada. Bongiorni spent an afternoon in Walmart, checking 106
items for their country of origin, and found 49 percent made in China
and 22 percent made in the United States, with Honduras running a
distant third. “The way I see it, unless Ms. Williams is including
groceries, or building supplies used to construct Wal-Mart stores in
her tally of American purchases, I just don’t see how her numbers
add up,” Bongiorni wrote.
Groceries are a good place to start unpacking Bongiorni’s
misperceptions of the global economy. Walmart is not just the largest
retailer in the world; it’s also the largest grocery store chain in the
United States. And despite eye-catching examples of globalization
like water shipped from Fiji or lamb chops from New Zealand, less
than 7 percent of the food consumed in the United States comes
from outside our borders.6 Since 54 percent of Walmart’s sales come
from groceries in 2011, that’s a lot of American-made foodstuffs that
Bongiorni didn’t consider.7
Her instinct that the materials used to construct Walmart stores are
sourced locally is a sound one as well. While it’s inexpensive enough
to ship high-value goods like electronics and, remarkably, drinking
water, and still make a profit, building materials are another matter.
Steel, timber, and concrete used in the United States are primarily
sourced domestically—about 20–25 percent of the steel used in the
United States is imported, as is under a third of the construction
timber, imported mainly from Canada.8 The company’s relationship
with suppliers of building materials, construction companies that
build Walmart stores, refiners that supply gasoline and diesel fuel to
Walmart trucks, and contractors that clean the stores are less visible
than the “made in China” labels that so haunt Bongiorni.
Bongiorni’s visceral reactions to the artifacts of globalization helps
us understand how we can overestimate the globalization of atoms.
She is particularly incensed by items she considers specifically non-
Chinese that are manufactured there: a ceramic statue of Jesus,
patriotic decorations for the Fourth of July. These distinctly American
items, she feels, should be made in America, and their Chinese
origins are proof to her of America’s manufacturing decline and
China’s rise.
The Chinese-made ceramic Jesus and the bottle of Fiji Water both
invite us to imagine a level of globalization that’s higher than actually
exists. The French economist Daniel Cohen observes, “French
people ‘see’ a McDonald’s on every corner, American films in all the
theaters, Coca-Cola in all the cafeterias, but they are apparently
blind to the thousands of French cafés that serve ham-and-butter
sandwiches, the bottles of Evian and Badoit, the French films
featuring Gérald Depardieu, or the regional press. In wealthy
countries, globalization is largely imaginary.”9
Geography still matters.10 Despite the rising globalization of
atoms, we have a strong bias in favor of local products. In 2000, the
economist Jeffrey Frankel calculated a theoretical level of
globalization with which we might compare our actual levels of global
trade. The United States represents roughly one-fourth of the world’s
economy. In a truly borderless world, we would expect Americans to
buy and sell 75 percent of their goods abroad. In fact, America’s
international purchases and sales equal roughly 12 percent of GDP,
suggesting a level of globalization that’s roughly one-sixth what we
might anticipate in a flat world where national origins of a product
had become completely irrelevant. And while China is the United
States’ second-largest trading partner (neighbors Canada and
Mexico are first and third),11 products made in China represent only
2.7 percent of US consumer spending.12
One reason that atoms are still so immobile is that governments
excel at slowing their flow. Protecting domestic markets is so
tempting for governments that they often hinder the flow of global
atoms with one set of regulations, while promoting free trade with
other legislation. The United States is particularly practiced at this
form of economic hypocrisy when the atoms in question are grown
by farmers.
In theory, one benefit of globalization is the ability for economies to
specialize and take advantage of the specific strengths of their
workforce. Wealthy countries tend to have well-educated and
expensive workers. It makes sense for them to design and
manufacture high-value, technically complex goods like computers,
electronics, and machine tools. Poor nations have undereducated
and inexpensive workers, whom we would expect to be employed in
sectors like agriculture and mining, producing raw materials at low
cost for export to wealthier nations. In this paradigm Mali grows
cotton and exports it to China, where it’s woven and sewn according
to Italian designs for export to the United States.
Not quite. As it turns out, the United States is the world’s largest
cotton exporter, responsible for roughly 40 percent of the world’s
cross-border cotton trade. We would expect a wealthy nation with
high labor costs to leave production of an agricultural commodity to
developing nations, but America’s dominance in this market is made
possible by massive agricultural subsidies that started in the 1930s.
These subsidies averaged $3 billion a year over the past decade and
have ensured that the 25,000 American farmers who grow cotton
receive roughly twice the market price for their goods.
Because American farmers have such great financial incentives to
grow cotton, they grow a lot of it. The United States trails only China
and India in total cotton production. And American farmers can sell
cotton very cheaply, depressing global markets, because the price
they are paid is set by the government, not by the market. Brazil, a
major cotton producer, was so incensed by the US system that it
sued the United States through the World Trade Organization and
won a settlement in which the United States pays Brazil $147 million
a year for the right to continue subsidizing domestic cotton
production.13

The Lumpy World of Migration

Economic logic suggests we should see a world where atoms are

profoundly mobile. Instead, cultural preferences and government
regulation shape a world of atoms that’s more local than global,
though that reality can be difficult to see at first. But while the
artifacts of globalization can blind us to the more complex realities on
the ground, the fiercest emotions about globalization tend to be
reserved for discussions of the movements of human beings. If we
have a hard time seeing the incomplete globalization of atoms,
understanding the realities of human mobility is even harder. What’s
emerging is not a single trend but a complex pattern, hidden behind
a shrill, popular narrative that sees immigration as a uniquely
modern crisis. When we see only that oversimplified narrative, we
miss the simple fact that developed nations need more migration, not
less.
Hostility to migration is becoming mainstream in some European
nations. Anti-immigrant political parties like France’s National Front
and Greece’s Golden Dawn are emerging as influential political
actors and members of coalition governments. Other European
nations are reconsidering liberal immigration policies in the face of
rising populations of Muslim immigrants who, Europeans fear, won’t
integrate into society as completely as previous immigrants have. In
the United States, a sustained recession has led some unemployed
people to speculate that their joblessness is caused by illegal
migration. Campaigns to ban the burka in France and to enshrine
English as the official language in United States may suggest that
people are as uncomfortable with images and speech that remind
them of migration as they are with migrants themselves.
Support for these and other initiatives, as well as the popularity of
anti-immigrant politicians, might imply that countries are
experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration. In fact, global
migration is significantly lower than it was a hundred years ago. Just
before World War I, roughly 10 percent of people worldwide lived in
countries other than the land of their birth.14 Mass migrations from
Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Germany reshaped the United States,
Canada, and Argentina, shifting 27 million Europeans overseas in
the three decades before World War I. Prior to these voluntary
migrations, indentured servitude sent Chinese and Indian workers to
Africa and the Caribbean and Africans to North and South America.
Today, immigration seems high to many of us only because global
mobility slowed almost to a stop after World War II and remains well
below historical highs.
A German farmer leaving for Minnesota in 1910 faced a long and
dangerous voyage, an uncertain and risky future, hostility and
resentment from his new neighbors, and a near-complete severing of
existing social ties. Technological change in the intervening decades
offers a contemporary migrant a very different prospect. Jet travel
means a (legal) voyage is essentially riskless and instantaneous in
comparison with overland and ocean journeys. A Nigerian immigrant
to Houston can call home for a few cents a minute or via Skype for
virtually no cost. She can read Lagos newspapers online and
download the latest Nollywood films. It’s comparatively inexpensive
to return home for a visit or to migrate in reverse. Some social
theorists have begun to worry that it may be possible to migrate
physically but not culturally, offering examples of Pakistani and
Turkish communities in northern Europe where Urdu and Turkish
remain the dominant languages and residents encounter more
satellite television than local media.15 This phenomenon—physical
mobility with cultural stasis—gives fuel to politicians who argue for
banning the burka or for English-only education.
While it’s possible to stay more closely connected to home than
ever before, these technological developments haven’t radically
increased the volume of international migration. The International
Organization for Migration estimates 214 million migrants worldwide,
or 3.1 percent of the world’s population. That percentage is rising
from a post–World War II nadir, but slowly. Between 2000 and 2010,
the migration rate increased from 2.9 percent to 3.1 percent of the
global population.16 Far, far more people want to migrate than are
able to, but they are constrained by immigration restrictions.
The rise of outsourcing can be thought of as one response to a
world where jobs are mobile but people are not. Many of the Indian
employees who answer customer service phone calls from
Bangalore would be interested in living and working in Europe or the
United States. They’re able to work at a distance because the forces
that constrain their movements don’t apply to the bits traveling
between computers and across phone lines. If migration restrictions
were relaxed or eliminated, it’s likely that millions of people would
move to places where they thought economic and political conditions
were better, enabled by globalizing technologies like air travel and
inexpensive telecommunications. But this possible movement is held
in check by laws that seek to protect cultures, economies, and social
welfare systems from too much flattening.
The result is a world with deeply uneven migration patterns. In
some nations that are highly dependent on “guest workers,” migrants
who reside in the country for extended periods but don’t have the
rights of citizens, immigrants represent the majority of the population:
87 percent in Qatar, 70 percent in the United Arab Emirates, 69
percent in Kuwait. Other nations have little to no immigration,
because of a lack of economic opportunity (Indonesia, 0.1 percent;
Romania, 0.6 percent) or legal or cultural barriers to migration
(Japan, 1.7 percent; South Africa, 3.7 percent). Levels of immigration
in North America and western Europe are higher than the global
average, which makes sense, because migrants generally leave
poorer nations for wealthier ones. Some 9.39 percent of the
population of the European Union live in countries other than the
country of their birth, as does 13.9 percent of the US population and
21.3 percent of those living in Canada.17
There’s no clear threshold at which migration triggers societal
tensions and debate. South Africa has seen anti-immigrant violence
even though more than 96 percent of its population is native born,
while Canada promotes a multicultural identity as part of its strength
as immigrants now account for more than 21 percent of the
population. What may be more important than an absolute number
or percentage of migrants are perceptions of how migration is
changing a society.
Rhetoric around immigration in Europe includes the idea of a “time
bomb” of Muslim migration, often accompanied by projections that
Muslims will represent 20 percent of the population of the EU by
2050.18 Those projections are extrapolations from existing migration
patterns and birthrates. The scenario in which one of five Europeans
is Muslim is the “naïve” scenario postulated in a controversial article
by a little-known Hungarian academic; more sophisticated models
(which assume that birthrates for Muslim families in Europe will drop
as those families become better educated, a well-documented
demographic phenomenon) show an even smaller growth in the
Muslim population.19
It may also be worth noting that Islam has been one of the world’s
fastest-growing religions over the past half century. The Pew
Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life projects that
26.4 percent of the global population will be Muslim by 2030,
suggesting that even if the prediction of the European “time bomb”
proves to be accurate, Europe would have a much lower proportion
of Muslims than the world as a whole. Pew predicts that 8 percent of
Europe will be Muslim by 2030, and that the United States will have
a larger Muslim population than any European nation other than
Russia or France.20
Rates of migration are much higher than they were forty years
ago, as we’ve moved beyond postwar isolation toward a rate of
migration closer to what the world experienced in 1900. And
migration undoubtedly raises challenges for governments and
societies. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the illusions we hold
about the mobility of people can blind us to the actual demographic
challenges nations face. One of the reasons European nations are
loath to impose sharp restrictions on immigration is that their
populations are aging. Without an influx of young taxpayers, they run
the risk that their social welfare systems won’t be able to support a
population of elderly retirees. Focusing on the illusion of a Muslim
takeover of Europe, or even the illusion of a flat world where labor is
highly mobile, makes it very difficult to see and address problems
like maintaining a survivable worker-to-retiree ratio. In a flat world,
Indians now at work in call centers might be flocking to Japan to care
for the elderly. In our semiglobalized world, they’re held in place by
immigration restrictions and cultural barriers.

Bits: Potentially Mobile, Practically Static

We see a “made in China” label and imagine the end of American

manufacturing. We see minarets and imagine a wave of Muslim
immigrants to Europe. But the fantasies of a seamlessly globalized
world of bits are even more seductive, since the bits are produced
and marketed by the world’s biggest technology companies.
It’s dark in the conference room, where stern-faced Japanese
businessmen confront an intractable problem: their sole supplier
wants too much money for valves! One of the youngest executives,
the only man seated in front of a computer, announces that they’ve
gotten an online bid from “Mitchco” for half the price. “Where are
they?” asks the boss. The young executive answers, “Texas,” and
we cut to a dusty machine shop, where Mitch, in his “Mitch & Co.”
coveralls, looks at a screen and announces in a drawl, “Domo
arigato.”
The ad, aired in 2000, advertised IBM’s eCommerce division,
which offered “solutions for a small planet.” That small planet is
connected by more than the planes and container ships that deliver
Mitch’s valves to the Japanese factories; it’s made possible by the
flow of bits that allow Mitch to learn about the opportunity in Japan
and bid on the contract.
The international flow of bits suggests a cosmopolitan future,
where Texas-based mechanics learn Japanese to conduct business
with their new partners. But as with the promises of globalized atoms
and people, it’s worth looking closely at the gaps between the
potential and the actual globalization of bits. If technological
advances have increased the potential mobility of atoms and people,
they have utterly transformed the potential mobility of bits. An
international phone call cost $2.43 a minute in 1970. As powerful
fiberoptic networks replaced overloaded copper ones and rival
providers offered competitive services, that cost fell to $0.14 a
minute in 2004, and the volume of international phone traffic rose
from 100 million minutes in 1970 to 63.6 billion in 2004.21 More
recently, the rise of the mobile phone has put the possibility of
international connection into almost everyone’s hands. In 2000,
roughly 740 million people owned mobile phones. By 2011, there
were nearly 6 billion mobile phone subscribers, or 85 phones for
every 100 people on the planet.22
Technology hasn’t just made communications cheaper. It has
made the previously impossible seem routine. Once a month, I chat
with a friend in Budapest over Skype. Using the video cameras
embedded in our laptop computers, we show off our children to each
other and they babble to each other, separated by five thousand
miles but connected by Internet service that’s too cheap to meter. As
recently as ten years ago, this sort of ad hoc, home-based
international videoconferencing wasn’t just prohibitively expensive: it
wasn’t possible.
That’s the appeal of the Mitchco IBM ad. The impossible—our
friend Mitch acting as supplier to a major Japanese auto firm—is
made real by IBM’s miraculous technology. In a world where
business relationships last longer than the sixty seconds of a
television commercial, Mitch may want to start reading up on his new
client and its competitors. Again, technological progress has
changed the landscape and rendered the impossible routine.
Twenty years ago, the average citizen had access to a few
television channels, each of which was broadcast from a transmitter
within a few hundred kilometers. Now, with only a small satellite dish,
an interested viewer in Ghana can tune into programming from
dozens of nations. An aficionado of international news twenty years
ago frequented newsstands in major cities, waiting to buy stale
copies of Le Monde or the Times of India. Those newspapers are
now available online, instantaneously, for anyone with Internet
access and the inclination to peruse them. And most of them are
free. Newspapermap.com offers links to more than ten thousand
newspapers from more than one hundred countries, accessible
online and machine translated from more than a dozen languages.
Moreover, access to information online goes well beyond
newspapers. As thousands of Americans discovered during the
January 2011 Tahrir Square protests, Al Jazeera English is available
online, as are streaming video services from Japan’s NHKWorld,
France24, Russia’s RT, and dozens of others.23
And yet, we rarely encounter this bounty of international
information. If the global flow of atoms is constrained by trade
restrictions and by taste, and the flow of people by employment
opportunities and immigration laws, the flow of information is
constrained by our interest and attention. Much as we imagine a flat
world of migration when visiting Dubai or a flattened supply chain
when in the aisles of Walmart, looking at the richness of news
available across international borders conjures up a world where
we’re deeply connected to information and perspectives from around
the world. The reality is more complicated.
The Times of India has a print run of 3.1 million copies, giving it
the largest circulation of any English-language daily newspaper in
the world. The online edition of the paper has an audience of roughly
9.1 million users in an average month; 1.1 million of those users are
in the United States. It’s fair to assume that the advent of online
newspapers has dramatically increased the US readership of the
Times of India from the days when reading the paper required it to
be flown in from Mumbai.
Americans generate about 800 million page views a month to
large international news websites like the Times of India, and more
than 10 billion to domestic news sites. In a theoretical flat world with
attention distributed equally among all corners of the Internet, like
the one Jeffrey Frankel proposes we consider in terms of trade,
Americans, who represent only 11.2 percent of the Internet’s users,
would get 88.8 percent of their news from other countries. In
practice, we get a lot less.
Doubleclick, an online ad company that has become part of
Google, publishes statistics on the monthly web traffic and “reach”—
the percentage of Internet users in a country who visit a particular
site in a month—for tens of thousands of news sites. Because
Doubleclick analyzes traffic in more than sixty countries, and
because it categorizes sites by topic, we can ask which one hundred
news sites are most visited by Americans or South Koreans, and
whether those sites are domestic or international.
In the view from the United States, the BBC is the eighth–most
popular news site, and the UK papers the Guardian, the Telegraph,
the Daily Mail, the Times, and the Sun all have substantial US
audiences. The Times of India ranks ninety-fourth in popularity with
US news readers, and it is the first non-UK, non-US source on the
list of news sites popular in the United States. Of the 9.87 billion
page views Americans generated to those top hundred news sites in
July 2010, 93.4 percent were to sites hosted in the United States,
while 6.6 percent were to international sites like the BBC and the
Times of India.
It’s possible to conclude that Americans are parochial, and as such
less likely to read international news sources than their cosmopolitan
brethren in, say, France. But look at the numbers: 98 percent of the
traffic to the top fifty news websites in France goes to domestic sites,
2 percent to international sites. In China, the first international site to
appear on a list of top news sites is Reuters.com, in 62nd place,
followed by the Wall Street Journal, in 75th, and the BBC, at 100th.24
Of the ten nations with the largest online populations that
Doubleclick checks, the United States ranks as one of the least
parochial nations, which is likely due in part to our large student and
immigrant populations. None of the top ten nations looks at more
than 7 percent international content in its fifty most popular news
sites.25
It makes sense that linguistically isolated nations—nations that
don’t share a principal language with any other countries—like Japan
or South Korea would read few international sources. It’s more
surprising that despite a long colonial legacy, and shared language,
Indians and Brits don’t read more of each other’s content. Nor do
they visit US news sites. As it turns out, shared language offers no
guarantee of interest in each other’s media. Spanish-speaking
nations in South America show little or no interest in reading each
other’s news or in online news from Spain. There is often interest in
news across borders from smaller nations that share a language and
a border with a larger nation: Internet users in Taiwan and Hong
Kong read a lot of mainland Chinese news, and Canadians read
American news more avidly than vice versa. (The Canadians, Hong
Kong Chinese, and Taiwanese may all be keeping an eye on their
powerful and unpredictable neighbors.) Interest in specific topics,
especially technical topics, seems to draw people across online
borders. Aside from the BBC, which shows up in virtually every
country’s media profile, tech-focused websites like C|Net are the
most likely to attract international readers.

Percent of news page views from domestic sites, Google Ad Planner data, 6/2010.

So who are the 1.1 million Americans reading the Times of India?
Are they entrepreneurs, like Mitch, looking to understand the trends
in promising new markets? They’re an advertiser’s dream: the
majority report an annual income of over $75,000, and 70 percent
have either a bachelor’s or a graduate degree, which means they are
wealthier and better educated than the online audience of the New
York Times. They’re also very loyal. In a given month, they generate
60 million page views and visit the site eleven times a month.
While some may be curious entrepreneurs, the vast majority of
these avid readers are members of the 2.8 million strong community
of “nonresident Indians,” a term the Indian government uses to
include Indians living in the United States on short-term visas as well
as those who’ve become US citizens.
 The Times of India data suggest that it’s too simple to say
Americans get 6.6 percent of their news from international news
sites. Some Americans, like nonresident Indians living in America,
get much of their news internationally; these readers make the rest
of us look more cosmopolitan than we actually are. It’s not surprising
that the Internet hasn’t magically caused most Americans to get their
daily news from the Times of India, or that Indian Americans are
disproportionately interested in Indian news. We pay attention to
what we care about and, especially, to persons we care about.
Information may flow globally, but our attention tends to be highly
local and highly tribal; we care more deeply about those with whom
we share a group identity and much less about a distant “other.”
If the flow of bits is constrained by interest and attention, it raises
an uncomfortable question: Are we getting enough information about
the rest of the world in order to flourish in a world of increasing
connection? We need this information to thrive in a connected world,
whether our goal is landing international business contracts or
responding to threats like SARS.
Perhaps Mitch hasn’t yet discovered Asahi Shimbun’s “Asia and
Japan Watch,”26 with regular English-language coverage of
Japanese economics and “cool Japan.” Maybe he’s counting on the
Houston Chronicle to bring him Asian news from a US perspective.
That would be a bad choice on his part.
American Journalism Review has conducted a “census” of foreign
correspondents writing for US newspapers since 1998. Since their
study began, twenty US newspapers have cut their foreign bureaus
entirely, and the 307 correspondents AJR was tracking in 2003 had
shrunk to 234 by 2011.27 Fewer dedicated correspondents doesn’t
necessarily mean less international coverage in US newspapers;
newspapers are leaning more on “parachute correspondents” and on
news wires to cover international stories. But the number of stories is
dropping as well. The Project for Excellence in Journalism surveyed
sixteen newspapers between 1977 and 2004 and saw a drop in
front-page coverage of “foreign affairs” from 27 percent of all stories
to 14 percent.28 My team at MIT’s Center for Civic Media conducted
a similar study, looking at all the stories published in four major US
newspapers in four weeks evenly spaced between 1979 and 2009;
we saw only one-third as many international and foreign stories in
two of four papers, and a significant drop in the third. (We found no
significant drop in the New York Times over the same time period.)29
Television news in the United States has seen a similar, dramatic
drop in international coverage. Some 78 percent of Americans report
getting news from local television stations, and 73 percent from
national broadcast or cable new coverage. A study of American
television news from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center reports that 45
percent of American television news stories in the mid-1970s
delivered international news.30 Working with data from the Vanderbilt
Television Archive and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Alisa
Miller, a journalism scholar and president of Public Radio
International, estimates that 10 percent of recent stories on national
news broadcasts and 4 percent of local news broadcasts were
international news stories.31
Despite the sharp fall in the supply of international news in the
United States, audiences don’t seem especially concerned. A survey
by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 63 percent
of Americans believe they’re getting sufficient international news,
while only 32 percent see a need for more coverage.32 Respondents
want more state and local news, and more stories on religion,
spirituality, and scientific discovery. Less than 40 percent of
Americans follow international news closely,33 which may help
explain why there is less space for international stories in
newspapers and television. Some percentage of Americans are
seeking out international news via public radio and via the Internet,
though our data on visits to international news sites suggest that the
population motivated to seek out different stories and perspectives is
quite small.
Of course, Mitch might learn about his new Japanese clients
through other means. Through Netflix, he might rent some Kurosawa
films after a long day in the machine shop. Again, there’s a gap
between opportunity and practice. Netflix reports that interest in non-
US film has remained low throughout its corporate history,
representing 5.3 percent of rentals in 1999 and 5.8 percent in
2006.34 And if Mitch visits a bookstore to look for a Haruki Murakami
novel, he’ll discover that only 3 percent of the books published in the
United States are works in translation. (The numbers are even lower
for fiction and poetry—usually lower than 1 percent.)35
IBM’s Mitchco ad asks us to imagine a connected future. The
actual appetite for news and film that cross international borders
suggests that this connected future may be a fantasy. If atoms and
people are prevented from crossing borders by tariffs and laws, bits
are slowed by our interests and preferences, which are probably
even harder to change than government trade policies.
This vision of a globally connected, informed, and cosmopolitan
world isn’t just the product of a single IBM ad. It’s part of a narrative
offered by the individuals and companies building the Internet. This
narrative is both a marketing campaign and an inevitable
consequence of our imagination. Powerful new infrastructures invite
us to imagine profound changes. To understand what the Internet is
and isn’t doing, we need to look at the network from at least two
different angles. We have to look at what’s possible and what
actually happens, at a map of infrastructure and a map of flow.

Infrastructure and Flow

There are at least two ways to draw a map of San Francisco. You
can start from satellite photographs, tracing the routes of streets, the
coastline, and the locations of key buildings. The artist Amy Balkin
chose to make a radically different sort of map. “In Transit” is drawn
by means of data collected from thousands of Yellow Cabs as they
travel the streets of the city. San Francisco’s Yellow Cab company
uses GPS to track the location of its cabs, and the company
released a large set of this data—stripped of information that would
identify drivers or passengers—to a set of graphic designers, who
built portraits of the city from this information.36
Balkin’s map reveals the major highways and streets of the city as
thick, white lines of light, the aggregated path of hundreds of taxi
journeys. The city’s coastline and major parks emerge as dark spots
where taxicabs can’t go. Other dark spots reveal neighborhoods
where taxis rarely go, like Hunter’s Point, a historically African
American neighborhood in the south of the city.
A map of flow is likely to be less complete than a street map of a
city, but it conveys information the traditional map lacks. On Balkin’s
map, it’s easy to see paths from area airports to San Francisco’s
downtown, and east–west paths from the downtown to Pier 39 and
other waterfront tourist attractions. But one can also see a set of
north–south paths, drawn by cabs acting as ad hoc ambulances, that
link residential neighborhoods and hospitals. The ley lines of the city
become visible.
You might not choose to use Balkin’s map to navigate from Union
Square to Fisherman’s Wharf, but its the map you’d want if you were
a city planner considering new bus routes or an entrepreneur looking
for a busy corner on which to site a gas station. Traditional maps of
infrastructure show you all possible paths people could take,
whereas flow maps show you the paths people actually choose. And
if most tourists walk to Fisherman’s Wharf on Stockton Street,
knowing that Stockton and Beach is a busier corner than Taylor and
Beach could be the difference between success and failure of your
new T-shirt store.
 San Francisco taxi routes. From “In Transit,” by Amy Balkin, 2006.

Many of the maps we encounter in our lives map infrastructures. A

road map shows us where we’re able to drive in a car; a transit map
shows us places we can access easily by a train, subway, or bus.
Cellphone coverage maps show us where our mobile phones will
(and will not) work. Maps of this sort are undeniably useful, but they
can also be deceptive. Knowing that we can get from here to there
doesn’t tell us whether the route is so popular that it’s likely to be
jammed with traffic, or so unpopular that it may be circuitous,
dangerous, or hard to follow.
The history of industrialization is told in part by maps of
infrastructure. Railroad companies were the first to mass-produce
maps, working with printers to perfect lithographic techniques and
produce intricate, detailed maps of railway lines running deep into
the American frontier, or knitting together Britain’s factories, mills,
and ports. In nineteenth-century America, the maps were literally
propaganda. For railroad companies to turn a profit, they needed to
sell the land bordering the tracks, granted to them by an act of
Congress. Maps were printed in the languages spoken by new
immigrants to East Coast cities to encourage them to spread inland.
The least honest of these maps featured cities with familiar names—
Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont—neatly lined up in alphabetical
order along a rail line. That these cities had yet to be built didn’t
decrease their appeal to newly arrived immigrants; the maps showed
an empty wilderness as civilized and connected, with the railroad as
land broker, conveyance for plows, seeds, and other supplies, and
the only way back to the communities they would leave behind.37

American Express, Steamship Routes of the World, circa 1900.

Almost as intricate as a Rand McNally atlas of railroad lines are

contemporaneous maps of telegraph lines, showing the town-to-town
connections that made it possible to send messages from Louisiana
to Nova Scotia. Or the American Express Company’s 1900 map of
steamship lines, where the oceans disappear under thick red lines of
connections between ports. The message is simple: our
infrastructure connects the world, and if you join us, you’ll be
connected too. These maps don’t help you navigate; they don’t help
you drive the train or steer the ship. They’re maps of the possible.
The wave of maps that accompanied the rise of the commercial
Internet echoed this age-old message. Network providers offered
maps of optical fibers connecting major cities that looked hauntingly
like early railroad maps. (In many countries, fiber-optic cables
followed rail lines, so early Internet maps were essentially rail maps.)
The geographer Martin Dodge collected hundreds of early maps of
the Internet, including maps of physical networks as well as maps of
“topologies,” the ways in which these networks routed traffic to one
another.
As networks became more pervasive and complex, these
topologies took on an organic quality. The Opte project, completed in
2005, was one of the last efforts to visualize the topology of the
connected Internet. The visualization it produced is a set of
multicolored branches of unfathomable complexity, looking more like
images of human neurons than railroad tracks. In fact, it’s impossible
to read the Opte “map” as anything other than an image, a symbol of
an Internet so complex that it should be thought of in organic terms,
as part of the natural order of things.38
If infrastructure maps hold out the possibility of connection, flow
maps offer different promises and different challenges. For one thing,
they’re harder to make than infrastructure maps. Infrastructure tends
to stay still. That’s not true with maps of traffic congestion, which can
change minute to minute and are invariably different on weekdays
and weekends. How can we measure it? For large streets and
highways, information is available from state and national
departments of transportation, which embed sensors in major roads
to monitor traffic volume and speed.39 Google uses this data to
render maps of San Francisco that include close to real-time
information about traffic conditions on many of the streets shown on
Amy Balkin’s cab map. For traffic data on smaller streets, Google
asks its users for help. When you use Google Maps on your phone,
you send information on your position and speed to Google’s
servers, which aggregate this data to make informed guesses about
the speed of traffic on the street you’re using.40
In a blog post alerting users that their data was being harvested to
make traffic maps, Dave Barth, the product manager of Google
Maps, referred to this practice as “the bright side of sitting in traffic.”
Aware that some users might consider this “bright side” an invasion
of privacy, Barth assured users that the data Google uses to make
maps is anonymized, and that they could opt out of data collection.
This reasonable privacy concern highlights a core tension inherent in
monitoring the flow of people: the maps produced can be
tremendously useful, but making them rapidly veers into the realm of
surveillance.
In 2010, the German Green Party politician Malte Spitz sued his
mobile phone provider, Deutsche Telekom, for access to all
information the company had about his phone usage, as a way of
highlighting corporate surveillance. He won the suit, and DT
presented him with a spreadsheet containing 35,831 rows of data
collected over the six months between August 2009 and February
2010. The information included whom he called and texted and when
he checked his email. A clear portrait emerged of when he was
awake, asleep, working, or playing, and exactly who was in his social
network.
Each of the 35,831 rows of data included geographic coordinates
for Spitz and his phone. Mobile phone operators are able to make
very accurate estimates of a user’s geographic position by
measuring the strength of the signal the phone receives from nearby
cell towers. Phone operators use this information to provide location
information to the police or ambulance services if a user calls an
emergency hotline.41 Spitz worked with the German newspaper Die
Zeit, which used the mobile phone data and publicly accessible data,
like his Twitter feed, to build a map that shows his movements and
activities over the period of six months.42
Watch the map like a movie, and Spitz roams his West Berlin
neighborhood, orbiting Rosenthaler Platz. Focus the map on
Nürnberg, and the timeline tells you that Spitz was in town the
morning of September 9, 2009, and passed through briefly on
November 20, 2009. Zoom in still further, and you can discern the
paths Spitz takes through his neighborhood and the beer gardens he
favors.
An interviewer asked Spitz what he’d learned by looking at the
visualization. He said that he was surprised to discover how small
his personal orbit actually was: “I really spend most of the time in my
own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me…. I am not really
walking that much around.”43
It’s easy for Spitz to imagine himself as more mobile and less
predictable than he actually is. The major events in his recent past—
a speech at a conference across the country, a visit to his hometown
—register as signal against the noise of countless trips to the local
coffee shop. This cognitive bias is a form of the regression fallacy, a
tendency to pay more attention to unusual moments in our lives than
to the ones closer to our average, everyday existence.
If we zoom out from Spitz’s experience and look at our own
movements, we are likely to see our own local biases, the familiarity
of the paths we trod. Much as we can imagine Chinese products in
every store, shelved by Mexican immigrants, we can imagine
ourselves encountering much more of the world than we actually
see. Looking at maps of the world, and the maps of our path through
the world, helps illustrate the disparity.
In early 2009, the Canadian photographer John O’Sullivan used
data from hundreds of airline route maps to produce a vast
visualization of those routes. In his image (below), every commercial
airline route he could find is represented by an arc between two
cities. Routes flown by multiple airlines have thicker arcs, which
darkens the best-connected cities into key points on the map. From
these thin blue arcs, the recognizable outlines of continents emerge
—South America tethered to Spain and Portugal, Africa to Britain.
O’Sullivan’s map shows what’s possible with a passport and an
infinite supply of frequent-flier miles: access to virtually any spot on
the globe.

Global airline routes. Map by John O’Sullivan.

 Dr. Karl Rege and his team at the Zurich School of Applied
Sciences used similar data but added another dimension—time—to
create a very different map. With data from FlightStats.com, a site
that tracks commercial aviation, Rege’s team created a video,44
which renders each airplane as a tiny yellow dot moving across the
surface of the earth. The 72-second clip shows a day’s worth of
flights and reveals patterns that aren’t visible from a static map of
airline routes. A flock of planes leaves the eastern United States for
Europe as night falls in New York, and a reverse flow from Europe to
the United States occurs as midday reaches London; a dense net of
flights ping-pongs between eastern China, South Korea, and Japan
regardless of the time of day; the United Arab Emirates emerges as
a midpoint for flights between Europe and Australia; from south to
south, there are vanishingly few flights connecting South America,
Africa, or Australia.
The most striking pattern in the Rege animation is the thick, yellow
mass that covers the United States, Japan, eastern China, and
Europe at the peak of their workdays. Even with each flight
represented by a single pixel, there’s enough commercial air traffic
over the United States—almost 25,000 flights per day—to render
any features on the ground invisible. There’s also vastly more
domestic air traffic than international traffic. In 2009, about 663
million passengers departed from US airports. Only 62.3 million
disembarked in other countries, and nearly 19 million of those landed
in either Mexico or Canada. (And only 32.8 million of the passengers
are Americans—the other 29.5 million are nationals of other
countries who’ve traveled to the United States for business or
vacation.)45
International travel accounts for just 9.4 percent of air passengers
and a smaller percentage of commercial flights, as international
flights, on average, carry more passengers than domestic ones. The
typical traveler at an American airport isn’t leaving the country or
even headed to the other coast—she’s traveling less than 900 miles,
visiting a nearby city, often in the same time zone.46 Rege’s
visualization suggests that this pattern holds true in other parts of the
world as well: Europeans are traveling mostly in Europe, Chinese in
China, Japanese in Japan. The infrastructure of air travel is global,
but the flow is local.
Imagine a vastly more complicated version of Rege’s animation
that includes data like Malte Spitz’s, but for each person in the world:
a Marauder’s Map that treats the whole world as Hogwarts.
Everyone’s daily movements—the train to work, the car trip to the
grocery store, walks to the park or playground—would be
represented. If we could overlay the trillions of trips people make on
foot or by bicycle, bus, and car, the flights on Rege’s animation
would disappear in a blur of local movement. The sort of
transnational travel depicted on O’Sullivan’s airline route map
becomes a rounding error.
Graph our travels—individually or as a nation—in terms of
frequency and length, and the curve that results shows a “long-tail”
distribution: the head shows lots of frequent, short trips, while the
long, thin tail shows our occasional lengthy trips. The latter trips may
be the ones we remember, but we spend most of our time taking
shorter journeys, staying close to home.
When we encounter content on the Internet, physical distance is
largely irrelevant; we seldom know whether we’re reading a web
page hosted nearby or halfway around the world. But we need to
consider another sort of distance, a distance between the familiar
and the unfamiliar. We celebrate the Internet’s ability to put
unfamiliar and unexpected content at our fingertips, but we have to
be cognizant of the difference between infrastructure and flow.
If we monitor our behavior, our flow across the global Internet,
we’re likely to find that our online travels resemble our off-line ones.
Our interaction with people and ideas from far-flung corners of the
world are infrequent, if memorable, and the majority of our
interactions are with a small set of people, often people with whom
we have a great deal in common.
If we look beyond the infrastructures that make global connection
possible, at the flow of our attention on the Internet, we are likely to
discover the powerful influence on our behavior exerted by
homophily.
 Homophily

In the early 1950s, the sociologist Robert Merton began an in-depth

study of friendships in two housing projects, one in New Jersey, the
other in western Pennsylvania. Merton and his associates asked
people in these communities to name their three closest friends, and
used the resulting data to offer generalizations about the social
forces that affect the formation of friendship. Close friendships were
most common between those of the same ethnicity and same
gender, a finding that led Merton to propose a term for a tendency
that had been observed millennia earlier, by Aristotle, in his
Nicomachean Ethics: “Some define friendship as a kind of likeness
and say like people are friends, whence come the sayings ‘like to
like,’ ‘birds of a feather flock together.’”
Merton coined the term “homophily”—love of the same—to
describe the phenomenon. It wasn’t especially surprising to Merton
that there were few friendships between black residents and white
residents of these communities, though he expressly chose as one
of his research sites a racially integrated housing project. More
surprising was Merton’s discovery of homophily effects around
beliefs and values—people who had similar points of view about
racial cohabitation in housing projects were significantly more likely
to be friends than those who had differing opinions.
Since Merton coined the term, sociologists have seen homophily
effects when examining social relations as intimate as marriage and
as loose as the exchange of work information between professional
colleagues, or the appearance of people together in a public place.
Researchers document homophily effects around ethnicity, gender,
age, religion, education, occupation, and social class. The
phenomenon so pervades our lives that the authors of a survey
paper, generalizing from dozens of sociological papers, characterize
homophily as “a basic organizing principle” of human societies and
groups.47
We seem capable of sorting ourselves—unconsciously, for the
most part—by the most trivial of factors. A recent paper by the
Canadian researcher Sean MacKinnon demonstrates that individuals
are more likely to choose seats in a computer lab or a lecture
classroom next to people who resembled their appearance in terms
of hair length and color and whether or not they wear glasses.
Questioned by MacKinnon in a follow-up study, students explained
their choices in terms of perceived attitudes; they believed students
who were similar in appearance to them would be more likely to
share their attitudes and more likely to accept and befriend them.48
Considering the power of these homophily effects can make us
uneasy. The educational psychologist and university president
Beverly Tatum titled a book on the development of racial identity
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” to
point to the unease we feel when we witness self-segregation.
(Tatum’s book argues that this sort of self-segregation is necessary
for students to become confident in their racial identities, a precursor
to building strong friendships across racial lines.) A common
personal reaction to the sociological research on homophily is to
conduct an internal inventory of our friends to find counterexamples,
seeking evidence that we’re less subject to homophily effects than
the average individual. Most of us think of ourselves as open-minded
and unbiased, willing and able to have rewarding social relationships
with people of all backgrounds, and seeing contradictory evidence
troubles us.
It’s a mistake to extrapolate from research on homophily and
conclude that “everyone’s a little bit racist,” as Robert Lopez and Jeff
Marx do in a song from their wonderfully transgressive musical
Avenue Q. If you grow up in a community where there’s little racial
diversity, your population of possible friends is limited. Sociologists
call this “baseline homophily.” People develop friendships with
people they interact with in a shared activity. If you’re an ice hockey
player, you’re going to meet a lot of white guys from cold climates.
Play cricket, and your pool of possible friends will likely look very
different. When we examine online activity, we see similar results.
The sociologists Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis used a huge
set of data from Facebook—the complete set of postings for one
class at one major university for a year—to study racial homophily
online and in the physical world. They focused on photos that the
students had posted. Students who appear together in a Facebook
photo are more likely to be “real” friends than people who’ve merely
“friended” each other on Facebook, a behavior so common at most
universities that it’s not a strong signal of actual friendship. Wimmer
and Lewis saw significant homophily effects and were able to study
homophily at a much finer level than in previous studies. They
conclude that certain types of homophily—for example, the tendency
of Asians to befriend one another—are simply generalized effects
from more specific homophilies: the tendency of Indian or Chinese
students to befriend one another. And they see distinctive nonethnic
homophilies, including a strong tendency for students from Illinois, or
math majors, or boarding school classmates,49 to be friends with one
another.
This finding suggests that the effects of homophily come at least
as much from structural factors—Whom did you have the chance to
meet in high school? In the computer lab?—than from personal
choice. The most powerful effect Wimmer and Lewis found in their
model was a “closure” effect, a phenomenon described by the
sociologist Georg Simmel early in the past century.50 If Jim is friends
with Bob and with Sue, Bob and Sue are likely to become friends,
closing the circle of friendship. If Jim is African, there’s a higher
likelihood than random that Bob and Sue are African. Their
friendship isn’t the result of each seeking out the comfortable
friendship of a fellow African as much as it’s a product of social
closure. Closure leads to the amplification of other homophily effects,
and Wimmer and Lewis’s model suggests that it can quickly lead to
all the black kids’ sitting at the same table. (They would point out
that, if we look closely, we’ll likely see Nigerians sitting with
Nigerians, African Americans from Atlanta with fellow southerners.)51
In other words, if you discover that your social circle is highly
homogenous in terms of ethnicity, gender, or national origin, it
doesn’t necessarily mean you’re racist, sexist, or nationalist. It more
likely means that your circle of friends has been shaped by where
you’ve lived, where you’ve gone to school, and what interests you’ve
pursued. And while this may not be a surprise to anyone whose
Facebook feed looks less like the United Nations and more like a
family reunion, it poses a challenge to universities that see part of
their educational role as preparing students for a multicultural world.
 That there are deep structural factors that help explain homophily
doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, however. The single biggest factor that
predicted friendship in Wimmer and Lewis’s set was students sharing
a dorm room. The university they studied appears to have a policy
designed to increase racial mixing. White students were rarely
placed in rooms with other white students, for instance. Wimmer and
Lewis reach an unambiguous conclusion about this policy: if it’s
intended to increase the number of friendships that cross racial
barriers, it succeeds.
Homophily offers a reminder that our view of the world is local,
incomplete, and inevitably biased. Our knowledge of other parts of
the world, and our interest in stories from other nations, is influenced
by the people we know and care about, and those people are more
likely to be our countrymen than people from a different continent.
Just as embracing the assumption that Europe is inexorably
sliding to life under sharia law makes it difficult to have a productive
conversation about immigration reform, imagining that we have a
broader picture of the world than we actually do subjects us to
unhelpful distortions and misperceptions. We may feel ready to do
business with our new Japanese customers, but there’s a good
chance that we’re simply imagining ourselves as cosmopolitan. We
need to ask whether we’re reading the Times of India, or imagining
we are simply because we could be. We have to look less at what’s
made possible by the Internet and more at what we actually choose
to do.
Wimmer and Lewis’s study of homophily is ultimately a hopeful
one. When universities decide their students would benefit from
building friendships across racial lines, they’ve found a structural
solution that works: forcing very different people to share the same
room. If we want to change the information we’re getting about the
wider world—to move from imaginary to digital cosmopolitanism—we
can make structural changes, too. But first, we need to take a close
look at how we encounter the world through media.
 WHEN WHAT WE KNOW IS WHOM WE KNOW

BEFORE 2000, WE ENCOUNTERED NEWS PRIMARILY THROUGH professional

curators. For the decade that followed, we began acting as our own
filters, searching for what we wanted to know. This decade offers the
promise that our friends will help us find what we need to know.
Each of these shifts in media has subtly changed our picture of the
world. As we’ve moved from edited, curated media into search and
social media, we have increasing choice over the picture of the world
we assemble for ourselves. We also have increased responsibility for
building a picture of the world that’s accurate and comprehensive
enough that we can navigate threats and seize opportunities.
These shifts are not complete or exclusive; we’ve always built a
picture of the world through some combination of our encounters
with media, our individual search for knowledge, and our encounters
with others. But a shift in volume, from a world in which much of our
knowledge and interest comes through curated and edited media, to
one where much more comes through search and social, offers a
good incentive to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each of
these three ways of seeing the world.
I began to think about these different ways of understanding the
world in 2000, when I began commuting between continents. I lived,
as I still do, in rural western Massachusetts, and I worked in the Osu
neighborhood of Accra, the capital of Ghana. When all went well, it
took about twenty-four hours to get to work, passing through Boston
and Amsterdam en route. All seldom went well.
I was working with friends to start a technology volunteer corps,
called Geekcorps, which matched experienced computer
programmers with Ghanaian software firms. While computer science
is a well-established academic discipline taught in universities
throughout the world, software engineering is a craft learned through
apprenticeship, working on projects alongside more experienced
programmers. Ghana, where I’d lived as a student in 1993 and 1994,
had no shortage of smart entrepreneurs who wanted to start web
businesses. It did have a shortage of experienced programmers to
learn from, so we recruited programmers and graphic designers from
the Americas and Europe who were willing to share their talents for
months at a time in exchange for food, housing, and the chance to
live in Accra, an impossibly colorful city with warm beaches, spicy
food, and the atmosphere of a street party virtually every weekend.
Working on Geekcorps required and encouraged a particular strain
of optimism. Ghana, blessed with natural and cultural riches, has
been slow to develop economically. Economists who study the
reasons nations become rich or poor are fond of pointing out that in
1957 (the year Ghana gained independence from the United
Kingdom), South Korea and Ghana had roughly the same per capita
income. Thirty years later, South Korea was a middle-income nation
on its way to becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, whereas
incomes in Ghana had actually fallen. Like most African countries,
Ghana was having a hard time transitioning from an agricultural
economy to an industrial one. Embracing the idea that Ghanaian
software firms could jump-start the country’s service sector by
helping Ghanaian businesses sell to international audiences or take
on outsourced tasks from companies in the United States and
Europe required something of a leap of faith.
Yet there were good reasons to believe this scenario was possible.
Ghana’s national language is English, and many Ghanaians are well
educated, a strong combination for winning outsourcing jobs. When
we began working in Accra, Ghanaians were working for Data
Management International (DMI), processing New York City’s
parking tickets, translating the scrawls of police officers into neat,
searchable databases.1 With plans underway for a massive
underwater cable connecting Ghana to the Internet via fiber, rather
than via satellite, it seemed possible that Ghana might become a
hub for English-language call centers and challenge India’s
dominance in the data entry space.
But projects like DMI’s were few and far between. Potential
customers had just gotten comfortable with outsourcing business to
India—Ghana was a step too far for most. More common than
interest in Ghana was skepticism on the part of foreign investors and
reluctance on the part of government and international aid
contractors to work with local firms. For investors, it was safer to put
money in markets closer to home. For aid agencies, it was safer to
contract with US and European companies that had long track
records rather than with local firms with less experience. For Ghana
to attract investment and new business, it wasn’t enough to be
optimistic about Ghana’s future; that optimism needed to be exported
and spread.
My commute between continents gave me ample time to read, and
I boarded monthly flights armed with a stack of newspapers and
magazines. I’d read the Economist, the Guardian, and the New York
Times on my way there, leave my copies with Ghanaian friends, and
return armed with the Daily Graphic, the Accra Mail, African
Business, and the New African. The African papers weren’t as well
written or professionally produced as the New York and London
papers, but they covered local, regional, and international news. The
American and UK papers, for the most part, appeared to have a
blind spot that blotted out most of the African continent.
On December 28, 2000, John Kufuor won a runoff election and
became president-elect of Ghana. The result was unprecedented in
Ghanaian history, and extremely rare at that point in African history:
an opposition candidate won a free, fair, and largely peaceful
election, defeating a candidate backed by the former dictator, who
had voluntarily relinquished his power. As someone who had
become professionally interested in good news from Africa, I
expected the story of Kufuor’s election and Ghana’s dramatic
change to be front-page news in the United States.
At home for the holidays, I flipped through the New York Times,
looking for American recognition of this rare, optimistic African story.
When I finally found a 300-word story on the election buried deep in
the paper, I was infuriated. No wonder we couldn’t get American
companies to take the idea of business in Ghana seriously. They
weren’t hearing any of the good news coming from the continent. In
fact, they weren’t hearing about Africa at all.
I can now recognize that the Times did a pretty good job of
covering Kufuor’s election. It ran four brief stories on the elections
over a week and, ten days after the election, a laudable editorial,
titled “An African Success Story,” which praised Ghana in just the
way I’d hoped.2 At the time, however, the apparently scarce
coverage sent me searching for the wisdom of hard-bitten journalists
frustrated by the shortcomings of international media. I found an
article by the journalist Peter Boyer, whose angry reflection on media
coverage of the 1984–85 Ethiopian famine included this observation:
“One dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who
are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans.”3
I decided to see for myself whether Boyer’s observation was true,
that newspapers were systematically underreporting news from
Africa. As it turns out, I would have been better off searching the
academic literature. George Washington University professor William
Adams tested Boyer’s formulation in a 1986 paper called “Whose
Lives Count? TV Coverage of Natural Disasters.”4 He concludes that
US television coverage of natural disasters correlates to US tourist
traffic to a country, a nation’s proximity to the United States, and the
size of a disaster, but cultural-proximity factors outweigh the
magnitude of the tragedy: the equivalent earthquake in Canada and
Cameroon will likely receive very different levels of attention, as
American audiences are more culturally connected to Canada than
to Cameroon. But during my days with Geekcorps I wasn’t even
pretending to be an academic, so I started writing code, assuming
that none of the world’s media scholars had noticed the gap in
attention between Africa and the rest of the world.

Mapping Media Attention

My experiment was less sophisticated than Adams’s, but broader in

scope. In 2003, I wrote a series of software scripts that polled the
websites of major media outlets—the New York Times, the BBC,
Google News, and a dozen others—each day and searched for
stories that mentioned the country or the capital city of over two
hundred countries and territories. Using this data, I produced daily
maps that offered a summary of what nations were receiving more or
less media coverage. And, like Adams, I used statistical techniques
to figure out what factors best explain which countries are in the
news and which get short shrift.
The maps I produced were quite similar across media and across
time. An attention map of the New York Times looks a great deal like
one of Google News, though one represents a single source while
the other aggregates thousands of sources. Similarly, it’s difficult to
tell a map from 2003 from one made in 2007 as the same general
patterns hold. American media pay close attention to western
Europe, to the large Asian economies (China, Japan, and India), and
to major powers in the Middle East. Sub-Saharan Africa, eastern
Europe, Central Asia, and South America all receive much less
attention.

Google News Media Attention, February 2004.

Mapping media in this fashion raises an awkward question: What’s

the appropriate level of media coverage for a nation to receive?
Boyer’s critique suggests that we might aim for an ideal world where
each person’s life or death is equally newsworthy, be they English,
Arab, or African. But that idea doesn’t scale very well. There are
4,116 people in China for every one in Iceland. We would need
several years of news about Chinese citizens before we received a
single dispatch from Reykjavik. Should news coverage be
proportional to negative impacts, the number of individual deaths? To
surprise? Should coverage favor news that might impact a reader or
viewer—events in countries with strong economic or cultural ties to
our own?
Deciding what’s news is both a thorny philosophical question and
an intensely practical one: it’s what editors do in newsrooms every
day. Given the difficulty in defining what factors should contribute to
newsworthiness, it’s worth looking at what factors—explicit or implicit
—help explain what and who make the news.
Disparities in media attention can be massive, even between
countries with similar populations. Japan’s population is just over 127
million and is slowly shrinking. Nigeria’s population surpassed
Japan’s in 2002, and now exceeds 154 million, ranking it seventh
among the most populous nations. There’s no shortage of
newsworthy events in either country, but their media footprint is
vastly different. In an average month, US publications will run
roughly eight to twelve times as many stories that mention Japan as
stories that mention Nigeria.
If attention were proportional to population, we would see a rising
interest in Nigeria as it grows and Japan shrinks. If common
language, religion, or geographic proximity were the key factor, we
would still expect to see more Nigerian news, since Nigeria and the
United States have a common language and a large Christian
population and are physically closer than the United States and
Japan. If conflict drove coverage, we would, again, expect to find
more Nigerian stories. The country has suffered ethnic and religious
violence and terror attacks in the past few years, while Japan has
been free of civil strife (though profoundly affected by natural
disasters in 2011, well after I’d completed this study).
The single factor that best explained the distribution of media
attention in US sources that I tracked from 2003 to 2007 was gross
domestic product. For some US news sources, GDP explained 60
percent of the variation in news coverage. Japan is the world’s third-
largest economy, while Nigeria ranks forty-first, behind much smaller
nations like Finland and Denmark. While I find it reassuring that
there’s an explanation for Nigeria’s comparative invisibility that’s
more quantifiable than racism or Afrophobia, it’s disconcerting to
conclude that US media have such a pronounced financial fetish and
so little interest in poorer nations.5
The other major determining factor for US media attention is the
involvement of the US military. Iraq and Afghanistan, both poor, were
heavily covered in US media during the years of my study. And
countries that rarely register in the US media can vault to
prominence when the military gets involved. When US Marines
landed in Monrovia, Liberia, to help end the second Liberian civil
war, in August 2003, the nation previously invisible on my maps was
at the peak level of media attention for about two weeks, then
receded.
The “GDP + US troops” model isn’t universal. For example, the
BBC’s attention profile was better explained by a model that
considered GDP and Britain’s colonial legacy. Nations like Kenya,
Zimbabwe, South Africa, and India are more prominent on the BBC
than on American media outlets, while parts of the world where
Britain had far less colonial influence, like South America, are less
prominent. And, just as William Adams also saw in his study,
countries show a strong interest in their neighbors. Rivals are also
well represented: the Times of India features heavy coverage of
Pakistan, India’s chief military rival, and China, its chief economic
rival. Whether a media agenda oriented toward a colonial past or
focused on current rivals is any more fair than an agenda tightly
correlated to national wealth is not clear, but the underlying biases
and assumptions are.
Late in 2003, I published a paper on my findings and started
posting my maps to my website. Within a few weeks, I received an
email from a journalism professor who politely wondered whether I
realized that there was a long history of research and activism
around media attention. She suggested I start with a paper from
1965 by Johan Galtung and his graduate student Mari Ruge, “The
Structure of Foreign News.”
 Galtung is a Norwegian sociologist whose six-decade-long
academic career has focused on questions of peace and conflict. He
founded the Journal of Peace Research in 1964 and the Peace
Research Institute Oslo, two of the central institutions in the peace
and conflict studies community. Early in his research, Galtung
scrutinized the effect of media on peace and conflict. He and I
therefore shared a pastime: the obsessive counting of foreign news
stories in newspapers.
“The Structure of Foreign News” examines four years of coverage
(1960–64) by four Norwegian newspapers, looking at stories about
three international crises, in Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus. Galtung’s
goal in analyzing these stories was to determine “how do ‘events’
become ‘news’?” He and Ruge suggest that we “tune in” on events
in the same way that radio receivers tune in to signals amid the noisy
mishmash of radio waves. If we’re turning the dials (remember, this
is an analog metaphor) on a shortwave radio, we’re more likely to
pay attention to signals that are clear, loud, and meaningful and miss
those that are noisy and unfamiliar. By analogy, Galtung and Ruge
offer a set of “news values” that describe events we’re likely to
register as news.
News, they suggest, has a frequency: events that transpire over a
very long time, like climate change or economic growth, are less
likely to become news than those that happen within a twenty-four-
hour news cycle—a tornado or a stock market crash. Events that are
unambiguous—good or bad—are more likely to become news, as
are ones that are more meaningful to us, in terms of cultural
proximity, relevance, or comprehensibility. They suggest that
newsworthy events swing between unexpectedness and
consonance. Unexpected events are more likely to be newsworthy
than commonplace ones: man bites dog is news, while dog bites
man is not. At the same time, news is likely to reflect our
preconceptions. We’re more likely to get news of conflict or famine in
Africa than an unexpected story about business opportunity. Galtung
and Ruge see evidence to support Boyer’s hypothesis that the media
seem to deem some lives more worthy of attention than others. They
see “topdog” nations receiving more coverage than “underdog”
nations, and elite persons, like leaders and celebrities, receiving
more attention than average citizens.
The dozen news values that Galtung and Ruge offer can help us
analyze current news imbalances. We might explain a systematic
bias in attention to Japan over Nigeria in terms of reference to elite
nations, or cultural proximity, while the light coverage of Ghana’s
presidential election might suggest that the story fails the test of
predictability or reference to something negative, by being
unexpectedly positive. The paper is more helpful in proposing these
factors than in proving their influence on Norwegian news coverage
in the early 1960s. And Galtung and Ruge aren’t clear on whether
these factors are actively on the minds of news editors or are instead
unconscious biases.
They are convinced, however, that the media of their day are
obstacles to peace: “Conflict will be emphasized, conciliation not.”
And they worry that an emphasis on powerful nations—at the time,
the United States and the Soviet Union—suggests a frame for news
where events are analyzed in terms of whether they’re good or bad
for the West, not whether they’re good or bad for the people directly
affected by them.

Agenda Setting

Why would it matter that we hear more about Japan than about
Nigeria, more about American military intervention than about
progress made by African democracies? In 1963, the political
scientist Bernard C. Cohen offered one answer: the press “may not
be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it
is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”
The journalism scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw called
Cohen’s idea “agenda-setting,” and set out to test it, surveying voters
in the 1968 US presidential election and closely analyzing the
newspapers and television programs they would be most likely to
access. McCombs and Shaw found a strong correlation between
issues voters identified as the most important in the 1968 campaign
and issues that received heavy coverage in local and national media.
It’s possible that newspapers were reacting to the interests of the
readers, but that scenario is hard to imagine, given the limited ability
for newspapers to track which stories in an issue were read and
which were ignored. It seems more likely that the news outlets in
1968 were promoting the importance of some issues over others and
that those choices shaped what issues voters considered to be
important.6
Agenda setting, like many important ideas, seems obvious in
retrospect. News signals what’s important. Because a near infinity of
events occurs every day, we would be overwhelmed by a stream of
non-newsworthy events: every city council meeting, every
parliamentary debate, every petty crime. We need someone or
something to tell us what events should be considered news, and
whoever makes that choice has tremendous power. It’s hard to get
outraged over the local government decision you don’t hear about, or
to mount a campaign to right an injustice you’ve not learned of.
Whoever chooses what’s news has the power to influence our
cognitive agendas, to shape what we think about and don’t think
about.
In a book examining US media coverage of the Vietnam War, the
political scientist Daniel Hallin offered a deceptively simple diagram
to explain some of the implications of agenda setting. The diagram,
sometimes called “Hallin’s spheres,” offers a circle within a circle,
floating in space. The inner circle is the “sphere of consensus,”
which Hallin explains is “the region of ‘motherhood and apple pie’; it
encompasses those social objects not regarded by journalists or
most of society as controversial.” It’s surrounded by a larger “sphere
of legitimate debate,” issues on which it’s well known that
“reasonable people” may have different views.
In the United States, the idea that representative democracy and
capitalism are the correct organizing principles for modern society is
within the sphere of consensus. You’ll see little journalistic coverage
of arguments that the United States should engage in a socialist
redistribution of wealth or become part of a global Islamic caliphate.
The sphere of legitimate debate includes conflicts over abortion
rights, restrictions on firearm ownership, or levels of taxation. Stray
away from issues where there’s consensus, or consensus that
there’s a debate, and you find yourself in the “sphere of deviance,”
where points of view aren’t even considered part of the media
dialogue. Hallin observes that the “fairness doctrine,” a policy of the
US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 1949 to 1987
that required broadcasters to devote substantial time to public issues
and to ensure representation of opposing views, explicitly stated that
broadcasters were not required to give airtime to communists.
The press, Hallin argues, plays a role in “exposing, condemning,
or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant views. By reporting
some views and not others, the press “marks out and defends the
limits of acceptable political conduct.” Even if, among scientists,
human impact on the climate has moved into sphere of consensus,
as long as American media keep airing dueling points of view about
the issue, it will remain within the sphere of legitimate debate. By
covering “birther” accusations that President Obama’s birth
certificate was invalid, the press moved a previously deviant idea
into the sphere of legitimate controversy and turned a conspiracy
theory into a major political debate.
Viewpoints don’t need to be particularly distasteful or offensive to
enter the sphere of deviance; they simply need to be far enough
outside the mainstream that “serious people” won’t engage them.
The political cartoonist Ted Rall proposes a simple test for detecting
deviance: “When ‘serious people say’ something, those who
disagree are by definition trivial, insipid and thus unworthy of
consideration. ‘No one seriously thinks’ is brutarian to the point of
Orwellian: anyone who expresses the thought in question literally
does not exist. He or she is an Unperson.”7 The phrase “serious
people” is also an attempt to defend the journalists’ notion of the
sphere of legitimate controversy against ideas from the sphere of
deviance.
The NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that Hallin’s
spheres help explain public dissatisfaction with journalism. “Anyone
whose basic views lie outside the sphere of consensus will
experience the press not just as biased but savagely so.” Believe
that separation of church and state is a poor idea or that the
government should be the primary provider of health care services,
and you’ll be so far outside the US sphere of legitimate debate that
you’ll never see your opinions taken seriously in the mainstream
press, which may leave you alienated, disaffected, and looking for
other sources of news.8
The sphere of deviance is also the sphere of obscurity. Believing
that Nigeria is as newsworthy as Japan is probably as far outside the
sphere of legitimate debate in the United States as advocating for
single-payer health care. Rosen points out that these spheres are
political, not in the sense of left/right, Republican/Democrat, but in
the sense of defining what’s worth the public’s time and attention.
The struggle to get “serious people” talking about an issue—be it
responses to famine in the Horn of Africa, or doubt that the US
president is an American citizen—is the political struggle to take an
issue from obscurity and turn it into a valid topic of debate.

The Gatekeepers

When Boyer complains that not all human lives are reported equally,
when Galtung proposes news values, Hallin spheres of coverage, or
McCombs and Shaw agenda setting, they’re all placing the
responsibility and blame on editors and publishers. Editors and
publishers are the “gatekeepers” who decide what stories receive
coverage and, indirectly, what ideas are the object of public debate.
The term “gatekeeper” was coined by the Prussian social theorist
Kurt Lewin in 1947. He wasn’t writing about making newspapers; he
was trying to get American housewives to change what they served
for dinner. Lewin’s research on the topic was sponsored by the US
government, which wanted to encourage increased consumption of
“secondary cuts” of beef—organ meats, tripe, sweetbreads—so that
primary cuts could go to feed soldiers. Would lectures on the virtues
of beef hearts, delivered to Iowa housewives, change their
purchasing behavior? Lewin identified “channels” that bring food to a
family dinner table and gatekeepers who controlled inputs into these
streams. Housewives, in his analysis, were the ultimate gatekeepers
over what families ate for dinner.9
Lewin didn’t live long enough to extend his theories beyond their
narrow remit; he died of a heart attack before the publication of his
initial gatekeeping paper. His student David Manning White brought
the theory of gatekeeping into the world of journalism in 1949,
analyzing the decisions an editor named Mr. Gates made at an
Illinois paper, the Peoria Star, in choosing what stories offered by
reporters and wire services made it into the newspaper. White saw
Mr. Gates’s process as highly personal and idiosyncratic. Rather
than following the lead of larger city papers, Gates choose stories he
was personally interested in and thought his readers would find
interesting as well. Paul Snider visited Mr. Gates seventeen years
later, in 1966, and reported that his selections remained similar. With
the rise of the Vietnam War, Mr. Gates featured a bit more
international news, but selected “a balanced diet” of events and
personalities to meet the tastes of his readers.10
Whereas White saw gatekeepers as makers of personal decisions
about what constituted news, the journalism scholar Walter Gieber
argued that gatekeepers were less like Mr. Gates and more like cogs
in a machine. Gieber studied the gatekeeping decisions made by
sixteen news service editors and concluded that they were
“concerned with goals of production, bureaucratic routine and
interpersonal relations within the newsroom.” Their judgments were
less about personal, subjective applications of news values and
more a response to the constraints of the structures that governed
their work.11
If Gieber is right, and gatekeepers are constrained by the
structures they work within, creating media that are more
representative or more hopeful about the future of Africa requires not
just changing Mr. Gates’s idiosyncratic mind but also altering the
systems he’s embedded in. That was the goal of a commission
convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) in 1977 to address the challenges of
communications in an interconnected world. Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow,
the UNESCO director general who convened the commission,
sounds like an early digital cosmopolitan in his framing of the
problem:

Every nation now forms part of the day-to-day reality of every

other nation. Though it may not have a real awareness of its
 solidarity, the world continues to become increasingly
interdependent. This interdependence, however, goes hand in
hand with a host of imbalances and sometimes gives rise to
grave inequalities, leading to the misunderstandings and
manifold hotbeds of tension which combine to keep the world in
ferment.

Scholars from sixteen nations, led by the Irish Nobel Peace Prize
recipient Seán MacBride, considered a huge set of these
imbalances: the geographic distribution of communication
technologies, from printing presses to communications satellites; the
flows of television shows and movies from the United States to
developing nations; ownership of news wire services by American
and European firms and a perceived bias against news from
developing nations. The commission produced eighty-two
recommendations, ranging from the quotidian (increasing the
international paper supply to make newsprint cheaper) to the fanciful
(a satellite network to “enable the United Nations to follow more
closely world affairs and transmit its message more effectively to all
the peoples of the earth”).12 Many of the suggestions explicitly
addressed media imbalances: “the media in developed countries—
especially the ‘gatekeepers,’ editors and producers of print and
broadcasting media who select the news items to be published or
broadcast—should become more familiar with the cultures and
conditions in developing countries.”13
The MacBride commission chose an unfortunately Orwellian name
when it released its proposed agenda in 1980: the New World
Information and Communication Order (NWICO). The MacBride
report was viewed by some readers as endorsing increased state
control over news and restricting press freedom. While the text of the
report forcefully defended rights of press freedom, with statements
like “Censorship or arbitrary control of information should be
abolished,” the apparent alignment of the USSR with developing
world representatives on the commission led American and British
commentators to see the MacBride report in a different light. They
argued that it proposed the licensing of journalists by governments
and the support of state news agencies to compete with private
outlets. By 1983, the New York Times had condemned the report on
its editorial page and endorsed a US withdrawal from UNESCO. The
United States and the UK left UNESCO in 1984 and 1985 in protest
over NWICO, and neither country rejoined for more than a decade.

The Power of the Audience

Whether the MacBride proposals were a veiled attempt at

authoritarian control of the press or well-meaning but impractical
suggestions for addressing media imbalance, their rejection
highlighted the difficulty of using international mandates to change
the behavior of gatekeepers. Armed with my data, historical
research, an overdeveloped sense of self-righteousness, and a
limited understanding of the business side of journalism, I decided to
confront gatekeepers individually over their coverage decisions.
My first target was Jon Meacham, then the managing editor of
Newsweek. At a meeting of the World Economic Forum in
Switzerland in 2004, I took advantage of the question-and-answer
period after his talk to launch a jeremiad condemning American
media’s undercoverage of international news. Meacham responded
graciously to my broadside, asking, “You realize we’re on the same
side, right?” He’d love Newsweek to publish more international news,
he explained, but every time he put an international story on the
cover, newsstand sales dropped sharply. “You and I may both want
more international news, but it’s not clear that our readers do.”
The numbers are with Meacham, at least as regards American
audiences. In a recent poll, 63 percent of the respondents said that
they were getting enough international news and wanted to hear
more local stories. Meacham’s comment reminds us that the
“Chinese wall” between the business and editorial sides of for-profit
news organizations is a flimsy and transparent one. In a predigital
age, it was hard to tell which stories were attracting the attention of
newspaper or magazine readers, except in the case of cover stories.
But in a digital age, there’s a wealth of data about which stories are
read and which are ignored.
 The news industry analyst Ken Doctor explains that while these
numbers were traditionally shared with reporters on a “need to know”
basis, the Washington Post is now sending three traffic reports an
hour to 120 staff members, giving them up-to-date information on
which stories are rising and falling in popularity.14 Other news outlets
are less shy about delivering metrics to their writers. The Huffington
Post relentlessly optimizes its front page, on the basis of the traffic
that stories are receiving, and reporters are acutely aware of how
much attention their stories are getting.15 An extreme case, Gawker
Media, proprietor of several prominent “lifestyle news” websites,
decorates its newsroom with the “Big Board,” a computer monitor
that displays which stories are receiving the highest traffic, updated
in real time, to help incent employees to publish stories that reach a
wide audience.
When news was delivered on paper, instead of on computer
screens, editors relied on their judgment to determine which stories
were likely to generate “MEGO.” William Safire explains this
important industry term: “MEGO is an acronym coined by Newsweek
staffers for ‘my eyes glaze over,’ to describe audience reaction to
subjects that everyone agrees are important but are surefire
soporifics. Latin American policy, Eurodollars, and manpower training
are MEGOs. A speech on government reorganization, written and
delivered in a monotone, can achieve the 10-point MEGO on the
Richter scale, putting the entire audience to sleep.”16 Today’s
enhanced metrics deliver real-time evidence of MEGO and
immediately penalize attempts to write about serious international
issues that fail to engage audiences.
Given this new real-time feedback environment, the mystery may
not be that we get so little international news but that we still get so
much. Sending reporters oversees to cover events is expensive, and
commercial news outlets have been shrinking their foreign presence.
The American network CBS had thirty-eight correspondents in
twenty-eight bureaus in the mid-1980s and had reduced its footprint
to five bureaus in four countries by 2008.17 Major US newspapers
like the Boston Globe and Baltimore Sun eliminated their overseas
bureaus, which had been a source of pride and prestige for the
papers, as cost-cutting measures.18 Much of the international news
that appears in smaller American newspapers comes from wire
services, which means the stories will appear in hundreds of other
papers. Correspondents on the ground allowed newspapers like the
Globe to offer exclusive international content, whereas running a
Reuters story on developments in Afghanistan provides no
differentiation or competitive advantage for a city newspaper.
Four major American newspapers still maintain substantial foreign
bureaus: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the
Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times
and the Journal reserve roughly 20 percent of their total news space
for purely international stories; each allocates another 10 percent to
stories on US foreign affairs.19 It’s possible that these papers publish
so much more international news than smaller US papers in an effort
to position themselves as “elite” media outlets, required reading for
those engaged with a world larger than their hometown. Or perhaps
the editors of these papers are neo–Mr. Gateses, fighting market
pressures more successfully than Meacham had been, ignoring
evidence of what the audience demands and delivering what they
believe to be most newsworthy and civically relevant. Without access
to their traffic statistics, it’s hard to know.20
The use of analytics by gatekeepers grants a new form of power to
the audience. When readers signal their interest in an international
story, they often are rewarded with more coverage. Heavy focus on
the Darfur conflict in US newspapers, and on Zimbabwean elections
in UK papers, suggests that engaged constituencies can keep
stories in the newspaper through interest and feedback, perhaps at
the expense of stories with more import but less audience, like the
conflict in eastern Congo. We can blame the gatekeepers, but we
must also examine our role, individually and collectively, as
audience.

Be Your Own Gatekeeper: The Arrival of “The Daily Me”

The power of the digital age makes it as easy to access one news
source as another, and to pick and choose the news we want to see.
This new arena, with its low cost barriers to publishing and
essentially unlimited space, means news isn’t constrained by the
bundle of paper delivered to our doorstop or purchased at a corner
shop, nor does it depend on transmission over a limited, crowded
broadcast spectrum. Rather than letting professional gatekeepers,
hobbled by business concerns and dominated by the biases of their
news values, govern what’s in our sphere of legitimate debate, we
can seek out the news we want and need.
We no longer have to rely on newspaper editors to curate a front
page of news we “need to know”—we are our own curators,
selecting what we want and need from a near-infinite range of
possibilities. This new power makes the idea that international news
competes with domestic reporting, sports, celebrity gossip, and
advertising for precious column inches in a newspaper, or time
during a television broadcast, seem decidedly twentieth century. But
how did we get here?
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, a dramatic shift occurred in the way
we organize information, a shift from curation to search. Curators—
to use a new term that came to encompass all manner of
professional gatekeepers, from editors to news anchors to media
critics—grew less powerful and were subject to greater critique and
scrutiny, while new, powerful organizations were built around the
power of search.
People quickly grew accustomed to the idea that they could use a
search engine to discover information on any topic of interest.
Exploring the Internet moved from directionless “surfing” to goal-
oriented searching. Being able to find exactly what you wanted to
know invites you to question authority figures—editors, educators,
doctors—who argue there are topics you need to know beyond those
you want to explore. Companies like Google realized that a
conceptual shift was underway and built a business around the idea
that you knew what you wanted to know better than any expert ever
could.
I had a front-row seat for this shift, which I watched, baffled and
disconcerted, as I helped build a company in the early days of the
commercial Internet. From 1994 to 1999, I was the head of research
and development for a website called Tripod.com. When I joined the
company, Tripod’s mission was to provide high-quality, edited
content for recent college graduates, helping them land jobs, rent
apartments, fall in love, and generally achieve twenty-something
happiness. We wrote stories, published guides to the best content
online, and applied our curatorial intelligence to the rapidly
expanding world of digital media.
Late one night in 1995, one of my programmers—Jeff Vander
Clute—had a clever idea. Earlier, we’d built a simple tool that
allowed people to enter information into a form and produce a
formatted résumé, essentially a web page that lived on our server.
Jeff realized we could put up a much simpler form—a big blank box
—and allow people to upload whatever web pages they chose to
build. He wrote up the code, we called it “The Homepage Builder,”
put it on the server, and promptly forgot about it.
I didn’t think about the homepage builder for nine months, until I
got a call from our Internet service provider, who informed me that
his bill for hosting our site had increased by a factor of ten. I
demanded an explanation, and he responded with charts of our
bandwidth usage. We’d gone from hosting a few thousand visitors a
day to hosting hundreds of thousands. I hadn’t noticed. I had been
diligently monitoring traffic to the content we’d painstakingly written
and put online, and not monitoring whatever it was our users were
creating. Those pages now represented the vast majority of our site,
in terms of total pages and traffic.
Our business model had been based on paying professional
editors to create web pages and selling expensive ads on those
pages. It took roughly eighteen months to figure out that we were in
the wrong business. We’d been surprised by two trends: the rise of
participation and the rise of search. With tools like our homepage
builder, millions of ordinary individuals were joining the tens of
thousands of companies that were making content available to
readers for free.
Until 1998, it had been unclear whether users would navigate the
web by using curated directories, like Yahoo!, or search engines, like
Altavista or Lycos. Google’s ascendancy, which began in 1999,
paralleled an explosion in content created by the millions of people
publishing online. The quality of the average page on the web
plummeted, but the total amount of worthwhile information increased
sharply. It just was much harder to find. As the size of the Internet
exploded from several million web pages into many billion, search
rapidly emerged as the only practical way to navigate this ocean of
content.
Tripod’s readers weren’t interested in the articles we’d carefully
crafted for them. They were coming to explore thousands of topics
we knew nothing about: Malaysian politics, Japanese animation,
customized cars. We thought we were running a newspaper for
recent college graduates, telling them what they needed to know to
succeed in the world. They helpfully told us that they couldn’t care
less—if there were topics they wanted to know about, they’d find
them through search, and they cared very little whether those stories
were written by professional authors or ordinary Internet users.
Once you’ve discovered that what interests you might be found in
any corner of the Internet, a general-interest news source makes
little sense.
If the promise of a high-quality newspaper is that you’ll find
everything you need to know about the day’s news within its pages,
the promise of search is more seductive: somewhere on the Internet
is everything you want to know, and we can help you find it, with a
minimum of what you don’t want.
One of the thinkers who first recognized the implications of the rise
of search and the fall of curation for newspapers was Pascal
Chesnais. Working with a team of researchers at MIT in 1994, he
introduced a news service called “The Freshman Fishwrap.” Drawing
from a pool of four thousand stories a day delivered via the
Associated Press, Knight-Ridder, and Reuters wire services, the
Fishwrap offered a user-customized newspaper with stories about a
student’s hometown, favorite sports teams, and topics of interest.
Rather than the professional editorial judgment of a Mr. Gates, a
reader was her own gatekeeper, asking Fishwrap to deliver the
stories she wanted to encounter, and to suppress the rest.21
Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital doesn’t mention Fishwrap by
name, but it describes a similar-sounding technology: “What if a
newspaper company were willing to put its entire staff at your beck
and call for one edition? It would mix headline news with ‘less
important’ stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see
tomorrow and places you are about to go to or have just come
from…. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily
Me.”
A paragraph later, Negroponte describes a less personalized,
more serendipitous newspaper designed for casual reading on
Sunday afternoon by the general public, “the Daily Us.” But it was
the Daily Me that caught public attention, both as inspiration for
personal newspapers like MyYahoo! and as the focus of a
philosophical critique by the constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein.
Sunstein’s 2001 book Republic.com opens with a chapter titled “The
Daily Me,” which starts with a speculation about a future world: “The
market for news, entertainment, and information has finally been
perfected. Consumers are able to see exactly what they want. When
the power to filter is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and
with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter. They can
design something very much like a communications universe of their
own choosing.”
Sunstein considers this hyper-personalized world a dangerous
one, where people’s opinions become more extreme in an “echo
chamber” of consonant voices. In a subsequent book, Infotopia,
Sunstein describes an experiment he and colleagues conducted in
2005 to study the phenomenon of group polarization. They invited a
set of Colorado citizens from two communities—liberal Boulder and
conservative Colorado Springs—to come to local universities and
discuss three divisive political topics: global warming, affirmative
action, and civil rights. The groups—five to seven citizens selected at
random from the same community—had a strong tendency to
become more politically polarized over the course of the brief
discussion. Liberals became more liberal and conservatives more
conservative, and the range of ideological diversity in each group
decreased.
Explaining the findings, Sunstein offers multiple possible
explanations. In a group setting, people will often gravitate toward a
strongly stated opinion, especially if their own opinions aren’t fully
formed. An ideologically coherent group is likely to repeat a great
deal of evidence for one side of an issue and give more
reinforcement for that viewpoint, a phenomenon called “confirmation
bias.” People also find it difficult to defy the will of a group, and some
may polarize their views to avoid interpersonal conflict.
Some of these cognitive biases may apply to information
encountered online instead of in face-to-face deliberation. Read only
right-wing newspapers and blogs, and you’ll encounter many
strongly stated opinions that may help cement your own. You’re likely
to encounter lots of information that supports your point of view
(confirmation bias) and may encounter few contradictory facts,
suggesting that the evidence supports your case (the availability
heuristic, where the ready ability to recall evidence that supports
your case can blind you to other views). The Daily Me then becomes
a machine for polarization, and Sunstein believes he sees the
beginning of the Daily Me in blogs: “The rise of blogs makes it all the
easer for people to live in echo chambers of their own design.
Indeed, some bloggers, and many readers of blogs, live in
information cocoons.”22
Sunstein’s writings on polarization are sufficiently controversial
that they’ve generated almost enough academic literature to define a
subdiscipline: echo chamber studies. Most responses to his
argument don’t attempt to counter his theories of polarized
deliberation. Instead, they offer evidence that the web’s diversity of
perspectives prevents people from being overly isolated, even if
they’re consciously or unconsciously seeking isolation.
The political science professor Henry Farrell and colleagues at
George Washington University examined the habits of US blog
readers using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election
Study, a large social survey conducted by a consortium of thirty-nine
universities, and found that blog readers were both unlikely to read
blogs across ideological lines and showed much higher political
polarization than the average voter.23 Other studies looked at
patterns of links between blogs and found few links across
ideologies in the US blogosphere.24 One study suggests that such
links as do exist are often contemptuous, pointing to a differing
perspective in order to denounce it.25
But readers of political blogs aren’t representative of all Internet
users. John Horrigan, associate director of research at the Pew
Internet and American Life Project, surveyed Americans to see what
political arguments they’d heard in the run-up to the 2004
presidential elections. Internet users, they concluded, are more
widely exposed to arguments they disagree with than non-Internet
users at a similar level of education.26 And the economists Matthew
Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro used information from an online
advertising company to conclude that, while some corners of the
Internet may be highly polarized, the websites viewed by the largest
audiences draw users from the left and from the right. This paper
was warmly received by the newspaper columnist David Brooks,
who declared, “If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a
cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max
public square.”
Gentzkow and Shapiro compared data about users’ political
preferences from several thousand Internet users with data on those
users’ visits to 119 large news and politics websites. From this
comparison the researchers were able to estimate that, for instance,
98 percent of the viewers of (the conservative commentator’s
website) rushlimbaugh.com identify as conservative, while only 19
percent of the viewers of (the liberal activist site) moveon.org do.
The economists use the “isolation index,” long used by sociologists
to measure the likelihood of meeting someone from another social
group or belief system, to examine the gap between liberals and
conservatives visiting a site. The isolation index for a site visited
equally by liberals and conservatives would be a zero, while for
rushlimbaugh.com, it’s 96 (98 percent conservatives minus 2 percent
lost and disoriented liberals).
While the isolation index of highly politicized sites seems to
support Sunstein’s contention of polarized online spaces, the authors
also discovered that readers spend a lot of time on sites that have a
less polarized audience—general news sites like Yahoo! News or
CNN.com. When you look at the span of sites the average
conservative user views, the audience of those sites is 60.6 percent
conservative—similar to the audience of (the centrist newspaper
website) usatoday.com. Across the span of sites the average liberal
visits, the audience for those sites is 53.1 percent conservative.
Calculated as the difference between sites popular with
conservatives and sites popular with liberals, the isolation index—the
difference between those figures—is 7.5, a figure the authors
characterize as “small in absolute terms.”
Gentzkow and Shapiro go on to compare the Internet isolation
index with other types of media in the United States, and discover
that local newspapers, national magazines, broadcast television, and
cable television all show lower isolation indexes than online media.
The only media that show a higher isolation index are “national
newspapers,” a set that includes only USA Today (a centrist, low-
prestige paper), the New York Times (a left-leaning, elite paper), and
the Wall Street Journal (a Rupert Murdoch–owned, right-leaning,
elite paper). Telling Americans that the readerships of the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal are politically polarized surprises
absolutely no one. Discovering that Internet sites are more politically
polarized than cable television news is a surprise, and one that
suggests Sunstein’s worries might be justified. The economists
recalculated their figures by removing the two largest, general-
interest sites—AOL News and Yahoo! News—and found that the
isolation index for Internet sites was now higher than for all other off-
line media, more polarized than readerships of the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal.
So why does this research leave David Brooks optimistic that the
Internet isn’t leading to ideological isolation?
When Gentzkow and Shapiro talk about online isolation as being
“small in absolute terms,” they are comparing the isolation indexes
they’re calculating to a measure of homophily in off-line life. Using
the 2006 General Social Survey, another massive, multi-university
sociological study, they calculate isolation indexes for off-line
interactions. Most people report that their close friends and family
share their political views. This means we’re ideologically isolated
when we spend time with friends and family. The economists
calculate the isolation index for “trusted friends” as 30.3—that is, if
you identify as conservative, you’re likely to report that 65 percent of
your friends are conservative and 35 percent liberal. That isolation
index is more than three times as high as the isolation they see
online, and they calculate high isolation indexes for friends, family,
co-workers, and neighbors.
 In other words, Gentzkow and Shapiro argue you’re more likely to
encounter someone with a different ideology because you’re both
reading CNN online than you are to find a neighbor with different
political views.
Not so fast. The General Social Survey asks respondents their
perception of the ideologies of their neighbors. We generally
perceive our neighbors to view the world the same way we do—the
isolation index for neighborhoods is 18.7. Calculate isolation indexes
using actual data on geography and political preference, and
neighborhoods turn out to be less homogenous than we think.
Calculated this way, the isolation index is 9.4 for zipcode, 5.9 for
counties. In other words, I’m more likely to encounter someone of a
different ideology in my rural county than I am reading news and
opinion websites, because where I live is more ideologically diverse
than I perceive it to be.
By comparing their online data with perceptions of homophily off-
line, Gentzkow and Shapiro can conclude that Sunstein is
overstating his case and that we’ve yet to fall into a world as
segregated and isolated as that of the Daily Me. But their study, like
most of the other research studies, suggests that some population of
Internet readers are selecting information that’s highly partisan
politically. Those are probably people highly engaged with politics
and frequent readers of political blogs. Still, in their online travels
even they are likely to stumble into less partisan spaces, if only to
check the sports scores. Larger audiences are finding news in
spaces that are less partisan than the extreme examples Sunstein
worries about. So while it’s possible to polarize, present research
suggests many audiences haven’t. The readership of the most
popular websites, Yahoo! News and CNN.com, is apt to be more
ideologically diverse than our neighborhood or workplace.
While that’s a good thing, it also seems like a bare minimum for
what we might expect from a news site: showing us perspectives
beyond the ones we can encounter from our friends, families, and
neighbors. But political ideology is only one form of diversity. If
Gentzkow and Shapiro’s study measured geographic isolation on the
web, we would see vastly higher values. As we saw in chapter 2,
most readers of the Times of India are in India (or are Indians living
in the diaspora), whereas most readers of the Globe and Mail are
Canadian. We may be reading news that’s read by members of
multiple political parties, but are we reading news that’s read by
people outside our home country?
Sunstein warns that we may be pushed to more extreme positions
by spending too much time reading people who share our points of
view and by deliberating with those who are like-minded. If we start
considering our online behavior less in terms of the left/right
domestic political spectrum and more in terms of an us/them view of
the world, we may find we have a problem. Like broadcast media,
curated media are far from balanced in offering a picture of the
world. We see some countries more clearly than others. And our own
desire to seek out and choose media is also affected by homophily.
If being surrounded by conservatives can convince you that cutting
taxes will lead to a balanced budget (or surrounding yourself with
liberals can convince you that deficits are irrelevant), how much
influence does being surrounded by fellow Americans, Canadians,
Chinese, or Danes have? The effect may not be the development of
raw nationalism; it’s likely to be a more subtle shaping of our
worldview, suggesting that the issues most important to our
neighbors are the most relevant international issues. We experience
confirmation bias, the belief that an issue is important because our
neighbors are convinced of its importance and confirm its
significance. Other key issues and topics elude us, but the
availability heuristic leads us to conclude that the topics we’re
hearing are the ones we need to know about. And since news has
social currency, we benefit from spreading and talking about the
news our friends care about and are interested in.
Are we more likely to see the world in terms of “us versus them”
now that our picture of the world comes not just from newspapers
but also through search engines? Given increased choice over what
information we encounter, are we more likely to choose local
perspectives over international ones? A recent lunch at Google
suggests to me that this may indeed be the case.
Many wonderful things await visitors to Google’s campus in
Mountain View—art-filled, elegant buildings, open Wi-Fi networks, a
wide array of free beverages. But the best part of a visit, in my
opinion, is lunch. Many of Google’s on-campus restaurants feature
salad bars staffed by professional chefs. Once you’ve selected your
ingredients, Google’s salad chefs ladle your chosen dressing onto
the salad, shake it between two bowls, and present it to you on a
plate.
On my first campus visit, I assumed that the salad chefs were
another manifestation of Google’s obsession with efficiency, like
offering employees dry cleaning and oil changes at the office. But
something more complicated and subtle is going on. Salad dressing
provides the easiest way to turn a healthful salad into a high-calorie
meal. The second easiest is to pile on too much protein. Google’s
salad chefs control the amount of dressing and meat, ensuring you
don’t overindulge. And while you select the vegetables and topping
for your bowl, the position of the ingredients on the salad bar is also
designed to encourage moderation. High-fat ingredients like black
olives and feta cheese are an awkward reach away, while raw
veggies fill the front row. I shared my observation with an old friend,
now a director of a division at Google, and she declared, “It’s social
engineering through salad.”
Google’s salad bar doesn’t prevent you from serving yourself a
dietary monstrosity laden with bleu cheese and bacon. It just
decreases the chances that you’ll do so accidentally, nudging you
toward healthier eating choices. In that sense, it’s much like the front
page of a traditional paper newspaper. A daily newspaper’s front
page is laid out with a mix of local, national, and international stories.
Often, the bottom of the front page will showcase a feature story
buried deep within the paper, which a casual reader might otherwise
miss. Major stories are presented with between 200 and 400 words
of text, enough to capture a reader’s interest and draw her off the
front page and into the paper. The front page of the New York Times
features roughly twenty “links” to stories deeper in the paper,
avenues to begin exploring the content inside.
If the paper New York Times is Google’s gently persuasive salad
bar, the online version of the New York Times is a Las Vegas casino
buffet. I counted over three hundred links to stories, sections, and
other content pages in a recent analysis of the Times homepage.
While there are vastly more links, there’s vastly less to tell you what
to follow: ten to twenty-six words associated with a story, on average.
The paper New York Times is built to encourage serendipity. It’s
designed to help you stumble upon a story you might not have
expected. And it shows us the curator’s agenda, her sense that an
international story is so important that it should occupy valuable
front-page real estate. The online Times favors choice. It trusts us to
know what we’re looking for and to choose the news that interests
us. And even though a growing number of users find their way to the
newspaper through search engines, the home page still matters; the
paper’s assistant managing editor reports that 50–60 percent of
people who visit the newspaper’s website start at the front page.27
Can we choose our news wisely without any curatorial assistance?
That’s the danger of the search paradigm—we may choose what we
want, not what we need. We may miss a story that’s important for a
large number of people, information necessary for us to be informed
as local or global citizens. There’s more choice, but also more
responsibility. (On the Times’s current online home page, you can
even choose between a US and a global edition, if you’re worried
your selections will be too global.)
Search increases choice at the expense of serendipity, the
experience of discovering beneficial stories that we weren’t
intentionally seeking. When we can easily choose the news that
interests us, we may miss stories that didn’t appear interesting but
that help us make unexpected and useful connections.
It’s not yet clear whether the next paradigm shift for news, the
social shift, makes us more or less likely to stumble on the
unexpected and beneficial.

The Social Newspaper

In 2008 Lauren Wolfe, a young political activist, told a journalist

about her news reading habits: “There are lots of times where I’ll
read an interesting story online and send the URL to 10 friends…. I’d
rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than
search through a newspaper to find the story.”28
 Wolfe’s role as a disseminator of content is not unusual. A Harris
Interactive study in 2006 found that 59 percent of American adults
frequently or very frequently forward information found on the
Internet to colleagues, peers, family, and friends.29 The exchange of
news stories through email and Facebook suggests a future where
people don’t make a decision to read the news. Instead, they simply
encounter the news that their friends choose to amplify. In an age
when many people are constantly connected via mobile phones,
social networks, and email, word of mouth apparently delivers
information to us all the time. It’s not hard to conclude, as one
college student told the media researcher Jane Buckingham, “If the
news is that important, it will find me.”30
She may be right, though the rise of social media as a pathway
toward encountering news can be hard to see at first.
In an analysis of traffic to the twenty-five most prominent news
sites for US audiences, the Project for Excellence in Journalism
found that 60 percent of the traffic came directly to the website, not
via a search engine query or link from another website. (The PEJ
study considers only online media; the majority of people still get
their news via television, radio, and newspaper, where a curated
model prevails.) Search engines, particularly Google, direct roughly
30 percent of the traffic to news sites. And social media sites like
Facebook drive less than 8 percent of traffic to the Huffington Post,
the site receiving the most traffic from social media in the study.
Other social media sites, including Twitter, drive far less traffic.31
These findings would seem to downplay the importance of social
media. But it’s worth taking a close look at the 60 percent of traffic
that comes directly to a website. Some comes to the site’s front
page. But much of the traffic comes to individual URLs on the
website. It’s safe to assume that few people type in a URL as
complex as http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/10/12/czech-republic-
prednadrazi-struggle-continues/, so those visits likely result from
links a visitor clicks from an email or an instant message. Alexis
Madrigal, a senior editor for the Atlantic, calls these visits “dark
social”—email and instant messaging are clearly social behaviors,
and they direct almost as much traffic to the Atlantic’s website as
search. Combine dark social—links shared by email and instant
messaging—with referrals from Facebook and Twitter, and social
media are the dominant drivers of traffic to the Atlantic.32
The Atlantic may be an outlier, but, as a whole, traffic from social
media is on the rise and traffic from search is falling. Facebook
reports that traffic from its network to the average media site doubled
between 2010 and 2011. The rise was sharper at some newspapers,
with the Washington Post reporting nearly three times as much traffic
from Facebook as it experienced a year before. Facebook now
drives more traffic to the Sporting News, a large US sports publisher,
than any other website.33 Tanya Cordrey, director of digital
development for the Guardian, partnered with Facebook to create an
app to feature Guardian content. In February 2012, traffic to the
Guardian from Facebook crested at over 30 percent of referrers,
surpassing traffic from search. Cordrey describes this as “a seismic
shift in our referral traffic,” important particularly because it’s bringing
younger readers to the Guardian’s site.34
As social media become a more powerful directors of attention, we
are encountering less media through professional curators or
through our own interest-based searches. In giving so much
responsibility to our friends to shape what we know of the world, we
need to consider the limitations of social discovery rather than just
celebrating its novelty.
Internet users now spend more than one of five minutes online on
social media sites like Facebook (22.7 percent of online time for
Americans in 2010, up from 15.8 percent a year before; 21.9 percent
for Australians in 2010, up from 16.6 percent).35 But this type of
social filtering is emerging throughout the web, not just on sites
where friends post photos and updates.
Foursquare, a site that encourages users to “check in” at real-
world locations like bars and coffee shops, now recommends places
you might want to visit, based on locations favored by your friends
and by people who frequent the same establishments you do. The
music streaming service Spotify lets you share the music you’re
listening to with your friends and follow their recommendations for
what to hear. Microsoft’s search engine Bing integrates Facebook
into the search experience, revealing what search results your
friends have liked, and letting you post potential purchases to
Facebook so your friends can “help you decide.” Behind these tools
is the idea that “millennials” (a generation of people born in the
1980s and 1990s) continually seek input from their friends and social
networks in making decisions. AdAge reports that 68 percent of
millennials consult their social network before making a “major”
purchasing decision, which can be as minor as choosing what
restaurant to eat at.36
The activist and author Eli Pariser is worried that this dependence
on social networks shapes what we know about the world. His book
The Filter Bubble begins with a story about his attempts to expand
the kind of information he was encountering through social media:
“Politically, I lean to the left, but I like to hear what conservatives are
thinking, and I’ve gone out of my way to befriend a few and add them
as Facebook connections. I wanted to see what links they’d post,
read their comments, and learn a bit from them. But their links never
turned up in my Top News feed.” Pariser’s conservative friends were
not showing up because Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm prioritizes
what’s shown on your Top News page. The news you see is a
product of time, the type of update (you’re more likely to see a wall
post than a comment), and your “affinity” with the person.37
This last factor is based on how often you visit that person’s page
or send him messages. You’re more likely to receive news from
someone you message with every day than from an old friend from
high school whose links you seldom read. Pariser had a low affinity
for the conservatives he’d added to his circle of friends: “Facebook
was apparently doing the math and noticing that I was still clicking
my progressive friends’ links more than my conservative friends’….
So no conservative links for me.”38
The rise of personalization technologies like EdgeRank, Pariser
worries, will reduce our opportunities for serendipity and create a
narrower world than we expect or hope to encounter. He’s especially
concerned about the invisible influences of personalization on tools
like search, where we expect to see the same results for a search as
everyone else but may actually be seeing content tailored by an
algorithm specifically for us. His worries may be premature. Most of
these services can be turned off, and Google engineers have
responded to his book by suggesting that the effects he documents
are generally less dramatic than the examples he cites.39
Pariser’s concerns about social media isolation are a subset of
broader concerns about ideological segregation. In his book The Big
Sort, the journalist Bill Bishop, relying on research by Bob Cushing, a
demographer, argues that Americans have physically relocated to
communities where their neighbors are likely to share their ideology.
Our communities are so highly segregated, Bishop observes, that
many of the most powerful marketing techniques rely on the fact that
individual demographics and psychological preferences are highly
predictable on the basis of our postal codes.40
Relocating to a community of the like-minded entails selling our
houses and packing boxes. Surrounding ourselves with the like-
minded online requires a few mouse clicks, and, as Pariser points
out, we’ve likely already done so. When you sign up for Facebook,
the service first asks to search your email inbox and connect you to
Facebook friends you’re in email contact with. Next, it asks for your
employer and for your high school and college information, including
years of graduation, which it uses to introduce you to co-workers and
classmates. Data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project
suggest that most of our friends on Facebook come from these off-
line associations: 22 percent are high school friends, 20 percent
immediate and extended family, 10 percent co-workers, and 9
percent college friends. Only 7 percent of Facebook friends in the
Pew study were “online-only” relationships; 93 percent were people
whom a Facebook user had met off-line.41
Given what we know about homophily and given Bishop’s
observations about our tendency to segregate in the real world, it’s
fair to assume that our online friends aren’t as diverse as the
population of the nation we live in, and certainly not as diverse as the
world as a whole. As social media become increasingly important as
tools for discovery, it seems plausible that we’re getting a less
diverse view of the world than we might have encountered in the
days of curated media, when professional editors endeavored to
present a balanced news diet for us and our neighbors. Our eyes
may glaze over when the Guardian runs updates on Paraguay, but in
an age of social recommendation, we might not ever hear about the
country unless we have Paraguayans in our social circle. Our filter
bubbles are three-dimensional: they insulate us from content that is
not just outside of our ideology but also outside of our orbits of
geography and familiarity.
Shortly after Pariser published his book, I offered to Cameron
Marlow my fears that social media were making readers of news
more parochial. Marlow is a scholar of social media who became
Facebook’s “in house sociologist” in 2007. He responded with a
provocation: we may soon hit a point where we’re more likely to get
news from another part of the world via a friend on a social network
than via broadcast media. On its face, Cameron’s idea seems
absurd. The BBC has correspondents in more than a hundred
nations, reporting global news, while the average Facebook user has
130 friends, most located in the same country. But Cameron’s
argument has a subtle twist: the question is not whether news will be
reported by social networks or broadcast media but whether we,
individually, will pay attention to it.
Many years before he became my boss at MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito
wrote me an email asking for links to African newspapers and blogs.
He was traveling to South Africa for the first time and felt
underinformed about the continent from American and Japanese
media. I sent him links to some top newspapers and a few dozen
bloggers I followed closely. He wrote me back weeks later with a
heartfelt and frustrated message: he was having a hard time
following the sources I’d offered because he knew very few Africans
and felt little personal connection to the events he was reading
about. Much as he wanted information from Africa, this “caring
problem” was making it hard for him to pay attention.
If you don’t know any Zambians, it can be hard to pay to attention
events in Lusaka, the nation’s capital. If a friend—perhaps one who
has visited the country or befriended someone there—starts paying
attention to news from Zambia, it sends a signal that stories from
Zambia are important, at least to our local micropublic of Facebook
friends. We might pay attention to the story as a way of showing our
friend that we care too.
Or we might discover that we actually do care. In 1944, the
communications researcher Paul Lazarsfeld proposed that media
were less influential over public opinion than a “two-step flow of
communication”—information that flows from media to an influential
friend, and then from that friend to her friends. This idea of “opinion
leaders” has been embraced by some sociologists and challenged
by others, who argue that media have more direct influence than
Lazarsfeld accounted for. But it’s certainly possible that sharing news
through social media signals the importance of a topic to our friends
and encourages them to follow along.
My completely nonscientific, anecdotal experience of following
news during the Arab Spring suggests that personal connection
correlates to interest in news. Events in early 2011 rapidly reached a
level of complexity that made it difficult to follow what was happening
in all of the nations experiencing protests. At one point the Guardian
published an online timeline that provided a simultaneous overview
of events in seventeen nations.42 (That timeline covered only the
Middle East and North Africa; protests in Gabon, Sudan, Pakistan,
and elsewhere inspired by the Arab Spring were not included.)
Paying close attention to events in every country was a herculean
task. Like most people, I watched and read what I was able,
resigned to the reality that I was missing key events.
I recently looked back at my Twitter feed and blog posts to see
what stories about the Arab Spring I shared with my readers. Stories
about Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain dominate my feed, along with a
few stories about Syria, but almost none about Libya. The imbalance
is easily explained. My closest colleagues in the region are from
Tunisia and Bahrain, and my interest in the events in their countries
was deeply personal. I’ve never been to Syria, but the partner of a
close colleague is Syrian, and her heavy tweeting about the situation
there captured my attention. My lack of connection to Libya led to a
corresponding lack of interest, which led to a lack of information.
Tunisia and Bahrain, of course, are not inherently more worthy of
attention than the conflicts in Syria and Libya, where far more
individuals have lost their lives, but my experience suggests that
while personal connections may not produce equitable results, their
effects are powerful.
Whether Cameron’s proposition proves to be correct depends
heavily on two factors: What do we pay attention to in broadcast
media, and how broad is our network of friends? The decreasing
coverage of international stories in the American press suggests that
publishers believe we don’t pay much attention to international news.
Homophily effects suggest that we’re unlikely to know many Syrians
unless we’ve lived, worked, or studied in Syria. But both those
factors are more complicated than they look at first glance.
In 2006, I conducted an experiment where I tracked every story
published on the BBC and New York Times websites, and used a
blog search engine to see whether the stories were “amplified” by
bloggers.43 Many international stories went unamplified, but so did
most local news. The stories that got circulated were ones that fit
into larger, ongoing narratives: the political battle between left and
right in the United States and the UK, the spread of terrorism around
the globe, and the march of scientific and technological progress. I
also found that “news you can use” stories—drink red wine and
avoid cancer!—were widely spread. A study conducted by Jonah
Berger and Katherine Milkman looked at a different form of
amplification: the New York Times “most e-mailed” list. Stories that
inspired people and evoked a sense of awe were forwarded, whether
they were domestic or international, the study reported.44
It’s not that we filter out international news; it’s that we tend to filter
out news that doesn’t connect to our lives and our interests. For a
story to be amplified, the connection can be quite loose. The strong
US demand for news about the Arab Spring suggests interest in an
inspiring story where familiar social media technologies appear to
have played a role. Whether or not Facebook really helped organize
protests in Cairo, the connection to a fascinating and familiar
technology may have encouraged more Americans to follow the
story.
Does Facebook raise the chances that you know someone in
Syria? Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, created a striking image in
December 2010 that suggests it might: he plotted arcs between pairs
of Facebook friends and produced a map that looks strikingly like an
airline route map, or a map of the earth at night, showing users in
almost every corner of the world.45 A few months later, Marlow and
colleagues released a study of friendships on Facebook that
demonstrated that as many as 15 percent of relationships on
Facebook cross an international border.46 Given what we know
about homophily, that’s a strikingly high number.
The 2011 Facebook paper showed a matrix of friendships
between people in different nations. Nations that are close together
geographically, or that share historical connections through
colonialism, tend to have more ties on Facebook. One explanation
for this is language: if you have a common language, you can more
easily maintain an online friendship. Speak a language that’s not
widely spoken in other countries, like Turkish, and you’re likely to
have fewer friends outside the country than if you live in a country
like Jordan and speak Arabic. Smaller nations seem to have more
international friendships than large ones.
I worked with Marlow and his colleague Johan Ugander to try to
understand these differences. We found evidence of a connection
between the mobility of individuals and the frequency of external
friendships. (A subsequent visualization built by Mia Newman and
Stamen Design helps confirm this, showing strong ties between the
United States and Mexico, Brazil and Japan, and other pairs of
countries linked by migration and by Facebook friendships.)47
Countries with high levels of migration, like UAE and Qatar, had
highly international patterns of friendship, while less mobile societies
like Nigeria were less connected. Facebook’s data don’t consider the
country a user says he’s from; they look at what country she logs in
from. This means that strong ties of friendship between Pakistan and
UAE probably don’t represent burgeoning friendships between
Emiratis and guest workers, but Pakistanis in Dubai keeping in touch
with friends at home. This suggests another reading of Butler’s
elegant map of Facebook friendships, as a picture of global
migration rather than a map of cross-border connection.
The data Facebook released considered only nations where the
network has a strong foothold. If we could look at nations that are
just starting to use the social network, we would see that countries
where Facebook had just caught on had a higher percentage of
international friends, while those on it for a long time had much lower
percentages. This isn’t evidence that Facebook is making people
more parochial. It’s evidence that the first people to use a tool like
Facebook tend to have strong international connections.
 Think of it this way: if you’re the first person in Palau to sign up for
Facebook, all your friends—by definition—will be outside Palau.
You’ve probably discovered Facebook because you travel outside
your country, or because you know people from other countries who
are using the tool. As you introduce your friends in Palau to
Facebook, your online social network begins to resemble more
closely your off-line network—less international and more domestic.
And the people who join later can look for friends in their own
community, not unfamiliar people from around the world. Soon the
people using Facebook aren’t the most cosmopolitan Palauans;
they’re Palauans of all stripes. But they’re just Palauans.
This phenomenon might explain some of the cosmopolitan
enthusiasm about early social media projects like The Well or
Usenet. It’s possible that interactions in those networks were
significantly less parochial than interactions on Facebook are today.
The people attracted to online communication may already have had
many connections to people in other countries, since online
communication was and is an inexpensive way to stay in touch. And
the structure of these networks, based on topical discussions of
specific interests rather than on remaining connected to friends, may
have decreased the tendency for online and off-line networks to
merge. Before the rise of social networks designed to help you
maintain existing off-line ties, the illusion of online cosmopolitanism
was probably less illusory.
It’s worth remembering that internationalism is only one possible
manifestation of diversity. The Internet community scholar Judith
Donath reports that she knows far more about the daily lives of her
high school classmates in the age of Facebook than she did in the
Usenet era. “Conversations on Usenet may have involved more
nations, but the people talking had a great deal in common in terms
of education level and occupation—it was all researchers and grad
students in technical fields,” she explains. “On Facebook, I’m in
touch with people from a much broader socioeconomic range,
because we went to school together.”48 That kind of diversity may
help with the problems Cass Sunstein and Bill Bishop worry about. If
we’re connected to both a left-wing union activist and a right-wing
evangelical because they were both in our high school class,
Facebook might be a powerful tool for exposing us to diverse points
of view. Or, if Eli Pariser is right, we may hear mostly from high
school friends with consonant interests and opinions. In either case,
unless you went to a very exciting high school, those viewpoints
probably are not overwhelmingly international.
The most interesting piece of the conversation about Facebook
cosmopolitanism came from an observation made by Johan
Ugander, a Swedish American scientist who coauthored the paper
on international ties on Facebook. “People like me have strong ties
to more than one country—we’re naturally going to have lots of
international ties, and we’re not typical of most people in a country.”
If the average American is connected to thirteen international
Facebook friends, what we’re actually saying is that 90 percent of
Americans have far fewer, and 10 percent have significantly more
international friends. Nations aren’t cosmopolitan; people are.
People like Ugander who’ve lived their lives in different corners of
the world are likely the key if we want social media to give us a
broad view of the world and help us care about people we don’t
otherwise know. With a Swedish citizen in my network of friends, I’m
likely to be exposed to news and perspective I otherwise would have
missed. Whether that exposure turns into interest and attention is a
function of my receptivity and Johan’s ability to provide context
around the news he’s sharing.
Whether Cameron’s prediction that we’ll receive more international
news through Facebook than through newspapers is right or wrong
is ultimately irrelevant. I’m interested in finding ways to broaden my
picture of the world and helping people who want to do the same. To
encounter that wider world, we need to think about changing our
media and broadening our circles of friends. We need to look at the
media systems we’ve built, over hundreds of years in the case of
newspapers and a dozen or so years in the case of social media,
and ask whether they’re working the way we need them to in a
connected age. If they’re not, we need to rewire.
GLOBAL VOICES

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak—and

the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of
speech.
To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak
to have the means to speak—and everyone who wants to hear
that speech, the means to listen to it.
Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by
those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by
governments that would restrict thought and communication.
Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can
tell their stories to the world.
We seek to build bridges across the gulfs that divide people,
so as to understand each other more fully. We seek to work
together more effectively, and act more powerfully.
We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond
between individuals from different worlds is personal, political
and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is
essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable
—for all citizens of this planet.
While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also
seek to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We
pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one
other.
We are Global Voices.1
AT 215 WORDS, THE MANIFESTO FOR THE GLOBAL VOICES project is shorter
and marginally more readable than most manifestos, perhaps the
most awkward of literary forms. It was produced in December 2004,
near the close of a conference hosted by the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society called “Votes, Bits and Bytes,” a three-day
conversation about how the Internet was changing the political
process in the United States and around the world.
Berkman’s annual conferences tend to reflect the conversations
that are taking place in academic communities about the future of
the Internet. In 2004, many of those conversations were about US
electoral politics. Governor Howard Dean, of Vermont, had run
unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency,
using the Internet to raise money, solicit ideas, and organize
volunteers. Although he was trounced in the polls, Dean’s use of the
Internet served as a trial run for techniques used by Barack Obama
in 2008. The idea that the Internet could be used to organize rallies
and fund-raisers inspired a wave of thinking about how distributed
participation might change politics and governance in general.
Two participants at the 2004 conference had written influential
essays inspired, in part, by the Dean campaign. Joi Ito’s “Emergent
Democracy” explored the idea that groups of people could cooperate
online to solve complex problems, anticipating Clay Shirky’s writing
on “organizing without organizations” and phenomena like
crowdsourcing. Jim Moore’s “The Second Superpower Rears Its
Beautiful Head” built on the idea that Internet-enabled public opinion
represents a check to American political power, and celebrated the
possibility that bottom-up deliberative democracy will give citizens a
voice in international institutions like the UN.
While I found these essays inspiring and challenging, they seemed
limited by their focus on the developed world and specifically on the
United States. Like Moore, I was a fellow at the Berkman Center and
had come under the spell of Dave Winer, a brilliant if sometimes
crotchety software developer who’d gotten the Center hooked on
blogging. But I worried that blogs weren’t giving voice to the
voiceless, as the Deaniacs hoped, as much as they were providing
another space for well-educated and well-connected Westerners to
share their thoughts and opinions. I wondered whether we could test
Moore’s and Ito’s rhetoric and use the Internet to make political
dialogues more globally inclusive or, as I argued in a response to
Moore’s essay, whether we were ready to make room for the so-
called “third world” in the “second superpower.”
My partner in this experiment was Rebecca MacKinnon, a
journalist who left her job with CNN after serving as its bureau chief
of Beijing and Tokyo. She exchanged that lucrative and prestigious
position for badly paid research fellowships at Harvard that enabled
her to experiment with blogging and to research online citizen media
because she was frustrated with CNN’s waning commitment to
international news. Rebecca is a respected China scholar, fluent in
Mandarin, and deeply knowledgeable about Chinese politics. “The
network kept telling me that my expertise was getting in the way.
They wanted me to cover the region less as an expert and more as a
tourist.”
Rebecca’s first few months as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government—before she decided to leave her
CNN job—were spent running a blog about North Korea, which she
covered as part of her CNN beat. North Korea is difficult to cover in a
“normal” journalistic way because it is largely closed to the Western
media. After coming to the Berkman Center, she began following and
writing about the first bloggers who were starting to rise to
prominence in China by late 2004. I was working with friends at
AllAfrica.com, an online publisher of African newspapers, to curate
BlogAfrica, a collection of blogs by Africans and travelers to the
continent. As our contribution to the Berkman conference, Rebecca
and I designed a “global bloggers summit” to run on the final day of
the conference.
We invited some of the world’s most visible and prominent
bloggers to join us, stars of the nascent online world like Omar and
Muhammed Fadhil of Iraq the Model, a relentlessly optimistic
account of post-invasion Iraq; Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-
Canadian whose Farsi-language guide to blogging had helped
launch an Iranian blogging movement; and Jeff Ooi, whose
passionate political blogging in Malaysia led to his election to
parliament. But we were also joined by people we’d never heard of,
like David Sasaki, a skinny, freckled Californian with an encyclopedic
knowledge of the Latin American blogosphere, who’d flown on a red-
eye from San Diego to Boston and slept on the floor of Logan Airport
so that he could join our conversation.
Rebecca and I hoped that we would find some shared concerns
and issues that united this disparate collection of bloggers. It was
beyond our wildest hopes that this group would find common cause
and begin to think of itself as a movement.
We quickly discovered that the writers we’d brought together had
three things in common. They believed that their country was
misunderstood and underrepresented on the global stage. This led
them to write, as a way to represent their point of view as a
counterbalance to how their country was often perceived.
One of the bloggers who inspired Rebecca and me to convene our
meeting was the Bahraini author and activist Mahmood Al-Youssif,
who explains his mission on his blog: “Now I try to dispel the image
that Muslims and Arabs suffer from—mostly by our own doing I have
to say—in the rest of the world. I am no missionary and don’t want to
be. I run several internet websites that are geared to do just that,
create a better understanding that we’re not all nuts hell-bent on
world destruction.”2 Most of the people who joined us at Harvard had
at least one myth to dispel, one perspective to counter with their
writing.
Because bloggers felt that their voices needed to be heard, they
were sensitive to the many ways they could be silenced, through
censorship, intimidation, or sustained lack of public interest.
Although online censorship was far less common in 2004 than it is
today, the bloggers who joined us understood that there were no
guarantees that speech would remain less constrained online than
off-line. So it wasn’t difficult for the group to agree on a collective
focus on defending freedom of expression on the Internet.
The third common ground took more time to emerge. Not all
people who are passionate about advocating for their country and
ensuring that their voices can be heard are able to listen to others
advocate for their own wants and needs. By the end of a long day,
many of the bloggers we’d brought together realized that they felt an
obligation to hear one another’s stories and advocate on their behalf.
Much as Kwame Appiah suggests cosmopolitans do, they saw
themselves having obligations to one another, chief among them, the
obligation to listen and try to understand. The language in the
manifesto about “a right to listen” reflected the emergence of this
common ground.

Building Global Voices

The Berkman conference had produced a document, but to make

that manifesto real we created a website that would put those lofty
ideas into action. Rebecca and I began posting excerpts from the
blogs we followed, including the blogs of our manifesto coauthors.
By the spring of 2005, the task had become unwieldy. We were each
skimming hundreds of posts a day from different corners of the
world. One day when both Rebecca and I were traveling, we asked
the legal scholar Zephyr Teachout, then a fellow at Berkman, to take
over the editorial reins for a day. “That was the most terrifying
experience of my entire life,” she reported back. “When you don’t
know anything about a country, it’s almost impossible to know
whether something on a blog is interesting or believable, or whether
it’s the work of a crazy person.”
Clearly there were limits to a model where Cambridge-based
intellectuals curated the world’s blogs. Zephyr’s discomfort helped us
move to a model where responsibility for representing regions of the
world rested with people from or living in those regions. We began to
build a team of paid editors responsible for the daily work of
collecting links to global blogs and for assembling teams of
volunteers who would report on local issues by summarizing and
excerpting important blog posts from their home countries. Reports
offered translated excerpts of those posts and context on the events
discussed, so that international audiences understood the issues
and questions in play.
It quickly became obvious that the prominent, visible bloggers
we’d built our conference around weren’t the right people to take on
this work. They had book contracts and speaking engagements.
Bloggers who were deeply enmeshed in local politics would post the
blow by blow of debates that made no sense to outsiders. Others
shared posts only from those they agreed with, or from those they
shared a language or ethnic background with.
Ultimately, we ended up relying on less visible bloggers who knew
the local scenes well and could explain these issues to a global
audience. Some, like Georgia Popplewell, a radio producer, who built
a team to cover the Caribbean from her living room in Diego Martin,
Trinidad, covered their home countries. Others, like David Sasaki, an
American who built a Latin American team while teaching English in
Monterrey, Mexico, were curious and well-informed interlopers.
Virtually all had experience living or working in different parts of the
world, like Lova Rakotomalala, who covered his native Madagascar
while finishing a degree at Purdue University in Indiana. These
digital cosmopolitans turned Global Voices from an optimistic vision
into a functional distributed newsroom.
Global Voices continues to work in this distributed way. Editors and
volunteers worldwide find stories on blogs, photo- and video-sharing
sites, and social media communities and share them on our website.
But the project has grown arms and legs and now involves roughly
nine hundred participants from more than a hundred countries. An
advocacy arm, founded by the Tunisian human rights activist Sami
ben Gharbia, documents threats to online freedom of speech and the
arrest of bloggers and citizen journalists. Rising Voices, led by the
Bolivian blogger Eddie Avila, supports online media from
marginalized groups around the world. A massive team of translators
produces versions of the Global Voices site in more than thirty
languages, ranging from Arabic to Aymara, the indigenous language
of Bolivia and parts of Chile and Peru. Roughly half a million people
visit Global Voices sites a month, and content from our sites appears
in media outlets around the world, including the Economist, the BBC,
and the New York Times.
I’m more proud of Global Voices than of any other project I’ve
helped build, but there’s a real sense in which we failed. Rebecca
and I saw Global Voices as a way to correct shortcomings in the
professional media’s coverage of the developing world: an
overreliance on uninformed “parachute” journalists, an emphasis on
reporting natural disasters and violence at the expense of more
complex and long-term stories, and an inability or unwillingness to
feature the voices of people directly affected by events.
I had hoped Global Voices would influence agenda setting. In the
simplest sense, I believed that by providing coverage of events that
other media outlets missed, we would help challenge the imbalances
in attention that Galtung and others had documented. Rebecca,
more experienced in the ways of broadcast media, was less
confident of our ability to sway news agendas. But both of us hoped
that by offering a global perspective through the eyes of a specific
individual on the ground, readers would have an easier time
connecting with unfamiliar stories.
Instead, Global Voices has become a go-to source for information
on the infrequent occasions that countries rarely in the news
suddenly burst into the headlines. We’d tracked civil unrest in Tunisia
from protests in Gafsa in 2008 through Sidi Bouzid in 2010 and
found ourselves inundated with calls for assistance during the week
that Tunisia’s revolution dominated the news agenda. As Jennifer
Preston of the New York Times wrote about our coverage of the
Arab Spring, “When unrest stirs, bloggers are already in place.”3
That’s true, and important, but in practice it means that Global Voices
offers reporters a way to get quotes from countries experiencing
sudden turmoil, rather than using us to find important unreported
stories before they break.
The power of personal connection has proven to be both stronger
and weaker than expected. We’d hoped that more bloggers featured
on Global Voices would emerge as guides to their cultures, like
Salam Pax, the Austrian-educated architect whose accounts of the
US occupation of Iraq helped personalize the war for supporters and
opponents of the invasion. We’ve seen few individuals emerge with a
profile like Salam Pax’s. Instead, citizen media reports are often
eyewitness accounts, capturing attention not because of a
relationship with the observer but because she was in the right (or,
more often, wrong) place. Perhaps this is because few global events
have captured America’s attention like the Iraq War, but it seems that
conflicts like the Syrian uprising could use a guide to explain events
on the ground to a global audience.
 Still, personal connection is the glue that has allowed Global
Voices to thrive with little money, little central organization, and very
little face-to-face contact. Aside from a biennial meeting that’s part
media conference and part global dance party, the connective tissue
of Global Voices is a set of mailing lists, where apparently trivial
updates, like birthday wishes and announcements of engagements
and children’s births, are far more common than heady discussions
about the future of media. Global Voices survives because it’s a
social network, connecting people with common interests and
purposes across lines of language, faith, and nation. What has
resulted is a powerful team of people who support one another, in
ways as mundane as providing a couch to sleep on and as profound
as managing international campaigns to release fellow community
members arrested by their governments for their online writings.
The successes and failures of Global Voices offer an object lesson
in the challenges of using the Internet to encounter a wider picture of
the world. Seven years of arguments over the day-to-day matters of
running an international newsroom and accompanying nonprofit
organization have proven an excellent reminder of the challenges
inherent in moving from theory to practice. A project like Global
Voices wasn’t possible before the spread of the Internet and the rise
of participatory media. But the fact that people are tweeting reports
from demonstrations in Syria doesn’t inexorably lead to media that
are more fair, more just, or more inclusive than analog media. Even
when it’s possible, connecting the world is hard work.
Global Voices got several things right, rarely because we figured
out what we were doing in advance. Instead, we tried and failed, and
tried again, on the path toward solutions. Our basic model for
sharing citizen media from around the world is a likely framework for
any project that uses the Internet to expand worldviews. We curate,
searching through the vastness of participatory content to find the
bits that illuminate issues, concerns, and lives in other parts of the
world. We translate, opening a conversation beyond its linguistic
borders. And we contextualize, explaining what events mean to
people on the ground and what they might mean to you. Whether
you’re trying to follow news from Thailand or to collaborate with an
artist in Senegal, filtering, translating, and contextualizing are going
to come into play.
One major shortcoming of Global Voices was a failure to
understand principles of supply and demand. Like many well-
intentioned reformers, I had assumed that the world wasn’t paying
enough attention to international news because there simply wasn’t
enough being reported. I thought that the problem was the financial
shock the journalism industry was experiencing from the rise of the
web, and that by supplying a set of novel perspectives and free,
high-quality content, journalists would flock to our project and amplify
stories to their audiences. When journalists didn’t beat a path to our
door, I began researching the dynamics of international news and
coming to understand that foreign news bureaus weren’t closing just
because they were expensive to operate.
Inequities in media attention are in part a demand problem. If
audiences aren’t interested in Madagascar, the wealth of stories we
provide from that strange and fascinating nation go unread unless
we can help audiences see how strange and fascinating they are. As
we figure out how Global Voices can fulfill its mission, we’re thinking
of our work—and particularly our curatorial work—in terms of
building demand, in part by helping people find not just what they’re
interested in, and not what we believe they should be interested in,
but what they’re surprised and delighted to discover they’re
interested in.
Global Voices reports on coups and protests, but also on how
families in different countries break the Ramadan fast. Our most
popular posts often aren’t breaking news stories, but stories on the
intricacies of South Korean pop music or Nigerian film. Building
demand means unpacking culture as well as news. Knowing that
Mongolia has the fastest-growing economy in the world in 2011 is
helpful if you’re an adventurous investor, but discovering that
Mongolians are dominating Japanese sumo and causing controversy
in the process might be more helpful in developing your interest in
Central Asia.
It’s hard to solve a difficult problem through theory alone. If we
want digital connection to increase human connection, we need to
experiment. We must build things, test them, and learn from our
failures. This section of the present book suggests three areas
where the Internet as we know it needs rewiring: language, personal
connection, and discovery. On the basis of the lessons learned from
Global Voices, I offer three possible ideas to explore: transparent
translation, bridge figures, and engineered serendipity. We’re far
from solving these vast problems, but we think we’ve found areas
where we could all benefit from some attempted rewiring. What
follows is an introduction to some of the efforts already underway,
and an invitation to join me and my friends in the work we’ve been
doing: rewiring the web for a wider world.
 FOUND IN TRANSLATION

IT’S A CLICHÉ TO OBSERVE THAT AMERICANS DON’T KNOW much about

football. First, we tend to call it “soccer.” Second, many Americans
tune into the world’s game only once every four years, noisily
supporting our national team during the World Cup, and then turning
attention back to college football, NASCAR, and other distinctly
American pursuits. When we do tune in, it’s expected that we’ll need
a refresher on the offsides rule and a reminder of some key
terminology.
As viewers around the world tuned into a surprisingly close game
between Brazil and North Korea at the start of the 2010 World Cup in
South Africa, many caught a glimpse of a banner held by Brazilian
fans that declared, “Cala Boca Galvão.” Those who watched
matches while trash-typing on Twitter saw the phrase repeated
thousands of times by Brazilian fans. Four days into the monthlong
tournament, Twitter listed “Cala Boca Galvão” as a trending topic, a
word or phrase receiving an unusually high amount of attention from
the service’s global user base. Was this a message of support for the
Brazilian team?
While Twitter told its users that “Cala Boca Galvão” was popular, it
didn’t help them figure out what the phrase meant. Fortunately,
Brazilian users were willing to help out. The Galvão bird, they
explained, was endangered, hunted nearly to extinction for its
colorful feathers, which adorn the headdresses of the samba schools
that dance in Carnival parades. The Galvão Institute was established
to raise awareness of the bird’s plight, and if other Twitter users
tweeted the phrase “Cala Boca Galvão”—Save the Galvão Bird—a
donation of $0.10 would be made to the cause. A slick, English-
language video produced by the Galvão Institute and posted on
YouTube provided background on the plight of the Galvão and urged
participation with the tagline: “One second to tweet, one second to
save a life.”
Clearly the campaign was working. Not only did Twitter users rise
to the defense of the Galvão bird, prominent celebrities took up the
cause as well. The pop idol Lady Gaga was rumored to be releasing
a new single, titled “Cala Boca Galvão,” and dozens of YouTube
versions of the song appeared. Many versions sounded like a
reworking of Gaga’s “Alejandro,” though some, strangely, appeared
to feature entirely different melodies. The Galvão Bird Foundation, a
sister organization to the Galvão Institute, exposed a darker side of
the issue with a revealing photo of the Argentine football coach
Diego Maradona with a green feather sticking out of his nostril.
Evidently, Galvao birds were also desirable for their hallucinogenic
properties.
For those who hadn’t already typed the phrase into a site like
Google Translate, the New York Times blew the joke with a June 15,
2010, story that revealed the simple truth: “Cala Boca, Galvão”
translates as “Shut up, Galvão.” Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Galvão
Bueno is the primary football commentator for Rede Globo, the
television network carrying World Cup games in Brazil. His constant
cliché-ridden patter alienated many Brazilian fans who wished he’d
just shut up. The phrase caught on as thousands of Brazilian fans
watched the opening matches on Rede Globo and began venting
their frustration. Once the phrase appeared on Twitter’s trending
topics, it became a game to maintain the phrase’s popularity. By
encouraging unsuspecting, well-meaning non-Brazilians to spread
the phrase, it turned into a vast joke wired Brazilians played on the
rest of the world.
There are a number of possible lessons we can take from the Cala
Boca Galvão story. First, a lot of Brazilians are on Twitter—over 5
million, 11 percent of the country’s online population, when this story
took place, and many more now. Second, at least some of those
Brazilian netizens have a wicked sense of humor. A later iteration of
the Cala Boca meme urged people to save the Geisy Arruda whale,
an unkind reference to a curvaceous Brazilian woman expelled from
a university in São Paolo for wearing a miniskirt. Most important for
our discussion here, however, is the lesson that linguistic difference
persists in the face of globalization, and that this difference is a
barrier to connection and understanding.
A connected world is a polyglot world. As we gain access to the
thoughts, feelings, and opinions of people around the world, our
potential for knowledge and understanding expands. But so does our
capacity to misunderstand. As we become more connected, we’re
able to comprehend a smaller and smaller fraction of the
conversations we encounter without help and interpretation.

A Lingua Franca?

Conventional wisdom suggests that English is becoming “the world’s

second language,” a lingua franca that many forward-looking
organizations are adopting as a working language. Optimists about
the spread of English as a global second language suggest it will
enable collaboration and ease problem solving without threatening
the survival of mother tongues. Pointing to hundreds of thousands of
Chinese children who learn English by shouting phrases back at
teachers, the American entrepreneur Jay Walker offers the idea that
English will be a language of economic opportunity for most
speakers: they’ll work and think in their mother tongue, but English
will allow them to communicate, share, and transact.1
Cultural-preservation organizations like UNESCO aren’t as
confident of this vision. They warn that English may crowd out less
widely spoken languages as it spreads around the world through
television, music, and film. But something more subtle and
complicated appears to be going on. While English may be emerging
as a bridge language, a wave of media is being produced in other
languages, in newspapers, on television, and on the Internet. As
technologies make it easier for people to communicate to broad and
narrow audiences in their native languages, we’re discovering that
linguistic difference is surprisingly persistent.
 One way to consider the future of language in a connected world
is to ask, “What percent of the Internet’s content is written in
English?”
Look online for an answer to that query—posed in English—and
you’re likely to encounter a website last updated in 2003,
EnglishEnglish.com. The site’s “English Facts and Figures” page
asserts that “80% of home pages on the Web are in English, while
the next greatest, German, has only 4.5% and Japanese 3.1%.” The
sources behind this assertion are unclear, but it’s consistent with
early research on linguistic diversity online. In 1997, Geoffrey
Nunberg and Hinrich Schütze released a study estimating that 80
percent of the World Wide Web’s content was in English. The Online
Computer Library Center followed in 2003 with a study estimating
that 72 percent of online content was in English.2
These early studies led researchers to suggest that English had a
“head start” that other languages would find difficult to overcome.
With such a large user base of English speakers online, many
websites would publish content only in English, and web users would
adapt to monolingualism by improving their language skills, which in
turn would increase the incentive to publish in English. Neil Gandal
of Tel Aviv University analyzed web use in Quebec, Canada, in 2001
and observed that native French speakers spent 66 percent of their
online time on English-language websites. Furthermore, young
Quebecois looked at more English content than their elders,
suggesting that language barriers would be even less relevant for a
future generation of web users.3 Given that Francophone Quebecois
were willing to read English content online, Gandal argued, website
developers wouldn’t bother to localize their content, leading to a
future with more sites entirely in English.
Both the 70–80 percent English “fact” and the head start theory
have lingered despite evidence that the linguistic shape of the World
Wide Web has changed dramatically in the past ten years as it
expanded both in scale and in the number of authors creating
content. One reason the “fact” persists is that it’s incredibly difficult to
generate a believable estimate of language diversity online. Early
studies tried to create a random sample of websites by choosing a
selection of IP addresses, loading whatever page emerged, and
using automated tools to determine what language it was written in.
This method works poorly these days, when sites like Facebook,
reached via a single IP address, include multilingual content
generated by more than half a billion users. Newer methods rely on
search engines to index the web, then attempt to estimate coverage
of different languages on the basis of the comparative frequency of
words in different languages.
Álvaro Blanco leads a team at FUNREDES (Foundation for
Networks and Development), a Dominican Republic–based nonprofit
organization focused on technology in the developing world, that has
been researching linguistic diversity since 1996 by means of these
new methods. Try your search query about English-language content
online, posed in Spanish or most other Romance languages, and it’s
his research that usually tops the search results. His team searches
for “word concepts” in different languages, counting the results for
“Monday” versus “Lunes” (Spanish) versus “Lundi” (French). In 1996,
his research estimated that 80 percent of the content online was in
English. That percentage fell steadily through successive
experiments until 2005, when he estimated that 45 percent of online
content was in English.
While Blanco’s research continues, he warns that search engines
may no longer offer a representative sample of content online.
“Twitter, Facebook, social networks—these are all difficult for search
engines to index fully.” Blanco estimates that search engines now
index less than 30 percent of the visible web, and suggests that the
indexed subset skews toward English-language sites, often because
those sites are the most profitable places to sell advertising. “My
personal opinion is that English now represents less than 40% of
online content,”4 Blanco offers, though he believes he’ll need to
refine his methodology to prove his hunch.
Statistics about Internet usage show much faster growth in
countries where English is not the dominant language. In 1996, more
than 80 percent of Internet users were native English speakers. By
2010, that percentage had dropped to 27.3 percent. While the
number of English-speaking Internet users has almost trebled since
2000, twelve times as many people in China use the Internet now as
in 1996. Growth is even more dramatic in the Arabic-speaking world,
where twenty-five times as many people are online as in 1996.5
But that’s not the most important shift. When Gandal predicted that
Quebecois web users would get accustomed to using sites like
Amazon.com in English, he didn’t realize that most web users in
2010 would be creating content as well as consuming it. More than
half of China’s 450 million Internet users regularly use a social media
platform, writing blog posts, posting updates on Renren (China’s
Facebook equivalent) or status messages to Sina Weibo, a
microblogging site similar to Twitter. And the vast majority of those
updates are in Chinese, not English.6
On a visit to Amman, Jordan, in July 2005, the high point for me
was a leisurely dinner with a dozen Jordanian bloggers, whose
websites I’d been following in the run-up to the trip. As we looked
over the ancient stone houses of Jabal Amman from the terrace of
the restaurant, our conversation bounced between English and
Arabic. “You guys all speak Arabic as a first language—why do you
all blog in English?” I asked. Ahmad Humeid, a talented designer
and the proprietor of the 360° East blog7 explained, “I want my
perspectives on Jordan to be read around the world, which means I
need to write in English. Besides, the people who only read Arabic
aren’t reading blogs.”
Seven years on, Ahmad still blogs in English, but many newer
Middle Eastern bloggers write primarily in Arabic. For multilingual
web users, there’s a tipping point associated with language use. So
long as most of your potential audience doesn’t speak your
language, it makes sense to write in a second, more globally popular
language. But once your compatriots have joined you online, the
equation shifts. If you want to reach your friends, you may write to
them in one language. If you want to engage a wider audience, you
may use another. Haitham Sabbah, a passionate Jordanian
Palestinian activist who served as Middle East editor for Global
Voices from 2005 to 2007, now writes in English to criticize American
and Israeli policy in the Middle East and in Arabic to critique Arab
leaders, making those criticisms more opaque to international
audiences. English is for engaging with a wide audience, while
Arabic is a private language for disagreements he has with fellow
Arabs, which he wants to keep “within the family.”
Gandal’s Quebecois research subjects may have read a lot of
English-language content, but that doesn’t mean they preferred
reading in a second language. While most of India’s 50 million
Internet users speak English, a survey by the Indian market research
company JuxtConsult revealed that almost three-quarters prefer and
seek out content in their first languages.8 Cognizant of this
preference, Google offers interfaces to its search engine in nine
different Indian languages, and in over 120 languages in total. Given
that 68 languages are spoken by at least 10 million speakers
worldwide, other companies with global ambitions may be looking at
developing Tagalog and Telugu interfaces in the near future.
When we began curating blog posts to publish on Global Voices,
Rebecca and I realized we would need to address issues of
language and translation. We hired editors fluent in French, Arabic,
Russian, Chinese, and Spanish to translate conversations into
English for publication on the site. In those early days, we never
seriously considered publishing an edition other than in English,
assuming that translating our work into other languages would be
prohibitively expensive and that, since our community of editors and
authors used English as a “working language,” everyone could read
and appreciate our output.
Less than a year after we started the project, Portnoy Zheng, a
Taiwanese university student, launched a Chinese edition of the
Global Voices site. Taking advantage of the fact that Global Voices
publishes using a Creative Commons license, Zheng and friends
began selecting stories from Global Voices that caught their attention
and posting Chinese translations on his website. After Portnoy
accepted our offer to turn his site into an official Chinese edition of
our site, hosted on our servers, Rebecca and I were flooded with
requests to build other-language editions of Global Voices.
Why does it make sense to produce Global Voices in Malagasy, a
language rarely spoken outside Madagascar, a country where only
1.5 percent of the population has access to the Internet? Our
Malagasy contributors were worried that their language wouldn’t
make the leap from the analog to the digital world. French, not
Malagasy, is taught in schools, and French enjoys a higher prestige
than Madagascar’s indigenous language. Our contributors were
willing to do the work to publish the edition and help preserve the
language. Though they personally were trilingual, they wanted to
share their work, and the broader coverage of Global Voices, with
friends and family who weren’t as comfortable reading English or
French as they were.
Our Malagasy site is now read by a significant fraction of
Madagascar’s online community and has inspired a new humility on
the part of our editorial team regarding the importance of language.
Translators, responsible for making our content accessible in more
than thirty languages, now outnumber writers of original content for
the site, and those sites, collectively, receive as much traffic as our
English-language site.
In 2010, members of our community asked for an additional
change to Global Voices: they wanted to publish original content in
French, Spanish, and other languages besides English. This
presents a challenge for our editorial team. While virtually everyone
involved with the project speaks multiple languages, it’s hard for our
editor in chief to take responsibility for posts in languages she does
not speak.9 After a long debate, we reached a consensus, and now
our multilingual newsroom translates stories written in over a dozen
languages into English. This leads to uncomfortable moments: I
sometimes glance at our servers and discover our most popular
(often our most controversial) story is in a language I don’t read well,
and I find myself waiting for our French-to-English translators to
catch up so that I can understand what our team is publishing. But
it’s clearly been the correct step to take. Our coverage of
Francophone Africa is much stronger than in past years, because
authors who can write easily in French can now compose in that
language, then rely on a community of translators to make their work
accessible in English.

Language Is a Tool
To understand why it’s so important for our volunteers to write in their
native languages, and why most web users will create more and
more content in their own languages, it’s useful to consider language
as a technology, a tool humans have created that can be applied to
solve a wide range of problems.10 When we begin using any new
tool—a screwdriver, a car, a computer—we tend to be acutely aware
of the tool itself, the challenges of using it, its limitations and
potentials. As we become increasingly familiar with the tool, it
becomes increasingly transparent to us.
In “The Disappearance of Technology,” the information scholar
Chip Bruce observes that, at a high degree of fluency, tools simply
become invisible: “We might say, ‘I talked to my friend today,’ without
feeling any need to mention that the telephone was a necessary tool
for that conversation to occur.”11 (Or, for that matter, language: “I
talked to my friend today using words, in English.”) That invisibility is
a benefit. We use tools more effectively when we think not about the
instruments at hand but rather about the task we’re trying to
accomplish. But that invisibility makes it easy to forget the biases
associated with the tool. Certain places are easier to get to on foot
than by car, and certain information is easier to find in a library than
online. As one of the most pervasive and powerful tools we use,
language biases what we encounter, and fail to encounter, every day.
For those who don’t speak English as a native language, language
biases are all too clear in online spaces. The task of learning to use
a new tool is complicated by the fact that the interface and
instructions are in an unfamiliar language. Achieving fluency—the
invisibility of the technology—takes longer, and the learning curve is
steeper. Creating content online in a language like Hindi requires an
author to install a new font and a keyboard driver that will allow an
English-language keyboard to create the appropriate characters. It’s
so complex and awkward that many Hindi speakers use Quillpad, a
piece of software that allows you to type Hindi words transliterated
into English characters and have the results appear in Devanagari
script. Given the barriers to creating content, the sharp rise in
content created in languages like Hindi should hint at the importance
readers and writers place on local languages.
 Those of us who do speak English as our first language need to
consider transparency and biases in another way. It’s easy to
assume that the most important content will appear in the language
we speak at some point. That’s no longer a safe assumption. Each
day the amount of information we could encounter via broadcast or
online media increases while the percentage we can understand
shrinks. The opposite is true for speakers of languages like Arabic,
Chinese, and Hindi, whose representation online is growing.
Wikipedia, the remarkable collectively written encyclopedia, was a
multilingual project almost from inception; German and Catalan
editions of the encyclopedia were launched two months after the
initial English-language launch of the project, in January 2001.
Rather than create a master encyclopedia in one language and
produce other editions through translation, early Wikipedians
realized that collaborative encyclopedias needed to be written
independently in different languages so that they could reflect local
priorities.
An ecosystem has emerged in which many Wikipedias have a
core of articles that exist in other languages and a large set of
articles unique to that language. While both French and English
Wikipedias feature long- and well-researched articles on Charles
Darwin, the sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe (whom we’ll
encounter in chapter 7) merits an article only in the French
Wikipedia. As we look for information outside the core subjects
covered in many languages, monolingualism emerges as a barrier. A
2008 study of English, French, German, and Spanish Wikipedias
suggests that the 2.4 million–article English-language Wikipedia had
350,000 articles covering the same topics as the 700,000–article
French-language Wikipedia, which implies that half the French-
language Wikipedia wasn’t accessible to English speakers, and over
five-sixths of the English-language Wikipedia was closed to
Francophones.12 A great deal of knowledge is inaccessible to people
who speak only English or French.
The challenge of accessing information in languages we don’t
speak can lead also to misunderstanding and misinterpreting what
we know. In January 2010, Google reported that its servers had
come under sustained cyber attack by Chinese hackers in search of
both corporate secrets and the personal email accounts of human
rights activists. On February 18, 2010, the New York Times broke a
story by John Markoff and David Barboza that traced the attacks to
two Chinese universities, the elite Shanghai Jiaotong University and
the much lesser known Lanxiang Vocational School. The Times
report characterized Lanxiang as a military-connected technical
college and reported that the attackers had studied with a specific
Ukrainian professor of computer science at the university. More than
eight hundred English-language news outlets printed some version
of the Times story, though a study conducted by Jonathan Stray for
the Nieman Journalism Lab found that only thirteen of those
accounts included original reporting.
The story caught the attention of Chinese audiences, and though
Chinese journalists were not surprised that Shanghai Jiaotong
University might be implicated, the inclusion of Lanxiang Vocational
School raised some eyebrows. The school advertises on late-night
television commercials with the tagline “Want to learn to operate an
earth extractor? Come to Lanxiang” and is known best for offering
degrees in auto repair and truck driving. Reporters from the Qilu
Evening News, a government-sponsored newspaper with a
circulation of over a million copies, visited Lanxiang shortly after the
Times story broke and reported that the university had no Ukrainian
professors, that the military ties extended to Lanxiang graduates’
repairing army trucks, and that computer classes at the school
taught word processing and some basic image editing. Their story,
which included slams at the New York Times for its credulity, ended
with the observation that Chinese netizens were circulating a joke,
“Want to learn to become a hacker? Come to Lanxiang in Shandong,
China.”
It’s understandable that English-language news outlets weren’t
able to travel to Lanxiang to verify the Times story, and
understandable, if disturbing, that outlets reporting on China aren’t
able to read reporting in major Chinese newspapers. But the Qilu
story was available in English within twenty-four hours of publication,
posted on EastSouthWestNorth, a website run by the widely
respected Chinese-to-English translator Roland Soong. While
Soong’s site is daily reading for many English speakers who follow
Chinese media, journalists covering the story missed the Qilu story,
suggesting that even when translations of key stories in other
languages exist, it’s easy to miss them unless they’re part of our
information discovery process, as visible in our inboxes or search
engines as domestic news sites.
The New York Times got the story wrong, presumably, because its
sources had inaccurate information. Other English-language
newspapers got the story wrong because they followed the Times,
but also because they couldn’t, or didn’t, read Chinese accounts of
the same events. We are still a long way from an Internet where
English-speaking reporters can triangulate between Chinese and
English language sources to understand Chinese events.

The Checkered History of Machine Translation

On January 7, 1954, a team from Georgetown University and IBM

held a demonstration of a remarkable new tool at IBM’s New York
headquarters: a computer system that translated Russian sentences
into English. As Robert Plumb reported in the New York Times the
following day,

In the demonstration, a girl operator typed out on a keyboard the

following Russian text in English characters: “Mi pyeryedayem
mislyi posryedstvom ryechi.” The machine printed a translation
almost simultaneously: “We transmit thoughts by means of
speech.” The operator did not know Russian. Again she types
out the meaningless (to her) Russian words: “Vyelyichyina ugla
opryedyelyayetsya otnoshyenyiyem dlyini dugi k radyiusu.” And
the machine translated it as: “Magnitude of angle is determined
by the relation of length of arc to radius.”13

Although the Georgetown/IBM system had a vocabulary of only

250 words and knew only six grammatical rules, its success was a
technical triumph, given that the computer system it ran on, the IBM
701, had total data storage of 36Kb and had to be programmed in
assembly language14 by the IBM systems programmer Peter
Sheridan. Because programming the 701 was so difficult, Sheridan
prototyped the software by writing a set of English-language
instructions and giving them and a set of dictionary cards to non-
Russian-speaking volunteers. Volunteers searched through the deck
of cards to find the appropriate Russian word and the corresponding
English word, and then worked through Sheridan’s instructions to
add or subtract stems from words or rearrange their order in the
sentence.
If the scope of the 1954 demonstration was limited, translating
sixty carefully selected sentences, the ambitions of those behind it
were not. Professor Léon Dostert, who developed the language
model Sheridan painstakingly programmed, noted that while it was
not yet possible “to insert a Russian book at one end and come out
with an English book at the other,” in the future “five, perhaps three,
years hence, interlingual meaning conversion by electronic process
in important functional areas of several languages may well be an
accomplished fact.” Building these systems, Dostert suggested,
would require a dictionary of 20,000 words and one hundred rules,
essentially a scaling up of the prototype.15
Dostert’s prediction sounds laughably optimistic in retrospect, but
the system he contemplated was being designed to translate
scientific journals, not Tolstoy or Pushkin. Dostert knew that
dictionary-based translation systems have a great deal of difficulty
with linguistic ambiguity and that natural human language is
extremely ambiguous. Many languages feature homonyms, words
with identical spelling but different meanings, or polysemy, where the
same word can have related, but different, meanings depending on
context: “Take note! I left a note for the trumpet player about the note
she needs to play.” More complicated phenomena like metaphor,
allegory, or puns add layers of complexity to the task of translation;
they make the process difficult to replicate by looking up words in a
dictionary and ordering them into a grammatically correct sentence.
When a human translator decides how to translate the word
“note,” she reads and understands the sentence, then chooses an
appropriate word in a target language on the basis of the context the
word was used in. Most of the sentences tested in the 1954
demonstration were from physics and chemistry, both because the
promise of the Georgetown/IBM system was the ability to translate
scientific literature and because the context of scientific literature
reduced the ambiguity around some of the terms used.
To solve the problems of context and to make it possible to
translate “note” correctly, more modern translation systems throw out
the dictionary and grammatical rules and work instead with statistics
and probabilities. These systems are built around huge piles of text,
called corpora. Most systems rely on two corpora. One is a collection
of sentences in a target language, which allows programmers to
develop a “language model.” By analyzing this collection of
sentences, the language model “knows” that the phrase “the blue
car” is more common in English than “the car blue,” and in choosing
between those possible translation outputs, it can choose the
grammatically correct one, not because it understands grammatical
rules but because the correct one is the most common one. A
second corpus collects sentences that have been translated by
humans between a pair of languages to create a “translation model.”
The translation model tells us that “el coche azul” in Spanish is
translated as “the blue car” quite frequently in English, though
occasionally “the azure auto” might appear in a document.
Translating a new document becomes a series of educated guesses,
choosing the likely sentence equivalents through the translation
model and ensuring they’re grammatical and readable through the
language model.
This method—statistical machine translation—was impossible
before the late 1980s. Until then computers simply couldn’t handle
the huge sets of data needed to build workable language models.
While it was challenging for the Georgetown/IBM system to maintain
a 250-word dictionary, the corpus Google has released to the public
as an English-language model consists of over 95 billion English
sentences. Given the size of the data sets needed in order for this
method to be effective, search engines have the upper hand in
building them. Indexing the Internet offers a great opportunity to
expand language models. But even Google is often constrained by
the need to find reliable parallel corpora, sets of sentences that have
been translated between one or more languages.
 Parallel corpora are hard to find because high-quality human
translation is (traditionally) very expensive. For these systems to be
useful, they must be huge. The Linguistic Data Consortium’s parallel
corpus for English/Chinese translation includes 200 million words, far
more words than exist in either language, because to be effective
those words need to exist in many different contexts. Many corpora
we might like to use—translations of Stephen King novels into
dozens of languages, for instance—are off-limits because of
copyright constraints. Looking for high-quality, open-licensed text,
programmers often rely on corpora that are collections of
government documents: official UN resolutions translated in the
institution’s six working languages; the European Parliament’s
proceedings, which include documents translated between the
twenty-three official languages; Canadian government documents,
which exist in English and French.
Because statistical machine translation is basically the process of
selecting a likely translation from a set of examples, there’s an odd
implication from the origins of these systems: in translation, we may
all sound a little like European parliamentarians. In practice, these
systems tend to do better in translating formal documents than in
translating slang and jargon-filled instant messages.
So why weren’t American and European newspaper reporters and
fact-checkers reading the Qilu Evening News through a mechanical
translation system to get a fuller understanding of the Lanxiang
Vocational School? In part, their decision might have been force of
habit. For many years, mechanical translations were awkward and
imperfect, and reporters may have developed a bias against using
them. But the quality of machine translations between Chinese and
English has increased dramatically over the past five years.
Programmers evaluate the success of machine translation systems
by comparing their output with outputs generated by professional
human translators. From the comparison, they calculate scores like
the Biligual Evaluation Understudy, or BLEU score, which measures
whether a machine translation includes the same words, in the same
order as a professional translation. When Google determines that a
BLEU score for a new translation pair (English/Chinese, for instance)
is high enough, it’s released and included in the set of tools Google
makes available for free at translate.google.com. Over six years,
from 2006 to 2011, sixty language pairs crossed this threshold.
Newspaper reporters might be impressed by what they see,
reading a machine translation of the Qilu Evening News story. I used
Google to translate the story and got, in part, the following:

Zhou did not meet with the school office reporter, but on the
phone to respond: “These reports are fabrications. A few days
ago, a Chinese-speaking women to call for consultation in the
name of recruitment cliches, and no Liangmingshenfen We are
mainly specialized vehicle maintenance, vehicle maintenance
down there are some students who do join the army after the
mechanical maintenance activities. said Professor Ukraine to
teach here, is off the mark, the school is not foreign teachers,
we do not have to use the teacher’s qualifications. Besides, we
are not refusing to answer whether the Ukrainian foreign
teachers, but she did not ask ah.”

The English text that emerges is somewhat comprehensible, but

far from easy to read. It’s unlikely that anyone would mistake this
passage for one written by a native English speaker. An intrepid
reporter might find the Qilu story in translation and use it to enhance
her story. But it’s unlikely that any English speaker would try reading
the Qilu Evening News each day through machine translation as a
way of keeping up on events. And, if she did, there’s a strong chance
she could misunderstand the article in question.
When IBM and Georgetown began translating Russian sentences,
the goal was to create a system that could automate some of the
translation of scientific journal articles, recognizing that those
translations would need to be hand-polished before delivery to
American scholars. As the program struggled to make gains in the
early 1970s, government funders backed away from automated
machine translation and focused instead on building tools that could
help make human translators more efficient—software like
“translation memories,” which store how a translator has interpreted
a complex phrase and make that translation available to him and to
other translators he works with. The goal for US government
systems became making human translators more efficient, rather
than perfecting automated translation.
The gaps between Soviet and US science are no longer as
politically important as they were in the 1950s. As we’ve moved
beyond the Cold War into a complex, multipolar world, the US
government audience for international media is now the intelligence
community, notably the Open Source Center, a section of the CIA
that tries to understand global events by reading local newspapers
published in Pashtun or Azeri (among others). Newspapers like the
Baku Xalq Qəzeti are translated by human translators for the benefit
of CIA analysts. Their work is available to the general public as well
… sort of. The US Department of Commerce packages the
unclassified work produced by translators, which now includes blog
posts, Twitter streams, and other forms of media, as the “World
News Connection.” These translations, which collectively represent
the most international newspaper known to humankind, are available
for an annual subscription fee of $300 plus $4 per article retrieved.16
Unsurprisingly, World News Connection is a tough sell, because of
the expense and because most readers—even passionate
Azerbaijan watchers—don’t want every story produced by Baku’s
newspapers. Translators like Roland Soong—the man who
translated the Qilu Evening News article for his readers—are
valuable not just because they produce text that’s easy to read but
also because they act as filters and select stories that are likely to be
interesting to a broader audience.

Roland Soong and the Future of Translation

A professional media researcher who studies the size and

demographics of mass media audiences around the world, Soong
relocated from New York to Hong Kong in 2003 to spend more time
with his elderly mother. Thrust into a Chinese-language media world,
Soong felt compelled to catch up, and he quickly discovered
 that Chinese-language and English-language readers were
getting different kinds of news. Many things of interest to the
Chinese were filtered out or simplified for various reasons (such
as cultural barriers, target audience needs, space, political bias,
etc.). So I began to look for the most interesting instances in
Chinese and translate them to English so that English-only
readers can have a better understanding of the issues and
backgrounds.17

Soong posts these translations to EastSouthWestNorth, a website

whose stark design almost disguises the wealth of content it
contains. ESWN’s homepage includes headlines in three columns:
Global, Greater China (in English), Greater China (in Chinese). The
left column follows the work of columnists and scholars, commenting
on China and on broader world issues, while the right lists stories in
Chinese publications that are getting attention in China. The middle
is where Soong’s hard work is most visible. Several articles a day,
sometimes totaling thousands of words, are selected from Chinese
publications and translated into English by Soong, who spends
anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours a day translating.
The motives for translating a specific story vary, but the general
operating principle is that these stories are important to Chinese
audiences but invisible to the rest of the world.

It may be a story that has almost all of China involved, but there
is scarcely any reaction outside China. The reasons may be
cultural, political (usurps western narrative) or substantive (too
complicated), but I will translate it if I think it tells people about
what is important in China…. It may be a follow-up on a story
that was reported in western media at first, but later evolved into
something different which was not followed up. With the Internet
today, many stories require investigative efforts to confirm, but
people don’t like to be told that they had been initially misled.

What becomes clear when discussing translation with Soong is

that the model of a remote China, isolated from the rest of the world
behind “the Great Firewall,” is insultingly simplistic. Yes, Chinese
censors are quite effective at preventing some stories, like accounts
of political upheaval in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, from gaining
wide exposure inside China. But censors’ efforts are far more often
focused on preventing stories about corruption in one corner of the
vast nation from being reported in other cities, for fear the stories
might inspire public demonstrations. By translating those stories into
English, Soong invites international reporters to explain tensions
around power and control in China to their audiences … and
sometimes to Chinese readers as well.
Soong was one of the few sources of information in English about
a wave of protests that began in Taishi Village in Guangzhou in
August 2005. Attempts to oust the corrupt village committee director
Chen Jinsheng led to hunger strikes, sit-ins, the arrest and savage
beating of the activist Lu Banglie, and the deployment of 1,000 riot
troops to subdue a village of 2,075 peasants. Chinese media
covered the story extensively through September, and Soong
translated much of the coverage. By early October, the Taishi story
was getting heavy coverage in Asian papers like the South China
Morning Post, but it hadn’t appeared in major American papers. That
changed when the Guardian reporter Benjamin Joffe-Walt
accompanied Lu to Taishi and was detained by local authorities;
Joffe-Walt offered a sensationalistic account of a beating
administered to Lu, and the Guardian was forced to retract and
correct his original report. Joffe-Walt’s story and Lu’s detention
gained attention through the controversy and brought reporting on
two months of protests in Taishi to US and UK audiences.18
While countless American commentators, most notably Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, have criticized China’s firewall and decried
Chinese censorship, far fewer have pointed out that there’s lots of
potentially important, uncensored Chinese news that never reaches
an English-speaking audience. China’s censored press provided a
great deal of information about Taishi, at least in early stages of the
protests. Soong translated an opinion piece from the People’s Daily,
the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, supporting
the protests, telling readers, “This is akin to official blessing by the
central government.” The Taishi story, in an optimistic first act of
successful village defiance and a sad second act of government
crackdown, has been an interesting and revealing instance of
governmental change in China. That Taishi isn’t familiar to non-
Chinese readers is a function of shortcomings in Western media, not
primarily of Chinese censorship.
Soong’s quest to reveal what’s important to China to an
international audience has gained fellow travelers. “Blogs such as
chinaSMACK and ChinaHush are covering many of the social stories
that I used to do plenty of,” Soong notes, which leaves him free to
focus on topics that fascinate him: media reporting accuracy, ethics,
and manipulation. His site continues to publish multiple stories and
thousands of words in translation a day.
Others have joined Soong in his quest to make Chinese-language
media accessible to global audiences. Tea Leaf Nation, an e-
magazine produced by three friends who met at Harvard—two are
Chinese, one is an American who learned Chinese as a Peace
Corps volunteer—translates political stories from social media for
English readers. Ellen Lee and Casey Lau produce “Weibo Today,” a
weekly YouTube video segment that reports on trends in China’s
microblogging services, or “weibos.” But the people behind these
projects are vastly outnumbered by Chinese translators working to
make the English-language Internet accessible to an audience of
over 400 million Chinese-speaking Internet users.
The Internet entrepreneur Zhang Lei began translating from
English to Chinese for the most personal of reasons: his father’s
death from lymphoma in 1996, the year Zhang came to the United
States as a student. “Since then I have been keeping watch on
materials about this disease in both Chinese and English on and off,”
he has said. “What struck me the most was that in English literature
lymphoma had been considered a curable disease, however that
critical piece of information was not available for Chinese patients.
This motivated me to discuss possible solutions to this problem with
my friends.”
Inspired by projects like Wikipedia, Zhang and two friends began a
project to allow people to work collaboratively on translations.
Yeeyan, their group translation site, was born in 2006. It began to
grow in earnest amid rising tensions between the United States and
China before the 2008 Olympics. Watching US media coverage
oscillate between the construction of stadiums, questions about
China’s human rights record, and clashes between Uighur protesters
and soldiers in Urumqi, in western China, Zhang saw clear evidence
of the ways in which Chinese and American audiences fail to
understand each other.
“I didn’t know what I could do,” he said in a presentation at the
2009 Chinese Internet Research Conference at the University of
Pennsylvania. “But I knew we could translate.” Yeeyan has over
210,000 registered volunteer translators who work together to
translate key English-language media into Chinese. Collectively, they
average a thousand translated stories per week. The contents vary,
but on an average day Yeeyan.org features stories from major
newspapers like the Guardian or the New York Times, from weekly
news magazines like Time or Newsweek (an unrelated team, the
Ecoteam, works on translating the Economist into Chinese each
week)19 and prominent websites like ReadWriteWeb. They’ve taken
on the translation of books as well, such as the US Federal
Emergency Management Agency’s Earthquake Search & Rescue
Manual and Earthquake Safety Manual in the aftermath of the 2008
Sichuan earthquake. And close to Zhang’s heart, the group has
translated a book called Getting Started with Lymphoma, which has
been downloaded by over 100,000 Chinese readers.
Yeeyan is likely to face complex copyright issues in the long run,
since some authors translated by Yeeyan may not want their content
translated into Chinese, especially if Yeeyan begins syndicating
content to Chinese newspapers and websites. But other publishers
have embraced the project enthusiastically. The Guardian began
pointing to Yeeyan’s translations as its official Chinese version in
2009, though it was forced to end the partnership shortly afterward.
If copyright hasn’t yet proven a major stumbling block for Yeeyan,
censorship has. Unlike Soong, who translates into English Chinese-
language content that has already been published in China, some of
Yeeyan’s English-language sources are regularly blocked in China.
Government officials shut the site down in December 2009 when
they grew concerned that the content translators were posting
violated local content guidelines. These guidelines change quickly
and are often ambiguous, but they are a fact of life for Chinese
media companies. After a difficult internal debate, Zhang and his
team decided to bring Yeeyan into compliance with local self-
censorship requirements. A team now reviews translations and stops
the publication of content likely to cause the project to be blocked.
“We communicate to our translators on individual basis when
sensitive translations can not be published and will only be stored as
draft for translators’ own record. This treatment is sadly the de facto
standard for UGC [user-generated content] sites operating within
China, therefore is accepted by community members,” explains
Zhang.
Inspiring as Yeeyan is, the site also poses a discomfiting question:
Where’s the English-language equivalent? The 210,000 volunteers
believe it’s important for Chinese audiences to understand what
English-language media are saying, and those volunteers donate
time to bridge barriers of language. Thousands of others are
involved in less-weighty types of translation, subtitling English-
language movies and television shows on sites like yyets.com. I find
it hard to believe that the Chinese-language Internet, where roughly
half of the over 400 million users create content via blogs or
microblogging services, produces so little content that Roland Soong
and a few dozen others can translate all that’s potentially interesting
to English-speaking audiences.
Of course, Yeeyan has an advantage over a parallel English-
language project, because many university degrees in China require
proficiency in English, creating a ready population of potential
translators. But we’ve not seen a project emerge in the United States
at the scale of Yeeyan to translate Spanish-language content, for
instance, even though many US high school students learn the
language and though a significant percentage of the US population
speaks Spanish as a first language and creates online content in that
tongue.
What amazes many people about Yeeyan—the willingness of
translators to work on a project like Yeeyan without direct financial
compensation—is well explained by scholars of open-source
software and of Wikipedia. While it’s possible for very experienced
translators to make a living translating online, and while a larger set
makes a few cents at a time translating through online labor markets
like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for Yeeyan’s translators, it’s closer to
being an avid hobby than a job. Zhang explains that a number of
other motivating factors come into play. Translators are looking for
experience, which they might leverage into well-paying jobs. But
they’re also motivated by recognition from the community, a sense of
accomplishment that comes from improving as a translator and from
enjoyment of the material they’re translating. The same motivations
that make community projects like open-source software and
Wikipedia possible seem to work with human translation. It’s a gift
culture, where status comes from providing the best gifts, the most
helpful translations. And giving conveys status. In his seminal Wealth
of Networks, Yochai Benkler recognizes this as “agonistic giving—
that is, giving intended to show that the person giving is greater than
or more important than others, who gave less.”20
Other communities that have succeeded with online translation
have embraced aspects of this model. The invitation-only TED—
Technology, Education, Design—conference began reaching beyond
the few thousand attendees who see talks delivered live (in English)
in Monterey, California, when TED’s media producer June Cohen
started publishing videos of the talks on the Internet in 2006.21 After
three years of publishing videos, June realized that many more
people would be interested in the lectures if they could watch them
with subtitles in their native language. She began paying a
transcription firm to produce high-quality English transcripts of the
talks and hired professional translators to produce subtitles in
Tagalog or Turkish.
Inspired in part by Global Voices’ success in using volunteers to
translate our online reporting, June began an experiment: she invited
volunteers to translate some talks, and hired professionals to work
on others, in order to set a high bar for quality. “As it turns out, the
volunteers have consistently produced translations that are as good
or better than those we paid for,” said June. “We were amazed.” TED
translators are not monetarily compensated for their work, but they
are widely celebrated, given near-equal billing on the website to the
speakers themselves, and the most prolific and successful
translators are invited to attend the conferences in person. What
makes the project work, June believes, is the combination of
community recognition of the importance of the effort and the fact
that translators choose what material they work on. “Translating a
talk you’re passionate about is fun, while translating one that bores
you is work.” As a result, the volunteer translation model works best
when the goal isn’t to translate everything but to prioritize the most
compelling material.
The power and reach of volunteer translation is surprising. Al
Gore’s 2008 TED talk on global warming, over an hour long, has
been translated into thirty-six languages and watched by 1.5 million
viewers. Two years into the project, TED translators produced
18,000 translations in eighty-one languages. The average talk is
translated into twenty-four languages within a few weeks. While only
about 10 percent of TED.com viewers watch talks with non-English
subtitles, that’s more than a million viewers a month. And TED
partners with Youku, the Chinese YouTube competitor, to show TED
talks with Chinese subtitles to millions more viewers.
Translation via the volunteer models is powerful, but it’s not quick.
It may allow Arabic speakers to understand an English-language
lecture, but they must wait days or weeks until an Arabic translator
takes on the task of localizing the piece. And the translation of the
talk doesn’t help them participate in the online discussions that erupt
when a new talk is posted. What we really want are translations that
are as nuanced and accurate as those produced by TED or Global
Voices translators and as fast as Google Translate.
Ed Bice’s Meedan.net project is an online space where Arabic and
English speakers can interact on common linguistic ground, thanks
to both machine and human translation. The word “Meedan” means
“public square” in Arabic, and the project attempts to create an
online public space for conversations between English and Arabic
speakers, a small online community focused on discussing current
events in the Middle East in Arabic and English. Articles posted to
the site from online news sources are automatically translated
between Arabic and English by means of machine translation.
Comments on stories can be posted in English or Arabic, and they
are automatically translated after posting. These machine
translations are considered the first step within the Meedan
community; volunteers look for new stories or comments and “clean
up,” or sometimes thoroughly revise, the machine translations that
have been posted. Machine translation allows a conversation to
unfold in real time, involving speakers of two languages. Human
translation makes that conversation more readable and creates a
permanent record that turns the conversation into an online
resource.
If Bice’s hopes for increasing English/Arabic dialogue through
translation are ambitious, they pale in comparison with Luis von
Ahn’s plans for Duolingo. Von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, is an expert in the emerging field of “human computation.”
Human computation uses the skills of thousands of human beings,
working in parallel, to solve problems that are difficult for computers
to solve. Von Ahn is best known for the “reCAPTCHA,” which you’ve
likely seen on the comment form of websites. The reCAPTCHA asks
you to transcribe two words to demonstrate that you are a human
being and not a computer program. In the process, you’re helping
transcribe scanned book pages, one word at a time. reCAPTCHAs
were transcribing the equivalent of 160 books per day in 200822 and
are now correcting errors in the Google Books project, Google’s vast
effort to scan the contents of major university libraries.
If humans can decipher ambiguous scanned words and transcribe
books, why can’t they translate documents? Von Ahn asked his
graduate student Severin Hacker, “How can we get 100 million
people translating the Web into every major language, for free?”23
The answer they came up with involves encouraging millions of
people to learn a second language. Join Duolingo, and you’ll be
invited to learn Spanish, French, or German. The sentences you
translate at first are simple and formulaic, but as you improve, you’ll
be invited to translate sentences from live web pages.
Should you trust someone who’s just learning Spanish to translate
a web page for you? Von Ahn’s algorithms help merge the judgments
of dozens of inexperienced translators into a translation he claims
rivals the quality of a professional translator’s. Scale is on his side,
because 30 million people solve reCAPTCHAs a day. If only a small
percentage of those users decide to learn a new language, von Ahn
believes, he’ll be able to translate the English Wikipedia into Spanish
in less than a week.24

Digital Extinction?

While Yeeyan and TED prove that volunteers can produce high-
quality translation of newspaper stories and academic lectures, and
Meedan suggests that a combination of machine and human
translation could enable real-time communication across languages,
the really exciting possibility comes in bringing these methods
together. For machine translation to work, programmers need large
corpora of material translated between a pair of languages. While
the amount of text translated by Global Voices or TED is currently a
small fraction of the text necessary to build a statistical machine
translation system, a partnership between translation communities
and machine translation experts might generate corpora where few
other options exist. The four thousand translations produced by
Global Voices Malagasy, totaling 300,000 words, amount to only 1.2
percent of the size of the Europarl corpus (one of the key sources for
parallel corpora, derived from European parliamentary
proceedings)25 and are likely too small for an accurate machine
translation system. On the other hand, it’s probably the largest
available corpus that translates between English and Malagasy.
Google’s ambitions to index and make available all the world’s
knowledge means it has to take seriously the existence of any
corpora for African languages. For the vast search engine to keep
growing internationally, it must provide services to hundreds of
milions of people for whom English, French, and Portuguese are
second languages. According to Denis Gikunda, who leads African-
language initiatives for the company, Google plans to offer
translation services, interfaces, and content in over one hundred
African languages that have at least one million speakers, including
Meru, his native tongue, which is spoken in the area near Mount
Kenya.26 For now, Google is focusing on bigger languages—Swahili,
Amharic, Wolof, Hausa, Afrikaans, Zulu, Setswana, and Somali, all
of which have at least ten million speakers.
 In order for Google or others to translate Malagasy, they need
more than a set of pages translated between English or French and
Malagasy; they require piles of data to build a Malagasy “language
model.” In other words, for Malagasy to be translatable through
statistical machine translation, a great deal written in Malagasy must
be available online or easily digitized. That presents a problem.
Consider the Malagasy Wikipedia, which contains roughly 25,000
articles. That makes it the seventy-fifth-largest Wikipedia in the
world, and the second-largest in an African language. Many of the
potential contributors to the project are well-educated people from
Madagascar who also speak French fluently. The French Wikipedia
has fifty times as many articles and a vastly larger audience. A
Wikipedian looking to have her contribution read and appreciated is
likely to contribute in French.
Lova Rakotomalala, a contributor to the Malagasy Wikipedia,
explains the catch-22: “My hunch is that people are not using the
(smaller language versions of) Wikipedia because of a vicious cycle.
People don’t want to create the content because no one is reading,
and no one is reading because there is no content.” Like the
Jordanian bloggers who wrote in English to reach a global audience,
Malagasy speakers have a strong incentive to write in French. And
unless they write in their native language, there may not be a tipping
point, as there was in the Arab blogosphere.
This would be more discouraging if Rakotomalala weren’t deeply
engaged in expanding the amount of Malagasy content available
online, both through Wikipedia and through Global Voices, where he
cofounded our Malagasy-language edition. But his comment helps
elucidate the complicated issues that surround hopes for a polyglot
Internet. If Malagasy speakers post more content online, more
Malagasy speakers are likely to create content in their native
language. With more content—and especially more content in
translation—online, Google and others may be able to build machine
translation systems, which in turn means that content available only
in Malagasy can be read by people who don’t know the language.
If Malagasy speakers decide, instead, to create content in French,
looking for a larger audience, they may suffer another problem.
Projects like the English- and French-language Wikipedias are
reaching “maturity”; the sites contain so many articles that
experienced editors now reject at least as many new articles as they
accept. Articles on important aspects of Madagascar’s geography,
fauna, and culture may be enormously significant to people in that
country, but might not meet Wikipedia’s “notability” threshold for
inclusion in the French Wikipedia. In a Malagasy Wikipedia, local
knowledge is an obvious candidate for inclusion; in a larger, more
global Wikipedia, the same information might not merit an article.
The existence or nonexistence of a single article in Wikipedia may
not represent a cultural crisis. But the extinction of languages merits
our attention. The anthropologist Wade Davis notes that half of the
world’s six thousand languages are no longer being taught to
schoolchildren. Without another generation of native speakers, most
will die out.27 Those concerned about language extinction worry that
culturally dominant neighbors will force out smaller languages. The
five million speakers of Mayan often also speak Spanish, a global
language. It’s not hard to imagine those speakers deciding it’s to
their economic advantage to speak Spanish for the most part and let
Mayan slowly disappear.
The cases we’re considering here outline the force the digital
world can exert on language disappearance. If speakers don’t have
an incentive to create content in a language, we won’t have enough
content online to build translation models. The bits of Malagasy or
Mayan content online may remain linguistically “locked up,” available
only to native speakers and invisible to everyone else. We may be
facing a wave of digital language extinction, where some languages
have a large enough online presence to maintain a community and
develop a machine translation system, while others fall beneath that
threshold and never make a significant mark online.

Making Translation Transparent

The ability to translate a language, via automated systems or

volunteer translators, doesn’t guarantee that we’ll ever encounter
those translations. Roland Soong’s translation of the Qilu Evening
News story about Lanxiang Vocational was available online, but the
journalists writing about Chinese hackers didn’t find it. Search is
such an important discovery mechanism that for many of us,
information not easily accessible via a search engine doesn’t exist.
Crossing the barrier of language requires more than making
translation merely possible. It involves making language transparent.
At moments of crisis, we’re often reminded how powerful language
barriers can be. As Tunisia, Egypt, and then much of North Africa
and the Middle East exploded into popular protest in early 2011,
many fascinated readers turned to Twitter for real-time reporting and
commentary. Much of what was most interesting on Twitter was
written in Arabic, not in English. Some extraordinary reporters, like
Dima Khatib, Al Jazeera’s Latin America bureau chief, acted as real-
time translators, posting in Arabic, English, and Spanish to reach a
broad swath of users.
Andy Carvin, NPR’s strategist for social media, put all other work
aside for the first months of 2011 and dedicated himself to covering
these struggles via online media. His Twitter feed, followed by over
25,000 readers around the world, frequently included pleas for help
in translating a slogan shouted in Tahrir Square or a tweet by a
Tunisian dissident. Since such a wide audience followed his
aggregation, translations often appeared seconds later, and Carvin
immediately reposted the information. Danny O’Brien, an advocate
for online free speech with the Committee to Protect Journalists,
automated the process by writing a simple tool—a web browser
extension—that adds a “translate” button to Twitter beside each
tweet, allowing an interested reader to quickly read a machine
translation of an otherwise unreadable post.
Carvin’s and O’Brien’s methods work well when we’re motivated to
seek out content in another language. But we’re still more likely to
decide to follow a Twitter friend who speaks in a language we
understand. Until language becomes entirely transparent, it will
shape whom we choose to listen to and whom we ignore.
Google is taking steps to try to make translation more transparent
across its products. When you load a page in Google’s Chrome web
browser, the program tries to detect what language it’s written in and,
if the language isn’t your default, offers a machine translation of the
content. You can disable this feature, accept translations as they’re
offered, or tell Chrome always to translate content in a particular
language into your native tongue. My installation of Chrome now
renders pages in Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic into English for me
by default, and I’ve discovered that I no longer instinctively reach for
the back button in my browser when I stumble off the comfortable
path of English-language pages. The translations offered can be
hard to read, but at minimum I have a sense of what topics they’re
covering and whether I might beg a multilingual friend for a more
readable translation. Google’s Gmail service now operates in a
similar way, offering to seamlessly translate email you receive written
in languages you don’t read.
But Google faces a larger challenge. For language to recede as a
major barrier online, translation needs to move from the browser into
the search engine. When we look for information through most
search engines, the language we use to build a query limits the
results we get. Search Google in the United States for “apple” and
you won’t get the same results as you would get by searching for the
Spanish equivalent, “manzana,” on Google.mx. This makes sense,
of course—many of the people searching in the United States would
prefer English-language results. But this limitation can constrain
what information is available.
Ivan Sigal, Global Voices’ executive director, is a serious amateur
cyclist. When he bought a secondhand, handmade bicycle frame
made by an obscure, defunct German manufacturer called
Technobull, he immediately wanted to learn more about his new ride
and other folks who rode the same brand. Searching for information
on Google.com, he found virtually nothing, a few dozen pages in
English referencing the brand as elite and expensive and one page
of Flickr images. So he turned to Google.de and discovered
thousands of pages, including an active online forum of riders who
venerate Technobull cycles. Ivan speaks a little German, and some
of the riders were willing to answer his questions and help him out.
The information Ivan needed was in German, not English, and
Google.com wasn’t able to help him find what he needed.
Yet, Google’s director of product management, Anjali Joshi, wants
to make sure that language isn’t an insurmountable barrier to sharing
knowledge. “A person in Korea, or any part of the world, should have
access to all information on the web in their language, rendered
perfectly, in a way that’s readable, understandable, findable.” This
goes beyond a search for apples that looks for results in English,
Spanish, and Korean: “Eventually we want people to be able to
converse with each other, to move seamlessly between languages in
spoken and written language.”
Despite Google’s dramatic progress in translation, this remains a
long path. (Google can translate between English and sixty other
languages. Translations from Icelandic to Yiddish, for instance, go
through English as a “bridge language.”) “There are three keys to
getting there,” Joshi tells me. “We need excellent machine translation
first. Then we need perfect search results across all languages.” In
other words, we have to have search algorithms that can decide
whether a translation of a Spanish page on manzanas or an English
page on apples was the better search result.
Joshi’s colleagues, sitting with us in a Mountain View conference
room, look slightly nervous about the challenges of achieving her
vision as she leans back in her chair and offers the third step. “Once
you can search in every language, and you have perfect translation,
you have the best content for everyone on the web. That would be
Nirvana.”
I think Joshi is partly right. Even if we have perfect, multilingual
search, we face another challenge: understanding the implications
and importance of what a person is saying. To discover information
from different parts of the world, we need more than excellent
translation: we must understand the context of the words we
encounter. The path toward Nirvana is a long one, and along the way
we need guides who can put our discoveries in context.
 TAKEN IN CONTEXT

THE EARLY 1980S WEREN’T ESPECIALLY KIND TO PAUL SIMON. He ushered in

the second decade of his post–Simon & Garfunkel life with One Trick
Pony, a forgettable companion album to a forgettable film starring his
former musical partner, Art Garfunkel. When a 1981 reunion concert
with Garfunkel brought 500,000 people to New York’s Central Park,
and sold over two million albums in the United States, the two began
touring together. But “creative differences” brought the arrangement
to a premature end, and a planned Simon & Garfunkel album
became a Simon solo release, Hearts and Bones, that was the
lowest-charting of his career. With the breakup of his marriage to the
actress Carrie Fisher, “I had a personal blow, a career setback and
the combination of the two put me into a tailspin,” Simon told his
biographer Marc Eliot.1
During this dark period, Simon was mentoring a young Norwegian
songwriter, Heidi Berg. Berg gave Simon a cassette of mbaqanga
music featuring musicians from Soweto, then the most notorious
blacks-only township in apartheid South Africa. While the identity of
the album Simon heard is uncertain,2 it likely featured the Boyoyo
Boys, a popular Sowetan band, and listening to the cassette in his
car, Simon began writing new melody lines and lyrics on top of the
sax, guitar, bass, and drums of their existing tracks.
“What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting
and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make
a record of that song. And if I couldn’t find the right musicians or I
couldn’t find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good
song and a kind of mediocre record,” Simon told Billboard
magazine’s Timothy White. “I set out to make really good tracks, and
then I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that I can
reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.’”3
In the hopes of working this new way, Simon appealed to his
record company, Warner Bros., to set up a recording session with
the Boyoyo Boys. In 1985, that was far from an easy task. Since
1961, the British Musicians Union had maintained a cultural boycott
of South Africa, managed by the UN Center against Apartheid. The
boycott was designed to prevent musicians from performing at South
African venues like Sun City, a hotel and casino located in the
nominally independent bantustan of Bophuthatswana, an easy drive
from Johannesburg and Pretoria. But the boycott covered all aspects
of collaborations with South African musicians, and Simon was
warned that he might face censure for working in South Africa.
When Simon turned to Warner Bros. for help, the company called
Hilton Rosenthal. Then managing an independent record label in
South Africa, Rosenthal had in the past worked with Johnny Clegg
and Sipho Mchunu, the two musicians who became the heart of
Juluku, a racially integrated band that electrified traditional Zulu
music and brought it to a global audience. Rosenthal’s label had
partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute Juluku’s records in the
United States, so Warner executives knew he could help Simon
navigate a relationship with South African musicians.
As a white South African who’d recorded a highly political, racially
integrated band in apartheid Johannesburg, Rosenthal was aware of
some of the difficulties Simon might face in recording with Sowetan
musicians. He assured Simon that they would find a way to work
together and sent him a pile of twenty South African records, both
mbaqanga acts and choral groups including Ladysmith Black
Mambazo. Then he arranged a meeting with his friend and producer
Koloi Lebona, who set up a meeting with the black musicians’ union,
to discuss whether members should record with Simon.
The musicians had reason to be skeptical of such a collaboration.
They had previously crossed paths with one of popular music’s great
appropriators, Malcolm McLaren. McLaren is best known as the
Svengali behind the Sex Pistols, assembling the seminal punk band
at his London clothing boutique. The controversial, explosive, brief,
and ultimately tragic career of the Sex Pistols launched McLaren as
a musical innovator and provocateur.
For his next act, McLaren didn’t bother to build a band. Duck
Rock, released in 1983, is a complex and compelling pastiche of
influences from around the globe: American folk, early hip-hop, Afro-
Caribbean, and lots and lots of mbaqanga music. “Double Dutch,” an
ode to African American jump rope culture, is built around an
instrumental track, “Puleng,” by the Boyoyo Boys. McLaren didn’t
credit the Boyoyo Boys for the track, claiming he’d authored it with
the Yes bass player Trevor Horn.4 The album borrowed heavily from
other South African acts, including Mahlathini and the Mahotella
Queens, who also worked unpaid and uncredited.
When Simon approached Rosenthal about recording with the
Boyoyo Boys, the band was in the early stages of a lawsuit
attempting to get royalties from McLaren.5 But Rosenthal and
Lebona encouraged the collaboration, and a majority of the black
musicians’ union agreed to invite Simon to South Africa to record.
They worried that the UN cultural boycott was preventing mbaqanga
music from taking its place on the global stage, as Jamaican reggae
had done. Realizing that Simon’s stature could bring a great deal of
attention to the local musical scene, they voted to work with him.
The sessions that Rosenthal and Lebona organized led to
Graceland, one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. It won
Grammy awards in 1986 and 1987, topped many critics’ charts and
regularly features on “top 100 albums of all time” lists. It also made a
great deal of money for Simon and the musicians he worked with,
selling over sixteen million copies. South African songwriters share
credits and royalties with Simon on half of the album’s tracks, and
Simon paid session musicians three times the US pay scale for
studio musicians. Many involved with the project, including
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, drummer Isaac Mtshali, and guitarist
Ray Phiri went on to successful international music careers.
At its best, Graceland sounds as if Simon is encountering forces
too large for him to understand or control. He’s riding on top of them,
offering free-form reflections on a world that’s vastly more
complicated and colorful than the narrow places he and Art
Garfunkel explored in their close harmonies. The days of miracle and
wonder Simon conjures up in “The Boy in the Bubble” are an
excellent metaphor for anyone confronting our strange, connected
world.
Collaborations like Graceland don’t happen without the
participation of two important types of people: xenophiles and bridge
figures. Xenophiles, lovers of the unfamiliar, are people who find
inspiration and creative energy in the vast diversity of the world.
They move beyond an initial fascination with a cultural artifact to
make lasting and meaningful connections with the people who
produced the artifact. Xenophiles aren’t just samplers or bricoleurs
who put scraps to new use; they take seriously both forks of Kwame
Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitans: they recognize the value of
other cultures, and they honor obligations to people outside their
own tribe, particularly the people they are influenced and shaped by.
Simon distinguishes himself from McLaren by engaging with South
African musicians as people and by becoming an advocate and
promoter of their music.6
Unlike xenophiles, outsiders who seek inspiration from other
cultures, bridge figures straddle the borders between cultures,
figuratively keeping one foot in each world. Hilton Rosenthal was
able to broker a working relationship between a white American
songwriter and dozens of black South African musicians during
some of the most violent and tense moments of the struggle against
apartheid. As a bridge, Rosenthal was an interpreter between
cultures and an individual both groups could trust and identify with,
an internationally recognized record producer who was also a
relentless promoter of South Africa’s cultural richness. Rosenthal, in
turn, credits Koloi Lebona with building the key bridges between
black musicians and the South African recording community.

Bridge Figures

The Chinese activist and journalist Xiao Qiang and I started using
the term “bridging” to describe the work bloggers were doing in
translating and contextualizing ideas from one culture into another.
Shortly afterward, the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan gave a
memorable talk at the Berkman Center as part of the Global Voices
inaugural meeting. Hossein explained that, in 2004, blogs in Iran
acted as windows, bridges, and cafés, offering opportunities to catch
a glimpse of another life, to make a connection to another person, or
to convene and converse in a public space. I’ve been using the term
“bridgeblogger” ever since for people building connections between
different cultures by means of online media, and “bridge figures” to
describe people engaged in the larger process of cultural translation,
brokering connections and building understanding between people
from different nations.
To understand what’s going on in another part of the world often
requires a guide. The best guides have a deep understanding of
both the culture they’re encountering and the culture they’re rooted
in. This understanding usually comes from living for long periods in
close contact with different cultures. Sometimes this is a function of
physical relocation—an African student who pursues higher
education in Europe, an American Peace Corps volunteer who
settles into life in Niger semipermanently. It can also be a function of
the job you do. A professional tour guide who spends her days
leading travelers through Dogon country may end up knowing more
about the peculiarities of American and Australian culture than a
Malian who lives in New York City or Sydney but interacts primarily
with fellow immigrants.
My friend Erik Hersman is an American, a former Marine, who
lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya. The child of American Bible
translators, Hersman grew up in southern Sudan and in the Rift
Valley of Kenya. After school and military service, Erik ran a
technology consultancy in Orlando, Florida, making regular trips to
East Africa to document technological innovation on the blog
Afrigadget. He then moved to Nairobi to lead the *iHub, a technology
incubator in central Nairobi designed to nurture Internet-based start-
ups.
Erik is able to do things most Americans aren’t able to do. He can
wander around Gikomba in Nairobi and talk to local metalworkers in
Swahili for a blog post about African hacking, because he’s a
Kenyan. And he can help Kenyan geeks develop a business plan to
pitch a software venture to international investors because he’s an
American geek. Lots of people have one of these skill sets, but
bridge figures are lucky enough to have both.
The sociologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem uses the term “third culture
kid” to describe individuals like Erik who were raised both in the
home culture of their parents and in the culture of the places where
they grew up. Useem argues that kids raised in this way end up
developing a third culture by combining elements of their “birth”
culture and the local culture they encounter. Children who go through
this process—the kids of military personnel, missionaries, diplomats,
and corporate executives—often have more in common with each
other than with other kids from their birth culture. Researchers
working in the same vein as Useem’s have found evidence that
some third culture kids are often well adapted to live and thrive in a
globalized world. Frequently they’re multilingual as well as
multicultural, and are very good at living and working with people
from different backgrounds. As a downside, some third culture kids
report feeling that they’re not really at home anywhere, in either their
parents’ culture or the culture they were raised in.
While Useem’s research focuses primarily on North Americans
and Europeans growing up in other parts of the world, international
patterns of education and migration are giving people from many
nations the opportunity to become bridge figures. Hundreds of the
individuals who write or translate for Global Voices are citizens of
developing nations who’ve lived or worked in wealthier nations,
learned new languages, and absorbed new cultures as students,
migrants, or guest workers.
Merely being bicultural isn’t sufficient to qualify you as a bridge
figure. Motivation matters as well. Bridge figures care passionately
about one of their cultures and want to celebrate it to a wide
audience. One of the profound surprises for me in working on Global
Voices has been discovering that many of our community members
are motivated not by a sense of postnationalist, hand-holding
“Kumbaya”-singing, small-world globalism but by a form of
nationalism. Behind their work on Global Voices often lies a passion
for explaining their home cultures to the people they’re now living
and working with. As with Erik’s celebration of Kenyan engineering
creativity, and Rosenthal’s passion for the complexity and beauty of
South African music, the best bridge figures are not just interpreters
but also advocates for the creative richness of other cultures.

The Taliban, McDonald’s, and Curried Goat

What happens when people encounter another culture for the first
time? Will we find a bridge figure to help us navigate these
encounters? How often do we embrace the unfamiliar as xenophiles,
and how often do we recoil and “hunker down,” as Robert Putnam
observes?
It’s a question as old as the Odyssey, where Odysseus’s
encounters with people of other lands remind readers that his name,
in Greek, means “he who causes pain or makes others angry.”7 For
all the kindly Phaeacians who sail Odysseus back to Ithaca, there
are Cyclopes who eat men and destroy ships. When we encounter
new cultures, should we expect cooperation or conflict?
The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart consider
this ancient question through the lens of media. In their book
Cosmopolitan Communications, they look at what happens when
people encounter different cultures through television, film, the
Internet, and other media. Their exploration starts by examining the
introduction of television to the small, isolated Buddhist nation of
Bhutan in 1999. Prior to 1999, television had been illegal in Bhutan,
though a small number of people had televisions and rented Hindi-
language videocassettes to watch at home. In June 1999, King
Jigme Singye Wangchuck allowed Bhutanese to begin watching
television and to connect to the Internet. Two Bhutanese
businessmen soon formed Sigma Cable, which by May 2002 offered
forty-five Indian and American channels to about four thousand
households.8
Almost immediately after the introduction of television, Bhutanese
journalists started reporting on an apparent crime wave, including
drug offenses, fraud, and murder. Bhutanese schoolchildren began
watching professional wrestling and practicing body slams on fellow
students in the schoolyard. The situation escalated into a moral
panic, as citizens and journalists speculated that television morality
would overwhelm Bhutanese values and traditions.
Bhutanese authorities had hoped that a local public broadcaster,
charged with producing educational content about Bhutanese
traditions, would help temper the influence of foreign media. But the
broadcaster was slow to produce programming, and the Hindi soap
operas and British news programs offered via cable television were
far more popular. By 2006, the government had created a new
ministry to regulate media, which promptly banned sports and
fashion channels as well as MTV on the grounds that they had “no
suffering alleviation value.”9 Worried that television was teaching
young Bhutanese to stay at home and watch soap operas, the
nation’s health and education minister embarked on a fifteen-day,
560-kilometer trek to warn his citizens against indolence: “We used
to think nothing of walking three days to see our in-laws. Now we
can’t even be bothered to walk to the end of Norzin Lam high
street.”10
Television’s apparent transformation of Shangri-la into a land of
violent, criminal couch potatoes expresses one set of fears
associated with cross-cultural encounter. Western media are so
powerful and insidious, this argument goes, that a fragile culture like
Bhutan’s can’t possibly hope to compete. Faced with American Idol,
Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s, Bhutan’s culture will inevitably
capitulate to the dominant, Western culture unless governments
aggressively intervene.
Norris and Inglehart argue that there are at least three other
possible outcomes to these types of encounters: resistance,
synthesis, and disengagement. We might see one culture violently
reject another, which they term “the Taliban effect.” The banning of
Western music and movies in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan
and the violent opposition to secular education in northern Nigeria by
Boko Haram are both examples of the ways encountering another
culture might lead to polarization instead of extinction at the hands of
a dominant culture. So too can dominant cultures polarize in the face
of perceived invasion or threat: when the city of Nashville,
Tennessee, tried to ban the use of languages other than English in
city buildings, it signaled a retreat from tolerance in the face of the
perceived threat of immigration.11
Happier possibilities exist. We can imagine “a blending of diverse
cultural repertoires through a two-way flow of global and local
information generating cross-border fertilization, mixing indigenous
customs with imported products.”12 Consider curry, where encounter
between the food of the Indian subcontinent and the rest of the world
has led to syncretic cuisine like Japanese kare-pan (curry-stuffed
bread), Trinidadian curried goat, or that paragon of British cuisine,
the curry jacket potato. Cultural encounter can lead to creative
fusions that honor both cultures while creating something
unexpected and new.
We could also encounter another culture, shrug our collective
shoulders, and conclude, “That’s not for us.” Norris and Inglehart call
this “the firewall theory,” and suggest that deeply rooted cultural
attitudes and values are quite robust when confronted with other
cultures through the flows of media and communication. These
values act as a “firewall,” allowing some influences to pass through
and others to be filtered out. The researchers find ample evidence
that cultural values—as measured by instruments like the World
Values Survey—are quite slow to change, even when countries are
well connected through media technologies. South Africa, for
instance, has become much more connected to global media and
economics since the fall of apartheid, but the World Values Survey
finds evidence for the survival of conservative social values during
this period of sharp change.13
This finding is good news for anyone concerned about the youth of
Bhutan. It’s also consistent with the effects of homophily on social
and professional media. Being connected to global flows of
information doesn’t guarantee that we’ll feel their influence over and
above the influences of homegrown media, or the preferences of
friends and family. But it presents a challenge to those who believe
that cultural encounter can lead to outcomes as banal as revitalized
pop careers and improvements in snack food, or as significant as
novel solutions to global problems like climate change. Creative
fusion may happen by accident, but it’s far from guaranteed. If we
want the benefits that come from sharing ideas across borders, we
need to work to make it happen.

Weak Ties or Bridge Ties?

Who’s most likely to help you find a new job—a close friend you talk
to every week, or an acquaintance you see a few times a year? The
close friend has more motivation to help with your job search, but he
probably knows many of the same people you do. The acquaintance
has connections to different social networks and is likely to know of
opportunities you haven’t already encountered. In fact, many
important contacts come through people whom job seekers barely
know or have fallen out of touch with—old college friends, former
colleagues. That’s the conclusion the sociologist Mark Granovetter
reaches in his widely cited paper “The Strength of Weak Ties.” In his
words, “It is remarkable that people receive crucial information from
individuals whose very existence they have forgotten.”
Granovetter’s finding has been so widely popularized that it’s
become standard job-seeking advice. The popular social-networking
site LinkedIn appears to exist primarily to allow cultivation of these
weak ties for job seeking. Malcolm Gladwell brought Granovetter’s
insight to a wide audience in his best-selling book The Tipping Point,
where he observes, “Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of
social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more
powerful you are.”14 Gladwell uses this insight to identify
“connectors,” people with vast social networks, who he believes are
a key to understanding how to successfully market and spread an
idea. The success of Gladwell’s popularization has made weak ties
one of the best-known ideas from contemporary sociology.
Despite the apparent familiarity of the idea, it’s worth returning to
Granovetter’s original paper to understand that not all weak ties are
created equal. “The Strength of Weak Ties” begins with an analysis
of sociograms, graphs of social networks. Granovetter is interested
in bridge ties—“a line in a network which provides the only path
between two points.” These ties are important because they are the
choke points in the flow of information and influence. Diffusion of
ideas through a network depends on these bridge ties.
Granovetter’s bridge ties have much in common with the bridge
figures we’re considering—they are part of two different social circles
and can broker ideas between these networks—but bridge ties exist
in social networks of people who share the same country and
culture. The friend at a cocktail party who introduces you to a
stranger who lives in the same building you do is a bridge tie.
It’s difficult to ask an individual to identify the bridge ties in her
social network. Answering the question requires knowledge you may
not have—for example, that your friend Jane is well connected to a
group of Latvian jugglers and could bridge between your social
network and theirs. Because sociologists cannot easily study bridge
ties through their usual survey methods, Granovetter proposes they
study weak ties instead. His logic? Strong ties—ties between people
who confide in each other, who see each other at least weekly—are
never bridge ties. Here Granovetter relies on Georg Simmel’s work
on closure. If I’m close friends with Jim and with Jane, Simmel
postulates, the two will feel intense social pressure to become
friends. This is what explains why all the West African students at the
college Wimmer and Lewis studied in their Facebook experiment are
friends—it would be impolite not to be.
Closure is such a powerful effect, Granovetter believes, that he
gives a special name to the situation in which I have strong ties to
Jim and to Jane, and they have no ties to each other: “the forbidden
triad.” Because it’s “forbidden” for two of my close friends to be
disconnected from each other, strong ties don’t serve as bridge ties;
if you and I are closely tied, I’m likely to already know the people you
are strongly linked to. Weak ties suffer no such restriction, though
they are certainly not automatically bridges. What is important,
rather, is that all bridges are weak ties. If we want to find the places
in social networks where we could find connections to unexpected
groups, we need to look beyond our closest friends and toward our
weak social ties.
Granovetter’s assumptions about strong ties may have been true
in 1973 when he wrote the paper, but they are more questionable
today. My wife, a congregational rabbi in our small town, is linked to
hundreds of people in our geographic community and hundreds
more through online discussions that let her interact with other
congregational leaders around the world. Her strong ties in the
geographic community may feel pressure to become friends with one
another, but her online strong ties feel no pressure to know her local
friends. This is not an uncommon pattern in today’s age of social
media: 50 percent of adult users of social media report a major
reason for use is connecting with friends they’ve fallen out of touch
with or are geographically distant from. Some 14 percent report
using social media to connect with others who share an interest or
hobby with them, maintaining ties that are geographically
independent.15 In an age of digitally mediated friendships, it’s quite
possible—and likely quite common—for strong ties to be bridge
ties.16
Ultimately it’s the bridge ties that matter even to Granovetter’s
analysis. He closes his paper with a look at two communities in
Boston and their fights against urban renewal. The Italian community
in the West End wasn’t able to organize in opposition, while a
similarly working-class community in Charlestown successfully
opposed redevelopment. The difference, he concludes, is in the
structure of friendships in those communities. West Enders belonged
to tight cliques of friends, often people who’d grown up together.
They worked outside the neighborhood and maintained close social
ties to these friends in the community. Charlestown residents, by
contrast, worked largely within the neighborhood, which gave them a
chance to meet other Charlestown residents who weren’t in their
immediate circles of friends.
It’s not that West Enders lacked weak ties. “It strains credulity to
suppose that each person would not have known a great many
others, so that there would have been some weak ties. The question
is whether such ties were bridges.” When it came time to organize,
Charlestown residents had bridge ties—from work and voluntary
organizations—within their neighborhood, while West Enders didn’t.
Granovetter speculates, “The more local bridges (per person?) in a
community and the greater their degree, the more cohesive the
community and the more capable of acting in consort.”
 It’s not simply the number of acquaintances that represent power,
as Gladwell posits. It’s also their quality as bridges between different
social networks. Lots of friends who have access to the same
information and opportunities are less helpful than a few friends who
can connect you to people and ideas outside your ordinary orbit.

Bridge Figures and Creativity

Weak ties may be able to help you find a job, especially if those ties
are colleagues within an industry sector. Bridge ties provide a
broader range of benefits. They’re often the source of innovative and
creative ideas.
Raytheon is the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor, a
multibillion-dollar company that builds everything from air traffic
control systems to guided missiles. Their Patriot missiles featured
prominently in the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, and in response to
sales requests from discerning governments around the world,
Raytheon began expanding, acquiring four major defense-
contracting businesses in the mid-1990s. Faced with the challenge
of integrating these companies, Raytheon executives launched a
close study of how ideas and best practices spread through
organizations.
Ronald Burt, a sociologist and business school professor at the
University of Chicago, was one of the thinkers they turned to. Burt
worked with Raytheon from 2000 to 2003, serving as vice president
of strategic learning, and testing his theories about social capital
within the framework of a large and complicated enterprise. Burt
believes that individuals who act as bridges between different social
networks within a company “are at higher risk of having good ideas.”
These bridge figures often end up as “brokers” between disparate
groups, sharing perspectives and different ways of thinking.
As a VP at Raytheon, Burt had freedom to design an unusual
experiment, relying on extraordinary cooperation from corporate
management. In 2001, he sent questionnaires to the 673 managers
who ran the supply chain for the company. He asked each to
document his or her connections to other people in the company with
whom he or she discussed “supply-chain issues.” A detailed
sociogram of Raytheon’s supply chain emerged. Burt calculated the
“network constraint” of everyone in the organization: managers who
spoke only to a densely connected network of co-workers, or who
interacted primarily through hierarchies, were highly constrained,
while those who connected with far-flung co-workers throughout the
organization were unconstrained.
Raytheon, Burt discovered, did a pretty good job of rewarding
managers who built bridges across “structural holes,” gaps in the
organization’s structure that prevented people from talking to one
another. The managers who were least constrained—the best
bridges—were better paid than their peers, more likely to be
promoted, and more likely to be evaluated as outstanding managers.
They were also more likely to have good ideas.
Burt asked the study participants to share an idea about improving
supply-chain processes at the company, then asked two senior
executives in charge of supply chains at Raytheon to evaluate the
ideas, stripped of all identifying information. Burt found small
correlations between the best ideas and employee age (employees
at the start and end of their careers had better ideas than those in
the middle) and education (college-educated employees had better
ideas than those with less education). But those effects were tiny in
comparison with the correlations Burt found with social structure.
“Even in the top ranks, people limited to a small circle of densely
interconnected discussion partners were likely to have weak ideas
for improving supply-chain operations,”17 while those connected to a
wide range of people were likelier to have better ideas, less likely to
have their ideas dismissed, and more likely to discuss their ideas
with others in the organization. The results were so pronounced that
Burt titled his paper, simply, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas.”
History celebrates the individual creativity of the solitary genius.
We remember Edison, not the thousands of engineers who worked
with him in Menlo Park. We can picture Einstein working alone at the
patent office, but not “the Olympia Academy,” a group of scholars he
regularly met with when he lived in Bern.18 Burt suggests that it
might be time to let go of the idea that creativity is a function solely of
personal genius. Good ideas, he argues, are a function of social
structure as well: “People connected to groups beyond their own can
expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be
gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is
creativity as an import-export business.”19
This import-export business works in multiple ways. At its simplest,
brokers make their colleagues aware of the interests and challenges
another group faces. Sometimes they’re able to transfer best
practices from one group to another. Higher levels of brokerage, Burt
suggests, involve drawing analogies between groups, escaping the
tendency to emphasize the differences between groups and instead
recognize similarities. At the highest level, brokers offer synthesis of
ideas between groups, novel solutions that combine thinking from
different groups. In other words, they make curry.
It’s worth remembering that the managers within Raytheon are
bridging between divisions in the same American company. When
Burt discusses cultural differences between groups, he’s talking
about differences between managers who purchase from outside
contractors and those who purchase from other departments within
Raytheon. And yet, despite the apparently low cultural barriers,
Raytheon has had a very hard time implementing the innovations
suggested by high-level bridge figures. Burt visited Raytheon a year
after his survey and asked another senior executive to look at the top
hundred ideas generated in his research—on eighty-four of the
ideas, no steps had been taken toward implementation. “There was
a brokerage advantage in producing ideas, and company systems
were working correctly to reward brokers … but the potential value
for integrating operations across the company was dissipated in the
distribution of ideas.” Bridge figures could identify opportunities for
Raytheon, but the corporation often wasn’t able to spread and adopt
those new ideas.20

The Foreign Correspondent as Bridge

If the “import-export” of ideas within a single company is

complicated, it’s vastly more complex when we consider the
challenges involved in encountering ideas from around the world.
The bridge figure seeking fusion between the best features of two
worlds may be brokering connections between people who speak
different languages or practice different faiths. While people who
work for the same company have (at least in theory) the common
mission of that corporation’s success, people in different parts of the
world may be working toward different, and sometimes competitive,
goals. The local biases of media attention and our personal
homophily mean we’re likely to encounter far more ideas from our
near neighbors than from other parts of the world.
For years, foreign correspondents have worked as bridge figures,
telling their audiences about the events, challenges, and attitudes of
the lands they’re living in. The first foreign correspondents were
literally letter writers, corresponding with friends back home. They
shared news from local newspapers and from what they saw in far-
flung cities, and their letters were printed as dispatches in early
newspapers. The hunger for international news in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries meant that American newspaper editors sent
copyboys to meet ships as they pulled into harbor, hoping to scoop
their competitors in providing the latest news from Paris, London,
and Amsterdam.
The arrival of the telegraph transformed the established model of
foreign correspondence. In 1850, Paul Julius Reuter left a job with
Agence France-Presse in Paris and moved to Aachen in the
kingdom of Prussia, close to the borders with the Netherlands and
Belgium. Using the newly completed Aachen–Berlin telegraph, and a
set of homing pigeons, he began reporting business news from
Brussels to readers in Berlin and transformed expectations about the
speed at which we encounter international news. The completion of
the telegraph line connecting the United States and Britain in 1857
began an age in which news could travel around the globe far faster
than human beings could.
Reuter made his fortune brokering international information that
required little context or interpretation: share prices from European
stock markets, dramatic news headlines like the assassination of
President Abraham Lincoln. More complex stories required context
and interpretation for audiences at home. William Howard Russell’s
lengthy dispatches from the Crimean War (1853–56) for the Times of
London established a model that informed foreign correspondence
for subsequent centuries. His missives weren’t intended to offer
breaking news. They arrived weeks later than shorter reports of
troop movements and battles fought.
Instead, Russell’s dispatches painted a vivid picture of conditions
on the ground for combatants and civilians, connecting British
readers to a conflict fought far from their shores. Historians credit the
power of Russell’s dispatches with inspiring Samuel Morton Peto and
other British railroad contractors to build a railway line to supply
soldiers in the siege of Sevastopol, now viewed as a turning point in
the war. And Florence Nightingale described Russell’s writing as her
inspiration to bring a group of nurses to tend to the Crimean War
wounded, greatly reducing the death rate in field hospitals and
reshaping models for contemporary nursing.
The need for connection and context remains in the age of
“parachute reporting,” where journalists armed with satellite uplinks
and video cameras were able to report from earthquake-ravaged
Port au Prince within hours of the devastating 2010 Haitian
earthquake. But most of those reporters spoke no Kreyòl and knew
little about Haiti before the quake. Much of the best reporting came
from journalists who’d lived and worked in Haiti before the quake,
writing for US and European newspapers, like Jacqueline Charles of
the Miami Herald. Charles, a Haitian and Turks Islander, began
working for the Herald as a high school intern in 1986. By the time
the 2010 quake struck, Charles had covered earlier Haitian disasters
that went largely unnoticed in the global media, like a set of tropical
storms that destroyed the town of Cabaret in 2008.
A native of the Caribbean who studied journalism in North
Carolina, Charles is exactly the sort of bridge figure we would expect
to be effective as a foreign correspondent. Her knowledge of US
audiences and Haitian realities allows her to explain events in terms
her audience will understand. Many news organizations have not yet
made the shift from the William Russell model—an Irishman
reporting on Crimea for British audiences—to a Charles model—a
Haitian educated in the United States, reporting on Haiti to an
audience in Miami. Traditionally, foreign correspondents have been
travelers from abroad, reporting news to audiences at home, not
locals writing for an international audience.
Solana Larsen, the Danish Puerto Rican managing editor of
Global Voices, picked a fight at a US journalism conference by
announcing her hope that foreign correspondents would become a
thing of the past and that media outlets would become more reliant
on local reporters, helping them contextualize their stories for global
audiences. Several journalists called her suggestion naïve and
irresponsible. But Richard Sambrook, then the head of global news
for the BBC, spoke in her defense. The BBC, he explained, was
moving away from parachute journalism and toward a future where
hundreds of local stringers reported for British and international
audiences.
The key is context. Without a clear understanding of what
audiences know and don’t know, stories from different parts of the
world can be completely incomprehensible.
We featured a cartoon on Global Voices in August 2010 that
depicted the Russian leader Vladimir Putin talking on a mobile
phone. We translated the Russian dialogue: “Abramovich? Hello!
Listen, do you have a rynda on your yacht? See, the thing is … You
have to return it.” Unless you follow Russian news very closely, you
probably need a translation of the translation.
In the summer of 2010, western Russia suffered a major heat
wave and a series of hundreds of wildfires. The fires destroyed the
homes and property of thousands of rural residents, and the smog
from the smoke, combined with the intense heat, led to the death of
many elderly and infirm city dwellers. Roughly 700 Muscovites died
per day in early August 2010, twice the normal death rate. The
insurance firm Munich Re estimates that 56,000 Russians died of
direct and indirect effects of the fires.
The Russian government, particularly Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin, came under intense criticism for its perceived inaction in the
face of the fires. A Russian blogger, “top-lap,” complained in a post
that his village was better prepared to fight these fires before the fall
of communism:
 Do you know why we’re burning? Because it is a fuck up. In my
village under communists—who are being criticized by everyone
now—there were three fire ponds, and a rynda that people
would ring in case of fire and—oh, miracle—fire truck, one for
three villages but at least there was a fire truck. And then
democrats came and that is when a fuckup started. They
leveled the fire ponds with the ground and sold that ground for
construction projects. They did something to the fire truck,
maybe aliens stole it, and the rynda was replaced (fucking
modernization) with a telephone that doesn’t work because they
forgot to connect it to the line.

Top-lap ended his diatribe with this demand: “Give me my fucking

rynda back and take your fucking telephone.” His post was spread
throughout the Russian Internet by Aleksey Venediktov, the editor in
chief of Russia’s most influential opposition radio station, Echo
Moskvy. Remarkably, Putin responded to the post, explaining that
unprecedented high temperatures had caused the fires and that the
government was working hard to respond to them. His message
closed with this assurance: “If you provide your address, you can
receive your rynda from your governor immediately.”21
Unsurprisingly, Russian bloggers had a field day with Putin’s
comments, and “rynda”— previously an archaic and rarely used term
for a small bell—emerged as a symbol of Russian dysfunction in an
age of crony capitalism. In the cartoon, Putin is calling Roman
Abramovich, the billionaire owner of the Chelsea Football Club.
Abramovich, a well-known and powerful oligarch, profited from the
collapse of the Soviet Union by purchasing valuable state-owned
assets, like the oil company Sibneft, at fire-sale prices. Asked to
bring top-lap’s rynda back, Putin is forced to call the oligarchs who
benefited from the end of the communist era.
The author who took on the challenge of explaining the cartoon,
bridging between Russian media and the global Internet, was Vadim
Isakov, an Uzbek blogger and journalist who, coincidentally, trained
at the same US journalism school as Jacqueline Charles. He has
worked as a Central Asian correspondent for Agence France-Presse
and as a media trainer in Uzbekistan and now teaches
communications at Ithaca College in New York. In other words, he’s
a bridge figure able to identify the features of the story that would
appeal to a Global Voices audience—the use of new media to
confront authority, humor, the spread of a meme online—and the
background necessary to understand and appreciate the cartoon.

Bridging in a Digital Age

For people like Vadim who are able to bridge Russian Internet humor
for international audiences, the Internet provides a rich set of tools.
Used well, they can give bridge figures superpowers.
In my explanation of the Putin/Rynda cartoon (stolen largely from
Vadim), I’ve opened by using a standard journalistic technique, the
“nut graf.” The nut graf is a quick summary of events that provide
context for a story. In a feature story, where an anecdote is used to
illustrate a larger event, the nut graf supplies the context; in my
example above, a paragraph about the Russian fires offers
background for the reader to understand the importance of the top-
lap anecdote. In news stories, the nut graf provides context to a
recent development: in a story about a vote on an immigration bill in
Congress, the nut graf might summarize debates over immigration
during the past few years.
Like many journalistic inventions, the nut graf is an elegant
adaptation to the limitations of the form. Space is scarce within the
pages of a newspaper, and the same story needs to inform both
someone who’s following a story obsessively and someone watching
it casually. Those limitations aren’t true for online media; a nut graf
can expand, accordionlike, into an “explainer.” The journalism
professor Jay Rosen unpacks the term: “An explainer is a special
feature that does not provide the latest news or update you on a
story. Rather, it addresses a gap in your understanding: the lack of
essential background knowledge, such that items in the news don’t
make sense, fail to register as important or add to the feeling of
being overwhelmed.”
To illustrate the explainer, Rosen points to “The Giant Pool of
Money,” an hourlong documentary produced by the radio program
This American Life. The documentary dives deep into the mortgage
crisis that rocked global financial markets in 2008, and it was the
most popular ever produced by This American Life. For Rosen, it
had another effect: “I became a customer for ongoing news about
the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. (How
one caused the other was explained in the program’s conclusion.)
’Twas a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for
information.”22
Without context, a news story can be overwhelming and
incomprehensible. It implicitly sends a message that we don’t know
enough about an issue to understand the story’s importance.
Participatory media—blog posts from unfamiliar countries, tweets
from protests or war zones—are even harder to understand. If we
can make rich, compelling explainers, timelines, and backgrounders,
Rosen argues, we can expand the audience for news stories that
often get ignored.
Sometimes the context for a story isn’t enough. Even in
translation, stories from other parts of the world can require
glossaries to make them understandable. This is particularly the
case in stories about the Internet in China, where fears of
government censorship encourage online authors to use sarcasm
and humor to get their points across.
The blog chinaSMACK offers English speakers an irreverent look
at the topics Chinese people are talking about in online forums, in
dorm rooms, and around dinner tables, with an emphasis on the
shocking, controversial, and weird. Few details are known about the
site’s editor, who goes by the pseudonym “Fauna.” She has told
reporters in email interviews that she’s female, from Shanghai, and
started translating posts from online forums in 2008 as a way to
refine her English skills.23 The site she now manages is viewed by
roughly a quarter million people a month, mostly in North America
and Europe. They visit china-SMACK in part because the site does
such an effective job of contextualizing the strange videos and
stories posted on the site.
A photo essay about migrant laborers in Guiyang who make their
living from picking through garbage, posted on the Netease web
portal, is translated on chinaSMACK, along with a sampling of the
comments posted on Netease.24 Most comments express sympathy
for the poor, suggesting campaigns to raise funds to pay for the
education of their children. Others have more complicated and
nuanced meanings:

These children may spend their entire lives without being able to
ride the high-speed trains, drink Maotai, nor will they be able to
take out money to donate to the Red Cross Society. Their hearts
are indeed pure, not feeling that what happens to them is unfair,
quietly accepting their reality, while us bystanders can only
express indignation towards the unfairness in this society….
Those in support please ding this more.

ChinaSMACK has helpfully hyperlinked the terms “high-speed

trains,” “Maotai,” and “Red Cross Society,” as well as the term “ding.”
The first three lead to collections of articles about recent scandals in
Chinese society: the crash of high-speed trains on the Ningbo–
Wenzhou line; a scandal regarding Sinopec’s corporate spending on
expensive rice wine; and stories about a wealthy twenty-year-old
woman, Guo Meimei, rumored to be central to a corruption case in
the Chinese Red Cross. “Ding” links to a glossary entry, explaining
the term’s similarity to clicking “like” on Facebook to promote a story
to a wider audience.
Decoded and contextualized, the pseudonymous comment is a
masterpiece of snark, inviting Chinese netizens to consider which
issues are worth getting outraged over and which should be
dismissed as trivial. With the explainer embedded into the article, a
story about scavenging in a garbage dump becomes an invitation to
follow links to other stories where terms have emerged, from articles
about Chinese support of charities in Africa to government spending
on the Shenzhen Universiade international sports competition.
The ability to traverse a set of hyperlinks is only one way in which
the Internet is especially fertile ground for contextual bridging. The
rise of photo- and video-sharing services allow bridge figures not just
to write about the places, people, and events essential to
understanding local context but also to show them. When I want to
explain the entrepreneurial culture of West Africa, I no longer have to
paint scenes of people carrying trade goods on their heads and
hawking them to passersby. I can search for “Ghana OR Nigeria
AND market” on Flickr and lead a reader through an impromptu slide
show of market cultures. None of the images in the streams are
mine; they’re posted by Ghanaians, Nigerians, and travelers to those
countries and shared under Creative Commons licenses, allowing
me to republish the images and credit the photographers without
paying licensing fees.
Participatory media’s power for bridging extends beyond A/V
show-and-tell. The people who write for Global Voices, bridging
between the communities they report on and audiences around the
world, tend to be fanatical users of social-networking tools like
Facebook and Twitter. If I find myself intrigued by Vadim Isakov’s
take on Russian social media, I can “friend” him on Twitter and see
what other stories he’s onto. Getting information about his likes and
interests aside from the stories he writes on Global Voices helps him
become more three-dimensional to me. When I hear stories about
Uzbekistan, I can connect them to a person I “know” through social
media, though I’ve never met him in person. I move a step closer to
solving “the caring problem,” and Vadim becomes a more effective
bridge for me because I understand his interests and foci and can
see what he might be emphasizing or missing in his accounts. I also
get the side benefit of catching glimpses of global media through the
eyes of an Uzbek professor, who’s likely to pay attention to some
stories I might have missed.
Being able to relate personally to a bridge figure can be a
complicated experience, especially when you’re building bridges
between people who’ve been at war.
Like many Armenians, the activist Onnik Krikorian didn’t know any
Azeris growing up. Although tensions between Armenians and
Azeris date back to pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century,
Krikorian’s generation remembers the Nagorno-Karabakh War,
where from 1988 to 1994 the countries fought over a disputed
province. The tensions around this stalled conflict create mistrust
between Azeris and Armenians; in a recent survey, members of both
groups overwhelmingly condemned the idea of making friends with
people from “the other side.”
The problem, Krikorian believes, is that there are so few spaces in
the physical world where Armenians and Azeris actually interact with
one another. On his blog, he writes movingly about teahouses in
Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, where Azeri singers perform Armenian
songs for a clientele that spans the Caucasus.
Since most youth in Armenia and Azerbaijan aren’t able to travel
or study abroad, Krikorian is encouraging connection in the one
space they have in common: Facebook. “Two years ago, an
Armenian befriending an Azeri on Facebook would have been
unthinkable,” Krikorian says. Through a set of online workshops,
video chats between members of the two communities, and endless
online and off-line diplomacy, Krikorian has helped encourage
contact between youth in the two countries. “We’re seeing simple
things—an Azeri wishing an Armenian friend happy birthday. But this
would have been impossible until very recently.”
Zamira Abbasova, an ethnic Azeri whose family fled Armenia
when she was four years old, encountered dozens of Armenians as
a student in the United States, but it took her years to “check the
expiration date on her hatred” and begin making friends.
“The difficult step is often to get people to acknowledge and
display the contacts that are taking place. When Zamira posted [on
Facebook] about losing her hatred for Armenians, she was flooded
with abusive email. Another participant received a death threat,
complete with a picture of a bloody corpse,” Krikorian explains. While
the Internet enables contact between people who’ve historically been
in conflict, it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll interact or that, when they
do, it will be positive. What Krikorian and friends are doing,
attempting to build bridges online, instead of in Georgian coffee
shops, is challenging and sometimes dangerous. Their form of
bridging requires a willingness to persist in the face of criticism,
resistance, and threats.

Human Libraries
I was recently in Nairobi, Kenya, researching the use of electric
power in poor neighborhoods. There are many good guidebooks to
Kenya, including ones that give overviews of “slum tours” to
neighborhoods like Kibera. But I’ve yet to find a guidebook or
website that could tell me how to visit dozens of shops in poor
neighborhoods and ask their owners whether they used grid or
generator power. For some questions, you don’t need an answer,
you need a guide.
If bridge figures are key to crossing contexts in a connected world,
the problem of finding an appropriate guide remains a tricky task. I
got lucky: one of my students was staying with a friend who
manages an arts center that works with youth in Nairobi’s poorest
neighborhoods. She found a musician from the Baba Dogo
neighborhood who led my students and me around, and translated
our nosy questions into ones shopkeepers were willing to answer.
To find a guide, I needed someone who understood my research
questions and who knew experts on neighborhoods in Nairobi. A
new wave of Internet services is trying to answer questions in a
similar way, posting your questions to a set of people, and trying to
find expert guides.
Prior to a recent trip to Adelaide, Australia, I posted a question to
Härnu, a new service named for the Swedish words for “here” and
“now.” I asked what websites I could read to understand local politics
in the city before talking to government officials, and within a few
hours, I had half a dozen suggestions. My question had been posted
to a virtual map, pinned to the city of Adelaide. Anyone was welcome
to field my question, but the answers came from Härnu users who
followed questions posted to South Australia. I’ve begun following
the site, trying to field inquiries posted to western Massachusetts and
West Africa, two areas I’m knowledgeable about.
Had I wanted an “expert” answer to my question, I could have
turned to Quora, where tech entrepreneurs like Steve Case and
Marc Andriessen have answered questions and where Marc
Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, has posted to ask what
companies Facebook should acquire. Whether they’re staffed by
Silicon Valley royalty or helpful South Australians, the services run
on the same basic principle: they match people with questions to
individuals with answers, and rank individual expertise on different
topics on the basis of how satisfying those answers were to users.
Other sites attempt to identify experts in terms of their social
media influence on particular topics. Klout tracks the posts
individuals make to Twitter and Facebook and looks to see how
widely that information spreads, giving users a measure of their
influence, or “Klout.” For users Klout knows a lot about, it suggests
topics they’re influential (and presumably knowledgeable) about.
Klout thinks I’m influential about entrepreneurship and Africa
(perhaps) as well as academics and prison (less likely). It’s easy to
see how this service could turn into a search engine to identify
experts on key topics (or people whom PR people should flood with
press releases, hoping to influence technology “influentials”).
The experts who make these services possible are a type of
bridge. They connect the general public with specialized knowledge
—the sites of Hong Kong, the politics of Ghana—tackling many of
the same challenges of context. The sites suggest a future where the
Internet connects not just people to information but people to
knowledgeable people, a reality in which bridging, contextualizing,
and explaining will need to move to the center of online interactions.
This is a future in which those best able to bridge will be some of the
most powerful in creating and sharing knowledge.
This idea of connecting people to people isn’t a new one. Socrates
taught through dialogue, not through written texts, and Plato
famously observed that books, unlike people, always offer the same
answers. In response to issues of urban violence in Copenhagen in
the early 1990s, a group of activists set up a “human library” of
“living books”: people who could be “checked out” for a brief
conversation by others who wanted to speak with a person from a
different background, to confront and overcome prejudices. The idea
has spread to communities in Australia and Canada, where human
libraries have expanded to include experts on community history, as
well as representatives of different ethnic and religious
communities.25
The library in my hometown, a college town in rural
Massachusetts, recently held a human library day, and I attended,
planning to “check out” a young undergraduate from Ghana, a
country I’ve regularly visited since the early 1990s. I hoped to
introduce myself and offer my services as a bridge to our local
community for him, but I didn’t get the chance. The program was so
popular, the Ghanaian student was booked solid, explaining West
Africa to New Englanders, and all other “living books” were checked
out for the day within the first hour of the event.
Not all projects take the notion of human libraries quite so literally.
They look for people who can act as guides to realms of knowledge
outside of established educational institutions. Achal Prabhala, an
Indian intellectual-property activist and adviser to Wikimedia, is trying
to get the vast online encyclopedia to acknowledge the complex truth
that “people are knowledge.” In a documentary film funded by the
Wikimedia Foundation, Prabhala and his collaborators explore the
challenges Wikipedia has had in incorporating knowledge from
communities in India and Africa. Much of the important local
knowledge isn’t in print; it’s in recipes known by women in villages, in
stories told by community elders, or in games played by generations
of schoolchildren. Wikipedia’s rules on sourcing—banning original
research as a citation for an article and demanding existing citations
in print or online—don’t work in these cases. Prabhala proposes that
Wikipedians start documenting knowledge from these communities
through video and audio interviews, both creating a body of indexed
knowledge that didn’t exist previously and bridging the individuals
who have this knowledge and the rest of the world.26
In this case, both Prabhala and the elders he’s working with are
acting as guides. The elders are able to connect him with experts on
undocumented cultures, and Prabhala is able to decipher the
complexities of Wikipedia, helping unlock their knowledge for a
global audience.
Human libraries and Prabhala’s expansion of Wikipedia remind us
that the Internet is far from the only space where we might encounter
unexpected knowledge. The Internet is special in that it makes it
trivially easy to encounter people and information from other parts of
the world, if we choose to. But we don’t always encounter guides as
skilled as Prabhala, or situations as carefully configured as a human
library. As we think about rewiring the Internet to encourage
connection, we need to think about how to build spaces and
institutions that help bridge figures and xenophiles.

Xenophiles

For bridge figures to be effective, someone has to cross the bridges

they build. If bridge builders invite people to explore and understand
different cultures, xenophiles enthusiastically accept that invitation.
Dhani Jones, recently retired as a middle linebacker for the
Cincinnati Bengals, is a xenophile. The spring of 2010 found him
playing water polo in Croatia, tossing the caber in Scotland, and
learning Laamb—traditional wrestling—from a massive wrestler
nicknamed “Bombardier” on the beaches of Dakar, Senegal. The
premise of his television show, Dhani Tackles the Globe, was simple:
he would visit a country for a week, train with top local athletes, and
compete in a sport he’d never played before.
It requires extreme physical talent to step into the ring with a
professional Thai kickboxer after a week of training and survive the
experience, but Jones’s most impressive traits allow him to build
connections with fellow athletes and nearly everyone he meets on
the show. He projects a sense of openness, good humor, and
approachability that lets people reach out to him and celebrate the
best features of their cultures.
A trip to Russia to study the martial art Sambo finds Dhani
standing on a bridge in St. Petersburg, attempting to drop coins onto
a narrow ledge above the water—a practice said to give good luck to
those dexterous enough to land a coin. An elderly man passes by,
and in a mix of smiles and hand gestures, Dhani enlists his help. The
two, the old man’s shaky hand guided by Dhani’s massive one, drop
coin after coin onto the ledge, high five, and hug. It may not be as
marketable a set of skills as tackling a running back in the open field,
but it’s damned impressive, as anyone who has tried to build
international friendships as a tourist knows.
Dhani’s not a bridge figure; he’s just well traveled. In his biography,
he traces his love of travel to a trip to Paris and East Africa with his
parents when he was four. But he was born and raised in the United
States, and while he’s passionate about his time in Senegal and
Singapore, he’s not the right person to explain the intricacies of
those cultures to the wider world. He’s in love with the diversity and
breadth of human experience, and he’s willing to cross bridges to get
to that wider world.
It’s no accident that passions make people encounter other
cultures: Paul Simon’s fascination with mbaqanga music, Dhani
Jones’s excitement about British rugby and Jamaican cricket. The
television network that bought twenty episodes of Dhani’s show, the
Travel Channel, is best known for airing No Reservations, a show in
which the chef Anthony Bourdain eats his way around the world,
usually accompanied by local chefs he admires and befriends.
(Bourdain, in turn, acts as a bridge, rather than as a xenophile, when
he invites us into the secret society of restaurant chefs in books like
Kitchen Confidential, his memoir about his life in professional
kitchens.)
Passion translates well across borders, and a shared passion—
particularly a passion put into practice—leads to interaction. Or as
Dhani notes, reflecting on his motivations as an athlete, “I think I play
sports because it allows me to connect…. I’ve built deep
relationships, through competitive sport, with people who have never
talked to a black man, let alone an NFL player.”27
If digital media make it easier for bridge figures to put their cultures
in context, they completely transform the life of a xenophile. In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, after Paul Simon had helped bring a few
African records into American record stores, I was obsessed with
Afrobeat and Afrojuju, trying to learn all I could about Nigerian
musicians like Shina Peters. This involved taking the train to New
York City, interrogating baffled record store clerks, and eventually
discovering that Afro-Caribbean grocery stores in the South Bronx
were the best hunting grounds. A quick Google search for Shina
Peters today turns up a well-referenced biography and discography,
hard-to-find albums on sale on eBay, and dozens of concert videos,
footage I would have killed for twenty years back.
Musical experimentation across cultures is no longer limited to
artists whose record companies can broker introductions to the best
musicians in another nation. The “techno-musicologist” Wayne
Marshall studies “nu-whirled music,” the strange cultural hybrids that
are possible in an age where cultural influences are a YouTube
search away. In a lecture at Harvard, he traced an LA street dance
style—jerkin’—where young dancers dressed in neon shirts, tight
jeans, and colorful Chuck Taylors strike angular poses to a
synthesized beat. The next video shows jerkin’ in Panama, where a
seminal jerkin’ track—New Boyz, “You’re a Jerk”—has been remixed
with a Spanish-language rap on top. The Panamanian kids have cut
a video as well, using footage from the New Boyz video and scenes
of Panamanian kids in their best jerkin’ clothes. Two videos later, and
jerkin’ has moved through the Dominican Republic, getting remixed
with “dem bow,” a Dominican variant of Jamaican reggaeton and
emerging as “jerkbow.” And now Dominiyorcan kids in New York are
showing off their jerkin’ moves, dressed in LA neon, in playgrounds
with snow on the ground.28
The next generation of musical xenophiles are making art from this
fluid world of “global bass music” or in a tongue-in-cheek term
Marshall coined, “global ghettotech.” One of the stars of the space is
Diplo, known to his parents as Wesley Pentz. Raised in Mississippi,
he developed an infatuation with the dance music style called “Miami
Bass” that led him to become a DJ and a musical explorer, mixing
global dance music in DJ parties in Philadelphia. Diplo quickly
became known for his love and knowledge of “baile funk,” a remix of
Miami bass for the favelas of Rio.29
Baile funk30 was largely unknown outside Brazil until Diplo
produced “Bucky Done Gun” for the Sri-Lankan British singer Maya
Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A. Released on an influential mix
tape, “Piracy Funds Terrorism,” the song samples heavily from Deize
Tigrona’s baile funk song “Injeção,” which, in turn, samples the horn
lick from the Rocky movie theme song. The influences in this popular
track are fascinating to trace: a three-decade journey back from
Diplo to baile funk, to Miami bass, to Detroit techno, to the early
American electro hip-hop of Afrika Bambaataa to the German
synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk.31
Both Diplo and M.I.A. have taken flak from critics and fellow
musicians for their working method: taking elements of different
musical cultures and mixing them into new, hybrid forms. Is this
appreciation or appropriation?
Asked by a Brazilian reporter whether his work runs the risk of
trivializing the music he’s celebrating, reducing it to “the flavor of the
month,” Diplo responded,

My job is just a DJ/performer, not a sociologist—and I do a good

job at it, collecting and introducing fresh sounds to my audience
(it goes back to the old days when hip hop DJs championed new
music and kept it secret from each other by covering the labels
on records—to have an upper hand on other DJs). But since my
livelihood depends in some way to these subcultures existing, I
have set up some things to help them develop.32

The “things” Diplo refers to include a documentary and a program

that works with indigenous Australian youth to produce dance music.
Diplo clearly sees himself as an ambassador for global bass
music. Whether or not he always gets it right, it seems that Diplo is
taking seriously the cosmopolitan notion of responsibility to others,
not just celebrating the musical artifacts he finds in his journeys
online and around the world.
This sense of responsibility separates the xenophile from the
appropriator, the collaborator from the musical tourist. Discovering
that sense of obligation to others can take time.
In 2003, the American videogame designer Matt Harding left his
job in Australia and began traveling, making short videos of himself
doing the same goofy dance in different places around the world. He
edited dozens of clips into a strange travelogue—he’s in the center
of every frame, dancing badly, a constant against a changing
backdrop of remarkable sights. Matt put the video, titled Where the
Hell Is Matt?, on his website and sent a link to a few friends. In a few
months after the release of his first video, which became a viral hit,
Matt had one of the world’s strangest jobs; he was paid to wander
around the world making funny videos, which he subsequently
released to the web in 2006 and again in 2008.
 There’s a noticeable shift between Matt’s second and third videos.
In the first two videos, he’s a lone figure dancing in front of
remarkable backgrounds. A minute into the third video, dancers rush
into the frame, crowding Matt out and turning the video into a series
of joyful mobs dancing in public in places ranging from Madrid to
Madagascar. In thinking about what to do for his third video, Matt
recalled, “I was beginning to realize that dancing in front of exotic
backgrounds was a thin gimmick. I’d found what I should’ve been
doing all along. I should have been dancing with other people.”33
If the first two videos are stories about one man’s remarkable
adventure around the globe, the third is a story about humanity and
the ways in which people connect with one another. Matt and his
girlfriend organized these shoots via email, inviting fans to come and
dance with Matt as they came through a city. In places where Matt’s
online celebrity hadn’t reached the general public, like Sana’a,
Yemen, Matt’s dancers are neighborhood children. One of the most
touching moments in the 2008 video is a cut from Matt dancing with
a massive crowd in Tel Aviv to him dancing with a small group of
Palestinian children in an alley in East Jerusalem, a transition
included at the insistence of an Israeli participant who told Matt, “Put
them together. They must be side by side, one right after the
other.”34
There’s another difference between Matt’s second and third
videos: the music. The soundtrack for Matt’s original video was Deep
Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby,” a song by French electronic musicians with
a long and controversial history. Describing themselves as “sound
reporters,” the members of Deep Forest claim that their albums
represent the voices of African pygmies: the lyrics to their debut
album’s first song describe men and women living in the jungle and
suggest they are both our past and possibly our future.
Perhaps little men in the jungle are our future, but they’re not the
ones singing on “Sweet Lullaby.” The track is built around a lullaby
called “Rorogwela,” sung by a woman named Afunakwa, recorded in
the Solomon Islands, roughly half a planet away from Central Africa.
The melody was recorded by the legendary ethnomusicologist Dr.
Hugo Zemp, and when Deep Forest asked his permission to use the
recording, he refused. Deep Forest used the sample anyway, Zemp
wrote angry academic articles about cultural appropriation, and the
scandal over the vocal didn’t stop the album from selling millions of
copies.35 Near as I can tell, no one attempted to contact Afunakwa
and share royalties with her.
Matt Harding heard the story about Afunakwa, and he decided to
handle the music differently for his third video. He commissioned an
original orchestral piece by the composer Garry Schyman, with a
Begali vocal sung by Palbasha Siddique, adapted from a poem by
Rabindranath Tagore. Harding’s motives here weren’t entirely
idealistic—his videos were so popular that he now needed to weigh
the risk of a copyright suit from Deep Forest. But his next steps only
make sense in the context of responsible xenophilia.
One of the most energetic shots in the 2008 video shows Harding
dancing with a room full of ecstatic children in Auki, capital of the
Solomon Islands. Matt paused his around-the-world trip for the third
video to shoot a short documentary, titled Where the Hell Is
Afunakwa? It has been seen orders of magnitude less often than his
dancing videos, but it marks an attempt to close the loop of cultural
borrowing, explaining the story behind “Sweet Lullaby,” interviewing
Afunakwa’s descendants and hearing about her death in 1998.
In 2011, Harding returned to the Solomon Islands to find
Afunakwa’s son, Jack. After an epic trip involving a flatbed truck and
a motorboat, Harding met Jack and worked with his sons to set up
an ad hoc committee that would accept a share of profits from the
videos and use the proceeds to pay medical and school fees for
Afunakwa’s descendants. Before he left, Harding wrote on his blog,
“I stopped by at the mission, found the headmaster, and paid the
annual school fees for all of Afunakwa’s descendants who are of
age. It cost slightly more than my monthly cable bill.”
Harding now regularly emails with Godfrey, Afunakwa’s grandson,
to inquire about the community’s needs and to coordinate wire
transfers of money from the United States to Afunakwa’s family. A
journey that began as a tour of beautiful places around the world has
turned into a righting of a wrong, and a bond of responsibility
between a xenophile Internet celebrity and a village in the South
Pacific.36
 In 2012, Harding released a fourth video, which suggests his
journey from goofball to xenophile continues. The video opens with
Matt taking dancing lessons in the streets of Kigali and Seville. As
the music swells, Matt’s no longer performing his silly dance, but
following the gestures of men in dishdasha in the Saudi desert and
shaking his hips with a crowd in Port-au-Prince. As he attempts to
waltz with an elegantly gowned woman in Pyongyang, it becomes
clear that Matt still dances badly, but now he has the world as a
dance teacher. As crowds in Cairo, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Hong Kong
thrust their arms into the air, echoing one another’s gestures, the
logic of the video becomes clear: Harding is trying to get his friends
all around the world to dance together.
The hard challenges we face as a species can’t be solved by even
the most talented dance instructor. But Harding’s experiment is a first
step in solving some of the thorniest problems in global
communication. If we accept Ronald Burt’s invitation to look for
creative solutions at structural holes, gaps in our knowledge about
the world, we’re led to look for ideas and inspirations from other
cultures. But we quickly bump into Joi Ito’s “caring problem”—without
a way to build personal connections to people from other parts of the
world, it’s hard for us to take their perspectives and insights
seriously.
Encountering the world through shared interests is a shortcut to
encounters that connect us with other human beings. It’s difficult for
us to rise to the challenge of paying attention to news that affects
people we don’t know in places we’ve never been—finding a shared
interest is a first step toward finding inspiration and insight in the
unfamiliar. That step, even as a sloppy dance step, is a move toward
problem solving that incorporates diverse and complementary ways
of thinking.
Important as xenophiles and bridge figures are in exchanging
ideas, they can’t correct the shortcoming of our media—and our
views of the world—by themselves. To follow the trails they are
blazing for us, we can’t rely purely on our desire to encounter a
broader world. We need to harness a powerful, and poorly
understood, path to discovery: serendipity.
 SERENDIPITY AND THE CITY

WILLIAM GIBSON’S 1984 BOOK NEUROMANCER OFFERED A vision of the

Internet as a physical space, a vast, colorful city of buildings
representing the computer servers owned by global corporations.
Only “console cowboys,” Gibson’s hacker heroes, could access this
imaginary space, “jacking in” to the Internet through custom
hardware, but to them it was as vast, intricate, and real as any city in
the world.
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash followed eight years later, and
invited us to think of the Internet as “the Metaverse,” an immersive 3-
D world populated by digital avatars, controlled by their goggle- and
glove-wearing users. Stephenson’s Metaverse is a vast, black,
mostly empty planet. The main space that’s inhabited is “the Street,”
a linear city that circles the globe, where users come to see and be
seen, to rub elbows and bump shoulders in a virtual environment.
Why is it so tempting to think of the Internet as a city? There’s no
reason data can’t be visualized as a forest or a sea of bits, an
endless desktop stacked with documents, Borges’s infinite library.
Cities are an insane way to visualize data—why would we force
people into close contact when we’re building “spaces” that can be
infinite in scale?
To understanding the appeal of the digital city, we need to consider
the charms of the physical city.

Cities and Choice

Makoko has been referred to as “Nigeria’s Venice,” with houses,
stores, and churches linked by plank bridges that cross above the
waters of Lagos Lagoon. The wooden pirogues that ply the waters
between buildings in this dense slum aren’t carrying tourists and
singing gondoliers. They carry fish from the lagoon and boards from
the sawmills that line the lagoon. They bring goods to market and
children to schools.
What began as a small fishing village on the outskirts of Nigeria’s
commercial capital, Lagos, has been transformed into one of the
densest neighborhoods of a notoriously crowded city. Estimates vary,
but most observers believe that at least 100,000 Lagosians live in a
neighborhood that now extends half a mile into Lagos Lagoon. What
brings people to this neighborhood is not prestige—it’s considered
one of Lagos’s most dangerous neighborhoods—or the waterfront
views. It’s not the amenities—there’s no running water, and
outhouses dump directly into the lagoon. Electricity, pirated from
lines on shore, is in short supply and dangerous when it’s on.
Cholera and other diseases are common. In July 2012, the governor
of Lagos state ordered the destruction of thousands of illegally built
dwellings, and knocked down dozens, leaving their owners
homeless.1
People come to Makoko because Lagos is growing, and there’s
nowhere else to go. An estimated 275,000 people move to Lagos
each year, roughly the same number who lived in the city in 1950,
and by some estimates, the city of 7.9 million is now more populous
than London. The small islands that serve as the commercial and
state capital are thoroughly developed, and nightmarish traffic jams
make living in the outskirts less appealing. Some newcomers to
Makoko are literally making their own piece of Lagos, alternating
layers of garbage diverted from landfills (going price is about fifty
cents a truckload) and sawdust from nearby sawmills (which helps
mask the stench) and topping the reclaimed land with sand, and then
structures made from wood and corrugated roofing.
The residents of Makoko are part of a global trend toward
urbanization. As of 2008, the majority of the world’s population lives
in cities. In highly developed countries (the membership of the
OECD), the figure is 77 percent, while in the least developed
countries (as classified by the UN), 29 percent of people live in cities.
It’s an oversimplification, but one way to think about economic
development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to
emphasize the shift from a rural population, supported by
subsistence agriculture, to an urban population engaged in
manufacturing and service industries, fed by a small percentage of
the population that remains focused on farming. As developing
nations industrialize, the shift continues and there’s a steady rural-to-
urban migration.2
In 1800, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities,
many in European capitals like London and Amsterdam. Even so,
those societies had rural majorities: roughly 80 percent in England,
75 percent in the Netherlands. A century later, 14 percent of the
world’s population resided in cities. And since 1950, we’ve seen
urban populations grow at a much faster rate than rural populations.
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
World Urbanization Prospects report predicts that we’re about to see
this continued urban growth complemented by a decline in rural
populations. The end result is a planet of cities, surrounded by
arable land, first in the developed and later in the developing world.3
It may not be obvious to people living in the developed world, but a
city like Lagos—with all its obvious downsides—is an extremely
appealing destination for Nigerians from rural areas. In most
developing-world cities, the schools and hospitals are far better than
what’s available in the rest of the country. And even with high rates
of unemployment, the economic opportunities in cities vastly outpace
what’s available in rural areas.
There’s a more basic reason for the appeal of cities—they are
exciting. A city dweller has more options: where to go, what to do,
what to see. It’s easy to dismiss this idea—that people would move
to cities to avoid boredom—as trivial. It’s not. As Amartya Sen
argued in his seminal book Development as Freedom, people don’t
just want to be less poor; they want more opportunities, more
freedoms, more chances to better their lives. Cities promise options
and opportunities, and they often deliver.
Harder to understand, in retrospect, is why anyone would have
moved to London in the years 1500–1800, when it experienced
rapid, continuous growth and became the greatest metropolis of the
nineteenth century. The city had several major shortcomings, not
least of which was an unfortunate tendency to burn down. The Great
Fire of 1666, which left as many as 200,000 in the city homeless,
was merely the largest of a series of “named fires” severe enough to
distinguish themselves from the routine fires that threatened wood
and thatch houses, packed closely together and heated with open
coal or wood fires. It’s likely that more Londoners would have been
affected by the Great Fire but for the fact that 100,000—a fifth of the
city’s population—had died the preceding year of bubonic plague,
which spread quickly through the rat-infested city.4
By the time of Dickens’s London, the threat was less from fires
than from the water system. Open sewers filled with household
waste, as well as the manure of the thousands of horses used to pull
buses and cabs, emptied directly into the Thames, the source of
most of the city’s drinking water. Cholera was common from the
1840s through the 1860s, and the smell of London during the hot
summer of 1858 was so bad that it led to a series of parliamentary
investigations. “The Great Stink,” as historians know the event,
finally led to the construction of London’s sewer system in the
1860s.5
People flocked to cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
but not for their health. In the 1850s, the life expectancy for a man
born in Liverpool was twenty-six years, as compared with fifty-seven
years for a man in a rural market town.6 But cities like London had a
pull not unlike that of Lagos now. There were more economic
opportunities, especially for the landless poor, and an array of jobs
made possible by the international trade that flowed through the
ports. For some, the increased intellectual opportunities provided by
universities and coffeehouses was an attraction, while for others, the
opportunity to court and marry outside of closed rural communities
was the reason to relocate.
One reason to come to the city was to encounter the people you
couldn’t encounter in your rural, disconnected lifestyle: to trade with,
to marry, to learn from, to worship with. You came to the city to
become a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan.
 Just as Diogenes the Cynic went to Athens to debate the great
minds of his day, cities have always attracted those in search of
intellectual stimulus. If you wanted to encounter a set of ideas
radically different from your own, your best bet in an era before
telecommunications was to move to a city. Cities are powerful
communication technologies, enabling real-time communication
between different individuals and groups and the rapid diffusion of
new ideas and practices to multiple communities. Even in an age of
instantaneous digital communications, cities still enable constant
contact with the unfamiliar, the strange, and the different.
Understanding the city as a communications technology helps
make sense of the decisions Gibson and Stephenson made in using
the city as a metaphor for cyberspace. Both were interested in the
ways the Internet could bring the weird, dangerous, and unexpected
(as well as the trivial, mundane, and safe) into a constant fight for
your attention.
Gibson and Stephenson were both interested in virtual spaces,
places where people were forced to interact, bumping into one
another as they headed toward the same destinations. They
believed that we would want to interact in cyberspace in some of the
ways we do in cities, experiencing an overload of sensation, a
compression in scale, a challenge of picking out signal and noise
from information competing for our attention.
We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse
set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase
the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. Cities
provide an infrastructure that should enable serendipity. From
studying infrastructure and flow, we know that people rarely use
infrastructures to their full capacity. Do cities really increase
serendipity?

How Cities Work

In 1952, the French sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe

asked a young political science student to keep a journal of her daily
movements as part of his city study Paris et l’agglomération
parisienne (Paris and greater Paris). He traced her paths onto a map
of Paris and saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her
apartment, her university, and the home of her piano teacher. Her
movements illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each
individual lives.”
That pattern of home, work, and hobby—whether it’s a
comparatively solitary activity like piano studies or the “great good
place” of public interaction celebrated by the sociologist Ray
Oldenburg—is a familiar one to social scientists. Most of us are fairly
predictable. Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at
MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining,” digesting huge sets
of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the
location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90–95 percent accuracy on
the basis of this type of data. (Those of us with less predictable
schedules and movements might be only 60 percent predictable.)7

Walking routes of a young woman from the 16th arrondissement over the course of a year.

We might choose to see our predictability as evidence of

contentment and lives well lived. Or we can react as the situationist
cultural critic Guy Debord did and decry the “outrage at the fact that
anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited.”8 One way or another,
the likelihood that we will be confronted with one of these maps is
increasing.
Zach Seward, outreach editor for the Wall Street Journal, is a
heavy user of Foursquare, the site that tracks your “check-ins” at
public places so it can recommend restaurants and destinations to
you. As he checks in at venues in and around New York City, he
generates a “heat map” of his wanderings. It’s easy to see a heavy
concentration around Manhattanville, where he lives, and Midtown,
where he works. With a bit more work, we can see that he enjoys
hanging out in the East Village, rarely strays into the “outer
boroughs” except to fly from LaGuardia Airport and to watch baseball
games—the one venue he has checked into in the Bronx is Yankee
Stadium. And because he has visited one of New York’s stadiums
and not the other, we can bet he’s a Yankees fan.9

Zach Seward’s New York City Foursquare check-ins, 2010.

If you’re using Foursquare, you’re broadcasting the data that can

be used to make a map like this one. The Greek graduate student
Yiannis Kakavas has developed a software package called “Creepy”
designed to allow users—or people watching users—to build maps
like this one from information posted on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,
and other geolocated services. Creepier, perhaps, is discovering that
even if you don’t use any of these services, you’re leaking this type
of data simply by using a mobile phone. While you may not be
interested in suing your mobile phone provider to obtain this data, as
the German politician Malte Spitz did, it probably has highly accurate
data on your movements, which could be released to law
enforcement on request or perhaps used to build a behavioral profile
to target ads to you.
Seward took a close look at his Foursquare check-ins and
discovered they provide information he hadn’t realized: his race. He
overlaid his check-ins in Harlem over a map that showed the racial
composition of each block and discovered that “his” Harlem is almost
exclusively blocks that are majority-white. As he observes, “Census
data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling
me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that
direction.”10
Seward is not a racist, nor is he “pathetically limited,” as Debord
suggests. We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re
regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel
familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we
live, where we work, and whom we like to spend time with. If we had
enough data from enough New Yorkers, we could build maps of
Dominican New York, Pakistani New York, Chinese New York, as
well as black and white New Yorks. The patterns we trace through
our cities show the effects of who we are, whom we know, and what
we do; taken as a whole, they become maps of personal and group
homophily.
When we talk about cities, we recognize that they’re not always
cosmopolitan melting pots. We acknowledge the ethnic character of
neighborhoods, and we’re conscious of ghettos that get separated,
through a combination of physical structure and cumulative behavior,
from the rest of the city. As a society, we hope for random
encounters with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that
increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob
Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may
instead hunker down when faced with a situation in which we feel
like outsiders, as Putnam’s more recent research suggests.
 In our online world, isolation can occur as well, of course. As we
saw in chapter 3, the biases of reported and curated media make
some parts of the world less visible than others. Navigating through
search brings our personal biases to the front. I get to learn about
topics I care about—sumo, African politics, Vietnamese cooking—but
I probably miss topics that I needed to know about because I was
paying more attention to my interests and less to reporters and
curators.
A recent wave of web tools tries to guide us to novel content by
examining what our friends care about. Community-based tools like
Reddit and Slashdot have formed communities around shared
interests and direct us to stories the community agreed (through
voting systems and reputation mechanisms) are interesting and
worth sharing. Twitter and especially Facebook work on a much
more personal level. They show us what our friends know and
believe is important. Or as Brad DeLong puts it, Facebook offers a
different answer to the question “What do I need to know?”—“You
need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already
know that you do not.”11
Unless you’ve got a remarkably diverse and well-informed set of
friends, there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has
some blind spots. The Guardian columnist Paul Carr tells an
instructive story about returning to a San Francisco hotel room and
being baffled that it, and the rest of the hotel, hadn’t been cleaned
that day. The hotel workers were protesting the Arizona immigration
bill, SB1070, and while there was extensive conversation about the
protests and the legislation on Twitter, they weren’t taking place on
feeds Carr followed on Twitter. By missing the protests until they
manifested themselves as an unmade bed in his room, Carr realized
that he was living in “my own little Twitter bubble of People Like Me:
racially, politically, linguistically and socially.”12 Does that bubble
provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web? If not, we
need to find ways to escape it.

Serendipity
Robert K. Merton devoted a book, written with his collaborator Elinor
Barber and published posthumously, to the topic of serendipity. This
may seem an odd exploration for a celebrated sociologist, but then
again one of his many contributions to the field was an examination
of “unintended consequences.” These unintended consequences are
often side effects of a successful intervention; for example, the
introduction of rabbits to Australia provided a key food source for
early white settlers, but inadvertently created a pest to farmers so
severe that the Australian government was forced to build a 2,000-
mile rabbit-proof fence to prevent crop destruction.13
Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of
unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what
the term meant, at least originally. The word was coined by Horace
Walpole, an eighteenth-century British aristocrat, fourth earl of
Orford, novelist, architect, and gossip. He’s remembered primarily for
his letters, forty-eight volumes’ worth, which offer a perspective on
what the world looked like through the eyes of privilege.
In a letter written in 1754, Walpole tells his correspondent Horace
Mann about an unexpected and helpful discovery he made, spurred
along by his deep knowledge of heraldry. To explain the experience,
he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in
which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by
accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”14
Walpole’s neologism is a pat on the back—he’s congratulating
himself both for a clever discovery and for his sagacity, which
permitted the discovery.
Useful as the concept is, the word “serendipity” didn’t come into
wide use until the past couple of decades. By 1958, Merton tells us,
it had appeared in print only 135 times. In the next four decades, it
appeared in book titles 57 times and graced newspapers 13,000
times in the 1990s alone. A Google search turns up 11 million pages
(and counting) with the term, including restaurants, movies, and gift
shops named Serendipity, but very few on unexpected discovery
through sagacity.
Merton was one of the major promoters of the word, writing about
“the serendipity pattern” in 1946 as a way to understand unexpected
scientific discoveries. Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin
in 1928 was triggered by a spore of Penicillium fungus that
contaminated a petri dish where he was growing Staphylococcus
bacteria. While the mold spore landing in the dish was an accident,
the discovery was serendipity. Had Fleming not been cultivating
bacteria, he wouldn’t have noticed a stray mold spore. And had he
not had a deep understanding of bacterial development—sagacity—
he might not have noticed the antibiotic properties of Penicillium and
developed the most important advance in health technology of the
first half of the twentieth century.
Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance
favors only the prepared mind.” Merton believed that serendipity
emerged both from a prepared mind and from circumstances and
structures conducive to discovery. In The Travels and Adventures of
Serendipity, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric
laboratory under the leadership of the chemist Willis Whitney, who
encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as on
discovery. A healthy blend of anarchy and structure was necessary
for discovery, and overplanning was anathema, since “the policy of
leaving nothing to chance is inherently doomed by failure.”
The idea that serendipity is a product both of an open and
prepared mind and of circumstances conducive to discovery can be
traced back to the story referenced by Walpole in 1754. The three
princes were deeply learned in “Morality, Politicks and all polite
Lerning in general,” but they did not make their unexpected
discoveries until their father, the emperor Jafer, sent them out from
his kingdom to “travel through all the World, to the end that they
might learn the Manners and Customs of every nation.” Once the
well-prepared princes met circumstances conducive to discovery,
unexpected and sagacious discoveries occurred: the identity of a
royal poisoner, the strategy to defeat a mysterious giant hand that
threatens a kingdom.
When we use the word “serendipity” now, it usually means “a
happy accident.” The parts of the definition that focus on sagacity,
preparation, and structure have slipped, at least in part, into
obscurity. As the word has changed meaning, we have lost sight of
the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both
personally and structurally. I suspect that we, and even Merton,
understand those preparations poorly. And as my friend Wendy
Seltzer, a legal scholar, pointed out to me, if we don’t understand the
structures of serendipity, it appears no more likely than random
chance.

Designing for Serendipity

If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we

might take some lessons from cities.
In the early 1960s, a fierce public battle erupted over the future of
New York City. The proximate cause of the battle was the Lower
Manhattan Expressway, a proposed ten-lane elevated highway that
would have connected the Holland Tunnel (which links Manhattan
and New Jersey under the Hudson River) to the Manhattan and
Williamsburg Bridges (which cross the East River and connect
Manhattan to Brooklyn). Plans for the highway required the
demolition of fourteen blocks along Broome Street in Little Italy and
SoHo and would have displaced roughly two thousand families and
eight hundred businesses.
The proponent of the plan was Robert Moses, the legendary and
influential urban planner responsible for much of New York’s park
and highway systems. His fiercest opponent was Jane Jacobs,
activist, author, and chairperson in 1962 of the Joint Committee to
Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The lasting legacy of
Jacobs’s opposition to Moses is both the survival of Broome Street
and her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a
critique of “rationalist” urban planning and a manifesto for preserving
and designing vibrant urban communities.
Jacobs framed many of her battles over urban planning by asking
whether cities were for the benefit of cars or of people, suggesting
that Moses was indifferent to the people he proposed to displace. A
slightly less biased frame might submit that Moses took a bird’s-eye,
citywide view of urban planning while Jacobs offered a pedestrian’s-
eye, street-level view of the city. From Moses’s point of view, one of
the major challenges of New York City was allowing people to move
rapidly from their homes in the suburbs to business districts in the
center, and back out to the “necklace” of parks he’d painstakingly
constructed in the outer boroughs.
In her critique of Moses, Jacobs offers two lines of questioning.
One set of questions is political: Whom is a city for, and whose
needs get considered when design decisions are made? By
challenging Moses’s role as an objective, disinterested expert, she
invites readers to consider the unstated political biases in Moses’s
decision, for the wealthy suburbanites, against the poorer inner-city
residents.
The other set of questions is about unintended consequences. For
example, Moses’s principle of separation of uses—residential
neighborhoods separate from business districts, separated from
recreation areas—may have the consequence of making cities less
vital. What makes cities livable, creative, and ultimately safe is the
street-level random encounters that Jacobs documented in her
corner of Greenwich Village. In neighborhoods where blocks are
small, pedestrians are welcome and there’s a mixture of residential,
commercial, and recreational destinations, there’s a vibrancy that’s
absent from planned residential-only communities or from city
centers that empty out when offices close. That vibrancy comes from
the ongoing chance encounter between people using a
neighborhood for different purposes.
Jacobs’s vision of a livable city has had a major influence on urban
design since the early 1980s, with the rise of “New Urbanism” and
the walkable cities movement. These cities tend to favor public
transit over private automobiles, and create spaces that encourage
people’s paths to intersect, in mixed-use neighborhoods and
pedestrian-friendly shopping streets. As the urban planner David
Walters observes, they’re designed to help individuals linger and
mix: “Casual encounters in shared spaces are the heart of
community life, and if urban spaces are poorly designed, people will
hurry through them as quickly as possible.”15
If there’s an overarching principle to street-level design, it’s a
pattern of designing to minimize isolation. Walkable cities make it
harder for you to isolate yourself in your home or your car, and
easier to interact in public spaces. In the process, they present
residents with a trade-off—it’s convenient to be able to park your car
outside your home, but walkable cities are suspicious of too much
convenience. The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not
the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly
and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically
opposed, but the forces are clearly in tension.
Cities embody political decisions made by their designers, as well
as the unintended consequences of those decisions. So do online
spaces. These days, urban planners tend to be transparent about
their agendas. They will declare an intention to create a walkable city
with the logic that they believe increased use of public space will
improve civic life. In the best of cases, planners test to see what
works and report failures when they occur—the persistence of
private car use in walking cities, for instance.
It’s not always easy to get the architects of online tools to articulate
the behaviors they’re hoping to enable and the political assumptions
that inform those decisions. Sometimes, the architects may not
recognize the assumptions they are bringing to the table. Twitter
began as a project management tool for distributed work groups and
grew into a powerful network for sharing ideas and links. Because
there’s so much traffic on the network, efforts to archive and index
tweets have been difficult to get off the ground.16 While there’s
increasing evidence that Twitter can have political importance, the
ephemeral nature of Twitter conversations means important events
that unfold on social media aren’t included in search engines and
disappear over time. Was this an unintended consequence of
Twitter’s design, or a conscious effort to make online communication
lighter, faster, and less permanent?
Other architects are clearer about their agendas, but can find their
unintended consequences uncomfortable. Unlike other online
networks that permitted users to log on using pseudonyms,
Facebook has always required users to appear online using their
real names. This policy dates from the site’s origins as a
replacement for paper “facebooks” issued at universities to help
students meet one another. As Facebook became a popular tool for
activism in repressive countries, human rights advocates warned
that the policy could endanger the safety of dissidents.17 Facebook
has been inflexible, arguing that the company’s “real name culture” is
essential to maintaining a high quality of discussion on the site.
Online spaces need their Jane Jacobses to identify hidden politics
and warn of unintended consequences. But they also need a better
sense of historical context.
Some of the people who design online spaces are trying to
increase exposure to a diverse range of information and to cultivate
serendipity. But it’s difficult to accomplish, in part because it’s too
easy to start from scratch in building online spaces. An urban
planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is hemmed
in by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and
interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the
costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow, and
as a result we have a rich history of cities we can study to see how
earlier citizens, architects, and planners have solved these
problems.
For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what
has succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus
of users to Facebook has largely turned MySpace into a ghost town.
It’s harder yet to study earlier communities, like LamdaMOO, a text-
based virtual world hosted on the servers of the legendary corporate
research lab Xerox PARC. I often find myself nostalgic for Tripod, the
proto-social network I helped build in the late 1990s. The admirable
Internet Archive includes several dozen snapshots of pages on the
site from 1997 to 2000, which gives a sense for the changing look
and feel, but offers little insight into the content created by the 18
million users of the site in 1998. Tripod’s more successful competitor,
Geocities, disappeared from the web entirely in 2010—its legacy is
less than 23,000 pages stored accessible through the Wayback
Machine, which threw up its hands at the impossible task of
archiving the vast site in mid-2001.
If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital
ones, what lessons might we take?

Design for Encounter

In her celebration of street life, “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,”
Jacobs emphasizes the importance of using the same spaces for
diverse purposes. Her neighborhood works because people pass
through constantly. The random encounter with the shopkeeper as
she leaves her house to head for work is possible only because he
works where she lives.
Virtual environments like Facebook support many different modes
of use. It came as a great surprise to most Americans, using
Facebook to plan weekend activities with friends or to catch up on
the developments in the life of an old flame, that Colombians were
using Facebook to organize a protest against FARC rebels.18 The
Americans making weekend plans and the Colombians planning
marches were in the same “space,” but were utterly invisible to one
another, unless they happened to be in one another’s circles of
friends. As a result, Facebook can feel like a single-purpose space,
designed for whatever purpose you’ve chosen to put it to. You’re part
of a massive public space, but you’re isolated by whom you know
and what you do, much as early users of Facebook were largely
isolated into campus-specific conversations.
Most American Facebook users didn’t want to trip over highly
political discussions on their way to tend their gardens in Farmville.
But the Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of
architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price
of admission. It’s more convenient for me to drive from my
Cambridge apartment to my office, but the drive isolates me from the
neighborhoods I pass through. As we examined in chapter 3,
critiques of social networks like Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” argument
worry about what we, individually and societally, lose from isolation.
With Google’s personalized search and Facebook’s algorithmic
curation of news from our friends, our online experience, he argues,
is an increasingly isolated one, which threatens to deprive us from
serendipitous encounter. Filter bubbles are comfortable, comforting,
and convenient; they give us a great deal of control and insulate us
from surprise. They’re cars, not public transit or busy sidewalks.
With the rise of Facebook’s “like” button on sites across the web,
we’re starting to see personalization come into play even on heavily
curated sites like that of the New York Times. I can access whatever
stories I want, but I also get signals regarding which of my friends
have “liked” the story I’m reading, and what other stories they’ve also
liked, as well as an algorithmic “recommended for you” list,
generated for each subscriber. It’s not hard to imagine a future where
“like” informs even more information spaces. In the near future, I
expect to be able to pull up an online map of whatever city I’m
visiting and see my friend’s favorite restaurants overlaid on top of it. I
can already, using a service called Dopplr, which shares my
movements and travel tips with friends, but I expect to see this
functionality emerge as a default in Google Maps at some point
soon.
Whether that scenario is exciting or troubling depends on whether
I see only my friends’ recommendations. If I also can see the
favorites of other communities, that’s a different story. As Pariser
observes, the filters we really have to worry about are those that are
opaque about their operations and that are on by default. A map of
Vancouver that I can choose to overlay with my friends’
recommendations is one thing; a map that recommends restaurants
on the basis of paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice
is another entirely. The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not
just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from
different groups: first-time visitors to the city; longtime Vancouverites;
foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea, or China.
If I’m visiting Vancouver, the most convenient map is the one that
knows what I like and helps me find it. It knows that I’m a fan of ban
minh sandwiches, locally brewed beer, and record stores with cheap,
used vinyl. It’s not hard to build this map today, and enhance it with
knowledge of what my friends have enjoyed on their trips to the city.
Before the plane lands, I can be presented with “My Vancouver.” But
unless I can look through that map and see the many different ways
people are experiencing the city, I risk trading away the possibility of
discovery for a comfortable form of isolation. As we design online
spaces, we need to think through the dangers of making those
spaces too comfortable, too easy, and too isolated.

Desire Lines
In any populated area, people create paths between the places
where they are and the places where they want to be. These ad hoc
paths, which urban planners call “desire lines,” reflect a human
tendency toward efficiency (or laziness). But they also provide
valuable information about where people want to go and how they
want to get there. Smart designers have taken to photographing
spaces after snowfall, or collecting time-lapse photographic images
so that they can lay paths atop the desire lines rather than fight a
losing battle between human behavior and lush grass.
Desire lines are a way that people inscribe themselves on places,
the accumulation of human behavior leaving visible traces. The
cupping of stairs as thousands ascend and descend, the marking of
a sidewalk with cigarette butts, discarded gum and dirt, and the
patina acquired through hands holding a rail are all subtle, important
signals about where people go and don’t go, what they do and don’t
do. As we walk through a city, evidence of human activity bombards
us: this park, crowded with strollers, is popular with parents and
children, while that one, littered with bottles, attracts a different
clientele. Whether the signals are generated in real time, by the
crowds outside the popular lunch joint, or over time, they tell us
stories about how people actually behave, not just how designers
and planners hoped they would behave.
As people began using Facebook to promote bands and brands,
as well as to keep up with high school friends, the company
introduced a new kind of online space, distinct from the standard
personal profile: a Facebook page. You could now become a fan of a
musician, a public figure, a movie, or another cultural phenomenon
that had a page. Shortly after Pages were introduced in 2007,
Facebook offered an alphabetical directory of them, alongside the
little-used but fascinating alphabetical list of all Facebook users,
perhaps the world’s largest virtual phone book.
Turn to a page of the directory, and you could see what’s most
popular within a given letter. The letter v featured Vin Diesel and
Victoria’s Secret, but also some more obscure celebrities: the
Turkish singer Volkan Konak, motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi,
Filipino talk show host Vice Ganda, and Mexican viral video
producers Vete A La Versh. The Pages directory was Facebook’s
form of desire lines, revealing the topics most interesting to the
service’s massively global user base, and a glimpse of the sorts of
figures who are celebrities in Nigeria, Colombia, or Vietnam, but not
in North America or Europe.
Some months back, I went to Facebook to show the directory as
part of a presentation about serendipity and discovery, and found
something very different—a single page that featured a small
number of pages that I’d expressed an interest in, and a selection of
topics Facebook thought I might find interesting. Because I have
many friends in the Middle East and because I conducted this
experiment during the height of the Arab Spring, most of the pages
recommended were Egyptian political organizations. I logged out of
Facebook and visited the Pages directory not as Ethan Zuckerman
but as a random user from an IP address in Massachusetts, and got
a page filled with Boston sports teams and Dunkin’ Donuts. Saving
me the inconvenience of sorting the Red Sox from Real Madrid,
Facebook buried its desire line information under a layer of forced
customization, offering me an experience that’s more comfortable,
but less conducive to discovery.19
Not all social media services have taken the same approach.
Twitter’s trending topics, featured on the main page of that service,
offer a glimpse into conversations that you would miss otherwise.
You may not know what “Cala Boca Galvão” means when you see it
as a trending topic, but it’s an invitation to learn more. For some
topics, Twitter has offered a one-line summary of the topic, making it
easier to understand the significance of a topic in an unfamiliar
language. It can also be an invitation to put up filters and learn less;
Twitter offers you the ability to choose to see only trending topics
from your local area, if you’re uninterested in the Twitterings of
people in Brazil or Japan. And trending topics favor fast-breaking
news over events that take a long time to unfold, like the Occupy
movement, making it easier to discover some trends than others.20
Simply revealing that a conversation is taking place does not
guarantee that it will become any more inclusive. Martin Wattenberg
and Fernanda Viegas, two of the world’s leading information
designers, tried a trending-topics experiment on a holiday weekend
in 2010. They looked at the ten topics trending in the United States
and then attempted to figure out who was involved in the
conversations by looking at the profile pictures of people
participating. They discovered a very sharp racial divide. Most
trending topics were dominated by African American youth, who’ve
been early adopters of the service and who often use Twitter quite
differently from other users. The topic #inappropriatechurchsongs is
filled with humorous suggestions for tunes your pastor won’t be
playing in church this weekend, because they’re either racy puns on
existing hymns or amusingly inappropriate suggestions. There’s
nothing preventing white Twitter users from joining the conversation,
but Wattenberg and Viegas found that ninety-four participants in the
thread were black, and six were white. Another topic—“oil spill”—
skews differently, with several dozen white and three black authors.
And “polyamorous” appears to be something Americans can all talk
about, black or white.

Local Maxima

Twitter’s trending topics are a form of local maxima, a sign of what’s

popular at a moment in time for a particular population. They’re
useful precisely because they’re not global maxima. If Twitter
showed us what was most popular across the whole service, we
would encounter an endless stream of Justin Bieber memes. By
looking for what’s hot today, we encounter a mix of the expected and
the surprising, the news we knew was breaking, and the news we’re
surprised to discover.
My friend David Arnold has emerged as a celebrity in the
molecular gastronomy world as the director of culinary technologies
for the French Culinary Institute in New York City. He’s the guy who
infuses gin with quinine in a whipped cream maker, carbonates it,
and serves it in a liquid nitrogen–chilled glass to offer a gin and tonic
that’s entirely gin.21 I knew him as a high school student, before his
culinary fascinations became apparent, and when I knew him he was
a big Bob Marley fan. Most high school Bob Marley fans are badly
deluded white guys who have secret dreams of becoming
dreadlocked Rastafarians. But Arnold just liked the music and had
an apparently limitless collection of early Marley recordings.
I once asked Arnold how he’d started listening to Marley. “I went to
the record store and realized there was this whole section—reggae
—that I knew nothing about. I looked in, and this guy Marley had
more albums than anyone else. I figured he was the best reggae
guy, so I bought one of his albums and took it home.”
The Dave Arnold algorithm is a remarkably effective way to
explore an unfamiliar space where someone’s done the work of
classifying information for you. Don’t know anything about French
Impressionism? Try this guy Monet. If that doesn’t work for you, you
might give Renoir a go. If you’re not a fan of either, there’s a decent
chance you can give up on the category and move on to Cubism or
Abstract Expressionism. You may miss Delacroix, but you’ll be able
to sample some of the greatest hits of other artistic movements
quickly, and then decide if you want to make a deeper dive.
Computer scientists call this a “breadth first search,” where you scan
the horizon for promising matches before descending for a complete
exploration of a category.
The local maxima strategy also works for wandering through a city,
once you start thinking of places popular with different groups of
people as categories to explore. Knowing that Times Square is the
most popular tourist destination in New York may only be useful so
you can be sure to avoid it. But knowing where most Haitian taxicab
drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where to find the best
Haitian food. Don’t know whether you like Haitian food? Try a couple
of the local maxima—the most important places to the Haitian
community—and you’ll be able to answer that question pretty quickly.
It’s unlikely you’ll dislike the food because it’s badly prepared, since
it’s the favorite destination for that community.
There are limits to the local maxima algorithm—goat soup may not
be the easiest Haitian cuisine to stomach. A bridge figure, perhaps a
waitress who’s experienced in introducing non-Haitians to her
country’s cuisine, might have a better suggestion. But following the
cab driver is a first step in escaping your existing patterns of
discovery. If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think
are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are
enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from
you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own
ways.
Again, Twitter is a space where you can identify local maxima and
let them curate your wanderings. Encounter an unfamiliar trending
topic like “#M23”—the name of a rebel movement in Democratic
Republic of Congo, allegedly supported by the Rwandan government
—and you’ll quickly discover that certain users are being amplified
more than others. That’s often because they’re on-the-ground
sources, or authoritative commentators on the topic in question.
Someone like Laura Seay, an African studies scholar and professor
at Morehouse University, wouldn’t register on a top hundred or top
thousand list of Twitter users. But if you follow a conversation about
conflicts in Central Africa, she’s likely to emerge as a prominent and
widely quoted source. You might follow her to see whether you were
interested in the topic, or to find the people she follows and quotes.
Or you might quickly conclude that your interest in the space is
limited and broaden your search for new inspirations.

Structured Wandering

The danger of the city is that we get trapped in Chombart de Lauwe’s

personally limited “real” Paris. The danger of online spaces is
Pariser’s filter bubble of comfortable media delivered by our friends.
In each case, the solution comes in part from wandering, making a
conscious decision to stray from our everyday path and experience
something unfamiliar. It’s possible to wander with a purpose. The
flaneur strolls the streets as a strategy for encountering and
understanding the city. We can wander in ways that seek serendipity.
We take a familiar question into unfamiliar territory in the hope that,
like Fleming, we will find that something unexpected and odd has
landed in our petri dish.
Guy Debord, the French social theorist who decried our
“pathetically limited” lives in the city, prescribed the “dérive,” an
unstructured drift through a landscape, as an intervention for
overcoming these limitations:
 In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop
their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other
usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be
drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they
find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than
one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have
psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed
points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit
from certain zones.22

If you’re worried about accurately sensing the psychogeographical

contours of your city, or if you simply don’t have an entire day to
wander, Serendipitor might be for you. You tell Serendipitor, an
iPhone and web application by Mark Shepard, where you are, where
you need to be, and how long you have. Rather than calculating the
shortest path between two points, as Google Maps usually does,
Serendipitor prescribes a meandering path that will get you to your
destination at the appointed time, but via a route that no human
would ever rationally select. Some routes are ones you shouldn’t
take—a recent version of the application occasionally prompts you to
flag down a passing car and see where it takes you! More an art
piece than a practical application, Serendipitor is a useful
provocation that if we’ve forgotten how to wander, we could always
develop software to help us go astray.
Systems like Debord’s and Shepard’s are by their very nature
arbitrary, and it’s easy to dismiss them as random or silly. But
sometimes you’ll be forced to experiment with arbitrary systems
because they’re a feature of the local culture. In Ghana, virtually
everyone you meet knows the day of the week he or she was born
on. In Ashanti culture, and many other Ghanaian cultures,
nicknames are based on the day of the week you were born. My son
Drew, who arrived early on a Saturday morning, is Kwame. Had he
been a bit quicker about coming into the world, he might have been
a Friday-born Kofi. When I find myself in church in Accra, I know that
I’ll be called up to make my offering along with all the other
Thursday-borns, the Yaws and Yaas. Each set of men and women
will dance to the altar when their day is called and make their
offerings; the pastor will then let us know which birth day offered the
most, leading to good-natured ribbing about who is generous and
who’s stingy.
Being able to introduce myself as Yaw to a group of unfamiliar
Ghanaians is a highly successful strategy for building arbitrary
connections. In most groups, I’ll meet at least one other Yaw, and
we’ll shake hands, make eye contact, exchange a few extra
pleasantries. We’re bound to find something to talk about—after all,
we share a name. Whether or not a wise Ashanti chief consciously
promoted the nickname system as a way of generating social capital,
or whether Ghanaians simply kept the practice up because it has
some ambiguous but positive social benefits, it works, it persists, and
it introduces me to Ghanaians I would otherwise never know.
Lest you think social connection through something as arbitrary as
the calendar is limited to tribes in West Africa, behold birth month
groups. Pregnant women, often those carrying their first child,
frequently join groups on the social networking site LiveJournal on
the basis of their due dates. All the women scheduled to deliver in
September join a group, and they’re able to update each other and
compare their progress and experience through the months leading
up to delivery. Many of these groups persist long after the children
are born as new mothers compare their children’s development
through infancy and beyond. The women involved have only two
things in common—they’re LiveJournal users, and they got pregnant
at roughly the same time. Many groups include both atheists and
people of faith, women from different races and ethnicities. The
arbitrariness of birth month mixes people in an unusual way, and the
deeply emotional experience of watching each other become a
mother generates social capital and, often, unexpected friendships.
Arbitrary structures can be a useful mechanism for individuals to
wander, not just for groups to discover new connections. Many years
ago, Jonathan Gold set up a wholly arbitrary challenge for himself.
Working as a copy editor for a legal newspaper, living on the
famously multicultural Pico Avenue in Los Angeles, Gold decided
that he would eat his way down the street, getting off the bus one
stop earlier each week and taking himself to dinner at one of the
Ethiopian, Korean, Cuban, Cambodian, or Jewish restaurants that
line the street. His yearlong experiment turned into a brilliant article
in the LA Weekly, titled “The Year I Ate Pico,” and launched Gold on
a storied career as a restaurant critic, one whose Counter
Intelligence column focuses on low-end ethnic cuisine in LA. That
work eventually led to a Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a food
critic.
I see echoes of Gold’s arbitrariness in a wonderfully strange
project launched online by the AllMetalResource blog, a leading
weblog focused on heavy metal music. The authors behind the blog
declared April 2011 “International Death Metal Month” and tried to
find death metal bands from each of 195 UN-recognized nations.
Their search didn’t involve plane tickets, just lots of searches on
YouTube. It turns out that death metal bands are a pretty sociable
bunch, and are often looking for the feedback of fans in other
countries. The organizers fell short of their goals, but they did make
some remarkable discoveries, including the Botswanan band
WRUST, part of a heavy metal scene whose members dress in black
leathers with cowboy hats, looking like a postapocalyptic western
movie set in southern Africa. Botswanan death metal may not be
your thing, but that’s really the point—pick a topic you’re interested in
and go global. The blogger Linda Monach makes dinner for her
family, including her meat- and potatoes-eating father, each night.
Bored with serving the same old food, she decided to spend a year
serving burgers from around the world: an Albanian burger of lamb
and flatbread, an Armenian creation that includes apricot preserves.
The constraint: meat and bread in every meal. The possibilities? As
wide as the span of human culinary creativity, or the selection at the
local supermarket.23

Breaking the Metaphor

The difference between an online and a real-world walking tour

reminds us that there’s a danger in extending the geographic
metaphor of the city too far. Compelling as we can make the
narration of a walking tour or the promise of excellent goat soup, it
still takes a long time to get from the Bronx to Staten Island. In digital
spaces, on the other hand, we can change proximities. We can sort
bits any way we want to, to reshuffle our cities any way we can
imagine. We can create neighborhoods that are all waterfront, all
park, all brick buildings, all eight-story buildings built in 1920 and
discover who and what we encounter in these new spaces.
David Weinberger writes about the powers and potentials of the
Internet. In his book Everything Is Miscellaneous, he explores what
happens when information is freed from physical constraints. In the
real world, a book can be shelved in only one hierarchy and one
location at a time. But in a digital world, there’s no limit to the ways
you can shelve your collection or present your data. The analog
world favors hierarchies and trees, while the digital world
encourages us to “put each leaf on as many branches as possible.”
Weinberger is one of the people behind the Harvard Library
Innovation Lab, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been
experimenting with reshuffling the library shelves, one of the most
powerful structures we have to encourage constructive stumbling
through an information landscape. Whether shelved by Library of
Congress classification, or the older and quirkier Dewey decimal
classification system, Weinberger, citing Clay Shirky, argues that the
shelving of books in a library forces us to order knowledge in a
single, universal way. This means we end up with biases that seem
arbitrary and dated: Weinberger notes that 88 of 100 topics available
in Dewey decimal coding for books about religion are reserved for
Christian topics, while Buddhists and Hindus share a single catalog
number.24
For all the flaws and peculiarities of this form of ordering
knowledge, there are unanticipated positive consequences when we
wander in an open-stack library. Because we expect books to be
sorted by subject, we start with what we think we want to know and
expand our search visually, broadening the topics we consider as our
eyes move away from our initial search. As we scan the stacks,
information about a book is available from its appearance—its age,
its size. Width tells us whether the volume is brief or long, height is
often a hint at whether a book contains pictures, as tall books tend to
feature colored photos.
 ShelfLife, a new tool developed at the Innovation Lab, offers the
ability to virtually reshelve books according to these physical factors
—size, width, height, age—as well as by data like subject, author,
popularity with a group of professors or a group of students. The
goal is to take what’s useful about physical ways of organizing and
the implicit information conveyed in those schemes and combine it
with the flexibility of organizing digital information. Combining
insights gained from studying the organization of cities with the
ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing
online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
How do we present the library shelf to maximize serendipity? How
do we encourage readers to stray from the familiar toward the
unexpected in a way that’s likely to encourage discovery, not simply
increase randomness?
Recommending the most popular books on the shelf simply
becomes a form of social search. In the process, we inherit all the
attendant problems: if others browsing the library are like us, we are
trapped in another bubble of homophily. And even if a very diverse
set of users uses ShelfLife, the system needs to know what we’re
interested in and what we already know about in order to make good
recommendations.
Engineering serendipity requires a certain amount of surveillance.

Self-tracking and Self-discovery

Consider Dr. Seth Roberts, the man who tracks everything. Since
1980, he’s been trying to cure himself of poor sleep, tracking his
hours asleep, diet, weight, exercise, mood, and other factors. His
experiments have tested a “mismatch theory,” the idea that some of
our discomfort with modern life stems from the ways in which our
routines and practices vary from what humans were used to in the
Stone Age. Roberts tried skipping breakfast (to mimic eating patterns
of hunter-gatherers), watching human faces on TV in the mornings
(to replicate the gossip and social contact that anthropologists
believe characterized Stone Age mornings), and standing many
hours a day. His meticulously documented findings, correlating the
quality of his sleep to his hours spent standing, persuaded him to
move to a standing desk and do much of his work while walking on a
treadmill.
Eventually he discovered that he slept much better when he stood
for nine hours a day. By the time I met him, at a cocktail party during
the inaugural Quantified Self conference in Mountain View,
California, he was experimenting with standing on one leg until
exhaustion multiple times a day. The bent-leg technique was one
he’d discovered by accident and was testing, trying random numbers
of bent-leg stands a day to determine the optimum number that
correlated with restful sleep. At the moment, six was looking like a
pretty good number to him.25
Roberts represents two phenomena, taken to an extreme: self-
tracking and self-experimentation. Using tools like the Fitbit, which
tracks each step you take, or Zeo, which tracks your sleep states,
self-trackers collect data about their bodies and their moods and look
for trends over time. Some self-trackers experiment on themselves,
making changes in their diet, exercise, or behavior, to see whether
they sleep better or awake happier.
What would we learn from surveilling and experimenting with
ourselves in this way? We humans, for all our cognitive strengths,
are pretty poor at long-term self-awareness. We remember major
events more than minor ones, and much of what we do every day
blurs into the background. Tracking our behavior is a helpful
technique for shattering the illusions we all hold about ourselves. I
had been invited to the conference—hosted by one of the leaders of
the Quantified Self movement, Gary Wolf—to talk about some
preliminary experiments I’d been conducting that looked at a less
frequently examined facet of the quantified self: consumption of
media.
In my investigations of imaginary cosmopolitanism and the
Internet, I realized I needed data about what news stories people
were seeing online and off-line, and what stories were capturing their
interest. This information is fairly easy to obtain in the broadest terms
—hours of media consumed a day—but difficult to pin down in terms
of specifics. Individual websites like the Huffington Post know what
articles users read and how long they spend on a site, and
advertisers are sometimes able to track users across multiple sites.
But data on what individual news stories someone reads or what
YouTube videos she watches is harder to aggregate. Tracking what
people read or watch in analog media—radio or broadcast television,
newspapers—relies on media diaries, logs that individuals keep of
their viewing or reading behavior as well as set-top devices that track
the programs played on a sample set of televisions. The data that
emerge from tracking media consumption fuel a multibillion-dollar
business. Even with access to pricey data sets from media-
monitoring firms like Nielsen or Arbitron, it would be hard to answer
the question “How much information from Africa did the average
American get this week?”
Rather than paying a media analytics firm, I tried the Seth Roberts
approach. For three months in the fall of 2010, I kept a diary of what
I read, watched, and listened to off-line, and used a system called
RescueTime to track my online behavior. RescueTime is designed as
a productivity tool. It generates a scorecard judging how much
productive time you spend at your computer versus “distracting” time
—time spent writing versus watching YouTube videos, for instance.
But you can use it in a less overtly judgmental fashion, simply
looking at what captures your attention during the average day.
I found that my perception of myself and the actual person who
populated my web browser history differ pretty sharply. I consider
myself a globally focused guy: I chair the board of a Kenyan
nonprofit organization, sit on boards of organizations focused on
African journalism and global citizen media, and on many days I
write about current events in different corners of the developing
world. But that’s hard to discern from my media consumption. What’s
more obvious when you review my online traces is that I’ve got a soft
spot for Internet humor and that I spend an inordinate amount of time
tracking my favorite football team, the Green Bay Packers. Globally
focused news sites like those of the New York Times, the Christian
Science Monitor, and South Africa’s Mail and Guardian and my own
site, Global Voices, received far less attention from me than
reddit.com and ESPN. Comparing the amount of time I spent reading
any news with the vast amount of time I spent reading and
answering email was a soul-crushing discovery in and of itself.
 Initially, I’d planned to blog about my weekly media consumption,
but after the first week of tracking my behavior, I concluded that I
was embarrassed even to share the files with my wife. If I wasn’t
seeking out international news online as often as I thought I was, I
was stumbling over a surprising amount of it through a much older
medium: radio. The most globally oriented days recorded in my
media diary were ones when I spent a long time driving. National
Public Radio’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered feature
heavy doses of international coverage, as does the BBC World
Service, rebroadcast by many US public radio stations. The less
control I had over what stories I encountered, the more international
news I heard—and I noticed that many of my online searches for
news started with stories I’d first encountered on radio.
Many self-trackers report that the act of logging their actions
changes their behavior. If you’re logging the food you eat during a
day to track calories, the thought of recording the calories associated
with a cheeseburger and fries can be sufficient to persuade you to
order a salad instead. My experiences with tracking media were
similar. I believe that encountering international news is important,
and I was dismayed to see how little I sought it out. Pretty quickly,
my visits to reddit and PackersNews.com decreased, and I found I
was reaching for harder news sites during moments of cognitive
downtime.
If a few million people track their sleep and their steps, fewer track
their movements through a city as Zach Seward has. And fewer still
track everything they read, hear, or encounter, if only because the
challenges of collecting data are so great. But we would benefit
greatly from tools that help us monitor what we see and help us
understand what we know and don’t know about.
Fitbit presents its wearers with a simple, stark blue number: the
steps you’ve taken in a day. It’s harder to lie to yourself that the walk
around the block was the equivalent of a workout when Fitbit tells
you it was only five hundred steps. Systems that show us where we
go, whom we talk to, and what we read would give us data we can
use to make changes. If we’re living a life that, as Debord warns, is
pathetically limited, we can make different choices and change our
behavior.
 But surveilling ourselves offers another possible benefit. A system
that knows what you’ve seen can use that information to help you
discover. Track what you’re reading, and it becomes clear which
local maxima have already been explored, and which could lead to
unexpected discoveries. And perhaps we can make
recommendations that are better than random, because our paths—
through the city and through the Internet—reveal our desire lines,
what we’re searching for, as well as what we’ve not yet found.
This is not to suggest that engineering serendipity is as simple (or
as complicated) as tracking what we encounter and seeking out
information that’s related, but unfamiliar. As we tackle those massive,
complex problems, we have to consider another variable: our
tolerance for risk.

Serendipity and Risk

We need serendipity because of our tendency to focus on the

familiar, to miss what might be provocative and inspiring because it’s
unfamiliar and unknown. Implicit in the metaphor of wandering is the
idea that serendipity is unpredictable, time-consuming, and far from
guaranteed.
Much of the work that’s been done on offering online
recommendations focuses on reducing risk. We know that young
social media users regularly rely on their network of friends for
advice in making choices. If your friends collectively think the
TGIFridays down the street is pretty good, it’s a less risky choice
than the unknown Turkish joint a block farther away. For high-cost
choices, this aversion to risk is reasonable. Buying a car without
knowing its provenance is almost certainly a bad idea, while buying a
meal from an unfamiliar restaurant may well lead to an unexpected
discovery.
Netflix, the online video rental company, has used
recommendation systems to help customers discover movies they
might not otherwise rent. This is a critical problem for the company,
because many customers sign up, rent the few dozen movies they’d
hoped to see in rapid succession, and then cancel their
memberships, costing Netflix their monthly subscription fee. If Netflix
can offer high-quality recommendations, it increases its odds of
retaining a customer.
Netflix recommends movies on the basis of an idea called
“collaborative filtering.” In collaborative filtering, you express a set of
preferences—a few movies you like, a few movies you dislike—and
the system looks for other users who have tastes similar to yours. It
collects a set of their favorite movies, then recommends ones you’ve
not seen. The trick is calculating what users have tastes similar to
yours.
One popular method for calculating this is a technique called
“cosine similarity.” A computer program collects your ratings of a set
of movies and compares those preferences to all other sets of
ratings. If your ratings are identical to another user’s—that is, you
both gave Casablanca five stars and Mission: Impossible none—you
score a one. If you have no films in common, you score a zero. The
actual math behind this is wonderfully cool, if slightly mind-bending.
Imagine a world with only two movies—Casablanca and Mission:
Impossible. I give Casablanca five stars and M:I one. Put a point on
a graph at (5, 1)—Casablanca’s our x axis, M:I our y axis—and draw
a line that passes through (0, 0) and (5, 1)—that’s the vector that
represents my preferences.
Now pretend you liked M:I a lot and thought Casablanca was
overrated. You get a point at (1, 5), and a vector from (0, 0) to (1,5)
represents your preferences. The angle between your vector and
mine is a measure of how similar we are, and taking the cosine of
that angle provides a simple way to scale the value to be between 0
and 1 for angles between 0 and 90 degrees. The rub, of course, is
that there are more than two movies in the world. Cosine similarity
adds a new dimension to our graph for each new term. So when we
compare your tastes to mine to see whether we like the same
movies, we’re playing with vectors that exist in 100,000-dimensional
space, one for each of the movies in the Netflix collection. Don’t
bother imagining 100,000-dimensional space; it will make your head
hurt. Just imagine 3-dimensional space and think about two vectors
that each emerge from 0, 0, 0 and each pass through an arbitrary
point in positive x, y, z space; it’s easy enough to imagine measuring
the angle between those two vectors. Then take it on faith that,
mathematically, you can do the same thing in many-dimensional
space.
Finding movies by using linear algebra can lead to some deeply
unexpected results. You like old Steve Martin movies and the
Japanese cartoon FLCL? Me too. And I like Wim Wenders’s epic
Road Movies. There’s not a sane system based on cinema history
that would propose New German Cinema when prompted with
American slapstick and Japanese anime as inputs … but a
collaborative filtering system just might, if a few users with my tastes
are represented in the system.
Collaborative filtering works, and works well. If you’ve ever
purchased a book recommended by Amazon based on your past
purchases, you’ve benefited from the technique. But Netflix wanted it
to work better. So it offered a $100,000 prize to any team that could
improve its algorithms sufficiently. Because Netflix has massive
amounts of data about what movies people have rated, it’s able to
test these algorithms against actual preferences: on the basis of fifty
ratings of other movies from a user, what’s she going to think about
The Breakfast Club? Compare your predictions to her actual
behavior, and you know how well or poorly you’re doing. Offer
measurably better predictions than Netflix’s in-house algorithm, and
the prize is yours.
The winners of the contest were a team of computer scientists
from AT&T and Yahoo! There was no single conceptual
breakthrough that put them over the top. Instead, they found
hundreds of small improvements they could make to the Netflix
algorithms that, taken collectively, were a major improvement. Netflix
paid them, the system improved, but we didn’t learn anything
particularly paradigm-shattering about collaborative filtering.
My friend Nathan Kurz wasn’t part of the winning team, though
early in the challenge his algorithms were placing in the top twenty
on the leaderboard. Roughly halfway through the contest, Kurz
realized that he and Netflix didn’t see the problem of
recommendation the same way. To win the Netflix challenge, your
predictions of a user’s ratings had to match its ratings quite closely.
Knowing that a user would think a movie was worth three stars out of
five—a “meh,” in qualitative terms—is as important as knowing that a
user would be likely to give a movie five stars. Netflix cares about
this because it wants to predict what you’re going to think about any
film. For Kurz, that’s a silly question: “Who rents a movie they’re
likely to give three stars? I want the movie that’s going to change my
life. I want to watch a movie that no one has ever heard of and fall so
deeply in love that I want to meet the other people who’ve given it
five stars because they’re likely to be my soulmates.”
As competitors in the Netflix prize discussed their progress, it
became clear that a small subset of movies was extremely difficult
for algorithms to handle. One of these movies is Napoleon Dynamite,
a cult film about growing up in small-town America that Netflix users
appear to love or hate. Very few people give the film three stars—if
you bothered to rate the film, you likely gave it a one or a five. Since
winning the Netflix challenge involves predicting a user’s preferences
with a high degree of accuracy, solving the Napoleon Dynamite
problem became central for many contestants. Most built systems
that tried to minimize the influence of polarizing movies on other
predictions—knowing that someone gave Napoleon Dynamite a five
doesn’t appear to help predict her taste for other movies.
For Kurz, movies like Napoleon Dynamite were a clue that there
are other ways to offer collaborative predictions. You could swing for
the fences, offering only films that might be fives for you, taking the
risk that some—perhaps many—would fall short of the mark. As a
user of Kurz’s system, you would lead a life that was a lot less
predictable, but potentially more rewarding and exciting.
Unfortunately, Kurz’s life hit a patch of unpredictability before the
close of the Netflix challenge. He caught the West Nile virus from
mosquitoes living in a drainage ditch behind his home in Las Cruces,
New Mexico, and spent two years recovering from the disease.
While fighting the disease, Kurz experienced decreased cognitive
capacity. “I couldn’t write code,” he says, “and I certainly couldn’t
design novel algorithms. I didn’t know if I was going to get better, so I
had to start thinking about another way to make a living.”
Kurz chose cooking, and began making sorbet, using the sorts of
highly technical processes only a Dave Arnold could love. His
sorbets have no emulsifiers or binders. They’re fruit juice, sometimes
sweetened with beet sugar, frozen into dense, cold cylinders and
scraped into sorbet by a machine called a Pacojet, which uses a
fast-moving titanium blade to shave the ice into a two-micron-thick
layer. The result is something that feels profoundly creamy while
tasting of nothing but the primary ingredient.
True to his theories on recommendation, Kurz’s sorbets can
polarize. Flavors like Almond Pink Peppercorn, Anaheim Chile,
Sugar Snap Pea, Fennel Citrus, Nectarine Habañero, Rhubarb
Ginger, and Coconut Thai Basil are not guaranteed crowd-pleasers,
but in any sufficiently large group of people, you’re virtually
guaranteed to find someone who thinks that Beet Lemon is the best
thing he’s ever tasted.
“It works because we encourage people to taste all the flavors,”
Kurz tells me, as I finish a cup of Lemon Shiso in Scream Sorbet, his
Oakland shop. “They’re going to hate some of them, but usually
there’s something in there that they love. I don’t ever want anyone to
eat anything mediocre. I want them to taste their new favorite thing.”
You can’t discover penicillin unless some random mold spores
drop into your petri dish. And you may need to tolerate a bite or two
of Roasted Daikon (which Kurz considers his least-successful
experiment) before discovering your love of Almond Pink Peppercorn
(my personal favorite). To experience serendipity, we need to take
the risks of failure, of frustration, of wasted time. If we’re
reengineering the media we encounter and the media we produce to
encourage serendipitous discovery, the key may be to increase our
tolerance for risk and to make it less painful—or at least more tasty
—to fail.
In the next ten years, I expect that tools that enable serendipity,
that help us stumble on unexpected and helpful information, will
become as important a utility as search engines and social networks
are today. At MIT, my students and I are working on systems that
closely watch what you read online, and what content you choose to
share, not to find users who are similar to you, but to help you find
communities you know little about. We’re exploring ways to find
hundreds of communities in networks like Twitter or Facebook, and
surface stories that prove interesting to otherwise unconnected
groups. In other words, we’re looking for local maxima that you might
not otherwise discover.
There’s vast work to be done in this space, whether it involves
building tools that help readers and researchers see what they’re
seeing and missing or helping curators lead people into unfamiliar
neighborhoods and weird parts of the Internet. Needed are both
technological breakthroughs and new ways of approaching the
problems of exploration and discovery. Better systems to visualize
what we have already encountered are crucial, but so are tools that
help us find translators and bridge figures who can contextualize
what we’re finding. Our first steps to designing for serendipity start
with realizing that the ability to make novel connections is a new
form of power.
 THE CONNECTED SHALL INHERIT

THE GUITARIST NEAL SCHOEN HAD A PROBLEM. WHILE THE glory days of his
band Journey ended in the mid-1980s, their anthemic arena rock
ballads still attracted fans from around the world. In 2007, when
Journey’s hit “Don’t Stop Believing” was used in the closing scene of
a television drama,1 The Sopranos, millions of American fans
recalled youths spent in acid-washed jeans and wondered when
Journey might tour again.
Schoen and his bandmates wanted to tour, but at the time Journey
lacked a lead singer. After Steve Perry left the band in 1986, Journey
had cycled through a long lineup of vocalists. Singing for Journey is
no easy task: the band’s hits, recorded with Perry at the helm,
abound with technically demanding vocal lines sung by a powerful
countertenor. For a dozen years—the post-Perry era—Journey fans
had suffered through vocalists not quite up to the task. When he
began his latest search for a new lead singer, Schoen wasn’t looking
for someone who would reinvent the band in his own image. He
needed a highly talented, technical artist who could help Journey
sound the way it had in its glory days.
Schoen turned to YouTube and began watching videos of 1980s
cover bands, looking for the right vocalist.2 Two days into his search,
he stumbled onto an extraordinary performance. In the Hard Rock
Café in Makati, one of the Philippine cities that make up the
sprawling metropolis of Manila, a band called the Zoo was
performing songs from the seventies and eighties soft rock canon:
Air Supply, Night Ranger, and, of course, Journey. The guitarist was
out of tune, the keyboard player stumbled over easy riffs, but the
vocalist sounded exactly like Steve Perry. Neal Schoen had found
Arnel Pineda.
Pineda was a city boy, born and raised in Sampaloc. His childhood
had the features of a ballad a Journey audience might wave its
lighters to. Pineda’s mother had encouraged her son to compete in
singing competitions, but when she died of heart disease when he
was thirteen, Pineda found himself homeless, making his living
collecting and selling bottles and scrap metal. His destitution didn’t
stop him from performing; at fifteen he was frontman for a local
band, and by the time he was twenty-one his bands were winning
contests in the Philippines. When Pineda caught Schoen’s attention,
he’d been performing in nightclubs for two decades. Although he had
cut a couple of albums for the Filipino arms of international record
companies, his name wasn’t widely known outside of South Asian
nightclubs and karaoke bars.3
Schoen had no way of knowing that the Philippines was the
perfect place to look for his new lead vocalist. The long and
complicated relationship between the United States and the
Philippines ensures that American pop culture enjoys widespread
exposure in Manila, and that most Filipinos speak English. In
addition, a style of singing called plakado—the Tagalog word for
“platter” or “record”—has been popular there since it was developed
in the 1960s. Filipino singers reproduce recordings as faithfully as
possible, and the highest form of praise for a live vocalist is that he
sounded plakado, exactly as it did on the recording. Plakado
reached even greater stylistic heights as electronic karaoke
machines that scored vocalists on their precision became
commonplace in Southeast Asia. All of that served to make the clubs
and bars of Manila, in essence, a system engineered to produce
vocalists who sounded exactly like Paul McCartney or Steve Perry.4
The videos of the Zoo performing in Makati had been uploaded by
Noel Gomez, a friend and longtime fan of Pineda’s, and Schoen
reached out to Gomez to schedule an audition with Pineda. Gomez
first had to convince Pineda that the invitation wasn’t an elaborate
prank, a process that ultimately involved placing a call to Schoen in
California.5 Then Pineda had to persuade the US embassy to grant
him a visa to travel to his audition.
He got the visa, the audition, and the job. On February 21, 2008,
Arnel Pineda debuted as the lead singer of Journey at the Viña del
Mar International Song Festival in Chile, a concert broadcast live to
25 million television viewers. Pineda was an instant hit with Journey
fans, who made the first album Pineda recorded with the band a
platinum-selling success. What happened next was more
unexpected. Not content with reviving Journey, Pineda has
connected the band with a new audience—millions of Filipinos at
home and abroad who love arena rock. The crowds at Journey
shows now feature a mix of aging rock fans remembering their
suburban youth alongside young Filipino Americans reveling in the
success of their countryman. Journey’s last concert video, released
through Walmart, features the band playing for its most passionate
fans. It’s titled Live in Manila.
In a world where the Filipino lead singer of an American rock band
wows crowds in Chile, it’s the connected who shall inherit.
In our connected age, people who are able to bridge between
cultures like Pineda have certain superpowers. They are able to
sample from what’s best in a variety of global cultures and
recombine those influences in creative and novel ways. They can
translate what’s wonderful about a culturally specific art form and
make it accessible to a new audience. There’s no doubt that Pineda
is supremely talented. But part of his genius comes from his
background and role as a bridge figure.

The Changing Face of the CEO

The world’s biggest corporations are seeking cosmopolitan leaders

to build world-straddling businesses. Their reasons for selecting
CEOs with a global perspective help us understand the power of
diverse points of view and what we, individually and collectively,
might gain from seeking cognitive variety through global awareness.
Multinational companies are becoming global companies, no
longer rooted in one country and selling to the world, but seeking the
best talent and leadership from wherever they work. We can see the
transformation at work with two brands that symbolize American
culture to much of the world: Coke and Pepsi. These American
institutions are led by a Muslim from Turkey and a Hindu from India,
respectively.
In 1980, Indra Nooyi was looking for work. After earning a BS in
her native Madras, and a management degree from the Indian
Institute of Management in Calcutta, she came to Yale to earn a
second management degree. Living in the United States for the first
time, she supported herself working an overnight shift as a
receptionist at a campus building. When she landed an interview for
a summer internship with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton,
she faced a dilemma: she could not afford a business suit. Rather
than borrow one, she wore a sari, and she got hired.6
After stints at Boston Consulting Group and Motorola, Nooyi found
herself at Pepsico in 1994. The global beverage giant faced two
challenges—breaking into new markets in the developing world and
diversifying the company’s base of sales from snack foods to a
broader and more healthful line of foods. Who better to lead the
transformation than a vegetarian from Madras? Nooyi was named to
the board of directors of Pepsico in 2001 and named CEO in 2006.
While she is not without critics, Nooyi is widely recognized as one of
the most powerful and successful executives on a global stage, and
her name is floated as a candidate for positions as varied as the
chief executive of the Indian manufacturing giant Tata and as a
possible future head of the World Bank.7
While the Cola Wars don’t rage as fiercely as they did in the
1980s, it’s fair to say that Coca-Cola keeps a close eye on smaller
rivals like Pepsi. And in 2008, Coke appointed Muktar Kent its CEO.
Like Nooyi, Kent had lived, worked, and gone to school around the
world. The son of a Turkish diplomat, Kent was born in New York,
raised in the Asian countries his father was posted in, and educated
in Turkey and the UK. His first positions with Coke took him to the
United States, Rome, and Amsterdam, before he took on logistics for
the company in Turkey and later in Central Asia. After twenty years
at Coke, he left to head Efes, Turkey’s largest beverage company,
and returned in 2005, to head Coke’s international operations.8
 Coke and Pepsi may be ahead of the curve on CEO recruiting. A
2009 study by the management consultants Herman Vantrappen and
Petter Kilefors calculates that 14 percent of Fortune 500 companies
are headed by non-native CEOs, leaders from a country other than
where the company is headquartered. On the one hand, that
percentage seems small, given that in many large companies, the
majority of employees work internationally, not where the company is
headquartered. But the number of non-native CEOs was near zero a
few decades past, which means the few dozen companies like Coke
and Pepsi that have hired transnational executives like Nooyi and
Kent are part of an emerging phenomenon.9
Companies may be looking to transnational CEOs in part because
big companies are growing, expanding in the size of their operations
and the markets they serve. When Fortune started tracking the
world’s largest companies in 1955, the top 500 firms had collective
revenues comparable to 39 percent of US gross domestic product
(GDP). While the Fortune 500 were big, they were less powerful,
collectively, than the thousands of small, family-run firms that
dominated the US and European economies. Not any more. The
combined revenues of the Fortune 500 would now make them the
second-largest economy in the world, and compare to 73 percent of
the US GDP.10
Much of the growth comes from US, European, and Japanese
brands finding new markets in emerging nations. As they have
grown, these firms have become unfathomably complex. At Coke,
Kent is responsible for over 140,000 employees in 206 countries and
territories—and that represents only a fraction of the company’s
business; Coke relies on thousands of national and regional bottlers
to get its product to consumers.
More than ever, the CEOs of the world’s biggest companies have
to manage and motivate an employee base that speaks a panoply of
languages and competes in radically different markets. Finding ways
to succeed frequently means putting aside long-standing
assumptions drawn from the company’s experience in established
markets. This becomes all the more true when a company begins to
falter.
 Some firms have turned to transnational CEOs in times of trouble.
The two leading Japanese firms led by non-native CEOs, Sony and
Nissan, both brought new leaders in during a crisis. Carlos Ghosn,
born in Brazil, of Lebanese descent, and educated in Paris, was
working for Renault when the company took a major stake in Nissan
in 1999. The Japanese auto manufacturer was deep in debt and
making money on only three of its forty-eight models. Renault asked
Ghosn to become CEO of Nissan in 2001, and he accepted,
promising to return it to profitability in a single year.
He did so by shutting down plants, laying off 14 percent of the
workforce, and ending the keiretsu system, in which Nissan owned
substantial stakes in most of its parts suppliers. In the process, he
violated virtually every established practice in the Japanese auto
industry, firing workers who had expected lifetime employment and
switching the corporation’s working language from Japanese to
English. Despite his audacity, many Japanese businessmen revere
him. A 160-page comic book celebrates his success at Nissan, and a
popular Japanese restaurant offers a Ghosn bento box, with rice and
sushi shaped to resemble his face. Renault celebrated him by
appointing him its CEO, while asking him to continue running Nissan.
The twin jobs make Ghosn an extreme commuter, splitting his time
between Paris and Tokyo.11
Nissan needed an outsider who could defy convention, make
decisions that were consistent with the global best practices of the
auto industry, even if they were unexpected within Japan. And Pepsi
may have turned to Nooyi in the hopes that her knowledge of India
would help the company navigate emerging markets. But the
changing face of business leadership also suggests that hiring
transnational CEOs may be about leveraging diversity.
One indicator is the rise of Indian CEOs on a global stage.
Thirteen companies in the Fortune 500 are headed by executives
born in India, which means India has produced more current CEOs
than any country but the United States. And while Indian executives
lead giant Indian firms like Tata and Mital, they also lead non-Indian
giants like MasterCard, Citigroup, and Unilever. There are lots of
reasons Indians are well positioned to lead multinational firms: they
are fluent in English, the global language of business, and they cut
their teeth in India’s competitive and challenging home markets, with
a government that deserves its reputation for creating red tape. But
the most important reason Indians succeed in business may be the
nation’s profound religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity.
Ajay Banda, who heads MasterCard, and his brother Vindi, who
headed Hindustan Lever from 2000 to 2005, credit their business
success to their itinerant childhood. Their father, a lieutenant general
in the Indian armed forces, moved to different parts of the nation
every few years. “You had to adapt to new friends, new places,”
Vindi has said. “You had to create your ecosystem wherever you
went.”12 Even Indians who didn’t move around as much as the
Banda brothers learned to live in a nation where neighbors spoke
one of more than four hundred languages and practiced faiths as
diverse as Jainism and Sikhism, where it was unrealistic to assume
that your perspective on the world was shared by everyone around
you.13
In the United States, the Partnership for a New American
Economy, a bipartisan coalition of American business and political
leaders focused on reforming America’s immigration laws, has
discovered that 18 percent of Fortune 500 businesses have at least
one immigrant founder. More than 40 percent have founders who are
immigrants or children of immigrants. These companies include
Google, Intel, eBay, and Yahoo!, some of the pillars of the digital
economy.14 Why are new Americans so successful in building global-
scale businesses?
America’s immigration policies must have an influence, and it’s
possible they are sufficiently onerous that only the truly talented,
hard driven, and best educated are given an opportunity to come to
the United States. Or that immigrant parents push their children
toward fiscal success harder than nonimmigrant parents. We might
also consider that immigrants and their children are often deeply
versed in the art of cultural bridging. The same skills that let an
immigrant search for a job in an unfamiliar language, or allow a child
to act as a cultural translator for her immigrant parents, can also give
an executive an edge in building diverse teams or creating a
corporate culture that values competing points of view. A bridge
figure is more likely to be able to translate insights from other
markets and less likely to be trapped listening only to the company
line.
It’s easy to dismiss a commitment to diversity as a form of
tokenism, signaling that Pepsi takes the developing world seriously
enough to hire an Indian executive, or as a form of political
correctness. But hiring a CEO like Indra Nooyi also demonstrates, at
the highest level of an organization, a commitment to organizational
diversity. Given the massive investments companies are making to
train and promote executives from around the world, and the
responsibility they’ve put in the hands of Nooyi or Ghosn, we should
consider the central importance some companies are giving to
cognitive diversity.

Cognitive Diversity

When Ronald Burt explored the spread of good ideas at Raytheon

(see chapter 6), he was focused on the creativity of individuals,
concluding that the company’s strongest thinkers were often bridges
in an organizational structure, linking units in a corporation that might
not communicate with one another. This structural position allows
bridge figures to draw on a set of unfamiliar ideas and engage in
creative thinking by adapting them for other uses. It’s a powerful
frame for addressing how individuals might help an organization
solve complicated problems, but it leaves an important question
unanswered: How should groups leverage diversity?
Scott Page, a scholar of complex systems at the University of
Michigan, has spent much of his career examining this problem. In
The Difference, a book written to share his complex mathematical
ideas with a lay audience, Page offers some provocative insights. All
things being equal, Page argues, a diverse team will solve problems
better than an equally talented team of like-minded individuals.
Furthermore, a diverse team selected at random will often perform
better than a team composed of members who are individually highly
skilled at solving a problem. In some circumstances, diversity trumps
ability.
 Page’s argument doesn’t extrapolate from experiences in the
business or political world. Instead, he and his colleague Lu Hong
set up a computer model where competing software programs called
“agents” search for the best solutions (in this case, high numbers
distributed at random, in a “map” of locations the agents can
explore). Following individual, custom sets of rules, an agent would
search a huge set of random numbers and locate those with the
highest values. A team of agents would work together, sharing their
findings, and would submit the highest number found in their
collective explorations. Page and Hong then conducted a
competition between teams, one team composed of the twenty
agents who’d performed the best individually, and another composed
of twenty agents chosen at random. The teams always performed
better than a single agent did, but, surprisingly, the team of twenty
randomly chosen agents consistently outperformed the team
composed of high achievers.15
Randomly chosen teams win because of the local maximum
problem. There are many possible good solutions to Hong and
Page’s problem, high numbers distributed in the set of random
numbers. Their agents find the highest number they can in a limited
period of time—the local maximum—then communicate with their
teammates, so everyone can then turn in the biggest local maximum
the twenty agents have found. This method works well as long as
agents are searching different corners of the map. But if they’re all
searching the same space, they converge on a small set of local
maxima, and miss other parts of the map.
Consider a real-world analogy. If I and a team of twenty people
were asked to plant a flag on the top of the highest mountain we
could reach within an hour’s travel, I’d know what to do. I live near
Mt. Greylock, the tallest mountain in Massachusetts, and I’d
confidently plant my flag 1,063 meters above sea level. If my
teammates all live in western Massachusetts, they’d end up on
Greylock with me, because it’s the tallest mountain for miles around,
the local maximum. If one of my teammates lived in northern New
Hampshire, we’d get very different results. She’d make for the top of
Mt. Washington and plant her flag at 1,917 meters. And our team
would do better still if one of our members lived in the Rockies, the
Alps, or the Himalayas. If it’s a competition between twenty rally
drivers and expert mountain climbers who are all in the same,
randomly chosen location, and twenty random individuals scattered
around the world, the diverse team is going to win most of the time,
especially if the mountain climbers are stuck in Nebraska.
Page and Hong’s experiment relies on two important assumptions.
One is that the problem is too hard for a single individual to solve
optimally most of the time. For problems where a skilled individual
can solve the problem herself most of the time, team diversity
doesn’t matter. Second, Page and Hong assume that people highly
skilled at solving a problem tend to solve problems the same way. In
their experiment, the agents that performed the best individually
used very similar algorithms. But because they use similar
techniques, they’re clustered in one corner of the map of possible
solutions, and they can be outperformed by a team of less-effective
agents that can see more of the map.
The phenomenon is not unlike the “best and the brightest”
problem. President John F. Kennedy was noted for surrounding
himself with smart, young foreign policy advisers, whom the
journalist and historian David Halberstam termed “the best and the
brightest,” in his book on the origins of the Vietnam War. These
individuals were unquestionably bright, but they came from similar
backgrounds—the best preparatory schools and elite universities,
the same university and foreign policy jobs. Personality differences
aside, on the whole they tended to solve problems in similar ways.
Furthermore, they liked the solutions their fellow advisers proposed,
because those solutions were comfortable, familiar, and likely to
preserve harmony within the group. As a result, they didn’t look for
other perspectives or solutions, and reinforced each other’s limited
thinking, a process the psychologist Irving Janus termed
“groupthink.”16
A shared set of assumptions about China, the Soviet Union, and
Vietnam proved disastrously wrong. Had the best and the brightest
included a more cognitively diverse set of people, the mean
intelligence of the group might have gone down, but their collective
ability to solve a problem would have increased. Page tells us, “Even
if we were to accept the claim that IQ tests, Scholastic Aptitude Tests
scores, and college grades predict individual problem-solving ability,
they may not be as important in determining a person’s potential
contribution as a problem solver as would be measures of how
differently that person thinks.”17 Adding more Harvard graduates
wouldn’t have made Kennedy’s team of advisers any smarter.
Adding someone who could have challenged their thinking about
China or Vietnam might have.
What kind of problems benefit from the cognitive diversity Page
prescribes? Really hard ones. Page singles out the breaking of the
German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers during World War II by a team
at Bletchley Park in England. Legendarily eclectic, the team included
not just mathematicians but also crossword puzzle experts, linguists,
classicists, and ancient historians, and it drew on the intellectual
resources of several Allied nations, including the remains of the vast
British empire. It was also legendarily successful, consistently
decrypting German messages and providing the Allies with military
intelligence that Churchill so valued that he saluted the Bletchley
Park staff as “golden geese that never cackled.”18 In the more recent
past, Page suggests, the team that won the Netflix prize—seven
computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers representing United
States, Austria, Canada, and Israel—benefited from being a
cognitively diverse group.19

Diversity and Dissent

Should your company hire an Austrian statistician or a Polish

classicist? Page is careful to distinguish between identity diversity
and cognitive diversity. Identity diversity refers to differences in
gender, ethnicity, national origin, religion, language, and dozens of
other factors. Cognitive diversity stems from differences in
perspective and heuristics, the tools we use to solve problems.
People from different backgrounds do tend to bring different
perspectives and heuristics to the table, but there’s not a one-to-one
mapping between identity and cognitive diversity. An African
American executive from rural Alabama and an Indian executive
from Madras may think very similarly if they went to the same high
schools, colleges, and executive training programs.
Hiring someone very different from the rest of your team in an
effort to increase cognitive diversity also invites conflict. Page and
Hong warn that “identity-diverse groups often have more conflict,
more problems with communication and less respect and trust
among members.”20 Warren Watson studied diverse teams in his
management classes at the University of North Texas, placing
students into work groups that were either all white American or a
diverse pool where teams featured a white American, an African
American, a Hispanic student, and a non-American student. He
studied how well they worked together over the course of a
semester, checking in at regular intervals. The diverse teams had
more “process problems” than homogenous teams, conflicts over
how the group should work together, and they were less successful
in the short run. Over the course of the full semester, diverse and
homogenous teams performed equally well, and diverse teams did a
better job in finding a broad range of innovative solutions to
problems.21
Even when a diverse team solves a problem better than other
teams, its members may not enjoy the process as much. Katherine
Phillips, who teaches at Northwestern University’s business school,
conducted a clever experiment in which teams of three sorority or
fraternity members worked together to solve a murder mystery,
combining pieces of information each had individual access to into a
complete whole. Five minutes into the twenty-minute discussion, a
new participant entered. In half the cases, it was a member of the
same fraternity or sorority; in the other half, the new participant came
from a different group. The groups where an outsider joined were
significantly more successful in solving the mystery, but they were
less confident than the homogenous team that they’d come to the
right conclusion. Members of teams with an outsider also enjoyed
participation in the exercise less than members of homogenous
teams. Diversity made the teams more successful, but less
comfortable for all those who participated.22
Phillips saw a significant effect from a minor difference—her
participants were affiliated with different Greek organizations, but
were all students attending the same university. The identity diversity
we find in a global company or an urban neighborhood is likely to be
much higher. Similarly, the discomfort we feel working together,
whether on a new-product rollout or on a new community park, is
higher as well.

Diversity and the Connected World

Some individuals who’ve grown up in multiple cultures learn to

leverage their diversity of perspectives and heuristics into creative
success in business or the arts, but this is far from guaranteed. And
it’s not clear how those of us who live and work near the place in
which we grew up—the vast majority of people—can acquire
cognitive diversity, or how we might embrace the benefits of diversity
while minimizing the conflict and discomfort that so often accompany
it.
It’s a long road, with some possible shortcuts.
States, corporations, and individuals are all looking to the power of
diverse perspectives as a path toward inspiration and toward tackling
our most complex and pressing problems. And while the problems
inherent in retooling a city or a country to benefit from diversity, while
minimizing the stresses created by conflicting goals, are far from
solved, we might look to cosmopolitan nations in the past and the
present for inspiration.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was the
center of the modern world. The Dutch East India Company, the
world’s first multinational, was funded by the Bank of Amsterdam, the
world’s first central bank. Trade from as far away as Japan passed
through the port of Amsterdam, and the city featured the first full-time
stock exchange. The Dutch East India Company was far from an
enlightened cosmopolitan actor in Asia; it used military force to
negotiate favorable trading terms with the people it colonized. But
Holland itself developed a reputation for connection, tolerance, and
success.
The Dutch golden age was in part an accident of history. Spain’s
invasion of the Low Countries during the eighty years’ war drove
wealthy merchants and weavers from Antwerp to Amsterdam.
Geography helped, too. Trading routes crossed through the state
and brought grain from the Rhine to the Mediterranean and wine
from France and Portugal. But the largest factor in the Netherlands’
success may have been religious tolerance. As Catholic kings in
Spain and France cracked down on nonbelievers in their lands,
Protestants, Anabaptists, and Jews flocked to the Netherlands,
bringing wealth, skill, and intellect. By allowing religious minorities to
own land and property and to worship freely, the Netherlands
attracted heretics from around the world. Some of them built great
commercial empires, others academic institutions like the University
of Leiden.23
In our day, nations and cities have sought economic success by
encouraging different flavors of cosmopolitanism. Singapore became
the wealthiest nation in Asia by inviting massive investment from far-
flung and local trading partners. It is impossible to celebrate
Singapore’s success without acknowledging that Singapore is an
authoritarian state where the same party has won every election for
the past half century.24 For better or worse, Singapore has emerged
as a model for many states that seek economic growth by becoming
a nexus of trade in goods and ideas.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the economic adviser who
helped lead the city-state’s transformation was the Dutch economist
Albert Winsemius. Winsemius visited Singapore on a UN mission
shortly after the nation achieved independence from Britain, and
became an unpaid adviser to the country for more than twenty-five
years. His advice covered matters large and small, from inviting the
Dutch electronics giant Phillips to build manufacturing plants in the
country to urging the government not to remove a prominent statue
of Stamford Raffles, the colonial leader who founded the city.
Winsemius argued that the statue of Raffles symbolized Singapore’s
openness to connection with people from all nations, irrespective of
previous colonial relationships.25
What advice might a contemporary Winsemius offer a government
intent on achieving economic success and development in a
connected world? Some choices, of course, would be tailored to the
level of development or government structure of a nation; other
principles might apply more generally. A Winsemius-inspired briefing
book would encourage connected (or would-be connected) states to
consider the following:
Physical Connection: Two key factors in Singapore’s success
were the construction early on of a major container port and an
international airport with affordable landing rights. Nations that have
built an infrastructure that allows connection through travel and trade
also tend to be connected to the flow of people and ideas. For the
most disconnected nations, especially developing nations, strategies
for connection begin with the basics of infrastructure: roads and
railroads, ports and airports, telephone and power lines and Internet
cables. For wealthier nations, questions of connection and
disconnection loom as they decide how to respond to security
threats like terror and pandemic. The temptation to close down
physical connections to achieve marginal safety gains must be
weighed against the disconnections caused. And nations need to be
cognizant of the gap between their perception of their own
international connectivity and how connected they really are. Nations
require an accurate picture of whom they are connected to and
disconnected from, and why, as a first step toward becoming more
central in the flow of goods and ideas.
Immigration: Highly connected nations are starting to see
themselves as “market states,”26 competing with other destinations
for highly skilled immigrants. In response, they build immigration
policies geared toward a highly mobile global workforce, creating
more provisions for guest workers and workable paths toward
citizenship for those who want it. They don’t always get it right—the
United Arab Emirates, for instance, will have to reform its bankruptcy
laws to continue attracting European migrants. Its human rights and
labor laws will also need an overhaul if the country is to continue
attracting workers from the Middle East and India. And one of the
secrets behind Singapore’s economic success is a system of
government that’s far from open. Building a state that’s both open
and attractive as a market state is an unsolved problem.
Nations that aspire to close this gap between creating attractive
markets and creating open societies need to pay special attention to
immigrants who are positioned to build bridges between their former
and their current homes. This might mean creating paths to
citizenship for immigrants who come to a country to study and learn
the local culture, since they’re more likely to help fellow countrymen
integrate and connect when they immigrate. And nations like the
United States would do well to encourage immigrants with strong
technical skills, who are likely to start new companies and transform
old ones.
Education: Connected states need to invest heavily in education,
preparing students to encounter a wide and complex world, both
abroad and at home. Efforts to build world-class universities in
Persian Gulf states reflect not just aspirations to be recognized as
centers of learning as well as centers of wealth but also the wish to
prepare citizens for their roles in internationally focused businesses,
operating domestically or abroad. These universities are hiring from
abroad not merely because more academic talent is available there,
but because it creates spaces for intercultural encounter, like inviting
the Jesuit priest Ryan Maher to teach theology to Qatari Muslim
students at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha.27
In countries with well-established educational institutions, there’s
an opportunity to revamp education by putting the connected world
at the center of a curriculum. Preparation for a connected world
involves not just math and science but also language and geography
education. Primary and secondary schools might focus on ways that
students could connect with different groups of people in their local
communities, embracing students and community members who are
best positioned to bridge and translate between cultures and to
encourage xenophilia as a core skill. Schools would be smart to
mainstream study abroad programs.
Foreign Policy: In a connected world, trade and diplomacy are
more powerful than they used to be. Infrastructures of connection
can allow small groups to be disproportionately powerful, through
direct action like terrorism or through the spread of disruptive and
destructive information. At the same time, the transparency that
connection brings makes it increasingly difficult to wage war without
attracting international scrutiny, as America discovered at Abu
Ghraib and as Israel has learned in the Gaza Strip. Winning wars is
often easier than securing the peace, and military forces are
transforming in some of the ways the military strategist Tom Barnett
has predicted.28 Such an army would feature a smaller force capable
of defeating enemies and a much larger force dedicated to rebuilding
and strengthening states, and it would employ as many
anthropologists and linguists as explosives specialists.
A connected world encourages countries like the United States to
massively expand public diplomacy projects like the Peace Corps.
These programs would attempt to cultivate more bridge figures and
xenophiles, and to identify and support the people who will work to
repair the damage of war and build the peace in the future.

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE NATIONS in Europe or North America undertaking

the changes mentioned above at a moment when economic
slowdown has left nations looking to create jobs within their own
borders. But connection is hard to undo, as the European Union has
found out when its weak economies threaten the stability of its strong
ones. In the long term, nations that want to benefit from connection
need to start the long process of rewiring.
Some corporations, particularly large multinationals and some
innovative technology companies, are engaged in a similar process.
Like the transforming of a state, this transformation is neither quick
nor easy. In certain cases it may not be feasible or desirable. But for
companies trying to benefit from the cognitive diversity of their
workforce, here’s an ambitious set of steps to consider.
Recruit and Celebrate Bridge Figures: Smart multinationals
create pathways for managers to work in different countries,
spending years—not weeks—in different divisions and different
countries. They’re consciously cultivating bridge figures within their
own organizations, increasing the chance that good ideas will be
carried by the people closing the organization’s structural holes.
Organizations should consider the role of bridge figures when hiring.
An employee who has lived and worked in different countries is likely
to bring novel influences and perspectives into an organization,
especially if it embraces the idea of learning from difference.
Cultivate Xenophiles: Not everyone is, or can be, a bridge
between cultures. Corporations need people to cross these bridges
as well. Outside the corporation, xenophiles often get interested in
other countries through a cultural product that crosses borders:
sports, music, film, or food. Within a corporation, xenophiles may
build connections around shared projects or professional goals, but
it’s at least as likely that personal and cultural connection will build
these ties. In a connected company, managers should find ways for
members of their team to work on culturally diverse teams and,
preferably, to travel to other countries and markets where the
company builds or sells products. And corporations would be wise to
invest in spaces—physical and virtual—where employees can
connect, even if those connections are as far from ordinary work life
as watching World Cup matches together or raiding in World of
Warcraft.
Bridge and Translate Internally: Working in a global corporation
doesn’t guarantee anyone a global perspective, of course.
Corporations need to look closely at the systems they use to share
news within the corporation and bring in ideas and inspirations from
outside. Monitoring a media diet isn’t helpful just for individuals; it’s
important for managers and strategists to consider how they’re
learning about their company and their market. And it is as essential
to build structures to allow translation of information and discovery of
content within a company as it is to build better tools to transform
global media.
Commit to the Long Haul: Bringing culturally diverse teams
together doesn’t ensure increased creativity or productivity—at first,
there’s likely to be more conflict than creativity. Companies brave
enough to shift into a connected way of working will accept the short-
term loss of productivity and work toward the long-term gains that
come through cognitive diversity.

NOT ALL OF US ARE in a position to rewire a country or a company. But

all of us can take steps to increase the diversity of influences we’re
encountering and make stronger connections with perspectives.
Monitor Consumption: Self-tracking of the media we each
consume is a first step toward understanding the biases we bring to
the world. Maintaining a simple diary for a week is likely to be
revelatory, while tools like RescueTime enable you to track your
behavior over the long term, which is useful if monitoring turns into
an effort to change your behavior.
Escape Your Orbit Slowly: If you discover that you spend a great
deal of time consuming the same few types of media—as most of us
do—you may be tempted to try to change your media diet all at
once. A better first step is to pursue an interest you already have and
look for international connections within that space. Whether it
means following your interest in economics to read a Ugandan
economist’s blog or pursuing an interest in sumo to learn more about
Mongolia, you’re more likely to change your habits personally if
you’re following a topic that already fascinates you.
Find and Follow Bridge Figures: The best introduction to
another country or culture is someone who understands that culture,
and yours as well. The Internet is filled with people passionate about
explaining their home cultures; our site Global Voices
(globalvoicesonline.org) features many such individuals, but
countless others exist. Communities like Meedan, sites like Tea Leaf
Nation, and tools like Härnu all endeavor to introduce you to bridge
figures who can help you understand another cultural context.
Seek Serendipity through Curators: Taking conscious steps
toward diversifying the media you consume will take you only so far.
We need to stumble on unexpected influences to make novel
connections. This means granting some of our attention to curators
—human and mechanical—who can introduce us to unexpected
influences. Curators include editors of newspapers and literary
magazines, new media curators like Maria Popova of Brain Pickings,
and semiautomated systems like StumbleUpon and Longreads. In
every case, seeking serendipity means embracing risk, being willing
to let a curator lead you astray in exchange for moments of
discovery.
These steps aren’t as easy to take as they should be. In each
instance, we would benefit from better tools to track and visualize
what we’re encountering, to make new connections within our fields
of interest, and to find guides to new ideas and perspectives. There’s
an incredible opportunity to create tools that help people move
beyond search and social modes of discovery and increase the
chances of serendipity. Builders of these tools have a chance not just
to gain great fiscal success but to make a positive impact on the
world, increasing the range of perspectives and strategies we can
bring to bear on complex problems.

The Task Ahead

The cultural critic Evgeny Morozov recently turned his fierce intellect
toward the influential TED conference, arguing among other things
that “since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED,
the solutions advocated by TED’s techno-humanitarians cannot go
beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the
engineer.”29
This book focuses on a set of technological tools, the media,
including news media, social media, and arts and culture. These
tools shape our experience of the world, especially our experience of
the world beyond our personal encounters with it. Like any
technologies, media tools embody political assumptions made by
their creators, consciously or otherwise. Facebook privileges
connections to people you already know over people you might want
to know. An online newspaper privileges your desire for the news
you want over the unexpected news an editor shows you.
Recognizing the politics embedded in our media technologies and
working to change them doesn’t guarantee that corporations will
value diverse perspectives of employees, or that nations will
reconsider their immigration policies or diplomatic strategies.
Choosing a world that favors connection over disconnection is a set
of political battles, large and small, fought everywhere from the scale
of national politics to the decisions we make as individuals when we
open our web browsers.
The scientists whom Morozov excoriates for seeking a
technological shortcut to problems of climate change are
opportunists, in the best sense of the word. They see how new ways
to harness solar energy or to produce biofuels from algae could
make it easier for governments and individuals to undertake crucial
changes that are vast in scale and politically hard to accomplish.
Seizing an opportunity for technical leverage doesn’t mean ignoring
or escaping politics. Often, it’s a way of changing the political
balance of power around an issue.
Our broadcast news media are decades or centuries old, but
they’re experiencing a moment of rapid and disruptive change. This
gives those who would like to rewire news to be more representative,
more global, and more surprising, an opportunity. A similar disruption
is taking place in the worlds of film and music, and rippling into other
cultural spaces. The tools of social media that shape what we see
and what we pay attention to are barely formed, and they change
week to week, not year to year. If we are excited by the possibility of
creating media that expose us to a wide range of perspectives, we
have the opportunity to build the tools we need.
It’s a mistake to assume that the Internet will inexorably bring
about a connected future. But it’s unhelpful to dismiss the ambitions
of technological optimists like Howard Rheingold, Marconi, and Tesla
simply because the futures they hoped for haven’t yet come to pass.
Their words might be read instead as prophecy. Rabbi Abraham
Heschel, a leading religious scholar and civil rights leader, began his
academic career with a vast study of biblical prophecy. While
“prophecy,” in modern parlance, has become associated with
forecasting the future, in biblical times, prophets brought God’s voice
to the people to encourage them to change: “The prophet was an
individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and
assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.”30
Read as prediction, the hopes of Marconi, Tesla, and Rheingold are
clearly wrong. Read as prophecy, they challenge us to take control of
our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather
than the world we fear.
If we want a world that values diversity of perspective over the
certainty of singular belief, a world where many voices balance a
privileged few, where many points of view complicate issues and
push us toward novel solutions, we need to build that world. To quote
another rabbi, the first-century CE Rabbi Tarfon, “It’s not incumbent
on us to finish the work, but neither are we free to refrain from
beginning it.”31 Whether we transform our own behavior, the tools we
use to encounter the world, or our society as a whole, we have an
opportunity to start the process of rewiring the world.
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1. Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic
Revolution (Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1986), pp. 17–18, 213.
2. Ibid., p. 18
3. The number of deaths at the Qom protests is widely disputed, with
sources reporting between two and seventy dead. See Charles
Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005), p. 37, and Ervand Abrahamian, A History of
Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.
158.
4. Abbas Milani, “Iran’s Islamic Revolution: Three Paradoxes,”
openDemocracy, February 9, 2009,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/iran-s-islamic-revolution-three-
paradoxes.
5. Abrahamian, History, p. 161.
6. “Remembering Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution,” Morning Edition,
NPR program hosted by Steve Inskeep, August 17, 2009,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111944123.
7. Taheri, Spirit, chap. 1.
8. From an August 1978 CIA report quoted by Gary Sick, principal
White House aide on Iran during the revolution, in his book All Fall
Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran (New York: Random
House, 1985), p. 92.
9. Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan E. Goodman, Best Truth:
Intelligence in the Information Age (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002).
10. Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security: The Risks Posed by
New Wiretapping Technologies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), sec.
9.6.
11. Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi, Small
Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian
Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
12. Landau, Surveillance, p. 216.

Chapter 1: CONNECTION, INFECTION, INSPIRATION

1. Chris Taylor, “The Chinese Plague,” World Press Review 50
(2003), http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/1148.cfm.
2. Tim Spanton, “World’s Deadliest Cough,” Sun, July 28, 2007,
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/158143/Worlds-
deadliest-cough.html.
3. “SARS FAQ,” Disaster Center,
http://www.disastercenter.com/Severe
%20Acute%20Respiratory%20Syndrome.htm.
4. Simon More, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)”
(PowerPoint presentation at EADGENE Workshop on Interpreting
Field Disease Data, Edinburgh, Scotland, February 1–2, 2010).
5. Donald J. MacNeil Jr., “Disease’s Pioneer Is Mourned as a Victim,”
New York Times, April 8, 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/science/disease-s-pioneer-is-
mourned-as-a-victim.html.
6. Laurie Garrett, “Outbreak,” review of China Syndrome: The True
Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic, by Karl Taro
Greenfeld, in Washington Post, April 9, 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/04/06/AR2006040601666.html.
7. Alexander Batalin, “SARS Pneumonia Virus, Synthetic Manmade,
according to Russian Scientist,” Global Research, November 10,
2003, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAT304A.html.
8. World Health Organization, SARS: How a Global Epidemic Was
Stopped (Geneva: WHO Press, 2006), chap. 15.
9. “Summary Table of SARS Cases by Country, 1 November 2002–7
August 2003,” World Health Organization, August 15, 2003,
http://www.who.int/csr/sars/country/country2003_08_15.pdf.
10. Jeffery Taubenberger and David Morens, “1918 Influenza: The
Mother of All Pandemics,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12 (2006),
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article.htm.
11. World Health Organization, SARS, introd.
12. “SARS Whistle-blower Breathing a Sigh of Relief,” China News
Daily, May 21, 2003,
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200305/21/eng20030521_117004.s
html.
13. Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, Divining a Digital Future: Mess
and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2011), p. 33.
14. Rania Abouzeid, “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and
Tunisia on Fire,” Time, January 21, 2011,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html.
15. David Kirkpatrick, “Tunisia Leader Flees and Prime Minister
Claims Power,” New York Times, January 14, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/world/africa/15tunis.html; Robert
Mackey’s blog, The Lede (blog), New York Times, references
Bouazizi two days earlier: “Tunisians Document Protests Online,”
January 12, 2011,
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/tunisians-document-
protests-online/.
16. Sal Gentile, “Octavia Nasr: US Media Missed ‘the Anatomy’ of
Tunisia’s Revolution,” PBS Need to Know, January 21, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/the-daily-need/octavia-nasr-u-
s-media-missed-the-anatomy-of-tunisias-revolution/6668/.
17. Kimberly Dozier, “Intelligence Community under Fire for Egypt
Surprise,” Associated Press,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41423648/ns/politics-
more_politics/t/intelligence-community-under-fire-egypt-
surprise/#.UGNE_Pl27_A.
18. Pippa Norris summarizes research on international news in the
late 1960s and 1970s, finding estimates of international and foreign
news at between 25 percent and 40 percent of total news broadcast,
in “The Restless Searchlight: Network News Framing of the Post
Cold-War World,”
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/Restless%20Searchlig
ht.pdf. Alisa Miller, citing work from Project for Excellence in
Journalism, sees 10 percent foreign and international coverage in
recent television broadcasts, in Media Makeover: Improving the
News One Click at a Time (TED Books: 2011), Kindle ed.
19. “Mobile Phone Access Reaches Three Quarters of Planet’s
Population,” World Bank press release, July 17, 2012,
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/2012/07/17/mobile-phone-
access-reaches-three-quarters-planets-population.
20. Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 283.
21. The reasons for Diogenes’s exile are matters of historical
dispute. One account of his exile states that he was banished for
“defacing the currency.” Historians are still trying to figure out
precisely what this means. It’s unclear whether Diogenes and his
father, who may have been the treasurer of Sinope, were stealing
money, or whether Diogenes defaced currency as a philosophical act
of defiance.
22. Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,
trans. C. D. Bonge (London: Henry Bohn, 1852).
23. “The World Goes to Town,” Economist, May 3, 2007,
http://www.economist.com/node/9070726.
24. Margaret C. Jacob, “The Cosmopolitan as a Lived Category,”
Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 18–25.
25. Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community
in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,”
Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2007): 137–74.
26. Ibid.
27. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. xv.
28. While this makes Appiah sound like a moral relativist, he defends
himself from the charge by arguing for universal values that are
shared across cultures, if obscured by “taboos” that are local in
scope and application.
29. “Picasso’s African-Influenced Period: 1907 to 1909,”
PabloPicasso.org, http://www.pablopicasso.org/africanperiod.jsp.
30. Andrew Meldrum, “Stealing Beauty: How Much Did Picasso’s
Paintings Borrow from African Art?,” Guardian, March 14, 2006,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/15/art.
31. Corinna Lotz, in Apollo: The International Magazine for
Collectors, December 2007, p. 122, http://www.apollo-
tmagazine.com/reviews/books/386241/art-that-scared-picasso.thtml.
32. Meldrum, “Stealing Beauty.”
33. Ibid.
34. Picasso and Africa, ed. Laurence Madeline and Marilyn Martin
(Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, 2006), catalog of an
exhibition held at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg,
February 10 through March 19, 2006, and the Iziko South African
National Gallery, Cape Town, April 13 through May 21, 2006.
35. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Masque nègre,” in Chants d’ombre
(1945), http://philosophie-et-litterature.oboulo.com/chants-ombre-
leopold-sedar-senghor-1945-masque-negre-114650.html, cited in
Lotz, “Art That Scared Picasso.”
36. Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information?
2009 Report on American Consumers,” Global Information Industry
Center of the University of California–San Diego, January 2010,
http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_2009.pdf
.
37. Seventy minutes a day, according to the Pew Research Center,
“Americans Spending More Time Following the News,” September
12, 2010, http://people-press.org/2010/09/12/americans-spending-
more-time-following-the-news/.
38. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on
the Electronic Frontier, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p.
181.
39. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of
the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (New
York: Berkley Books, 1999), p. 83.
40. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with
Aviation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 37.
41. Ivan Nardodny, “Marconi’s Plans for the World,” Technical World
Magazine 18 (1912): 145–50.
42. From a 1926 interview in Colliers, quoted in “Marshall McLuhan
Foresees the Global Village,”
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_mcluhan.htm.
43. Langdon Winner, “Sow’s Ears from Silk Purses: The Strange
Alchemy of Technological Visionaries,” in Technological Visions: The
Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken
et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 34.
44. Personal correspondence with Howard Rheingold.
45. Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey (London: Henry Colburn, 1826),
bk. 6, chap. 7.
46. Jens Eric Gould, “The Making of the Innocence of Muslims: One
Actor’s Story,” Time, September 13, 2012,
http://nation.time.com/2012/09/13/the-making-of-innocence-of-
muslims-one-actors-story.
47. Jones has gone on to burn copies of the Quran, though his
actions have attracted less attention than his 2010 threat. See Kevin
Sieff, “Florida Pastor Terry Jones’s Koran Burning Has Far-reaching
Effect,” Washington Post, April 2, 2011,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/florida-pastor-terry-
joness-koran-burning-has-far-reaching-
effect/2011/04/02/AFpiFoQC_story.html.
48. Pamela Constable, “Egyptian Christian Activist in Virginia
Promoted Video That Sparked Furor,” Washington Post, September
13, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/egyptian-christian-
activist-in-virginia-promoted-video-that-sparked-
furor/2012/09/13/f2a52a4c-fdc4-11e1-b153-
218509a954e1_story.html.
49. Robert Mackey and Liam Stack, “Obscure Film Mocking Muslim
Prophet Sparks Anti-U.S. Protests in Egypt and Libya,” The Lede
(blog), New York Times, September 11, 2012,
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-mocking-
muslim-prophet-sparks-anti-u-s-protests-in-egypt-and-libya/; John
Hudson, “The Egyptian Outrage Peddler Who Sent Anti-Islam
YouTube Clip Viral,” Atlantic Wire, September 13, 2012,
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/egyptian-outrage-
peddler-who-sent-anti-islam-youtube-clip-viral/56826/.
50. Yoni Bashan, “Arrests Made after Police Officers Injured at Anti-
Islamic Film Protest in Sydney CBD,” Daily Telegraph, September
16, 2012, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/police-use-pepper-
spray-on-anti-islamic-film-protesters-in-sydney-at-the-us-
consulate/story-e6freuy9-1226474744811; “Belgian Police Detain
230 Protesting Anti-Islam Film,” Hürriyet Daily News, September 16,
2012, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/belgian-police-detain-230-
protesting-anti-islam-film-.aspx?
pageID=238&nID=30247&NewsCatID=351.
51. Mona Shadia and Harriet Ryan, “California Muslims Hold Vigil for
Slain Ambassador,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2012,
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/15/local/la-me-anti-muslim-film-
20120915.
52. Judith S. Donath, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual
Community,” in Communities in Cyberspace, ed. Marc A. Smith and
Peter Kollock (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 27–58.
53. Marc Lynch, “The Failure of #MuslimRage,” Foreign Policy,
September 21, 2012,
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/09/21/a_funny_thing_happ
ened_on_the_way_to_muslimrage.
54. Chris Stephen, “Bodies of Six Militiamen Found in Benghazi after
Attacks on Bases,” Guardian, September 22, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/22/bodies-six-militiamen-
found-benghazi?newsfeed=true.
55. “People of Benghazi Trying to Save Chris Stevens Life before
His Death,” YouTube.com, September 17, 2012,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC0B0qrv2wA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=yMSnyOMRXos&feature=watch_response_rev.
56. “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life, October 7, 2009, http://www.pewforum.org/Mapping-
the-Global-Muslim-Population.aspx.

Chapter 2: IMAGINARY COSMOPOLITANISM

1. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp.
3–4.
2. For more information on Fiji water, see the following: Rob Walker,
“Water Proof,” New York Times, June 1, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01wwln-consumed-
t.html; Claudia H. Deutsch, “For Fiji Water, a Big List of Green
Goals,” New York Times, November 7, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07 /business/07fiji.html; Kerri
Ritchie, “Fiji Media Told to Adopt ‘Journalism of Hope,’” ABC
(Australia), April 17, 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-
17/fiji-media-told-to-adopt-journalism-of-hope/1654410; Anna
Lenzer, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle,” Mother Jones,
September/October 2009,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/fiji-spin-bottle?page=2;
Ed Dinger, “Fiji Water LLC,” Answers.com,
http://www.answers.com/topic/fiji-water-llc; AAP, “Hollywood Couple
Buys Fiji Water for $63m,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 30,
2004, http://www.smh.com.au/news/Business/Hollywood-couple-
buys-Fiji-Water-for-63m/2004/11/29/1101577419156.html.
3. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Howe, 1920), in paperback from
Management Laboratory Press (2009), p. 20.
4. “U.S. at War: Globaloney,” Time, February 22, 1943,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774367,00.html.
5. Jennifersharpe, “Denim Jeans,” Sourcemap.com,
http://sourcemap.com/view/478.
6. Andy Jerardo, “What Share of U.S. Consumed Food Is
Imported?,” Amber Waves, February 2008,
http://webarchives.cdlib.org/sw1vh5dg3r/http://ers.usda.gov/AmberW
aves/February08/DataFeature/.
7. Bruce Blythe, “Wal-Mart’s U.S. Grocery Sales Rose to Nearly
$141 Billion Last Year,” Drover’s Cattle Network, April 1, 2011,
http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/company/Wal-Marts-US-
grocery-sales-rose-to-nearly-141-billion-last-year-119064289.html.
8. “Steel Industry Executive Summary: July 2012,” U.S. Department
of Commerce, International Trade Administration, http://hq-
web03.ita.doc.gov/License/Surge.nsf/webfiles/SteelMillDevelopment
s/$file/exec%20summ.pdf?openelement; Mark Piepkorn, “Lumber by
the Numbers,” Continuing Education Center,
http://continuingeducation.construction.com /article.php?
L=5&C=645&P=1, originally published in GreenSource,
January/February 2010 issue.
9. Daniel Cohen, Globalization and Its Enemies, trans. Jessica B.
Baker (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 52.
10. Jeffrey Frankel, “Globalization of the Economy,” in Governance in
a Globalizing World, ed. Joseph S. Nye and John D. Donahue
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000).
11. US Census, “Top Ten Countries with Which the United States
Trades,” May 2012, http://www.census.gov/foreign-
trade/top/dst/current/balance.html.
12. Galina Hale and Bart Hobijn, “The U.S. Content of ‘Made in
China,’” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter,
August 8, 2011,
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-
25.html?utm_source=home.
13. “Brazil’s Victory in Cotton Trade Case Exposes America’s
Wasteful Subsidies,” Washington Post, June 3, 2010,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/06/02/AR2010060204228.html; Will Allen,
Eddie DeAnda, and Kate Deusterberg, “U.S. Cotton Subsidies:
Killing Farmers & Poisoning Consumers & the Earth,” Organic
Consumers Association, December 9, 2003,
http://www.organicconsumers.org/clothes/willallen011504.cfm; Pietra
Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley, 2009). Global cotton prices spiked well above subsidized
levels in late 2010 and early 2011, which means subsidies weren’t
paid. But there have been few changes to the underlying subsidy
system, and the United States will probably return to subsidizing
cotton beyond this market spike.
14. Cohen, Globalization, p. 27.
15. Farzana Hakim and Colleen Harris, “Muslims in the European
‘Mediascape,’” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2009,
http://www.strategicdialogue.org
/ISD%20muslims%20media%20WEB.pdf.
16. “Facts and Figures,” International Organization for Migration,
http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/facts-and-
figures/lang/en.
17. These figures were calculated from data in the Wolfram Alpha
database.
18. Adrian Michaels, “Muslim Europe: The Demographic Time Bomb
Transforming Our Continent,” Telegraph, August 8, 2009,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/5994047/Muslim
-Europe-the-demographic-time-bomb-transforming-our-
continent.html.
19. Karoly Lorant, “The Demographic Challenge in Europe,”
Brussels, April 2005,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/inddem/docs/papers/The%20demogr
aphic%20challenge%20in%20Europe.pdf.
20. “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life, January 27, 2011,
http://www.pewforum.org/The-Future-of-the-Global-Muslim-
Population.aspx.
21. Federal Communications Commission, International
Telecommunications Data Report (2004),
http://transition.fcc.gov/ib/sand/mniab/traffic/files/CREPOR04.pdf, 1.
22. Data from International Telecommunication Union,
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/.
23. Most Viewed Now, wwiTV.com,
http://wwitv.com/most_viewed_now.htm.
24. All three publications offer large Chinese-language sections. Of
course, these sites aren’t always accessible to all Chinese, because
of China’s aggressive and ever-changing Internet censorship.
25. Nigeria ranked tenth in terms of total Internet users, but
Doubleclick didn’t track Nigeria at that point, so our set includes
South Korea, then number eleven.
26. Asia and Japan Watch, the Asahi Shimbun, http://ajw.asahi.com/.
27. Priya Kumar, “Foreign Correspondents: Who Covers What?,”
American Journalism Review, December/January 2011,
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4997.
28. “Content Analysis,” The State of the News Media,
http://stateofthemedia.org/2005/newspapers-intro/content-analysis/.
29. We plan to publish our study in early 2013. As in the Media
Standards Trust study, we hand-coded every story in four American
newspapers—the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the
Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post—for selected weeks
separated by intervals of a decade. We saw major drops in
international and foreign news stories in the Chicago Tribune and
Washington Post over the forty-year period. The Los Angeles Times
dropped sharply in both categories between 1979 and 1999, but had
extensive international coverage in 2009; we are currently trying to
understand if this is a data artifact, a week of heavy coverage for the
paper, or a more general finding. We saw a major dropoff in foreign
and international coverage in UK newspapers, but not in the New
York Times, which was running 80 percent as many stories in these
categories in 2009 as it was in 1979.
30. Guy Golan, “Inter-Media Agenda Setting and Global News
Coverage: Assessing the Influence of the New York Times on Three
Network Television Evening News Programs,” Journalism Studies 7,
no. 2 (2006): 323–33,
http://syr.academia.edu/GuyJGolan/Papers/227056/Inter-
Media_Agenda_Setting_and_Global_News_Coverage_Assessing_th
e_Influence_of_The.
31. Alisa Miller, Media Makeover: Improving the News One Click at a
Time (New York: Ted Books, 2011).
32. Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, and
Kenny Olmstead, “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer,”
Pew Internet and American Life Project, March 1, 2010,
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News/Part-1/4-
Satisfaction-with-coverage-of-different-news-topics.aspx.
33. “In a Changing News Landscape, Even Television Is Vulnerable,”
Pew Research Center, September 27, 2012, http://www.people-
press.org/2012/09/27/section-3-news-attitudes-and-habits-2/.
34. Anthony Kaufman, “Is Foreign Film the New Endangered
Species?,” New York Times, January 22, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/movies/22kauf.html.
35. Three Percent,
http://www.rochester.edu/college/translation/threepercent/index.php?
s=about.
36. Amy Balkin, “In Transit,” CabSpotting,
http://cabspotting.org/projects/intransit/; “FAQ,” CabSpotting,
http://cabspotting.org/faq.html.
37. “History of Railroads and Maps,” Library of Congress, 1998,
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrintro.html; Olivier
Zunz, Making America Corporate (London: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
38. Martin Dodge, “Cybergeography Research,” University of
Manchester, 2007,
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeograph
y/atlas/atlas.html.
39. Josh McWilliam, “How Does the Google Maps Traffic Feature
Work? Where Does the Data Come From?,” Bright Hub, September
24, 2010,
http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/46896.aspx;
Frederic Lardinois, “Google Maps Gets Smarter: Crowdsources Live
Traffic Data,” ReadWriteWeb, August 25, 2009,
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_maps_gets_smarter_
crowdsources_traffic_data.php.
40. Dave Barth, “The Bright Side of Sitting in Traffic: Crowdsourcing
Road Congestion Data,” Googleblog, August 25, 2009,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08 /bright-side-of-sitting-in-
traffic.html.
41. Increasingly, operators also give this information to law
enforcement officials when requested; the US mobile phone
company Sprint provided 8 million records, many of which contained
positioning information, in response to law enforcement requests
between September 2008 and October 2009. See Kim Zetter’s
December 2009 article, “Feds ‘Pinged’ Sprint GPS Data 8 Million
Times over a Year,” Wired,
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gps-data/.
42. Kai Biermann, “Tell-all Telephone,” Zeit Online, March 26, 2011,
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention.
43. Noam Cohen, “Cellphones Track Your Every Move, and You May
Not Even Know,” New York Times, March 26, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/media/26privacy.html?
_r=1.
44. Wiredautopia, “airtraffic,” December 7, 2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
feature=player_embedded&v=oR00_uLfGVE.
45. Research and Innovative Technology Administration, “Table 1-46:
Air Passenger Travel Departures from the United States to Selected
Foreign Countries by Flag of Carriers,” in National Transportation
Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Transportation, July 2010,
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics
/html/table_01_46.html.
46. Ibid.
47. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds
of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of
Sociology, no. 27 (2001): 415–44,
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/alan/stats/network-
grad/handouts/McPherson-Birds%20of%20a%20Feather-
Homophily%20in%20Social%20Networks.pdf.
48. Christian Jarrett, “We Sit Near People Who Look like Us,” BPS
Research Digest (blog), July 18, 2011, http://bps-research-
digest.blogspot.com/2011/07/we-sit-near-people-who-look-like-
us.html.
49. One group that showed the strongest homophily was students of
America’s most elite boarding schools, providing ample fodder for
conspiracies about an American ruling class.
50. George Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed.
Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950).
51. Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis, “Beyond and Below Racial
Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on
Facebook,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 2 (September
2010): 583–642,
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/wimmer/WimmerLewis.pdf.

Chapter 3: WHEN WHAT WE KNOW IS WHOM WE

KNOW
1. Robert F. Worth, “In New York Tickets, Ghana Sees Orderly City,”
New York Times, July 22, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/nyregion/in-new-york-tickets-
ghana-sees-orderly-city.html. In an ironic twist, the New York Times
article that called attention to Ghana’s role in NYC parking tickets led
to scrutiny of the outsourcing decision, and the contract with the
Ghanaian workers was not renewed.
2. “Op-Ed: An African Success Story,” New York Times, January 8,
2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/opinion/an-african-
success-story.html.
3. Peter Boyer, “Famine in Ethiopia,” Washington Journalism
Review, January 1985, pp. 18–21.
4. William C. Adams, “Whose Lives Count? TV Coverage of Natural
Disasters,” Journal of Communication 36 (Spring 1986): 113–22,
http://www.gwu.edu/~pad/202/readings/disasters.html.
5. This economic bias may become more pronounced in US news as
Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal are expanding their foreign
coverage teams, while most other news organizations shrink their
overseas footprint.
6. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting
Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2
(Summer 1972): 176–87.
7. Ted Rall, “How the U.S. Media Marginalizes Dissent,” Al Jazeera,
August 4, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08
/20118164314283633.html.
8. Jay Rosen, “Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet
Weakens the Authority of the Press,” PressThink (blog), January 12,
2009, http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/atomization.html.
9. Chris Roberts, “Gatekeeping Theory: An Evolution” (paper
presented at Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication, San Antonio, TX, August 2005),
http://www.chrisrob.com/about/gatekeeping.pdf.
10. Pamela Shoemaker and Tim P. Vos, Gatekeeping Theory (New
York: Routledge, 2009), p. 16.
11. Dan Berkowitz, ed., Social Meanings of News (London: SAGE,
1997), p. 9.
12. MacBride commission, Many Voices, One World: Toward a New,
More Just, and More Efficient World Information and Communication
Order (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), p. 270.
13. Ibid., p. 263, rec. 47.
14. Ken Doctor, “The Newsonomics of WaPo’s reader dashboard
1.0,” Nieman Journalism Lab, April 7, 2011,
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-newsonomics-of-wapos-
reader-dashboard-1-0/.
15. Michael Shapiro, “Six Degrees of Aggregation: How the
Huffington Post Ate the Internet,” Columbia Journalism Review,
May/June 2012,
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/six_degrees_of_aggregation.php?
page=all; “Google Analytics and Google Apps Help The Huffington
Post Keep Its Edge,”
http://www.google.com/analytics/customers/case_study_huffington_p
ost.html.
16. William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-
Watergate White House (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2005), p. 392.
17. Diana Saluri Russo, “Is the Foreign News Bureau Part of the
Past?,” Global Journalist, January 30, 2010,
http://www.globaljournalist.org/stories /2010/01/30 /is-the-foreign-
news-bureau-part-of-the-past/.
18. Jodi Enda, “Retreating from the World,” American Journalism
Review, December/January 2011, http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?
id=4985.
19. “The Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch,” Journalism.org,
July 20, 2011,
http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/wall_street_jo
urnal_under_rupert_murdoch.
20. I asked the head of analytics at the New York Times whether he
could share information on traffic to international stories on the paper
versus domestic stories. He was polite, but firm in his refusal,
explaining that the Times doesn’t even share that information with
advertisers.
21. Elizabeth A. Thomson, “Freshman Publishing Experiment Offers
Made-to-Order Newspapers,” MITnews, March 9, 1994,
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1994 /newspaper-0309.html.
22. Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce
Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 188.
23. Eric Lawrence, John Side, and Henry Farrell, “Self-Segregation
or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in
American Politics,” Department of Political Science, George
Washington University, March 10, 2009,
http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/files/Lawrence_Sides_Farrell-
_Self-Segregation_or_Deliberation.pdf.
24. Natalie Glance and Lada Adamic, “The Political Blogosphere and
the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog,” Proceedings of the 3rd
International Workshop on Link Discovery (2005): 36–43.
25. Eszter Hargittai et al., “Cross-ideological Discussions among
Conservative and Liberal Bloggers,” Public Choice 134 (2008): 67–
86.
26. John Horrigan, Kelly Garrett, and Paul Resnick, “The Internet
and Democratic Debate,” Pew Internet and American Life Project,
October 27, 2004, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/The-
Internet-and-Democratic-Debate.aspx.
27. Mark Glaser, “Social Media Grows at NY Times, But Home Page
Remains King,” MediaShift, January 13, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/01 /social-media-grows-at-ny-
times-but-home-page-remains-king013.html.
28. Brian Stelter, “Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It
On,” New York Times, March 27, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27voters .html?_r=1.
29. Dee T. Allsop, Bryce R. Bassett, and James A. Hoskins, “Word-
of-Mouth Research: Principles and Applications,” Journal of
Advertising Research,” December 2007, pp. 398–410.
30. Stelter, “Finding Political News Online.”
31. Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell, and Tom Rosenstiel, “Where
People Go, How They Get There, and What Lures Them Away,” Pew
Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, May 9,
2011, http://www.journalism.org/node /25008.
32. Alexis Madrigal, “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the
Web Wrong,” Atlantic, October 12, 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-
we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/.
33. Justin Osofsky, “Making News and Entertainment More Social in
2011,” Facebook Developer Blog, December 28, 2010,
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/443/.
34. Tanya Cordrey, “Tanya Cordrey’s Speech at the Guardian
Changing Media Summit,” Guardian, March 21, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gnm-press-office/changing-media-summit-
tanya-cordrey.
35. “What Americans Do Online: Social Media and Games Dominate
Activity,” Nielsen Wire (blog), August 2, 2010,
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile /what-americans-
do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/; “Social
Networking Accounts for 1 of Every 5 Minutes Spent Online in
Australia,” comScore, Inc., February 18, 2011,
http://www.comscore.com/layout/set/popup/Press_Events/Press_Rel
eases/2011/2/Social_Networking_Accounts_for_1_of_Every_5_Minu
tes_Spent_Online_in_Australia.
36. Matt Carmichael and E. J. Schultz, “Millennial Grocery Shopping
Habits and Marketing Trends,” AdAge Blogs, June 29, 2011,
http://adage.com/article/adagestat/millennial-grocery-shopping-
habits-marketing-trends/228480/.
37. Jason Kincaid, “The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News
Feed Tick,” TechCrunch, April 22, 2010,
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/.
38. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from
You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), p. 5.
39. Barry Schwartz, “Duck! Google’s Cutts Responds to Search Filter
Bubbles,” Search Engine Roundtable, June 21, 2011,
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-bubble-response-
13591.html.
40. Bill Bishop, “The Big Sort Maps,” The Big Sort,
http://www.thebigsort.com /maps.php.
41. Keith N. Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Lee Rainie, and
Kristen Purcell, “Social Networking Sites and Our Lives,” Pew
Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, June 16,
2011, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files
/Reports/2011/PIP%20-
%20Social%20networking%20sites%20and%20our%20lives.pdf.
42. Garry Blight, Sheila Pulham, and Paul Torpey, “Arab Spring: An
Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests,” Guardian, January 5,
2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-
east-protest-interactive-timeline.
43. Ethan Zuckerman, “What Bloggers Amplify from the BBC,” my
heart’s in accra, January 28, 2005,
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2005/01/28/what-bloggers-
amplify-from-the-bbc/; “New York Times Headlines in Blogs, Seen by
Technorati,”
http://gapdev.law.harvard.edu/results/20050128/nytheadlines.html.
44. Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, “What Makes Online
Content Viral?” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012):
192–205,
http://www.journals.marketingpower.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmr.10.035
3.
45. Paul Butler, “Visualizing Friendships,” Facebook’s Engineering
Posts, December 13, 2010,
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/visualizing-
friendships/469716398919. One striking thing about Butler’s map is
what’s missing—much of Asia. Facebook is blocked in China and
has had difficulty gaining traction in South Korea and Japan.
46. Johan Ugander, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom, and Cameron
Marlow, “The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,” November
18, 2011, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.4503v1.pdf. Discussions with the
authors suggest that this paper overrepresents Canada because of a
miscounting of Facebook users who use Blackberry devices, and the
actual percentage of international ties is closer to 13.3 percent.
47. “Stories,”
http://www.facebookstories.com/stories/1574/interactive-mapping-
the-world-s-friendships#color=continent&story=1&country=US.
48. Personal conversation via email, October 10, 2012.

Chapter 4: GLOBAL VOICES

1. “Global Voices Manifesto,” Global Voices Online, April 9, 2007,
http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/gv-manifesto/.
2. Mahmood Nasser Al-Yousif, “About,” Mahmood’s Den,
http://mahmood.tv/about/.
3. Jennifer Preston, “When Unrest Stirs, Bloggers Are Already in
Place,” New York Times, March 13, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/business /media/14voices.html.
 Chapter 5: FOUND IN TRANSLATION
1. “Jay Walker on the World’s English Mania,” TED talk, February
2009,
http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania
.html.
2. Edward T. O’Neill, Brian F. Lavoie, and Rick Bennett, “Trends in
the Evolution of the Public Web,” D-Lib Magazine 9, no. 4, April
2003, http://www.dlib.org /dlib/april03/lavoie/04lavoie.html.
3. Ted Smalley Bowen, “English Could Snowball on the Net,”
Technology Research News, November 21, 2001,
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2001/112101/English_could_snowbal
l_on_Net_112101.html; Neil Gandal and Carl Shapiro, “The Effect of
Native Language on Internet Usage,” November 12, 2001,
http://econ.tau.ac.il/papers/applied/language.pdf.
4. Email exchange, February 3, 2011.
5. “Internet World Users by Language,” Internet World Stats,
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm.
6. Marissa McNaughton, “Over 50% of China’s Internet Users
Regularly Blog and Use Social Media,” Realtime Report, January 10,
2011, http://twtrcon.com /2011/01/10 /over-50-of-chinas-internet-
users-regularly-blog-and-use-social-media.
7. Ahmad Humeid, 360° East, http://www.360east.com/.
8. Daniel Sorid, “Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages,” New
York Times, December 30, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/technology
/internet/31hindi.html?pagewanted=2.
9. After all, she speaks only English, Spanish, Danish, German, and
French.
10. A number of philosophers and linguists have offered the idea of
considering language as a tool, rather than as an innate cognitive
feature. See Andy Clark, “Magic Words: How Language Augments
Human Computation,”
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/concepts/magicwords.ht
ml, or Daniel L. Everett, Language: The Cultural Tool (New York:
Pantheon, 2012).
11. Bertran C. Bruce, “The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an
Ecological Model of Literacy,”
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/13343/disappea
rance_of_tech.pdf.
12. Eytan Adar et al., “Information Arbitrage across Multi-lingual
Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the Second ACM International
Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (New York, 2009).
13. Robert K. Plumb, “Russian Is Turned into English by a Fast
Electronic Translator,” New York Times, January 8, 1954.
14. “Assembly language” is the “native language” that computers
speak. It features a very limited set of instructions that a
microprocessor can execute. Programming in assembly language is
painstaking and difficult, much more difficult than programming in
modern programming languages, which bear at least a vague
resemblance to human language. These “high-level languages”
weren’t implemented until three years later, when Sheridan helped
IBM develop FORTRAN.
15. W. John Hutchins, “The Georgetown-IBM Experiment
Demonstrated in January 1954,”
http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/AMTA-2004.pdf.
16. Barry Newman, “U.S. Government Sells News Service with
World News Gathered by the CIA,” Wall Street Journal, February 28,
2011,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487046290045761363
81178584352.html.
17. Interview of Soong via email, February 5, 2011.
18. Ethan Zuckerman, “Who’s Writing about Lu Banglie?,” my heart’s
in accra (blog), October 10, 2005,
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2005/10/10 /whos-writing-
about-lu-banglie/; Roland Soong, “The Taishi (China) Elections—Part
1 (Chronology),” EastSouthWestNorth (blog), September 19, 2005,
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050919_1.htm.
19. Current editions are available at http://www.ecocn.org/portal.php.
20. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006), p. 83.
21. The TED conference moved from Monterey to Long Beach,
California, in 2009, and TED talks online now include talks from the
main conference, TED Global, hosted in the UK, and from TEDx
talks around the world.
22. Luis von Ahn et al., “reCAPTCHA: HumanBased Character
Recognition via Web Security Measures,” Science, September 12,
2008, pp. 1465–68.
23. Luis von Ahn, “Massive-Scale Online Collaboration,” TED talk,
April 2011,
http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collab
oration.html.
24. Christopher Mims, “Translating the Web While You Learn,” MIT
Technology Review, May 2, 2011,
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/423894/translating-the-web-
while-you-learn/.
25. Philipp Koehn, “Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical
Machine Translation” (paper presented at Machine Translation
Summit, 2005), http://mt-archive.info/MTS-2005-Koehn.pdf.
26. J. M. Ledgard, “Digital Africa,” Intelligent Life, Spring 2011,
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/jm-ledgard/digital-africa?
page=full.
27. Wade Davis, “Dreams from Endangered Cultures,” filmed
February 2003, TED video, 22:05, posted January 2007,
http://www.ted.com/talks
/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html.

Chapter 6: TAKEN IN CONTEXT

1. Marc Eliot, Paul Simon: A Life (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010),
p. 186.
2. The identity of the specific cassette Berg gave Simon is the
subject of much speculation by music historians. It’s widely reported
the cassette was titled “Gumboots: Accordion Jive Hits, volume 2,”
but no one has been able to find a record released with that name.
Frustrated and fascinated by the elusiveness of the source material,
Eric Kleptone, a British musician who has built a career on remixing
other people’s source material, released a mix online called “Paths to
Graceland,” featuring music that might have been on the legendary
cassette—http://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-
paths-to-graceland.
3. Timothy White, “Lasers in the Jungle: The Conception and
Maturity of a Musical Masterpiece,” Warner Bros. Records, 1997,
http://www.wbr.com/paulsimon/graceland/cmp/essay.html.
4. The Boyoyo Boys, All Music, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-
boyoyo-boys-mn0000625695.
5. “The Boyoyo Boys and Township Jive Today,” Samaka Music
(blog), December 9, 2007,
http://samakamusic.blogspot.com/2007/12/boyoyo-boys-and-
township-jive-today.html.
6. Simon is not a perfect person or a perfect xenophile; it’s certainly
possible to see his work as appropriation. The last two tracks on
Graceland feature the Latino band Los Lobos, whose members are
credited as musicians, not as songwriters. Steven Berlin of Los
Lobos claims that “The Myth of Fingerprints” is a song he and his
band wrote, titled “By Light of the Moon,” and has threatened to sue
Simon, calling him “the world’s biggest prick, basically.” Then again,
Berlin hasn’t sued Simon.
7. “Notes on Odysseus’ Name and Pseudonyms,”
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/m%27onomakluton.html.
8. Alexis Bloom and Tshewang Dendup, “Bhutan’s Busiest Cable
Guy,” FRONTLINE/World, December 2000,
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/interview.html.
9. Somini Sengupta, “Bhutan Lets the World In (But Leaves Fashion
TV Out),” New York Times, May 6, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world /asia/06bhutan.html.
10. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, “Fast Forward into Trouble,”
Guardian, June 13, 2003,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2003/jun/14/weekend7
.weekend2.
11. Pat Harris, “City of Nashville rejects English-only law,” Reuters
online, January 23, 2009,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/01/23/us-usa-english-nashville-
idUSTRE50M11420090123.
12. Pippa Norris, Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity
in a Globalized World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2009), Kindle ed., locations 549–52.
13. Ibid., chap. 10.
14. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can
Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 54.
15. “Why Americans Use Social Media,” Pew Internet and American
Life Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Why-
Americans-Use-Social-Media/Main-report.aspx.
16. I’m grateful to my friend and colleague Zeynep Tufekçi for this
observation and her help in interpreting Granovetter.
17. Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American
Journal of Sociology 110, no. 2 (September 2004): 349–99,
http://www.bebr.ufl.edu/sites
/default/files/Structural%20Holes%20and%20Good%20Ideas.pdf.
18. “Akademie Olympia,” Albert Einstein in the World Wide Web,
http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/olympia-e.html.
19. Burt, “Structural Holes.”
20. Ibid.
21. If there’s an ominous tone to Putin’s request for top-lap’s address
—and therefore, his identity—that’s probably not a coincidence. Five
months after his post “went viral,” his blog was discontinued. Top-
lap’s last few blog entries reported on a visit from the police, who had
confiscated his hard drive and USB key, and signaled his intent to
flee in the hopes of avoiding arrest.
22. Jay Rosen, “National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the
Demand Side of News,” PressThink (blog), August 13, 2008,
http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/08/13/national_explain.html.
23. Tiffany Ap, “The Wild, Wile Web: Ever-Elusive, chinaSMACK
Founder Fauna,” The Beijinger (blog), July 26, 2010,
http://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2010/07/26/The-Wild-Wile-Web-
Ever-Elusive-chinaSMACK-founder-Fauna; Maile Cannon and
Jingying Yang, “Bloggers Open an Internet Window on Shanghai,”
New York Times, February 24, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010
/02/25/technology/25iht-rshanblog.html?pagewanted=all.
24. Fauna, “Migrant Workers’ Children Spend Childhood Scavenging
Landfill,” chinaSMACK, August 24, 2011,
http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/migrant-workers-children-
spend-childhood-scavenging-landfill.html.
25. Human Library, “About,” 2012, http://humanlibrary.org/the-
history.html; Andrew Weichel, “Surrey Library to Loan Out Volunteers
as ‘Living Books,’” CTV News, August 20, 2011,
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews.
26. Achal R. Prabhala, People Are Knowledge (video), posted July
15, 2011, http://vimeo.com/26469276; Noam Cohen, “A Push to
Redefine Knowledge at Wikipedia,” New York Times, August 7,
2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-
to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html?_r=1.
27. Dhani Jones and Jonathan Grotenstein, The Sportsman (New
York: Rodale Books, 2011), Kindle ed., locations 3885–86.
28. Ethan Zuckerman, “Wayne Marshall on Nu Whirled Music… and
My Thoughts, Too… ,” my heart’s in accra (blog), December 15,
2010, http://www .ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/12/15/wayne-
marshall-on-nu-whirled-music-and-my-thoughts-too/.
29. David Drake, “Diplo: The Stylus Interview,” Stylus, October 4,
2004, http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/diplo-
the-stylus-interview.htm.
30. The term “baile funk” actually refers to the dances where funk is
played—the music is often referred to as “funk carioca” in Brazil. But
“baile funk” is generally the term used outside Brazil to discuss the
music, and I’m following that convention here.
31. Sasha Frere-Jones, “Brazilian Wax,” New Yorker, August 1,
2005,
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/01/050801crmu_music?
currentPage=1.
32. Camilo Rocha, “Globalistas: An Introduction,” Spannered,
February 20, 2008, http://www.spannered.org/music/1375/.
33. Matt Harding, Where the Hell Is Matt?: Dancing Badly around the
World (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), p. 77.
34. Ibid., p. 143.
35. Hugo Zemp, “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record
Business,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996): 36–56. See
also Stephen Feld, “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public Culture
12, no. 1 (2000): 145–71.
36. Matt Harding, “Auki, Solomon Islands Loose Ends,”
Wherethehellismatt.com, February 4, 2011,
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/journal/2011/02/auki-solomon-
islands.html.

Chapter 7: SERENDIPITY AND THE CITY

1. “Lagos Makoko Slums Knocked Down in Nigeria,” BBC News
Africa, July 17, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-
18870511.
2. World Bank, “Urban Development,” 2012,
http://data.worldbank.org/topic /urban-development.
3. John Grimond, “A Survey of Cities: The World Goes to Town,”
Economist, May 3, 2007, http://www.economist.com/node/9070726;
“European Urbanization” (map), Philip’s Atlas of World History,
http://qed.princeton.edu/index.php/User:Student/European_Urbaniza
tion_1800; Population Reference Bureau, “Human Population:
Urbanization,” 2012,
http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urb
anization.aspx; World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision
(New York: United Nations, 2007),
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007WUP_H
ighlights_web.pdf.
4. It didn’t help that the mayor of London had ordered all cats and
dogs killed for fear they were spreading the plague—instead, they
were likely keeping the plague rats in check.
5. David Perdue, “Dickens’ London,” David Perdue’s Charles
Dickens Page, 2012,
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london.html; “John
Snow: Broad Street Pump Outbreak,” UNC Gillings School of Global
Public Health, http://courses.sph.unc.edu/john_snow/prologue.htm.
6. Martin Daunton, “London’s ‘Great Stink’ and Victorian Urban
Planning,” BBC History, August 22, 2012,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain
/social_conditions/victorian_urban_planning_01.shtml.
7. Ethan Zuckerman, “Geek Tracking, African Hacking,” my heart’s in
accra (blog), April 27, 2007 (2:08 pm),
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog /2007/04/27/geek-tracking-
african-hacking/.
8. Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” trans. Ken Knabb, in
Situationist International Anthology (2006), posted on
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.
9. Zachary M. Seward, “Everything the Internet Knows about Me
(Because I Asked It To),” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal,
December 22, 2010,
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/22/everything-the-internet-knows-
about-me-because-i-asked-it-to/.
10. Ibid.
11. Brad DeLong, “What Future Does Facebook Have?,” Brad
DeLong (blog), January 10, 2011,
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/01/what-future-does-facebook-
have.html.
12. Paul Carr, “NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory—The Brave New World of
Online Self-Segregation,” TechCrunch, May 2, 2010,
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/02/a-limey-writes/.
13. “YESTERDAY: The Rabbit Proof Fence,” State Barrier Fence of
Western Australia, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/43156/20040709-
0000/agspsrv34.agric.wa.gov.au/programs/app/barrier/history.htm.
14. Letter to Sir Horace Mann of January 28, 1754, cited in T. G.
Remer, Serendipity and the Three Princes, from the Peregrinaggio of
557 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).
15. Colin Eagan, “What the Design of Cities Teaches Us about the
Design of Sites,” Fit & Finish: Insight from the ICF Ironworks User
Experience Group, July 27, 2010,
http://fitandfinish.ironworks.com/2010/07/what-designing-cities-
teaches-us-about-designing-sites-or-how-not-to-become-the-digital-
equivalent-of-tysons-corner.html.
16. The Library of Congress announced plans to archive all public
Twitter messages in 2010. By 2012, those messages were not
accessible, and reporting on the project focused on the technical
challenges the Library of Congress was experiencing in managing
the large data set Twitter creates:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/library-of-congress-twitter-
archive.html.
17. Matthew Ingram, “Which Is Better, Real Names on Facebook or
Helping Dissidents?,” GigaOm, February 8, 2011,
http://gigaom.com/2011/02/08/which-is-better-real-names-on-
facebook-or-helping-dissidents/.
18. Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, “Facebook Becomes Catalyst for
Causes, Colombian FARC Protest,” MediaShift, February 22, 2008,
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/02/facebook-becomes-catalyst-
for-causes-colombian-farc-protest053.html.
19. The Pages Directory, ranked by page popularity, is accessible
here: http://www.facebook.com/directory/pages/.
20. Gilad Lotan, “Data Reveals That ‘Occupying’ Twitter Trending
Topics Is Harder Than It Looks!,” Social Flow (blog), October 12,
2011, http://blog.socialflow.com/post/7120244374/data-reveals-that-
occupying-twitter-trending-topics-is-harder-than-it-looks.
21. Jon Fasman, “The $10,000 Gin and Tonic,” Intelligent Life,
September 2007, http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/153.
22. Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” trans. Ken Knabb, in
Situationist International Anthology (2006), posted on
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.
23. Linda Monach, Burgers Here and There, 2011,
http://burgershereandthere.com/.
24. David Weinberger, “Free Dewey!,” KMWorld, October 1, 2004,
http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Column/David-Weinberger/Free-
Dewey!-9579.aspx.
25. S. Roberts, “Self-experimentation as a Source of New Ideas:
Examples about Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 27 (2004): 227–62,
http://quantifiedself.com/2011/03/effect-of-one-legged-standing-on-
sleep/.

Chapter 8: THE CONNECTED SHALL INHERIT

1. The Sopranos, “Made in America,” The Sopranos, June 10, 2007.
2. “Journey Announces New Singer,” Blabbermouth.net, December
5, 2007, http://www.blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?
mode=Article&newsitemID=86205.
3. “Arnel Pineda Biography,” Biography.com,
http://www.biography.com/people/arnel-pineda-20860785.
4. Benito “Sunny” Vergara outlines the idea of plakado and Arnel
Pineda’s improbable journey in a set of blog posts:
http://americanpop.asianweek.com/2008/06/tongues-like-parrots/,
http://americanpop.asianweek.com/2008/07/the-man-can-sing-
anything/, http://americanpop.asianweek.com/2008/07/its-steve-and-
its-not-steve/.
5. Alex Pappademas, “He Didn’t Stop Believin’,” GQ, June 2008,
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200805/arnel-pineda-
journey-lead-singer.
6. Patricia Sellers, “It’s Good to Be the Boss,” CNN Money, October
2, 2006,
http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/29/magazines/fortune/mpw.femaleCE
Os.intro.fortune/index.htm.
7. Rob Cox, “Will Indra Nooyi Leave Pepsi?,” DailyBeast.com, July
30, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/29/will-
indra-nooyi-leave-pepsi.html.
8. “Senior Functional Leadership: Muhtar Kent,” Coca-Cola
Company, http://www.thecoca-
colacompany.com/ourcompany/bios/bio_76.html.
9. Herman Vantrappen and Petter Kilefors, “Grooming CEO Talent at
the Truly Global Firm of the Future,” Prism 2 (2009): 91–105.
10. Partnership for a New American Economy, “The ‘New American’
Fortune 500,” June 2011,
http://www.renewoureconomy.org/sites/all/themes/pnae/img/new-
american-fortune-500-june-2011.pdf.
11. Joann Muller, “The Impatient Mr. Ghosn,” Single Articles (blog),
http://www.singlearticles.com/the-impatient-mr-ghosn-a779.html;
David Ibison and James Mackintosh, “The Boss among Bosses,”
Financial Times, July 7, 2006, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1/530603e4-
0de3-11db-a385-0000779e2340.html#axzz27tXNmlIA.
12. Carla Power, “India’s Leading Export: CEOs,” Time, August 1,
2011,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2084441,00.html.
13. R. Jagannathan, “5 Reasons Why Indian CEO’s Are Making It
Big on Global Stage,” FirstPost Business, November 14, 2011,
http://www.firstpost.com/business/5-reasons-why-indian-ceos-are-
making-it-big-on-global-stage-130524.html.
14. Partnership for a New American Economy, “The ‘New American’
Fortune 500.”
15. Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers
Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (2004):
16385–89.
16. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of
Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1972), p. 277.
17. Hong and Page, “Groups,” p. 16389.
18. Jerome M. O’Connor, “Churchill’s ULTRA Secret of the Century,”
September 2000, http://www.historyarticles.com/bletchley_park.htm.
19. Steve Lohr, “Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New
Contest,” Bits (blog), New York Times, September 21, 2009,
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/netflix-awards-1-million-
prize-and-starts-a-new-contest/; “Academy Interview: Five Questions
for Dr. Scott Page,” NASA, June 30, 2010,
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/ask-
academy/issues/volume3/AA_3-6_F_interview.html.
20. Page and Hong, “Groups,” p. 16386.
21. Warren E. Watson, Kamalesh Kumar, and Larry K. Michaelson,
“Cultural Diversity’s Impact on Interaction Process and Performance:
Comparing Homogeneous and Diverse Task Groups,” Academy of
Management Journal 36 (1993): 590.
22. Katherine W. Phillips, Katie A. Liljenquist, and Margaret A. Neale,
“Is the Pain Worth the Gain? The Advantages and Liabilities of
Agreeing with Socially Distinct Newcomers,” Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin 35 (2009): 336.
23. Joop de Jong, “The Dutch Golden Age and Globalization: History
and Heritage, Legacies and Contestations,” Macalester International
27 (2011), http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol27/iss1/.
24. “Authoritarian Democracy in Singapore,” BBC,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/authoritarian-democracy-in-
singapore/10102.html.
25. Christopher Ong, “Albert Winsemius,” Singapore Infopedia,
http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_1457_2009-02-11.html.
26. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the
Course of History (New York: Random House, 2002).
27. Ryan J. Maher, “A Priest Walks into Qatar and… ,” Washington
Post, July 20, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802558.html.
28. Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and
Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2004).
29. Evgeny Morozov, “The Naked and the TED,” New Republic,
August 2, 2012, http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-
arts/magazine/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna#.
30. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: HarperCollins,
1969), p. xv.
31. Pirkei Avot, 2:20.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rewire is my first book. Like many first-time authors, I discovered

that it is far easier to talk about writing a book than to actually
complete one. It has been a long journey from idea and intention to
the book you’re reading, and without the help of dozens of friends, I
would never have completed the voyage.
My agent, David Miller, was profoundly generous with his wisdom
and expertise, helping me shape my ideas into something I could
share with the rest of the world. Brendan Curry, my editor at W. W.
Norton, is the answer to a first author’s prayers. I am grateful for his
help in smoothing the rough edges of my writing and in guiding me
through the process of turning a manuscript into a book.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
was my intellectual home while I wrote the majority of this book. I am
grateful to John Palfrey for inviting me, almost a decade ago, to join
this stimulating, challenging, and convivial community. I’ve learned a
great deal from Berkman’s directors: John Palfrey, Charles Nesson,
Urs Gasser, Terry Fisher, Jonathan Zittrain, and, especially, Yochai
Benkler, who has been an invaluable sounding board as I’ve worked
through these ideas. I’m grateful to the dozens of fellows I’ve had the
chance to work with, especially Dan Gillmor, Andrew McLaughlin,
Rebecca MacKinnon, Hal Roberts, Aaron Shaw, and Persephone
Miel, of blessed memory. A special thanks is due to Dave Winer, who
years ago convinced me that I should try blogging, my first step
down a slippery slope that has led to more serious crimes, including
authorship.
For me, the best part of Berkman has been the “book club,” a
group that has met weekly for years to help scholars turn their ideas
into books. My fellow clubbers of books have become some of my
closest colleagues and dearest friends, and I thank them all: danah
boyd, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Judith Donath, Eszter Hargittai,
Jason Kaufman, Colin Maclay, Christian Sandvig, Doc Searls,
Wendy Seltzer, Lokman Tsui, and Zeynep Tufekçi. I owe special
thanks to David Weinberger, who has honored the rest of us by
treating us as peers while sharing the many lessons he has learned
in writing his rich, intricate, and challenging books.
I completed this book at my new intellectual home, the MIT Media
Lab. I am grateful to Mitch Resnick, Pattie Maes, and Nicholas
Negroponte for inviting me to join their community, and thankful for
Joi Ito’s friendship and support as we both discover this legendarily
fascinating institution. James Paradis has ensured that I feel as
much at home in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT
as I do at the Media Lab, and I’m grateful for his close reading of a
draft of this book. My students have contributed more than they
know, both in shaping my thinking and in helping me learn how to
communicate these ideas. I’m especially grateful to Nathan Matias,
Matt Stempeck, and Molly Sauter for their comments on the
manuscript, and offer special thanks to Molly, who did much of the
hard work of footnote wrangling. Thanks to Rahul Bhargava for his
work in creating two key illustrations, and to Lorrie LeJeune for her
wisdom and friendship.
If Harvard and MIT have been my intellectual homes for the past
decade, Global Voices has been my spiritual home and my extended
family. I’m humbled by the work this extraordinary community does
every day to share glimpses and impressions of the wider world with
a wider audience. Thanks to everyone involved in the Global Voices
family, and especially to Amira Al Hussaini, Boris Anthony, Sami ben
Gharbia, Hossein Derakhshan, Onnik Krikorian, Solana Larsen,
Gilad Lotan, Ndesanjo Macha, Georgia Popplewell, Lova
Rakotomalala, David Sasaki, Ivan Sigal, Jillian York, and Portnoy
Zheng, each of whom has challenged me to think through the issues
of cosmopolitanism and connection. Global Voices would not exist
without Rebecca MacKinnon, my cofounder, partner, and dear friend,
and mere thanks seem inadequate to recognize the impact on my
life, and the lives of many others, she has had by bringing this
project to life.
I am grateful to the TED community for giving me a stage to share
some of my ideas while I was early in the process of writing this
book. Thanks to June Cohen, Chris Anderson, and Bruno Giussani
for their friendship and support.
Numerous friends and colleagues have been kind enough to
engage with me as I’ve worked through these ideas. An incomplete
list of inspiring interlocutors includes Akwe Amosu, Kwame Anthony
Appiah, Genevieve Bell, Joshua Benton, Ed Bice, John Bracken,
Andy Carvin, Kate Crawford, Darius Cuplinskas, Cyrus Farivar,
Shannon Farley, Henry Farrell, Pankaj Ghemawat, Brooke
Gladstone, Josh Glenn, Margaret Gould Stewart, Allen Gunn, Matt
Harding, Janet Haven, Erik Hersman, Ahmad Humeid, Alberto
Ibargüen, Sherrilyn Ifill, Susan Landau, Zhang Lei, Marc Lynch,
Cameron Marlow, Wayne Marshall, Alisa Miller, Jim Moore, Pippa
Norris, Quinn Norton, Danny O’Brien, Dick O’Neill, Ory Okolloh, Eli
Pariser, Xiao Qiang, István Rév, Howard Rheingold, Jay Rosen,
Roland Soong, George Soros, Jonathan Stray, Cass Sunstein, Clive
Thompson, Jenny Toomey, Johan Ugander, Katrin Verclas, and
Nasser Weddady. Apologies to the valued friends I’ve failed to name
here.
I did not understand the full weight of the word “favor” until I asked
a set of friends to read a draft of this book and offer their thoughts.
I’m deeply indebted to danah boyd, Judith Donath, Nathan Kurz,
Rebecca MacKinnon, Nathan Matias, James Paradis, Molly Sauter,
Clay Shirky, Matt Stempeck, Zeynep Tufekçi, and David Weinberger,
and I promise to return the favor if any of them are kind enough to
ask.
Thanks to Emily, Daniel, Chris, Amy, Seth, Debbie, Hank, Kate,
Shannon, Jay, Sandy, Katherine, Colin, Nate, Emmy, Josh, Maggie,
Embly, Mike, and the rest of the Noppet tribe for helping keep me
sane, and keeping Rachel and Drew company.
My late mentor Dick Sabot taught me that the question of
inequality—of resources, opportunity, or attention—was one of the
most important topics one could study. I hope he would approve of
how I’ve tried to address those questions, and I hope I’ve honored
his memory with this book.
I come by my xenophilia honestly, because my parents, Don and
Donna Zuckerman, have been fascinated by the width of the world
since long before my birth. Thanks to them and my sister Liz for
encouraging my wanderlust and always welcoming me home.
And finally, thanks to my wife, my best friend and my first reader,
the Velveteen Rabbi, Rachel Barenblat. I am grateful for your
patience, tolerance, and wisdom, and I love you more than I can say.
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abbasova, Zamira, 193

Accra, Ghana, 76, 77, 231
Ad Age, 108
Adams, William, 79, 82
Afghanistan, 82, 93, 175
Africa, 49, 67, 87, 112, 123–24, 140, 160, 163, 196, 199, 202, 237
underreporting of news from, 78–79, 80, 81, 84, 89, 111
Afunakwa, 202–4
Agence France-Presse, 184, 188
agents” (software programs), 257–58, 259
agricultural subsidies, 47–48, 282n
air travel, 12–14, 16, 28, 29, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 66–68, 113, 264
Ali, Imam, 1, 2
Al Jazeera, 17–18, 54, 163
AllAfrica.com, 123–24
Al-Nas television, 32
Amazon, 137, 156, 241
American Express Company, 63–64, 63
American Journalism Review, 58–69
Andriessen, Marc, 194
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 23–24, 30, 34, 125, 170, 278n
Arabic language, 114, 138, 142, 158, 163, 164
Arab media, 34, 54, 138, 161, 163
Arab Spring movement (2011), 4–5, 17–19, 34, 36, 54, 111–12, 128,
152, 226
social media in, 17, 19, 113, 163
Aristotle, 70
Arnold, David, 227–28, 243
Ashanti culture, 23, 231
Associated Press, 96
Athens, 20, 21, 22, 210
Atlantic, 107
attentional biases, 19–20, 26–27, 55, 79–93, 96–113, 234, 269
cultural media and, 26, 60, 89
cultural proximity factors in, 58, 79, 83, 84
geographic proximity factors in, 20, 56–57, 79, 82
homophily’s effect on, 23, 73, 103, 109–10, 112, 116, 184, 215
of news audiences, 12–13, 18, 19, 26, 55, 56–57, 58, 59–60, 79,
83, 91–92, 93, 110–13, 128, 130, 204, 214
in news coverage, 26, 40, 78–90, 91, 92, 93, 111, 127, 130, 184,
214, 285n
personal connection and, 20, 73, 110, 111–13, 116, 128, 192, 204
search media as embodiment of, 26–27, 94, 96–97, 98–105, 214
social filtering and, 105–13, 116–17, 215, 240
attention maps, 79–80, 80, 82
Australia, 12, 33, 45, 67, 107, 194, 196, 201, 216
Bacile, Sam, see Nakoula, Nakoula Basseley (Sam Bacile)
baile funk, 200, 294n
Balkin, Amy, 61, 62, 65
Baltimore Sun, 92
Banda, Ajay, 255, 256
Banda, Vindi, 255–56
Barber, Elinor, 215, 217
Barboza, David, 143
Barnett, Tom, 266
Barth, Dave, 65
BBC, 56, 57, 79, 82, 110, 113, 127, 186
BBC World Service, 4, 238
Being Digital (Negroponte), 38, 97
Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine, 17–18, 19
Benghazi embassy attacks, 32–33, 35, 36
Berg, Heidi, 167, 291n
Berger, Jonah, 113
Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 122–23, 124, 125, 126, 171
best and brightest” problem, 259–60
Bhargava, Rahul, 80, 213
Bhutan, 174–75, 176
Big Sort, The (Bishop), 109
Bishop, Bill, 109, 110, 116
Blanco, Álvaro, 136–37
Blériot, Louis, 28
Bletchley Park, 260
BlogAfrica, 124
blogs, bloggers, 112, 121–31, 150, 153, 155, 172, 187–88, 203, 238,
293n
amplification of news stories on, 112, 113
contextual “bridging” by, 124–27, 129, 171–72, 188, 189–92
cross-cultural personal connections forged by, 128, 171, 192–93
on cultural media, 130, 191, 192, 232–33
ideological isolation and, 98, 99, 102
linguistic diversity in, 127, 129, 137–38, 139–40, 153, 155, 161
as sources of international news, 111, 112, 113, 123–28, 129, 150,
153, 155, 187–89, 190–91, 237
translating of, 127, 129, 139, 140, 153, 155, 161, 171, 190
see also Global Voices
Bongiorni, Sara, 44, 45–46
Bouazizi, Mohamed, 17, 18
Bowling Alone (Putnam), 214
Boyer, Peter, 78–79, 80, 83, 87
Boyoyo Boys, 167, 168, 169
Brazil, 14, 48, 114, 132–34, 200, 294n
bridge figures, 131, 170, 171–73, 174, 178, 181–97, 205, 229, 245,
266–67
bloggers as, 124–27, 128, 129, 171–72, 188, 189–92
characteristics of, 172–73, 255–56
in contextualizing foreign events or ideas, 36, 124–27, 129, 171,
185–92, 195, 245, 269
in corporate organizations, 181–82, 183, 256, 257, 267
in forging cross-cultural personal connections, 116, 128, 171, 185,
192–93, 204
 as sources of creative ideas, 180–83, 251, 257
translators as, 127, 129, 140, 150–59, 171, 190, 194, 268
bridge ties, 178, 179–80, 182–83
Briggs, Charles, 28
broadcast news, 15, 19, 32, 54, 79, 86, 90, 100, 103, 106, 110, 111,
112, 142, 237, 271
agenda setting in, 84, 127
on Arab Spring movement, 17–18
decreasing international coverage in, 19, 59, 92, 123, 277n
Brooks, David, 99, 101
Buckingham, Jane, 106
Burt, Ronald, 181–83, 204, 257
Butler, Paul, 113, 114, 288n
cable television, 123, 175
isolation index of, 100–101
Canada, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 57, 68, 79, 102, 196,
289n
Carter, Jimmy, 1, 3
Carvin, Andy, 163, 164
Case, Steve, 194
CBS, 92
censorship, 40, 90, 125, 152, 153, 155, 190, 282n, 288n
CEOs, transnational, 252–57
Chan, Johnny, 12, 13
Charles, Jacqueline, 185–86, 188
Chesnais, Pascal, 96–97
Chicago Tribune, 283n
China, 12, 41, 56, 67, 68, 80, 82, 123, 137, 144, 154, 259, 260, 288n
as major global supplier, 44–45, 46, 47, 48, 52
SARS epidemic in, 13–14, 15, 17
chinaSMACK (blog), 153, 190–91
Chinese media, 15, 57, 143, 144
censorship in, 152, 153, 155, 190, 282n, 288n
English translations of, 144, 148–49, 150–51, 153, 155–56, 163
as invisible to Western world, 151–53
Chombart de Lauwe, Paul-Henry, 142, 211, 212, 229
Churchill, Winston, 260
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 3–7, 150
cities, 207–15, 218–20, 222, 235
flow mapping of, 61–62, 64–65
personally limited patterns of movement in, 211–14, 212, 213, 229,
230
segregated ethnic communities in, 22–23, 214
structured wandering in, 229–31, 232
see also urban planning
Clinton, Hillary, 152
closure effect, 72, 178–79
CNN.com, 100, 101, 102
Coca-Cola, 252, 253, 254
cognitive diversity, 252, 257–68, 270, 272
corporations as benefiting from, 252, 254–55, 257, 260, 262, 263,
267–70
transnational CEOs and, 252, 254–55, 257
Cohen, Daniel, 46
Cohen, June, 157
collaborative filtering, 240–43
collective action, 29–30, 154, 156, 159
communication technologies, 6–7, 19, 31–36, 49–50, 53–54, 89, 184,
272
collective action enhanced with, 29–30
in containing deadly epidemics, 14–17
global trade enabled by, 41–42
social change movements enabled by, 4–5, 17–18, 19
utopian visions in wake of, 27–30, 31
see also Internet; media, media tools; specific communication tools
confirmation bias, 98, 103
Congo, Democratic Republic of, 83, 93, 229
Congress, U.S., 42, 63
constrict theory, 23, 174, 214
contact theory, 23
corpora, 146–48, 160
corporate organizations:
bridge figures in, 181–82, 183, 256, 257, 267
 cognitive diversity as beneficial in, 252, 254–55, 257, 260, 262,
263, 267–68
“structural holes” in, 181–82, 267
transnational CEOs in, 252–57
cosine similarity, 240–41
Cosmopolitan Communications (Norris and Inglehart), 174–76
cosmopolitanism, 20–24, 170–71, 210, 214
Appiah’s definition of, 23–34, 125, 170
bridge figures and, see bridge figures
cognitive diversity and, 252, 262–64
digital, see digital cosmopolitanism
engineering serendipity and, see serendipity
homophily as barrier to, 23, 69–74, 101–2, 103, 109–10, 112, 113,
115, 116, 176–77, 178, 184, 214
imaginary, see imaginary cosmopolitanism
key factors for achieving of, on national levels, 262–67
linguistic diversity as barrier to, see linguistic diversity
maximizing benefits of diversity in, 262–70
transnational CEOs and, 252–57
of xenophiles, 170–71, 197–98, 201, 203–4
cotton trade, 44, 47–48, 282n
creative fusion, 167–71, 176, 177, 182–83
in cross-cultural music collaborations, 167–71, 199–201, 251
Creepy” (mapping software), 213
cross-cultural encounters, 167–77, 266
creative fusion in, 167–71, 176, 177, 182–83, 199–201
on Facebook or Twitter, 35–36, 113–15, 116, 129, 132–34, 163–64,
192, 193, 195, 225–26, 229, 289n
homophily in preventing of, 23, 69–74, 101–2, 103, 109–10, 112,
113, 115, 116, 176–77, 178, 184, 214
international blogs as means of, see blogs, bloggers
Internet video-sharing services as vehicle of, 31–34, 35, 36, 54,
153, 157–58, 190, 191, 199–200, 201–4, 232, 249–50, 251
linguistic diversity as barrier to, 134, 136, 142–44, 149, 150–51,
154, 163, 164–65
xenophiles and, 170–71, 174, 197–205
 see also cosmopolitanism; diversity; international news; translation,
language
cultural media, 26, 41, 49, 130, 174–75, 176–77, 198, 199, 228, 249,
271
blogs on, 130, 191, 192, 232–33
collaboration vs. appropriation of, 169, 201, 203, 292n
collaborative filtering of, 240–43
finding serendipity in, 228, 232–33, 240–43
linguistic diversity in, 60, 135, 155
see also music
curated media, 75, 83–87, 94, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 223, 245
gatekeepers of, see gatekeepers, media
serendipity in, 105, 245, 269
and shift to search and social media, 75, 93–97, 103, 106, 107
Cushing, Bob, 109
cyberskepticism,” 29
cyberutopianism, 27, 29–30, 31, 271
Data Management International (DMI), 77
Davis, Wade, 162
Dean, Howard, 122, 123
Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 218
Debord, Guy, 212, 214, 230, 231, 239
Deep Forest, 202–3
Derakhshan, Hossein, 124, 171
desire lines, 224–27, 239
Development as Freedom (Sen), 209
Dhani Tackles the Globe (TV show), 197–98
Difference, The (Page), 257–58, 259
digital cosmopolitanism, 27, 31, 36–37, 74, 89, 115, 130–31, 271–72
bridge figures and, 36, 171–72, 173, 188–93, 194–95, 196–97, 269
contextual bridging and, 124–27, 188–92, 199, 245
cyberutopianism vs., 30
global bloggers role in, 124–27
in Global Voices project, 125, 126–27
imaginary sense of, 43, 44, 52–60, 74, 115, 236, 237–38
linguistic diversity as barrier to, 114, 132–34, 135, 136–40, 142–44,
149, 150–51, 153, 155, 158, 160–62, 163, 164–65
 transparent translation as key to, 131, 163–66
digital language extinction, 161–62
digital media, see Internet; search media; social media
Diogenes, 20–21, 210, 277n
Diplo (Wesley Pentz), 200–201
Disappearance of Technology, The” (Bruce), 141
Disraeli, Benjamin, 30
diversity, 22–23, 255, 260–61, 270
conflict as arising from, 23, 51, 261–62, 268
constriction of encounters in face of, 23, 174, 214
global connection and maximizing benefits of, 262–70
linguistic, see linguistic diversity
in online friendships, 113–15, 116
religious, 263, 266
see also cross-cultural encounters; homophily
Donath, Judith, 33, 115–16
Dostert, Léon, 145–46
Doubleclick, 55–56, 282n
Duck Rock, 169
Duolingo, 158, 159
EastSouthWestNorth (website), 144, 151
echo chamber studies, 97–102
Economist, 28, 77, 127, 154
EdgeRank, 108–9
Egypt, 4, 18, 32, 34, 112, 113, 152, 163
email, 106, 107, 111, 113, 164, 203
EnglishEnglish.com, 135
English language, 77, 134–42, 145, 157, 158, 160, 165, 255
Chinese media translations into, 144, 148–49, 150–51, 153, 155–
56, 163
Chinese translations of, 139, 147, 148, 153–56, 157–58
reaching broader audience with, 137, 138, 139, 161
epidemics, 5, 6, 11, 14, 16–17, 19, 264
see also SARS
Europe, 12, 67, 68, 77, 80, 267
media in, 18, 89, 185, 283n
Muslim immigration in, 48–49, 51–52, 73
European Union, 51, 267
Everything Is Miscellaneous (Weinberger), 233–34
Evian water, 38, 39, 46
expert guides, 36, 194–97, 229, 270
explainers,” 189, 191, 195
Facebook, 26, 71–72, 73, 107, 108, 110, 115–16, 136, 137, 192, 194,
195, 213, 221–23, 244
in Arab Spring movement, 5, 17, 113
homophily and segregation from other social groups on, 109–10,
178, 215, 222–23
international social ties on, 113–15, 116, 193, 288n–89n
“like” button on, 223
Pages directory of, 225–26
Top News filter on, 108–9, 223
Fadhil, Omar and Muhammed, 124
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), U.S., 86
Feinstein, Dianne, 19
Fiji, 38, 39, 40–41
Fiji Water, 38–40, 41, 45, 46
Filter Bubble, The (Pariser), 108
firewall theory,” 176
Fitbit, 236, 239
Fleming, Alexander, 216–17, 230
Flickr, 191, 213
FlightStats.com, 67
ow maps, 61–62, 64–69
oreign correspondents, 110, 183–88
shrinking number of, 58–59, 92–93, 130, 285n
Foursquare, 108, 212–13
France, 3, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 263
Frankel, Jeffrey, 46, 55
French Wikipedia, 142, 161, 162
Freshman Fishwrap, The” (news service), 96–97
Friedman, Tom, 41, 43
FUNREDES (Foundation for Networks and Development), 136
Galtung, Johan, 82–84, 87, 127
Gandal, Neil, 135–36, 137, 138
Garfunkel, Art, 167, 170
gatekeepers, media, 87–90, 94, 105, 110
analytics used by, 91–92, 93, 237
audiences as stepping into role of, 93–105; see also search media
Gates, Mr., 88, 89, 93, 97
Gawker Media, 92
Geekcorps, 76, 79
General Electric, 217
Gentzkow, Matthew, 99–101, 102
Georgetown/IBM translation system, 144–45, 146, 147, 149
Ghana, 54, 76–77, 78, 84, 195, 196, 231, 285n
Ghemawat, Pankaj, 42–43
Ghosn, Carlos, 254–55, 257
Giant Pool of Money, The” (documentary), 189
Gibson, William, 206, 210–11
Gieber, Walter, 88–89
Gilmour, David, 39, 40
Gladwell, Malcolm, 177–78
global connection, 5, 36, 176–77, 251
air travel and, 12, 13–14, 16, 28, 29, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 53, 66–68,
264
digital tools of, see Internet; search media; social media
Fiji Water as illustration of, 38–41
infrastructures of, 43–44, 49–50, 53, 60, 63–64, 63, 66–67, 68, 77,
184, 263, 264, 266; see also communication technologies
spread of disease and, 11, 13–17, 31
see also cosmopolitanism; globalization
globalization, 42–48, 134
of atoms, 39–40, 41, 42–48, 52, 53, 55, 60
cosmopolitan nations and, 262–64
Fiji Water and, 38–41, 45, 46
human migration and, 43, 48–52, 55, 73, 256, 264, 265
of information, 43, 44, 50, 52–60, 264
infrastructures of connectivity in, 43–44, 49–50, 53, 60, 63–64, 63,
66–67, 68, 77, 263, 264, 266
manufacturing supply chains and, 44–46, 47–48, 55
outsourcing of jobs and, 41, 50, 52, 77, 285n
 overestimating scale of, 43, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 49, 50, 51–52, 55,
58, 60, 73, 264–65
transnational CEOs and, 252–57
see also global connection
Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), 15, 16–17
Global Voices, 121–31, 138, 161, 171, 173, 186, 188, 192, 238, 269
language translation on, 127, 129, 139, 140, 157, 158, 160
manifesto of, 121–22, 125
Google, 6, 26, 55, 57, 94, 96, 106, 109, 138, 143, 165, 199, 216, 256
Mountain View campus of, 103–4, 166
translation services of, 133, 147, 148–49, 158, 160–61, 164, 165
Google Books, 159
Google Maps, 64–65, 223, 230
Google News, 79, 80
Gore, Al, 157
Graceland, 170, 292n
Granovetter, Mark, 177, 178–80, 292n
Great Britain, 5, 42, 56, 67, 76, 90, 208, 264, 283n
group polarization, 97–99, 100, 101, 175–76
Guangzhou, 11, 152
Guardian, 56, 77, 107, 110, 112, 152, 154, 155, 215
guides, 36, 194–97, 229, 270
see also bridge figures
Haitian earthquake (2010), 185–86
Halberstam, David, 259
Hallin, Daniel, 85–86
Hallin’s spheres, 85–87
Harding, Matt, 201–4
Härnu, 194, 269
Harvard University, 59, 123, 125, 153, 199, 234, 240
Hersman, Erik, 172, 173
Heschel, Abraham, 271–72
homophily, 69–74, 101, 112, 113, 176–77, 214, 235, 284n–85n
attentional biases affected by, 23, 73, 103, 109–10, 112, 116, 184,
215
ideological isolation and, 101, 102, 109–10, 215
in online social networks, 109–10, 113, 115, 176, 178, 215
 racial, 70, 71–74
structural factors in, 72–73, 74
Hong, Lu, 257–58, 259, 261
Hong Kong, 45, 57, 195
SARS outbreak in, 5, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17
Huffington Post, 91–92, 106, 237
human libraries, 195–96, 197
human migration, 43, 48–52, 55, 56, 173, 176, 256, 264, 265
government regulation of, 48–49, 50, 52, 55, 73, 215, 256, 265,
271
rural-to-urban, 208, 209, 210
societal tensions and debate triggered by, 48–49, 51
BM, 53, 54, 60
translation system of, 144–45, 146, 147, 149, 290n
celand, 5, 80
dentity diversity, 260–62
see also diversity
deological isolation, 98–103, 108–10
Hub, 172
maginary cosmopolitanism, 41, 44, 60, 61–69, 71, 73, 74, 115, 236,
237–38, 264–65
global potential vs. actual flow of information and, 40, 41, 43, 52–
60
see also incomplete globalization
mmigration, see human migration
ncomplete globalization, 41, 43, 60, 73
of atoms, 45–48, 55, 60
in flow of information, 40, 41, 43, 44, 53, 55, 58–60
government regulations and, 47–48, 50, 52, 55, 60, 73, 265
of human migration, 50–52, 55, 265
ndia, 41, 48, 56, 80, 82, 138, 196, 252, 255–56, 265
outsourced jobs in, 50, 52, 77
ndonesia, 44, 51
nfotopia (Sunstein), 97–99
nfrastructure maps, 61–64, 63, 66–67
nglehart, Ronald, 174–76
nnocence of Muslims (video), 31–34, 36
nternational news, 18, 54–60, 77–84, 88, 94, 103, 105
attentional biases in coverage of, 26, 40, 78–84, 87, 89–91, 92, 93,
130, 183–88, 285n
attentional biases of audiences and, 12–13, 18, 19, 23, 55, 56–57,
58, 59–60, 91, 92, 93, 110–13, 128, 130
censorship of, 40, 152, 153, 155, 190
contextual bridging for understanding of, 36, 124–27, 129, 185–91,
195
cultural-proximity correlating to interest in, 58, 79, 83, 84
decreasing coverage of, 19, 59–60, 91, 112, 123, 277n, 283n
domestic news online traffic vs. traffic for, 55–56, 57, 102, 286n
geographic proximity correlating to interest in, 56–57, 79, 82
“newsworthiness”/news values of, 80–84, 87
online citizen media as source of, 17, 19, 111, 112, 113, 123–28,
129, 150, 153, 155, 163–64, 187–89, 190–191, 226, 229, 237;
see also Global Voices
online sites for traditional sources of, 49, 54–58, 60, 93–94, 102,
112, 113, 127, 144, 154–56, 163, 238
online translations of, 127, 129, 139, 140, 144, 148–51, 152–56,
158, 163
personal connection correlating to interest in, 73, 111–13, 116,
128, 185, 192, 204
and shrinking number of foreign bureaus and correspondents, 58–
59, 92–93, 130, 285n
social filtering of, 110–13, 116–17
underreporting of important events in, 18, 40–41, 78
nternational trade, 41–48, 55, 210, 263, 266
cotton suppliers in, 47–48, 282n
see also globalization
nternet, 6, 7, 19, 23, 33, 38, 43, 44, 54, 60, 77, 122, 172, 174, 264
citizen participatory media on, see blogs, bloggers; participatory
media; Twitter
collaborative filtering on, 240–43
contextual bridging tools on, 188–92, 199
cyberutopianism in early days of, 27, 29–30, 31, 271
“digital city” metaphor for, 206–7, 210–11, 221–22, 233
digital re-organizing of information on, 233–35
 engineering of serendipity on, 221, 224, 225–26, 227, 232–33, 235,
238–39, 240–43, 244–45
freedom of speech and censorship on, 121, 125, 127, 163, 282n,
288n
as frontline for stopping SARS, 14–17
global infrastructure of vs. localized user flow on, 23, 26, 54–58, 69
guide-finding services on, 194–95, 196, 197, 269
isolation index of, 100–101, 102
linguistic diversity on, 135, 136–40, 142, 153, 155, 157–58, 160–
62, 163–66
photo and video-sharing on, 54, 127, 133, 153, 157–158, 190, 191,
199–200, 201–204, 232, 237, 249–250, 251; see also YouTube
reCAPTCHAs on, 159
xenophiles and, 199, 202
see also search media; social media
nternet Archive, 222
nternet Relay Chat (IRC), 27
In Transit” (Balkin), 61, 62
ran, 1–3, 124, 171
raq the Model (blog), 124
raq War, 82, 128
sakov, Vadim, 188, 192
slam, 3, 24, 51
“Muslim Rage” media narrative and, 34, 35–36
see also Muslims
slamic revolution (1979), 2, 3, 4
solation index, 100–102
to, Joi, 111, 122, 123, 204
acobs, Jane, 218–20, 221, 222, 223
apan, 41, 51, 52, 56, 58, 67, 68, 80, 81, 84, 87, 114, 130, 263
auto industry in, 254–55
media in, 54, 111, 288n
igme Singye Wangchuck, King of Bhutan, 174
ones, Dhani, 197–99
ones, Terry, 31–32, 33, 34, 279n
ordan, 114, 137–38, 161
ourney, 249–50, 251
 uxtConsult, 138
Kakavas, Yiannis, 213
Kennedy, John F., 259, 260
Kent, Muktar, 253, 254
Kenya, 82, 172
Keynes, John Maynard, 42
Khatib, Dima, 163
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 1–3, 4
Knox, Philander, 28
Krikorian, Onnik, 192–93
Kurz, Nathan, 242, 243–44
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 169, 170
Lagos, Nigeria, 207–8, 210
LamdaMOO, 222
Landau, Susan, 4, 6
anguage biases, 141–42, 144
Lanxiang Vocational School, 143, 148, 163
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 111
Lebona, Koloi, 169–70, 171
Lewis, Kevin, 71–74, 178
Library of Congress, 234, 295n
Libya, 4, 18, 32, 34, 35, 82, 112
nguistic diversity, 56, 81, 114, 132–44, 255, 266, 282n
as barrier to global connecting, 114, 134, 136, 142–44, 149, 150–
51, 154, 163, 164–65
in blogging, 127, 129, 137–38, 139–40, 153, 161
in cultural media, 60, 135, 155
extinction/preservation of languages and, 139, 161–62
on Internet, 135, 136–40, 142, 153, 155, 157–58, 160–62, 163–66
in social media, 114, 132–34, 137–38, 139–40, 153, 161, 163–64
on Twitter, 132–34, 163–64
LinkedIn, 177
Liu Jianlun, 11–12, 13
LiveJournal, 231–32
ocal maxima, 227–29, 239, 244
ocal maximum problem, 258–59
London, 22, 42, 67, 207, 208, 209–10, 294n
Lorenz, Edward, 14
Lorenz ciphers, 260
Los Angeles Times, 93, 283n
Luce, Clare Boothe, 42
Lynch, Marc, 34–35
MacBride, Seán, 89–90
machine translations, 54, 133, 141, 162, 163–64, 165
combining human resources with, 158–60
history of, 144–50, 290n
of search engine tools, 133, 147, 148–49, 160–61, 164, 165
statistical model used in, 146–48, 160, 161
MacKinnon, Rebecca, 123–24, 125–26, 127–28, 139
MacKinnon, Sean, 70–71
Madagascar, 126, 130, 139–40, 161, 162, 201
Makati, 250, 251
Makoko, Nigeria, 207–8
Malagasy language, 139–40, 160–62
Malaysia, 44, 124
Manila, 250–51
Mann, Horace, 216
maps, mapping, 113–14, 223–24
of flow, 61–62, 64–69
of individual patterns of movement, 211–14, 212, 213, 223
of infrastructure, 61–64, 63, 66–67
of media attention, 79–80, 80, 82
of “topologies,” 64
Marconi, Guglielmo, 28, 271, 272
Marlow, Cameron, 110–11, 112, 113, 114, 116
Marshall, Wayne, 199, 200
MasterCard, 255
Matisse, Henri, 24, 26
Mayan language, 162
mbaqanga music, 167, 169–70, 198
M’Bow, Amadou-Mahtar, 89
McCombs, Maxwell, 84, 87
McLaren, Malcolm, 169, 171
Meacham, Jon, 91, 93
media, media tools, 6, 19, 26–27, 49, 50, 77–117, 176, 205, 270, 271,
272
in containing SARS, 15, 16–17
digital, see Internet; search media; social media
first-time cross-cultural encounters via, 174–75, 176–77, 199
negative cross-cultural encounters enabled by, 31–36
self-tracking personal consumption of, 237–38, 268, 269
social movements enabled by, 5, 17–18, 19
see also specific types of media and media tools
media, U.S., 57, 84–87, 111, 153–56, 184, 185, 186, 238
attentional biases in foreign news coverage by, 78–79, 81–82, 89, 111,
285n
audience preferences in shaping coverage by, 91, 92, 93
decreasing international news coverage in, 19, 59–60, 91, 112,
123, 283n
important global events ignored by, 18, 40, 78, 152
“Muslim Rage” narrative in, 34, 35–36
shrinking number of foreign correspondents in, 58–59, 92–93
Meedan, 158, 159–60, 269
Merton, Robert K., 69–70, 215–16, 217, 218
Miami Herald, 185
Miller, Alisa, 59, 277n
mismatch theory,” 235
MIT, 96, 244
Media Lab at, 38, 44, 111, 211
Mitchco IBM ad, 53, 54, 60
mobile phones, 17, 19, 43, 53, 62, 106, 230, 289n
surveillance data provided by, 65–66, 211, 213, 284n
Moore, Jim, 122, 123
Morozov, Evgeny, 270, 271
Moses, Robert, 218, 219, 223
Mubarak, Hosni, 5, 18, 19
Muhammad, Prophet, 31, 34
music, 135, 173, 198, 202–3, 228, 232–33, 249–50, 271, 291n, 294n
creative fusion in, 167–71, 177, 199–201, 251
cultural appropriation of, 169, 201, 202–3, 292n
Muslims, 124, 266
 anti-Islamic YouTube video and, 31–36
European immigration of, 48–49, 51–52, 73
see also Islam
MySpace, 221–22
Nagorno-Karabakh War, 192
Nairobi, Kenya, 172, 193–94
Nakoula, Nakoula Basseley (Sam Bacile), 31, 32, 33, 34
National Public Radio (NPR), 163, 238
Negroponte, Nicholas, 38, 97
Netflix, 60, 240–43, 260
Netherlands, 41, 208, 263
news media, 26, 32, 46, 77–113, 116–17
African news as underreported in, 78–79, 80, 81, 84, 89, 111
agenda setting in, 84–87, 105, 127–28
attentional biases in coverage by, 26, 40, 59–60, 78–90, 91, 92, 93,
127, 130, 184, 214, 285n
attentional biases of audiences and, 12–13, 18, 19, 26, 55, 56–57,
58, 59–60, 79, 83, 91–92, 93, 111–13, 128, 130, 214
attention mapping of, 79–80, 80, 82
censorship in, 40, 90, 152, 153, 155, 190, 282n
gatekeepers of, 87–90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 105, 110
“newsworthiness”/news values in determining coverage by, 80–84,
87
online citizen participatory, 111, 112, 113, 121–31, 150, 153, 187–
89, 190–91
“parachute journalism” in, 59, 127, 185, 186
personal connection correlating to interest in, 73, 111–13, 116,
128, 185, 192, 205
shrinking presence of foreign bureaus and correspondents in, 58–
59, 92–93, 130, 285n
social filtering of, 105–13, 223, 229
social media referrals to, 106–7, 109, 113
wire services in, 59, 88–89, 92–93, 96–97
see also international news; specific types of news media
newspapers, 6, 15, 16, 26, 40, 77–78, 83–88, 96, 106, 111, 116, 117,
135, 184, 185, 188–89, 237, 269
declining foreign news coverage in, 59, 283n
 frontpage layouts of, 104, 105
language translations of, 144, 148–50, 152–53, 154, 163
online sites of, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 100, 102, 106–7, 113, 238
shrinking foreign bureaus of, 58–59, 92–93
user-customized, 96–97
Newsweek, 34, 35, 36, 45, 91, 92, 154
New Urbanism, 219–20
New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), 90–91
New York, N.Y., 22, 40, 67, 77, 167, 172, 199, 212, 218–19, 228
segregated ethnic communities in, 22–23, 214
New York Times, 41, 77, 90, 100, 101, 127, 128, 133, 144–45, 154,
238, 285n
foreign news coverage in, 18, 40, 59, 78, 93, 143–44, 283n
online site of, 57, 79, 104–5, 113, 223, 286n
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 70
Nigeria, 81, 84, 87, 114, 175, 207–8, 282n
Nightingale, Florence, 185
Nissan, 254–55
Nooyi, Indra, 252–53, 255, 256–57
Norris, Pippa, 174–76, 277n
North Korea, 123, 132
Norwegian media, 83, 84
nut graf, 188–89
Obama, Barack, 18–19, 33, 86, 122
O’Brien, Danny, 163–64
Odyssey (Homer), 174
Oldenburg, Ray, 211
online news sites, 49, 54–58, 60, 113, 238
analytics used on, 91–92, 93, 237, 286n
domestic vs. international traffic on, 55–56, 57, 102, 286n
“explainers” on, 189, 191
homepage layouts on, 104–5
for language-translated content, 127, 144, 151, 152–53, 154–55,
163
self-tracking personal consumption of, 237–38
social media referrals to, 106–7, 109, 113
 of traditional international media outlets, 49, 54–58, 60, 93–94,
102, 112, 113, 127, 144, 154–56, 163, 238
online spaces, designing of, 220–24, 233
“desire lines” in, 225–27
engineering of serendipity in, 221, 224, 225–26, 227, 235, 240–43,
244–45, 270
overpersonalization in, 223–24, 226
Opte project, 64
O’Sullivan, John, 66–67, 68
outsourcing, 41, 50, 52, 77, 285n
Page, Scott, 257–58, 259, 260, 261
Pahlavi, Reza, 1–2, 3
Pakistan, 33, 82, 112, 114
parachute journalism, 59, 127, 185, 186
Pariser, Eli, 108–10, 116, 223, 224, 229
participatory media, 121–31, 150, 153, 190–92, 229, 237
video-sharing in, 127, 153, 157–158, 190, 191, 199–200, 201–204,
232, 237, 249–250; see also YouTube
see also blogs, blogging; Global Voices; Twitter
Pasteur, Louis, 217
Peace Corps, 153, 172, 266
People’s Daily, 153
Pepsico, 252–53, 255, 256–57
Perry, Steve, 249, 250, 251
personalization technologies, 96–97, 108–9, 223–24
Pew Internet and American Life Project, 59, 99, 110
Philippines, 12, 250–51
Phillips, Katherine, 261–62
Picasso, Pablo, 24–26, 27, 36
Pineda, Arnel, 250–51
Plato, 21, 195
Plumb, Robert, 144–45
Prabhala, Achal, 196–97
Project for Excellence in Journalism, 59, 106, 277n
Putin, Vladimir, 186, 187–88, 293n
Putnam, Robert, 22–23, 174, 214
Qilu Evening News, 143, 144, 148–49, 150, 163
Quebec, Canada, 135–36
Quillpad, 141
acial homophily, 70, 71–74
adio, 28, 29, 60, 106, 237, 238
ailroad maps, 62–63, 64
Rakotomalala, Lova, 126, 161
Raytheon, 180–83, 257
eCAPTCHAs, 159
Reddit, 215, 238
Rege, Karl, 67–68
Renault, 254, 255
Republic.com (Sunstein), 97
RescueTime, 237, 269
Reuters, 56, 92–93, 96
Rheingold, Howard, 27, 29–30, 271, 272
Roberts, Seth, 235, 237
Rorogwela,” 202–3
Rosen, Jay, 87, 189
Rosenthal, Hilton, 168–70, 171, 173
Ruge, Mari, 82–84
Russell, William Howard, 185, 186
Russia, 3, 45, 52, 186–88, 198
see also Soviet Union
Russian media, 54, 192
Putin/Rynda cartoon in, 186, 187, 188
Sadek, Morris, 31, 32, 33
Safire, William, 92
San Francisco, Calif., 215
flow map of, 61–62, 64–65
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 5, 6, 11–17, 19, 31, 36, 58
Sasaki, David, 124, 126
atellite television, 19, 32, 50, 54, 89
Schoen, Neal, 249–50, 251
earch engines, 6, 94, 96, 106, 108, 109, 136–37, 138, 164, 195, 221,
244
see also Google
earch media, 93–105, 107, 108, 244, 270
 information you want vs. information you need in, 94, 96, 97, 104–
5, 214
language barriers in, 163, 164–66
personalization tools in, 97, 109, 223
shift from curated to, 75, 93–97, 103, 107
translation tools in, 133, 147, 148–49, 158, 160–61, 164, 165
elf-tracking, 235–39, 268, 269
Sen, Amartya, 209
Senghor, Léopold, 25, 26
erendipity, 7, 105, 130, 131, 205, 215–18, 224–33, 239–44, 269–70
in cultural media, 228, 232–33, 240–43
in curated media, 105, 245, 269
designing cities for, 211, 219–20
designing online spaces for, 210–11, 221, 224, 226, 227, 240–43,
244–45, 270
personalization technologies and loss of, 109, 223–24, 226
personally limited patterns of movement as barrier to, 211–14, 229,
230
risk-taking as necessary for, 217, 239–40, 243, 244
self-tracking of behavior and, 237–39, 268
social filtering and loss of, 109, 204, 223–24, 229–30
Seward, Zach, 212–14, 213, 238
Shapiro, Jesse, 99–101, 102
Shaw, Donald, 84, 87
ShelfLife, 234–35
Shepard, Mark, 230, 231
Sheridan, Peter, 145, 290n
Shirky, Clay, 122, 234
Sidi Bouzid, 17, 18, 128
Sigma Cable, 174
Simmel, Georg, 72, 178
Simon, Paul, 167–71, 198, 199, 291n, 292n
Singapore, 12, 16, 44, 263–64, 265
Sinope, 20, 21, 277n
Six Degrees (Watts), 20
Skype, 29, 49, 54
Small Media, Big Revolution (Sreberny and Mohammadi), 4
Snow Crash (Stephenson), 206
Social Capital Benchmark Survey, 23
ocial filtering, 75, 105–13, 215, 223–24, 240
of international news, 110–13, 116–17
personalization technologies and, 108–9, 223–24
serendipity lost in, 109, 204, 223–24, 229–30, 235
ocial media, 6, 15, 26, 105–17, 127, 137, 153, 176–77, 179, 192,
195, 220–27, 240, 244, 270, 271
amplifying of news stories in, 106, 112, 113, 229
in Arab Spring movement, 5, 17, 19, 113, 163
attentional biases and, 105–7, 108–9, 111, 113, 116–17
bridging of cross-cultural personal connections via, 116, 128, 171,
192–93
engineering of serendipity in, 224, 225–26, 227, 244–45
homophily of contacts on, 109–10, 113, 115, 176, 178, 215
international news shared on, 17, 19, 111, 112, 113, 123–28, 129,
153, 163–64, 189, 190–91, 226, 229, 237
international social ties on, 113–15, 116, 193, 288n–89n
linguistic diversity in, 114, 132–34, 137–38, 139–40, 153, 161,
163–64
machine translation tools in, 163–64
overpersonalization in, 108–9, 223–24, 226
shift from curated to, 75, 106
see also blogs, bloggers; specific social media sites and services
ocial networks (off-line), 6, 106, 129, 181, 182–83
attentional biases influenced by, 73, 103, 105–7, 108–9, 111, 112,
116–17, 177, 215
homophily in, 69–74, 101, 102, 103, 109–10, 115, 184, 284n–85n
online see social media
weak ties in, 177–78, 179, 180, 214
Socrates, 195
Solomon Islands, 202, 203
Soong, Roland, 144, 150–53, 155, 163
South Africa, 51, 82, 111, 167–70, 238, 288n
music of, 167–71, 173, 199, 233
South Korea, 56, 67, 76, 130, 282n
Soviet Union, 2, 3–4, 84, 90, 149, 188, 259
 see also Russia
Spain, 67, 263
Spitz, Malte, 65–66, 68, 213
Stamen design, 114, 213
Standage, Tom, 27–28
tatistical machine translation, 146–48, 160, 161
teamship routes, 63, 64
Stephenson, Neal, 206, 210–11
Stevens, Christopher, 32–33, 35
Strength of Weak Ties, The” (Granovetter), 177, 178–80
tructured wandering, 229–33
Structure of Foreign News, The” (Galtung and Ruge), 82–84
Sudan, 33, 112, 172
Sunstein, Cass, 97–99, 100, 101, 102, 116
Syria, 112, 113, 128, 129
Taishi Village protests, 152–53
Taliban effect,” 175–76
Tata, 253, 255
Teachout, Zephyr, 125–26
Tea Leaf Nation, 153, 269
TED conferences, 156–58, 159, 160, 270, 291n
elegraphs, telegraph lines, 28, 29, 63, 184
elephone, 4, 28, 42, 49, 50, 53, 264
elevision, 26, 28, 54, 89, 106, 133, 135, 174–75, 237
cable, 100–101, 123, 175
satellite, 19, 32, 50, 54, 89
see also broadcast news
Tesla, Nikola, 28, 271, 272
third culture kids,” 172–73
Three Princes of Serendip, The, 216
Time, 15, 154
Times of India, 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 73, 82, 102
Tipping Point, The (Gladwell), 177–78
op-lap (Russian blogger), 187–88, 293n
topology” maps, 64
ranslation, language, 36, 60, 139, 144–66, 190, 194, 245, 266, 268
corpora in, 146–48, 160
 English-to-Chinese, 139, 153–56, 157–58
of global blogs and social media, 127, 129, 139, 140, 153, 155,
161, 171, 190
in Global Voices project, 127, 129, 139, 140, 157, 158, 160
human vs. machine, 146, 148
online tools for, 133, 147, 148–49, 158, 160–61, 164, 165
of TED conferences, 156–58, 159, 160
of traditional international news sources, 127, 144, 148–51, 153–
56, 158, 163
in U.S. intelligence agencies, 149–50
volunteer, open-source model in, 154, 156–58, 159, 163
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, The (Merton and Barber), 217
Tripod, 95–96, 222
Trocadero Museum of Ethnology (Paris), 25–26
Tunisia, 4, 5, 17–18, 112, 127, 128, 152, 163
Twitter, 66, 106, 112, 129, 137, 150, 189, 192, 195, 213, 215, 220–21,
227, 229, 244, 295n
machine translation tools on, 163–64
muslimrage hashtag on, 35–36
trending topics on, 132–34, 226–27, 229
Ugander, Johan, 114, 116
unintended consequences, 216–17, 219, 220, 221
United Arab Emirates, 51, 67, 114, 265
United Nations, 40, 42, 90, 122, 147, 168, 169, 208, 264
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 89–
91, 135
United States, 3–7, 44, 52, 67, 68, 77, 84, 107, 114, 253–54, 266–67
agricultural subsidies in, 47–48, 282n
immigration in, 49, 51, 56, 256, 265
intelligence agencies in, 3–7, 18–19, 149–50
international news sites visited in, 56, 57–58, 60
level of international trade in, 46–47
locally sourced products in, 45–46, 47–48
as manufacturing supplier, 44, 45
SARS in, 12–13
Urbani, Carlo, 12, 13, 14–15
urban planning, 61–62, 218–22, 235
 “desire lines” in, 224–25
engineering of serendipity in, 211, 219–20
unintended consequences in, 219, 220
see also cities
USA Today, 100
Useem, Ruth Hill, 172–73
Usenet, 115–16
Victorian Internet, The (Standage), 27–28
Viegas, Fernanda, 226–27
Vietnam, 12, 14–15, 260
Vietnam War, 19, 85, 88, 259, 260
Vivian Grey (Disraeli), 30
volunteer translators, 154, 155, 156–58, 159, 163
von Ahn, Luis, 158–59
Walker, Jay, 134–35
walking tours, 229–33
Wallace, Henry, 42
Wall Street Journal, 15, 56, 93, 100, 101, 212, 285n
Walmart, 45–46, 55, 251
Walpole, Horace, 216, 217
Washington Post, 91, 93, 107, 283n
Wattenberg, Martin, 226–27
Wayback Machine, 222
weak ties, 177–78, 179, 180, 214
Weinberger, David, 233–34
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria” (Tatum),
71
Wikimedia, 196
Wikipedia, 142, 154, 156, 159, 196–97
foreign-language versions of, 142, 161, 162
Wimmer, Andreas, 71–74, 178
Winsemius, Albert, 263–64
Wolfe, Lauren, 105–6
World 3.0 (Ghemawat), 42–43
World Cup (2010), 132–33
World Health Organization (WHO), 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17
World Trade Organization, 48
WRUST, 233
xenophiles, 170–71, 174, 197–205, 266, 267–68
bridge figures vs., 171, 197, 198
cosmopolitan traits exhibited in, 170–71, 197–98, 201, 203–4
digital media tools exploited by, 199, 202
musical, 171, 199–201, 203, 292n
Xerox PARC, 222
Yahoo!, 96, 97, 242, 256
Yahoo! News, 100, 101, 102
Year without “Made in China”, A (Bongiorni), 44, 45
Yeeyan, 154–56, 159
Youku, 157–58
YouTube, 35, 133, 153, 157, 199, 232, 237, 249–50
anti-Islamic video on, 31–34, 36
Zemp, Hugo, 202–3
Zhang Lei, 153–54, 155, 156
Zoo (band), 250, 251
Zuckerberg, Mark, 194
Zuckerman, Drew, 231
 COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2013 by Ethan Zuckerman

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Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu; p. 63: courtesy of Princeton
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Zuckerman and Rahul Bhargava; p. 212: Pierre Henry Chombart de
Lauwe; p. 213: map rendered by Rahul Bhargava from data from
Zach Seward, map tiles by Stamen Design, map data by
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Zuckerman, Ethan.
Rewire : digital cosmopolitans in the age of connection / Ethan
Zuckerman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-08283-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-393-24062-7 (e-book)
1. Social media. 2. Internet—Social aspects. 3. Cosmopolitanism. I.
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