Scrutiny

Last week, YouTube announced on its company blog (in an entry titled “A YouTube for All of Us”) that it is tightening its restrictions on sexual content and profanity. Of course, YouTube has always had limits, mostly for pornography, spam, and gratuitous violence, handled primarily through automatic filtering that can spot X-rated scenes, and through the user community itself flagging inappropriate content for review. Now that user community is in an uproar about the recent announcement, because the restrictions will extend to sexually suggestive video and video that uses profanity. It’s not a surprise that sites like YouTube have to strike their own balance, between being an open platform for whatever users choose to post, and building a user community (not to mention a public brand) that’s acceptable to mainstream users and to the sponsors eager to sell to them. Censorship is hardly new to the Internet. What is new is the way YouTube intends to handle inappropriate videos: not only by removing some videos and placing age restrictions on others, but through “demotion.” “Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our ‘Most Viewed,’ ‘Top Favorited,’ and other browse pages.” This means that videos with too much profanity or sexually suggestive content will not be removed, but their popularity will be mathematically reduced, so they don’t show up on the lists of what’s most popular - censorship through technical invisibility. And we won’t know which videos, for what reasons. That YouTube can bury the rules, and their judgments, into the mechanisms by which users know what’s available and popular, points to the kinds of free speech dilemmas we’re likely to face in a digital future, and that we’re hardly prepared to think through.

Will the information industry be next at Congress’ doorstep, looking for its own bailout? With the Tribune Company’s declaration of bankruptcy today, the recession of 2008 has again proven adept at revealing those industries whose business models were already top-heavy and unworkable. But, while many will point to a decade–long decline revenues for paper-and-ink news and blame this all on the Internet, I wonder whether the business that failed them was that the entertainment industry, so eager to lash together every entertainment property it can swallow into an advertising megaplex. Isn’t it telling, that Tribune is struggling not just because readers are canceling their newspaper subscriptions for digital feeds — after all, Tribune has an enormous web presence — but because they were unable to sell off the Chicago Cubs in time to make this year’s debt payments?

LA Times report here; CEO Sam Zell’s letter to his employees here.

This is certainly not the time in this world to be a one-issue voter — if there’s ever a good time to be one. And if you’re going to pick a single issue to base your vote for President on, make it repairing the economy or rebuilding public schools or getting out of Iraq or a forward-thinking energy policy, not whether the candidate has the right policy on the Internet. That said, this is my area of interest and perhaps expertise, so I pay a little extra attention to it. And I do agree with a number of recent commenters, that a technology policy belongs on that list of priorities; we are still in a formative time around information and communication technologies, where the policies we set today, in Congress and ther courts, will resonate for decades.

So I wanted to highlight some recent discussion of McCain’s missing technology policy statement. Obama released his several months ago, and it hits the mark on most issues, if perhaps it lacks some specifity and hews to a gentle line of progress and not a bolder one. But McCain has not released any official campaign statement about technology yet, and many have connected this both to the Bush administration’s severe and devastating disinterest in promoting scientific and technological innovation towards progressive ends, and to McCain’s campaign trail admission that he’s an Internet “illiterate,” has never emailed, and relies on his wife when they need online information. This is simply reprehensible, though again not exactly of the same scope of other crucial campaign issues. There are lots of people who do not and cannot use the Internet, of course, in this country and elsewhere. But it is primarily because they cannot afford the tools or the process of developing the skills, and/or they work in jobs that do not depend on computing. Neither of these is true for a U.S. Senator. And, as today’s Salon piece on this issue notes, it is not simply that he is older; they cite a recent Pew report that 3/4 of Americans 65 and older are on online. I think its striking that former FCC Chairman (and Obama supporter) Reed Hundt has said “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it.”

The Salon piece goes on to discuss McCain’s role in Congress over the last decade and a half, regarding policies relating to the Internet. Their emphasis is on the fact that McCain voted against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because it was too regulatory — a bill that, in my opinion, has been more harmful than good because it handed too much of the shaping of the Internet over to private companies, i.e. was too deregulatory — that he worked against the “E-rate” elements of that bill, that gave federal breaks to public schools to help them establish Internet access, and most of all for co-sponsoring the Internet School Filtering Act in 1998. This one is, in my mind, the most egregious. It was co-sponsored with Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, who tech and law enthusiasts will know as one of the worst offenders in the digital copyright world, proposing bills that would have required all digital devices to incorporate DRM, at the behest of the entertainment industries. The bill required schools receiving the E-rate funding to install filtering software on their school computers, at a time when filtering software was proving to be deeply flawed, easy to circumvent, and most importantly, an easy means to censor vital online speech. And, it would have given the responsibility for imposing this rule to the FCC, a vast expansion of their jurisdiction. As Salon noted, even conservative tool Rick Santorum disagreed, and threw his support behind a gentler version of the bill — that still obligated public schools to invest in filtering software, pointlessly, at their own cost.

Whether or not McCain has personal familiarity with the Internet is less the issue here. Because you can be an Internet user and still see it as a devil’s playground full of porn and baddies, or as an pristine field perfect for the construction of a corporate shopping mall. My greater concern is the parallel with the Bush administration’s approach. Whatever McCain doesn’t know about the Internet is counterbalanced by his apparent commitment to hand over the task of guiding the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to private corporations, and then allowing government to simply ignore the issue altogether.

Update: McCain has posted his technology policy. Lessig dissects it and finds it wanting here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the shape of cultural and political discourse in the contemporary digital environment. And there’s been no better place to consider it than the current U.S. presidential campaign. Sometimes I feel like the campaigns are simply working to fill my lectures - Obama Girl, the CNN/YouTube debates, The Hillary Clinton 1984 parody. The latest volley was the McCain web ad that called Obama the world’s biggest celebrity, with flashes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, then wondering whether he is ready to lead. (Of course, there’s no logical connection between the two claims, and none is actually made in the ad. But whatever.) The video gets all sorts of play, making it to the top of online circulation sites like Google News and getting picked up and replayed by the traditional media. Then Paris Hilton responds on FunnyorDie.com, with a surprisingly dry and pointed response ad - that itself makes the rounds, enough that the McCain campaign has to respond.

But this note from Crooks and Liars is even more intriguing. A web ad released by the McCain campaign during the primary, trumpeting McCain as the “true conservative” in the vein of Ronald Reagan, has been removed from their site and from YouTube. John Perr notes that the removal is timely, considering McCain’s recent ads present him in his “maverick” role, a reach for independent voters. Not only is the video gone, but the press releases that originally accompanied the video are gone as well. But the curiosity is that the video is still available, and bloggers noting the removal can still point to it — being posted back to YouTube by others, available in Google’s cache, or in the Internet Archive.

Political campaigns are turning to online platforms for an array of modes of comunicating to their base, to undecideds, to the press, to donors. Posting a video onto a campaign website and to YouTube can happen quickly and circulate widely, and with any luck gets repeated on TV newscasts. It can take advantage of the social networks and email mailing lists being cultivated by the campaigns to keep supporters linked in, to whatever degree they’re willing. But there are some points of jeopardy in these online environments. And one is visible here, the way that the record remains, even when a candidate might want to shift the tone of their campaign or the emphasis on certain talking points.

It is not as if YouTube simply retains all submissions. Videos can be removed by their posters, by YouTube itself, or by YouTube on behalf of others (for instance, copyright holders). But, because of the material workings of the web (caching) and the efforts of users (saving the stremed video and reposting it) it cannot be scrubbed clean. What exactly is kept, and when it will reappear, is unpredictable. But it cannot be erased with certainty. And its return can be fast and vast, if the moment calls for it. What you post can always return to haunt you — whether its The Daily Show calling it up to point out hypocrisy, or bloggers digging out a statement once made and since repudiated, or a journalist finding a position statement the preceded financial support from someone who may have benefited from it. The contours of political discourse is only now accomodating this particualr feature of online environments, and whole industries (late night comedy, for instance) are emerging in the space provided by this phenomenon: the uncanny return of the once published and never removed.

Here’s the video:

I don’t know if I’m actually going to get around to it — so many different directions to take one’s research, one can’t do them all — so I thought I would just post this and let anyone think it out for themselves. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, ever since I published my book, about how to study copyright “on the ground,” to move from the places where the rhetoric about digital copyright is produced and circulated, to where the mundane practices that grapple with and, in quieter ways, shift the workings of copyright in the contemporayr moment.

One of the most vital questions for how information is regulated and culture is shaped, and that copyright offers such an ideal insight for understanding, is to look into the particulars of the interlocking of technology, law, culture, and practice. However, most of the scholarship so far has tended to look at the issue on a very broad, macro-social level: Congressional mandates, court decisions, public debates, cultural controversies. (My book is certainly guilty of this top-down and sometimes generalized perspective.) To deepen our insight into these problems, we must also examine not just the biggest changes and the loudest debates, but also the ways these arrangements play out “on the ground.” How do designers of new technologies understand their copyright obligations, and how do they incorporate those obligations into the tools they design, amidst other economic and practical pressures? How do corporate partners collaborate on techno-legal strategies for enforcing their copyrights, and how do they persuade legislators, the courts, and the public to see it their way? How do users come to understand what copyright is, and in what way do they incorporate or disregard it in their everyday habits of acquiring and producing culture? Insight into these practices will illuminate the ongoing debate about copyright in a digital age. But the question extends beyond the particulars of copyright: how are the rules of information production and knowledge in a digital environment conceived and imposed? How do the various participants in this process understand their role within it, respond to pressures, and rationalize their activities? How do their efforts extend, normalize, or undercut these changes in copyright and information regulation. How are we building what will become ‘digital culture’?

The discussion of digital copyright needs much more ethnographic attention to the lived realities of all this. These questions require a methodological attention to the real spaces and practices in which decisions are made, elements come together, problems are grappled with. Getting inside the rhetorical debate means examining people in their actual social contexts: in the cubicles of software designers, in the meetings of industry consortia, in the offices of media producers, in the dorm rooms of users. It will be very interesting to figure out what the right ethnographic sites should be, which information practices and local discourses are revealing of the complex lived tensions between property and not, which arrangements most need to be drawn into focus and dissected. Is it something like Pirate Bay, where the political dimension of copyright violation is most explicitly articulated? (There’s been some recent work about Pirate Bay — I saw a talk a few months ago dealing with just what you’re pointing to, the way Pirate Bay is moving itself from an outlaw community to a legitimate political force.) Is it Brazil, where the mew politics of IP is not just technological motivated, but wrapped up in seeking alternatives to Western models? Is it at Creative Commons, where people are seeking to shift the debate and locate a third way? Is it in the dorm rooms of avid downloaders, where the anti-piracy rhetoric of established industry reaches for the American “digital native”? (I don’t much like the term, but it makes the point.) Is it with musicians, grappling with a shifting landscape of circulation, the long and tortured history of the role of record labels, and the swirling rhetoric? I feel like these are the obvious ones, and that part of what needs to be done here is to ferret out where else this lived experience of information and property needs to be studied. Still, each of these (and lots I’m not thinking of) have real potential.

If you’re interested, Joe Karaganis’ edited anthology Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, has been made available online for free. I have a small piece in it on regional coding in DVDs, but the entire antholgoy is really superb. Below is the table of contents.

* Presentation, Joe Karaganis
* The Past and the Internet, Geoffrey Bowker
* History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus Online, Gregory Crane
* Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia, Ravi Sundaram
* Pirate Infrastructures, Brian Larkin
* Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production, Mizuko Ito
* Pushing the Borders: Player Participation and Game Culture, T. L. Taylor
* None of This Is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster, danah boyd
* Notes on Contagious Media, Jonah Peretti
* Picturing the Public, Warren Sack
* Toward Participatory Expertise, Shay David
* Game Engines as Open Networks, Robert F. Nideffer
* The Diablo Program, Doug Thomas
* Disciplining Markets in the Digital Age, Joe Karaganis
* Price Discrimination and the Shape of the Digital Commodity, Tarleton Gillespie
* The Ecology of Control: Filters, Digital Rights Management, and Trusted Computing, Joe Karaganis

I just saw a presentation of an amazing online resource called Metavid. It is overseen by Warren Sack at UCSC and designed largely by his students Michael Dale and Aphid Stern. Its funded by the Sunlight Foundation and a grant from the NSF.

The site houses every second of video footage from the Senate and House floor since January 2006. All of it is searchable online by the text of the speech (scraped from the closed captioning of the CSPAN broadcast), the name of the speaker, the session. You can search, with a really simple and effective interface, not only for what a certain person said on a certian topic on a certain date, but also cross-referenced by some of the information the Sunlight Foundation offers — so, you could request any mention of “health care” by anyone recieving more than X dollars from pharmaceutical industry donors.

Any clip can be very simply embedded into a blog or website. You can jump to the stream of footage and indicate the start and finish point of the clip you want, and that can be added to a blog or website. You can help label clips for content, or even repair text errors in the closed caption transcript. You can combine clips (in an astoundingly nimble drag-and-drop interface) together, and put the montaged clip into your blog or website.

I’m really, really impressed.

Maybe I’m in a grouchy place, from jetlag or lack of coffee or too much coffee. But I think I’ve decided to never use the term “Web 2.0″ again, except maybe to speak critically about it as a construct. I know its almost as popular to bash the term as to use it, so I’m not cutting any edge here. But I’m finding it exhausting in this conference, and I realize that I may have used it in my own presentation - in fact, I’m not even sure if I did or not, which is disturbing.

This is partly inspired by David Berry’s talk, in which he critiques the term as an “imaginary technology,” one that, in fact, was meant not as a category but as a manifesto of principles when Tim O’Reilly first coined it. David made an excellent point, which is that it is dangerous for scholars to turn to study a phenomenon, and do so by accepting a term manufactured to describe it, and manufactured by interested parties. (I particularly loved that he kept calling it “2-point-naught.”) But its also a reaction to the way this term has so insinuated itself into this conversation. Precisely because the conference called itself “Politics 2.0″ has made it such this term, on a regular basis, gets used by presenters as not a manufactured term, or even a set of principles, but a matter-of-fact category of technologies out there.

It is a singularly useless and shamefully promotional term, and plays into our worst habits as academics, intellectual laziness and over-simplification as insight.

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 just wanted to share with everyone the syllabus for my new course, 320: New Media and Society, which is offered in Communication and cross-listed in Information Science. I’m pretty proud of it, and hope it will be of some interest to those who might be reading this blog. Here’s the blurb:

We are all immersed in a complex and pervasive media culture, which makes it particularly difficult for us to recognize the complex relationship between media and society: how what we see, hear and read is in some ways the product of our society and its particular political, economic, and cultural shape, and how it also shapes our understanding of ourselves, our community, and our world. And at the moment, our media culture is undergoing a series of transformations - as new forms of entertainment, new venues for political debate, and new models of journalism emerge online, and as the established producers of media struggle to adapt to the challenge.

This course will interrogate how the cultural landscape has changed in relation to media and information technologies, how broadcast media and traditional publishing are converging with networked computing, and what implications these changes may have for society, politics, and culture. It will focus on cases drawn from new, information-based media - online news, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, mashups, social networking applications, TiVo, video gaming, etc - but will examine them so as to understand the underlying relationship between media and society.

 http://www.tarletongillespie.org/syllabi/320.S08.html

I love when the world takes care of my teaching responsibilities. Next week, in my new course on “new media and society” (I’ll share the syllabus here soon, I’ve been slow getting it into web form), we’re supposed to talk about ownership, concentration, and convergence: do the scholarly concerns about traditional media ownership, that concentration in the content and information industries poses a problem for the character of public discourse, apply in the new media environment? Does it matter that Google owns so many features of the new media landscape, in the way that it seems that Time Warner or Disney/ABC or News Corp does? Well, in the timeliest fashion, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6 billion dollars to purchase Yahoo. This doesn’t answer the question we’re tackling in class, but it certainly gives us new food for thought.

(This post was written for the MIT PressLog.)

The writer’s guild has complained for years that they’ve been unfairly shut out of profits from digital versions of the TV shows and movies they helped create; as networks and studios continue to expand the web presence of their programs, providing “webisodes” and character blogs and background stories for their on-screen content, they have further enlisted writers to produce material they’re not being adequately compensated for. Perhaps the current strike will help rectify this inequity.

But are screenwriters inadvertently helping to shift the new media landscape – just as they get their extra slice for their “webisodes,” are they digging out the ground beneath their entire venture? In 1988, the last writer’s strike, grinding the prime time television season to a halt was a powerful move: we were still in a world of four channels and “must-see TV”. The absence of new programming was disruptive enough to audiences and advertisers that the networks and production companies felt compelled to enter negotiations. Today, the scope of that media universe has changed. What are viewers doing without their new episodes of House or The Office? They may be catching up on series they hadn’t gotten to, finally exploring Friday Night Lights or Mad Men or Weeds, either through on-demand services, iTunes, the network websites, Netflix, or even illicit peer-to-peer networks. The networks may actually cash in on the opportunity, if they’re smart: “never got around to Aliens in America? Want to see what critics are talking about? We’ll start at season one, let you come in from the beginning, starting Monday!” An array of other options loom: video games, social networking sites, blogs.

And what if viewers (and advertisers with them) find themselves gravitating to that massive “channel” of content produced by non-unionized writers, i.e. the rest of us: YouTube? Will some ascerbic amateur writer, especially as we head into the heart of the presidential season, become the YouTube stand-in for the political humor of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and SNL? Will dramatic shorts or amateur sitcoms, produced by aspiring writers or just those bored college kids, finally become a viable entertainment form, filling the current vacuum on TV? It would be ironic indeed, though not unprecedented in the history of media, for this squabble over one version of the digital media future to end up giving a boost to a different digital media platform, a tectonic shift in viewer preferences and cultural legitimacy that would be difficult to undo.

Apologies for the dead air on this blog, but this spurred me to post: Time magazine columnist Bill Tancer noted this week that, according to Hitwise measures of web traffic, 18-24 year olds have put social networking above the seemingly unbeatable kipper app, porn:

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here’s a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I’ve actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It’s a leap to say there’s a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I’d bet it has everything to do with Gen Y’s changing habits: they’re too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

(I don’t know much about how Hitwise gathers its data or classifies sites, so keep that caveat in mind.)

In the history of media technologies, porn regularly plays a crucial role at the start, often the first commercially viable use of the new form — especially but nut exclusively the visual media. Generally, other uses join porn as a viable activity, giving the medium a much needed veneer of legitimacy and cloaking our baser impulses. Part of my reaction to this news is actually a little surprise that it hadn’t happened yet — porn is still on top for the generation above this.

Or does this mean that Facebook is the new porn?

In an attempt to maintain this blog as an academic pursuit, I have long held half of my
bloggy impulses in check. I love reading music blogs, and have often debated whether I could let some of this blog focus on music, just for the love of music. But I decided to wall it off, for all sorts of intellectual and (tenure-based) strategic decisions. So it is with gratitude to Radiohead, who has for many years now been my favorite artists, to give me permission to bring the two together.

Lots of people are talking about Radiohead’s recent announcement. (here’s coverage in The Telegraph and The New York Times.) They’re new album, “In Rainbows,” is available for pre-order, exclusively through this website. To buy access to the digital downloads, which will be available October 10, you pay whatever you want. Over and above a .45 pence credit charge, you set the price, as high or as low as you choose.

I just ordered the album, and offered to pay 4.92 pounds, which at that moment was $10. you could offer twice that, or you could offer a single pency, about two cents.

In addition to the digital downloads for whatever price, you can buy the “discbox” version, with the album on CD, a second CD of alternative tracks, vinyl versions, artwork, etc. Its 40 pounds, or about $81. And there’s talk of a traditional CD release in January.

Much of the talk is about what kinds of offers Radiohead will get, and I hope/assume we’ll hear at some point what people are generally proposing. Farhad Manjoo, on his blog Machinist, did some of the basic math, to figure how much they’d have to get to match what they’d get selling it on iTunes through a major label:

For every $1 song sold on iTunes, according to reports, Apple keeps about 30 cents, giving about 70 to the record label. But activists say artists typically get just 8 to 14 cents per song from the deal — or about $0.80 to $1.40 per album sold digitally.

So that’s the main test here; in order for the band to come out ahead, Radiohead needs to clear only more than a buck-50 per sale. Easy.

I have to agree with his guess, that Radiohead fans are a particular stripe, and will pay generously enough to balance out those who decide to try the album for less than $1.50 and the ones who like the thrill of paying a band two cents and getting a full album. The songs will get traded wildly on p2p networks, but that would be true if they went the traditional CD route. And all that antipathy for the major labels, whether its real or a useful posture to justify file-sharing, might tip some scales and convince some to drop a few bucks through this unorthodox model.

I’ve often argued that artists could really change this whole game — the example I always think to is Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks breaking from the Hollywood studio system and starting United Artists as an actor-friendly studio — a studio that survived for decades. Imagine the tectonic shift that might follow if George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Will Ferrell just set up shop with a radical new way of doing business. Or, since its the music industry that needs renovation today, imagine Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, and Bruce Springsteen setting up a record label where artists didn’t sign away copyright, they just got support and promotion in exchange for a cut of their profits. Radiohead is messing with the system in their own way, and it pushes the question in a way that a new distributor or reseller can’t, because the justifications for copyright so often focus on the authors and artists.

Because the option to price the album as you choose is so unorthodox, it is going to get the most attention. But let’s also remember that this is a major artist selling their album online without the support of a record label. This is not entirely new: Prince has been doing it for some time, Aimee Mann did it for her last album after being unceremoniously dropped from her label. Obviously lots of unsigned bands try it. But a success in this regard by a band that has had recent success going the more traditional route does have an impact. Radiohead is working with a distributor called W.A.S.T.E. Products, who are handling the financial transactions and downloads; I don’t know what kind of economic arrangement they have with them, though I imagine some/all of that .45 is for them. But a success here, especially a high-profile one, could spur distributors like W.A.S.T.E. to emerge and offer their services.

And let’s add another wrinkle to the picture. As I write this post, I’ve been listening to nearly every track from their upcoming Radiohead album that I already paid for but can’t download until Wednesday. And I don’t use peer-to-peer networks. Nearly every song is available on YouTube in some live version, from a Radiohead appearance at Bonnaroo, or a British show called The Basement, or some other show recorded by a fan and posted. And Manjoo has a blog post with the album tracklisting, nearly every track a link to its YouTube locale. So the music’s out there, in a somewhat different form. Without a label to interfere (Radiohead finished its contract with EMI with Hail to the Thief in 2003, and refused to resign. Was George Bush the “thief” in the title, as many surmised, or was it EMI and the record industry?), no one is ordering YouTube to take these down. Will that mean fewer will buy the album, because they can just make a YouTube playlist for free and listen to their heart’s content, or will more buy because they can hear that the songs are of the quality Radiohead so regularly offers? I suspect the latter… and we’ll see… though there will be dispute as to how to interpret the numbers, how it would have been different otherwise.

And finally, some praise for Radiohead. I have long adored their music, have never been dissatisfied. They may or may not be your cup of tea, I can appreciate that. But they are smart musicians, exploring a range of sonic ideas not as some knee jerk gesture towards reinvention and not ever repeating past successes. They’re smart about the world, smart about technology, smart about making music speak to the world and still move you as music should. They respect their fans as thinkers, as listeners, as citizens. And they have proven to be very thoughtful about the industry in which they participate. It is not separate from, but I think vitally connected to, artistic practice, to have the gall, the daring, the ingenuity to challenge what seems true, to see where it may be otherwise. I do not demand that music not be a commodity — Radiohead will get paid, to some degree, no matter how this works — just that the rigidity of those commodity relations, the replacement of cultural ends with market means, the overshadowing of meaning by the overemphasis of the exchange, be shaken up from time to time. So while the academic blogger in me thinks any result from this experiment will be a fascinating insight into the intellectual questions pressing around music, copyright, and digital culture, the music blogger in me is pulling for Radiohead on this one 100%.

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.

The Internet has been tarred and feathered as a haven for sexual predators and pedophiles since its inception; while I don’t mean to dismiss the concern entirely, I’m often troubled by the way that reports of this lurid terror are regularly magnified, overemphasized, and used as justification for regulations of the Internet that go far beyond the scope of the threat.

The latest version of this worry has emerged around social networking sites, especially MySpace, after some cases began to emerge where MySpace played some role in the criminal solicitation of a minor. MySpace has been under pressure recently to develop ways of patrolling its massive site to make it safer for kids; The Associated Press reported today that MySpace has removed 29,000 profiles whose users matched registered sex offenders. North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper is calling for legislation that would require adults to prove their identity before being allowed to create a profile, and require kids wanting to set up profiles to have their parents prove their identity. (This would likely mean entering a credit card number, though there are other ways. Requiring users to establish identity would make it easier for MySpace to compare their users to the sex offender registry; currently you do not need to indicate your identity to establish a profile, which means MySpace has not necessarily identified all registered sex offenders with profiles.) As Farhad Manjoo notes at Machinist, one of the problems of such a rule is how to define “social networking site” — would it apply to YouTube? del.icio.us? Twitter?

29,000 sounds like a lot, and part of the reason this is news is because MySpace had announced back in May that it had found and removed 7,000 registered sex offenders from its site; the revelation that the number is much larger adds an alarmist ring to the issue. But this quantification of the problem lends a great deal of power to these fears, and is often the reason they can be exploited for political gain. It made me want, despite my skepticism of quanititative evidence more generally, to put these numbers into some perspective. But I find that doing so also reveals how difficult it is to reach reliable numbers. Here goes…

According to a May 2007 report from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, there are 602,139 registered sex offenders in the U.S. This number has likely changed since then, but presumably not by an order of magnitude, so let’s use it. The AP report is not explicit about whether MySpace is comparing their users against only this U.S. registry, or if there are also international ones they have access to. So let’s make the assumption that they’re only using the U.S. registry. It’s also not clear from the report whether the 29,000 includes the 7,000 deleted in May, or if they located 29,000 more. If it’s 29,000 total, this means that 4.81% of all U.S. registered sex offenders had MySpace profiles that were located and deleted; if it’s 36,000 total, then that represents 5.98% of the registered sex offenders in the U.S. This feels, at least to me, like a pretty big number; if it was discovered that 6% of registered sex offenders were regularly attending Little League games (maybe they are), would we want to intervene? moreover, this doesn’t tell us how many MySpace user profiles of registered sex offenders did not include their real names and therefore have not been located and deleted — I imagine, if you’re a registered sex offender, that you wouldn’t be too inclined to provide your real name, though I don’t know to what extent there are other services MySpace offers that would require a credit card, making it more likely that real names end up being involved.

The AP report also notes that MySpace has over 180 million user profiles. This number is only an estimate of course, mostly because new profiles are being added all the time. But if we use this estimate, this means that the 29,000 or 36,000 profiles deleted represented approximately 0.016% or 0.02% of all MySpace profiles. These numbers feel small, to me at least. It is important to remember that we can’t necessary use them to stand for a percentage of all MySpace users, just a percentage of profiles; a single user may have multiple profiles. We could take this to suggest that, while there may be more profiles of registered sex offenders, the 29,000/36,000 at least represents that many people; maybe some of the profiles they have yet to discover are these same people; we might also take it to mean that some of these 29,000/36,000 may be multiple profiles of the same person, meaning there were fewer users identified as sex offenders (though if this were the case, to a significant degree, it’s likely that MySpace would make it known in order to downplay the concern.) Also, profiles remain even if their users logged on once and then never came back; the number of active profiles is significantly smaller, though this also applies to the number of sex offender profiles, though perhaps to a different degree.

Of course, we have obviously not accounted for sexual predators who are not registered as sex offenders for whatever reason — they’ve never been caught, they’ve yet to do something criminla but are about to, they were indicted as a minor or under some other circumstance that does not require them to register — or their crimes were in countries that do not maintain a registry, or a registry that MySpace has access to.

Just to add to the tangle, it’s probably important to recognize that part of the fear is based on the assumption that any child who has a MySpace profile is at risk of being accosted by one of these sex offenders. According to research reported in the Journal of Adolescence (blogged about here) a random sample of 2423 profiles by users under 18 years old, 948 were set to “private,” which means they can only be seen by the user’s friends. of the remaining “public” profiles, only 8% revealed their full name on the site, only 1% provided an email address. (Of course, I’m relying here on the abstract of the research and a secondary retelling of the published results of a research project; lots of details about how these numbers were reached are unavailable to me.)

I find it frustrating that the rhetorical power of a number depends in part on its clarity, which means its ability to obscure the complexity of the issue. And developing other numbers to counter it is an exercise in continued frustration. They always depend on unknowns, which must then be ignored, estimated, or explained away — or represented in ways that then undercut the rhetorical power of the number produced. I could say “29,000 sex offenders were removed from MySpace’s 180 million profiles” or I could say “roughly either 29,000 or 36,000 user profiles that likely represented some of the profiles maintained by sex offenders registtered in the U.S. were removed from MySpace’s approximately some number of active user profiles less than 180 million and changing every day.” Both are “true;” in some way the second statement seems like a fairer and more accurate representation, but it’s pretty clear which has more rhetorical oomph, which one will make it into the abstract of the paper, which will get it published, which will get picked up by the press.

And, these numbers always represent another attempt to make compelling numbers for the sake of some argument. A report that says 36,000 sex offenders were removed from MySpace is different than a report that says that 0.016% of MySpace profiles represent sex offenders, which is different than a report that says that 99.984% of MySpace profiles are people without records of sex offenses. Each of these claims is loaded, an “accurate misrepresentation” of the issue.

Update: “The Numbers Guy” at the Wall Street Journal has raised some similar concerns.

Despite my copyright politics, I actually have a great sympathy for the efforts by authors and musicians to control how their work is first released. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think there’s a difference between unpublished and published, and I like that part of the artistry can be about crafting that first moment. Still, I wanted to point out a comment from Salon blog-umnist Farhad Manjoo at Machinist (a terrific blog that’s become my second click when I go online, after Salon) about how the multiple leaks of the new Harry Potter book demonstrate that the information environment has forever changed, and that security measures (like DRM) simply cannot cope. Despite millions of dollars of extraordinary security measures to protect the higly-anticipated final installment, including satellite tracking of delivery trucks, leaks of the final book’s major plot points, and even digital photos of each page, have surfaced online. Again, fans are largely fuming about the leaks, and I can appreciate it, though Manjoo makes some very compelling points about how this is unlikely to hurt Rowling or Scholastic financially.

But then he delivers the sad truth:

Rowling intended her story to be released a certain way. She wanted it to come out on July 21, she wanted it to come out on paper (and audiobook), she wanted people to delight, together and simultaneously, to the climax of a tale they’ve been waiting a decade to read. The artist, in other words, expected a certain fate for her art…

So let me try to say this kindly, hopefully without causing any offense: What the author wants is not, anymore, all that will happen. Today, artists — even those as powerful as J.K. Rowling — can’t reasonably expect such dominion over their art. A well-laid plan is dashed by some guy with a camera and a lot of time on his hands, and that’s that. And mostly this loss of control is a good thing, for fans as well as for artists. Rowling and her wizard have, after all, benefited tremendously from the Internet; through fan fiction and unending online discussion, creative Pottermaniacs have immeasurably deepened and intensified her work, keeping it thriving between releases.

Much of the discussion about the internet and copyright and peer-to-peer and control mechanisms have been about the economics (are sales going down? do people try new works and then buy them?) and the law (should re-distribution be illegal? Is copyright working in this altered environment?). But I think some of the most interesting questions are going to be about the cultural questions. How will the experience of entertiainment change? Will we have these blockbuster moments, where many of us gather at the same time for a carefully crafted mega-experience? If not, is that good or bad? How will the relationship between the original and the secondary material (parodies, sequels, reviews, criticisms) change, perhaps in ways that fundamentally change what “the” and “original” mean? And how will artists and writers innovate in this new environment, conjuring up new ways to thrill people never before possible in the bottlenecked, mass-produced, blockbuster version of culture we’ve had for the last century or so?

Is Harry Potter the last blockbuster? Probably not. We’ve been wondering about the death of the mass culture experience for a long time now, long before the Internet, as film attendance declined in the 60s and 70s, the three television networks become hundreds, the VCR allowed time-shifting, and the terrain of popular music fractured into dozens of sub-genres. But I do wonder if the pop culture phenomena of the near future will have very different contours, in part because of the power to circulate and recreate that is so taking advantage of digital technology and the Internet.