By Zafar Anjum
16 Sep 2009

A few months ago, when the Congress Party returned to power in India, the Manmohan Singh-led government announced a new, ambitious project: Issue a unique non-duplicable ID card to every Indian citizen, starting with the target population of some flagship schemes.

For this purpose, the government appointed Infosys co-chairman Nandan Nilekani as the chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), under the aegis of the Planning Commission.

Now, in India and abroad, Nilekani is a media darling. He was the inspiration behind Tom Friedman’s bestseller, The World is Flat. As a veteran Indian journalist put it, Indian media would criticise neither Nilekani nor the ID project. Sure enough, after the project was announced, the Indian media lapped it up as expected, glorified the already feted Nilekani with sweet write-ups. No doubt that Nilekani is a thoughtful corporate leader but it was the project’s scant details that worried people like me. Not only the media came out confusing details, I was disappointed to see not a single report that could challenge the assumptions behind the ID project.

It took the veteran interviewer Karan Thapar to do this unpleasant job: In his programme, Devil’s Advocate for CNN-IBN, he thoroughly grilled Nilekani. During the interview, many facets about the project came out that need debate, discussion, and clarification. I am surprised that the Indian government has announced the establishment of an Authority without gauging the budget and implications of such an ambitious programme.

Ambition outstripping ability?

The main issues, as raised during the TV interview, are as follows:

-    Why do we need a unique identification number for all Indians? About 80 per cent of Indians have Election Commission (Voter ID) cards, others have some other identification documents, such as ration cards, driving licences, PAN cards, BPL cards and passports.

-    Does a suitable technology exist to undertake such a mammoth exercise? According to a London School of Economics study, a similar project in the UK was scrapped because of unreliable technology.

-    Cost of the project is another issue. According to an Indian weekly, Frontline, the project could cost hundreds of billions of rupees. That kind of money could be better spent on health, sanitation, nutrition and education of the poor. Nilekani himself, who is heading the project, is not aware of the cost involved in this project but he insists that the cost is a fraction of the figure quoted by the magazine.

-    Security of the database, containing the record of a billion-plus people, is another major issue. There is a major risk of hacking. Nilekani also accepts that there is the risk of hacking.

-    Caste and religion-based profiling of the population is another danger. People can indirectly misuse the database and target a group of people, using the data against them.

Nilekani, quite gentlemanly, agrees in the interview that most of the above-mentioned charges are correct. But he is also convinced that the project is required (and is feasible) as India needs one single non-duplicate way of identifying a person (through a combination of finger prints and pictures) and a mechanism to authenticate that identity online anywhere. According to him, the project will deliver a huge impact on India’s ‘leaking’ public services. It will make delivery of social services and government grants more efficient and make the poor more inclusive in growth.

It all sounds noble and well-intentioned. But Nilekani agrees that with such a monster of a scheme, we are going into uncharted territory. According to him, the technology is there and we will have to scale up the existing technology. He understands that there are certain risks involved in this project but the benefits will be immense, countervailing the risks. As for the misuse of the data, he argues that a mechanism of citizen oversight and a combination of checks and balances could make it less prone to misuse.

As any right-thinking citizen will demand, the project must have a regulatory and independent risk assessment component. There must be checks and balances and it must not give the rogue the power to snoop around with people’s identities. That would be the greatest disservice anyone can do to a country. I’m sure Nilekani would be cautious in devising the parameters and security aspects of the project.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/the-devil-is-in-the-detail

By Zafar Anjum
11 Sep 2009

Google is without doubt one of the most influential and revolutionary technology companies in history. In over a decade’s time, the way Google has risen in the cyberspace and redefined everything—from search to e-mails to applications—is unparalleled.

Today, it is a much admired company. In The Wall Street Journal’s list of Asia’s 200 most admired companies, Google ranks at no 3, just after Apple and Toyota Motors, and above Sony, Nokia and Microsoft.

Perhaps, even unbeknownst to Google, it has been changing the way human beings think and process information. According to Nicholas Carr, the Internet (led by Google) is making us stupid, “chipping away” at our capacity for concentration and contemplation (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, The Atlantic, July/August 2008). The New Yorker’s media writer Ken Auletta is coming out with a new tome on Google titled, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (to be out Nov. 3, Penguin Press).

Not to be evil, a snide reference against Microsoft, is one of Google’s stated mottos. That position of the company is well-known. Yet, the Internet giant has been drawing flak of late for a number of its products.

Is Google the new Microsoft?

When Google started out, it seemed that the company would strict itself to search. But over the years, it has not only entered the space of e-mails (Gmail) and applications (Google Apps) but also that of videos (by acquiring YouTube) and mapping (Google Earth).

In the field of search, Google is the master and commander. In a short space of a decade, Google Search has become the virtual gateway to the Internet. The way Google commercialised search was also unprecedented. Now, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt wants to take Google into a completely new domain: he wants to connect Google straight to our brains. Make whatever you want to make of that!

At one time, hotmail was the king of e-mails. In fact, Sabeer Bhatia, if you remember the US-based Indian techie, was the one who popularised e-mails. Then came Yahoo and a host of other companies providing e-mail services. Gmail, with its unlimited space and search functionalities, completely changed the game.

Similarly, when YouTube became more popular than Google Video, it bought out its rival. Now, do you see any rival to YouTube? There might be some lame imitators but YouTube has emerged as the ubiquitously popular video website.

Now, Google wants to monetize the site’s popularity in unprecedented ways: by reading brain waves to measure the effectiveness of the ads. According to a Wired report, “together with neuroscience  advertising research firm NeuroFocus, Google has measured things likes users’ skin responses, eye movement and an EEG brain scan in response to YouTube InVideo overlay ads. They found that the ads have high levels of engagement, increase user experience and improve brand reponse.”

For a search and software company, it is not clear why Google launched the Google Earth project. But ever since its launch, the project has drawn criticism from people who don’t want Google’s crew taking photos of their neighbourhood. In Europe, there have been reports that people chased away Google’s vans photographing their houses. Moreover, the application’s possible misuse for purposes of terrorism has also been highlighted.

The latest controversy surrounding one of Google’s projects is its programme to digitise and sell millions of books. The plan is ambitious and has been under way for the last few years. But there are major copyright issues surrounding Google’s programme.

US publishers had sued Google for failing to respect their copyright when the company had started digitising books. Later, they reached “a revenue-sharing settlement covering books that are still copyright-protected, ones whose copyright has expired, as well as the huge number of books that are technically still protected but have fallen out of print and where the copyright owner can’t be located”.

But now the plan has hit bad weather in Europe. According to a report, five organisations representing EU publishers, libraries, rights holders and businesses active in Internet commerce told the European Commission at a hearing on Monday (7 September) that the proposed US Google book settlement is unacceptable in its present form, because it would lead to “a de facto monopoly” in the emerging digital books market.

Also, more than two dozen authors and publishers have filed an objection to the proposed settlement. Without stronger privacy safeguards, Google employees, third parties or the US government could obtain lists of the books people have purchased and read, the authors and publishers said in a court filing.

The settlement has no limitations on Google’s collection and use of reader information and no privacy standards for data retention, deletion and sharing of that data with third parties, argued the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

“If there is no privacy of thought—which includes implicitly the right to read what one wants, without the approval, consent or knowledge of others—then there is no privacy, period,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon said in the court document.

No matter where the controversy goes, past record shows that Google will somehow again prevail. But in an age when privacy of ordinary people are being trampled over left, right and centre, history will remember where Google stood in that equation. It is altogether another matter how much of human history still remains to unfold.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/a-touch-of-evil

What’s in a tweet? Ask Shashi Tharoor, the diplomat-turned politician and India’s minister of state for external affairs.

If anyone should know about the nuance of words, who better than Tharoor—a novelist and columnist, who also has been a suave diplomat with the United Nations as the under secretary general for communications and public information.

But a greenhorn that he is in the arena of politics, he recently made a “bovine blunder” as the AFP likes to put it.

Asked on Twitter if he was travelling by economy class on a trip to his home state of Kerala, he tweeted: “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”

This witty remark created a controversy in India, as it was deemed to be in bad taste, especially coming from a Congress member of parliament and a minister in Sonia Gandhi’s ruling party—a party that had recently given a call of austerity to all its members.

Tharoor’s witticism couldn’t be more politically incorrect!

As India is suffering from conditions of draught and the common people are suffering from the effects of a global recession, Sonia Gandhi’s party men are supposed to shun all ostentations, stay away from five-star hotels and travel in economy class (the so-called “cattle class” in the tweet)  in solidarity with the common man. All these measures are obviously symbolic in nature as India’s common man neither flies in airlines nor has a compulsive addition to Twitter.

After the austerity call, the minister had just got out of a five-star hotel where he had been staying for months (he was yet to get his official bungalow in Lutyen’s Delhi). Then came this tweet, mocking the austerity drive and making fun of the expression holy cow—cows being sacred in India, and more so if the comment was spiteful against the Congress party members.

Not to lose an opportunity, Tharoor’s detractors attacked him in the media. Some even asked for his resignation. But many came out in his support, arguing that the remark was made in jest, and that the issue was being blown out of proportion. Sure it was. The remark was innocuous but the timing was wrong—giving it a sinister slant.

The result? Tharoor was reprimanded by his party boss. The poor minister didn’t have to resign but he had to apologise.

Sometimes austerity, not brevity, is the soul of wit

In my estimate, Tharoor’s cattle class faux pas was a disaster waiting to happen.

Tharoor is a 21st century politician, so it was natural for him to take to twittering right from the time of his election campaigns. Within months, he became the most active and most ‘followed’ Indian politician on Twitter.

Buoyed by his popularity and perhaps also due to his compulsive addiction to Twitter, the minister frequently tweets on a daily basis, so much so that I once asked him how come he managed to post so many tweets every day: offered prayers at this temple, delivered a speech at such and such meeting, on the way to meet so and so, and so on. I asked him if he was tweeting after every meeting, every political function, out of some kind of compulsion—as if one needed to keep a record of every act that one performed in 24 hours, like a 24- hour live TV broadcast . Of course, he never replied to the question.

So, the slip was waiting to take place. If not this blunder, something else would have come up and caught by his opponents who would look at each of his tweet with a microscope.

After the “bovine blunder”, perhaps now Tharoor would be a bit restrained and circumspect in his tweets. It would be less fun but more sensible for him being a responsible minister.

On 17 Sept, he admitted as much: “I now realise I should not assume people will appreciate humour and you shouldn’t give those who would wilfully distort your words an opportunity to do so (sic).”

Now, isn’t that a lesson for all of us who tweet?

Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia portal.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/a-bitter-tweet

There is a think tank called Project for the New American Century. One of its fundamental postulates is that American leadership is good for the world.

That may be the case, though a large part of the world would disagree with this position, especially those who see America as the global policeman, the security state that uses its force to implement the corporate agenda on behalf of the global elite.

China, as the project views it, is no doubt a growing world power. But despite its economic muscle, China is not favoured to assume a role of global leadership (even though China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council). The reason for denying China this role is the country’s political system. Lacking a Western style democracy, China is supposed to be in a state of ‘trapped transition’. One of the arguments favouring this view is that China’s political set up will limit its growth, ensuing from the argument that there are limits to developmental autocracy.

This view might sound sexy but it defies logic. I am saying this from a historical point of view.

In every stage of historical development, different forms of government have prevailed. Soon after the Industrial Revolution, Britain, and other European nations, made themselves rich through imperialism—trading companies with armies setting up colonies to siphon off the colonies’ wealth to their mother countries.

After the French Revolution, the stage was set for the idea of nation states and democracies–kings and queens with the divine right to rule were replaced by parliaments and constitutions. Between the two world wars, this finally led to the rise of America—as a liberal democracy at home and as an neo-imperialistic global power gradually dominating the world through the MNCs, led by its military industrial complex. It became the hotbed of innovations—both cultural and material—and used the MNCs to spread globalisation after vanquishing its rival Socialism as an alternative system.

The IT revolution that started nearly three decades ago has given rise to the all-seeing, all knowing security state. What about democracy itself after the end of the cold war? Many, including legendary novelist and essayist Gore Vidal in the US and novelist and activist Arundhati Roy in India, see democracy as it is practised in their respective countries today as a system that arrogates people’s right to push through the corporate world’s agenda (facilitated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund [IMF] and World Trade Organisation [WTO]). In the process, all checks and balances of the executive and judiciary and also of the media have been compromised. The corporate has co-opted all branches of the democracy.

China’s time has come

China’s meteoric rise as the manufacturing hub of the world and as the third largest economy of the world (it will be the second largest in the next three years) has placed it in a unique position to dominate the world in the age of ‘Orwellian security state’. And to dominate in this ‘environmentally challenged’ new world, China does not need to wage wars like America. The country is building up its sphere of influence through selective investments all over the world–right from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to Iran, Russia and Africa.

This is happening at a time when America is involved in a bleeding war on terror, and is hugely in debt,  especially after the financial crisis of 2008-09. The American middle class has been hollowed out (downward mobility is now a mass phenomenon), thanks to outsourcing, increased immigration of foreign workers and policies of globalisation (closing factories in America to open them in cheaper locations such as China).

Part 2

China exemplifies what economist Meghnad Desai might refer to as Marx’s revenge. China has a unique political and economic system—undemocratic, with a central command and control structure but one that welcomes foreign investment and globalisation, a convergence of socialist and American industrial cultures, if you will.

Even in the hay days of the Soviet Russia, USSR and China did not see eye to eye, even though both countries were supposed to be communist regimes. After the dissolution of the USSR, Russia embraced western-style capitalism (with strong oligarchic influences). But China had begun to open up its economy much before USSR’s implosion. To get rich is glorious, Deng Xiaoping had declared, casting away the old notion that socialism equals poverty.

In fact, communism had not failed with the death of USSR, as Desai explains it in his book, Marx’s Revenge—The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002). What USSR achieved was not the communism propounded by Marx. Capitalism would not go away until it had exhausted its potential. It had not and it has not.

Desai notes that the limits of capitalism would be reached when it is no longer capable of progress. “The information technology revolution has just begun,” he writes. “What more may come we do not know—biotechnology, new materials, outer space as colonisable land. The whole world is not yet fully integrated into global capitalism.”

In this IT-aided stage of global capitalism (globalisation), China is a leading actor, the way the US was in the last century.

As China is industrialising itself at a scorching pace (even in this year of recession it will probably achieve an eight per cent growth rate) and the farmers are becoming cheap factory hands, a state needs a tough hand to immediately quell any kind of unrest.

Apart from its superlative police and military force, the country is also harnessing the power of IT to control its huge population—the cheap labour that it needs to supply to its capitalists and the middle class (bourgeoisie) that it needs to oil the engines of globalisation.

The Great Firewall

One way China exercises control over its citizens is through ownership of the propaganda machinery and media censorship. The media (print, TV) is controlled by the state. For the educated Internet-savvy masses, it allows only limited access to the Internet. You might have heard from your friends in China how they are not able to access certain Internet sites.

China even wanted to install Internet filtering software on all computers in the country. It was called the green dam project and its implementation was postponed due to immense criticism. The Chinese government claimed that the technology would curb access to pornography, but Internet users said it would block politically sensitive content and would be used to track people’s behaviour. Did I hear thought-policing?

Recently, ahead of its 60th anniversary of communist rule, China again clamped down on the Internet, blocking free access to the Internet.

Another notable example of the state’s heavy control is the situation in Xinxiang. IDG reported that nearly four months after deadly ethnic riots in China’s Muslim region led authorities to shut off the Internet there, local residents are still barred from sending text messages and getting online.

The report said the clampdown on telecommunication in China’s western Xinjiang province, where rioting claimed nearly 200 lives in early July, has hurt local businesses and cut residents off from many non-government sources of news and other information.

But the state’s control is not limited to the media and the Internet. The overall goal seems to be able to control the urban population and build smart cities where everything, including individuals, can be tracked all the time.

For this purpose, China is building technologically-equipped urban systems because cities are relatively manageable microcosms of systems that operate globally. For example, for the city of Guangzhou, China picked IBM to manage its four commuter lines, 60 stations and 116 kilometres of track, and help make the transit system more intelligent and environmentally friendly.

China’s template of controlling citizens will be useful for governments in other countries to copy and implement its Orwellian systems. The only difference is that governments in other countries will need democratic means of deception to manufacture the consent of its citizens.

Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia dot com. These are his personal views.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/china-is-the-new-america-part-2

Are you planning to buy or give a Kindle, Amazon.com’s beautifully designed e-reader, this festive season? If yes, you should read this blog post.

Do you live outside the US and plan to get a Kindle? If yes, then you must read the following.

But first, a confession. I don’t have a Kindle. Like you, I too want to have one and that’s why I am looking at its pros and cons. There are many questions that bother me—is it worth it and how does it compare to its competitors, especially the Sony e-reader, to begin with.

That brings us to the nub of this blog. Like you, I too was looking for information on this topic and that’s when I came across these two interesting write-ups on the Kindle experience.

The first one is an essay by Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker (‘A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book’). Like most New Yorker essays, this too is a sprawling piece of American journalism at its best—it runs into nearly 8 pages! So I thought I will glean some relevant points from the essay and present them as easy-to-digest facts for you (if you enjoy reading a piece of fine writing, do click on the hyperlink).

•    The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was grey. And it wasn’t just grey; it was a greenish, sickly grey. A post-mortem grey. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker grey. Dark grey on paler greenish grey was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

•    Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

•    I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested ‘The Bourne Identity’ and a book by Michael Connelly, ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both. Outside, I sat on a bench near L. L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order ‘The Bourne Identity’ wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of ‘The Bourne Identity’. What? What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of ‘The Jewel in the Crown’. There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’, no ‘Remains of the Day’, no ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s ‘In Country’, no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no ‘Swimming-Pool Library’, no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no ‘World According to Garp’, no ‘Catch-22’, no ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, no ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’, no ‘Henry and Clara’, no Lorrie Moore, no ‘Edwin Mullhouse’, no ‘Clockwork Orange’.

•    But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalogue copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little grey screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—eg, the phrase ‘She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms’ is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel ‘Tequila Truth’.

•    …You can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle… Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less grey, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick.

•    Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

I stop quoting from Barker’s article here. Heavy duty stuff? Read the full piece and you will get more painstakingly noted reasons on why the Kindle is great or not so great (yes, I decided to keep the mystery on!).

The second article that I want to mention here is actually a blog post from an India journalist, Rati Chaudhury (‘Kindling my literary taste’). Rati lives in India and she has recently acquired her Kindle for Rs13,000 (about US$280; S$400). She is generally happy about the e-reader: “Its six-inch screen and e-ink format makes the reading experience almost like a real book. You can even bookmark pages and highlight key messages.” And so on.

But she has some complaints too: “Although I am drooling at this gadget yet there are a few things I wish Amazon will correct. Firstly, it has no backlight so it is not possible to read it in the dark. There are no Indian newspapers on Kindle yet, but I hope that will be sorted out soon. Also Web browser is disabled in the international edition.”

What do you think now? Does an e-reader with a sickly grey screen, no backlight, and a defunct (turned off) Web browser interest you? Hmm…I’m still thinking about it but do let me know if you make up your mind.

Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia dot com.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/read-this-before-you-buy-a-kindle

Being in the media industry I’m often asked if we have figured out our media strategy. Well, to be honest, being a journalist, I am not directly involved in the digital strategy of the media company I work for. It’s my publisher and our marketing team who have to square up to the challenge of the digital age: how to monetise content for a readership that wants full access to all our content free of charge?

But to answer the question, I am tempted to bring in media baron Rupert Murdoch into the picture. Even a man as astute as Murdoch is still in the process of figuring out the media strategy in the digital age.

Murdoch accuses Google of ‘theft’

Murdoch, arguably the most innovative publisher and media company owner of our time, recently accused Google of content rustling (Google calls it fair use when it displays news headlines from newspapers all over the world in its Google search results). Google, like many other aggregation sites, gathers headlines on its search engine, usually without paying news organisations for their content.

During a Washington forum on newspapers on Tuesday (1 Dec), Murdoch said the “almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it’s theft.” In fact, the accusation is not new. He has been raising his voice against Google for some time now.

But this time, the media mogul is taking the battle against Google one step further. According to a report in the LA Times, “Murdoch could scare Google into paying, or else lose a huge chunk of his audience. The Australian magnate is searching for ways to stem the haemorrhaging, perhaps by forming a newspaper consortium—such publishers as the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp., and Tribune Co. have already been approached—to charge for distribution online and to portable readers. News Corp. is also reportedly in talks with Microsoft, which would pay News Corp. to prevent articles from being listed in Google, providing their content instead to Microsoft search engine Bing.”

Study: Most won’t pay for newspaper, magazine content online

But not everyone would agree with Murdoch’s approach. The criticism against him has come from people like Seth Godin to Arriana Huffington. Rupert Murdoch has it backwards, said Godin, the marketing guru in his blog. “You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them,” he wrote. “If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.”

Godin’s suggestion is vindicated by the fact that, as a recent Forrester study says, 80 per cent of US consumers would rather skip a news article online if it’s not free.

Forrester Research polled around 4,700 US consumers, 80 per cent of whom indicated they’re unwilling to pay for access to newspaper and magazine articles and other content.

So, doesn’t it mean that charging for content online will be a tough sell?

The study also suggested that catering to the remaining 20 per cent of respondents who are willing to pay for content won’t be a slam dunk either: “This group is splintered in its preferences for payment methods. Eight per cent would like a subscription fee for accessing all online content; another eight per cent would like a subscription for access to content on the Web, in print and via mobile devices. The other three per cent lean towards micropayments, shelling out dough for individual articles.”

The sooner media companies broaden their profit models, the happier they will be

I posed this question to our Fairfax Business Media (Asia) director, Andrew Smart. Taking a step back, Andrew tried to look at the issue in a bigger perspective. “TV used to be free but now cable subscription revenue has been the star performer for Comcast and other broadcast media companies,” he said. “The telephone used to be very cheap, with local calls on a virtually flat fee basis, but now mobile phone calls, SMS and data charges are the star performers for SingTel and other telcos.”

“So pay models are already spreading into online media, initially subsidised by transactions (like brokers bundling media within a brokerage model) or data subscription models (like ThomsonReuters).”

“In the consumer space, people already pay to interact with media like in SMS voting on American Idol and to download the contestants’ songs. So the broader platform is free but the value-added experience for those who want it is paid.”

“Within this transformation and the broadening of the business model, the underlying principles of media remain the same, and editorial integrity is still a key ingredient.  But the sooner media companies broaden their profit models, the happier their staff and shareholders will be.”

Google’s First Click Free programme: Is it the answer?

According to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Google sends online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from their other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free!

Perhaps answering to Murdoch’s anxiety, Josh Cohen, Google’s senior business product manager wrote on the Google News blog on 1 December: “As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both—the two aren’t mutually exclusive. There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable. Today we’re updating one of them, so we thought it would be a good time to remind publishers about some of their options.”

Referring to Google’s First Click Free Programme, Cohen writes: “Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user’s first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request. First, Click Free is a great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay.”

Google has another solution to this problem: “In addition to First Click Free, we offer another solution: We will crawl, index and treat as ‘free’ any preview pages—generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story—that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it’s not cloaking. We will then label such stories as ‘subscription’ in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free.”

These solutions sound workable but as a blogger has pointed out, even with the First Click Free programme, Google is going to keep its core business model intact: “organizing the world’s information without having to pay for any of it, continuing to siphon off the revenues that once kept newspapers alive.”

The interesting thing to see is how Murdoch and other media companies react to Google’s offered solution.

Andrew offers a publisher’s angle on this: “If I had the global clout of Murdoch, I would threaten and beat Google in an attempt to get them to surrender part of their revenue that is related to searches involving my news outlets.”

“Why not push them to pay if you can get it from them? It’s just business,” he argues.

Murdoch has a point too. “Producing journalism is expensive,” Murdoch said in Washington. “When this work is misappropriated . . . it destroys the economics of producing high-quality content.”

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/the-future-of-newspapers

I am not a climate change denier. Climate change is a reality because climate is meant to change. It is a dynamic phenomenon of nature and it has been changing ever since it came into existence.

When we talk about ‘climate change’, we refer to the phenomenon of global warming due to the greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major component of the greenhouse gases.

The question is whether it is the humans that are emitting the excessive carbon dioxide that is polluting the earth and making it an unsustainable place.

For years, this was the main question in the climate change debate: one group blamed the humans, another the sun (the sun argument being that the sun was getting hotter and hence was the main culprit behind the earth’s rising temperatures.)

Proponents of both sides of the argument have been championed and funded by vested interests. The ‘humans being responsible for the climate change’ side has been championed by the green brigade. Some political groups even brand them as “the green fascists” who want “to impose their de-industrialisation agenda to kill people”. The other side, the climate change deniers, are often backed up by the traditional energy—oil and coal—industry.

There are climate change scientists in both camps to argue for or against the motion. The common man was confused, not knowing which side to support. Until Al Gore walked into the picture.

Due to a concerted global media campaign, the climate change sceptics kept losing the ground. Once Al Gore went around the world with his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the room for scepticism shrunk considerably. From AP to the New York Times to CNN, the world’s agenda setting media spoke in one word: Climate change was real and we humans must do something about it! The world’s timid and copycat media repeated what their leaders asked them to print and speak. The global consensus on climate change was thus built.

It didn’t take long for the Nobel Committee in Sweden to award a Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC, the United Nation’s body studying and building global consensus and policies on climate change.

A few months ago, when Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace, I was reminded of Gore’s Nobel. True to my gut feeling, within a few weeks of winning the Nobel, Obama ordered a 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan. More war for peace—the classic Orwellian doublespeak!

Sorry for the digression but I couldn’t help but make the remark.

Once the consensus on climate change was built, the world’s most influential people started using the IPCC to push through their agenda. Kyoto happened. It was decided that all countries of the world will have to cut CO2 emissions and a quota system was developed. That’s when climate change stopped being about climate change.

Copenhagen: About climate or about money?

Weeks before world leaders would meet at Copenhagen in December this year, e-mails from scientists working on data gathering for the IPCC at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, were leaked. The leaked e-mails, among many other despicable malpractices, established that scientists at UEA were tweaking the data to suit the argument that the temperature on earth was rising.

The leaked e-mails created a brouhaha, casting deep mistrust on the science behind the climate change movement. Regrettably, it didn’t change much at Copenhagen. Only Gore had to cancel his ticketed speech.

But that is not my point. No matter what the science says, we all know that greed is not good. As Mahatma Gandhi has said, there is enough on this earth for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed. Unfortunately, in today’s world of globalised corporatism, we live through the constant cycle of consumption and production. We can’t afford a slowdown and it means we have to keep consuming and keep growing. That means more pollution for the earth.

One quick little example: In New Delhi, the government has tried to combat the pollution problem through CNG (compressed natural gas) buses for public transportation. What it achieved in eight years was washed away by the pollution generated by the cars that joined the roads of New Delhi in just one year! But can you ask the Delhiites not to buy cars? That is against the idea of growth.

So, under Copenhagen, countries such as India and China will continue to grow and pollute. So will the developed countries. Only they will have to buy some carbon credits from poor nations where people don’t have enough money to buy cars and run factories. The rulers of poor countries don’t mind this arrangement as long as they get their dirty hands on the moolah! Enter the world of carbon credits and carbon money managed by the World Bank!

Danish text leaked

The leaked “Danish” text, that became available to UK-based newspaper, The Guardian, clearly points out what the world is going to achieve at Copenhagen. The paper reported: “The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol’s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol—the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.”

The text’s main points include:

• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;
• Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;
• Do not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
That’s why it is not surprising that James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate scientist, said “any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.” He is “vehemently opposed to the carbon market schemes—in which permits to pollute are bought and sold—which are seen by the EU and other governments as the most efficient way to cut emissions and move to a new clean energy economy.”

“Hansen is also fiercely critical of Barack Obama—and even Al Gore, who won a Nobel peace prize for his efforts to get the world to act on climate change—saying politicians have failed to meet what he regards as the moral challenge of our age.”

Hansen says climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. “This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues, you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50 per cent or reduce it 40 per cent.”

I don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t agree with Hansen. If we can’t throw the politics and greed out of Copenhagen, then it must fail for the good of the larger humanity.

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/why-copenhagen-must-fail

Since we are reaching the end of this year and Christmas and the holidays are round the corner, I thought I would leave you with a sober thought by talking about a film that looks at spiritualism and technology.

This is the time of the year when God and the glamour of technology come together in a bright, dazzling way. Think of the illuminated streets and shopping malls, the festive spirit, the exchange of gifts and the celebration through various symbols of a great spiritual figure’s birth, a figure who changed the destiny of mankind.

I cannot think of a film more appropriate for this time than Luis Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965). Bunuel (1900-1983), a Spanish-born filmmaker who acquired Mexican citizenship, is considered one of the world’s greatest filmmakers. He worked in Mexico, France, Spain and the United States and made a number of remarkable surreal and philosophical films including Belle de Jour, That Curious Object of Desire, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, among others.

Simon of the Desert is the last film that Bunuel made in Mexico, using Mexican actors. The film, at its 45 minutes length, is incomplete because the producer ran out of money after five reels.

The film is about the main character, Simon, a stylite, played by Claudio Brook. Simon is an ascetic who spends his life on top of a pillar, atoning for his sins, and dedicating his life to the prayer of God.

In the early part of the film, Simon is about a smaller pillar to a taller pillar, a gift from a rich benefactor—the whole episode suggesting “opportunities for professional advancement” even in the realm of renunciation.

When the film begins, Simon has spent six year, six months and six days—666 being the mark of the beast—on his old pillar. His quest for holiness attracts the devil’s attention to him. The devil appears to him in several forms—a beautiful woman carrying a water pitcher, a seductress dressed in a school girlish sailor suit, a young male shepherd with fake curls, a worldly woman with a fancy hairdo and finally a miniskirted dancer in a New York nightclub.

Each time the devil appears to tempt or distract Simon, he recognises him and does not fall prey to his mischief. Until the final scene when this rupture occurs: the worldly woman tries to tempt him and an airplane flying overhead—the only symbol of modern technology in the film so far—seals the deal. In the next and last scene of the film, we see Simon as a suited and booted young New Yorker in a nightclub throbbing with lusty, dancing bodies. There is a live instrumental rock band on stage and the devil tells Simón that the hipsters are dancing a dance called “Radioactive Flesh”. The film ends there.

Since the film remains incomplete, we are not sure what Bunuel intended to convey but in his interviews he has pointed out certain things. To the question that “the devil takes Simon to the twentieth century and brings him to a noisy discotheque”, he replied: “I don’t know. You must remember that the film is not finished…Simon should have ended up on an even taller column, some twenty meters high, next to the sea, where the hierarchy of the church would come to see him. I filmed for only eighteen days. Since the storyline breaks, I had to look for an ending that didn’t have Simon praying atop his column…I was interested in seeing Simon’s reaction when he returns to the world. But the end result was dubious.”

Bunuel was not known for his spirituality and he often invited unfavourable comments from the Vatican on his films. On his belief system, Buñuel, in a 1977 article in The New Yorker, wrote: “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist, either…I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine, ‘I’m an atheist, thank God.’ It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called Mexican Bus Ride, about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It’s guilt we must escape from, not God.”

Therefore, showing the airplane, standing in for technology, as a world transformative phenomenon, even a vehicle of the devil, and the crazy, radioactive flesh dance (allusion to nuclear technology and its inherent menaces) do not necessarily mean that Bunuel was preaching against technology. At best he is ambiguous. “I’m always ambiguous,” he has said. “Ambiguity is a part of my nature because it breaks with immutable preconceived ideas. Where is truth? Truth is a myth…”

Yet Bunuel was aware of the loss of the power of spirituality in humans in the modern civilization. “In fact, holiness counts for very little now,” he said. “But though we are not believers, we can feel that as a loss.”

http://www.mis-asia.com/opinion__and__blogs/bloggers/cinema-and-technology-simon-of-the-desert-1965