Cyber adventures

Be all you want in cyberspace

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

On the Internet nobody knows whether a person is a dirty old man trying to seduce teenagers, a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a virtual game room, or a teenager posing as an expert. It is also true that eventually no one can hide in cyberspace. Cyber opacity is an illusion.
A few years ago, a California teenager Marcus Arnold, using his knowledge gained from television programmes such as Court TV or Judge Judy, and taking advantage of the pseudonymous freedom that a knowledge sharing company had provided, turned himself into a legal expert and began to dole out free legal advice. And he began to be noticed by people hungry for information.
Arnold’s direct and jargon-free approach to tough legal questions had a great appeal. Soon people began to call him at home seeking his legal advice. But then his conscience or may be the fear of being found out began to bother the 15-year-old boy. And one day he revealed his true self to his admirers.
Real lawyers poured scorn but the public rallied around him and he continued to give his non-expert common sense expertise on legal matters for sometime. AskMe, the online knowledge sharing outfit closed its free Website, but at its height about 10 million registered visitors posted questions and answers on everything from Armageddon to Zen mediation.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but also provides an interactive collaborative environment in which words can become deeds and speech can become action.
Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics appliances. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating the cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, that can motivate people to act and change their social behaviours. Stanford University researchers call this rhetorical concept as Captology, which “focuses on the planned persuasive effects of computer technologies”.
The next challenge for software programmers is to design virtual environments to motivate people, for example, not to drink and drive, to have healthy sexual behaviours, to avoid pregnancy, or to be successful corporate leaders. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School believes that computer codes have the potential to control behaviour the way law does, that programmers in a manner of speaking could become lawmakers.
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 may be a fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.
One of the great strengths of the strength of the Internet is its interactivity, its ability to respond and give instant feedback. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings.
Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience.
Islamic jehadis share each other’s vision of “Paradise”, and for them suicide becomes a door to that mental image of the promised everlasting beauty, as Omar Khyyam said, “…A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou Beside me singing…”
Persuasion works through sharing of mental models. The Internet makes it easy to share mental models whether they are of instant access to Paradise through self-destruction, buying and selling on a virtual platform such as e-Bay, or sharing experiences in MySpace as millions of teenagers do.
Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very persuasive, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse scepticism, are absent in Internet communication especially when it is time delayed 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, lack of control or sense of shame.
Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what one researcher, JB Walther, called as “hyperpersonal”, that is, 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.
Many teenagers go astray in chatrooms because cyberspace lets them assume fake identities and gives them the freedom to pretend ~ 13 going on 18 ~ 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.
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 control of our environment that real life might deny us. The strength of teenagers’ most popular portal MySpace is also its vulnerability, as many parents have been discovering.

Gates Giving

Bill Gates is retiring... So what?

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

The market shrugged off Mr Bill Gates’ announcement that he would give up the commanding heights of Microsoft, the digital empire he co-founded with his friend Mr Paul Allen in 1975. Gates plans to focus on philanthropy, especially global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is not the end for Mr Gates but another chapter in the life of a most creative mind who began, like most American innovators, in his garage with an idea and transformed the world. Yes, Mr Gates helped usher in the digital civilisation. But I wonder if Mr Gates could have risen to the top in any other country except the USA, a country that brings out the best in ordinary people like Mr Gates and transforms them into extraordinary humans through the competitive ethos of the marketplace.

In his introduction to Mr David Brown’s book, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse, Mr James Burke, a London-based television producer, commended America’s “can-do” spirit and said that the “readiness to adapt to circumstance is one of America’s most enduring characteristics and is what makes the American social environment more amenable to innovation than any other...”

Henry Ford, for example, adapted a British Royal Navy-originated assembly-line idea of production and used it to usher in an era of “democracy of possessions”. Of course, the democracy of possessions also creates social and environmental problems that demand the application of new technology, thus, feeding the inventive-entrepreneurial spiral.

What makes a scientist more inventive and innovative in the USA than back in his native country might be puzzling to some of us, especially those who do not understand the ethos of American society. Consider the case of Mr Ashok Gadgil, one of the 35 inventors profiled in the book, whose invention of a drinking water purification system might save millions of people in developing countries where diarrhoea, cholera, hepatitis and water-borne diseases are widely prevalent. The “Bengal cholera” of 1992 that spread throughout India and killed approximately 10,000 people, challenged Mr Gadgil, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, to develop an affordable and effective water purification system using ultraviolet light. Mr Gadgil’s device, the UV Waterworks, may not be an earth-shaking invention but it is extremely useful for the masses in India and other developing countries, where drinking water contamination is commonplace.

It sounds incredible but Mr Gadgil says in the book: “You could disinfect one person’s drinking supply for a full year for a couple of cents.” Could Mr Gadgil have developed this invention in India, a nation with a quotas-and-reservations mentality and a straightjacket bureaucracy? The USA is the most inventive and innovative nation today.

In 2005, US residents received 85,238 patents out of a total of 165,485 granted by the US Patent and Trademark office. Burke wrote in his book that scientists and inventors follow the two-fold rule propounded by the 17th century French rationalist philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes: Be a doubting Thomas and reduce every system to its fundamentals. You cannot sit in your bathtub and wait for “Eureka” to occur. Inventing is sweating all the way (Thomas Edison’s 99 per cent rule) until a new configuration, a new way of doing things surfaces like an irrepressible force, an answer to a prayer, when you say, yes, yes, indeed, one plus one is equal to 11.

During the last 70 years, job categories (teaching, journalism, road-building, etc.) have increased from 80 to 800 in the USA. With global e-commerce rising, the job marketplace will explode the world over and will demand massive inventiveness and innovations. What will happen to a nation that does not invent and innovate?

In his foreword to the book, Mr Lester Thurow, an MIT social scientist, wrote that most scientific and technological advances in human history have occurred slowly and sporadically in civilisations, often vanishing from the place of their origin. After the end of Roman civilisation, Europe plunged into the Dark Ages when technological leadership passed on to the Islamic world. China was more advanced in the 15th century than in the 19th century.

There are no guarantees that a nation’s technological lead will last forever. The restless and questioning spirit in Europe began with the re-invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the 15th century that unleashed simultaneously two forces, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which caused a tremendous upheaval in Europe and the rest of the world from the time of the discovery of America to that of the colonisation of Asia and Africa. One great invention led to another ~ the invention of steam engine led to electricity ~ and moved some countries to the rank of the first world and relegated many others to the third world.

But what has made scientific and technological innovation a sustainable enterprise in modern times, according to Prof Thurow, is the German idea that “systematic investments in research and development based upon academic science could lead to a much faster rate of technological progress.”

Universities have become the most important source of inventiveness and innovations in the USA and elsewhere. Great research universities, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and others, with abundant research funding resources, attract the best brains from all over the world and make the USA the most inventive and innovative society. That explains why the book celebrated Mr Gadgil as an American, not an Indian, inventor because the USA provides the socially supported scientific platform that India does not.

We know how German rocket scientists were persuaded after WWII to come to the USA to help beat the Soviet Union in the race into space. But Prof Thurow warns: “What has been gained can be lost.” Great Britain and Germany were the technological leaders since the industrial revolution began 200 years ago. So was China once, as were the Arabs.

What makes the USA so different from the past technological leaders is that it is culturally situated between the First Amendment freedoms and the awesome temptations of the open marketplace. The marketplace of goods and ideas, the Darwinian competitiveness, is fuelling the relentless pace of inventiveness and innovations in the USA which is the only place where a man like Bill Gates could rise.

THE MIGHTY HARVARD

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra
The Statesman

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

~ TS Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

When South Korean Scientist Dr Hwang Woo Suk admitted last December to have faked the result of his research regarding the creation of stem cell lines from cloned human embryos, it seemed a terrible setback to one of the most transformative and promising fields of medicine.
But last week’s announcement that Harvard Stem Cell Institute will begin doing research using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer process to create specific cell lines from cloned human embryos has once again raised hopes for millions of people suffering from incurable diseases.
Harvard research will be diseases specific; for example, the nucleus of a skin cell of a diabetic patient will be inserted into an unfertilised donor egg, from which the nucleus has already been removed. The newly engineered composite egg will be nurtured on a petri dish where it will develop into an early embryo from which embryonic stem cell lines would be developed and guided into becoming healthy insulin producing pancreatic islet cells. These would replace the diseased ones, for example, in a child suffering from juvenile diabetes.
What would you not do to make your child disease free and healthy? But somewhere in the process, life begins. That has been an ethical dilemma for those who believe that human life is sacred at every stage, even on a petri dish.The late pope John Paul II, for example, admonished President George W Bush on a visit to the Vatican saying that a “free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.”
The late pontiff was referring to proposals for the creation of embryonic stem cells for research purposes, which hold the promise to lead to a cure for diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and much more. The pope himself was afflicted with Parkinson’s, one of the millions of sufferers of the debilitating disease. The promises of embryonic stem cell research for healing incurable diseases and rejuvenating life are so great that it appears inhuman to shut the door on it.
Many people wondered why the Vatican would deny the gift of stem cell miracle to the suffering humanity. Suffering is at the heart of Christianity, especially Catholicism. Suffering creates compassion and humanises us. Respect for life must begin at the beginning, and the beginning of life could be on a petri dish or the womb. Pope John Paul II warned: “how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb, leading to accommodation and acquiescence in the face of other related evils such as euthanasia, infanticide…”
Would Pope John Paul II have refused the stem cell-based cure for his Parkinson’s, if it were available in his times? The Vatican, nonetheless, is not totally opposed to stem cell research; it favours the research based on adult stems cells, though the results of such a research at present are not promising. Embryonic stem cells have the potential of growing any specific stem cell, such as bone or brain stem cell, needed to heal the body. Cloning embryonic stem cells takes one more step toward creating life to heal life.
The Vatican’s view about the sanctity of life is a sharp condemnation of the practice of foeticide, especially the killing of female foetuses, a widespread practice in some parts of South Asia. It is difficult to surmise what happens to the conscience of a woman who learns upon pre-natal screening that she is carrying a female foetus and decides to abort it, especially now when abortion technology enables a woman to abort in a jiffy. That’s why many Americans have not been able to ignore the late pope’s warning that the destruction of embryos to extract stem cells, even when the purpose is to fight diseases and reduce human suffering, would dehumanise us.
Regardless of the views of the Vatican or the policy of the Bush administration to deny funding embryonic stem cell research with federal money, stem cell research, as the Harvard announcement shows, is unstoppable for the simple reason that the perceived health benefits not only in terms of fighting incurable diseases but also prolonging healthy life are immeasurable.
Stem cell revolution is as momentous as was the splitting of the atom; therefore, it needs protocols and safeguards to harness its benefits without the coarsening of our conscience.It requires a fundamental change in our thinking, a paradigm shift as significant as when Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens ~ away from the Vatican.
Now that that the mighty Harvard has put its moral authority, reputation, knowledge and wisdom at stake in pursuit of health and happiness for mankind, let us hope the marketplace, the ultimate test of everything in the USA, does not coarsen life in the process.

The Mighty Harvard

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra

INDIA: A JUST & MERITORIOUS SOCIETY

CYBER AGE
For a just & competitive society
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Quotas and reservations in India are merely populist measures to win votes for the next election; they would never churn up the backward classes to the fore. Even if some people were put on the creamy surface, they would go down unless they are intellectually prepared and enabled to stay on the top in a competitive environment.
The quota and reservation system is one of the biggest frauds being committed against historically deprived classes. This is the way to keep them down forever. The best way to raise them high is through a system of challenge and response; by providing them access through merit and need-based scholarships so that backward class kids can compete in the marketplace. Let’s keep in mind that historically deprived people are not genetically deprived.
Like India, the USA is an imperfect and messy democracy. The goal of inclusiveness, not merely desegregation, has been a struggle for every generation. Time and time again, the US Supreme Court has played a critical role in bringing the American people back to the basics, the vision of the founding fathers of an integrated society.
The Supreme Court is not only the ultimate authority in the interpretation of the Constitution; it has become the supreme moral authority in the USA. “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”
That was the opinion of the US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regarding the affirmative action admission policy of the University of Michigan (23 June 2003). Justice O’Connor, who occupied a middle-of-the road open-minded position on the US Supreme Court, has retired but her legacy lives on.
When the Supreme Court speaks, the question of what is right and what is wrong is settled until the next time when another crisis brings the nine justices together to ponder over and argue once again what the Constitution means, after all. Its decisions are seldom unanimous and the voice of dissenting justices is never lost.
Even a lone dissenting opinion might become the voice of the Court majority in another time when the mode of consciousness of the society changes. That’s why there is so much partisan political struggle as to who gets appointed to the Supreme Court.
But by and large the Court is both a reactive and creative institution. It listens and questions; but when it does speak everyone listens.
That’s how it bonds American society whenever it seems to be coming apart, for example, in the 2000 presidential election. On 23 June 2003, the Supreme Court spoke about the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan and its decision has impacted every private and public institution as well as businesses in their recruitment practices. Its decision has not gone unnoticed by Indian commentators struggling with the recently proposed nationwide quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC) for admission to Central universities.
One of the US Supreme Court decisions involved the University of Michigan Law School that used a method of admission in which race was included as one of the factors. The Court upheld the practice thus affirming the 1978 (the Bakke case) decision that allowed race to be considered as one of the many factors, a “plus” factor, for admission, emphasising that diversity enriches the educational environment.
The Court did not endorse the idea of a quota for any race. The Court was, however, troubled with the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, which used a point system that automatically granted 20 points to a minority student (Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans) toward a minimum of 100 (on a scale of 150) required for admission. The plaintiffs had complained of reverse discrimination that disqualified otherwise qualified white students. In this case a 6-3 majority led by the late Chief Justice Rhenquest called the numerical system not good enough to enrich diversity.
An individualised admission programme would consider the whole person, including race as a factor among others. In the Law School case, Justice O’Connor wrote for the 5-4 majority: “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realised…. Access to legal education (and thus the legal profession) must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational instructions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America.”
Since the enactment of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans have been given a legal recourse to fight against discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. It has opened many doors for minorities to advance in fields that were shut on them. The United States Military wouldn’t be what it is today without affirmative action. It is the biggest field of “the American Dream” and minorities are drawn to it with the hope that service to the nation would open up opportunities for them.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell, a retired army general, exemplified what a person could achieve once affirmative action opened a door. But his successor, secretary of state Dr Condoleezza Rice, another black person, has risen to international prominence on sheer guts and merit.
American businesses, too, have embraced diversity as something good for them to succeed in a multi-cultural global environment. The Supreme Court heard myriad briefs filed in support of the University of Michigan, and the Court’s decision embodies their collective voice: Diversity is a compelling national interest. But neither corporate America nor any social group has ever advocated that diversity and social justice should be achieved through a system of quotas and reservations for historically deprived classes, as it is being done in India.

Our Corporate Masters

CYBER AGE
Building corporate character
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Last week, Kenneth Lay, former chairman of the defunct energy company Enron, and Jeffrey Skilling, former president of the company, failed to convince the jury that they had done nothing wrong personally, that Enron was a good company stampeded to death by market panic, speculators, and footloose media reports. Both were convicted on conspiracy and fraud charges.

Good for America, and a lesson for others.
A company that strode like a giant with global footprints, including one at Dhabol, Maharashtra, collapsed in 2001, taking down hundreds of thousands of shareholders, employees and pension holders’ funds. The collapse of Enron was one of the many corporate scandals that hit the USA at the beginning of the new millennium, shaking the faith of the American people in corporate America. Many top corporate executives were hauled to prison, handcuffed like common criminals, as will be the case with Enron’s Lay and Skilling, when the sentencing is done.

Corporate USA functions on command and control, with little internal checks and balances. The political system, however, is based on a built-in checks and balances system along with a free Press that keeps politicians under restraint by exposing them to public ridicule, threatening to impeach them or put them in jail.
Several American presidents, state governors and legislators have been disgraced because of their abuse of power. The notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff has named names and testified against members of Congress whom he bribed to buy favours for his business clients. It is worthwhile to watch the unfolding American drama of political corruption and how the system cleanses itself periodically.
The functioning of the political system is not left to the innate goodness of the people seeking power. Nor is the development of good political behaviour left to any kind of special education or training in ethics course work in schools or colleges or the culture of the sports arena, for that matter.
The temptation of power trumps everything else ~ transparency and accountability are indispensable to good governance. That, unfortunately, is not the case with corporate USA, where most Americans are vested through their pensions and other retirement accounts. Today, we live in a world where corporate power overshadows most of our activities. The class struggle of workers v capitalists has been replaced by public interest civic groups v global corporations.
Corporate leaders rise to power on the promise of maximising profit, market value and economic health of their companies. Shareholders’ interest is limited to annual returns and dividends. The boards of directors are amoral; their interest is limited to increasing shareholders’ value. They hunker for executives who maximise their investments. So long as an executive performs well and exceeds the expectations of Wall Street, he can get away with excesses.
Last year, former chief executive Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom (now MCI, Inc), whose $11 billion fraud drove the telecommunications company into bankruptcy, was sentenced to serve 25 years in prison. The former financial chief officer of the company, Scott Sullivan, who pleaded guilty and testified against his former boss, told the jury he had warned Mr Ebbers that accounting adjustments, creative accounting or cooking books, whatever you call it, could not be justified.
Mr Ebbers told him the company had to “hit the numbers,” and meet the financial and revenue targets. Underlings were, of course, blamed by Mr Ebbers for the fraud, said to be the largest in the US history. At its peak in 1999, WorldCom had a market capitalisation of $180 billion, and Mr Ebbers was a darling of Wall Street. But it was a reputation built on sand.
When WorldCom’s real earnings could not meet the forecast, Mr Ebbers asked the account department to “adjust the numbers”. Corporate accounting departments are notorious for slouching towards the powerful.
Wall Street analysts and financial journalists who, out of fear or favour, work as paid employees of big corporations rather than as watchdogs of public interests, went along with the web of lies woven by the WorldCom team until the whole edifice began to collapse in 2000, and the share price sank to $15 from a high of $65.
But Wall Street seldom forgives anyone’s trespasses. One cannot get away with lies for too long, but sometimes the price a company and eventually the public pay is too high, and the damage to reputation is irreparable.
Why do corporate executives misbehave? Deborah Gruenfeld, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Business School, discussing the psychology of power and leadership in Stanford Business Magazine said: “Behaving badly may be natural at the top.” But why? According to her research, power creates “disinhibition”. In other words, power gives you a feeling of immunity from the consequences of your actions, especially when your salary and bonuses are in a stratospheric region. Consider the pay package of Exxon Mobil Corporation’s CEO Rex Tillerson for 2006, which at $13 million is the highest in US history. What does this man think about the rest of us struggling to fill our gas tanks? Can we make corporate bosses honest, even when we pay them so much?
Can we instill ethics into their souls? May be, the ignominious march of Enron’s Mr Kenneth Lay and Mr Jeffrey Skilling to prison will instill some sense of fear, if not ethics, into our highly paid “disinhibited” corporate masters.

The future is digial

Going digital at full speed

N D Batra
From The Statesman

The enthusiasm about the Internet among the young and the old all over the world has been increasing steadily. Memories of the deflated dotcom balloon have faded. The digital age is rising on a solid foundation as more and more users begin to realise the Internet’s potential in diverse fields.
The main reason for the growing popularity of the Internet is that it makes the users’ lives easier. Though this is basically an adult view ~ teenagers value the Internet for different reasons ~ the fact remains that its popularity among all sections of society especially in the USA is widespread.
The phenomenal rise of Google shows that dotcom companies have not slowed down. The users regard the Internet not only as a limitless source of free information available at a mouse click but also a shopping mall, banking street and place to socialise. Of course, some people still don’t feel confident about trusting the computer screen ~ even if an online grocer gives free home deliveries; they would rather go to the store, browse and enjoy the sensuous experience of personal shopping.
Habits die hard, especially for the old. Some time ago, the Markle Foundation issued a report that confirmed the widely held view that the Internet is “a source of worry” regarding privacy, pornography, accuracy of information (“You have to question the truthfulness of most things you read on the Internet,” said the respondents) and accountability. As these concerns diminish, the dotcoms would become a pre-eminent engine driving the economy, as one can see happening in India to some extent. The question of accountability is a typical one that the American public normally asks, whether it is a tire manufacturer, pharmaceutical company or a television network.
But since the Internet is not owned by anyone and is “impossible to govern”, the question of accountability becomes intriguing and difficult to handle. As the report said: “The public is concerned about accountability online, in part because they believe they have fewer rights and protections when they use the Internet than in comparable offline activities.” The American public by a wide margin is worried about the government and private companies collecting information about them when they are online. Data-sniffers do make us vulnerable on the Internet. If in a shopping mall someone watches or stalks you, you become alert and take action; or may be choose to do nothing. On the Internet you don’t know who is watching you and why, which creates diffused anxiety and consequently reduces trust in the system.
The public wants the ungovernable to be governed, may be through some kind of commission, Federal Trade Commission, for example; or Interpol. Amusingly, to a hypothetically question as to who to include in a watch dog body for the Internet, the respondents mentioned two interesting individuals: Oprah Winfrey, a most trusted talk-show hostess, and Bill Gates about whom an American judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, who tried the monopoly case against Microsoft, said that he had a kind of a Napoleonic complex and wanted to dominate the world through his company, and recommended that the company be broken up. The judge had not foreseen the rise of Google; nonetheless, Bill Gates is even today a most admired person in the USA. The adult users’ view of the Internet contrasts sharply, in many respects, with what American teenagers think about cyberspace.
Teenagers love the Internet’s freedom and anonymity. For them it is an equaliser, a source of empowerment, “an authority free zone” where “they feel less likely to be judged,” a nowhere land that shuts out “curfews, homework, teachers, and parents”. Unlike adults who want the Internet to be regulated somehow, teenagers prefer the Internet to be left alone, to keep it “as anarchistic as possible”, lest its freedom be compromised. They are aware of the dangers of meeting strangers and predators online but feel confident of dealing with the situation on their own, a view that also finds expression in other reports about the Internet and teenagers. Teenagers are also not as much concerned about surveillance as adult users are, which seems a little puzzling. I believe teenagers’ indifferent attitude regarding data mining and profiling is due to the fact that they have very little to lose in material terms, for example, credit card identity theft, financial blackmail, bad credit, et al.
Fear grows, as we grow older. Like my own students whom I occasionally use as focus groups to see which way the social winds are blowing, the teenagers in the Markle survey felt that it is the responsibility of “the individuals to educate themselves, or for parents to take responsibility for looking after the safety of their children.” The survey was limited to teenagers coming from stable American families because it did not answer the question about vulnerable teen users of the Internet who come from single-parent families, or those where parental supervision is not available.
When the family bonds are loose and guidance minimal, how would teenagers deal with the freedom of the Internet, especially with portals like MySpace where kids can do whatever they want, posting personal and private thoughts, pictures, whatever. This makes it difficult to resolve the dilemma how to regulate the Internet, when the two main user groups, adults and teenagers, disagree sharply about the role of the government and private companies in cyberspace. Nonetheless, the world is going digital at full speed.

De-fanging Pakistan for world peace

Why doesn’t India take terrorism seriously?

The Statesman/CYBER AGE/ND BATRA

The heart-wrenching picture of Manisha and Anisha, daughters of the slain Indian engineer K Suryanarayana, wailing beside their father’s body at the time of his cremation, “Shattered Dreams,” as The Statesman captioned it, should open our eyes to the fact that war against terrorism will never ~ ever ~ be over.
Some analysts and commentators have been dumping Islamic terrorism with Maoist insurgency and incidents of communal violence, as if they were a continuation of the same problem. It is just like a quack telling you that cancer and malaria are the same disease because both kill their victims, much like traffic accidents kill people, which is no way of facing the horrific realities of international terrorism.
The modus operandi of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq is no different from that in Kashmir where in April 32 innocent people, Hindus only, were dragged from their homes and killed in Doda and Udhampur; or Varanasi where in a temple attack 30 people were killed in early March. You see the monstrous face of Islamic jihadism: death and destruction multiplied thousand times by an endless cycle of television images, disembodied end-of-the world sounds and images of scarred and mutilated humans and buildings, fear magnified and mirrored on hundreds of ghostly faces everyday.
Fighting terrorism is not a gentleman’s game. It consumes a politician, as President George Bush knows. Superb intelligence gathering, preemptive and preventive measures and anticipatory disaster plans could go a long way in minimising the damages, if India would take terrorism as seriously as the United States of America does, and politicians are prepared to pay the price in terms of popularity. President Bush’s popularity is down in the drains but he keeps fighting terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, there has been no terrorist attack in the USA. When would one say that about India?
Eradicating terrorism is not a simple matter of bringing one evil man to his heels; or killing a militant here and a militant there. Although its origin lies in religious fanaticism and a blind hatred of non-believes, at an organisational level terrorism must be considered as an enterprise that manufactures dread, customised for each political and cultural market. The response of each country, therefore, has to be different. Though the USA cannot directly help India fight terrorism, working together on a long-term basis, especially in Afghanistan, would strengthen both countries’ efforts in fighting terror.
Osama bin Laden alive and kicking in Pakistan is not alone. Nor could he plan and execute bloody carnages in so many places without the brainpower and resources of a multitude of strategists and financiers living in sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Arab world. Chris Patten, chancellor of Oxford University and former EU commissioner for external relations, last week wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal holding Pakistan singularly responsible for the prevailing instability in Afghanistan, and asserting that the nation’s primary export to Afghanistan today is terrorism.
“Every few days,” wrote Lord Patten, “the resurgent Taliban carry out another deadly attack on school children, aid workers, or local and international security forces... On the most basic level, attacks in Afghanistan, including suicide bombings, are often planned and prepared at Taliban training camps across the border.”
And Pakistan has done nothing to stop them in spite of President Pervez Musharraf’s protestations to the contrary. Lord Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, knows what he is talking about. So should US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, though for diplomatic reasons she may not be able to speak up as frankly as Lord Patten has done regarding runaway radicalism in Pakistan: “Demilitarising and de-radicalising Pakistan is truly the key to bringing about stability in Afghanistan and the wider region.”
The killing of Suryanarayana should be seen in the light that the Government of India or any other government wouldn’t be able to assure anyone’s safety unless terrorism is rooted out at its source, which according to Lord Patten flourishes in India’s neighbourhood. But the terrorists also flourish in open and secular societies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States of America; only more so in India. That’s what complicates the matter.
How do we recognise the enemy who may be also amidst us without violating the values of the open society that we are trying to protect? It is puzzling that the global financial system is very much intact and the confidence of the investor remains unabated, but wails of mourners continue.
Attacks against ethnic minorities adversely affect civil liberties, which are already under threat. In the USA, law enforcement authorities have been given expanded powers of surveillance including wire-tapping and e-mail scrutiny. Last week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll indicated that 63 per cent of Americans approve President Bush’s domestic surveillance practices to fight terrorism, though his overall approval rating has sunk very low.
Open societies face a serious dilemma. As law enforcement authorities try to locate and destroy international terrorist cells functioning openly or clandestinely in their own backyards, they need to do so with minimum loss of civil liberties and without endangering the security of ethnic and religious minorities.
Whatever happens in Kashmir should have no repercussion in the streets of Ahmedabad.The struggle against international jihadist terrorism is going to be a relentless, long drawn out global campaign from which India cannot escape. India has no choice but to keep fighting.

Pakistan's weapon: Terrorism

Why doesn’t India take terrorism seriously?

Branding Scotch but what about Taj Mahal?

Darjeeling, Basmati, Scotch

CYBER AGE From The Statesman
ND Batra

Recently, when I visited my colleague, he offered me a cup of Darjeeling brew. And whenever I used to visit my cousin in Mumbai, he would offer me Scotch.

I anticipated the pleasure and knew what I was getting. The recent Delhi High Court ruling that Indian brewer Golden Bottling cannot appropriate “scotch” or similar sounding words to brand its own whiskey is a most remarkable decision in the sense that it recognises a geographical region as the site of a global brand, which is in accordance with the Geographical Indications (GIs) clause of the WTO-TRIPs agreement. GIs confers intellectual property rights on a product from a region “where a given quality, reputation or other characteristics of the good are essentially attributable to its geographical origin”. Basmati and Darjeeling are no different from Scotch, are they?

The only way to get a sensible grip on a widely misunderstood but fashionable concept, knowledge-based society, is to define it in terms of intellectual property rights. Much of the rest is propaganda to shock and awe the innocent.

Many of us still can’t get over the shock that that a Texas-based company, RiceTec, was given the patent for a supposedly new strain of Basmati rice. Something which has defined the Indian sub-continent for centuries was gobbled up by a knowledge-based society, where assembling, re-assembling, storing, patenting and branding of information is becoming a major source of wealth, power and hegemony.

Contrary to what you learn from the high-minded, a knowledge-based society is not one whose members are inquisitive, knowledgeable, skilled or willing to learn all their lives. Rather, it’s a society where information and knowledge are created for money. It is its ability to build legal infrastructure, enforce laws and claim ownership of information through copyrights, brands, trademarks and patents. Danjaq and United Artists warn that only they can make James Bond 007 television and film series. RiceTec too asserted the claim that only it should have the right to call its rice variety Basmati including its variants, Texmati, Kasmati, etc., and forbid others from using similar sounding brand names.

It goes much against the popular belief, but a patent’s legal force does not lie in giving one the permission to exploit an invention; rather it permits its owner to exclude others from making, using or selling the invention. If it had gone totally unchallenged, the RiceTec patent might have been be used to exclude Basmati traders and exporters of the sub-continent not only from the US market but also from the rest of the world markets. It may sound far-fetched and paranoid that this could ever happen, but the law, they say, is like an Indian donkey: it can hit anyone with any leg at any time. But mostly the donkey favours the rich and the powerful. Competition for a share in the world marketplace is so ruthless that few would disagree with Intel’s CEO Andy Grove when he says, only the paranoid survive.

It’s not so simple to answer the question, what is patentable? US law requires that the invention must be practical, deal with processes, machines, manufactures, compositions of matters; or the new uses of the above. It must be useful, novel and non-obvious (unique). Plant patents, under which rice plant falls, according to US Patent and Trademark Office, “are granted to any person who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated spores, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than tuber-propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state.” But Basmati is not only rice. Like Scotch and Champaign it is the flavour of a region, a cultural icon.

Since the uses and unique attributes of Basmati have been known for centuries, so one might ask: What did RiceTec add to it for which the company was granted a patent on some varieties? Probably nothing worth patent-able, but it does give us a glimpse into the shape of the knowledge society to come: creation of brand names, trademarks, value added-information; and not the least the ability to exploit information for commercial purposes through international treaties, backed by diplomacy, legal chicanery, FDI or even brute force.

This is, however, not to belittle the importance of intellectual property rights, without which writers, creators and inventors will perish, and society will stagnate. But we must demystify the slogans of the emerging information society and understand its modus operandi, its terms of empowerment.

Consider the trademark law, which was originally enacted to prevent unfair competition, and is used to protect words, symbols or images that identify a business or its products. Trademarks have existed since the Middle Ages and they have been always protected under the common law of usage. Coke, for instance, is a distinctive trademark of the Coca-Cola Company and it would be unfair competition if some other company were to use it. So are Kodak, Xerox, Exxon, the Golden Arches, etc. But when Donald Trump, a New York real-estate tycoon, plunders a cultural symbol like the Taj Mahal and uses it as trademark for his gambling casino in Atlantic City in New Jersey, there is something wrong the way the world is turning into a global marketplace. If a knowledge-based society uses religious icons and other sacred names to sell sneakers and other consumer goods, it is time to challenge its presumptuousness.

Commenting upon India and Pakistan forming a working group to bring Basmati into the GIs fold, Ashfak Bokhari wrote in the Dawn: “More often than not, bio piracy occurs in the West and that too primarily because of the inherent western bias towards the Third World. The West still suffers from the ‘Columbian blunder’ and assumes it has the right to plunder the resources of the non-West countries by treating their people’s knowledge systems as non-existent, hence empty of prior creativity and prior rights, and hence available for ‘ownership’ through the claim of ‘invention’.”

The (mis) appropriation of Basmati, a defining culinary-religious symbol of the Indian subcontinent, into an intellectual property right, as RiceTec has done, is a cultural assault and must be fought tooth and nail, along with other misappropriations of cultural symbols and sacred images of ancient civilisations, wherever they happen.

Media smart CEOs

Advice for golfing CEOs

Cyber Age
ND Batra
The Statesman

While we were waiting to tee off, my golf buddy who happens to be the CEO of a global company, asked me how a company should deal with journalists for whom bad news makes a good story. The news media, I agreed, have begun to play a very significant role in the conduct of both national and international business. 24/7 television news is converging with the Internet, making events live and spontaneous beyond the control of gatekeepers. The rise of bloggers, Online whistleblowers and public interest groups, enables the presentation of alternative views of what companies are doing.

Gone are the days when a business could be conducted beyond the public view. The reason for this heightened interest in what companies do is simple. The impact on people’s lives even if they are not directly invested in a company is tremendous. The very presence of Home Depot or Wal-Mart in a town raises fear and expectations. This gives rise to the need for intense scrutiny by the news media. When India’s Ambani brothers of the Reliance conglomerate were fighting, Wall Street was watching keenly.

Of course, the news media is itself a global business and is subject to rules and regulations like any other business. But in the United States and in many other democratic countries, especially in Europe, Japan, India and Australia, the news media has a privileged position.

In the United States, it is extremely difficult to win libel damages against the news media because of the legal provision that the plaintiff must prove what is called “actual malice,” or “wreckless disregard for truth.” Proving media negligence only is not enough to win libel damages. The near immunity from libel gives the news media freedom and encourages investigative reporting and keeps society healthy.

Because of the inescapable fact that our economic well being, pensions, retirement savings, environment and quality of life have become dependent on the marketplace, no business can escape media attention. Bigger companies invite the healthy suspicion of the media about their activities. Add to it millions of blogs that feed upon each other.

The conspiracy of silence is possible only in a one-party authoritarian state like China, which probably is one of the reasons why global corporations want to do business there. There are very few anti-business reports from China, which nevertheless in the long run might prove counterproductive. So what can be done?

A company doing business globally has to become media savvy and must understand how news organisations work and how they produce stories. Corporate communicators and diplomats have to understand the media’s sources of information and their reporting methods, and have to learn how to influence them by providing them correct information.

Companies have been using advertising as a major method of influencing the public ~ for example, oil companies, BP and Exxon-Mobil, make advertisements to divert attention from the alleged price gouging at the pump. Advertising is still a powerful mode of direct communication with the public at large. But advertisements cannot beat headline news, breaking stories, or special reports with which the news media try to draw public attention that is distracted by infoglut.

It is a big challenge to be heard in the Tower of Babel and more so, when the reputation of the corporate world, because of a series of accounting scandals and the personal misconduct of some companies’ CEOs, has created an air of diffused distrust in the public. Let us keep in mind that no reporter could ever turn a bad story into a good one, especially in crises, when news organisations and celebrity journalists try to outdo each other.

News is a competitive business and no one can afford to keep silent over a story that has an impact on the public. In good times, a company that has excellent working relations with the news media can strengthen its position by presenting positive stories and thus enhance its reservoir of public good will. Consequently, when a crisis hits the company, it will be able to draw upon the public sympathy.

Building social capital is as important as building market capital.
The traditional method of issuing press and video releases is still relevant, especially in local news media outlets, where the paucity of resources might prompt a local television station or a newspaper to repackage a company’s story as a news item. But national news media organisations are inundated with e-mail news tips, and video and press releases and so, they hardly pay attention to junk mail. It is therefore important to target the right people in the news media.

Steps for effectively dealing with the news media require research. But the following points can be helpful:

First determine whether you have a definite story and whether it needs to be told to the news media and why.
What is the audience for the story and which news media would be the best to reach? Which reporters normally cover such stories and which one of them would be most sympathetic to your story?
Is the reporter accessible for pitching the story? What angle would he adopt and how to influence him?
When the news media come calling for information and comments, the company should offer full cooperation; and the spokesperson should be ready with facts and figures or promise to provide the data promptly to meet the reporter’s deadline.
Information should be provided thoughtfully and judiciously. It is difficult to undo or correct the information once it is out.
Providing reliable and prompt information is one of the best ways to build bridges with the news media; when the need arises, the company can count upon the media good will.
Most of all, do not be caught with your hands in the cookie jar. And play honest golf.

Comprehending China's rise

China ~ myth of immensity?

CYBER AGE
From The Statesman
ND Batra

Is China like the Greek mythological figure Icarus flying too close to the sun on wings of feathers and wax? From Long March to Mao’s Thoughts to Cultural Revolution to no-holds-barred mercantile capitalism is quite a flight. China is a nation intoxicated with its future: “Rise up, people who do not want to be slaves.” “Motherland, 10, 000 years.”

Cleverly staged mass media propaganda and lobbying by people in high places including some of the top CEOs of major US corporations has helped the Chinese authorities in blurring facts with fiction, creating the perception of China’s relentless and inevitable rise to a global superpower. “You cannot afford not to be in China,” runs the refrain in many corporate boardrooms in the USA.

China fascinates corporate America with its myth of immensity but more so with its ruling party’s collective mind that controls the obedient masses: 1.3 billion worker-consumers who would one day buy every branded product made in the USA. You have heard the drumbeat, repeated ad nauseam. And China has come to believe that since Americans cannot do without its cheap goods, why worry about intellectual property thefts, currency manipulation to fuel exports, humongous trade surplus, or even the problem of nuclear proliferation created by North Korea and Iran?

Consider, for example, the 2008 Games. In 2001, the International Olympics Committee too took the bait, as The Wall Street Journal had naively put it, “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 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 won the right to stage the Games in spite of its abominable record of the 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.

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. But Falun Gong is still alive and kicking, as a protestor demonstrated loudly on the south lawn of the White House, a most restricted area, during President Hu’s meeting with President Bush last week (“President Bush, stop the persecution of Falun Gong, stop the killing,” shouted the protestor).

Trade and the Olympics had no civilising effect upon 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 about three decades ago, China’s economy has been opening up and growing rapidly with its gross national product rising to more than two trillion dollars. The rate of annual economic growth has remained above nine per cent. Made-in-China goods ~ toys, shoes, electronics, and even golf clubs and handguns ~ are found in every shopping mall of the world. Much 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 would pour into China. But would they remain silent observers?

The Deng Xiaoping market economy revolution unleashed China’s entrepreneurial and organisational energies, but not without the help from the outside world, especially the USA, 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. 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 USA, 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, but I wonder if it ever would have the same control over cyberspace as it has over Tiananmen Square. The Internet might bring about tremendous political upheavals in China.

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. Can China control the uncontrollable, the digital generation swapping billions of text messages on cell phones, the generation that could organise itself into an upsurge? Look at the wonderful people of Nepal!

The authoritarian Communist regime may have no choice but to open its doors, skies and cyberspaces to a worldwide audience. China does not live on the Communist time but the Internet time, where changes occur fast; and events occur on a different time scale and generate different values.

Oprah The Shopping Mall Creditcards With Eyeballs

CYBER AGE

Women in cyberspace ~ so desirable, so vulnerable

From The Statesman
ND BATRA

The dotcom world is rising again. Companies that survived the last crisis have revamped their business models by turning cyberspace into an extended turf of their existing businesses.
Cyberspace has become a goldmine of valuable information left by surfers, which could be turned into databases for target marketing. Cyber profiling is emerging as an important business tool for reaching the right woman through narrowly focused and targeted popup and banner advertising and e-mail marketing.

Since most of the domestic buying in the USA, more than 80 per cent according to some estimates, is done by women, data miners and cyber profilers are concentrating on websites aimed at women, which is raising serious concern about information privacy.

It is no great surprise that advertisers and marketers have begun to use the Internet in befriending women because they control effective spending. Only in the matter of high expenditure items like buying a new house, car or going on a vacation, men do butt in with their wisdom, though even in these domains, the woman's voice is decisive.

Advertisers have known the truth all along. In the 1920s, radio began to develop as a mass medium with a potential to reach millions of women, most of who did not have jobs and stayed at home with children and extended families. Domestic product companies like Proctor & Gamble developed daytime serial dramas to entertain and hook women so that they could listen to soap commercials.

That's how daytime radio dramas came to be called soap operas. In the 1950s, when television started to dominate American homes, soap operas migrated to the new medium and they have continued to retain their popularity, in spite of the fact that most women work today.

Soap operas dramatise women's problems ranging from date rapes and workplace harassment to raising children and keeping up with husbands in a culture where matrimony is one block away from the divorce court.

Those who do not succumb to the charm of slow moving daytime dramas cannot resist the temptations of Oprah Winfrey, her talk show, her "O" magazine, and her Oxygen Media, where TV and the Web converge. She is probably the biggest electronic shopping mall where women come and go talking of George Clooney and Tom Cruise, but leave with bags full of goodies. Women are "inherently desirable" not only in cyberspace but also in the traditional media because they virtually control the purse. Why? Because women love to shop.

Men do not know even the size of their own shirt collar. Ask a man to buy an apple and he would bring an orange! Men can't buy their pajamas or decide on what colour their boxers should be. Home Shopping Network and other interactive television shopping malls run on the patronage of women. Men in the mall might push the cart, but women fill it up.

There lies the future of cyberspace as a medium of e-commerce, but that would require the building of high quality websites where women feel comfortable and do not mind shedding valuable data that can be aggregated and collated into reliable individual profiles. Imagine every woman having her own personal shopping corner in cyberspace where everyone knows her tastes and preferences and where all her problems can be solved.

So when a woman enters iVillage.com or Oxygen Media portal, she could join a women's chat group and make new virtual friends; explore fitness and beauty issues and food recipes, while working from home and parenting; find advice about her job and tips about marriage, dating and love; and publish her personal story on the Web.

There is a price to pay for in cyberspace free lunch is a thing of the past. As women become comfortable in their own cyber quarters, they will be scanned of all their personal data, including intimate details, but unlike at the airport, where touching and probing and electronic scanning can be so humiliating, in cyberspace it will be painless because they won't even know it.

Once cyberspace held so much promise for women, wrote Professor Ann Bartowin in the University of San Francisco Law Review, that it was the closest women could come to being "brains in boxes". "In cyberspace, we would not be judged by our bodies. No one would know when we have bad hair days. We would not have to wear make-up and high heels. We could be even 'men' without the hormones or expensive surgery. Then we began shopping and chatting over the Internet. Shortly thereafter, we learned that anyone in cyberspace could ascertain our gender, ages, incomes, education levels, marital status, sizes, consumer purchase proclivities, aspects of our health, and employment histories, and the number, ages, and genders of our children, and that this information could be used to sell us goods and services. Now, instead of 'brains in boxes', we are eyeballs with credit cards."

That's a terrible disappointment for women who thought that the anonymity of cyberspace would enlarge their freedom and empower them vis-à-vis men. But instead of reaching new thresholds of freedom and equality, women are being robbed of their privacy through surreptitious profiling. Welcome to cyber age.

Pit Bull Corporate Diplomacy

CYBER AGE FROM THE STATESMAN

Handling corporate crises

ND BATRA

Wal-Mart, according to a New York Times report, has been looking for a couple of wise guys who could help the global retailer to brighten its public image and to also fight its dirty battles the way politicians do during election times, for example, by doing opposition research on those who attack the company.

Wal-Mart should not forget that those who live in a glass house must not throw stones at others. There are better and more constructive ways for a corporation to build public goodwill than to have an overly aggressive attitude toward its critics. Every corporation gets into trouble but not all troubles turn into a crisis. Some crises are man-made due to criminal intent, negligence or poor product design.

A crisis by its very nature takes everyone by surprise and makes an excellent story for the media, which thrives on scoops and bad news. Companies like Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, and Coca Cola, for example, are not darlings of the news media and a whiff of suspicion is enough for the media to spin yarns on criminal neglect and blame. Crisis management requires some of the best communications and diplomatic abilities on the part of top leadership. Pit bull dogs won’t do.

Although disasters that strike a company such as hurricanes, earthquakes or riots cannot be avoided, enough advanced planning can be done to mitigate the ensuing disastrous effects. Sincere efforts help the company to rehabilitate itself in the public eye and recover its reputation as a reliable company.

Manmade crises due to negligence such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, Perrier natural mineral water contamination in 1990, or Union Carbide (Bhopal, 1984); or crises due to evil intentions as in Tylenol (cyanide lacing in 1980s) or Pepsi (the syringe hoax case, 1993) could be worse than natural disasters. Manmade crises occur mostly due to poverty of imagination.

But once shock and awe sets in, the crisis develops quickly and draws intense scrutiny by the public and the media. No one can come up with quick answers to myriad questions. This worsens the situation.

In spite of the best intentions and creative exercise of anticipatory imagination and scenario building, any corporation could be hit by a crisis. Smart ones, nonetheless, not only manage a crisis successfully but also turn it to their advantage and renew themselves and come out even stronger, as Johnson and Johnson did after the Tylenol crisis.

Response to any crisis will most likely be based on insufficient information but if a company has a crisis management plan and has built up a sufficient reserve of public and media goodwill, it can overcome the crisis successfully. Building social capital is important. Chemical, pharmaceutical, food, energy and building industries are most likely to be hit by a crisis. Add to it the possibility of terrorist attacks and you would feel that you have no choice but to prepare for crises and calamities. September 11, 2001 will forever remain a benchmark for unprepared-ness, and what the 9/11 Commission called “as a failure of imagination.” Varanasi shows that India is no better in this respect.

Strategic communication experts recommend some important steps for crisis management. For example, establish an early awareness system. Build worst-case scenarios in brainstorming sessions inviting not only senior leaders from different divisions of the company but also outside experts trained in crisis forecasting and management.
Dramatise each crisis to see its maximum impact upon various stakeholders and constituencies. Assess the probability of the occurrence of each crisis.
Prioritise stakeholders since the impact of a crisis will be different on different constituencies. For example, saving the lives of employees is more important in a terrorist attack than thinking about shareholders’ value or the company’s reputation.

Make crisis management an integral part of the company’s business case. Provide workshops and training in crisis management in a virtual environment and through simulation.
Create a crisis task force with command and control and clearly assigned budget responsibilities and accountabilities. Establish communications technology backup systems for data security. Develop a strong and trusting relationship with the media and with civic society activist groups. Do not forget to plan for legal liabilities.

Communication in crisis would depend upon what is at stake. In the case of a catastrophe, of course, human life takes precedent and communication strategy has to be different from the one when there is a product liability or sexual assault. The message and the medium of communication including face to face meetings, town hall gatherings, satellite conferencing, television appearances, newspaper interviews, company’s websites and blogs are equally important. In a crisis, the public hungers for every bit of information.

In a foreign country where the crisis has occurred, communications must be done through a local spokesperson, someone who knows the culture and has credibility. Although it is important that the company should speak with one voice, top managers should be familiar with the crisis plan and its proposed execution if the situation arises.

Defining the problem, getting and synthesising information from various sources to find the cause of the crisis, communicating with affected parties directly, and communicating with the media with as much openness as is necessary and as often as it is absolutely essential during the crisis are important steps that require the expertise of a seasoned corporate diplomat rather than a hired gun with the attitude of “Let’s nail them.”

Coping with info deluge

The always on info world

The always on info world

ND Batra
Fron The Statesman

There was a time when production, distribution and processing of information, news and entertainment, existed in a state of balance. We consumed and assimilated what was produced. And then there was time for silence, for gossip, and for imagination. But that was before computers, microwave and satellite transmission created a deluge that seems to sweep away everything else from our lives. Some of us, especially of the older generation, raised on the logic of linear thinking and writing, can’t handle what we see as an information flood.

Others, especially of the digital generation, raised on computer games, cell phones, instant messaging, kids born to multitasking, revel on this new culture of incessant message swapping. I have not heard net-generation kids complaining that there is too much information swirling around them.

David Schenk bemoans in his book Data Smog that – thanks to a ceaseless development of computer technology – information and data production has become so abundant that it clutters our minds as “a pollutant.” We produce too much information for our own good, and so fast that our minds can’t assimilate it, he said. Of course, what is a pollutant could become raw material for something new in the future, only if know what to do with it. In other words, we don’t have enough information on how to turn pollutants into useful products. Perhaps we need even better technology to manage information.

Making a sweeping statement, Schenk says that the phenomenon of accelerated information production and data collection is of recent origin, only half a century old. “For nearly 1,00,000 years leading up to this century, information technology has been an unambiguous virtue as a means of sustaining and developing culture… Then, around the time of the first atom bomb, something strange happened. We began to produce information much faster than we could process it.”

He does not mean that the atom bomb triggered an unstoppable information avalanche, though there’s no gainsaying the fact that the dropping of such bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a kind of information explosion that could not have been handled by traditional means of information processing, especially in a manner that would have created knowledge and understanding of what man had done to man.

Like Luddites of the 19th century, who out of fear of loss of jobs and their traditional lifestyles, destroyed machinery rather than adopting and accepting it, Schenk too seems to be giving up instead of trusting that human mind has not come to the end of its development and evolution. “We have quite suddenly mutated into a radical different culture, a civilisation that trades in and survives on stylised communication… The blank spaces and silent moments in life are fast disappearing. Mostly because we have asked for it, media are everywhere. Television, telephones, radios, message beepers and an assortment of other modern communication and navigational aids are now as ubiquitous as roads and tennis shoes – anywhere humans can go, all forms of media now follow: onto trains, planes, automobiles, into hotel bathrooms, along jogging paths and mountain trails, on bikes and boats...”

True, we are living in a world of multimedia ecology, and for some of us information generated by ubiquitous computing and the Internet is too much. Sometime ago, the television sitcom Hope and Faith introduced a double episode about wife swapping, which in spite of its suggestive open marriage indecency wasn’t as naughty as it might sound. In fact “Wife Swap” was a separate reality show, where two housewives in culturally different states (red and blue, for example) exchange households along with children, but without sharing beds.

In a parody of the reality show, in the Hope and Faith episode of wife swap, Hope leaves her home in Columbus, Ohio, and moves to live with a family in Manhattan, New York, where she finds that the high-tech New York family members have all the cyber-age gadgets but they seldom talk with each other as a family. The worst culprit is the work-alcoholic father, Aaron, who in a delightful mockery of “always on, always available,” is always talking to someone on his hand-free cell phone. When he looks at his “swapped wife” Hope at the dining table, she thinks he is talking with her, but of course, no, he is talking past her, with someone else on the other side, a client. The Manhattan man symbolised the multitasking man of today, always in communication, always networking, always connected, except when it comes to touching someone emotionally and keeping relations on a steady keel.

The Manhattan wife-swapping episode ended with the cell-phone addicted Aaron deciding to give up his always-on wireless communication gear, sell his multimillion-dollar apartment and return to his family’s bosom and turn to simpler things of yesteryears. But running away from information age is no solution. We have to consider the evolutionary possibility that confronted with an ever increasing deluge of information, the human mind might evolve and adapt and learn to improve the signal-to-noise ratio; new technology might help us to see patterns in what is called noise and clutter.

History of human evolution has been a struggle to transform nothingness to information, from empty cave walls to primitive carvings and murals, from rags and papyrus to manuscript writing, from zero-and-one sheep counting to decimal system to binary bits and bytes. Tools that help us to create information would also help us to find patterns of meanings in the flood of information that we generate.

Educating and training American GIs

GI Joe and GI Jane

How should we educate and train GI Joe and GI Jane so that they fit into the new global environment of terrorism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other?

HOW MARKET-DRIVEN SELF-INDULGENCE COARSENS LIFE

Killing field of American popular culture

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Movies, television programmes and popular music do not always spur viewers to spontaneous immediate action, but their delayed, cumulative effects are immense. Television commercials, for instance, impact viewers and keep the market economy thriving.

If commercials make people buy, buy and buy, repeated violent programmes too could incite some viewers, especially those who are mentally disturbed, to kill people. A few years ago, Queen Latifa, the rap star, featured in Set It Off, an R-rated movie about four desperately seeking women who go on a binge, shooting and robbing banks. The movie was linked with several copycat fatal shootings, including that of an eight-year old girl, Tynisha Gathers of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who watched a bootlegged copy of the movie along with three other girls.

And later while replaying a scene from the movie, Tynisha was shot in the head, as it was shown on the tape, with a .380 caliber semiautomatic handgun lying in the house. Imitation and role-playing, no doubt, excite all children. Tynisha’s 10-year old sister was held in custody and charged with manslaughter, while gun-dealers and movie-makers hid behind their constitutional rights to bear arms and exercise unfettered free expression, of course, only to make money in the free marketplace.

Unlike constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights, there are no fundamental obligations, except to pay taxes.The courts have been very reluctant to award damages in cases of personal injuries caused by the media, unless there is a definitive showing of “clear and present danger,” amounting to direct incitement of violence. Punishing the media for mere negligence, the courts have said in several media related personal injury cases, would chill free expression and lead to self-censorship, thus negating the purpose of the First Amendment.

Gun industry lobbyists repeat ad nauseam: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. But this has not been a comforting thought to parents of children brought up in an environment of toy-guns (which look indistinguishable from the real ones) and senseless media violence. Every year hundreds of children either become victims of gun violence through media imitation or cause injuries to others.

The 1981 case of Olivia N v National Broadcasting Company, concerning the broadcast of the film Born Innocent, which dramatised effects of an orphanage on an adolescent girl, was a crying tale of horror. As recounted in the court records: a young girl is shown in a community bathroom peeling off her clothes and taking a shower. The water suddenly stops and she faces four other girls, who wrestle her to the ground, force her legs apart, and one of the assailants plunges a plumber’s helper into the girl, with a to-and-fro sex-act thrusting motion.

Four days after the film was broadcast, a nine-year old girl was attacked by some adolescents on a beach and “artificially” raped with a bottle. The attackers had done this after they had seen the movie Born Innocent and discussed the bathroom scene. The lawsuit alleged that NBC was negligent, in spite of several authoritative studies concerning media violence and its effect upon children. The California Court of Appeals ruled that if the television networks were subjected to “negligence liability,” the effect would be “self-censorship which would dampen the vigor and limit the variety of public debate.”

To win damages, the court ruled, the plaintiff would have to show that the movie incited rape. In another case, a 13-year old boy, who had watched and tried to imitate a stunt performed on the Tonight Show by the late comedian Johnny Carson, was found dead, hanging from a noose, facing a TV set which was still on. But when action was brought against the network, the court held that NBC was not liable because the plaintiff had failed to show “advocacy of violence” or “incitement to violence” leading to immediate action.

Ozzy Osbourne, notorious for lyrics such as Suicide Solution, that conveyed the message that “suicide is not only acceptable, but desirable” as a method of avoiding pain and despair, was not held liable by courts for death by suicide of several disturbed youths in 1980s.But what kind of enlightened public debate is generated by destructive free expressions such as in Born Innocent, Set It Off, or rap lyrics? Has the quality of life for orphans and women improved? Has artistic expression been enriched?

There has been growing concern about the coarsening of life in America, and many people blame the media, especially television, for widespread depredations of civic virtues.

Is it possible that the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison in which Iraqi prisoners were physically and sexually humiliated by patriotic US soldiers might have been the consequences of long exposure to senseless violence in popular culture?

How could such normal, decent people behave in this inhumane sadomasochistic way? Their subconscious minds must have been fed by brutal images, while growing up.

How ironic, to paraphrase an old fart, that as civilisation advances, civility declines. I believe it is the culture of self-restraint, not of advertisement and market-driven self-indulgence, which creates civility, social refinement.

CORPORATE GLOBAL DIPLOMACY

Power of persuasion
By ND Batra
From The Statesman

In its bid to take over Arcelor, Mittal Steel needs a better communication strategy and more effective global corporate diplomacy to persuade Europeans that the Mittals are no stealers and come as friends. As corporate India expands globally, it must communicate well. Excellent communication is the key to effective corporate public affairs and global diplomacy. Without a comprehensive communications strategy that takes into account significant stakeholders who interact with the company and form its business environment, global corporate diplomacy cannot be effective. The recent failure of Dubai Ports World in its attempt to take over the management of US ports is a case in point.

In this age of global transparency of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, and of reporting standards established by global watchdogs like the Global Reporting Initiative, companies can neither run nor hide. Companies just cannot afford not to communicate about a problem that concerns stakeholders in their business environment. And since they have to communicate, they must do it efficiently. At the heart of communication is persuasion, even when a company is just trying to inform stakeholders. Power to persuade is the soft power that companies exercise to win the hearts and minds of people. But to do so in a multi-channel environment over which they do not have much control, needs diplomatic finesse, especially when a company has to operate in a foreign environment.

Consider how the following factors affect the global corporate communication environment:

(a) Companies have become de-localised (Mittal Steel, IBM, for example). They are no longer woven into the fabric of local communities as they used to be in the pre-digital age. Company employees do their work in a virtual environment and their mobility makes them less concerned with what is happening in their neighbourhood. In an environment like this, it would take extraordinary efforts for global companies to communicate and present their position in a persuasive manner. China’s CNOOC did not know how to talk to Americ when it tried to take over Unocal.
(b) Perception is reality and many people perceive global companies as more powerful than the government, which draws enhanced critical scrutiny from the media and NGOs. The image of power that global companies project raises expectations as well as fear in the minds of the people. Growing expectations of corporate responsibility create unusual challenges for corporate communications and diplomacy.
(c) Because of the recent corporate scandals in the USA that has put many top corporate executives in jail, the American people expect greater openness and transparency from companies. This may not be true of some rapidly developing countries in Asia, where companies may get away with behavior that may not be acceptable in the USA, Japan or Europe. Since expectation of corporate behaviour differs from country to country, corporate communications strategies must take such variables into account.
(d) Effective communication takes place in a cultural context. Understanding the host country’s political culture is very important for corporate communication and diplomacy to be effective, a lesson corporate India must learn quickly. Political culture includes the legal system, and the rules and regulations which must not be violated in the host country. Although good corporate behaviour is not rewarded, bad behaviour is not only punished but also sullies the reputation of the company. Companies should be problem solvers and should not become part of the problem.
(e) Each country has abiding cultural symbols and icons which make global corporate communication quite a challenge. What is culturally and politically correct in one country may not be so in another country. Not understanding national cultural differences can create a nightmare for companies doing business abroad. While these general observations about the global communication context are important, in order to be effective, global corporate communication must be aimed at specific groups or audiences that are especially relevant to the company. Such groups are: customers, financial analysts, government authorities, and non-business stakeholders such as NGOs.

Customers are the most important constituency for a company. They are the reason for doing business and a very important source of a company’s strength. In a competitive environment, where one product may not be qualitatively much different from the other, keeping the customer coming back to the company requires communication at multiple levels — product, price, image, trust and most of all, reputation, the company. How a company presents itself publicly, through signs, symbols and slogans, and how customers perceive it would determine its place in the marketplace. Trust and reputation are the basis of communication with customers.

The US transparency law (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), for example, was enacted in the aftermath of Enron’s collapse and other scandals. Communicating effectively with market analysts and financial journalists is very important because it is through them that a company manages its image of financial strength and growth. Raising false expectations for short-term benefits can destroy a company’s reputation. Sometimes, when analysts and financial journalists, instead of being impartial and objective, become reporters and critics, they become part of the vicious conveyer belt, destroy public trust and provoke harsher regulations.

Corporate behaviour is regulated by rules and regulations, which are framed in the public interest and in consultation with the industry. But once the rules are in place, not only authorities but also public interest groups, many of which have established a global network to monitor compliance, closely watch companies’ errant behaviour.

Microsoft’s ordeal in the USA and Europe for anti-trust violation is a case in point. Worldwide, there are thousands of NGOs who have made it their business to scrutinise the behaviour of local, regional and multinational companies to protect the public and environment from exploitation. With clear and well-defined demands, global NGOs that have a huge and broad-based financial and legal support system can swing into campaign mode against a corporation and even a country, very quickly and very efficiently.

Think how Greenpeace International stopped asbestos-laden French carrier Clemenceau from coming to Gujara (India). Cooperating and communicating with international NGOs requires special diplomatic efforts.

Why I love Japan

Buddhism has made Japan a beautiful country.

Innovate or perish

N.D. Batra

Be creative and grow rich

A recent IBM ad, a company that has been trying to re-invent itself as the foremost global solution company, talks of “houses that make doctor calls,” sensitive cars that enable you drive safely, “power grids that fix themselves” and “silos that talk to each other,” and much more.

I am still waiting for some solution company, Bangalore, Inc. or something, to make a bold statement, Hey, we know how to predict where the next terrorist attack after Varanasi would occur. It should be that simple: If computers can predict precisely where a tornado would hit, they should be able to predict where the next terrorist attack would occur. I am sure India’s scientist president Dr. APJ Kalam and the young IIT geniuses would agree with me: For every problem, human or technological, there must be a software solution. Be creative or thou shall perish.
In any case, this is an age of smart ideas. Ideas are potential assets. Creativity matters and would set India apart.

Just think what businesses are doing to stay in business. There’s a new frenzy for reaching customers through newer modes of communications, including product placement in television programs.
The busiest shopping season in the United States has always been Thanksgiving through Christmas, but for businesses it is too risky to depend solely upon the holiday season for profitability, market share or even survival. Which has led advertising and marketing agencies to find creative ways of persuading buyers to open their wallets.
A decline of even 1 percent in holiday sales ripples through every trailer park and leaves many people shivering in the cold. So shoppers are being offered unprecedented discounts on sales of all kinds of goods from cars to carpets to offset a bad holiday season, if it were to occur.

Any idea that brings the shopper to the mall and persuades her to fill up the shopping cart is an invaluable asset. The United States desperate seeks ideas that can make things happen, whether it is to catch Al Qaeda operatives; or to persuade the shopper to take out the credit card and spend whether she has the money or not in the bank.

But how do you turn an idea into an innovation and bring it to the marketplace? “I am your idea,” said an Accenture blurb sometime ago. “One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone.” Ideas are ephemeral unless you grab them and make them do something. Make ideas work by sharing with people who know how to turn them into innovations and tangible goods.

Occasionally in social gatherings, someone would buttonhole me and say: India has some of the world’s brightest economists, why can’t their ideas be turned into something that would speed up economic growth in India? At such moments I nod in wonderment. India is full of bright minds, indeed! And they would be returning to India especially with the introduction of dual citizenship, a brilliant idea that would generate unprecedented opportunities for investment in India.

Besides, every time there is some discussion about India’s economic growth, naturally China’s sustained economic growth of 8-10 percent during the last two decades comes up for comparison. Two decades ago both the countries were struggling at the same level of poverty. But one day the Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had a bright idea. Capitalism is good, he mumbled after returning from a visit to the United States. Make money, not revolution. And the floodgates of entrepreneurial spirit opened up in China, even without political freedom.

Keith Bradsher of The New York Times wrote sometime ago that China, “by quickly converting much of its economy to an unfettered and even rapacious version of capitalism, has surged far ahead…. China has high-speed freeways, modern airports and highly efficient ports that are helping it dominate a growing number of manufacturing industries.” In a matter of years, China has become a manufacturing hub of the world, sucking most foreign direct investments. Once all roads led to Rome. Now all sea-lanes lead to China.

China’s miracle is not based on any grandiose economic theory, but on a few simple ideas: Excellent law and order conditions; good transportation and communications facilities; and the courage to let the people make money. In short, the Marwari and Gujarati spirit.
Ideas have no boundaries. You can take them from one field and make them work in another, for example, from the battlefield to the marketplace.

Americans are good at this; for example, American advertisers are using Jean Piaget’s theory of child development, sensory experiences and visual stimulation to sell EZ Squirt Ketchup to grownups. Said Alissa Quart in Wired, “Piaget is only the beginning. Just as the pharmaceutical industry steers medical research, marketing and advertising are beginning to guide the way scholars investigate brain functions, perception, and language.”

Consider, for example, cognitive science, a multidisciplinary area that includes psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and computer science. At the highest level, it is associated with the study of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, but at market level its ideas are being increasingly used to study ”the psychology of acquisition and the science of material desire,” for better marketing and placement of products, anything from toys and cereals to jeans. That’s creativity.

Many of us do have qualms about turning the academia into a handmaid of the marketplace but in the United States various fields of intellectual endeavor are not sealed shut from each other. Ideas flow from one field to another and flourish wherever they find the best applications, whether it is the shopping cart or fighting terrorism.

It is all about the psychology of desire that transforms an idea into an asset; turns driving a car into love and adventure; turns zeros and ones into an outsourcing industry. And the same psychology of desire could also read the desires of terrorists before they hit again.