When I first discovered the internet, the potential the medium held was so huge in my mind that I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept racing about how quickly the entire world would be transformed. While the internet continues to influence our daily life in huge ways, absolute assimilation has taken longer than I expected. I know folks who still don’t know the difference between an email address and a website. Susan Crawford is working to change that and bring everyone up to the 21st century.
Susan Crawford is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the web celebrated each Sept. 22. She’s a law professor in New York City, a member of the ICANN board, and a fellow of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Yale Information Society Project. Susan teaches communications law and cyberlaw, and writes frequently about these subjects on her blog and in published articles. Susan will be a visiting professor at U. Michigan (fall 2007) and Yale Law School (spring 2008) this coming year. On top of all that she plays a wicked viola. OneWebDay, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 5 words or less, describe OneWebDay.
OneWebDay, Sept. 22, is an “Earth Day for the web.”
Why should I care about OneWebDay?
If you’re reading this blog, you’re already deeply clueful. (Thanks, Juxtaviews!) But there are a lot of people out there who don’t understand what makes the internet special (interactivity) and how it can transform human lives. There are a number of threats to the net out there, including: (1) We’re all at risk of taking the net for granted, and treating it like a broadcast medium; (2) many governments around the world are interested in censoring access to internet content; (3) not enough people have adequate online access; (4) too many people are persuaded to be afraid of the internet for various reasons. You should care about OneWebDay because its goal is to create a global constituency that cares about the future of the net.
The web has changed the world in the last ten years; it’s helped families keep in touch, helped people find jobs, brought news close to home, and on and on. Because the web is made of people, it’s up to us to protect and defend it - and not take it for granted.
(BTW, we know the difference between “internet” and “web,” and we chose OneWebDay because it’s more human and approachable.)
The point of OneWebDay is to make the interactive nature of the web visible so we don’t take it for granted. Why do 160 million Chinese people belong to the QQ social network? Why do 183 million people use MySpace? Why do 96% of 20-somethings in Korea spend time in Cyworld? Because humans want to connect - visibly. The web is the very first interactive medium that makes it possible for groups to form and work/play together, visibly. The web is made of people, not machines. It is changing lives around the world, and we have no idea what will happen next. OneWebDay is a 501(c)(3) company that was formed for the express purpose of celebrating the web. Stepping back and appreciating the web takes some education, and we see our role as helping people understand that they are the web.
In a nutshell, a central purpose of OneWebDay is to help people “see” the web. If you care about the future of the net, you should participate.
For a visual overview of OneWebDay, you watch this brief video: http://dotsub.com/films/onewebday/index.php.
Give us the short story about your initial introduction to and subsequent enthusiasm for the Web.
The first online site I ever saw was The Spot - it was a beach house in Santa Monica being shared by a bunch of people. I felt like the back of the computer had fallen off. I’ve been enthralled ever since.
My first job after law school was working for a small law firm in Los Angeles that was one of the first to specialize in computer law. The lawyers all had PCs and used email - this was a huge change from prior ways of doing things. Then, when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1992 I went to a large law firm that was (again) one of the first to have a PC on every lawyer’s desk. For some reason Yahoo! hired me early on as an outside lawyer, and I’ve been involved since then.
The advent of the internet is the key transformative event of my lifetime, and I feel lucky to have been around when things were just getting started. We are still at the very beginning of its history.
What’s the plan for OneWebDay 2007 - parties, conferences, websites, speakers, etc? Basically, what are members of OWD doing to get people excited and help spread the word?
OneWebDay is made up of local physical events (teaching sessions, discussions, speeches) and online collaborations (video describing how the web has changed lives around the world, photo collections celebrating the internet).
Offline: last year, there were offline events of various kinds in about twenty places around the world. This year, 2007, we’re aiming for at least fifty. These offline events can range from sponsoring a teaching event (how to edit a wiki, how to post a photo online etc) to helping a school or town set up a hotspot, to having a panel of speakers talk about the ways the world has been/will be changed by the internet.
We already know that there will be offine events in Los Angeles, Boston, Colombia, Bulgaria, Italy, the Philippines, Poland, Israel, Tunisia, and Egypt. In the next month we’ll hear about more. In New York City, we’ll be in Washington Square Park at 3pm on Sept. 22.
We are working this year with the Internet Archive and the Internet Society, both of which have global affiliations. Blip.tv and AOL are running PSAs for us, and we’re asking youtube to do the same; the American Libraries Association is getting its members involved; Andy Carvin at pbs.org is encouraging K-12 educators to do OneWebDay projects with their students; the Sunlight Foundation is planning something (don’t know what yet); and we’ll be seeing more and more as the month goes on. Please consider doing a OneWebDay event in your town - use the onewebday.org wiki to organize.
Our online focus this year is video - we’re encouraging people to make their own short videos and post them on blip.tv or youtube tagged “onewebday2007″. Suggested topics:
- how the web has changed your life
- how you’d like the web to change the world in the future
- highlights of what you’ve seen online the day you make the video
- your favorite online event ever
- something you’ve done online with other people in other countries
One of the stated goals of One Web Day is to make the Web a “little better” than before. The term “better” is, of course, open to wide interpretation, and ultimately becomes political. For example, I may think Net Neutrality makes the Web and my life better, while the CEO of AT&T may think differently. Is the organization neutral as to what makes the Web ‘better’?
We have been careful not to take political positions as an organization. Like Earth Day, the point is to encourage other people to use the day for their own purposes, while keeping the central themes of participation/interaction/community building in place. We can’t control this, and we’re not trying to. The point, again, is to create a global constituency that can rise up to defend the web when needed locally. We’re suggesting that you can make the web “better” by leaving part of yourself online, because the web is made of people.
Not to regurgitate a theoretical cliche, but Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”. Is One Web Day a celebration of the Web, or are we really celebrating the liberal and democratic values that the Web facilitates (or even imposes on us), such as community, transparency, democracy, inclusion, freedom of speech, etc.?
We’re really asking people to step back and reflect on the impact the web has had on their lives. This is more about human agency and transformation than anything else.
What are the major obstructions to a “better Web” in your opinion? What areas should we focus on?
In thinking about how to use OWD for your own purposes, it seems to me (personally) that you should keep in mind that these obstructions are different in different parts of the world. For some people, just getting access is an obstacle. For others, it’s highspeed access. For others, it’s symmetric access (uploading and downloading). Censorship/gatekeepers of all kinds are concerns, particularly at the infrastructure layer, all over the world.
It seems to me that people are already aware of the power of the Internet. Do the folks at One Web Day plan to move beyond awareness and into action?
You’d be surprised! Someone told a friend of mine recently that she didn’t go online because she didn’t like “mass media.” I think we have a huge educational mission that will take a while to work through. The web is not the same as a telephone, or television, but a lot of people around the world don’t understand that.
The Web has obvious benefits, but there are also many concerns about the erosion of privacy, ever-increasing security costs, and unwanted public attention that go hand in hand. There’s also the current controversy surrounding NSA data mining and warrant-less surveillance. The Web in all its democratic glory could also pave the way for an electronic Big Brother scenario. What are your thoughts on some of these issues?
My personal thought about these issues is that every medium is used in piratical ways at the outset. If we build things to protect ourselves against piracy, we’ll be shooting ourselves in the foot — we’ll miss out on longterm benefits in favor of short-term fears. I am quite concerned about the fear-mongering about the internet that goes on in the press, and OneWebDay is an attempt to create some good news in response. We’re just at the beginning of the internet’s history, and we’ll eventually figure out a good balance between privacy and security, but the bigger risk now is overdoing lock-down control in order to manage all possible hysterical fears of government or industry. Bad legislation gets introduced every year, all over the world. Now, when it comes to the NSA scandal, that’s one I’d put in the “rule of law” category - we need *good* legislation and effective enforcement to counteract the tendency of the current administration to ignore legal limits.
If someone doesn’t plan on participating in a OneWebDay event, how else can people help support the cause?
Post a video and tag it onewebday2007. Post a picture, post a blog post - as long as you tag it, it will be found around the world and awareness will continue to grow. Leave a blog post on onewebday.org!