rasmuskleisnielsen.net

OK, so this is an argument I have been working on for a while. I have just send a revised version to the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Andrew Chadwick is editing a special issue on the basis of a conference in London, where I presented an earlier version of the argument.

The one-liner version of it is banal to some and unheard of for others: “organizing matters even more in collaborative projects when communication is almost free for senders, precisely because the decreasing up-front costs help generate so much communication and thus increase the costs of dealing with it all”. I wish I had read this before, because the challenges that Michel and others at Off the Bus confronted are in some sense similar to what the activists I studied struggled with.

The more academic abstract goes like this:

This article analyzes the use of Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 2008 U.S. presidential primary. Whereas the literature on political activism has generally argued that the Internet provides low-cost communication that facilitates collective action, this case highlights the labors that accompany Internet-assisted activism. The analysis, based upon participant-observation, identifies related problems of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload with which the activists struggled. Drawing on concepts taken from science and technology studies, the article argues that these problems have socio-technical roots and arise from the specific affordances of an increasing number of Internet elements integral to activism. Even as such elements reduced the up-front costs associated with communication for the sender, they help generate new transaction costs when they are integrated into heterogeneous assemblages with no shared communication protocol, single infrastructure or clear exostructure, or any other means of tempering the tendency for participating Internet-assisted activists and groups to always communicate more.

The thing itself is available here. I post it because I will be presenting versions of it for different audiences at the Politics Online 2009 conference at George Washington and hopefully also at Personal Democracy Forum 2009, and the journal version has not been finally accepted yet. Also, it feeds into other projects that I am still working on.

So, as always, feedback is welcome. The argument is qualitative and I hope I have moderated my claims enough to make it palatable even to people who remain skeptical of such work. I stand by it till I stand corrected.

Went to an “Emerging Technology Brown Bag” gathering today, organized by Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL). It featured Thomas Tague, who works with OpenCalais. OpenCalais is a free web service developed by Thomson Reuters that automatically extracts rich semantic metadata from digitized content.  It integrates with a number of open source platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, and Firefox.

Though the talk was partly framed as being about the future of journalism, there were none such present (it is spring break, to be fair…). Most of the people who came were librarians.

I’m not a tekkie, so I shan’t pretend to be able to explain the details of what Tague & co are doing, but a few basic points are worth fastening on to and spur the commentary that follows.

Users of the service submit chunks of basic textual content, and Calais returns the text enhanced with categories (percentual fit with sport, news, business, etc), identifies named entities (people, companies, etc), facts (John Doe said “x”) and events (company Y released its quarterly earnings). Even taking into account the obvious fact that these extraction capacities are not generic, but have limited capacities and some pre-set categories, this is obviously interesting and useful for all sorts of large-scale analysis and can enrich datasets in many interesting ways, in addition to being hugely useful for auto-coding of large databases operated by companies such as, well, Thompson Reuters.

In terms of journalism, Tague said that Calais can help with new forms of reporting (based on meta-data), can help investigative reporting of a more traditional kind be more effective, and can cut editorial costs to free up more dollars for actual reporting. And since they are developing this in the open and making many of the tools available for free, it lends itself to experiments of all sorts.

I think what is even more interesting and instructive is the reasons offered for why Thomson Reuters, a “most-assuredly for-profit company”, are doing this and making it available. He pointed to two reasons.

(1) engaging in open development helps the company to stay up-to-date technologically.

(2) they need to prepare themselves for a new information environment where their traditional business model, charging for exclusive content, may not be viable on its own.

The second reasons is obviously hugely important in many ways. If Thompson Reuters, a veritable knowledge-economy giant with roughly $11 billion a year in revenue and  50,000 employees (that is, about five times the size of the New York Times Company), behind probably only a few intelligence services in the amount of information they produce, store, and process (sorry, Bloomberg), is preparing itself for a post-walled garden future, then those who think they can save their much smaller heritage industry organizations by building their own tiny little walled square-inch gardens should maybe think again (newspapers, anyone?).

Tague argued that Thompson can still do a fair amount of business on the basis of charging for access to raw data, but that they also needed to start offering richer meta-data that customers could mix and match easily with other sources in the linked data cloud, and that they most of all needed to move towards a position where their premium good was not simply information and access, but information you can trust. Information that is not stale, misleading, off-the-point, etc.

In the business world, this is of course crucial, and worth paying the kind of premium for that you can build giants like Bloomberg and, well, Thompson Reuters, on. Whether it works for news is anybody’s guess, and in most cases (i.e. “average American newspaper” cases) my guess would be a resounding “no”. Unless the telecoms and content industries manage to change the internet as we know it dramatically over the coming years, it is hard for me to imagine that the Cleveland Plain Dealer controls content that can be monetarized and is valuable enough to sustain a walled garden (what its owner, Advance Publications, has and hasn’t, can and can’t, is another story).

So for Tague, the future is not so much one of information monopoly for companies like Thompson Reuters (their traditional model), or of control over the means of dissemination and thus a certain audience (the old mass media model), but of interoperability, collaboration, and, importantly, standard-setting. Fascinating.

– – – Ben Peters send me the below comment, which for some reason didn’t make it through to the site – – –

Fascinating stuff, here, as usual. I’m going to speculate that these categories are provided by some automated inference maker that bases its inferred categories for the given corpus of text off of a much larger corpus of pre-categorized text. I wonder, if this is not entirely wrong, how the categories in the source text are procured? Shouldn’t the slide around with dynamic use? Every assigned category should come with meta data: P of error, R2, etc., etc. How these tech questions are answered, I think, will tell us the most about the longer-term, more important questions you raise about walls and business. I’ll be glad to keep an eye open with you on this one.”

A bit of straight-forward self-promotion, my review essay ‘Uneven accelerations’, discussing John Tomlinson’s The Culture of Speed, Jose Van Dijck’s Mediated Memories, and Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser’s 24/7 has been published by New Media and Society, and is available here.

Also, check out Ben Peters’ and Christina Dunbar-Hester’s articles in the same issue.

This will be my final post about the conference we hosted at Columbia little more than a month ago.

I have updated my posts about the three keynote presentations to include summaries of the discussions that followed.

The discussion is also raging elsewhere, both on- and offline (Benkler has reacted on the New Republic piece that Starr’s presentation was based on–see his piece here). It can be followed through the set of links and tagged pages aggregated here. Anything tagged with ‘cdpc09’ on delicious will be added to the list automatically, so tag away if you encounter or produce something.

After the conference, I emailed many of the participants to ask about their reactions to the day’s discussions. I will obviously not post these emails here, but I would like to offer a digest of some of the reactions I received.

Rather crudely, but perhaps usefully, many reactions can be grouped in two camps:

One group of people thought we spend too much time discussing the future of the newspaper as we have come to know it as an institution in society in the last fifty years. The motivations were diverse, from people arguing that the importance of the newspaper, professional journalism, and hard news might be overestimated (we might soon find out!) to people simply saying they felt that the attention paid to it came to overshadow the wider question of how public controversies play out today across many different and differently interlinked institutions, networks, and infrastructures. Many suggested that rather than lament the potential passing or at least dramatic change of a particular historical institution, we should try to identify the constituent elements of the processes it has animated, and think about how those of them that seem normatively desirable might find new forms in a new communications environment, even as others wither. Personally, it seems to me that this was more or less precisely what Starr and Benkler tried to do, Starr arguing that central parts of what the newspaper has done historically is unlikely to be done if it passes, and Benkler arguing that much of what it has done will be done by others in the future–both have recognized the importance and validity of each others positions, both at the conference, and in their exchange in the New Republic. In a sense, this argument seems largely empirical to me, and thus the repeated call for more research in the emails I have received might be particularly pertinent here.

Another group of people basically wrote back and said that they thought that many were too quick to trust the promise of new technologies, and failed to recognize the links between the more beningn and desirable aspects of actually-existing journalism and the organizations that host it (such as the ability of large news organizations to stand up to the threat of law suits, even if reluctantly (see the NYRB article on the Guardian on that topic here). Basically, yes, we can re-conceive journalism as a process rather than a profession, and it can be disaggregated, and parts of it will find new homes in the new communications environments–there will still be content production, and there will still be news–but the totality we had might have been more than the sum of the parts, and even if the new totalities might have other, new attractive sides (and new dark sides too), it might be important to pause and recognize the value of what we stand to lose.

The commonalities between the two “camps” (that I have constructed…) are I think, more pronounced than the disagreements–everybody seems to agree that more empirical research is called for (good news for the grad students!), and that the changing dynamics of public controversies can only be understood if one takes into account the interplay between and mutual imbrications of technology, norms, institutions, and laws.

As those of us who gathered at the conference, a motley intellectual crew from many different disciplines, turn to face this question with out colleagues elsewhere, it seems to me again important to underline the importance of thinking about some of the conceptual challenges that were discussed after Latour’s presentation at the conference: how useful is the vocabulary we have inherited in this anlaysis? Is Lippmann’s public a good tool to understand the public today? Is Habermas’ still-popular idea of the public sphere? Do we need to turn elsewhere, or mix and match or at least re-interpret old concepts? If the conference has contributed to pushing forwards both the empirical and the conceptual discussion of public controversies, and underlined their importance, I think it has been a success.

The final presentation at the Feb 7th conference was Yochai Benkler on “Power and Participation in the Networked Public Sphere”.

– – – again, rough summary on the basis of my notes, no guarantees – – –

Benkler started out by suggesting an underlying change of much wider-importance than any particular change in politics or communication–namely the change from an industrial information economy to a networked information economy, a change he has discussed in The Wealth of Networks and elsewhere. The central take-away here is that the latter situation comes with radically decentralized capitalization in terms of human know-how and communication technologies, the most important inputs in most work. To put it bluntly: in the advanced post-industrial democracies, more people will have their brain and a networked laptop tomorrow than had the kinds of tools it took to get things done in an industrial economy yesterday.

He went on to point out that while progress is uneven, we see more and more actual examples of distributed and networked peer-to-peer production of things people previously thought could only be brought about by large and hierarchical organizations. News is an example pertinent to the conference, but an arguably larger and more technologically complicated and challenging example of something produced by peer-to-peer networks is the Apache web server.

He offered a few examples of how similar forms of production have been put to use and even institutionalized through Porkbusters and the Sunlight Foundation, and news gathering sites such as the Huffington Post’s ‘Off the Bus‘ project.

So what does this matter for the public sphere? Benkler suggested that the basic blue print of the mass public that accompanied the industrial information economy is changing as more an more interaction and production can take place outside the market and government institutions that dominated in the past.

He challenged various objections made to the basic idea that whatever its substantial merits and flaws, what he calls the ‘networked public sphere’ is preferable to the mass public–saying that empirical research problematizes ideas such as the ‘babel objection’ (Cass Sunstein and his Republic.com 1.0/2.0), the idea that web speech is somehow inferior chatter, and the idea that power law distributions of links and attention online somehow reduces everything but a few sites to irrelevance (an argument that Matthew Hindman has elaborated in a very impressive manner in his recent book, The Myth of Digital Democracy).

Against these objections, Benkler maintained that while each is on to something important, the odds are good that peer-production online can maintain watchdog roles that some newspapers have historically sometimes fulfilled, and help people to do other things as citizens that newspapers never afforded.

He points as an example of part-market, part-collaborative enterprises with an important impact to smallish online news outlets like Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Townhall.com that each maintain staffs that are much smaller than a newspaper with similar web traffic, but in contrast to the latter seems economically viable in the long run.

He pointed out the notable asymmetries in how far the left and the right have come in embracing and developing these potentials, with the progressives generally being more prominent online, more successful, and more technologically and organizationally advanced and generally in line with the collaborative logics of the net. Benkler is currently doing research with Victoria Stodden on mapping these differences and explaining them, and offered for discussion various hypotheses.

Finally, he returned to the idea that while the commanding heights of the mass public may be withering, there are reasons to believe that the emerging networked alternatives can maintain both the attention backbone, the news gathering and watchdog capacities, and the vigorous debate that a democracy needs to thrive.

– – – more sources – – –

Benkler on open-source economics here (youtube).

And his The Wealth of Networks in a nifty wiki version here.

– – – discussion – – –

to repeat, based on my rough notes, and thus not attributed to individuals, in case I distort and simply arguments, as I undoubtedly will

two central questions dominated the discussion of Benkler’s argument

first, what is the relationship between the practical promise he outlines and the power of entrenched institutions who are often slow and even reluctant to embrace the technology as it has emerged, and rather tries to refashion it in their own image (schools, Hollywood, the mass media, and political organizations spring to mind–it is often insurgents who have led new media innovation in all these areas, against incumbent reticence). Benkler of course deals with precisely this question at length in his book, and quite happily conceded that important resistance exists, and may eventually fundamentally change the dynamics he have identified today. There is a central battle going on here that reaches beyond simply struggles over open software and net neutrality, and suggests two diametrically opposed logics at play, the disaggregating trust of digital technologies (their ‘bittiness’) and the aggregating pull of institutions.

the second question is how well his argument scales, both domestically in the U.S., and in countries that are either smaller (like my native Denmark) or have low internet penetration (like Pakistan, with about 1/100 connected). Are there problems of critical mass, or is it a question of other differences when the potentials he describes through U.S.-examples sometimes seems unfulfilled in other cases? Everybody seemed to agree that this is an area that calls for additional empirical work.

“Is Walter Lippmann’s Phantom Public be more visible on the web?” – that was Latour’s title and opening question.

– – – rough summary on the basis of my notes, no guarantees! – – –

The starting point was a quote from page 129 of this book: “can simple criteria be formulated which will show the bystander where to align himself in complex affairs?”. It is premised on Lippmann’s basic definition of ‘the public’ as ‘bystanders’, those disinterested citizens normally outside the world of public affairs who can be mobilized around an issue or an actor when every other mean of decision-making breaks down.

As Latour pointed out, this minimalist and pragmatic understanding of the public is in stark contrast to more demanding and substantialist understandings like the ‘unattainable ideals’ of his time that Lippmann criticized, and like the ones that reign in much communications research, drawn from the work of Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and others vetted to a tradition of critical theorizing.

Latour turned from Lippmann’s idea of an occasional public that could materialize to deal with issues when everything else has failed to the question of how this public (or such publics) can be mobilized. Mentioning the work of some of his collaborators, like Noortje Marres, Richard Rogers, and Tommaso Venturini, he pointed out the importance of the issues that publics form around, the tools and networks such assemblages rely on, and the controversies that they constitute.

He argued that from a democratic point of view, one should explore the opportunities for building new tools of assemblage that would facilitate publics–not in the substantial sense of rich, reason-based, deliberation, but in the minimalist sense of interventions by bystanders aligning themselves to resolve situations that has ground to a halt. He argued that such publics need quick knowledge, and easy tools, to make their mark on the world of affairs. He underlined the potentials of new technologies in this area.

At the end, Latour offered his own, expanded and elaborated, contemporary version of the Lippmann sentence that he started with: “can we reuse digital technologies to help bystanders navigate through controversial datascapes and align themselves when a public is needed in the last instance without meddling?” And offered a qualified ‘yes’ as an answer.

– – -sources – – –

previous incarnations of parts of the argument are available here (text) and here (youtube).

– – – discussion – – –

several points came up during the lively discussion of Latour’s presentation. Since this is, to repeat, a rough summary, I am not going to attribute my confused notes to individual participants, or to myself, for that matter.

One point made by several people was that Lippmann’s central concern was information and alignment of an otherwise passive public, and that many new information and communication technologies have made the distinction between passive bystanders and active participants seems less clear, and perhaps less stark–we all leave data shadows that are fed back into algorithms that help define what appear in search results et al, and the barriers for producing and sharing content, either publicly (on websites) or privately (via email etc) are arguably lower than ever. So is Lippmann’s vocabulary really what we should reach for now, at this moment, where we might all be if not exactly activists, at least a little active?

Other people took issue with the reactive view of the public that Lippmann offers as a practical ideal (the public as reacting “in the last instance”), and suggests that pro-active activists in many cases have successfully mobilized the public against the state through social movements like the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism, and gay rights–and that this should be not only analytically recognized, but also considered a good thing. We may not wait, as Lippmann suggested, till things have broken down, before we consider what role the public can play in politics. And many of the people who will try to mobilize the public, phantom or nor, certainly won’t wait, and won’t agree on when things have broken down.

Finally, a lot of people balked at the basic idea of a project that Latour is pursuing with Tommaso Venturini, Noortje Marres, and others, that puts issues at the center of attempts to understand public controversies today–some said that the social and technological workings of new communication technologies makes the network, and specifically the network of trust, the organizing principle of debate–rather than the issues that dominated the bandwith-poor mass media-dominated public.

Paul Starr delivered the first presentation at the conference I organized last weekend. The title was “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a new Era of Corruption)”. I don’t have to offer a rough summary of his presentation, since the New Republic has published the written version of it right here.

– – – update on the following discussion – – –

A few points that came up after Starr’s presentation:

Newspapers and journalism?

To what extend (and how) should one distinquish between the social role of ‘newpapers’ and ‘journalism’ and particular newspapers and journalists? Several people pointed out that a contributing factor to the current crisis in the news industry, and hence in the profession, is the expansion of several major conglomerates and chains in the 1980s-2000s, usually on the basis of borrowed money. Those loans are now weighing the companies down, and the ‘rationalizations’ made in those chains have often served to undermine the idealized forms of journalism that people often refer to when they praise its role and value.

Beyond journalism?

To what extend can the proliferation of ‘journalistic auxiliaries’ and other organs of transparency (both private, like the Sunlight Foundation, and public, like ombudsmen and various oversight and record-keeping offices) counterweight the decline of the traditional newspaper? If the expensive thing is to produce the news, and we keep in mind old communications-research findings suggesting that sources to a large extend make the news, these kinds of organizations should be able to continue to keep an eye on untoward things, and produce content that various new and surviving old media organizations can then disseminate.

Public/publics?

People also disagreed on the state of, and value of, the national public (inadvertent of not) that the mass media system that was ripe in the 1970s maintained. Some argued that this public had always been composed of a multitude of audiences and issues, some underlined that even if it wasn’t, it would be in the future, some maintained (like Elihu Katz has done) that there was a national public, it was a by-product of the mass media system, it had important beneficial sideeffects, and it is going away.

– – – warning! this is just my rough summary, not a transcript, and I have undoubtedly missed some things and misrepresented others  – – –

Lemann started out by highlighting the particular way in which journalism education has been institutionalized in the United States, pointing out that there are only few professional schools of journalism located at research universities (he highlighted Columbia, Berkeley, and CUNY), while most journalism education takes place in undergraduate programs in ‘journalism and mass communication’ at large state universities, programs largely staffed by former professionals and oriented towards employment beyond the profession of journalism itself and in a wide range of communications-related fields such as public relations and advertisement.

He argued that his has contributed to the mutual suspicion between professional journalists and communications researchers. The journalists see the researchers not only as highly critical of their profession, but also as engaged in education students in fields that many journalists think of as fundamentally different from their own–i.e. PR and advertisement. Whereas communications scholars might think of journalists as simply one form of content production (and managers in media companies too!), journalists think of themselves as what Lemann calls “applied epistemologists”, people interested in finding out the truth of a situation and reporting it, and thus specifically not as engaged in the strategic, instrumental communication that marketers and politicians employ.

Lemann went on to point out that this particular subset of journalism, the part that corresponds more or less to the description he had offered as applied epistemologists seeking truth through reporting and trying to convey it to broad public audiences in print or what not, is in, and I quote “existential danger” today.

He said that the changing information environment has meant that many of the sources of information that the main institutions hosting professional journalism in most of the 20th century, the large newspaper, made most of its money off–useful information like movie schedules, classifieds, and TV programs–are now easily available elsewhere, and much of the news and opinion material that was produced by journalists and came with it is available for free online (and sometimes in free newspapers too).

In terms of the opinion side of this, he said he wasn’t too worried. Opinion, criticism, and debate had, arguably, he said, thrived more online than it ever did offline.

What was really worrying, he said, was that the traditional economic basis for the basic work of reporting, the gathering of facts, basic analysis of them, and the conveying of them to wide audiences, is gone.

The various functions that had been bundled in the 20th century newspaper, with some functions (classifieds) subsidizing others (the newsroom), and their combination and the local information monopoly that many regional and metropolitan newspapers enjoyed for a while, is being disaggregated. Craigslist takes the classifieds, Monster.com the job postings, and so on. Leaving the news alone, and when the news is free online and attracts too few eyeballs to survive only on advertisement, basic newsgathering journalistic reporting runs into a problem.

First, the media conglomerates started cutting down on their foreign bureaus and their D.C. bureaus. That may not be so worrying. Plenty of other outlets continue to cover major world powers and what goes on in Washington. But now, the metropolitan bureaus are also being cut, and many large American cities may face a future without a local newspaper (Detroit springs to mind).

Lemann said that this is probably largely inconsequential for the issue that communications researchers have historically cared the most about, namely enhancing civic life and public debate, making it more inclusive and so on, since all this is probably served quite well by a transition to an Internet-enhanced communications environment. And he applauded that development. But, he underlined, he was not persuaded that these civic groups and volunteer associations and individual bloggers and citizen journalists could fill the vacuum that the shutting of metropolitan bureaus leave behind. He thought that basic reporting about public affairs would suffer greatly.

He ended by offering three avenues that should be explored by people wanting to do something to save the reporting dimension of professional journalism that he said was in existential danger. He reiterated that this was not about saving the media industry or particular organizations like newspapers, but that he wanted to alert people to the fact that unless something was done, the fall of these organizations might well take the underpinnings of a hole aspect of the journalistic profession with them. His four things, non-exclusive, obviously, were:

(1) Experiment with micropayment and other ways of reintroducing an element of customer contribution to newsgathering. Think WSJ.com.

(2) Explore non-profit involvement. Think ProPublica as an example of this, an endowment-funded news organizations without their own outlet, sharing their stories with partner media.

(3) Public sector involvement.Direct or indirect government subsidies.

He ended up by saying that he knew the last option was wildly controversial in the United States, and often rejected out of hand as journalism caving in to and becoming dependent upon government. He said that while there are forms of public subsidy that entail that danger, there are others that minimize it, and his finishing point was that any kind of income source comes with strings attached, and the central challenge for a profession and particular organization that wants to maximize its autonomy and independence is to try to balance different income sources so as to not become dependent on any one in particular.

– – –

We had very little time to discuss his opening comments, which were anyway in line with parts of Paul Starr’s argument in the next session, so they were sort of covered there. One objection raised primarily by Eric Klinenberg from NYU was that Lemann’s distinction between journalism and the organizations it exists in is problematic, and that a large part of the predicament that the news industry find itself in today arise out of the imperial aspirations of conglomerates that accumulated massive debt in their attempt to expand their reach (The Tribune Company and Gannett being two examples).

I helped organize a conference called ‘The Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies’, hosted Saturday, February 7th by the Communications PhD program at Columbia. Nicholas Lemann, the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism opened a long day of conversation, and Professors Paul Starr, Bruno Latour, and Yochai Benkler gave presentations to lead off three separate discussions sessions. (more info on the conference here).

A truly impressive group of people gathered in the Butler Library for the event (see the list of participants here). I’m going to write a few posts with main points made by the various presenters, and a few key excerpts from the discussions. This is by no means meant as an exhaustive summary, an impossible task, but just as a few bits that stuck with me.

“Like George W. Bush before him, Mr. Obama is trying to bypass the mainstream news media and take messages straight to the public.” (from the NYTimes, ‘Melding Obama’s Web to a YouTube Presidency’).

All politicians dream of direct communication with voters and fellow elites, from Ross Perot’s infomercials, Bill Clinton’s use of talkshows, George W. Bush evading the Washington-based press in favor of the local media, and now to Obama turning to online platforms and his own network to supplement press coverage.

All these dreams come true, but rarely as direct communication. They have costs and biases of their own, different from those of the news media, but costs and biases nonetheless.

In the case of Obama, the central limitation of his net+network, its power nonewithstanding, is that it is based on self-selection, and thus communications almost exclusively to his base. It is not going to do much good when it comes to persuading skeptics. I would think its main use will be to help local activists and Obama-supporters pressure reluctant Democrats in the House and elsewhere to support him.