Scrutiny

I just, finally, watched Barack Obama’s March 18th speech on race. Ridiculous that it took me this long, but there you go. It’s an impressive and important speech, and yet more evidence that he’s the most astute, thoughtful, and invigorating candidate out there — in a field of candidates and recently ex-candidates that I’m quite impressed by: Clinton, Edwards, even McCain. (Have I mentioned I’m an Obama supporter? There you go.)

I think it was the mark of a leader, more than a politician, that he responded to the furor over his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s militant rhetoric and Geraldine Ferraro’s abrasive comments as he did, by opening up the messiness and complexity of race in America rather than skirting the topic. Its an issue that, no matter how old, and no matter how improved since decades past, nevertheless persists, and will long persist. It is a problem deep and subtle enough that, when we think we have addressed some fundamental rift, we must look for the new and more subtle way it remains.

But it also strikes me that I wish he also had taken another tack, one not about race but about intellectual independence. Its one thing for people to call for Obama to condemn some of the more outlandish statements made by Wright, which he did. But others are saying that he should have disassociated himself from Wright’s churhc as soon as some of these perspectives were expressed. I can’t help but think that this assertion, that one must distance oneself from everyone who you substantially disagree with, is exactly what’s wrong with our contemporary political landscape. It seems both foolish and devastatingly dangerous to surround oneself with those who perfectly share your perspective — its the road to being blinded by the seemingly impeccable logic of your own ideology. I’d much rather have a leader that is determined to speak to those who disagree with him, to understand other sides of the argument, to force themselves to think bigger than they already do. And, I expect that our leader will have the intellectual fortitude to encounter such perspectives and yet also withstand them - to understand them, to think more clearly about their own position from the encounter, maybe to learn from them; to be open to being persuaded if the other perspective is compelling, but not to fall under the sway of some argument just because it is made with style and flourish. I wished Obama had also said that; that he is certainly capable of listening to someone like Wright, to take strength from the good things he said, to be thoughtful but critical of those claims that were corrosive, and to be smarter about race and politics and strife and progress because of it. That, in fact, we want a leader who dares to encounter those who think differently, rather than those who flee from and caricature them.

I appreciate, historically, that we still worry about the persuasive power of leaders who can convince their people to go down a path they do not believe in; the twentieth century was rife with them. But I think we worry too little about the opposite problem. We are much more prone to feeling confirmed by those who agree with us than we are to fall sway to the demagoguery of those who do not. I wish we had a political culture that respected and cultivated debate, thoughtfulness, inquiry, and the intellectual independence necessary to benefit from that, than the kind of wagon-circling, managed group-think
that has been championed so persistently since 9/11.

In case you haven’t seen it:

The Chronicle for Higher Ed reported this week that a decision was handed down in the copyright case against Turnitin, the plagiarism detection site. (Quickie: Schools subscribe to Turnitin, and teachers require their students to submit their papers to them before handing them in. Turnitin compares the new paper against their database of existing papers, indicates whether there’s plagiarism or not. And, they add the new paper to their database, meaning the database grows. Four students sued the parent company, iParadigm, for copyright violation, in that the site makes a copy of their paper, and [in cases where it later detects plagiarism] can occasionally distribute that paper to specific faculty.) Turnitin claimed fair use, that their use is transformative and does not hurt the commercial value of the original. The court agreed.

The Chronicle came to the same conclusion I did when I first heard the news — this is very good news for Google Books. If the APA lawsuit against Google ever goes to court, Google is going to need to argue that, though they do make single copies of books, they do so not for their redistribution or in a way that harms the commercial value of the original, but for a different use. I have argued elsewhere that, though I think Google should be allowed to do this, that trying to stretch and pull fair use to cover all of these “indexing” kinds of activities is problematic for fair use. Apparently, this court saw fit to extend fair use to cover this.

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?

When Apple emerged as an online music retailer, it seemed that those who oppose DRM had won the battle but lost the war. Apple uses DRM, but impose much milder use restrictions than the record labels were proposing with their own music services. Apple’s lenient policy, combined with the popularity of the iPod and iTunes site seemed like they would settle the debate through gentle compromise, and the compromise would be that DRM would exist. My worry at the time was that, while Apple didn’t seem as bad as the record labels themselves in locking down content, it did totally close off the possibility of (legitimate) excerpting and remixing — that is, users’ “agency” with their own culture. Further, the fact that DRM would remain, become normal and pervasive, meant that we’d accept its logic, that computer platforms would be built to honor it, and it could always return in its more restrictive form.

But, as we have seen, the major music labels have step-by-step moved towards selling unrestricted music in MP3 format, without DRM. And the reason, it seems, is that DRM gave Apple an incredible amount of power in the online music market — DRM allowed Apple to tie the music labels’ content to the iPod, which users have embraced, and now Steve Jobs gets to sit at the table and dictate price and availability. Now, as the New York Times reported this weekend (Thanks, Josh, for the link), the major audiobook publishers, including Random House and Penguin, seem to be making the same move. And lo and behold, Apple reappears as the cautionary tale for why they’re letting go of DRM:

If the major book publishers follow music labels in abandoning copyright protections, it could alter the balance of power in the rapidly growing world of digital media downloads. Currently there is only one significant provider of digital audio books: Audible, a company in Seattle that was bought by Amazon for $300 million in January. Audible provides Apple with the audio books on the iTunes store.

Apple’s popular iPod plays only audio books that are in Audible’s format or unprotected formats like MP3. Book publishers do not want to make the same error originally made by the music labels and limit consumers to a single online store to buy digital files that will play on the iPod. Doing so would give that single store owner — Apple — too much influence.

Turning to the unprotected MP3 format, says Madeline McIntosh, a senior vice president at the Random House Audio Group, will enable a number of online retailers to begin selling audio books that will work on all digital devices.

I love that DRM, so problematic because it locks users to a model of consumption designed by the content providers, is being jettisoned because it locked those content providers to the hardware. Turnabout is indeed Fairplay. Ironically, while it is the DRM format lock-in that is pushing users to Audible and Apple iTunes, Audible is owned by Amazon, who is emerging as the favorite of the music labels to unseat Apple by selling DRM-free MP3s.

Now, of course, its time for Apple to use its market position again. I’d suggest partnering with Adobe to make it easy to drop PDF-formatted books and documents onto their iPhone and iPod Touch, thereby producing a powerful, and instantly superior, alternative to Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader — which uses DRM to lock people to the hardware, just as Apple did.