Using The Web To Advance Politics

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Tuesday evening, as President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union, millions of people in the United States and around the world will turn to their TVs and radios to learn what may be in store over the coming year. But a growing number will also increasingly turn to the Internet and social media, not only to listen to the address, but to engage in instant political debate during and after.

President Reagan delivers the 1983 State of the Union address (Wikimedia Commons)

The State of the Union speech is more tradition than constitutional requirement, becoming in the 20th Century a major media event and the closest thing the US has to monarchical pomp and ceremony. As media changed, so did the speech. For most of American history, the speech wasn’t even that, but rather just a written message from the President and delivered to Congress to be read into the record.

1923 brought the first speech broadcast via radio (President Calvin Coolidge’s first) and 1947 the first seen on television (President Harry Truman’s second.) As broadcast coverage increased, so did the speech itself, growing longer and, in 1965, moving to prime time. (George Washington’s first speech was less than 10 minutes long, while President Bill Clinton’s final address clocked in at one hour and 49 minutes.)

The digital revolution continues that evolution. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s first SOTU address, coming just four months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11th, was webcast live for the first time. That was two years before Facebook, four years before Twitter and five years before the first iPhone. Now, in the second decade of the 21st Century, the State of the Union has become a social media event: a portable, borderless political debate.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” says Sarah Lauren Stern with the group League of Young Voters. “The end-game is to empower young folks to become active participants in our democracy, and not just on Election Day.”

To that end, Stern’s organization is producing an international SOTU event that exists both online and the real world. All day Tuesday, the LYV will host a series of panel discussions taking place at the popular DC eatery “Busboys And Poets” and, following that, a live SOTU watch party.*

By itself, that’s not so unusual – watch parties for all sorts of events have become popular pastimes at all sorts of bars across the country. But the LYV is going several steps beyond that – all online.

All day Tuesday, the League will stream a live webcast online of the panels for anyone to watch, and is also organizing an on-going Twitter and Facebook discussion in real time. It’s called “#BarackTalk” and in years past, thousands of people from across the nation and around the world have joined in. Stern says the discussions have been passionate, energetic and memorable – everything that good politics should be.

“The idea that young people don’t care about politics is a myth, plain and simple,” she says:

“The web is an important conduit for advocacy and political involvement. First of all, it enables any person with a smartphone or internet connection to get involved with a cause – regardless of if there is a local movement in their area. More importantly, it’s the quintessential space where American society discusses its values and exchanges information. The numbers don’t lie – 66% of social media users post about civic issues.”

The Internet, by its very nature, encourages many-to-many conversations that aren’t limited by borders, language or even time as actual human conversations can be. When something happens, increasingly it isn’t just reflected online but amplified and changed by many voices and hands. When something as important as the State of the Union moves into social media, it becomes something altogether new.

Of course, new isn’t necessarily better. Political discussion is invariably made better when participants actually listen to each other and work to understand ideas different from their own. As we’ve often noted, this is not one of the web’s stronger suits.

Still, Sarah Lauren Stern says if the ultimate goal is for people to listen, you first have to get them to talk – and little does that as well as the web:

“The Internet is the modern-day town square. It enables anyone who cares about a cause to build community, discuss an issue, and mobilize people to act quickly. Not all issues require a rapid response, but when they do, the web is the most efficient way to spread the word and take action. On top of all of that, the amount of information and knowledge-sharing available online is infinite. That being said, nothing can replace the value of having a conversation face-to-face about an issue.”

You can watch the League’s live stream above, or at their webpage. Twitter users are encouraged to share their opinions using the hashtag #baracktalk; non-Twitter users can follow the social stream here.

*Full disclosure: VOA will have a reporter at the LYV watch event for our live TV/radio simulcast.

A New Study Suggests How And Why Users Take A Facebook Break

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Think for a moment about how you spend your time online. Researching? Randomly clicking through Wikipedia? Watching cat videos?

Now think about who’s there with you. Not in real flesh-and-blood terms, but who’s hanging around you online…watching what you read and what you say.

(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, FILE)

Increasingly, spending time on the Internet is a social event, thanks to the pervasive influence of networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ (in addition to VKontakte, QZone and a handful of others.) We don’t just read anymore; we share. Separating the online you from your “friends” you’ve connected with takes more and more effort.

But what if you need a break? What if you’re just tired of your friends; can you take a vacation from them and come back a few weeks later like nothing happened?

That’s the question researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life project explored in their recent study “Coming and Going on Facebook.” And it turns out that lots of people are taking more short-term breaks from their online networks, but for a wide variety of reasons.

“What we’re seeing is people are just taking a pause,” says Pew director Lee Rainie, also a co-author of the study:

“They’re not thinking they should abandon the site, they just want more time, less drama. A portion of people said they were nervous about privacy concerns. The people who come back apparently think there’s an advantage for them being on, and they’re ready to reengage and feel like it’s worthwhile for them.”

The report begins with a whopping statistic: that 67 percent of American adults who are online are members of Facebook. (That’s probably no surprise to Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s still a huge number of users.) Of those, nearly 61 percent say they have taken at least one voluntary break from the site for at least a week or longer; some many times.

The biggest reason for the Facebook fasts? 21 percent of respondents in the Pew survey say they just didn’t have enough time for it.

“People just feel overwhelmed with the volume of social contact they have on Facebook and they’re taking a break to capture a little more time in their life,” says Rainie:

“There are other people who take a break and see what it does for them; to see whether it gives them extra time they cherish. You could almost hear people doing mental calculations of what are the advantages of staying on and taking a break, and it’s this bigger story of how people weave technology into their life. Sometimes it feels appropriate to immerse yourself, and sometimes it feels appropriate to take a break, gather your wits and spend all of your time online.”

Anyone who’s a member of an online social network knows that there are times when your friends seem to be doing genuinely interesting things, and times when…well, not so much. At moments like that, a network like Facebook can feel like a chore filled with drama or tedium. Rainie says the study suggests that people are becoming more open to the idea of taking a short break to refresh, re-evaluate, or just catch their breath.

And when they come back from their fast? “69 percent, a large majority, say they’re ready to engage with their online friends just about as much as they did before.

It’s an ebbing and flowing; it depends on what’s going on in their life, the season, what their friends are talking about, a whole host of factors,” says Rainie. “People are trying to figure out where social media fits in their life.”

So, the next time you think you want a little break from Facebook, perhaps you should take one.

Ross Slutsky | Atlanta GA

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

There I was, going about my business, watching a video on YouTube. As I often do, I set the video to 1080p, one of YouTube’s highest definition standards, when I noticed something interesting:

See that magical word next to the gear thingy?

That’s right. A certain subcategory of YouTube videos is now available in 3D.

The most interesting thing is that 3D video on YouTube is nothing new – it’s just not widely known about. In April of last year, Youtube took 3D video out of beta testing and incorporated it directly into the video player.

The best part is, you do not need to own 3D glasses to make it work:

If you set YouTube 3D to “no glasses” mode, you can witness videos in 3D without external aid. Here’s how it works:

See the white dots above each screen? If you cross your eyes so that a third white dot appears in between the two dots, a third screen will appear in the center that will display the video in 3D. This stereoscopic visual effect can seem a bit daunting at first, but if you work on it for five minutes or so, you should get the hang of it, and with further practice, you will develop muscle memory for it that will make doing this much easier.

What are the broader implications of this?

Rose-colored Realities?

We know that Google has been working on augmented reality glasses for a few years now, with Project Glass set to hit stores in 2014.

(If the video embedded above does not display properly in your browser, you can see it here)

While the iterations of Project Glass that we’ve seen so far do not appear to be optimized for 3D viewing, Project Glass may only be a preliminary foray into visual augmented reality devices. As The Verge reported in April, one of the engineers on the Project Glass team has worked on developing pixelated contact lenses. In other words, Google may be hoping to develop sophisticated display systems that include 3D functionality at a later time.

Given that Google owns Youtube, they might have encouraged the deployment of sophisticated 3D capacities in the hopes that as Google or other companies develop 3D display systems, Youtube users would experiment with 3D film production and populate Youtube with 3D content so that there will be a wealth of consumable user generated content when the 3D display technologies have matured.

Democratization?

If we take an optimistic outlook about this, 3D YouTube is a new frontier. David might have already visited the dentist and Charlie’s already bitten a finger, but the world is yet to see a 3D YouTube viral sensation.

Maybe it will be you.

If you have your eyes set on YouTube fame, there are various apps and attachments you can purchase for your phone that will enable you to shoot in 3D such as this, this, and this.

Kate Woodsome | Washington DC

Cuba, as seen through reflective puddles, windows and windshields. Photo by Zoriah.

Whenever my Internet connection is slow, I try to imagine I’m using a typewriter so that I’m pleasantly surprised, rather than infuriated, by the pace and technology. It’s a mind game I learned years ago when I lived in Cuba, where the Internet is painfully slow.

This week, the Cuban government announced a change that might just pick up the pace. The state-run Granma newspaper acknowledged Thursday the government is conducting tests on an undersea fiber-optic cable connecting Cuba with Venezuela and Jamaica and, through them, the world.

The report said the ALBA-1 cable, in the works since 2007, has been operational since August when Cuba began studying voice traffic related to international telephony. Then, this month, it started testing the quality of Internet traffic on the system.

The ALBA-1 fiber-optic cable, suspended from buoys, is rolled out by a ship in La Guaira, Venezuela, Jan. 22, 2011. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

This is a big deal.

Until now, Cuba has only had satellite-based Internet largely because of restrictions under the 50-year-old U.S. trade embargo.

The global Internet monitoring group Renesys first broke news of the cable’s activation in a blog post this week that sparked an international buzz and seemingly forced Granma to confirm the report.

Doug Madory of Renesys says he has sifted through Cuba’s Internet traffic for the past six years and has never seen speeds like he’s seeing now. The latency, or lag time, is way down.

“Now it’s down to sometimes below 200 miliseconds, which has never occurred in Cuba. Ever,” he told me.

That doesn’t mean Cubans will be streaming movies uninterrupted anytime soon. Madory says latency is still “pretty high” because of various factors, like antiquated equipment.

And even if the speed improves further, that doesn’t mean access will.

“How much this helps the people of Cuba is an entirely different matter,” Madory says.

If you’re Cuban, you’re not allowed to get on the Internet without government permission. There’s a local intranet in schools and state-run computer centers, but connection to the World Wide Web is mostly limited to government officials.

When I was in Havana, I’d run up the steps of the Capitolio, leaving my Cuban friends outside their own capitol building while I paid outrageous prices to use the Internet cafe for foreign tourists.

There are ways around the restrictions. Some government workers quietly pad their salaries by renting out time on their home computers, but the price is prohibitive for most Cubans.

Yoani Sánchez, a Cuban blogger who’s gained a global following by emailing posts to friends outside the country, mocked the Internet “upgrade” on Twitter.

#Cuba Si #CabledeFibraOptica con #Venezuela está activo, por qué una hora de #Internet en un hotel cuesta aún 1/3 de salario mensual?

— Yoani Sánchez (@yoanisanchez) January 23, 2013

Cuban dissident and blogger Yoani Sanchez (AP)

Her tweet reads: “#Cuba If the #FiberOpticCable with #Venezuela is active, why does an hour of Internet in a hotel still cost one-third of a monthly salary?”

Sanchez, temporarily detained last year for her blogging and political interests, sends tweets using an SMS phone messaging system. It’s just one of the tricks Cubans use to connect with the outside world.

Granma said after tests on the ALBA-1 cable are finished, it will not “automatically increase the possibilities of access.”

The newspaper reported the island’s telecommunications infrastructure will have to improve, as will its foreign exchange resources. And only then, it said, will Cuba “achieve the gradual growth of a service we provide free today mostly with social objectives.”

Cuba is changing. Mobile phones are no longer banned, and the government just ended its requirement that Cubans get a special exit permit to leave the island. The country’s economy is sluggish, and loosening certain restrictions like these could be a way to improve the foreign exchange resources Granma mentioned.

But for my Cuban friends who were left waiting outside while I surfed the Web, the changes are as painfully slow as the Internet.

Just What Happened to the Internet’s Great Terror?

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Just who, or what, is Anonymous these days?

Prediction is a fool’s game. Just ask anyone leaving Las Vegas. Or Nate Silver.

Generally speaking, we don’t play the “Top Ten 2013″ list-type entries that populate blogs and other journalism this time of year. There aren’t many things about the future that can be predicted.

But there are a few. Looking back to this same time last year, you might have said we were fools to predict the rapid decline of Anonymous.

“How far will Anonymous go before it goes too far?” we asked back on Feb. 8, 2012. “The answer may come sometime soon.”

It seems that 2012 has given us an answer.

When Things Go Bad

For those unfamiliar, Anonymous calls itself a group with no leaders, no members and no plan, other than what Anonymous decides to do…whatever that means. In point of fact, as we’ve pointed out before, this is simply a lie – but it’s a lie the media have willingly gobbled up and repeated.

Of course there are members of Anonymous, even if many come or go depending on the issue. It takes many busy hands to launch a successful attack against the government of Egypt, or the Zeta drug cartel, as two examples. Of course there are part-time leaders choosing targets and coordinating work, even if they don’t like to be called that. And in spite of some of its admittedly “white hat” good-guy attacks it has launched, of course Anonymous has a plan. That plan, in part, has been to get people talking about Anonymous.

For years, the merry band of pranksters that make up Anonymous has brilliantly exploited media appetites with a series of attacks on the computers systems of governments and corporations, accompanied by a taunting, swaggering attitude that reporters ate up. They rallied to the support of accused leaker Bradley Manning and embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, striking back at credit companies that refused to process financial donations to the group. The group Telecomix, an Anonymous related group, has worked ceaselessly to harass or embarrass Syrian government authorities while keeping the rest of the population as connected to the Internet as possible. Famously, when the CEO of computer security firm HBGary thought he had exposed Anonymous members, he merely encouraged the group to strike back by seizing control of the firm’s systems, publicly humiliating the company and ruining the life of its boss. All of this (plus lots more) just in 2011.

If 2011 represented something of a highpoint for Anonymous, it also began what may have lead to its retreat underground. It was in that summer that the Anonymous-offshoot “LulzSec” began grabbing headlines and stirring it upwith a string of rapid, if not entirely sophisticated attacks on a wide series of targets – all, in their words, “for the lulz.” But also that year, U.S. federal authorities trying to break the back of Anonymous began targeting LulzSec, perhaps as a step closer to its ultimate target.

The Lulzsec mascot, in his salad days

That August, LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. “AnonymousSabu,” began secretly working with the FBI to finger his computer compatriots. Six months later, in early 2012, the FBI arrested five people (one in the US, two in Britain and two in Ireland) charging them with participating in LulzSec hacks. As quickly as it appeared, LulzSec was over. But the biggest “lulz” – against Anonymous – had yet to come.

It may just be coincidence, but at nearly the same time, some of the first high-profile arrests of Anonymous members began in earnest. In February 2012, 25 people were arrested in Europe and South America. Soon after, self-appointed Anonymous spokesman (and perennial attention seeker) Barrett Brown was taken into custody in the middle of a live web-cast chat he was hosting. [Ed note: this is really worth watching!]

Although less entertaining, more arrests followed.  All while Anonymous slid further and further from public view. Observers began to publicly wonder whether the unthinkable might have occurred: that the multiple heads of the Anonymous hydra may have been chopped off.

Losing The Limelight

To be sure, hack attacks have continued. It wouldn’t be beyond belief to think a small volley might be aimed squarely at yours truly for poking a few holes in Anonymous’ reputation. And it is nearly impossible to ever fully contain a group whose membership and leaders are so fluid and ad hoc. Anonymous won’t die largely because it can’t.

But something changed in 2012. For a group whose oxygen had been the media spotlight, it’s noteworthy that there was less bluster, less posturing, and significantly less activity credited to Anonymous last year.

On December 28, 2012, a report prepared by the security firm McAfee (named for founder John McAfee, who has had his own problems in 2012) concluded:

“Because Anonymous’ level of technical sophistication has stagnated and its tactics are better understood by its potential victims, the group’s level of success will decline. However, we could easily imagine some short-lived spectacular actions due to convergence between hacktivists and antiglobalization supporters, or hacktivists and ecoterrorists.”

Meaning: the days of spectacularly brazen hack attacks by Anonymous may largely be behind us.

That’s only one opinion, and perhaps not all that new. A year ago, in late 2011,Meaghan Kelly, writing at VentureBeat, wondered whether Anonymous would continue to spin off other groups that pick up the hacktivist banner:

“Anonymous isn’t made up of individuals who allwant to “dox,” or reveal personally identifiable information on the Internet. Instead, many of these people prefer disrupting a website’s service or systems to prove a point. These may be the people who branch off, leaving those who wish to publish personal information to fly the Anonymous flag.”

As long as there’s an Internet, there will be pranksters. Just witness last week’s exposure of the “Bicholim Conflict“, a completely fabricated entry on Wikipedia about a non-existent battle between the colonial Portuguese and India’s Maratha empire. The article, all 4,000+ words of it, lived on Wikipedia’s site for more than five years before an editor, ShelfSkewed, discovered the ruse. Pretty good lulz.

At the end of 2011, this blog declared that year to be “The Year of Anonymous.” Now, just one year later, it looks like Anonymous’ moment has come and – for the moment at least – gone.

Sometimes Facebook Friends Are Not As They Seem

Ross Slutsky | Atlanta GA

The other day I got a friend request from a man claiming to work at VOA in DC as a programmer. His pedigree was impressive, with claims to an Oxford education.  As a one-time VOA intern and current Digital Frontiers contributor, I friended him without any further hesitation, thinking he might be trying to open a dialogue with me about a work-related project. However, upon closer examination, I began to question the validity of his claims. One quick tip off came when he updated his cover photo to this:

Though a lovely photo, this picture of a choir has nothing to do with Voice of America.

Furthermore, when I scrolled down his wall, I found statuses like this:

And like these:

The Trap

I called in to VOA back in Washington DC, and they confirmed that there wasn’t anyone by the name on the profile employed by the agency. At this point, when I was ready to move on, I noticed that this mystery person was available on Facebook Chat.

This wasn’t an opportunity I was going to pass up.  And very quickly, this person confirmed my suspicions:

VOA has only five floors.

We went on like this for a little while, but one of my questions must have scared him off. Nonetheless, due to my innate sense of curiosity and/or utter lack of self-discipline, I wasn’t done trying to figure this guy out.

From the friends tab, I quickly learned that most of his “friends” claim to be from either Indonesia, India, or Pakistan. That said, my favorite one of his “friends” was a Nigerian dude who went by the name of “BlessedBestman” and had the following listed under his employment section, which includes one of my favorite places of employment of all time:

Just when I thought it was over and that things couldn’t possibly become any more bizarre, the person claiming to be a VOA programmer now added two new titles to his employment:

At this point, apart from feeling like an underachiever, I was puzzled. Why would someone pretend to work at VOA in the first place? Furthermore, why would this person pretend to work for two different news entities and add these job titles in such a short period?

The 8.7 Percent

This is far from an isolated occurrence. Back in August, Facebook reported that 8.7% of the profiles on their site were not real. While that doesn’t mean a little less than 10 percent of your Facebook friends are phonies, it is a good reminder that when you meet people only in cyber-space, it can be difficult to really know who you’re meeting.

But the question remains. Why would someone do this?

Is this person a spammer who simply hasn’t started spamming me yet? A bizarre PR professional trying to get in touch with VOA personnel by using me as a mutual friend? A fan trying to be closer to VOA by digital affiliation? Or is there some other cultural difference that’s being expressed here?

What do you think?

Special thanks to Bruna Ladeira for her help in verifying personnel in the VOA system.

Nations Struggle To Control What Was Designed To Be Uncontrollable

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

UPDATE December 14, 17 hours UTC: Negotiations to create a consensus for new standards for Internet oversight and privacy collapsed in Dubai Friday when several nations, lead by the United States, refused to sign on to any agreement.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, had been organized to build international concensus on updating the International Telecommunications Regulations – a binding global agreement that sets out the rules of the road for regulating electronic communications. UN officials had said that the ITR haven’t been updated since 1988, long before the explosion of the wireless mobile and the Internet, and were sorely in need of an update.

Some nations, such as Russia and several Arab monarchies, had floated proposals that opponents said would have made it much easier to censor the web and reduce the privacy of mobile data users. While those proposals were all defeated, the final ITR document did include a proposal to reduce unwanted emails, or spam. However, some negotiators said that the language was too vague, and would have opened the door to allow greater censoring of content on the web such as political or religious views.

When it became clear that the spam language would stay, the U.S. representative, Amb. Terry Kramer, announced “It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the U.S. must communicate that it’s not able to sign the agreement in the current form,” and walked out.  The US was joined by nearly 80 other nations, including Japan, Canada, Greece, Italy, Poland, Kenya, Egypt and Great Britain.

The general secretary of the two-week conference, Hamadoun Toure, expressed disappointment at the last-minute break down, but emphasized in a statement that he believes the WCIT had achieved something important. “It has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global communications,” said Toure.

While the new document will be signed by those nations that didn’t walk out of the talks, it is not a binding treaty.  More to the point, the fact that more than a third of eligible signatories have refused to sign makes the document largely meaningless.

December 13, 2012

For months, advocates for Internet free speech and open architecture have been warning of this moment: a power-grab by the United Nations that would make the Internet a little less free, and a lot less open.

The cause is this week’s  World Conference on International Telecommunications, an international gathering organized by the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union to update global laws regulating the web, among other things. The last time the Internet was the subject of such a meeting was 1988 – long before smart phones, the explosion of wireless, and portable computing.

In the lead-up to this year’s meetings in Dubai, several nations, among them Russia, China and others, have been floating proposals to give individual states more control over the web’s architecture and freedom. Some of those proposed regulations would let individual nations block sites or monitor traffic at their choosing, and charge web-companies and service providers for data usage. The U.S., E.U. and many large Internet firms such as Google and Facebook have vigorously opposed any such changes.

Organizers of the WCIT had previously promised that new regulations to change the open structure of the Internet would not be on the agenda. However on Wednesday of this week, little more than a day before the conference close, the conference chair may have turned an informal tally into an on-the-record vote to include new Internet regulations in the WCIT’s final report.

“What was first termed as getting a ‘temperature of the room’ by the Chairman of the conference turned into an apparent ‘vote’ to include an Internet Resolution in the ITRs,” said Lynn St. Amour, President of the Internet Society:

“The Internet Society came to this meeting in the hopes that revisions to the treaty would focus on competition, liberalization, free flow of information and independent regulation – things that have clearly worked in the field of telecommunications.  Instead, these concepts seem to have been largely struck from the treaty text.  Additionally, and contrary to assurances that this treaty is not about the Internet, the conference appears to have adopted, by majority, a resolution on the Internet.   Amendments were apparently made to the text but were not published prior to agreement.

“This is clearly a disappointing development and we hope that tomorrow brings an opportunity for reconsideration of this approach.”

20 Years Of Texting, And What The Next 20 May Hold

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

According to the calendar, the 21st Century began exactly at 12:01am on January 1st, 2001. But in practical terms, you could argue it actually began about eight years earlier, on December 3rd, 1992.

That’s because that was the day that Neil Papworth, a British software engineer, sent a friend the world’s first SMS text message. “I typed the message out on a PC,” Jarvis tells the Guardian‘s Tracy McVeigh.  “It read ‘Merry Christmas’ and I sent it to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone, who was enjoying his office Christmas party at the time.”

And the world hasn’t been the same since.

From Texting to TXTNG

Now as common as the billions of smart phones that litter the planet, it’s hard to believe that just 20 years ago, there was no such thing as text messaging. At least, in the modern sense.

Since the 1920′s, with the laying of the first transatlantic cables, engineers began using the twisted copper phone cables to electronically send alphabetic characters and numbers while not in use. It was called “telex” – or more commonly, “texting” – and it was the near-exclusive domain of major industry and government. In the 60′s and 70′s, basic numeric data was being sent via existing radio waves to small receivers, which emitted a “beep” with each new message: thus was born the doctor’s “beeper.”

How did we survive before the text?

Then in 1984 an international group called the “Global System for Mobile Communications” – GSM for short – began working on a standard for using mobile phone networks to transmit short alphanumeric messages in Europe. They called it SMS, or Short Message Service, because at the time, nobody could imagine such messages would be anything other than short, impersonal, and strictly limited to business use. The standard lay largely dormant for years except among a handful of engineers and tech enthusiasts, read geeks, that tinkered with just how it might work.

When Jarvis sent his first message in 1992, mobile phones didn’t offer a function for sending texts, only receiving them. His holiday greeting received no attention save for a small circle of enthusiasts, and a few with an eye to the future.

One of those was Brennan Heydan, an engineer working in Ireland. “They said people would never use it, they wouldn’t be bothered to type messages on a phone,” he told the New York Times. But Hayden believed otherwise, and in 1993 sent the world’s first commercial text message via SMS, this time from Los Angeles. His message: “burp.”

A New Medium Finds Its Voice

In the mid-to-late 1990′s, as mobile phone competition began to seriously heat up around the world, manufacturers and service providers began offering SMS texting as a standard option. And on the surface, it had several advantages.

First, a message can be sent relatively quickly using just the recipient’s phone number, meaning users no longer had to use clunky email programs to send messages. Second, SMS is robust: because of the limited bandwidth it takes up, text messages are often more reliable to reach the recipient than email or even phone calls, especially in times of heavy network use. And finally, texting is fast. Users soon discovered they could send several messages in the time it took to dial a phone and wait for someone to answer.

That said, SMS texting – or just ‘texting’ by now – wasn’t perfect. As its use exploded, service providers experimented with different ways to charge for its use, sometimes charging the recipient or the sender, sometimes for a flat fee or per character, leading to confusion between networks and across nations. Mobile manufacturers had to re-tool their product lines to make texting easier at the same time they struggled to add new features and shrink phone size.

And, like any new medium, its users didn’t really have any rules for how to text, using as few characters as possible but still making your intent clear. Like email before it, a new etiquette took time to develop around when and how to send messages, how often, to whom and what they should – and most definitely should not – be about. (Example: is it OK to break up with someone via text? My answer: not if you’re the one being broken up with.)

Soon users were developing not just their own rules of the digital road but a new language as well. “ROFL”, “OMG”, “LOL” and “IMHO” soon populated not just the textverse, but began seeping into people’s actual real-life conversations. Emoticons went from punctuation marks you had to view sideways to elaborate graphic images encompassing just about every feeling imaginable. Phones grew so text friendly that some began to wonder if they were even phones any more.

And by some, I mean specifically old-timers, like myself. A growing raft of studies all point to the same trends: young people are emailing less, texting more, and increasingly not bothering with the actual telephone unless they absolutely have to. No less a figure than AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson now says it’s “inevitable” that service providers will begin offering data-only mobile plans, and eschew the telephone completely.

While this is purely anecdotal, it’s been my experience (and that of just about everyone I know) that how you prefer to communicate says a lot about your age. For friends and colleagues generally under 35, I text them. 35 to maybe around 60, email is where it’s at. And those over 60 would really just prefer you picked up the darn telephone and called them. I’m curious if others find similar trends.

“Relationships…right in front of us.”

In 2011 it was estimated that, on average, over 4 billion text messages were sent every day around the world. That number is assured to grow even higher for 2012. Heck, these days even Pope Benedict XVI has a Twitter account so he can update his followers via mobile phone.

So with all this texting, humans must feel more connected with each other than every before, right? Not necessarily.

MIT researcher Sherry Turkle has made a career of examining how new tools like texting are transforming our real-world social relationships – as she explained to VOA, often in unhealthy ways:

“If I had done this research and found a nation of people who checked their email and went on social networking but were maintaining close and loving relationships with friends and family, I wouldn’t have written the book.  But what I found instead were parents who text at the dinner table, leaving their children feeling bereft.  Parents who were texting on the playground while they pushed their kids with one hand and do their email with another.  Mothers who are not happy because they’re reading Harry Potter and having their BlackBerrys under the blankets so they can check their mail while they’re reading, feeling that they’re sort of missing out on the experience with their kids but they can’t stop themselves.”

Just this week, following the shocking suicide of Kansas City Chief’s linebacker Jovan Belcher, Chief’s quarterback Brady Quinn spoke of the importance of human contact and connections in the real world, and how difficult that can be in the text age. “We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook,” a somber Quinn told the press:

“That’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”

Like every other tool or device that helps keep us digitally distracted, texting will likely continue to grow in use until the next big something we can’t yet see replaces it. And that, again, will be followed by tech-enthusiasts embracing it as the tool of the century and stern warnings from cyber-dystopians about the dangers to human culture. Whether the text message becomes for the 21st Century what the automobile was for the 20th is too early to know. What’s certain is that it will be around for some time to come.

IMHO.

Claims That “Terrorists” Cut The Web Fall Flat

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Update December 3, 1330 UTC: Renesys’ Jame Cowie writes on the company blog that Internet service has been almost fully restored in Syria. Traffic began flowing into and out of Syria at 4:30pm Damascus time on Saturday afternoon:

“The restoration was achieved just as quickly and neatly as the outage: like a switch being thrown. Does that mean that we believe the government (or the opposition) threw the switch? Frankly, the data available just don’t support attribution at this point, despite all the speculation.”

At 12:26 pm, Damascus time, on Thursday afternoon, the nation of Syria disappeared from the Internet. Practically speaking, at least.

“In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria’s IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet,” writes James Cowie, chief technology officer at Renesys, in the company blog:

“Looking closely at the continuing Internet blackout in Syria, we can see that traceroutes into Syria are failing, exactly as one would expect for a major outage. The primary autonomous system for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment; all of their customer networks are currently unreachable.”

The precise moment nearly all of Syria’s Internet went dark. (courtesy Renesys)

Never mind the techno-lingo. What this means is that, for the moment, computer networks outside of Syria have no paths or gates to enter and transmit data into the nation. Computers within Syria similarly have no means of ‘talking’ to the rest of the world. The only other way to cut Syria off from the Internet as effectively would be to actually sever the lines.

The government of Syria quickly blamed “terrorists” for the Internet outage, but several factors raise doubts about that claim.

First is the timing: the blackout comes amid numerous reports of increased fighting around Damascus International Airport. Second, scattered reports coming out of Syria suggest that both mobile and land line phone service have become spotty, particularly in and around the capital city. Both factors hint at what may be a government that is either concerned about its stability, or perhaps preparing for a major offensive that it would rather the rest of the world not know about.

But most suspicious is the manner of the Internet shutdown itself. As Cowie notes, presently 100% of all the Internet address paths into Syria are failing. Another firm, Akamai, that monitors Internet traffic like Renesys, has confirmed the timing and near totality of this blackout. While data is still being analyzed, it appears initially to some that the cutoff mirrors that in Egypt in January of 2011. Then, the Mubarak government was the first to try erasing itself from the web by removing BGPs, or Border Gateway Protocols, from the web – an outage that was also first picked up by Renesys. Writing then we noted:

BGPs are like maps used by service providers and traffic routers to deliver data from one computer to another as efficiently as possible.  Erase the map, and the data has no place to go.

“They raised the digital drawbridge,” says Rodney Joffe, senior technologist with the DNS service provider firm Neustar.  Speaking with New Zealand’s “Computerworld“, Joffe likened Egypt’s actions to flipping a virtual kill switch.

Terrorists, even very sophisticated ones, might be able to take down a few service providers, or create havoc at specific websites or networks. But the only entity that can effectively destroy every Internet map into and out of the nation is the national government itself.

For the moment, Renesys’ James Cowie tells VOA that he’s not yet sure about the technical reasons for Syria suddenly going dark, but it seems likely who’s to blame:

“We can’t see how they did it yet, but we can infer that the Internet was probably turned off in some central location.  That could be the result of a government decision (“flipping a switch”), or it could be a side effect of an opposition action (power outage, facility destruction).    Anything short of facilities destruction would be the ‘best case’ because it implies that the Internet could be brought back online as quickly as it was taken away.

Several outside activist groups, aligned with the Syria rebels, say they are working on building temporary bridges to the Internet for those inside Syria via land line phones, but the security of those lines has not been established.

We’ll keep you updated.