October 13, 2005
UW professor to head UN delegation
It’s not every day that a UW assistant professor leaves Mary Gates Hall to head a foreign delegation at a major overseas conference of the United Nations.
But that’s exactly what will happen next month when the Information School’s Karine Barzilai-Nahon represents her native Israel at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society
The summit, in Tunis, will mark the world’s first major attempt to deal with an Internet that leaps borders like a high-tech wildfire. Some of the debates there will be searing-hot — over everything from free speech to naming Web domains.
“Most nations understand that the Internet broke a lot of borders, physical and symbolic, and that countries now have to cooperate even if they don’t like each other,” said Barzilai-Nahon, who joined the UW last year with a fresh doctorate in management of information systems from Tel Aviv University.
Barzilai-Nahon will coordinate Israel’s 60-plus-member delegation, though it will be formally headed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and will include ministers of his cabinet, members of parliament and other high-ranking decisionmakers. One of Israel’s particular concerns, she said, is the wild anti-Semitic propaganda promulgated over the Internet by extremist groups. Sure to be debated in Tunis is how to rein in hate speech without violating Western freedoms.
Americans, however, are more likely to encounter debates over the U.N. body’s attempts to wrest control of the main computers that direct Internet traffic and the issuing of domain names — areas that the United States has so far controled.
As an academic, Barzilai-Nahon sees her role as sharing her knowledge and framing issues, not necessarily parroting her delegation’s official position. Issues raised by new information technology’s long have fascinated her. Her dissertation, for example, demonstrated that the Internet is not exactly the free-fire zone that it first appears — informal “gatekeepers” move networks along a straight-and-narrow path of their users’ interests.
She co-authored another study on the Internet last year with her husband, Gad Barzilai, a prominent Israeli political scientist who now teaches at the Jackson School and in the Comparative Law and Societies Studies (CLASS) center.
The pair’s data source for the study was unusually extensive: Internet-use records of 14,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Representing about 6 percent of Israel’s population, and living in self-contained enclaves with few modern amenities, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox had long been barred by their leading rabbis from using the Internet for anything but work.
“When we started, we were almost certain this community would reject technology,” Barzilai-Nahon said. “Instead, we found they have modified it to meet their own needs.”
What the research revealed was a complex encounter between technology and a community struggling to stave off secular distractions. Despite the ban on private Internet use, nearly one-third of the ultra-Orthodox were found to surf the Web — a much lower rate than Israeli society overall, but still significant.
The study also probed the “Digital Divide” of unequal access to technology along class lines. That will be a core issue of the upcoming Tunis summit, over which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will preside.
“The majority of the world’s population has yet to benefit from these new technologies,” Annan pointed out after 175 countries agreed on a preliminary declaration in Geneva in 2003 (with Barzilai-Nahon representing Israel).
The hoped-for agreement in Tunis Nov. 16–18 will be akin to a global constitution, according to the draft, for “a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge…”
Take note of the agency leading the effort, The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which could one day be as familiar as UNICEF.
– Steven Goldsmith
