TIME's Julian Assange Interview: Full Transcript/Audio

[astrid]

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040-2,00.html

Interesting interview, worth a listen

[Richard]

Audio of the interview:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks to TIME's Managing Editor Rick Stengel about the ramifications of the release of thousands of diplomatic cables. 01/12/10
http://pdl-stream.timeinc.net/time/audio/2010/assange_audio_120110_dl.mp3

[astrid]

Thank-you , i was just trying to figure out how to do that!

[Richard]

Thank-you , i was just trying to figure out how to do that!
My pleasure :)
Look here btw: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?1281-New-Modifications-to-forum&p=11049&viewfull=1#post11049

[astrid]

lots of things to ponder and discuss in that interview, but i thought this part was very insightful, on the workings of technology and social media....


RS: I want to ask you a broader question, about the role of technology and the burgeoning world of social media. How does that affect the goal you're trying to achieve of more transparent and more open societies? I assume that enables what you're trying to do.

JA: Let me just talk about transparency for a moment. It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it's our goal to achieve a more just society. And most of the times, transparency and openness tends to lead in that direction, because abusive plans or behavior get opposed, and so those organizations which tend to commit them are opposed before the plan's implemented, or it's an exposure or something previously done, the organization tends to lose a [inaudible], which is then transferred to another, and then we [inaudible] organization. For the rise of social media, it's quite interesting. When we first started, we thought we would have the analytical work done by bloggers and people who wrote Wikipedia articles and so on. And we thought that was a natural, given that we had lots of quality, important content. Surely it's more interesting to write an article about top-secret Chinese [inaudible] or an internal document from Somalia or secret documents revealing what happened in [inaudible], all of which we published, than it is to simply write a blog about what's on the front page of the New York Times, or about your cat or something. But actually it turns out that that is not at all true. The bulk of the heavy lifting — heavy analytical lifting — that is done with our materials is done by us, and is done by professional journalists we work with and by professional human-rights activists. It is not done by the broader community. However, once the initial lifting is done, once a story becomes a story, becomes a news article, then we start to see community involvement, which digs deeper and provides more perspective. So the social networks tend to be, for us, an amplifier of what we are doing. And also a supply of sources for us.

So when I saw this problem early on in our first year, that the analytical effort which we thought would be supplied by Internet citizens around the world was not, I saw that, well, actually, in terms of articles, form tends to follow the funding. You can't expect to get news-style articles out of people that are not funded after a career structure in the same way that news organizations are. You will get a different sort of form, and that form may be commentary, which sometimes is very good and sometimes there are very senior people providing commentary that is within their media experience, or we get sources who hand over material, because once again, within their media experience, it is an important issue to them. But what we don't get from the [inaudible] community is people writing articles about an issue that they didn't have an intimate involvement with in the first place. And of course, if you think about it, that's natural — why would they be? The incentive's not there. When people write political commentary on blogs or other social media, it is my experience that it is not — with some exceptions — their goal to expose the truth. Rather, it is their goal to position themselves among their peers on whatever the issue of the day is. The most effective, the most economical way to do that is simply to take the story that's going around — it has already created a marketable audience for itself — and say whether they're in favor of that interpretation or not.

[astrid]

And another excellent article on JA and Wikileaks , here....
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all