Negotiating Culturally Appropriate Data Transfers Part I: Defining the Problem

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface

Introduction:

In this editorial we discuss the need for a browser protocol which would permit content providers and end-users to screen out culturally inappropriate digital material. In later editorials we will discuss how this might be done in ways that facilitate the global exchange of diverse materials via the Internet.

At present this process is done haphazardly and in what amounts to a contested environment. Providers, knowingly or unknowingly, push content at end-users who attempt to block undesirable materials. Blocking is sometimes done by national authorities employing a firewall, sometimes by families or other corporate groups running commercial programs. These approaches, because of their crude methods, invariably deny users access to much unobjectionable material and can deprive content providers of large audiences.

The firewall approach is also one-sided. End users or their governments defend themselves from content they believe to be inappropriate. This process easily politicizes particular events while ignoring the larger questions of defining culturally appropriate and culturally inappropriate content. Examples might include:

  • American attempts to prevent or tax Internet gambling
  • Chinese and American attempts to screen materials that lend themselves to violent attacks on their respective nations
  • German attempts to control the sale of Nazi memorabilia and block access to Nazi propaganda
  • Saudi attempts to block religiously objectionable material

Examples of the conflict between national firewalls and content providers are very easy to find. Above we alluded to issues regarding Nazi regalia [1]. A more recent example involved Chinese authorities and Google [2]. Each of these examples invariably became highly politicized. The search engines Google and Yahoo were caught in the middle [3].

Such crises currently are inherent to the Internet itself. But it is possible to make the filtering process an actual negotiation between provider and end-user. Then the it becomes less a virtual weapons" race between the shields of Internet firewalls and the blunt instrument of pushing all digital materials uncritically to everyone.

We are not, of course, able to propose a panacea. A certain amount of inappropriate content will always be pushed at end-users (Spam and pornography will probably always be with us.). But the current process makes it very difficult to define licit and illicit content. It also ignores local differences in cultural belief systems while it prevents mutually satisfactory solutions.

It is easy to reduce the technical processes that constitute the Internet to very simple terms:

Someplace in the real world there is a computer; on that computer there is digital material. Someplace else there is another computer; its "user" employs a browser to present that material on his or her screen.

But an analysis such as this might be termed "reductionist" by scholars; that is, it so simplifies the digital exchange that essential elements of it are lost or important differences are ignored in individual cases. Such a generalization ultimately becomes so commonplace as to be little more than an obvious statement, and not worth making.

The problem is, that while we have described the Internet as process above, so far as the Internet is concerned, context is everything. The content can range from an illegally copied MP3 file on a computer in Poland or a manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of government A, B, or C, to a graphic of a child being sexually attacked. The viewer may be a scholar in New York, a housewife in Teheran, or a teen-ager in Taiwan.

Culture and the Internet:

Values as to "unobjectionable" and "objectionable" materials occur in a wide range, from individual opinions at one pole all the way to universal human values at the other. That is, I object to demeaning images of my religious leaders; you object to anti-Semitic diatribes; but we all object, insofar as we are "normal," to images of children being sexually attacked. It is thus very difficult to qualify content in more than a very general way as "good" or "bad." The question is, invariably, for whom?

But someplace in the middle, we believe, are the values specific to particular ethnic or national cultures. In some cases, individual variations may be dominant ones; that is, in order to understand the impact of delivering any particular content, we need to know not about the gender, ethnicity, religion, or the age of the end user, but about his or her deeply personal opinions. Such perspectives, of course, may be scattered across populations in no particular density or distribution.

However, if we know about the national or ethnic culture [4] of the end user, we immediately know a great deal about the likely impact of content X upon that user. In effect, the culture of a given group is a "set" of values that will embrace most but not all individual members of it. Furthermore, individuals in a given culture, though they may not fully embrace its values for themselves, are very likely to accept the right of others in that culture to do so.

While remaining aware of individual differences, we can state that a clear awareness of the end user"s culture is the most immediately useful way of understanding the contextual relationship between most individuals in that culture and the digital content being accessed. This is particularly true if the end user is behind a firewall or a filtering device which is itself culturally defined [5].

Even a conditional acceptance of this point, however, still leaves many vexing questions. How, for example, are we to develop a "set" ---or a database---which defines culture at the end-user level? We believe that this problem, while knotty, can be solved. We can begin by discussing cultural commonalities among all human beings, what is often called "Global Civic Culture."

Global Civic Culture

We understand "Global Civic Culture" to be that culture which is defined by our basic humanity; we embrace it because we are human. The Internet has become integral to any discussion of Global Civic Culture because it has facilitated the near-instantaneous sharing of internationally distributed digital materials.

There was a period, prior to the events of 9/11 and the reactions to them, when many thoughtful people saw the Internet as the ultimate tool for the spread of a truly internationally defined Global Civic Culture. For example, it was hoped, the Internet would facilitate truly participatory democracy in such advanced societies as the United States; internationally it would pressure governments that deviated substantially from perceived human norms to accept them for their own wards. It was held by some analysts that these processes eventually would result even in the withering away of some coercive state functions and the weakening of all states as power was both re-defined and re-distributed electronically to shared human audiences [6].

But just as the hope for realizing a universal Global Civic Culture has been effectively negated, or at least postponed, by post 9-11 political events, so is the Internet itself increasingly restricted by commercial or restrictedly nationalistic purposes. Individual nations have improved their filtering of the Internet so as to shape access to content to their own definitions of culturally appropriate materials; the U.S. Congress as of this writing is contemplating the wisdom of controlling access to the Internet by content providers on the basis of their ability to pay for higher or lower speeds.

Conclusion:

In this first part of this series we have tried to do little more than lay out the problem. We believe that a partial solution to it may be found in a systematic assessment of global human values.

In subsequent editorials we propose to discuss how such an assessment can lead us to identify appropriate value sets for different cultural groups. Subsequently we will discuss technical approaches to marrying appropriate value sets in metadata to browser settings so as to permit simultaneous negotiations over culturally appropriate and inappropriate data transfers. For Part II of this series, please go to: "Negotiating Culturally Appropriate Data Transfers: Part II: Creating Culturally Sensitive Value Sets".

References

[1] For a good discussion contemporary to the events and affecting Yahoo and EBay see: BBC News, "Selling a dark past" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/665072.stm

[2] See Venuenet.com "Congress to investigate Google's China decision" at http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2149230/congress-investigate-google

[3] For Congressman Smith"s piece on the issues involved here, see: http://www.house.gov/list/press/nj04_smith/opedChinaMoral.html Smith has made this issue something of a campaign platform and is thus a useful indicator of the politicization of the problems which we are discussing here. Smith manages to castigate not only Google and Yahoo but includes Microsoft and Cisco as well. See also: http://www.house.gov/list/press/nj04_smith/opedgofa.html

[4] We will define culture here as "The total, generally organized way of life, including values, norms, institutions, and artifacts, that is passed on from generation to generation by learning alone" -- Dictionary of Modern Sociology. To our shame, this material came from the least authoritative of commonly utilized WWW sources, Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#Defining_.22culture.22

[5] For a filter structured around Christian beliefs, see: http://christianityonline.com/

[6] See "American Power, Globalism, and the Internet: Editorial Essay" Jeffrey Barlow, http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/editorial.php