Category: Russia

Novoblogika Discussion: Regulating the Blogosphere

Our last day at Interra featured what I expected to become my personal highlight. A public discussion on “regulating behavior in the blogosphere – necessity and possibility” promised a great opportunity to exchange views on censorship. Since we just had – and still have – a huge discussion about internet censorship in Germany, I was eager to learn about the situation in Russia.

On Friday, Marco had already interviewed Ilia Kabanov. While at first planned as an interview on youth participation, the talk soon shifted to freedom of expression in Russia. “At the moment we are safe. But we don’t know what will be tomorrow”, Kabanov summed up the feelings of Russian bloggers.

In other words, this sentence popped up in the discussion as well. While there are cases in which bloggers have had quarrels with the authorities, up to now they could always get out of it safely – except for Savva Terentyev, who received a one-year suspended sentence for promoting the public burning of policemen (well, you could also say it was the punishment for extraordinary public stupidity). But as there are plenty of laws that limit freedom of speech in Russia, the bloggers have to live with the constant threat of being targeted by the authorities in future.

Right at the beginning of the discussion, both me and Ilia Staheev lashed out against all efforts to regulate the blogosphere. This provoked an incident that was both funny and useful. One woman, introduced to me as a professor from one of Russia’s best journalism academies in Moscow, angrily stood up to respond to our claims. My translator summed up the woman’s stance in just one sentence: “Why are you against the state?”

Indeed, neither Ilia nor me are against the state. I had spoken about how the social web means that for the first time there is a truly democratic media sphere, and how this makes it unacceptable that any authority may regulate the blogosphere from above. But obviously, the views expressed by us bloggers were far to liberal for this old school journalist. After speaking up a second time, lashing out against bloggers, she left the room – not without asking not to discuss her stances.

While this is a truly childish behavior, the incident was indeed a lucky one for us. As Ilia later told me, “if we didn’t have this woman in the audience we would have to invite such people”. Which is, as I’ve experienced quite regularly, nearly impossible.

To me, it is especially interesting that the woman as a journalist spoke out so broadly in support of the state. Should not journalism be independent from political authorities? In fact, if it is not, we can’t deem it anything else than propaganda. So why did she say so?

As I said later in the discussion, it is not the state that has to fear bloggers, and neither does media. Simply because we are the state, and we are the media. But elites do. And so, when supporting the state’s role in regulating the blogosphere, saying it was keeping up the order, I think the woman was defending her own position as a part of the journalistic elite.

There is a famous quote by German journalist Paul Sethe: “Press freedom is the freedom of 200 rich people to spread their opinion”. It is the fear of those 200 people that this old school journalist expressed: The fear that they will loose a freedom that is based on a monopoly. And indeed the blogosphere as a part of the democratization of media will lead to a downfall of journalistic elites, just as grassroots democracy would, if implemented appropriately, mean the end to political elites. But anybody who deems freedom of expression worth more than their individual power – and I can’t imagine a good journalist who doesn’t do so – will welcome this change.

From there on, the discussion decreased more and more to become what I would rather describe as a speech by Anton Nossik. The organizers spoke of him as “the most important Russian blogger”. Maybe that’s true. But certainly he would be a great hakawati. Talking for what seemed hours, switching from one topic to the other, lining up anecdotes like pearls on a necklace, Anton lectured audience and discussants. While there was little to say to contradict his positions, intellectual brilliance doesn’t make up for good manners.

In fact, the discussion desperately needed a moderator. That’s especially true because Marco and me always had to wait for the translation (the whole discussion, just as all other events, was held in Russian), making it impossible for us to interject the other participants.

After all, I was rather disappointed of the discussion, especially since most of it was none. Additionally, huge parts of the talk dealt with topics such as the subjectivity of statements deemed offensive. I had hoped for a debate that would center more on the relationship between political and economical powers and bloggers and deal with the measures that bloggers can use to defend themselves against censorship and repression.

Talking to Russian youth

I’m in Novosibirsk to blog about the Forum Interra. Thanks to the Goethe Institut in Novosibirsk that invited me!

Our discussion with Russian bloggers on social media and education also carried a great opportunity to talk to some young Russians about their educational experiences. School time is far shorter here than in Germany, where we have up to 13 years of school education:

“For Russian children the serious side of life begins at age six or seven. Those who enter school only with seven years just have to go to elementary school for three years. Following up to this is, without a change of school, the fifth grade at a secondary school [...]. What’s happening to the fourth grade? It’s only attended by those pupils who have been schooled in at age six.

With the ninth grade the secondary school in Russia ends and with it compulsory education. Most students continue to attend school after passing their exams. Either at a general-education school where after the eleventh they receive a diploma that entitles them to apply for university. Or they move on to a technical school [...] where they receive vocational training and a diploma of equal value after three years.”
– from: Meißner, Barbara and Reuther, Henrike: Glasok

That’s why one of the bloggers we met, who was schooled in when she was just five years old, could attend university at age fifteen. But even those who go to school from on the age of six or seven will be able to go to university when they are seventeen years old. I was the second youngest student in my class and still I had just turned nineteen when I got my Abitur, so this seems quite strange to me.

My first thought when i learned about the low age of Russian high school graduates was how they feel deciding about their future. One girl I talked to told my that she would soon finish her master’s degree in economics and that she “totally didn’t [knew] what to do”. In fact, she explained, many young Russians just take up studies that promise a fast financial gain.

That may also be rooted in their situation. As the girl told me, it is very uncommon to take some time off after graduating from high school. Therefore, young Russians only have about three months to transition from school to university. This change is often combined with a move to a new city as well. One of the bloggers explained to us how some youth who are coming from a small town located in the stark vastness of Siberia enter what seems like a different world when they enroll at a university in some of the bigger cities.

After all, I am happy to have had my 13 years of school in Germany, even though it was often boring and at several times I wished that I had the opportunity to focus more on my interests. But when I finished my eleventh grade, the best time at school was still waiting for me. I had just found blogging then and had also become politically active within the previous months, two experiences that since then have shaped much of my view on the world. At the time when Russian youth have to decide what to do with their lives, I had just started to explore my possibilities.

Novoblogika

I’m in Novosibirsk to blog about the Forum Interra. Thanks to the Goethe Institut in Novosibirsk that invited me!

Marco and me are primarily here for the second edition of Novoblogika, a Siberian bloggers’ gathering. When the event took place for the first time in spring this year, it saw a couple of participants from Germany, among them Markus Beckedahl.

We first met with the Russian bloggers on Thursday evening to introduce each other. The meeting was followed by a session on multimedia in internet mass media, held by RIA Novosti’s deputy editor Nataliya Loseva. I attended the session, but left after around half of it. On the one hand because it was just too hot in the room (something I would never have expected: that I would complain about the heat in Siberia) and admittedly because I was quite tired after the short night following our ride to Tomsk.

But on the other hand, the topic just didn’t seem of any importance to me: Multimedia is nothing that needs to be talked about. In fact, it is just the reality we are living with. While I’m not sure whether I caught everything she was saying since my translator didn’t translate simultaneously, it seemed to me as if Loseva was living in the times around the millennium. She talked about new media as it was regarded ten years ago before the internet’s ability to change our read culture to a read/write culture shifted the focus to social media.

I left the lecture after one and a half hours, when there was still an hour to come. At that point, Loseva started to talk about monetizing multimedia, making the point that up to now, multimedia would bring in money only for mobile content. I’ve never seen it that way: There’s no difficulty in monetizing multimedia content – the difficulty is to make money with content online.

Maybe the different ways of thinking – mine and Loseva’s – can be summarized in two quotes. While she was talking like “content is king”, I prefer Cory Doctorow’s view that “conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Friday we met again with the Russian bloggers, this time to discuss how blogs and other social media can be used for educational purposes. Despite the language barrier – they spoke Russian, we got an English translation – it was very interesting to talk to them.

We both share the experience that social media is used in education only due to the engagement of individual teachers. That’s especially true for high school education. The question for us is how social media can be brought to use in education on a broader level.

My point was that as for the first time the young generation has significantly more knowledge on a relevant topic than their elders the youth have to become teachers themselves. It is not to be expected from teachers of the older generations that they will not only accept, but understand social media well enough to be able to teach it.

That’s because social media is not just another medium. In fact it means a fundamental change in how communication has to be regarded. And while teachers can read up on a new topic, at least the majority will not adopt a new way of thinking.

That’s also rooted in the structure of the education system. The Russian bloggers made a point that the strong role of the state in dictating what is to be taught has a very positive side in that it ended the chaos of the nineties, when after the end of the USSR “every professor taught what he wanted to”. But it also means that the system is even less open for new ideas, not to speak of new ways of thinking.

From there on, our discussion moved to several topics, including the question of what value it is to learn and know “useless” information. At the end, the discussion over different education systems moved to Waldorf schools, so I had the chance to introduce the other participants to my former school form.

Talking about some singularities of Waldorf schools, such as the abandonment of marks, the diverse subjects that include a lot of handcrafting and arts and the focus on working on projects I think I could really make an impression on them. While I’ve never been fully satisfied with my school – after all, it wasn’t paradise – I think that these are very positive approaches that can serve as examples for other schools.

It is also interesting that Waldorf schools do not have headmasters, but are lead by the community of teachers. In a way, their administration is to regular schools what social media is to mass media: instead of hierarchy, there is discussion. Still, I think there is a need to implement concepts that lead away from authority to equality in the lessons as well.

While I’m not falling for the utopia that school could be like a decade-long barcamp, we need to think about educational concepts that suite our times. When social media eliminates broadcasting, when Wikipedia has a higher quality than the Encyclopedia Britannica, then we need to ask ourselves how educational institutions could take them as an example for the power of non-hierarchical organizations.