Scrutiny

I’ll be offering an audio conference called Using Copyrighted Works: Digital Rights Management in Education through Progressive Business Audio Conferences, September 4th at 1pm. The seminar requires registration ahead of time. They keep pushing it to be a how-to presentation, but I don’t really do that, so it’ll be more about getting people to think about the implications of DRM for educational institutions like libraries, based on some of the arguments in Wired Shut. We’ll see what happens.

UPDATE: It went well, though the questions that came in were seeking more procedural answers, mostly about fair use. I don’t feel so bad, then, because what a lot of the questions wanted were clear guidelines for what they could call fair use, and I’m not the only one without answers to those questions; there really aren’t any, at least not any that have the certainty of law.

I believe you can order a CD of the conference at the PBAC site, if you so desire.

I’ve just posted the syllabus for my graduate reading course on technology and society
that I’ll be leading this fall; it was developed with the help of Dima Epstein and Erik Nisbet, and aims to visit the foundational work in Sociology and Communication that tackles the relationship between technology and society. Some people asked that I post it to the blog; here you go. It’s also available here, neatly formatted. Comments are very welcome.

Much of the contemporary literature dealing with information technologies, new media, and digital culture either overlook or oversimplify the complexity of technology as a social phenomenon. It is often remarkably ahistorical as well, as if the examination of communication technologies began alongside the arrival of the Web. For those of us who deal with information and communication technologies in our own work, the various demands of our research projects rarely allow us the chance to revisit the traditions that produced these areas of study. This semester we aim to rectify that. This reading course will explore some of the foundational works in Sociology and Communication that aim to understand the relationship between technology and society. We will generally read one scholar per week, in order to read them deeply. In our meetings we will discuss the readings on their own, and then try to identify what they might offer to the current literature on new technology and society. The outcome will certainly be a better understanding of this area, and a rich set of theoretical tools we can each bring to our own research.

Week one: Aug 27-31
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination: excerpt from introduction [1959]
Martin Heidegger “The Question Concerning Technology” [1977]
Carl Mitcham, “Types of Technology” Research in Philosophy & Technology v1 [1978]
Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” Social Research 64.3 [1997]

Week two: Sept 3-7
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1925/1978]: 3-62
Max Weber, Essays in Economic Sociology [1924/1999] (Richard Swedberg, ed.) 41-115, 155-178
Max Weber, “The Bureaucratic Machine”

Week three: Sept 10-14
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [1927]: 1-184
John Dewey, “What I Believe,” in Collected Works

Week four: Sept 16-21
Karl Marx, “Ch 1: Commodities” and “Ch 14: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, Vol. One [1867] (125-177, 492-587)
Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process” in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things [1986]: 64-94

Week five: Sept 24-28
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [1934]: 3-106, 321-446 [available as e-book]

Week six: Oct 1-5
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society [1954/1964]: 3-22, 64-162, 319-343, 412-436
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor [1986] 3-120

Oct 8-12 - Fall Break…

Week seven: Oct 15-19
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society [1984] xiii-xxxvii, 1-40, 162-280

Week eight: Oct 22-26
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication [1951]: 3-142, 156-198
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media [1961]: 3-61

Week nine: Oct 29-Nov 2
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [1974]: 1-157 (all)

Week ten: Nov 5-9
James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [1982]: 13-36, 113-230

Week eleven: Nov 12-16
James Beniger, The Control Revolution [1986]: 1-30, 291-438 [available as e-book]
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish [1977]: 195-217

Week twelve: Nov 19-23 [Thanksgiving]
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New [1988]: 1-231 (all)

Week thirteen: Nov 26-30
Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology [1991]: 1-167 (all)

Week fourteen: Dec 3-7 [note: after classes end]
Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture [2004]: 1-174 (all)

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.

MIT Press just posted their first podcast in their authors series — me — on iTunes. You can either try this direct link (thanks Daithí), which should open iTunes for you, or search under “MIT Press Podcast” in the iTunes Store, and it should come up. Chris Gondek did the interview, it’s about 13 minutes long, and ranges over fair use, Jack Valenti, film industry tactics, and the pressures of commerce.

UPDATE: Apparently, when it is officially released as a full episode, I’ll be paired with an interview with Sherry Turkle, about her edited collection, Evocative Objects:

In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things…

Whether it’s a student’s beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes–the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.

In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound.

Among the essays are pieces by Henry Jenkins (death-defying superheroes) and my friend and colleague Trevor Pinch (synthesizer). Very cool.

I just got the latest table of contents (v23n4) for the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication, and they reproduced a series of papers from last year’s NCA in San Antonio as a Critical Forum. In their article, Roderick P. Hart and E. Johanna Hartelius put Jon Stewart on trial:

We accuse Jon Stewart of political heresy. We find his sins against the Church of Democracy to be so heinous that he should be branded an infidel and made to wear sackcloth and ashes for at least two years, during which time he would not be allowed to emcee the Oscars, throw out the first pitch at the Yankee’s game, or eat at the Time-Warner commissary. Our specific charge is that Mr. Stewart has engaged in unbridled political cynicism. And it is no coincidence that “sin” and “cynicism” have an assonant quality. But we are not accusing Mr. Stewart of being an apostate, one who has abandoned the Democratic Faith altogether. Unlike an apostate, a heretic professes faith in the overall tenets of the religion but disagrees with, or fails to practice, or tries to undermine, its most vital beliefs. In contrast, Mr. Stewart cleverly claims to advance the tenets of democracy during his nightly assignations while in truth leading the Children of Democracy astray. He plants in them a false knowledge, a trendy awareness that turns them into bawdy villains and wastrels.

Then both Robert Hariman and W. Lance Bennett rise to his defense. here’s Bennett’s start:

Esteemed members of the jury: is there anyone here who is not a fan of Jon Stewart? As no hands are raised, I move to empanel all of you as jurors in this case. It is clear that our task is less to decide the fate of one comedian than to dispel the common prejudice that a cynical brand of comedy is somehow undermining the capacity of citizens (particularly young citizens) to gain enough knowledge and perspective to enable intelligent political participation. Indeed, the core charge is that the prevailing brand of comedy epitomized by practitioners such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not only distracts people from serious understandings of events, but stigmatizes the political process and demeans citizenship itself.

The article’s are smart, and are also a nice reminder that scholarship can also have style. Sadly, the journal is by subscription, so unless your library has it, you need to pay to get access to the articles.

One of the interesting aspects of the battle over digital copyright and peer-to-peer file-sharing has been the shifts in the discourse around it. The entertainment industries have worked not only to create new laws and more vigorously enforce old ones, not only to shift to DRM locks as their primary mechanism of enforcement; they’ve also worked very hard to change the tenor of the debate. And it has worked: from the early days of Napster when a magazine as mainstream as Time could headline an article “Is It Sharing or Stealing?”, the public coverage of the issue has accepted the arguments that downloading is (a) indisputably illegal, (b) very bad for business, and (c) morally wrong to some degree. These are exactly the talking points that people like Jack Valenti hammered at in every press opportunity, every speech on campus, every appearance before Congress.

So it’s refreshing to see an article like “File-Sharing 101″ — part of a “back to school” series in Wired that also includes more consumer-friendly reporting, like what tech gear you need and what the best social networking sites are. The article compares the benefits and drawbacks of using BitTorrent, Direct Connect, and various “one-click hosting” services like Megaupload to collect music and movies. Most of the discussion is about the availability of content, the technical limitations, the ease of use. The legal risks are a factor, but the article takes a distinctly agnostic stance about whether those legal risks are worth obeying for their own sake. The article ends with the following:

Legal interpretations may vary about what constitutes legitimate sharing of copyrighted content, and we’re not lawyers. Sharing a few music clips with your friends may not violate copyright law, but distributing the latest Hollywood blockbuster to 30,000 other fans almost certainly does. So give some thought to your file sharing before you start. While one-click hosting is fairly private at the moment and darknets keep content away from prying eyes, it’s all for naught if your university actively monitors traffic and is determined to shut down peer-to-peer activity.

We recommend you check your college’s “acceptable use policy” and similar documents to determine their position on file sharing before engaging in potentially illegal activity, or at least make sure you save three grand, the going rate, in case you get caught.

This is a relatively unique statement in the mainstream press, both for its defiantly casual attitude about the legal issues — suggesting that you have $3000 around to cover the potential legal penalty is hardly a moral admonition from on high — and for daring to suggest that some limited sharing may in fact not be a copyright violation at all. This has still not been directly tested in a major court, as far as I know; the Napster judgment simply assumed it, as a step in the logic of finding them liable for contributing. The RIAA has been relatively careful about settling most of its lawsuits against individuals, in part so that the question does not get asked.

It’s nice to see Wired, a magazine that has generally seemed to have discarded its defiant digital politics for a more business-friendly stance (compare their recent covers [Stephen Colbert, Transformers, Heroes, Jenna Fischer of The Office, even Martha Stewart] to those of their first few years [Marc Andressen, John Malone of TCI, Laurie Anderson, Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT] for just one clear sign of this shift), jostling this discursive frame a bit.