Scrutiny

Fenwick McKelvey, a graduate student from Ryerson, working with Greg Elmer, posed an interesting question after our panel. What do we mean exactly when we talk about a new media “platform”? I use the term, but probably not in a particularly analytical way. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of “platform” as sites that act as vessels for user contributions: YouTube, Flickr, even Craigslist, eBay. Wikipedia suggests that the term does not refer to such sites, but to hardware or software platforms that allow other tools to run, but I feel like I have often heard it used to describe sites that host content, not just tools.

This is worth thinking through. In fact, the main point of my talk today may actually beg that very question. I suggested that there’s a paradox for new media platforms for political involvement, where they may offer up their site as a certain kind of space, but it is the users who end up defining in powerful ways what the site offers and what kind of deliberation it hosts, because each subsequent user arrives at the site filled with their contributions, may only be true because I am thinking about new media “platforms” that have to be offered up first as an empty vessel, a la YouTube or Flickr. But of course, in those cases, the site provider can post their own content if they so choose, and may have at the start in order to get things going — though as the site grows, their contributions are dwarfed by the content provided by others. In our WikiCandidate project, we did not want to “prime” users in any way by putting even space-holding text — but this is an artifact of our particular desire to see what gets built, and to be able to ask communication questions as well as technology and politics ones. I could imagine other sites, like Remix America, where the very point is to fill the site with a certain kind of content, in order to encourage further contributions.

Is “platform” on of those terms, like “peer” or “amateur,” that is being adopted because it does some very particular cultural work in this mew media environment? Is it another discursive way to appear open, to make a promise of technological neutrality? The metaphor of a platform is a pretty compelling one: it raises you up, but it is flat and without walls, so its open to all and privileges no one. Its also worth remembering that the term has been long used in the political venue, in terms of a party’s platform, to suggest that the candidate stands on these principles. Is it a term that needs unpacking, as well as being more analytyically rigorous about it when we do scholarship on such tools?

I’m currently attending the Politics 2.0 conference being held at the Royal Holloway University of London, organized by Andrew Chadwick. The Wikicandidate project that my students and I have been developing made it a natural fit, and we were lucky to have a really good audience for our panel. So while I’m here, I may throw some thoughts to the blog, about the implications of new media phenomena for political involvement.

One issue that emerged from our panel and the discussion that followed, is the tension between engagement and consensus. There is a tension in the ideas about public political involvement and the “public sphere,” between whether the value of public participation in debating the issues of the day is the value of engagement for its own sake, or engagement in order to accomplish something, to reach consensus or resolution. I don’t know Habermas’ body of work as well as I should, so I don’t know if he addressed this directly or not. But it seems to be a persistent but often implicit question when we actually build for political involvement. Are we building spaces for people to come together to debate, because debate is a good thing, because it makes us better citizens overall, because it is the symbolic heart of democracy as an ideal? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want that debate to accomplish something, to reach a resolution on some pressing issue, to take an informed vote on some bill, to set the agenda of an governing body? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want people to reach consensus, to agree?

One point a made in my presentation was that wikis, and especially as instantiated in Wikipedia, seem to emphasize consensus over engagement for its own sake. Though some trumpet Wikipedia for its collaborative nature, the priorities at Wikipedia are about the resource produced – I think Wikipedia would prefer an encyclopedia entry that is fair and accurate but written by one person, to an entry that’s flawed and incomplete but built by many. And the wiki is technologically designed to highlight the consensus produced over the discussion that produced it: the tool foregrounds the entry and backgrounds the discussion, history, and edit functions. (You could imagine an alternative-universe Wikipedia where, when you go to the entry on “democracy” you’d arrive first to the page where users debated how to present the concept of democracy, then could click to see what they came up with. This is just as technologically possible as the one we have, but already seems counterintuitive. Its not so far from the way a Usenet threaded discussion on democracy would look.)

So if there is a tension between engagement for its own sake and engagement for the production of consensus, and remains an open question about which has greater value (or what combination of the two we require), new media platforms are being built today that decide on an answer to this question, without the question being asked.

One of the most important steps we can take as scholars is to demand that, as new answers are being offered to old questions, the question at least gets asked.

One of the most challenging tasks in teaching a class on new media is to get past Internet-centric stories about contemporary change. We could call this “technological determinism,” the tendency to explain social change by pointing to the Internet as the cause, but I think that actually doesn’t help. There are many claims made about how a new technology causes change — “hey, the web is changing politics!” But even when scholars and critics are trying not to simplistically pin their explanation on the technology, there is a convention of using technologies to discursively mark and comprehend moments of change. It’s a kind of shorthand, like “The Industrial Age,” where the author may not actually think that the cotton gin or the assembly line changed everything, but they need a reference point to make sense of a broad period of time when ceertain kinds of things mattered and took effect. Its also an acknowledgement that certain technologies, the Internet certainly one of them, often motivate a public attention to changes, changes that may already have been underway but that become clear or problematic around a new technology. And, as new technologies emerge in certain moments, amidst change, they often become playgrounds and battlegrounds for the exploration of contours of that change, and so become entangled with it.

But this does tend to do an injustice to the process of understanding these changes and the forces behind them, because the technology often figures way too prominently in the discussion, and can often stand in as a shorthand explanation. So how do we talk about the Internet and politics, or new media and journalism, or online advertising, without incessantly telling a pre- and post-Internet story, and without having to claim that nothing has changed?

In the course of teaching this class, I’ve noticed one tactic I find useful: drawing attention to changes that were already underway, that predate the Internet, but that got taken up around new media. This draws on a tradition in the sociology of technology, that suggests that technologies are the product of social negotiation rather than the other way around, and from a lesson I learned from Phil Agre in graduate school, when he said “instead of studying the Internet, study the social phenomenon you’re interested, then consider the 5% of that phenomenon where the Internet matters.” (I’m paraphrasing; its been a few years.) Of course, one of the challenges is that you have to really know the social or political phenomenon in question, and you need a sense of history, something I find under-emphasized in my department’s curriculum.

This insight keeps arising for me, even in surprising ways. So I’m re-reading Zizi Papacharissi’s article “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere,” from New Media & Society 4.1 (2002), where she astutely examines the question of whether online political discussion is fostering or undermining a public sphere, in Habermas’ sense of the term as well as his critics’. She works through lots of the issues around how online discussion spaces work (or worked: the article pre-dates blogs, wikis, and social networking), including issues of access and overload, diversity and fragmentation, and commercial pressure. In her conclusion she notes a concern raised by Breslin, that “the internet promotes a sense of sociality, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into solidarity.” (21) But her reaction is excellent: that while we may wonder if online communities and political debate can match the kind of organized solidarity that communities or unions or political organizations or rallies could, that may in fact not be how political engagement works anymore. Forty years of “identity politics” have moved the political discourse from solidarity to individual expression as a political gesture. And the political use of the Internet may fit much more neatly with that version of political discourse. So its not, “is the Internet helping or hurting the political process?” but rather “as the politicla process continues to struggle with structural tensions, for instance around communal versus individual political engagement, how does the Internet get taken up in this process, play into or against that tension, and afford unanticipated opportunities that other communication technologies did not?”

The most striking moment in the course so far, where I felt like a rich sense of cultural history would help focus us on a long change that predates but tangles with the Internet, is around journalism. We discuss the question of whether newsblogging is a form of journalism, mostly because it helps reveal the complexity of journalism as a social category, how it has always tangled with the shape of the dominant media form, and how ideals and arrangements get re-thought in light of a new medium. But as we discussed the history of media journalism, especially around the superb Frontline documentary “News War” (part three is especially relevant, but its all good), it became clear that, rather than thinking about blogging as this radical new form that throws journalism into disarray, that it was useful to think about two longer-term trends (maybe others are relevant here as well): the intersection of news and entertainment under increased pressures on news organizations to turn a profit, and the increasing public skepticism around the ability of mass media journalism to take an independent and forceful position in relation to government.

Journalism once enjoyed high regard in the public eye in the days of Watergate, it has squandered that in the days of a de-fanged Reagan press corps, the embrace of infotainment formats like newsmagazines, a series of scandals about falsified news reports, and cost-cutting in the newsroom while demanding higher profits. As David Simon, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “The Wire,” put it in a recent Salon interview, the Internet isn’t exactly what is killing newspapers:

“Making an 18 percent profit and thinking that there was nothing else on the horizon and you were the only game in town … You can’t tell me that they were saving the money for a rainy day. Nobody knew that the Internet was going to be what it was. Nobody at my paper did, anyway. And now it is what it is, and there is no money, and they didn’t spend the window that they had building something that was so essential and so vibrant and so necessary to understanding the world well that you couldn’t do without it.”

And, in competition with more and more outlets for news, especially with the rise of cable, news providers needed to distinguish themselves, one of the ways they did so was to emphasize punditry, political stripe as brand, a la Fox News. The rise of talk radio in the 1980s and television news punditry in the 1990s, combined with the emergence of “citizen journalism” and “peace journalism” all highlight a call for more user involvement to break the chokehold that professional journalists had on the agenda and presentation of wordly events.

To see newsblogging in this context suggests that, rather than blogging emerging from what the Internet offers technically, it is the expression of some long-brewing frustrations with traditional mass media journalism, and does so by, not surprisingly, extending those shifts that were already bubbling up: subjective voice, the blurring of news and commentary, user involvement.

If we want to extend our historical lens even further, this in fact situates blogging as just the latest step of a very long back-and-forth in American journalism, about whether the provision of public information should be political or commercial or independent, amateur or professional, local or institutional. I’m cribbing here from the masterful work of Michael Schudson on the history of American journalism and political participation.

So the question I’m left with is, how to best incorporate this perspective in the classroom? How do you know enough history, and teach enough history, to really put these changes and tensions into sufficient context? There’s a part of me that’s tempted to teach classes not in the Communication framework, but like American Studies classes: that to understand the Internet you need to understand Western society, culture, and politics of the last century — maybe longer, and maybe beyond the Western context even. My courses have always had a historical dimension, but only in the sense that phenomena we were examining were always understood as historically situated. But if your class is full of kids who were born in the 1990s, how do you give them a rich enough sense of the historical context itself, for them to get that the contemporary phenomena they know emerged from it?

I don’t claim that this is original, and I bet I could guess who’s already said something like this, if I had an afternoon to go look at their books/blogs/articles. This is just a thought, walking out of my class today, a way I found I could make sense of something worth making sense of.

The topic this week was whether the classic concerns about media concentration around broadcasting and publishing, i.e. the worry that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies, applies and raises the same implications in new media industries, such as the search business. The point I think I closed with today, though it’s only coming clear in my head now, is that the concerns we had for traditional media emerged from the “economic imperative of mass appeal”: If your business model depends on helping an advertiser get the same message in front of as many eyes as possible, and the economics are such that it costs a whole lot to make the movie or show that’s going to draw them in but cheap to get that show to a huge audience, then the tendency is to try for a mass audience, make one thing as appealing to as many as possible, and be sure its something tht advertiser won’t shy away from. And from that, the risks and abuses that can come from media concentration are of a certain kind: shying away from volatile topics, homogenizing the content, chasing past successes, failing to report on news that might damage your own business or that of your advertisers. (This is not to say that this always or even endemically happens, but that it can, and does.)

On the other hand, in the search industry, the business model is to attempt to give each user what they’re looking for, not give them all the same thing. And advertisers pay to associate themselves to specific terms and pages, not to be everywhere for everyone. So the business logic, and with it the risks that emerge from economic concentration, come not from mass appeal but from the “economic imperative of comprehensiveness”. The best search engine will be the one that catalogs the most of the web, or the most of the web that’s relevant to the most people, and serves that index up in a way that satisfies users requests, or seems to. The goal is to give every user to the right advertiser, every advertiser to the right user. And it benefits the search company to find ways to bring users to them and to keep them there, not just by doing search well, but by building themselves into other services so users are channeled back to them. (Google does this by building its search into a browser toolbar, into other websites, by building the search into GMail and YouTube and Picasa and Google Maps and Google Books and iPhones and so on…) This is the “googlization of everything” that Siva Vaidhyanathan has been writing about.

And, thus, all the kinds of risks and abuses that have emerged around Google’s dominance in the search industry and around concentrated corporate ownership in the new media realm all stem from this economic imperative of comprehensiveness. It is not about content control or political timidity, as it can be with traditional media. Instead, its Google choosing to scan books first and letting copyright owners opt-out (rather than asking them all for permission first, which would have been legally safer) — the value of that library will depend in large part on being able to say that its “everything,” or close to it. Its the temptation to mine GMail messages and search queries and Deja News posts as consumer data to better fit ads to users and search terms, because Google needs to know as much as it can about every user and every kind of interest, no matter how obscure. Its the Google Maps “street view,” where privacy concerns come second to the impulse to document every inch of every street corner.

This framework, I’m sure, was inspired by Elizabeth van Couvering’s dissertation work on search engines, part of which was assigned reading for my class today.

The other day I put together a five minute presentation for our incoming freshman, to give them a sense of the kinds of things they could study around new media and society. I riffed on the role that YouTube is playing in the presidential political process:

- every major candidate (BO, HC, JE, MR, RG, JM) has a YouTube space, for posting videos of campaign stops, television ads, debate moments… Are these new ways to speak to people, or rehashes of opportunities previous media already offered?

- Hillary Clinton posted a series of videos along with her invitation to have her supporters her campaign song, including a video that parodied the closing moments of The Sopranos finale. Are we seeing the political discourse merge with popular culture in new ways, or are these just the classic, painful ways politicians try to speak the language of the people?

- in light of the video that merged Clinton’s speech with the classic Apple “1984″ ad, suggesting that supporting Obama would counter the “big brother” grip on democratic politics… which seemed at first to hagve been produced independently but apparently came tangentially but not directly from the Obama campaign organization… what is the value and impact of political parody, and to what extent does YouTube add another step in the complex set of ways in which people add to the political discourse?

- does the availability and persistence of video clips mean that statements made by a candidate in one place are statements that must be ready to be potentially seen by anyone/everyone — the “macaca” statement by George Allen as a key example, where a comment made in one venue gets recirculated, and recirculated by the videographer working for his opponent sent to capture those very gaffes. Does this change the political process, in that candidates can no longer speak to different audiences in different ways? Does our political culture now have a dimension, most visible on The Daily Show, where old statements will constantly be held up for scrutiny against new ones?

- does the YouTube sponsorship, along with CNN, of one of the Democratic debates, where questions were submitted via YouTube and then moderated by Anderson Cooper (the moment where the candidate respond to a global warming question asked by a talking snowman was particularly surreal) represent another move towards revising the way in which political debate is structured, along side town hall debates and the like? Does it represent a new form of public participation or a cheapening of the dialogue?

But, the issue I keep being struck by, again and again, is the way that much of what isd on YouTube is not exactly ‘amateur’ production. This came up here because I started with the “Obama Girl” video and its progeny. Again, it was discussed as an emergent phenomenon, someone out there (implicitly, an independent person with no official life in the political process or in the production of media) who simply wanted to support Obama and thought of a clever way to do it. But a quick look revealed that Obama Girl was the result of the efforts of a production team, who used it to start their site barelypolitical.com, and that the actual Obama Girl is lip-synching for another singer. Bells go off for me here, reminding me of lonelygirl15, or subservient chicken, or the BMW films.

Maybe this seems an important insight only because I’m giving too much credit to the claim that YouTube is a venue for amateur video, when perhaps it has never really been that. Certainly the legal issues are around regular users posting not their own work, but copies of major studio films and television. And maybe I am simply highlighting one slice of content, one that I often encounter, and that the sheer mass of video really is the kid in his dorm room, the videocasting, the cute kittens, etc. But it feels like there’s a story to be told here, about the way YouTube is not just handing a venue to the people that was once monopolized by the professional media industry, but that its making a space for the forgotten middle — the film students, the ad team making weird videos in their free time, the campus groups, the studio musicians, the artists trying to break into the business, the “long tail” stuff for niche groups. Maybe that material, which once had to survive in the festival circuit, in informal trades, in film school archives, has a powerful and public venue. It reminds me of the way MySpace has been taken up so vigorously by bands — not the majors though they’re venturing on now, and not just the kid strumming his guitar in his garage, but the middle-tier bands, the ones on minor labels or not yet signed but with a history and with some kind of professional aspirations. Its the very bands that were squeezed out by the corporate consolidation in the record industry in the 1990s

I wonder if the story we will eventually tell about digital culture and the Internet is not the “everyone’s an author / information is free” story that sounded so tasty at the start, but two other stories: the social network story represented by Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, Digg, Slashdot, maybe Wikipedia… and this one: the expanding visibility and opportunity for the “middle of production,” the struggling bands and the video teams and the open source programmers and the journeyman writers — “amateurs,” not in the sense that they’re inexperienced in production, but in the sense meant in the Olympics: those not hired and paid to produce media, or not paid to produce this particular media, or momentarily outside of the traditional sphere of how such media are produced, or momentarily outside of their professional capacity, or just now rising in that professional capacity.

I finally got to see the final episode of The Sopranos, just a day late. I’m not going to join in on the debate about the narrative choices David Chase made (ok, I think it was startling and brilliant). I;m not even going to reveal them: I’m sensitive to those who haven’t watched yet but intend to, as I did (it was a tricky 24 hours, avoiding articles, skipping emails from friends that might reveal details). But there’s an interesting dimension to how the show ended that keeps coming up in articles I’m now reading. Without revealing the details of the ending, I will say two things: first, the episode ends abruptly, cutting to a silent black screen and holding for a few seconds before rolling the credits. Second, based on the way the show ended, many have commented that David Chase was, among other things, poking an elbow in viewers ribs a bit, perhaps for the endless speculation about how the saga would close.

Many viewers, when confronted with the black screen, thought for a moment that their cable or TiVo had failed them, that perhaps the show had run long and not been recorded, or the signal dropped at that crucial moment. Even watching it on HBO on Demand, I had the same sensation (exacerbated by the fact that the HBO on Demand service had initially failed when my we tried to start the program). Its a gut panic, an existential dread that, cruelly, our technology has failed us at the crucial moment of dramatic denouement, and its a terrible feeling. And a revealing one. My good friend Josh Greenberg has written about the complexity of thinking about media technology, and one of the things he has noted is that we are constantly making a very subtle but seemingly simple distinction between what is the text and what is the technology. The radio blares out a song, that’s the text; it blares out static, that’s the technology. There’s even some artistic room to meddle — a song that starts with the hiss and pop of a turntable, or a character in a television show “knocking on the glass” of our TV.

That final moment in The Sopranos put us in an ambiguous space of technical ambiguity, one where we could not decide for a moment whether the black screen was a purposeful aesthetic decision on the part of the makers of the show, or the sign of a technical failure in the distribution system that brought it to us. I suspect that the choice may even have been Chase poking an elbow in our ribs, as the producer of an epic drama in an age of “snack culture”. I may be making too much of a small point, and certainly the ending deserves discussion on its narrative merits more than on this. But it strikes me as an intriguing moment — as the ways we watch TV multiply (cable, on demand, iTunes, broadcaster websites, DVD, peer-to-peer downloads, subscription streaming), the distinctions we have to make between technology and text, between what is the media and what it is mediating, grow more complex.

I’d been hearing rumblings about a new book, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, for a while now — its apparently a screed against the Internet for allowing amateur purveyors of information, opinion, and art to swamp the traditional, expert, professional providers of such things. I have not read the book, and am certainly curious to see what he manages to marshal by way of evidence or persuasive argument, as I am most certainly already skeptical of his central premise. But Lawrence Lessig, who apparently was privy to an early copy, has already sharply and beautifully taken Keen and his book to task. No surprise, Lessig disagrees with Keen’s argument, and no surprise, Lessig shows up in Keen’s book as a champion of the amateurish Internet. But Lessig performs a surgical smackdown, noting not only Keen’s mischaracterization of Lessig’s position, but a series of fundamental and painfully obvious errors and overstatements that, he notes, are endemic to the book.

Lessig goes so far as to winkingly suggest that, in fact, Keen is defending the amateur, by demonstrating that the old model — major publisher anoints expert author to say authoritative things to mass audience — can produce just as much crap as the Internet does.

Well, Keen, you wanted a return to the authority of experts. You got one.

Lessig is bringing up sideways a point I like to tackle head-on in my classes. I find the most interesting aspect of these phenomena (be it Wikipedia or blogging or YouTube or Amazon recommendations) is the way that they force is to recognize that the established mechanisms and institutions of information and culture (be it Encyclopedia Brittannica or The Wall Street Journal or NBC or Consumer Reports) are themselves socially produced, historically contingent, institutionally bound, and systematically imperfect systems. They too have an implicit, built-in philosophy of where knowledge and culture come from and how one knows to trust or appreciate it, they too are structurally better at getting at some things and worse at others, they too can be mishandled or exploited. This is not to say that we should adopt a relativist position, that any way of producing information is okey-dokey. We can have a discussion about specific kinds of resources are best served by particular arrangements, some of which may benefit from wider, amateur participation, others benefiting from more bound, trained communities. But it obligates us to give up this kind of comfortable certainty we enjoy about those traditional forms, the social authority they have built up over time that cloaks their imperfections. And just as much as the Internet and its applications may be highlighting this, the traditional institutions of knowledge are doing a fine job revealing their own weaknesses all by themselves — from the failure of the political press to challenge the run up to war in Iraq, to the diminishing cultural relevance of major label music, to the crushing consolidation of corporate radio , etc etc.

In a discussion with students yesterday, with a powerful snowstorm raging outside, the (now quite old) question of real vs virtual came up. This is what happens when you read Julian Dibbell, even if you’re reading him to think about how democratic structures do or do not emerge inside of nascent communities. Do people in online spaces get so immersed that they disconnect from the real world. The question posed was a more interesting one that the typical, because it was focused on political blogging, which is not your classic “virtual” worry, like MUDs or Second Life or, way back when, Dungeons and Dragons in shuttered university corridors. The question was, do people get involved in political blogging, not for the connection to the real political landscape (support this issue, criticize this candidate, sway this election) but for the gamesmanship, the sheer process, the insular back-and-forth: here’s today’s Post editorial, let’s dissect it.

It’s an interesting question, but it also got me thinking back to that old concern about people getting lost in the virtual. And it struck me that a better way to think about it, a way to get past what really was a fear of an unfamiliar technology, is to think about the range of coordinated, social activities we engage in as on a spectrum: from interventionist to escapist. This is not about what the activity is so much as it is about how the pleasure of participating is presented. So participating in that political blog discussion is pitched as vitally connected to the real political landscape; Second Life is offered up as something separate from… an alternative to… a second life. So this is not just the offer of “virtual reality”, it is also the offer made by “murder mystery weekends” and costume parties and even the theater.

This is not to say that people must therefore experience it that way; there may be some who just enjoy the gamesmanship of political blogging, and clearly there are plenty who have turned to Second Life and found not an escape form their mundane experience, but a way to link the two. (I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January with some fellow scholars, and one reported talking to an IBM rep, who described how they often host their bi-coastal meetings in Second Life. And, that there is a naked gnome who takes great pleasure in regularly streaking through their meetings.) Nor are we somehow duped by the illusion, as some fret. But the promise of these activities, along the spectrum of being interventionist or escapist, is a powerful one, especially to those who are trying to comment on it.

Maybe we could add another dimension, similar and often parallel but not the same: instrumental vs immersive. So it is no surprise that the 3D, highly visual environment of Second Life, or of video games, supports this promise of escapism. It is more difficult, though I suspect not impossible, to enjoy such escapist activity when the medium is sparse, when the aesthetics are mundane, when the activity is too reminiscent of the ones we engage in every day.

Which leaves me with a final thought, just to finally put the nail in the coffin to that old, but weirdly persistent worry that those who get too involved in these “virtual” spaces risk losing track of the ‘real” world: the best example I can think of for a escapist, immersive activity, is professional football. Not atching the gamr, but actually playing in it. It offers an alternative reality, where a bizarre set of rules of engament apply and every consents to obey them, it happens inside of a space entirely designed to make visible and confirm that world, to take you out of your real life, it offers no promise that engaging in the activity has any impact on the real world, only on the constructed world of professional football itself (the season, the rankings, the playoffs, etc.) They even wear costumes. Yet we do not worry that football players will “lose” themself in the game. In fact its seen as a legitimate thing to do, something we urge our high school kids to join in. I suspect that play in virtual environments will eventually shed these connontations and concerns — they’re already diminshing, especially around online environments and video gaming — and settle in as fanciful, escapist, but not psychologically seductive, activities.