Freedom vs. security

Jonathan Zittrain‘s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, taps a theme that seems universal to many governed societies: the tension between individual freedom and societal security. Zittrain defines the future of the Internet (it’s a path he wants to alter, not stop) as a tradeoff between the innovative, generative capability of our technologies that are now globally linked and the need for stability and security in our technology.

This theme is analogous to the U.S. debates over The Patriot Act following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Following the attacks, terrified Americans were much more willing to forego personal freedoms to allow potential law enforcement intrusion into their privacy.

Whereas Zittrain acknowledge the dangers of governmental control over accessibility of the Internet, he argues that the net-neutrality debate misses what he believes is an even greater threat: technology from industry leaders that surreptitiously squeezes out third-party innovators who are the backbone of the Internet’s generative quality. Innovation more often occurs outside corporate walls than within, a conclusion that rings true for me as  I watched the newspaper industry defend its profit margins rather than aggressively invest in new forms of information architecture. Innovation outside the corporate boundaries often is driven by motivations other than market segment or profit margin.

Zittrain argues for finding a balance between the chaos that can be generated across the Internet and the desire for both secure technology and,  just as important, the ability to control our personal online identities (he references the “Star Wars kid” on P. 211). At times he comes across as bit Pollyannish in his belief in the power of people to reach reasonable compromises. He points to the Internet’s roots as branching from a desire to share, and he leans heavily on the example of Wikipedia, notably failing to mention the failed experiment of the Los Angeles Times editorial board. It’s fair to question whether the Internet, born lacking capitalistic genetics and nurtured in a sharing environment, has grown up into something altogether different and has forever lost its glamorized infancy. And Zittrain’s perspective demonstrates a bias shaped by the presumptions of Western legal institutions and precedents. Can that bias still shape the Internet?

Still, Zittrain is asking a lot of the right questions and pointing fingers in the right directions. There are dangers in the limitations of computers as appliances sold and controlled by mega corporations, such as Apple and Google. The November 23rd entry on his blog reports that the developer of Facebook’s iPhone app will no longer work with Apple because he is philosophically opposed to Apple’s review policies and tight control over their platform. In the preface to his book, Zittrain writes: “The serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative era gave us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia — all ideas out of left field. Now it is disappearing, leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.”

Zittrain, on the one hand, seems to be shouting about the need for governmental agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission to pay attention and catch up before it’s too late to stop the 800-pound gorillas from squeezing life out of the innovators, and therefore competition. More importantly, Zittrain is shouting warnings to all of us about the dangers of complacency about our technology and fawning acceptance of our online connectivity. Is this not analagous to the same warnings we’ve heard for years about apathy in democratic forms of government? Has this drama not been staged throughout history and continues to play out daily? The cynic in me says that the “great unwashed” prefers security over disruption, simplicity over innovation.

Zittrain does not want to lose the generativity that was a salient feature of the PC and extended to the Internet as PCs were connected. He defines generativity as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (P. 70) On the succeeding pages, he defines the characteristics of both generative technologies (the PC) and systems (the Internet) that nurture innovation. He sums up, “”Generative systems and technologies are more inviting to disruptive innovation thanks to their leverage, adaptability, ease of mastery, and accessibility, and they make it easier for their fruits to spread.” (P. 87)

Disruption — whether in commerce, society or technology — scares the heck out of most of us; embracing the chaos is much easier said than done. But Zittrain warns that there are much more frightening possibilities than disruption. That would be monopolistic control and inaccessibility. Zittrain writes that “the Internet’s very generativity — combined with that of the PCs attached — sow the seeds for a ‘digital Pearl Harbor.’ If we do not address this problem, the most likely first-order solutions in reaction to the problem will be at least as bad as the problem istelf, because they will increase security by reducing generativity.” (P. 97)

Zittrain, above all, wants the tension between security and disruption, which leads to innovation, to be debated publicly. He is enamored with the successful public nature of Wikipedia, while also praising the light regulatory touch of verkeersbordvrij, an experiment in which reducing the number of traffic signs reduced accidents in one Dutch district by forcing the public to assume responsible driving behavior. “The elements of Wikipedia that have led to its success can help us come to solutions for problems besetting generative successes at other layers of the Internet. They are verkeersbordvrijj, a light regulatory touch coupled with an openness to flexible public involvement, including a way for members of the public to make changes, good or bad, with immediate effect; a focus on earnest discussion, including reference to neutral dispute resolution policies, as a means of being strengthened rather than driven by disagreements; and a core of people prepared to model an ethos that others can follow.”

This sounds like trying to bring order in a courtroom filled with jesters. Again, I give Zuttrain credit. He’s at least shining the light of public attention so that the worst cannot happen in the darkness of night.

The death of the lone cowboy

“Perhaps networks are the site in which life-forms are continually related to control, where control works through this continual relation to life-forms.”

I particularly liked this postulation about networks in The Exploit (P. 128). It helped me clarify how I’ve come to think about networks after reading Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees last week and The Exploit this week. Watts introduced us to the science of networks; Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker help us understand networks as political structures. The authors argue that networks are the new form of power relations that are challenging hierarchical structures.

The sentence gave me an “elevator speech” for why networks are born, how they exist and why they cease. Here’s my attempt to apply a corporeal metaphor to what I understand about network theory and science after reading these two books.

Networks are a life-form; they have a state of being, born from the power relations from within the network, between networks and outside of networks. Within networks are nodes, the network’s bodily organs, all of which have varying power relationships with each other. Some are more important than others. The edges of the network are the veins, the line, that simultaneously represent the robustness and fragility of a network’s connectivity.  Pulsing through the network’s veins is the lifeblood of information.

Such an anthropomorphism may be over simplified, but I can see how it applies as a universal characteristic of networks. The computer virus, for example, is a man-made creation that does take on a life of its own, or become a life-form, as it generates responses to counter-virus actions. The same can be said of the mutations of biological viruses. The state of being is generated by the actions and reactions to power and control. The authors contend that “networks are constituted by this tension between unitary aggregation and anonymous distribution, between the intentionality and agency of individuals and groups on the one hand, and the uncanny unhuman intentionality of the network as an ‘abstract’ whole.” (P. 155)

Galloway and Thacker write: “Life-forms are not merely biological but envelop social, cultural, and political forms as well. Life-forms are the nondistinction between these. Life-forms posit the polyvalent aspect of life, all the while posting something, however inessential, called ‘life’.” The authors turn to Karl Marx  to amplify this concept (P. 127). “Life-forms are similar to what Marx called the ‘inorganic body’: ‘Nature is man’s inorganic body — nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature — means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die.” (P. 127) The “continuous intercourse” of networks is the flow of information that controls, or modulates, power relationships.

The authors build their concepts about the political form of power relationships in networks through the ideas posited in some of our previous readings by Marx and Foucault. Foucault’s historical foray into the concept of unilateralism — the Panopticon effect on modulating societal behavior — helps explain, as the authors contend, how unilateralism, or notably the sovereignty of the State, depends on multilateralism. “Following Foucault, to become unilateral, it is necessary to become multilateral, but via a veiled, cryptic sort of multilateralism. To become singular, one must become plural.” Extending this concept to the political power of the United States government, the authors add: “The center of so-called American unilateralism is constructed through its network properties. In a sense, any particular presidential administration is only half aware of this. It has placed itself in a paradoxical position. To ensure the cohesion of American unilateralism it must forge links outside its domain.”

Clearly, George Bush was even less than half aware of this nuance. His disdain for the United Nations as an icon for international relationships, his cowboy “do-it-alone” ethic, manifested itself in the U.S. inability to break an al Qaeda network, despite extraordinary military operations. Only as the military has understood the networked nature of the enemy that attacked us — using box cutters stuffed in their pants, not tanks and F16 fighters — has it been able to interrupt, or modulate, the source of the enemy’s power. This same scenario, it seems to me, is being played out now in Iran. Can an isolated sovereign State shut down the network of protest? Does Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have control or does it rest within the network of protesters? (Here’s an interesting piece on Iran’s attempt to “re-educate” its youth from The New York Times.)

Galloway and Thacker contend that our political structures have shifted from top-down hierarchical form to the topology of networks. “Networks operate through ceaseless connections and disconnections, but at the same time, they continually posit a topology. They are forever incomplete but always take ona shape.” As this relates to media studies: the shapes of network are drawn by the flow of information. It is the lifeblood of the networked being.

The authors view the new multilateral, networked structure of power relations as an evolution of control, not as a new paradigm for freedom. They see less freedom for individuals as we become increasingly networked. Networks generate their own Foucauldian Panopticons. Interestingly, Galloway and Thacker offer their vision of how future political resistance will form to counter these new structures of network control. The new exploit — finding the hole in the power structure — will be nonexistence. “The question of nonexistence is this: how does one develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccounted for? A simple laser pointer can blind a surveillance camera when the beam is aimed directly at the camera’s lens. With this type of cloaking, one is not hiding, simply nonexistent to that node. The subject has full presence but simply not there on the screen.” (P. 135)

Resisting the imposition of control by networks, the authors contend, will necessitate becoming informational nomads. “Thus we should become devoid of any representable identity.” (P. 136)

“Perhaps the challenge today is not that of hypervisualization (as Virilio worries) , or of non-recuperation (as Bey suggests), but instead a challenge of existence without representation (or at least existence that abandons representation, a nonexistence, an a-existence).” (P. 138)

Hmmm. Perhaps this better explains why Dr. Parry isn’t on Facebook.

What’s your Obama number?

For me, it’s three — meaning that a longtime business associate who knows me on a first-name basis could call another associate, who in turn knows the President on a first-name basis. And when President Bush was in office, the degree of separation was two. But before I can get too impressed with myself, Duncan Watts would say, “So what?” As he does on Page 299 of his book, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

“But even if it is true that everyone can be connected to everyone else in only six degrees of separation, so what? How far is six degrees anyway? … So far as extracting resources is concerned, or exerting influence, anything more than two degrees might as well be a thousand.” (Damn. I was sure I could influence the President on the whole healthcare thing.)

Two pages later, Watts conversely argues: “In a world spanned by only six degrees, what goes around comes around faster than you think. … When it comes to epidemics of disease, financial crises, political revolutions, social movements, and dangerous ideas, we are all connected by short chains of influence. It doesn’t mater if you know about them, and it doesn’t matter if you care, they will have their effect any way. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each others’ burdens as well.”

Those two converse statements sum up the tone of Watts’ book. Anyone expecting definitive answers to questions about how to understand the complexity of a connected age will be disappointed. There are no answers, only more questions. The science of networks, which Watts clearly promotes as an emerging discipline greatly in need of much more research, is complex and often contradictory.  To quote the cliché, the devil’s in the details of each type of network. Watts warns the reader in the book’s preface that “the connected age cannot be understood by trying to force it into any one mode of the world, however reassuring that might seem, nor can it be understood by any one discipline working alone. The questions are simply too rich, too complicated, and frankly too hard for that. Equally frankly, the science of networks doesn’t have the answers yet either.”

Still, the inability of science to crack the contradictory code of a highly networked world doesn’t make the pursuit any less significant, Watts concludes. “Before Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their first plane at Kitty Hawk, man wasn’t mean to fly. … In every field of human endeavor, there is always the impossible. Most of the time they fail, and the impossible remains just that. But once in a while, they succeed, and it is at these jump points that we collectively pass to the next level of the great game.”

The anecdotal evidence of how connected we are is vast. Watts offers up his own examples in the book, ranging from a 1996 power blackout in the western United States to the devastating Ebola viruses in Africa that, by random luck, did not reach U.S. shores. Written today, Watts could include the 2008 global economic meltdown, the spread of H1N1 flu virus or last week’s blackouts in Brazil. Watts argues that, when networks have been disrupted by either a collection of minor events or major shocks, we traditionally have tried to understand the disruption  by re-creating events rather than studying the network’s structure. He believes that understanding the complex, varying structures of networks requires a cross-disciplinary approach — combining the “mathematical sophistication of the physicist, the insight of the sociologist, and the experience of the entrepreneur.”

Watts attempts to understand small-world networks, as symbolized by social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiment that explored the hypothesis that the world “was in a certain sense small; that is, any one person in the world could be reached through a network of friends in only a few steps.” Watts analyzes the historical contributions of different disciplines to the study of network structures. Watts acknowledges he was on a journey to bring the power of mathematics and computers to the creation of a model of social networks. Ironically, he uses his own small-world network in search of answers. He pulls in the peers of friends and the friends of his friends’ peers in this quest.

Along the way he explores the theory of random graphs, which is a network of nodes connected by links in random fashion. He explains how physics can help us understand how a series of small random events — “events that would go unnoticed under normal conditions” — can transform a locally occurring phenomenon into something global. In each scientific model, however, Watts finds faults. The models do not account for real-world dynamics, for variances in group and individual decision-making. Physicists, for example, “developed their tools to address physics questions; not social or economic ones, and sometimes that history gets in the way.” Watts adds: “In the world of networks, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, computer scientists, biologists, engineers, and physicists all have something to offer each other and much to learn. No one discipline, no single approach, has a stranglehold on a comprehensive science of networks, nor is that likely to happen. Rather, a deep understanding of the structure of real networks can come only through a genuine marriage of ideas and data that have been lain dispersed across the intellectual spectrum, each a piece of the puzzle with its own fascinating history and insights,  but none the key to the puzzle itself.”

This reminds me of the Indian fable about six blind men who lay hands on an elephant to understand the animal. Each comes away with a different description of what an elephant is like: a rope, a serpent, a mighty fan, the trunk of a palm tree. The moral of the fable: each man was partly right, though all were wrong.

Many of Watts’ graphical representations of networks were mystifying to me as a non-math major, but I did appreciate what Watts and his cohort captured as four elements of social networks worthy of research (Page 72):

1. social networks are small, overlapping groups that are densely connected and that overlap by virtue of individuals having multiple affiliations;
2. social networks aren’t static;
3. not all potential relationships are equally likely (a fault of fixed scientific models that don’t account for individualism);
4. and the intrinsic aspect of people’s actions, meaning that we make connections that have nothing to do with existing affiliations.

I also found the story about Toyota particularly interesting. It was a great example of Watts’ point that networks can be both robust and fragile at the same time, and in fact, the robustness of a network can create its fragility.

Thank goodness Watts warns us front: The study of networks has no easy answers.

A wake-up call

The phone rang about 1:30 in the morning and shook me from sleep. A man’s voice on the other end asked, “Is Evan there?”

Despite my grogginess, I demanded, “Who is this?” Followed quickly by, “And why are you calling my son at 1:30 in the morning?”

The caller, who sounded much older than my junior high-age son, hung up. I shot into my son’s room, where he was sleeping, woke him and peppered him with questions: Who was this guy? Why was he calling at this hour? What information do you have on your MySpace page?

The incident frightened my son, who didn’t know the caller and wondered how he could have found our phone number. I told him it wasn’t hard to figure out, given the information my son had posted. The MySpace page came down, and my son moved to Facebook. In the end, the incident was, so to speak, a wake-up call for my son about “invisible audiences” and “the blurring of public and private,” two concepts that Danah Michele Boyd explores in her dissertation, “Taken Out of Context.”

My son easily could have been one of those teens who Boyd interviewed. He really didn’t think about MySpace as a public place. It was just an extension of his school circles. When confronted with the concern about a stranger viewing his personal information, my son chose what he thought was a “safer” platform, Facebook, for more controlled access — what many of the teens who Boyd studied did. But as Boyd explains, the difference between public and private is often fuzzy for many teens. “In unmediated social situations, people tend to know who is present to witness a social act. This is not often the case in networked publics where audiences are invisible and access is asynchronous,” Boyd writes.

Boyd acknowledges that most teens understand that social media are “public by default, private when necessary,” but clearly that means much more than many of them realize. During her two-and-a-half years of research on teens and social media usage, Boyd found that social media introduce new complexities to managing public identities in mediated space. She writes:

“Every day, in unmediated environments, people ritually seek to manage the impressions they make in social interactions. This impression management requires them to negotiate, express, and adjust the signals that they explicitly give and those that they implicitly give off. In his seminal text, Goffman (1959) details the ways in which people take into account the social situation and their role in it to use body language, speech, and other people to convey an impression. What Goffman’s account does not foresee is the way that mediated situations might alter this process. Much of what people take for granted in unmediated situations cannot be accounted for in mediated ones. Online, there are no bodies in the corporeal sense, obscuring both identity information that is typically written on the body and presence information that makes a person visible to others. To exist in mediated contexts, people must engage in explicit acts to write themselves into being. On social network sites, this means creating a profile and fleshing out the fields as an act of self-presentation.”

I found Boyd’s research on the self-reflective nature of creating online profiles notably interesting. Generating a profile that both reflects  social status and individual identity is challenging work, and something that few adults have had to do.

“When building a profile, teens are not constructing a census dossier—they choose content that helps them define the social situation and express themselves in that context,” Boyd writes. “I see profiles as ‘digital bodies’ in that they both uniquely identify a person and are the product of self-reflexive identity production. To me, profiles locate and are the combination of controlled self-descriptions in the context of social connections.”

In addition to trickier profile management, social media amplify the teen drama that plays out in unmediated spaces. Boyd writes: “The underlying dynamics of teen friendship and peer relations have not changed. … What has changed is where these dynamics play out. Rather than gathering at malls or in parking lots, teens are leveraging social media and connecting through social network sites. The same pressures to fit in and stand out extend to these environments and these environments mirror and magnify the dynamics underlying teen friendship and peer relations.”

When I was a teen, our dramas played out, as Boyd notes, in malls and during late-night gatherings at some grocery-store parking lot. Today, teens face ever-growing restrictions on their ability to meet up in the physical world (two teens shopping at the mall are OK, but OMG! three constitute a gang). So social media spaces feed the desire to gather, but with complications. Interestingly, Boyd concludes her dissertation with a voice of optimism: Teens are amazingly capable of adapting to these new, more complex social spaces and then transforming them for their purpose, which gives us clues as to how new, as-of-yet-created media will be used.

New boss, same as the old boss

As I read Michel Foucault’s explanation of Panopticism, I could not shake this mental image of an unblinking CBS eye watching my every move. In the light of media studies, I see a connection between the Panopticon and the CBS “eye.” And I think there’s a connection of both of those to Lisa Nakamura’s essay, “Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”

Here’s my argument.

First, Foucault gives us an historical accounting of the Panopticon, a circular prison with a surveillance tower at its center. From the tower, a guard can see at all times into every cell on the periphery. This architectural design creates an economic extension of authority: one to many. The Panopticon is designed to instill in the prisoners a feeling of constant surveillance. The inmates cannot see who’s watching them from the tower, but they constantly “feel” the presence of authority because of the omnipresent tower. “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,” Foucault writes. “So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary: that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” (We still use this design today in those mobile police towers with opaque windows that create a sense that officers are watching over your car in the mall parking lot, even though these towers are not always occupied.)

Foucault’s historical accounting, for me, is an explanation of the unseen authority by which culture sustains a “power relation” with individuals within a society. Our cultural identities — for example, what it means to be American or French or British — are shaped not directly by an authority — a constitution or royal family — but by extensions of authority. Panopticism, Foucault contends, “has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.”

And how is cultural homogeneity ingrained so deeply that individuals “themselves are the bearers” of  a shared cultural identity? How are social “norms” amplified? Foucault cites examples of disciplinary systems, such as schools, hospitals and the military. “Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion, or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that derives from its very unity an increase in its forces. …”

Foucault does not write about media, but media, particularly in the 20th century, are particularly effective, efficient forces for amplification of authority and establishment of cultural identity. We have talked about the time when, before our current explosion of new media, all Americans could watch the same national news broadcasts. The unblinking CBS eye helped bring us nightly messages and images of what it meant to be American.

But surely, in this revolutionary age of unlimited digital reproduction, an interconnected Web, virtual reality and new social media, the efficiency of old media to amplify cultural authority has been undermined. Certainly the biases of old media that disseminated a narrower perspective of “social norms” have been exposed at the end of the rainbow of new media? Arguably to some degree,  but Nakamura warns that new media generate their own stereotyping, which she has cleverly named “cybertyping.” Whereas new media “acts as a forerunner for this more general process of cultural re-conceptualizations,” Nakamura contends that old stereotypes are being “transcoded” to new media that were created and are still dominated by the same social class — white males — that dominated old analog media. She writes:

“The study of racial cybertypes brings together the cultural layer and the computer layer; that is to say, cybertyping is the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the “cultural layer” or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace. [Lev] Manovich is correct in asserting that we must take into account the ways that the computer determines how ideological constructs such as race get articulated in this new medium.”

Nakamura argues that new “cybertyping” stems from “a common cultural logic,” which I connect to Foucault’s explanation of Panopticism. Common cultural logic was established by disciplinary institutions, such as schools, and amplified by media, from the printing press to national network affiliates like CBS. However, Nakamura adds a great deal of nuance. Cybertyping in new media also seeks “to redress anxieties about the ways that computer-enabled communication can challenge these old logics. [Cybertypes] perform a crucial role in the Signifying practice of cyberspace; they stabilize a sense of a white self and identity that is threatened by the radical fluidity and disconnect between mind and body that is celebrated in so much cyberpunk fiction. Bodies get tricky in cyberspace. That sense of disembodiment engendered by cyberspace which is both freeing and disorienting creates a profound malaise in the user which stable images of race works to fix in place.”

Nakamura contends that promise of new media to eradicate the stigma of, for example, race instead reinforce old stereotypes.  “In other words, machines which offer identity prostheses to redress the burdens of physical ‘handicaps’ such as age, gender, and race produce cybertypes which look remarkably like racial and gender stereotypes,” she writes. But cybertyping is more than the mere transportation of old stereotypes into a new medium, Nakamura contends, because of new media’s collaborative nature.

Nakamura concludes that “there is no question that the digital divide is both a result of and a contributor to the practice of racial cybertyping,” which cries for ongoing scrutiny. I particularly connected with her reference to Audre Lorde, when she writes:  “…taking up the master’s tools ‘may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.’ “

The quotation reminded me of a time in the newsroom when an Hispanic editor objected to a photograph that she believed was offensive to Hispanics. She complained to the photo editor, who defended the picture on its technical quality merits. He did not understand the fuss. I became the arbiter. I told the photo editor, a white male, to select another quality picture. I asked him: “We hired this Hispanic editor not only for her talent but for  perspective, but then we don’t want to listen to her?”

In the analog world, the newspaper represented the Opticon, the “master’s tools.” Nakamura argues for a new world in new media. I’m skeptical, though. I see too much of old behaviors easily imported into virtual reality arenas, such as in massive multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. Watch the YouTube video on the “Funeral Massacre” and tell me what you think.

Is Wikipedia Habermas’ public sphere?

With last week’s reading, we learned about Habermas’ view of the ideal public sphere, a place — whether physical or metaphysical — in which rational individuals debated the important issues of a democratic society and good ideas filter up from reasoned argument. This week, Clay Shirky explains in Here Comes Everybody how a seemingly chaotic, unworkable idea like Wikipedia, in which anyone can write an article and anyone else can edited, delete or rewrite that article, has become phenomenally useful and popular site for articles about both the important issues of a democratic society as well its more trivial.

It seems Wikipedia is a Habermasian public sphere of sorts, a collaborative forum for the exploration of a myriad subjects.

Shirky explains that Wikipedia succeeds because of its easy-to-use social media tools and its fulfillment of promise and bargain. This triad of elements — promise, tool and bargain — are part of the complex formula behind which social media experiments take hold and why others fail. When the Los Angeles Times shut down its wikieditorial experiment in 2005, the newspaper’s editors failed to grasp the symbiotic relationship of the elements.  Shirky writes: “The promise is the basic ‘why’ for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the ‘how’ — how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?”

Wikipedia, Shirky contends, is perhaps the most famous example of collaborative production. Wikipedia has replaced its analogue and other digital encyclopedia counterparts as an authoritative source. Its promise — which Jimmy Wales describes as its mission — is “a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Anyone can put their stamp on that collection of human knowledge, and see if their contributions stand up to the tests of truth and reason through a collaborative editing process.

The wiki, which was first created by Ward Cunningham in 1995, is the social media tool that allows impassioned, serious contributors to fulfill Wikipedia’s implicit promise of “if you help, this will get better.” As Shirky explains, wikis “avoid the institutional dilemma. Because contributors aren’t employees, a wiki can take a staggering amount of input with a minimum of overhead. This is key to its success: it does not need to make sure its contributors are competent , or producing steadily, over even showing up.” Traditional media outlets — newspapers in particular — are institutionally bound, both in ethic and practice. The ethic of traditional media is filter-before-publishing (although this is changing with television and newspaper websites, which must move quicker in competitive breaking-news environments). The ethic of the wiki is publish-then-filter. Early critics, especially those who see many negative consequences in social media tools that allow everyone to contribute, argued that the idea of publish-then-filter just couldn’t work. But it has — and not without problems — because the actions of those who vandalize the work of sincere, serious contributors can be easily countermanded, thus frustrating the vandals.

The bargain is what Shirky contends is the third element that depends upon the presence of the other two. “Wikis take on one of the most basic questions of political philosophy: Who will guard the guardians? The basic bargain of a wiki means that people who care that the site not be used for [a]  prank have the edge, because it takes far longer to write a fake entry than to fix it.”

Wikipedia mimics Habermas’ concept of the public sphere, albeit much more narrowly than perhaps what he envisioned. Habermas feared the disintegration of the public sphere, and it seems that social media tools are indeed breaking arguably was a singular public sphere — in which, for example, we all watched the same network broadcast news — into multiple public spheres, multiple public gatherings shaped by focused interests.

But Shirky also argues that social media tools make it easier for those smaller public spheres, the “grouping of like with like,” to network with other small circles. These networks “operate as both amplifiers and filters of information. Because information in the system is passed along by friends and friends of friends  (or at least contacts and contacts of contacts), people tend to get information that is also of interest to their friends.” The public sphere that Habermas envisioned, I contend, is transforming into a spectrum of public networks and overlapping Small Worlds connected by people whom Malcolm Gladwell’s calls Connectors. Those individuals are adept at making social connections and reflect what I believe has been a consistent theme throughout all of our readings so far: We use media to connect with each other.

Shirky’s book, it seems to me, paints a picture of possibilities, how journalists may come to think about both the authorship and the dissemination of information as we pass through this  revolutionary media epoch. “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society,” Sharky writes. The future will be shaped by new realities. One is that we are “living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.” Another is that the public sphere is being transformed into a myriad small spheres that can be easily connected into powerful networks.

In this age of information overload, “trusted” information often comes from friends, or friends of friends, as much as from  dispassionate, unfamiliar third parties. And media users clearly want greater participation in their media, greater ability to express themselves. In spite of the Los Angeles Times’ failed attempt at a wiki editorial page, wikis perhaps could shape how local news outlets “author” critical information about their communities. Perhaps what Wikinews is doing on a global scale can someday be economically feasible at a community level. Most “citizen journalism” experiments, thus far, have been half-hearted attempts by traditional media outlets to solicit “free” content, thereby filling information gaps created by cost-cutting in newsrooms. Many journalists have been highly skeptical, just as critics of Wikipedia once were, that citizen journalism doesn’t work. But I believe most citizen journalism initiatives have been approached with the same preconceptions of traditional journalism: filter-before-publishing.

It is certainly worth further research as to how local journalists might transform both the power of social networking and the elemental triad of promise, tool, bargain into the kind of viable, useful journalism. It may develop as a nonprofit model, or perhaps a blend of nonprofit and commercial but whatever form it takes, I would argue that journalism still plays a crucial role in any democratic society.

Scattershooting on the public sphere

Pardon the blatant theft of a technique that longtime Dallas columnist Blackie Sherrod used, but there were so many interesting points in this week’s readings that I won’t focus on just one. So here’s a little scattershooting on various issues, in no particular order, with my thoughts in ital:

From Pieter Boeder’s piece reflecting on Habermas’ heritage:

• “The emergence of the electronic mass media in the public sphere made things even worse. ‘The news is made to resemble a narrative from its own format down to stylistic detail; the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned.’ Yet at the same time they have an impact more penetrating than the print media … The world fashioned by mass media is a pubic sphere in appearance only.” Boeder also adds: “The character of the public sphere is increasingly restricted; the media serve as vehicles for generating and managing consensus and promoting capitalist culture rather than fulfill their original function as organs of public debate.” When USA Today appeared on the newspaper landscape, critics said it “dumbed down” journalism. But USA Today’s hypermediated appearance and short stories — in some ways a throwback to what Habermas contends was newspapers’ pre-literary journalism role as pure information vehicle — didn’t dumb down the news. What dumbed down the news was a corporate ethic that de-emphasized the literary lineage of the news business in the interest of pursuing popularity. Broadcast media is hyper-guilty of this. The depth of reporting on local news is incredibly bad. And newspapers thought they needed to compete with broadcast media on their playing field, instead of improving on its role as an organizer of public opinion and debate. Corporate attention, focused on profit margins, dumbed down print products to reduce controversy, which advertisers shun, even before the economy and the growth of the Internet grabbed newspapers by the throat.
• “The mass media, Habermas argues, have mutated into monopoly capitalist organisations.” That was a point I was trying to make in last week’s post about UT Austin professor Robert Jensen. The spectrum of public opinion and debate in newspapers and broadcast is woefully narrow. Individuals on both the left and right turned to a better medium — the Internet — to find perspectives excluded from media organizations focused on making money and supporting the system that funneled the money.
  
• “If we believe in the importance of the universal human impulse to communicate, we have to believe in reason. Habermas … believes that reasoned communication can weaken prejudices, increase the scope and power of the public sphere and strengthen democracy.” I always told journalists with whom I worked that bad ideas on one end of the spectrum and outright prejudice and hatred at the other withered in the light of public exposure. If we did our jobs as journalists and shined the light on bad ideas, the court of public opinion would rule by reason and fairness.
• “The debate that emerges as a reaction on Habermas’ work goes in different directions. Important focal points are the significance of the public sphere for democracy. Growth of information inequality threatens basic human rights; the power of the state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals.” Remind me again: How many times has the U.S. government conducted wiretaps on legal U.S. citizens? What has the Iranian government done do shut down protesters of its presidential (sham) election? I love how Mark Poster expresses the threat from the State: “…the dangers to the population are and have always been far greater from this state apparatus itself than from so-called terrorists. More citizens have been improperly abused, had their civil rights violated, and much worse by government than by terrorists. In fact terrorism is in good part an effect of government propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy.” For good evidence to this point, read David Rohde’s powerful series about his seven months of captivity in the hands of Taliban in the New York Times. The deep-rooted hatred of America is in part driven by what they see is a history of lies and propaganda from the U.S. government.
• “Rheingold (1998) … stresses the importance of active participation: Electronic media do offer a unique channel for publishing and communicating, which is fundamental to democracy. … ‘When we are called to action through the virtual community, we need to keep in mind how much depends on whether we simple “feel involved” or whether we take the steps to actually participate in the lives of our neighbours, and the civic life of our communities.’ ” Amen.
• “The public sphere is not just a ‘marketplace of ideas’ or an ‘information exchange depot,’ but also a major vehicle for generating and distributing culture. Dahlgren leaves no doubt about the relevance of the discussion around the public sphere for journalism: ‘One could say that journalism has been doing its best to deny the mounting evidence of difficulties in the classic Enlightenment formulations — a refusal to air the relevance of such disputes for its own activities.’ ” I, along with many other journalists, stand guilty as charged. Buried in our own egotistical viewpoints, we missed the point. I often stood behind the concept that newspapers were a store in the marketplace of ideas. I didn’t get that a new age was upon us that was redefining the whole public sphere.
• “McQuail notes that ‘much of the content offered by media that is both popular and commercially successful looks to many critics as if it is, variously, repetitive, infantile, thematically limited, undisturbing, ideologically tendentious, empty, nasty, anti-intellectual and subordinating content to form and technique.” Watch local television news; look at local newspaper websites. Crime news dominates both. We used to say that if we really wanted to drive website traffic — popularity — we could succumb to the allure of becoming ‘click whores.’ Put sex and crime in every headline. Sex and crime sell.
• “Bardoel (1996) points out that because of the increasing individualization and segmentation in communication such notions as ‘community’ and ‘public debate’ should be taken less for granted: The traditional task of journalism will shift from collecting information to directing the social flow of information and public debate. Next to this ‘orientating journalism,’ the new media offer scope for ‘instrumental journalism.” I see journalism definitely headed away from Gatekeeper status and towards a role as the public’s Knowledgeable Guide, helping to connect dots, more about orienting than outright driving.
• “By treating communities as social capital networks, rather than strictly as discourse communities, we can being to ground the connective elements of new information technologies in social life and social structure.” An important point that all journalists must heed.

I’m going on too long. There’s so much more to comment on, but perhaps that’s fertile ground for the final paper. I will close on two notes. First, thank you to Habermas for reminding us that the concept of a public sphere did not always exist. We should be grateful that, even as the public sphere changes, we  have benefited from a least some semblance of a public sphere, as opposed to the public representation of authority “before” the people, instead of for the people, as Habermas notes.

And on a light note, I loved this from Poster: “As an historian I find it fascinating that [the Internet] should emerge from a confluence of cultural communities which appear to have to so little in common: the Cold War Defense Department which sought to insure survival against nuclear attack by promoting decentralization, the countercultural ethos of computer programming engineers which had a deep distaste for any form of censorship or active restraint of communications and the world university research which I am at a loss to characterize.” Ha!

Karl Marx, Stuart Hall and Robert Jensen

Karl Marx’s and Stuart Hall’s writings reminded me of an affable, intelligent, outspoken professor I met years ago when we both participated in the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation’s First Amendment Institute. His name was Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

Three days after the 9-11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C., Robert wrote an op-ed piece for the Houston Chronicle that criticized the U.S. government’s own history of terrorist activity and cited this activity as a factor in the 9-11 attacks. You can imagine the uproar it caused. People called for his firing. (Here’s a link to Robert’s Nov. 2, 2001, speech on free speech in which he discusses the issue.) Robert’s ideas hit a nerve at a time of high-pitched nationalistic fervor.

In our brief encounters, Robert would harangue about the narrow spectrum of political discourse in this country. I took from my conversations with Robert that the national “intercourse,” as Marx would have called it,  is largely framed, defined, dominated and delivered by the ruling class, who control wealth (the means of production) and thus shape the messages delivered through media, who are linked to the ruling elite because of their influence on media economics.

In light of this week’s readings, you can see why Marx’s and Hall’s writings reminded me of Robert. Marx contended that that those who control the means of material production also control the means of idea production.  Hall contended in his writing that the British political and military elite exercised the same control of ideological discourse more than a century later, and that the messages shaped by the ruling class were assumed and disseminated by professional broadcasters who were tied to the dominant hegemonic position.

In the late 19th century, Marx worked to overthrow the religious notion that man’s consciousness of himself came down from heaven to earth and resulted in some spiritual awakening, the prevalent ideology of the ruling elite at the time. This ideology supported the ruling class’ divine claim to authority. Marx argued that what it meant to be a human was connected to how humans produced their means of sustaining life. “What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

I connected Marx’s assertions to Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human psychological needs, which he identified in his paper A Theory of Human Motivation. At the base of Maslow’s pyramid are physiological and safety needs — what I think Marx would have defined as the means of subsistence: food, water, shelter,  safety and the means to produce those. Only once those needs are met can we, as humans, realize “higher” concepts of self-actualization. Marx contended that those who control the means of production — the base of the pyramid — control upward movement toward self-actualization.

Marx extended this concept of the individual as defined by the means of production to social and political structures. As populations grew, as individuals formed varying types of unions — from tribal communities to feudal kingdoms and eventually to nations — the same dynamics that defined individuals defined the interactions of nations. “The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals … as they really are., i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.” In other words, economics define us as individuals as well as a country, and it is in the interest of the State to shape that image as a means of maintaining the State.

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. “

Through communism, Marx sought to liberate man by overturning the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse.

Hall, on the other hand, analyzed the perpetuation of the ideology of the political and military elite through how messages are delivered (coded) by media and received (decoded) by viewers.

Hall saw broadcasting professionals as operating relatively autonomously but also linked “with the defining elites not only by the institutional position of broadcasting itself as an ‘ideological apparatus’, but also by the structure of access (that is, the systematic ‘over-accessing’ of selective elite personnel and their ‘definition of the situation’ in television).” I interpreted this to mean that, even though professional broadcasters found themselves in conflict with the State at times, their general over-reliance on defining news or historic events through the eyes of the ruling elite creates a hegemonic reality for viewers. Hall labeled this  the dominant-hegemonic position, in which the ruling class viewpoint carries “the stamp of legitimacy — it appears coterminous with what is ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’, ‘taken for granted’ about the social order.” (I suspect that Robert Jensen would agree with Hall. He has often criticized U.S. media as lame mouthpieces of government.)

“The hegemonic interpretations of, say, the politics of Northern Ireland, or the Chilean coup or the Industrial Relations Bill are principally generated by political and military elites: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats, the selection of personnel, the choice of images, the staging of debates are selected and combined through the operation of the professional code.”

Hall contended that viewers, or consumers of news, can decode the hegemonic messages in different ways, either through their own situational lens (what he called the negotiated code) or through an alternative framework (the oppositional code).

Someday soon: Your life as a visual database

Of all of the interesting concepts that Lev Manovich presents in The Language of New Media, the most intriguing to me is the idea of the computer database logic shaping culture. Manovich cites a 1994 edition of the journal Mediamatic, in which its editors wrote: “Everything is being collected: culture, asteroids, DNA patterns, credit records, telephone conversations; it doesn’t matter.” For Manovich this means the computer age “brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality->media->data->database.”

I connected Manovich’s database assertion to a concept he postulates in an earlier chapter: “Cinema, the major cultural form of the twentieth century, has found a new life as the toolbox of the computer user. Cinematic means of perception, of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking, and emotion have become a way of work and a way of life for millions in the computer age… In short, what was cinema is now the human-computer interface.”

Manovich also asserts: “Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface, a toolbox for all cultural communication, overtaking the printed word.”

That got me thinking about the amazing rate at which computer processing speeds are increasing and how quickly the cost of digital storage has dropped. Nanotechnology could someday soon give rise to microscopic video cameras and virtually unlimited digital storage. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates envisioned in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, the day when computer engineers could build a “single-electron transistor,” in which a single bit of information would be assigned to a lone electron, creating super fast computers. What that means is we could potentially record, archive, and retrieve every moment of our lives, from sometime after birth until death. Our every moment stored in a database by far more powerful than human memory. Think how the engineering of such a visual database would redefine culture, human interaction, and how we mediate internal experiences.

Right up front, Manovich acknowledges that we do not yet fully comprehend the revolutionary times we are in. In his introduction, he writes: “… just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern society and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution — the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication. This new revolution is arguably more profound than the previous ones, and we are just beginning to register its initial effects.”

He adds: “…the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of media — text, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions.”

Manovich clearly believes that we are digitizing our culture through new media, which consist of two layers, one cultural, the other computational. The cultural layer of new media can be found in story and plot; composition and point of view; mimesis and catharsis; comedy and tragedy. The computer layer can be seen in sorting and matching; function and variable; computer language and data structure. “Because new media in general is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional cultural logic of media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer,” Manovich writes.

I would add that the digitization will only increase exponentially as computational power improves.

I also found interesting Manovich’s belief that the logic of the database redefines how we think of narrative in new media. Traditional linear narrative does not disappear, but it is now one among many other possible narratives. “The ‘user’ of a narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database’s creator,” Manovich writes. “An interactive narrative (which can be also called a hypernarrative in an analogy with hypertext) can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database.”

Manovich argues that, in new media, the database engineer now holds greater influence than the creator of traditional narrative, a point I’m not sure I’m ready to concede. Manovich writes: “It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory in the new media landscape. What is more surprising is why the other end of the spectrum — narratives — still exist in new media.” With the Web itself, the “database is more popular than ever before.”

But I will defend traditional narrative here; it has a long history that establishes an easily recognizable pattern — a beginning, a middle and an end — that even new media users welcome as a means of wading through more information than is humanly comprehensible. Manovich is convincing in his argument for the growing importance of database logic. But traditional narrative is still valued.

Blow it all up — again

In his 1936 essay, Walter Benjamin characterized mechanical reproductions of art, and specifically in film, as “dynamite of the tenth of a second.” Decades later, Bill Nichols updated that observation in his essay on culture and cybernetic systems. The computer chip, Nichols wrote, is the “dynamite of nanoseconds” that “explodes the limits of our own mental landscape.”

OK, after reading both Benjamin and Nichols, I begin to humbly bow to the idea that, indeed, we are experiencing a revolutionary media era as opposed to an evolution of what we already know. Just as the printing press gave birth to new ways to perceive the human experience as represented by media, the computer chip has again altered the consciousness of ourselves and our environment.

Both essays are fascinating reads because Nichols takes us back in time and helps us understand why Benjamin believed that photography, and more specifically motion photography in film, changed how we thought of and perceived culture and art. Nichols’ observations on Benjamin’s essays are a commentary on the current changes in the media landscape.

Benjamin asserted that, prior to mechanical reproduction and photography, the authenticity, or aura, of an art piece rested in its “presence in time and space….  The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. … Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority.” But mechanical reproduction blows up that authority, Benjamin contended. “Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choir productions, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.”

Benjamin wrote his essay during the rise of socialism following World War I and amidst howling winds of Facism preceding World War II. The tumultuous worldwide political climate gave rise to Dadaism, a movement that rejected traditional art, culture and aesthetics. Dadaists cried out against the upheaval of their times through art intended to offend traditional culture. Dadaists believed that the existing culture and logic of a bourgeois capitalist society led to World War I.

Film was the perfect agent for the Dadaist movement, Benjamin argued, because of its capability to change how art and culture were represented to and perceived by the masses. Dadaism’s “one requirement was foremost: to outrage the public,” Benjamin wrote. With film, the “spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which like all shocks, should be cushioned by a heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.”

In other words, the technology shook our thinking. “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception,” he wrote. “The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. … The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment.”

Decades later, Nichols acknowledged that what Benjamin observed about film is applicable to powerful cybernetic systems that moved beyond reproduction of reality to its simulation.

“The orchids of immediate reality that Benjamin was wont to admire have become the paper flowers of the cybernetic simulation,” Nichols wrote. “The enhanced ability to test the environment, which Benjamin celebrated in film … certainly continues with cybernetic communication. The computer’s dialogic mode carries the art of the ‘what if’ even further than the camera eye has done, extending beyond the ‘what if I could see more than the human eye can see’ to ‘what if I can render palpable those possible transformations of existing states that the individual mind can scarcely contemplate?’ “

Whereas film as visual medium allows us to watch and imagine romance or conflict, online virtual reality games like Second Life allow us to experience them. Whereas medical imaging equipment allows us to peer into the human body like never before, nanotechnology will someday deliver engineering particles to detect and treat individual diseased cells in the body.

For Nichols as for Benjamin, technology has become the means of changing our way of thinking about the possibilities.

“The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought,” Nichols wrote. “Its material surface is its meaning — without history, without depth, without aura, affect or feeling. The copy reproduces the world, the chip simulates it. It is the difference between being able to remake the world and being able to efface it. The micro-electronic chip draws us into a realm, a design for living, that fosters a fetishised relationship with the simulation as a new reality all its own based on the capacity to control, within the domain of the simulation, what had once eluded control beyond it.”