Pull down the digital walls

In cyberspace, disciplinary zones need not become impenetrable
barriers. But in order to turn them into an asset, it is necessary to
develop
a user-friendly IT system that provides reliable and uniform services,
which can be adapted to ever increasing complex environment across
academic disciplines, divisions, and schools.

Do you know Oliver Goodenough?

From Filter
Q & A with new Berkman fellow Oliver Goodenough

Q. In your latest paper on why good people steal intellectual property,
what is the key message? Do you view intellectual property infringement
as an ethical issue or a technical one?

The technical and the ethical are inextricably linked. In a world of
difficult copying, a legal standard could be enforced without the
necessity of deeply held ethical buy-in from the general population.
Once copying becomes trivial, then the standard needs that kind of
buy-in, which hasn't occurred.

Q. How do you view intellectual property rights on a cyber platform? How
would you advise entrepreneurs who wish to utilize this online platform
for their business?

Intellectual property rights has a place in the cyber world - not all
things make sense in an open source configuration (of course the reverse
is true as well - IP isn't appropriate in all cases either - that is
what makes the debate so interesting). In advising cyber platform
entrepreneurs, I would urge them to decide on their goals - both as to
society and as to their individual financial return. They should also
make distinctions between those areas where propertization will actually
work - and those where it won't - and plan accordingly. Radiohead's
experiment with distributing their new album through request for
voluntary payment is a very interesting approach to a new idea where the
old property approach wasn't working.

Q. Do you believe that intellectual property and corporate laws that
apply to 3D virtual environments should be governed by a new set of
international laws since that space is free of physical boundaries?

The idea has merit, but there is a chicken and egg problem. There really
isn't an international law-making body at this point - it may need a
wide-spread adoption of 3D virtual environments to create such a body.
See Linden Dollars.

Q. How do you view the phenomena of the rising demand of real-life
lawyers to deal with virtual problems?

As a law professor, it sounds good to me. But they will need training
that is a bit different from the current standard, involving
understanding the general approaches to cooperation, security, property,
etc., and not just a particular legal standard.

Q. Do you know of the game Second Life? If so, could Second Life be used
as a tool in which to practice game theory in relation to law or
business problems?

I do know of Second Life (see the first question), and believe it does
have potential for the kind of "practice" you describe - indeed,
although my direct experience is quite limited, it looks to me as if
variations are in full swing as a natural outgrowth of social
interaction through the web.

Q. Is the hybrid game theory + institutional economics cooperative model
part of what you consider is cultural evolution?

It certainly has application in cultural evolution - the emergence of
cooperative structures can - and often does - occur through cultural
means - see the law. The possibility of making such structures available
through institutions like the law is a major advance in human
productivity. Means of electronic interaction both expand the reach of
these institutions and create new challenges for them.

Q. What is your latest project at the Berkman Center?

I have two projects going - the first is using the insights of cognitive
neuroscience to better understand the limits of intellectual property
approaches to allocating rights in creative and technical innovation;
the second is the exploration of digital institutions - both at the
theoretical level and at the level of legal and societal application.

Q. How does the Berkman Center support your studies? What kind of
improvements/changes do you want to see?

Berkman gives me an intellectual "room of my own" within which to work
and, slightly paradoxically, a vibrant community and network with whom
to work. Both are great assets. Improvements and changes? A less cramped
fellows office.

Q. Do you find it difficult (or necessary) to juggle multiple projects?
How do you keep up with so many issues?

It is a bit difficult - and also necessary. First of all, I used to
practice entertainment law, and the model of my producer clients was
that you had to have 10 projects cooking to get a couple brought to
fruition. Secondly, many of the really interesting problems have to be
solved using a number of different tools and knowledge basis sets - so
my multiple projects are in fact really just different aspects of one or
two central projects, each with a lot of somewhat diverse sub-tasks.
Finally, my experience of Berkman is that most players there are taking
a similar approach.

_________________________________________________________________

Global Civic Engagement

Global civic engagement through technology

From The Statesman
ND Batra

As the ravaging fires in California burnt hundreds of homes and killed several people, a small public radio satiation KBPS-FM San Diego, which was knocked off the air, used its ingenuity and decided to serve the public by publishing on its website maps of places where fires raged, evacuations were ordered, roads were closed, and the places to go for shelter and the best way to reach there.

Using Google’s My Map, its online managing editor Leng Caloh created a virtual map of Southern California, which was continuously updated and has been visited by more than 1.25 million people, giving up-to-date information about the developing situation. KBPS also used the social networking web service Twitter for text updates for cell phones. Twitter is a micro-blogger that allows short text messages to be sent to its site and it is mostly used by people who just want to exchange brief tit-bits, say, what the heck are you doing now? But KBPS used it to update the information on the status of the howling firestorm. Google Maps Website allows users to overlay information about weather, photos and places to go; but the company couldn’t have imagined that its service My Map will be ingeniously used for planning for public safety.

The use of technology for a purpose different from its original intent is called bricolage. It is the practice of tinkering and using the available material to create something new or solve a problem in a unique way. Americans are not the only bricoleurs, though they are most fertile and creative.

The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting story about a Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai who stealthily sent his reporters to Myanmar to report about the brutality of the military regime against the anti-government protesters, including thousands of Buddhist monks.

The use of cell phone cameras by Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily reporters made it possible for the world to see the bloody carnage in the otherwise closed country and prompted First Lady Laura Bush to write an op-ed piece about Myanmar in the Wall Street Journal. President George W Bush took a stand and imposed sanctions, which seem to be working. You see: the generals are talking.

A few weeks later in October, President Bush and the Dalai Lama met in advance of the ceremony to award the monk the Congressional Gold Medal, a unique honour for a homeless man. Although China huffed and puffed loudly like a helpless dragon warning that these events would be bad for US-Chinese relations, the television images of a man of compassion sent a powerful message of American support for Tibet’s autonomy that China has never honoured.

In many ways we see ourselves and know the physical world through our narratives and descriptions. Our nervous system and our personal and historical memories limit our abilities, our sense and sensibility, to describe and capture reality. But communications technology enhances our natural abilities and enables us to see other dimensions of reality.

Millions of words, for instance, have been written about Mahatma Gandhi whose birthday was celebrated on 2 October and yet it’s doubtful if the truth about this complex man has been completely captured.

If somehow we could know a way of tuning up and enhancing the nervous system to a higher level, the reality would change. Think of the time when zero was discovered and the subsequent development of decimal system; and how that might have changed the perception of reality by subjecting physical phenomena to measurement.

Measurement is actuality, which can be enhanced by technology. When Galileo’s telescope was embedded into the human nervous system, the view of the universe changed and the earth ceased to be a stationary planet.

Or consider some modern political events. Had satellite pictures not revealed the existence of the Soviet’s missiles in Cuba in the 1960s, Americans wouldn’t have perceived the threat to the country.

If the remote-sensing technology could pick up sights and sounds of human sufferings, it would become possible to know how the Chinese have been brutalising the Tibetans and their culture. The Tibetan cultural pogrom will find full description. Description either leads to action or generates guilt. Guilt demands action and atonement. That’s how human consciousness has been evolving, perhaps. Through communications technology, the human nervous system extends itself and gives a better or a fuller account of reality, and a feeling of liberation from the constraints of earlier description of reality.

New reality demands new laws, ethics, and social relations; and it creates new lifestyles, as one can see happening in the burgeoning economy of Kolkata, where the communist party is a dead man walking albeit still ruling. Communications technology — satellites, radio, television, cell phones and the Internet — which made free flow of information possible, has castrated communism.

History teaches a lesson that it is through the control of narratives that the powerful, the ruling classes, exercise their hegemony. I have always wondered how Britain ruled so successfully over India for about two hundred years. The British succeeded to a great extent by supplanting the native stories and narratives with their own literature and legends, so that knowing the legend of King Arthur was deemed more civilised than knowing the legend of King Asoka.

China has begun to transplant its own stories and historical descriptions upon the young Tibetans, and by the time they grow up into adulthood, their reality will clash with the truth held by their parents — unless modern communications technology, including wireless Internet, shortwave radio and miniature antenna dishes, keeps them alive as Tibetans. By denying the Tibetans access to their language and culture and access to communications technology, China is doing unto Tibetans what Americas have done unto Native Americans.

Don’t you agree that there is something remarkable about the Jewish people, in the sense that from the Old Testament through Steven Spielberg, they have been natural born story-tellers? Because of the anecdotal and photographic accounts of the concentration camps and documentaries like Shoah and docudramas like Schindler’s List, it is impossible to deny the truth of the Holocaust, in spite what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad and other nay-sayers might say.
Most of us feel guilty for not having stopped it.
The Tibetans have no great film-makers, no story-tellers, and no access to communications technology. They might perish in the unheard silences of the Himalayas unless world leaders keep raising their voices, as President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did recently. It is time for global civic engagement through all available means of diplomacy and technology.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is working on a new book, This is the American Way. He blogs at http://corporatepower.blogspot.com )

PAKISTAN HAS A FUTURE, YES

What can India do for Pakistan?

From The Statesman

ND Batra

Benazir Bhutto represents a future that must happen: a progressive, liberal and secular Pakistan that should become a model for rest of the Islamic world. That is in India’s national interest. Weak and unstable neighbours cannot make India strong. Pakistan’s problems are India’s problems too because the patterns of behaviour of the two people are not dissimilar.

“The attack was not on me. The attack was on what I represent. It was an attack on democracy and it was an attack on the very unity and integrity of Pakistan,” Bhutto told the global news media after the dastardly bombings that turned her triumphant return into an unmitigated tragedy. “We believe democracy alone can save Pakistan from disintegration and a militant takeover,” she said with firm conviction even when others were wondering, “whodunit”?

Pakistan is undergoing political and cultural turmoil that has of course not gone unnoticed by rest of the world. People opposing the authoritarianism of President Pervez Musharraf have been lawyers, journalists and other open-minded moderate groups trying to bring Pakistan under the rule of secular law. But the situation is much more complex; religious extremists’ attempt at keeping the country under siege, for example, is certainly not without the support of some strata of the all pervasive military.

The “pattern of ad-hoc deal-making between the Pakistan government and pro-Taliban militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,” according to Dawn’s publisher Haroon Hameed, the CEO of the Dawn Group of newspapers, has been destroying the internal security of Pakistan. The solution to the problems does not lie in the imposition of emergency or martial law, but rather reviving the moribund democratic processes.

Unlike most other Muslim countries, Pakistan is no stranger to democracy. It has a vibrant Press, free and bold judiciary, and an intellectual class that is envy of the Muslim world. It is unfortunate that Pakistan is caught up between democratic aspirations at the top and religious obtuseness at the bottom. Instead of depending upon the questionable political strength and commitment of Musharraf alone for war against terrorism, the United States has been reaching out to a wide variety of constituencies in Pakistan including the media, universities, businesses, non-profit organisations, tribal leaders and intelligence communities.

Bringing Bhutto and Musharraf together to share power in a democratic framework has been so far the Bush Administration’s great diplomatic achievement. The democratic initiative will succeed if Bhutto and Musharraf accept each other as co-equals and co-dependents and realise that the enemy of Pakistan is embedded within the country and must be eliminated whatever it takes.

On a visit to Pakistan sometime ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney urged Musharraf to do a lot more to curb the growing influence of Al-Qaida and Taliban and prevent them from rebuilding and strengthening the infrastructure of terrorism in the safety of tribal areas from where they have been operating to carry out terrorist attacks against Afghan and NATO troops. As the recent Karachi bombings show, Al-Qaida-Taliban groups have spread their tentacles more pervasively in the country.

It is tragic that Pakistan has turned itself into a country warring against the very elements, Islamic extremism and militancy, that its super intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), nurtured as tools of foreign policy. Musharraf has not been able to make a total break from the forces that have supported him in his hold on power and hence the reluctant approach for fighting terrorism.

Since Musharraf cut the deal with tribal leaders relinquishing sovereign authority over the tribal territory, Pakistan has become a safe haven for Al-Qaida and the Taliban. John D Negroponte, Deputy US Secretary of State, observed before a Congress committee in February that Al-Qaida was “cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.”

Since Musharraf is not in full control of the forces operating in the divided country, what can be done? First of all, the United States forces should cross into the tribal territories in pursuit of the Taliban and Al-Qaida. Bhutto, once she assumes political power, may be open to this idea since these forces threaten the integrity of Pakistan.

Bhutto-Musharraf must break the nexus between the ISI and Taliban and other sectarian extremist groups. The ISI works like a powerful state within a weak state and it is necessary for the United States intelligence to penetrate its hierarchy with the ultimate goal of subduing this monster that terrorises the country.

India should join hands with the United States and do a well-planned public and business diplomacy in Pakistan to reach out to the intelligentsia and middle classes, who have the same global aspirations as other countries with growing economies. The prospects of rapid economic growth and rising prosperity would present Pakistanis with an alternative future that is founded on science and technology and globalisation, the future that Benazir Bhutto has come to symbolise.

(ND Batra who teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University is the author of Digital Freedom and is working on a new book, This is the America Way)

China and America

Behold the power and glory that is China!

From The Statesman

ND Batra

Earlier the salesman pitch used to be: “You cannot afford not to be in China.” But now corporate CEOs are so eager to apologise to China for its own egregious behaviour. Last month Mattel’s executive vice-president Thomas A Debrowski delivered a well-structured diplomatic apology: “Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologises to you, the Chinese people, and all our customers who received the toys.” It is just like a rape victim apologising to the rapist: Pardon me for tempting you, sir.

Cleverly staged mass media propaganda and lobbying by people in high places, including some of the top CEOs of major US corporations and university professors, has helped the Chinese authorities in blurring facts with fiction, creating the perception of China’s relentless and inevitable rise as a global superpower. China fascinates corporate America with its myth of bountifulness but more so with its ruling party’s collective mind that controls the obedient masses that produce cheap goods for American markets and whose 1.3 billion worker-consumers would one day buy every branded product made in the United States.

You have heard the drumbeat, repeated ad nauseam, which China has come to believe that since Americans cannot do without its cheap goods, so why to worry about intellectual property thefts, currency manipulation to fuel exports, humongous trade surplus, defective toys, and tainted food products.

Consider, for example, 2008 Olympics, which the Wall Street Journal childishly put it as an event “to refashion the Olympics from a sports and merchandising extravaganza to an engine of political and social change.” That’s expecting too much from an organisation like the IOC that has been paying little attention to its own widespread problems, bribery scandals and drugs, for example.

If human rights were the deciding factor in determining the choice of the host city for the Games, Moscow under the Soviet Union and Berlin under the Nazis would not have been selected to host the Olympics.

China will be showcasing the Games in spite of its abominable record of suppression of human rights of the people of Tibet, the followers of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, political dissidents and scholars rotting in its jails without recourse to a fair trial.

In an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, Slavoj Zizek wrote last week that in Tibet, the Chinese authorities “in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonisation. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks... in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States.” He forgot to mention gambling casinos, drugs, booze, and obesity.

Doing business with China is more important than human rights, though Americans along with rest of the world go on paying lip service to the problem. Trade and the Olympics had no civilising effect upon the Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; therefore, to expect a miracle to happen in China because of the Olympics in 2008 or increasing international trade is puerile and silly. Rising prosperity would not force China’s Communist Party to give up its monopoly over power and become democratic. Since Deng Xiaoping took the road to capitalism, replacing communist brutality with capitalist brutality, about three decades ago, China’s economy has been opening up and growing rapidly with its gross national product (GNP) rising to more than two trillion dollars. The rate of annual economic growth has remained above 9-10 per cent.

Made-in-China goods, apple juice, toys, shoes, electronics, and even golf clubs and handguns are found in every shopping mall of the world. Huge economic benefits are expected from the 2008 Games because it has necessitated an investment of billions in infrastructure and information technology to modernise and showcase Beijing for the events. Millions of tourists who would pour into China, perhaps take a train to Lhasa and visit the Three Gorges super-dam, nonetheless, are expected to remain silent observers.

The Deng Xiaoping market economy revolution unleashed China’s vicious capitalist energies, but not without the help from the outside world, especially the United States, which magnanimously opened its markets to China.

Today China is a healthier, better-fed and better-educated nation than most other developing countries but it remains a closed society ensconced in pollution.

Who needs freedom? That’s why George W Bush never preaches freedom to China though he repeatedly asks that it should let its currency rise. China feels that it can compete with the best, but can it tolerate the noise and chaos of an open society like the multicultural and multiracial United States, where the people demand accountability from their political leaders? Beijing with the help of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco has been trying to expand its control into the digital domain and expects to have the same control over cyberspace as it has over Tibet. The Internet might bring about tremendous political upheavals in China, so be warned: Don’t move my cheese. Large centralised political systems break down due to internal pressures triggered by communications technology, unless they have built-in capabilities for adjustment, which China does not have at present. And so it is difficult to say what might happen in China in the age of the Internet, satellites, cell phones and hosts of other wireless, digital, and interconnected sensing devices that are becoming available. China wants to control the uncontrollable, the digital generation swapping billions of text messages on cell phones, the generation that could self-organise itself into a smart mob. Look at Myanmar’s recent Buddhist monk uprising, which must be giving the Chinese rulers sleepless nights.

The authoritarian regime is getting ready to open its doors, skies, and cyberspace to a worldwide audience during the 2008 Olympics. But will it be able to close the skydome once the crowd is gone? Yes, of course, with the help form corporate America, which one day might become a dancing bear for China, if others follow Mattel’s obsequious behaviour?

(Dr ND Batra is working on a new book, This is the American Way)

Hey Bangalore! Are You Listening?

When our daily lives become hyper-personal

From The Statesmsn

ND Batra
Google knows whether a person is a dirty trickster, an older man trying to seduce a younger woman; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a cave in Second Life; or a teenager posing as a medical expert.

Google is becoming the keeper of surfers’ personal history, well, at least for 18 months after which it makes it anonymous, or so it promises. The idea behind surf & search record-keeping is to create patterns that anticipate the searcher’s behaviour and provide the information quickly next time he looks for an item. More than that, based on searching patterns, Google, according to CEO Eric Schmidt, could answer hypothetical questions, for example: Where should I invest my bonus, in mutual funds or a savings certificate? Freedom in cyberspace is becoming “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland would have cried. The more you have it, the more you lose it.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but it also provides an interactive collaborative experience, doing things together, when words become deeds and speech becomes action. Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics systems. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, and can motivate people to disclose personal information and change their social behaviours. Social engineers, especially those who serve authoritarian governments, know the potential of the Internet for creating an illusion of boundless freedom only to entice people in digital chains.

The next challenge for software programmers whether they work for Google, Yahoo or some authoritarian regime is to build a network architecture that enables the designing of virtual environment to motivate people, for example, to buy, sell, invest; obey the supreme leader; or even induce good social and personal habits such as not to drink and drive, not to have unhealthy sexual behaviours. Computer codes have the potential force of law, according to Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessing, and programmers could bypass the government and, in a manner of speaking, take law into their own hands. Or the government could also use programmers to stifle dissent. Give the monks of Myanmar computers and free access to the Internet. They may not come out of cyberspace to protest in the streets. But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back, has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There is a great fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.

Hey Bangalore! Are you listening?

The strength of the Internet is its interactive immersion, its ability to respond and give instant feedback and gratification. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message, in fact an illusion of freedom. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings, of which a Web portal might keep a record. Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience. Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very enticing, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable as many patients and therapists are finding. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse skepticism are absent in Internet communication, especially when it is time delayed (asynchronous) such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.

Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction and lack of control. But Google, Yahoo and the ilk keep digital footprints of what is going on in your hearts and mind. Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what JB Walther, a professor at Michigan State University, calls as “hyper-personal,” that’s, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous. So many teenagers go astray in cyberspace because it lets them assume fake identities and gives them freedom to pretend what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con-men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
An Avatar can be very deceptive.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be,” creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel in control of our environment that real life might deny us. Those who spend too much time in Second Life might forget what real life is. In search of a fake identity, we are in danger of losing our real identity.

(ND Batra, the author of Digital Freedom is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, This is the American Way: An Intellectual Travelogue)

A supply-chain of knowledge?

Building a global supply-chain of knowledge

From The Statesman
The challenge for information technology guys from Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and other knowledge hubs is to create a system that is capable of aggregating and accessing available sources of knowledge and mining all modes of information, whether audio, video, pictorial, textual or in the form of a spreadsheet. The system should create a protocol, much like TCP/IP protocol, that transcends cultural, semantic and computer language/format barriers. And finally, as Gupta suggested, the IT system should be capable of customizing knowledge as per individual or group needs. For example, the IT system should be capable of automatically converting a report about Mynamar protests into various formats, such as newspaper, radio, television, and mobile devices such as cell phones to which editorial value could be added subsequently.
The world of collaborative knowledge seeking and innovation has just begun.

Digital Natives

Facing the YouTube generation

From The Statesman
August 1, 2007

By ND Batra

Hardly has the conspiratorial expression “Let’s Google him” settled in as a sizzling hot potato on the American tongue-in-cheek civic discourse when there is another linguistic gatecrasher “YouTubing” into American culture and consciousness, as last week’s Democratic debate showed. The YouTube questioning began with a street expletive, “Wassup?”

It was a remarkable event technologically speaking since this is certainly the beginning of a new era when television and the Internet have begun to converge into a seamless medium used by the Internet hoi polloi and potential voters who asked all kinds of questions ranging from gun control and global warming to healthcare, sex education for children, gay marriages, Darfur (Sudan), and Iraq war.

Experts could not have asked better questions of the candidates, and as author James Surowiecki might have said, it was a sample of the wisdom of the crowd made visible by YouTube. Therefore, to say that it was nothing more than another digital town hall meeting is to miss the point: the challenge of the emerging new media to traditional media gatekeepers and professional pundits. It was a surge from the earth gone flat; and there will be more to come.

The questioners it seemed had already “Googled” the Democratic presidential candidates’ past track records on various issues and using their home videos equipment they personalised controversial issues and uploaded them to YouTube for the debate, which was in actuality candidates’ reactions to questions rather than they debating among themselves.

But there were faces, ethnically heterogeneous, the Democrats could not ignore. Nor will the Republicans when they confront the YouTube generation on 17 September at St. Petersburg, Florida, though one of them, Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, said in an interview: “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.” But Republicans cannot escape the tech savvy YouTube generation or they will be left behind. Out of 3,000 questions ranging from the serious to the absurd, CNN, the all news cable network, selected 39 for hosting to Democratic presidential hopefuls, who had gathered on the campus of the military college, Citadel, South Carolina, deep in the Bible belt.

An animated video clip of Snowman with his snowball kid created a stir when it asked a question about global warming, which even former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth could not have done better. Then there was a gun-toting wise guy who held an automatic guerrilla-style gun and calling it “my baby” asked whether it would be taken away if a Democrat were to occupy the White House. “He needs help. I don’t know if he’s mentally qualified to own that gun,” said Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, one of the eight candidates on the stage. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the issue of gun control receded into the lower depths of American consciousness, though gun violence has not abated. But Senator Biden missed the irony: The assault weapon guy was mocking the Second Amendment, the American people’s right to bear arms like “my baby.” Regarding questions about Iraq war and withdrawal of US troops, Democrats as expected were united in condemning President George W Bush in misleading the country and mismanaging the post-war operations.

Moreover, they were equally united about how soon to withdraw, soon enough but in a phased and gradual manner in order to protect the troops and not leave a hellhole behind, which Iraq has already become. Some set tentative dates while others were judiciously ambiguous, which showed once again how deeply confused and divided Americans are about Iraq. In response to a question whether he or she would meet with the leaders of Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea in his or her first year as President in order to promote diplomacy, Democratic candidates took this as another opportunity to hit at the Bush administration’s reluctance to use diplomatic tools for advancing national interest.

Senator Barack Obama, a leading candidate among Democrats and the biggest challenge to Senator Hillary Clinton’s ambition to go to the White House, sharply rebuked the Bush administration saying that it’s nothing short of ridiculous to believe that not talking to countries is a kind of punishment to them. He said he would readily talk to them as John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan continuously did with the Soviet Union.

Senator Clinton’s thoughtful and measured response to the question made her look and sound presidential. She said that she would not rush to meet with them in her first year without knowing what their intentions were and certainly she would not like to give them a chance to use the meeting for propaganda purposes. The President of the United States cannot behave like a used car salesman ready to talk to anyone. The reason why some Republican candidates are reluctant to face the YouTube debate format is that they are not sure what kinds of questions might get into the YouTube pool and what questions CNN might select. To minimise the CNN effect, questions could be randomly selected. Politicians are control freaks and do not want to lose control over their professionally designed, customised and controlled messages, which they can drumbeat through television commercials and for which they have to raise millions of dollars. In this sense, the Internet is a very different medium because it empowers people. In the future instead of holding a Press conference, politicians might be asked to hold a YouTube conference.

(Dr ND Batra teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is the author of Digital Freedom)