Author: Kevin Donovan

Much has been made about the iPad as a consumptive, rather than creative, device. Some, including law professor Tim Wu at a recent New America event, have voiced concern that it heralds the end of a golden era of user-generated content. But to truly understand the importance and impact of user-generated content – including on the traditional media that Clay Shirky has recently argued are fatally too complex to survive – we must have better measurement of the phenomenon. Without reliable data and sensible comparative metrics, it is impossible to say if we have even experienced a golden age of open creative possibility.

For example, nearly two years ago in response to Shirky, Nick Carr bristled at the idea that the Web was the necessary component for creative production, participation and sharing. According to Carr, the people he knew back before the Web were also creating – writing, photographing, drawing, constructing and volunteering. This is undoubtedly true, but because technology did not enable the inexpensive recording, archiving, sharing and finding of this creativity, it went largely unnoticed. Of course, cheaper technology almost certainly does enable more creative production, but how much is hard to say.

When Shirky notes that an amateur video of two children has garnered more views than American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and the Superbowl combined, it is comparing apples and oranges. A minute video hardly competes with the Superbowl for eyeballs; certainly the Internet has opened opportunities to competitors to the Superbowl, but let’s compare those. The problem is, we don’t currently have the categories and metrics necessary to make sense of the rise (and potential fall) of creation. Some people are trying to create quantify the impact of blogs on the news cycle, but in regards to other media types, we seem to be ignoring the problem and living off anecdotes. So, how can we move ahead with better metrics for user-generated content and what should those metrics be?

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In recent months, a number of folks have argued that the arrival of high-speed bandwidth in Africa represents not an opportunity for economic growth, but a dangerous threat to the world. According to these Western pundits who are, incidentally, often promoting their cybersecurity services, computers and connectivity in Africa either pave the way for terrorists to unleash cyber-attacks or for botnet operators to gather millions of unprotected machines into their control. Although we’ve spent considerable time debunking the hysteria around cyberwar, this new version of the meme is even more unfounded.

Worrying that Africa is going to start producing top-notch hackers in any great quantity seems pretty absurd, when we’re talking about a continent where basic literacy, not to mention programming prowess, is a challenge. When Franz-Stefan writes in one of the articles above, that “skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet cafe in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo” will create the world’s biggest botnets, he shows that he has little understanding of those “slums.” For starters, electricity is intermittent enough to make cyberwar a sputtering failure. Secondly, although there are pockets of terrorists on the continent, by and large, elsewhere terrorists have access to far better finances and bandwidth than their comrades in Mogadishu. The fact that those terrorists haven’t used the Internet for these types of attacks with any regularity suggests that they place far more faith in tried-and-true methods of terrorizing, and there is every reason to believe that those in Africa will be the same.

Finally, as Miquel Hudin points out, it is ridiculous (and very likely offensive) to think that Africans are any more likely to keep their PCs insecure than anyone else. An American or European who points to Africa as the source of infected botnet computers is wildly hypocritical considering the enormous number of insecure computers that wealthy, educated Westerners have in their homes and offices. It seems quite unlikely that African computers are any more insecure than elsewhere.

Frantic articles painting Africa as just another threat, especially with regard to a great opportunity for the continent – connectivity – are reckless and miss both on-the-ground context and level-headed responses to the challenges of the continent.

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