Scrutiny

There has been a movement afoot to convince Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor and thoughtful copyright activist, to run for Congress in the 12th district in California, a seat just vacated by the death of Democrat Tom Lantos. Apparently, he has heard the call; in a video available here, at Lessig08.org, he makes announcements: the second is that he is considering this move, and will have some answer by March 1. The first, and arguably just as important, is the pre-announcement of his project “Change Congress,” a grassroots movement to change the “economy of influence” in Washginton. This stems from the scholarship he has taken on since his work on copyright and free culture, about the power of lobbying and money in our political process.If you think highly of Lessig and his work, say so — on his site, or by joining the “Draft Lessig for Congress” Facebook group. And whether he runs or not, look into the Change Congress project. You can add your email and be alerted when the project itself goes live. I believe this issue is the most important issue today for free speech and character of the public discourse, and is a crucial piece of the puzzle of why every major political issue of our day is conducted on a far-from-level playing field. I have long said, when asked what needs to change in copyright law, that the answer is campaign finance reform. Lessig can take this point right to D.C.

While you’re at it, you might also be interested in Lessig’s video explaining his support of Barack Obama. (If nothing else, Lessig’s particular gift for lucid talks and weirdly compelling Apple-Keynote presentations would itself be a welcome addition to our nation’s political discourse. Gore-Lessig for Powerpoint-President, 2012!)

Update: Lessig has announced in his blog that he will not run for Congress, but will focus his efforts on developing the “Change Congress” grassroots project. I suppose being in Congress is not the ideal way to move one issue forward — even when that issue is endemic to all political concerns — since you would be spread across so many issues. Fair.

I’m proud to say that WikiCandidate, a research project developed by two of my graduate students and that I’ve hopefully been somewhat helpful on, launched this week. Take a look: WikiCandidate08 — what you’ll find is the campaign website for a contender in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. But the candidate is entirely the product of what you, and anyone else who joins the site, comes up with. Every element of the site, from the candidate’s biography to their stance on issues to news reports from the campaign trail, is editable, using a familiar wiki format.

Who would your ideal presidential candidate be?

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.

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.