Scrutiny

Update: Thanks to Kim Christen for pointing me to this discussion and this article of the news reports about uncontacted trbes. It is fascinating to know that I am less media savvy when it comes to topics I’m less familiar with — I can spot techno-hype, but I don’t have an eye for anthro-hype. Anyway, read the post, it tells a fascinating and more subtle story about how tribes like this one not only have had sporadic contact with the ‘Westernized’ peoples that live near them, but that a number of organizations and governments work very hard to buffer these tribes from incursions by loggers, governments, and gawkers.

So what was it that was so fascinating to me about this story? I imagine, as someone who studies technology and digital culture, there is always this lingering question of what it would be like to have a radically “other” existence, where the trappings of our technological, capitalistic, globalized society simply did not exist. This is one version of the classic fascination (fetishization) of the other, where we project all our hopes and fears and unease about our own world on those we we see as radically different. But there is something tantalizing about imagining a culture that has siply navigated a very different existence; even as we can question whether this technological advance or this cultural phenomenon is socially valuable, its extremely difficult to question it all. So the “lost tribe” moment is a seductive one. And, as Kim pointed out, the real story is its own kind of insight into our global society too: the messy efforts to both interact with those we share the world with and to preserve something unique about our own collective, the aggressive pressure of capital and nation-building that constantly press into the far corners of the world, the tendency to turn difference into the emblem of difference.

This is not related to my work or my broader interest, I just find it utterly astounding.

(CNN) — Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Indians are photographed during an overflight in May 2008, as they react to the overflight at their camp. Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks “uncontacted tribes” — indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders — and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.

This notice just came through on the Chronicle for Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” mailing:

Rensselaer Polytechnic Starts ‘Science of the Web’ Program

What is the future of the Web? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute plans to explore this issue when it launches a new academic program next month focused on the emerging academic discipline of “science of the Web.” The field examines the architectural underpinnings of the Web, its social aspects, and who controls the flow of information, among other issues. The university has titled its program: The Tetherless World Constellation. The program will be publicized June 11 at Rensselaer Polytechnic where a panel of experts from academe and industry, including Timothy J. Berners-Lee–who is credited with having invented the Web–will discuss its future. Web users across the world will submit questions for discussion.–Andrea L. Foster

I’ve recently been in conversation with some of my colleagues at Cornell, from both Communication and Information Science, about how to reimagine and rearticulate (dare I say, re-brand) the HCI program here, based on the presence now of a enough people, and a range of people, to really say its something we do. It strikes me that this might be one way to get at some of what HCI is about, while getting away from some of the limits built into its very name and its particular history.

On the other hand, I saw a talk at ICA last week where a very well known scholar in media studies briefed the audience on the emerging discipline they were trying to create, called “cultural science,” which (from an albeit brief and rapid presentation) looked like a push to soak the study of culture in things like evolutionary economics and game theory. The endpoint of the talk was to focus on the “entrepreneurial consumer” — which I think is the most shocklingly wrong direction that the study of culture, media, and society could possibly take.

A regular concern in my class this past spring was whether the kind of worries about media concentration in broadcasting had any parallel in the online world. While its easy to point to Google / Microsoft / Yahoo as an apparent oligopoly, and Microsoft’s attempts over the last few months to benevolently devour Yahoo seemed confirmation, its not exactly clear that the way that media concentration among broadcasters seemed to dovetail so powerfully with commercial imperatives carried over to these players. yes, Google is, at least financially, primarily an advertising company, their business model is to serve every interest, not narrow to a select few that serve everyone, as with NBC.

But here’s a key glimpse of why these concerns do matter in the new media industries, care of Farhad Manjoo at Salon. and I don’t care about this because its “anti-academic”, as I never used their service myself, but in terms of the driving corporate logic:

Microsoft has announced that it is shutting down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, two search engines that aimed to index scholarly works that are often difficult to find online. The company is also ceasing its ambitious effort to digitize library books, a project that it had long promoted as an alternative to Google’s own such efforts.

The company says it “recognizes” that closing these services will “come as disappointing news” to publishers and Web searchers. And yet Microsoft says it must shut them down anyway, because letting people search through books and academic journals no longer fits into the company’s business strategy.

What’s that new strategy? Microsoft wants to help people who have “high commercial intent.”

I am not making that up. Satya Nadella, the company’s vice president for search, actually uses those words. Microsoft would simply prefer to build search engine just for people looking to buy stuff.

Sigh.

In the next month or so, I’m going to be attempting to back up a bit in my thinking, to take in the big picture of the issues I’m invested in examining in my scholarship. I’m calling it the Big Think 08. We’ll see if the practical realities of life allow it. But, as I go, I’d like to throw to the blog moments and aspects, in an attempt to partially develop this snapshot.

One issue that has always troubled me is the persistent myth of the liberal media. Many have attempted to address this, so its not exactly a new area of study. But its persistence in the face of this examination is quite amazing, and speaks of something else entirely, the way the press gets played within the contemporary U.S. political context. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has a sharp critique of it today, spurred by a comment made by Scott McLellan, former White House Press Secretary for Bush, in his new autobiography:

“the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.”

Greenwald follows this with a litany of evidence of this deference, from the failings of the New York Times in allowing Judy miller’s reporting to stand, or the press adoration of McCain, or their use of military analysts in their Iraq war coverage that were made available by the DoD. He finishes with:

Press secretaries of all types instinctively view the media as adversaries and typically feel besieged by what they perceive to be the media’s unfair hostility. So if even Scott McClellan recognizes the mythical nature of the “liberal media” cliche and sees political journalists as meek little handmaidens for government propaganda, how much longer can this myth be maintained?

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’m in a conversation right now in a pre-conference workshop, organized by Pat Aufderheide, on “Mapping Public Media,” and part of our charge is to think about what counts as public media in a contemporary media environment, and how we might protect and support that. Much of the conversation has turned on how we define public media, in a way that is generous enough to throw its net widely, but specific enough to be actionable by funders and lawmakers. But we’re also coming up with ideas for how to research and intervene in public media in useful ways.

So here’s my idea, built on a suggestion made by Kevin Barnhurst. Kevin’s point is that, rather than identifying something that counts as public media (the new NPR for the digital age) but rather we articulated certain  criteria and principles that public media should honor — transparency of funding and purpose, openness to user engagement, neutrality of platform, commitment to  ublic mobilization — then encouraged media to offer up data on how they serve those functions. This data would be very easy for third parties to scrape and analyze, and offer up to citizens and critics a lens on how our media are serving these various principles. My idea is we add to this a carbon “emissions trading” notion. Those that are serving these principles well would get support as public media. Those that were failing to meet these criteria could “offset” their footprint by buying credits against their “pollution”.

Its only a half-serious suggestion, but I like the idea that FOX News would regularly have to support DailyKos.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say on this one, except that the process of pushing on every possible edge of copyright to their advantage has led the record companies
into a kind of mania. From the EFF:

In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs (”promo CDs”) that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is “an unauthorized distribution” that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right — if you’ve ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don’t still have it, UMG thinks you’re a pirate.

The EFF is, of course, picking up one comment in a brief that is a little more subtle. UMG is suing Troy Augusto for selling the promotional CDs he received from them over eBay.  Augusto claims this is protected under the first sale doctrine, the same rule that lets you sell books to a used bookstore. UMG doesn’t like this. But in the process, they have to follow their tortured logic to its own conclusion:

Augusto testified that “a common way to dispose of them” is to give unsold promotional CD away, or he may throw them away. Both are unauthorized distributions. (from the UMG brief [PDF])

This is the kind of crazy that makes the whole RIAA effort just seem untethered to most people, when they get a glimpse. But what I find more curious is that, among a couple of different claims, UMG is arguing that first sale doesn’t apply here because the promotional CDs weren’t sold. As such, and because they are labelled as a “promotional copy,” Augusto shouldn’t have the right to re-sell them. Unfortunately, this is exactly counter to the argument the music and movie industries had to make when they pushed the NET Act through, and worked to criminalize peer-to-peer downloading: even though no money changes hands when someone trades software or music, the industry considers it a commercial act because it replaced a sale.

There is a logic in our legal system, that the process should be an adjudicated one: the judge decides, and as such, the parties involved can more or less try anything. A trial lawyer is not responsible for deciding if their client actually murdered someone, in fact they are obligated to give them the best defense regardless. In these kinds of copyright suits, except if the court finds a plaintiff to be wasting the courts time or absuing the law itself, the logic suggests that they can throw any argument against the wall to see if it sticks. But its troubling to me that this logic seems to permit stakeholders like UMG to plainly disregard any concern for what’s reasonable, what’s workable, what’s not that big a deal, what might be progressive, what’s tradition, what’s necessary, and instead just push their interests into every conceivable corner of copyright law, and see what these fishing expeditions turn up. At what point are we even asked to think as citizens, as part of society, as having collective responsibility, rather than self-interested individuals within it?

OK, so I went the profound direction. (Well, you can be the judge as to whether I actually got there.)

Professors Troy Schneider and Benjamin Bates have posted some really thoughtful reviews of my book, at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, and the site’s host, David Silver, invited me to craft an author’s response. You can find the reviews here and here, and my response is posted here, and is as follows:

It’s with a sigh of relief that I read the thoughtful reviews from Professors Bates and Schneider — its reassuring to find that readers’ reactions are not far from my own, about the book’s merits and its flaws. How unnerving it would be if someone found a glaring error I couldn’t even recognize. I’m grateful that both found some value in the book, and I completely agree with the main concerns, that the book is somewhat dated, and does more to connect existing scholarship that to veer off into its own. Let me speak to each.

One of my goals in writing Wired Shut was to put three bodies of literature into conversation. Much of the legal scholarship on the digital copyright debates and the (at the time) emerging issue of technical content protection was astute and enlightening. But inside of the traditions of legal studies, this work did not feel the need to approach these questions in terms of the social dimensions of technologies or the cultural formations emerging around them. These were legal and economic questions, either of legally-managed efficiencies upset by technological change, or first principle rights constricted by corporate actors. Technology appeared in these arguments either as cause or context, but almost always as a thing apart from history, social contest, or cultural meaning. So it seemed important to introduce it to the sociology of technology being developed in Science & Technology Studies and the sociology of culture conducted by the more historically-oriented members of my own field of Communication. (I have by no means been the only one working to reconcile some of these literatures: the work of Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chris Kelty, Kieran Healy, Kembrew Mcleod, and Ted Striphas have also helped advance this conversation.) This did mean, I suspect, that my intervention was more about playing host a conversation than being a particularly loud voice in it.

I do hope that there’s a contribution made by Wired Shut, in offering a vocabulary for parsing technocultural dilemmas like copyright. I’m glad Professor Schneider agreed. I still find my notion of the “regime of alignment” a useful insight — that the regulation of a cultural practice depends not just on a forceful legal regime, or a guiding business model, or a moral assertion, but all of the above. Those who are invested in the future of copyright have utilized all of these mechanisms to pursue their particular agendas. Further, each piece helps obscure the others, and diffuse responsibility for the quite vigorous changes in the contours of cultural discourse they’re attempting to generate. An industry lobbyist can downplay the new law they’re asking for by assuring legislators that, in the end, the market will decide; in another venue, the same company can debut their new business plan, placating critics that copyright law will remain a vigilant limit on their reach. This jigsaw puzzle regulation obscures itself through its own fluid complexity, making it hard to pull all of its details into focus. These tactics are by no means exclusive to questions of copyright.

The second concern is that the work is dated, an issue that has haunted me as far back as the start of the dissertation that was the precursor to the book. Whether it was my own work pace or the inertia of the academic publication process, it became clear that I could not write the scholarly analysis I wanted to produce and also keep up with the issue itself. So I resigned myself to thinking of this as a (recent) historical analysis, one that of course has been superceded by events, but still hopefully provides insights with enduring value, insights that may even resonate with those events that have followed. I’m convinced that, at least today, the academic publication machine is structurally unable to handle this kind of analysis, and is in dire need of reform. And while I have been using my blog sporadically to make more timely comments, it has not quite suited me as a viable medium for scholarship, yet, even though others more deft with the format have put it to very good use.

The main question brought on by recent events is, is DRM dead? Apple partnered with EMI to sell DRM-free music, then Amazon partnered with all of the major labels to do the same; Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails conducted high-profile experiments to distribute their albums without music labels and without technical copy protection, while thousands of bands, signed and unsigned, are playing with MySpace, music blogs, and their own sites to offer some of their music free for promotional purposes; the DRM encryption system for the Blu-Ray high-def video format was cracked, causing a stir when the Digg recommendation site first took down user posts about the crack, then reinstated them when users swamped the site with re-posts; recently, Random House and Penguin publishers announced a move to mp3 format for their audiobooks, while more television networks are partnering to provide online streams of their shows, free with advertising. Just as some suggested that music was the canary in the coal mine, a portent of what was to come, it may be that we are witnessing a turn, once again led by the music industry, away from DRM.

Perhaps. In some ways, the reasoning for these apparent about-faces is pointed to in my book. The music labels are not leaving DRM behind because they believe it to be cultural or politically wrong, or even because it never proved to be particularly effective in curbing peer-to-peer downloading. They’ve begun to leave it behind because its costly — not just financially, which it is, but politically. DRM has elevated the hardware makers to a new position of control over price and distribution. Apple, in part because of a technical system foisted upon them, is now the biggest music retailer in the world, and the keeper of the most popular music device in the world. DRM, along with some savvy marketing and quality design, put Apple in this position.

And while the music industry may be willing to swim without the DRM life vest, I suspect that the movie industry shows no such inclination, and is likely not to have to discard it. As I note in the book, Hollywood always been savvier than the music industry in this regard: leasing you access to a film rather than selling it outright, cascading releases across technical environment and price point, and instituting restrictions before their customers get comfortable with freedoms they’re not willing to allow. So DRM has a life in the years to come. Moreover, in many ways we’ve already embraced both the underlying logic DRM depends on — technologies we use that are not our own, content we lease rather than buy, interfaces that closely manage our commercial and experiential engagement with information — and we’re building computer platforms designed for them. There will always be those who hope to manage the circulation of information, whether for politics or profit; we have now encountered, and largely accepted, a new road map for that kind of information choreography, and the political, institutional, and discursive terrain has been reconfigured in ways that will allow, and promote, these kinds of restrictions.

Many thanks, again, for the thoughtful reviews. in the spirit of being timely and engaged, I’ve posted this on my blog, and welcome your thoughts.