Among all the current trends that are presently shaping the future of the Internet – the copyright revolution, the redefinition of cybercriminality, the dilemma of privacy on social networks, to name a few- there is one that has been underestimated and should be thoroughly reconsidered: the revolution of content. The ongoing euphoria towards social networks (Mark Zuckerberg has just become Time Magazine’s 2010 Man Of The Year) and the recent global trauma caused by Cablegate have played against the exposure of other major trends of New Media that really deserves equal attention.

The revolution of content is clearly one of those.

There is much to say about it but the case of Google speaks volume about the discomfort and concern characterizing the debate about how mass info is and will be apprehended by the system.

The One Trillionth Page Syndrom: When Quantity Prevails Over Quality

In 2008, Google announced it had indexed its one-trillionth page, and that was not going to stop. The new record indexation was presented as a positive evolution, the rationale behind it being that each new page indexed was a new step towards progress . However, though they presented the indexation of their trillionth page as a success, Google engineers themselves realized how monstrous the web had become.

In fact, in its blog, the web search giant claimed its engineers “stopped in awe” when they realized how big the web had become, after the index hit the trillion mark, with the web growing by several billion every day.

« This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States,” Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj wrote in the blog.

Going a step further, the same engineers also recognized that the number of pages they had indexed and keep indexing is probably not the best yardstick by which the progress of the Internet should be measured. The idea is quite simple: indexing new pages does not reflect any improvement since that is an intrinsic characteristic of the system where pages- with no regard to the quality of their content- add up mechanically.

« So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all. Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a new page. »

So, why has Google boasted about that indexation if among the best engineers working for the company, some overtly expressed their concern about it claiming the link between quality and quantity was not proven at all? As Vinton Gray Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet and the inventor of the  TCP/IP Protocal put it once in a famous metaphore, the good news about the Internet is that “the kid is growing” and the bad news about the Internet is that the “kid is growing”.

At the same time that the Internet grows, it Achilles’ Heel gets more exposed too. Therefore, the fact that the Internet is growing is neither good news, nor bad news. That’s purely factual. But what is inauspicious is to realize that the creator has lost control over its creature and that is threatening quality on the web.

“Ninety-five percent of the universe is stuff we don’t understand,” Cerf told WebProNews anchor Abby Prince Johnson.

Is the dice cast? Has the breakpoint been reached already or is it still possible to regain control on content?

To answer this question, the study of how access to music (songs and tunes being the content) has evolved since the far-west style of the democratization of the access shed some light and should certainly be set as an example of what should be done in the future to perpetuate good content and avoid poor ones in other fields.

How Music Content Has Survived The Napster Era:  learning from our mistakes.

I remember the 1998-2002 period when, at that time, the big thing for teenangers and more generally Internet users was the possibility through peer-to-peer opportunities and pirate interfaces to download tons  of music for free. I was impressed.

That was a revolution. It seemed like a new era of freedom had started. Music choices would never be burdenned by economic constraints anymore. I fully took advantage of it, and so did everyone around me.

However, what first seemed to be an incredible step further for the democratization of arts & cultures soon became a nightmare for the music lover I had always been. People would see music quantitatively.  A sentence I still remember hearing over and over again was: “how many tunes do you have?” or “how many weeks of music do you have?” That was the idea, the more music you had the cooler you were.

It didn’t  matter if you could realistically think of  hearing all that music in your lifetime. It didn’t matter if you could list all the music you had. All that mattered was “how many”. And what had to happen just happened.

After a few months,  people around me started to have wild music libraries with hundreds of thousands of untamed playlists . A non-negligible portion of those tunes had not been properly downloaded and became amputated songs. Another significant number of those were untitled or just labeled “song 1”, “title 7”.

Not to mention the poor-quality of almost all the songs, due to the alteration caused by peer-to-peer liaisons. What is more, it was not surprising to find in one’s own library unknown songs that had nonetheless been downloaded.

This era of disillusioned freedom should have given the alert to a system where quantity and easy access started to prevail over quality and selectivity. Artists were not powerful enough to have the tide reversed but collectively, with the help of their majors, they started the change.  Governments followed suit.

Through huge media campaigns and legal packages, it indeed started to change. People realized how detrimental to music incommensurate and illegal downloading could be, and eventually came to the idea that having all the music one wants in a legal framework provided the payment of a small fee had, at least, three major positive consequences: first, it would protect the music industry which, in turn would keep producing talents; second, the downloaded music would be of high-quality and third, it would force them to really select what they really want.

First-In First-Out, The music industry was definitely the very first place where content were threatened and then rescued.

Offering someone free water at home for one’s lifetime should not be an incentive to leave the tap open 24/7. Free water doesn’t mean drinking water and people should underdstand that it is always better to pay a small charge for clean and drinking water rathen than have it for free at any quality.

Purpose believes that solutions to crises of the 21^st century require global policy shifts and tremendous consumer change. By mobilizing movements of people, online and off, Purpose is helping the green and social economy, as well as major brands, impact global problems.

The creators of Purpose, Jeremy Heimans and David Madden, have already experienced success in the ‘movement entrepreneurship’ world, founding the global movement Avaaz.org and the Australian political movement GetUp.org.

Avaaz, which means voice in many languages, was launched in 2007 with a mission to organize international citizens to take action on critical global issues. Whether the battle is against corruption, poverty, conflict or climate change, Avaaz’s internet model allows thousands of individuals to be forged into a collective and powerful force. Campaigning in 14 languages, with core teams on 4 continents and thousands of volunteers, Avaaz sets out to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform policy decisions. Currently Avvaz.org has over 5.5 million members.

Based in Australia, GetUp.org is an independent, community advocacy organization that facilitates Australians to get involved in key political issues and take strategic, coordinated action. With international recognition and praise, GetUp has more members than all of Australia’s political parties put together.

Purpose, based in New York, is creating “21st century movements”. Working with some of the leading players of the green and social economy, Purpose is helping movements to scale and mobilize around progressive causes.

An example of such a movement is ‘Global Zero: A World Without Nuclear Weapons’. Led by Queen Noor, Richard Branson, over 100 world leaders, and endorsed by President Obama, Global Zero’s goal is to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. Working with Purpose, Global Zero is pushing the issue of nuclear disarmament to the top of international agendas.

I spoke with James Slezak, who leads Purpose’s work on the sustainable economy. James is motivated by the belief that for the green movement to be successful major sectors of the economy must be rebuilt:

“In the green space the goal is to shift the ways we do things, the economy. This means making less, as well as changing what we make. What is also crucial is shifting demand away from unsustainable products to sustainable ones.”

James’ key projects include building a global movement to support the deployment of electric vehicles, as well as renewable power.

James and his team launched helloelectric.org, a strategic movement to get electric cars on roads faster. This movement demonstrates to society at large that viable alternatives to fossil fuel cars are now available, and also channels enthusiasm for the necessary transition. James is concerned that if electric cars are not trusted from their initial launch they will fail, and there will be no other realistic way for countries like America to lose their oil addiction.

Purpose is dedicated to creating a consumer movement to lay the groundwork for the transition to electric cars. The initial goal is to give populations the opportunity to demonstrate their need for electric cars, so that car companies can target sales in these communities, and increase confidence of investors in the technology.

To achieve this, Purpose is having conversations with government municipalities, electric car industry groups, and working closely with Project Get Ready.  Project Get Ready, a non-profit initiative of the Rocky Mountain Institute, is working with numerous partners and technical advisers to help cities develop plug-in vehicle infrastructure and introduce electric cars.

Purpose is also talking to car rental companies and taxi services looking to transfer some of their fleet to electric cars.

This dynamic dialogue of governments, private companies, and non-profits is geared towards sharing ideas and best practices to help cities make the transition to electric cars:

“The benefit of having so many people and like minded groups working together is that you can cross pollinate ideas, to see what works and what doesn’t. Having so much experience is one place also enables you to create benchmarks.”

James explained that to combat the major environmental and economic problems the world currently faces we must rebuild the energy sector and eradicate carbon emitting power sources. Turning the roads of the world electric will be a key strategy to achieving this, and Purpose will continue to drive this movement.

As international citizens looking for a brighter future, let’s help them get the pedal to the metal.

Arguments span from accusations that Assange is a terrorist who belongs in jail, to the idea that can free the world from lies and conflict.

Sadly, few seem to argue for the middle path.

Why we need Wikileaks

As the past decade has shown us we do need organizations like Wikileaks. When democratic leaders go to war on false grounds and keep vital information hidden from the public, then, clearly, there is a democratic win in having an organization that can notify the public the way Wikileaks does.

Through its disclosure of classified documents, Wikileaks has given citizens important insights into state secrets and helped fight the trend to over classify government information.

“Wikileaks is enabling people to improve democratic accountability. That’s valuable to a democracy,” says Quint Hendler, staff writer for Columbia Journalism Review.

His opinion is supported by Alexander Hotz, who is Digital Media Associate at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

“Even in the US, sources are not entirely safe from outing or prosecution. Wikileaks provides a leaking platform, which is safe, secure and anonymous. I think that’s nothing short of revolutionary.”

… And a Critical Mindset

Yet it seems that caution and healthy skepticism towards Wikileaks may also be beneficial.

Although a democracy needs someone to blow the whistle on governments, it also needs for people to be critical when an organization, whose main objective is to promote transparency, is itself an extremely closed system.

“We are watching seismic events prompted by information from unknown sources, selected by unknown curators, paid for by unknown funders,” says Anne Nelson, Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Her opinion is supported by Hendler who adds:

“It would be nice if Wikileaks were a better run and more transparent organization. At the moment, there is room for improvement.”

Further querying the methods of Wikileaks is the fact that the organization relies on framing to shape people’s perception of the material it discloses.

An obvious example of this is the military video “Collateral Murder,” disclosed in April, showing soldiers killing civilian Iraqis. Although the video certainly qualified to be a matter of public interest, Wikileaks was criticized for editorializing by adding a value-laden description of the content, focusing on a limited part of the video and giving it a very subjective title.

“It was definitely intended to be viewed in a certain way,” says Hendler. However, he does believe that Wikileaks subsequently toned down the editorializing effort.

Still, the organization does not refrain from giving its own opinion on the documents it releases.

“Much of Assange’s rhetoric suggests that Wikileaks has an agenda. The organization is clearly anti-Iraq war and hostile to US foreign policy. That bias – even if you agree with it – is a reason for skepticism,” warns Hotz.

A Powerful Underdog

The increased influence Wikileaks calls for a more nuanced view of the organization. In addition to being an advocate of openness, Wikileaks is also a gatekeeper because the organization single-handedly chooses what information to publish and how.

According to Nielson this is problematic because Wikileaks does not provide us with the same transparency and fact-checking ability as the press.

“The legal framework and safeguards for the print media have been built up over several hundred years,” she says, “Now the Internet presents us with a ‘Wild West’ where we don’t always understand the long-range implications of rapidly evolving events as they occur,” she says.

“The public shouldn’t trust anything Wikileaks releases as gospel unless the information is fact checked by journalists or academics,” Hotz notes, “To Wikileaks’ credit, nothing it has published has proven false.”

Wikileaks is trying to promote a world with total transparency. However, in its attempt to do so, it reproduces the exact same practices it’s trying to fight: Though promoting transparency, the organization itself is secretive about its operations and to expose governmental manipulation, it relies on editorializing information.

Nevertheless, this does not justify any attempt to prevent Wikileaks from leaking information that can strengthen democracy.

Similarly, the increased power of Wikileaks’ does not reduce our need for the organization. It does, however, highlight the need for us to assess Wikileaks critically.

With the organization’s multiple roles as transparency advocate, gatekeeper and powerful agenda setter, the question arises; who is to blow the whistle on Wikileaks?

I was so surprised to read that the Obama administration (and Obama himself !) called Wikileaks a criminal organization. Logically speaking, if Wikileaks is a criminal organization, then the New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Guardian are too (they have been working with criminals) and should be blamed for complicity. Is this relevant or just ludicrous ? The problem here is not WikiLeaks, it is about the “politics of naming” that should force those who lead those policies to be consistent from the beginning to the end. Amateurism…

I was surprised to hear that the US State Department has required all its staff and employees not to read the disclosed documents. Not only does this information sound like a revival of old forms of conscience censorship, but it is also so ridiculous given that the State Department still call those documents “confidential” and “Top Secret”.

I was surprised by French Minister of Telecommunications Eric Besson saying this week-end that he wants to take action to try and block Wikileaks from being hosted by French Server/Host Owni on the Internet. The Internet is so liquid and volatile that any attempt to block a website’s content from being hosted by another website could only be  a waste of time: if Besson succeeds, no wonder then that Wikileaks would always manage to  be hosted by another guy.

Why are our officials so incompetently appointed? The problem here is not WikiLeaks but the lack of though and judgment of some people applying “real life” measures to what should be once and for all understood as a complex new digital age.

I was very surprised to receive an e-mail email from OSA (Office of Students Affairs) sent to SIPA’s entire body warning students not to discuss the wikileaks fiasco in any online forum, lest students interested in pursuing careers within the State Department would put their future in jeopardy. This directive seems odd considering that last year, the head of the State Department’s new e-Diplomacy was talking at SIPA. It was about need-to-share and transparency policies…

My only consolation last week came from T.Friedman’s new Op-Ed in the New York Times. The author wrote a fiction piece called « From Wiki China » where he imagines : « What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? ».

A Must Read. Enjoy !

Founded on August 24^th, 2009, M.A.L.I[i] is a group of thirteen Moroccan citizens who present themselves as staunch advocates of individual and civil liberties aiming at fostering the debate on Individual liberties and civil rights in Morocco.

“We all love our country and that’s why we want it to improve in the field of individual liberties”, explains M.A.L.I Co-Founder Betty Lachgar.

The ambitions of M.A.L.Is go beyond words. In fact, M.A.L.I members are rather seeking to organize coup-de-poing happenings to destabilize the country’s most sacred conservatisms and then start the debate.

“ In this respect, we have decided to start a struggle against intolerance, power abuse, socio-religious inquisition and abusive laws” adds Psychoterapist Betty Lachgar.

And that is exactly what they did.

Aware that Islam is the most volcanic taboo in Morocco’s society, M.A.L.Is did not choose provocation deliberately.  What they were bent on doing was to act as the mirror of “the provocative contradictions of Morocco’s social, religious and institutional fabric.”

“We wanted to perform a symbolic act to point out the very contradictions of Morocco’s institutional backdrop. In fact, while Morocco’s constitution guarantees freedom of Worship, article 222 of Morocco’s criminal code still condemns anybody presumably of Muslim belief to a six-month sentence to jail” argues Co-Founder Zineb El Rhazoui, 27.

The Butterfly Effect

At first glance, M.A.L.I appears as one of the million movements locally struggling for the advancement and improvement of individual liberties. So far, so good. Nothing new under the sun.

However, absent social networks, what happened in Morocco on September 13^th, 2009 could have gone totally unnoticed. And that’s what makes M.A.L.I so revolutionary.

The idea is quite simple to understand. Aware that their low weight and high powerlessness as a 13-member group is a disheartening liability, M.A.L.Is have mostly relied on Facebook as a stepping stone to spread over their ideas.

How Could a 13-people picnic in the small city of Mohammedia, Morocco set off a tornado in the highest ranks of Morocco’s authorities, hit the headlines of  Le Monde and El Mundo, and arouse the ire of Human Rights Watch?

At The Beginning Was Facebook.

The conception, description and pubilicity of the un-fasting happening all started on M.A.L.I’s Facebook page.

What first started as a mild and cordial discussion about religion and society evolved to a more and more tensed, aggressive and sometimes violent exchange between those who supported the initiative and those who condemned it with the utmost vehemence.

Choosing to compare the insignificance of the incident itself with the huge consequences it had and still has as the yardstick by which the success of the operation should be assessed, one would doubtlessly call it a success. Let’s have a look.

The Media

On the local level, the story hit the headlines of all daily and weekly news magazines such as Tel Quel: “They Did It!”

On the international level, Spanish Newspaper EL Mundo’s headline best encapsulated the discrepancy between the incident and its irrational consequences: “In Morocco, 100 Policemen against 10 Sandwiches”.

NGOs

“We should not, in the name of our Muslim heritage, accept that people be condemned only because they express a different opinion” argues Khadija Rouissi, President of Bayt Al Hikma, one of the local NGOs which supported M.A.L.I’s intiative.

“They started the debate, and that’s very positive” adds AMDH President Khadija Ryadi.

On the international level, on September 19^th, Human Rights Watch called on the Moroccan authorities to cancel any charge against M.A.L.I members. A camouflet for a country that has always been boasting about being one of the most advanced democratic Muslim country in the world.

The Internet: Facebook as a facade and forums as ramifications

Facebook has been essential for M.A.L.I.  They were three important phases.

First, the creation of a Facebook group of 13 admins, a couple of clicks, some pictures, a description of the group, and the weapon was ready.

The second phase was impulsed by the creation of an event, the “symbolic picnic”, which made the group grow from 13 people to 200 ones, a sufficient critical mass to spark a small buzz prior to the event.

The third phase is still going on and it is about how the Facebook page beneficiated from the incident post-euphoria. The two groups now have more than 2,500 members. Though this number is incomparable to what we generally witness with NGOs in Western countries, it is still a lot for a country where Internet accessibility, literacy and fear of retaliation are still serious issues.

As for forums[ii], they have been playing a satellite and shelter role. Among them, Bladi has been the most active one.

Recently, In July 2010, the famous American blog Freethought devoted a 2,000-word piece on the story and its consequences.

Speaking in absolute terms, the fact that 13 people stubbornly decided to eat publicly during Ramadan 2009 in Morocco should have remained an insignificant and marginal incident. Yet, owing to the very special modus operandi chosen by the “dissident” movement to make their act go viral and start an unprecedented media buzz going beyong the borders of Morocco, what happened that day should be given the utmost attention and be construed as a major and fundamental change in the way religion and society dynamics are and will be apprehended in Morocco.

Now the Pandora box is open and there’s nothing to do to reverse the tide.

[ii] Forums perfectly illustrate Professors Keck and Sikkink’ arguments (Activist Beyond Borders, 1998)about the power of transnational networks metaphorized by the « boomerang effect »: the idea that a local group can « send » a boomerang (ask for help through the internet for example) to a group acting abroad and have the later inform and put pressure on its own local environment which, the authors believe, will in turn help the foreign group that asked for help in the first place (they « send back » the boomerang).

What is the danger of a single story?

Chimamanda Adichie explains it well. When she started to write, Adichie explains that, though she was living in Nigeria, a country that she had never left at that time- all her characters were blonde and blue-eyed people who would eat apples, drink ginger beer and always talk about the weather. While Nigerians would rather eat mangoes than apples, drink water than Ginger Beer and never be amazed at the sun coming out, Adichie explains that she couldn’t imagine writing about anything else that the very context which composed all the literature that made her want to be a writer. And that literature was purely white-dominated.

Now, Can we extrapolate Chimamanda Adichie’s idea to new digital social networks ?

I believe so. Let’s take the example of Facebook. Is facebook dangerously promoting a “single story”?

When one signs up for a new account, one is requested to fill some elementary boxes which-it is assumed- is the best way to introduce oneself to the world: first name, last name, pictures, friends, hobbies, interests, education, marital status, religious beliefs etc.

It is true that you can choose not to show all of this information, but what is very intriguing is to notice that there is no other way to introduce yourself to the rest of the world. Therefore, it can be argued that people who are not used to this way of presenting themselves are discriminated against.

Ask children in rural Kenya working with their parents in community fields what their hobbies are, I’m not sure you’d get answers such as “photo”, “horse-riding”,”bird watching”.

Ask people from Atlas mountains in Morocco to talk about their education or say a few words about the marital status. What answers would you get, if you ever get them, let alone in English?

In many cultures, it is obscene, taboo or at least unusual to ask these kind of things.

Therefore, it seems that new digitals social platforms are mostly targeting urban people from urban megalopolises while claiming their goals is to reach out to everybody throughout the world.

While they say they want to narrow the world’s digital divide by providing a one-size-fits-all platform allowing anyone, on equal footage, to enjoy equality of numeric opportunities, it seems that those platforms are rather widening the gap between those living in the world’s most important urban centers who can now better interact socially through the use of such platforms and those who just still cannot.

Last week, Chinese authorities arrested Cheng Jianping (online alias of Wang Yi) and sentenced her to a year-long labor camp for “disturbing social order” — or more specifically, for retweeting a satirical message about attacking Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

The original message that Cheng reposted was from her fiance, joking about recent protests in China in which some Chinese smashed Japanese goods. Her fiance wrote, “Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago … It’s not a new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you’d immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion.”

Cheng retweeted the above, adding to it, “Angry youth, charge!”

According to statements from Amnesty International to Reuters, her tweet was retweeted by only three people. The group also stated that she may be “the first Chinese citizen to become a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet.”

The director for the Asia-Pacific within Amnesty, Sam Zarifi, added, “Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression.”

Though Cheng may be the first arrest on the basis of a single satirical tweet, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen China crack down the whip on the use of social networks and media. The most popular example may be that of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his low-level activism and use of media to speak up against the Chinese government.

Just a few days ago, the organizers of the Chinese Blogger Conference — started in 2005 — were forced to cancel the annual event due to pressure from authorities. The venue was announced just four days before the two-day conference, but the venue’s owners reneged the location’s use for the conference after being pressured by authorities.

Blogs, social networks, and other mediums used for information sharing have been harshly regulated in China. There are few avenues by which users can still voice themselves to some extent. A Twitter microblogging equivalent, Weibo, was launched in China after the Twitter ban but posts are closely monitored by Chinese government. Again, programs and companies like Tweetdeck also allow for a backdoor entry way to reach the banned mediums. The Amazon Kindle seems to be popular as well, as the e-book technology gives people a way to connect to Facebook.

It’s interesting to see how social media and networking will continue to unfold and develop — or not — in China.

Why Special?  Well, Inspire is special because it is nothing short of the official Al-Qaeda’s online magazine, which « surfaced with frank essays, creatively designed imagery and ominous terror tips », write CNN journalists Joe Sterling and Mohammed Jamjoon.

The first issue of the magazine, which was posted in July 2010, clearly announced the type of target the Jihadi editors were looking for: provide bomb instructions and offer English translation of Osama Bin-Laden speeches to young American and British readers.

One month Ago, in October 2010, the magazine issued its second edition in which various articles encourage terror attacks on U.S. soil, suggesting that followers open fire at a Washington, D.C. restaurant or use a pickup truck to “mow down” pedestrians.

Unaware of what that magazine was all about in the first place, my firs read was really boring: The magazine looked like one of the million tasteless humoristic magazines that blossoming websites and humor forums are offering on the net on a monthly basis.

In the same vein as the world famous video of Ahmad the Dead terrorist , reading the magazine first gave me the impression of a new humoristic attempt to make fun of terrorists –their sign language, their beards and clothes, their solemn tone when they speak, their mottos, expressions and gestures.

Am I exaggerating it using “humoristic” as an adjective to describe my first impression reading the latest October edition of the magazine? Judge by yourself:

In an article called “The Ultimate Mowing Machine”, editors explain how readers should proceed: “To achieve maximum carnage, you need to pick up as much speed as you can while still retaining good control of your vehicle in order to maximize your inertia and be able to strike as many people as possible in your first run”.

Going a bit further, there are some key lessons one should take away.

First, Social Internet has become an unavoidable marketing tool and an inevitable means of communication, whether you are an individual blogger, a profit company, a non-profit organization or a Jihadist group.

Second, the alleged depravation of the western world as always described by Al-Qaeda is not that “bad” as the terrorist organization does not hesitate to use some of its characteristic features when it can benefit from them.

Last but not least, If we take seriously the impact of such a magazine on “weak and influential” people living in English-speaking countries targeted by Al-Qaeda, it seems that the undoubtedly positive improvement represented by social networks and Web 2.0 could play as the Free West’s Achilles Heel: augmenting its general well-being and at the same time, increasing risk exposure to Enemies of Freedom.

Besides the wild beauty of antique Habana, the marvellous white-sand beaches of Cayo Largo, the static colonial touch of Trinidad and the “revolucion” spirit surrounding Cienfuegos, « el pueblo recolucionario », what strikes you when you travel in the largest island of the Caribbean is the almost total absence of the internet.

No matter where you are in Cuba -in a provincial pueblo or in Downtown Habana- looking for a decent Internet connexion is as difficult as looking for a 54 Ford in New York City.

However, if you wake up early and pull yourself together, you may find a place where they “offer” Internet access. When you’re a tourist, you can go to hotels. Not all of them have those services but some do.

Now, what happens when you find the right place and want to get started ?   Like any other usual western tourist, you want to quickly check your e-mails, send a sweet message for a friend’s birthday, update your facebook status to “Having so much fun in Cuba!” and, just in case, have a look to the details of your return flight.

Could you reasonably do that? Well, unless you have ten hours to spend there and a lot of money to lavish, you won’t be able to do that.  Connections are so slow, and the Internet costs you $8 an hour.

With no exaggeration, I’d say that you’d use a quarter of that hour to open gmail, another quarter to write and send ¾ e-mails. With the remaining half-hour, if it’s your day of luck and the connection does not crash all of a sudden, you may open the New York Times and probably read two articles before the final countdown appearing on the bottom-right corner of your screen kindly lets you know you have 59 seconds left to skim through your third article.

An hour had passed, $8 gone, and you only did what you normally do in 10 minutes. Stay calm and keep walking. You’re in Cuba.

That being said, my trip to Cuba was an amazing opportunity to compare the two systems – the Free West and The Tropical Communism- through the prism of Digital Age, Web 2.0 and Social Networks.

It is so different and so similar at the same time.

Social networks perfectly function in Cuba, only they do not happen on the Internet. The best example I can come up with relates to finding places where to stay when my friend and I would arrive in new cities. In New York City, Paris or London, you do things on the net, you book and tell your cab the address before showing the hotel receptionist your e-booking reservation. And if you want to go further, you go to some travel forums beforehand to ask for advice or ask your friends whether they know of someone able to put you up.

In Cuba, it’s different, but as efficient.

You talk to the first guy you meet on the street about the best way to find a place to stay (think of a forum on the net), and that guy send you to another person who knows somebody who has a “casa particular” (think of links that redirect you to the right person).

If the casa is free, you just stay there, if not, the owner of the casa (who you added as friend…ring a bell?) would call all his friends (think of creating an event on facebook) until someone has a free room for you (it works like craigslist).

Well, some would say you have to give those guys propinas (tips), but is the Internet connection your use from your Manhattan home free for you?

Some others would contend that the guy you ask for the room may take advantage of the situation and try to sell you postcards of the Che or fake cigars, but aren’t you all the time exposed to adds and scams on the Internet?

I know my point here is debatable, but I sincerely never had the impression that Cubans were missing a lot of things because they could not really access the Internet.

The capacity human beings have to adapt to any context is formidable. The famous example when it comes to Cuba relates to their cars: how can these guys still manage to have 70-year-old cars still function? Well, when you know that you can’t have a new one, you find a way to make the old one works…

The same applies to social networks. They make do with what they have, their tactility, smartness and resourcefulness.

Cubans are much more than poor victims of a repressive and dictatorial regime, they are some sort of pre-modernity geniuses who always find their find through resourcefulness, smartness and tactility.

In this YouTube promo video, a book-loving ape tries to teach a tech-savvy donkey about a “curious object” he calls a book. Flat and rectangular, with a hard cover and soft inside, it baffles the donkey:

What do you have there? the donkey asks.
It’s a book, says the ape.
Can you scroll down?
Nope. You turn the page. It’s a book.
Can you blog with it?
No, it’s a book.
Well, can it Tweet?
No, says the ape, exasperated.
Can it text? Can it Wi-fi? Does it need a password?

The lesson might be parody today, but imagine what it says for the next generation of people that will grow up in our increasingly digital era. Will books become nostalgic, dusty artifacts in a museum? Will our children never know the experience of reading in a chair with a book spread open on their laps? For many people, this notion is inconceivable.

For Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, it’s “nonsense.” Last year, at the FIPP World Magazine Conference in London, he said, “To those that believe that paper and print will disappear, I have only one word – nonsense.” The crowd roared in applause.

Maybe it is just nonsense that books will disappear. Although they can’t compete with the virtues of computers or Kindles, books offer something different — a tactile experience that forces us to slow down and exercise our imaginations.

As Adam Gopnik writes in the New York Times Magazine: “The moral of Smith’s book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are — their turning pages, their sturdy self-­sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still.”