April 30th, 2008
links for 2008-04-30
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Interesting stats.
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Video of Shirky’s great speech.
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Fascinating.
Archive for April, 2008
April 29th, 2008
links for 2008-04-29
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Characters from The Wire, Simpsonized!
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Huh. Skeptical.
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Netroots power, using debates as a metic.
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I’m slightly homophilic, I admit it.
April 29th, 2008
The vulnerability in uncharted territory.
I think Jay Rosen is right that Mayhill Fowler didn’t break any rules of journalism when she recorded Obama at a fundraiser in San Francisco and then broadcast his amateur sociology to the world. Things aspiring presidents say about politics are on the record unless designated otherwise. That much is pretty straight forward to me.
Even so, I’m sympathetic to Michael Tomasky’s concerns with the ambiguity of the situation. Fowler, for the uninitiated, was invited to a closed-door (but not explicitly off the record) fund raiser for Obama. She entered the event as a supporter who blogged, she left it as a journalist who caused significant damage to the campaign. She didn’t break the rules, but she clearly broke some implicit trust and contradicted the assumptions of those around her.
Which may be fine when it comes to presidential campaigns, but it points to a new fundamental vulnerability we all live with. You can no longer assume, with anyone anywhere, that your words will not be taken and projected around the world. That vulnerability, applied to less prominent figures, makes me more wary than Jay Rosen is about entering “unchartered territory.”
Let’s say, for example, you’re standing in line for coffee and you hear your city councilor, in line in front of you, talking to a friend about what an idiot the mayor is. Or let’s say you’re at a party and you hear a principal telling a friend that one of the local teachers is incompetent.
As a citizen journalist in a situation where a public official has made no clear request to be off the record, are these words reportable for the front page of a local newspaper? Or, more likely, a local blog?
There is a reason, after all, that the role of journalist is in some ways the role of social outcast. If they’re doing their jobs well, a journalist is out to uncover people’s dirty laundry and share it with the world. Their job is to be willing to make enemies for the greater good. To be more committed to what is true than what is comfortable. It’s not a standard always met, but it’s at least the standard.
What does a world look like in which we’re all journalists?
Jeff Jarvis, in a debate with Tomasky on his piece, embraces a kind of radical transparency. If public figures know that they are constantly vulnerable, he argues, they’ll become more honest.
But an alternative path is possible, and it’s especially possible in a situation in which the trust being violated is more fundamental than that between a campaign and a supporter. It’s especially possible if the person who is being made vulnerable isn’t running for President and therefore as deserving of that scrutiny.
We will, no matter what Rosen and Jarvis (and I) would like, never live in a completely transparent and honest society. Honesty, in fact, is not always the best thing for communities. Many communities are held together by the choices we all make every day to put social order and peace above our own personal opinions. They’re held together by a certain amount of trust we have that other people will keep our confidences.
The alternative path is that the uncharted territory we now live in breeds a culture of suspicion and starts to erode the trust that most lived communities are built on. Not the trust between a campaign and a supporter, but the trust that a local public figure has that they can talk with their friends at a coffee shop or a party. The trust that a bad friendship won’t end with a youtube video of your worst moments. The trust that your entire life does not have to be lived out in public when others choose to put it there.
Mayhill Fowler did nothing wrong when she chose journalism over the trust that the Obama campaign had in her. But we mustn’t over-learn the lesson and accept the idea that ambiguity should always lead to disclosure, or that there is nothing problematic about the deep vulnerability that now defines public, and often private life.
We don’t need the old rules, but we do need to have a long conversation about what rules, and what explicit understandings we come to as a society, we need if we want to protect communities from a deep culture of suspicion.
April 28th, 2008
links for 2008-04-28
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Apparently Newsweek is all about stereotyping liberals.
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A good list (including TPM).
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A regional makes the big move!
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I’m a shirky-ist. Does that exist yet?
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More ouch.
April 28th, 2008
The history of digital community in under 7 minutes.
Berkman just reposted this speech by Ethan Zuckerman from 2006.
[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7O4uMRADB8"]
April 28th, 2008
Prince does Radiohead’s “Creep.”
April 28th, 2008
Are we learning what do do with our surplus time?
The first part of a fascinating speech by Clay Shirky:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
April 28th, 2008
If you can’t afford a thousand words.
McClatchy editors on the new challenge:
Matt Thompson was one of the first people I know who talked about the evolution of journalism as it seeks to shift between dealing with information scarcity and information abundance. In his potent analogy, “The press earned its stripes covering a scandal [Watergate] about which information was scarce. The press lost its stripes covering a scandal [Enron] about which information was plentiful. The plenitude of information, not its scarcity, defines the world we live in now. And journalism must change to accommodate that fact.”
We’re all far more engaged now in information architecture, data-mining and visualization than when Matt wrote that in June 2006. Simply constructing and posting searchable databases is a basic step; more layered and textured graphical presentations – like some of those the Charlotte Observer used to help explain its ground-breaking discoveries of home-lending abuses – show us the next step.
There are many steps yet to go. We’ve got to become increasing sophisticated and adept at uncovering data-rich news (Matt’s main point) and presenting it in ways our increasingly demanding audiences require.
April 27th, 2008
You have to know everything to go on the teevee.
One of the most amusing parts of being on the teevee recently was how flummoxed anchors seem to become at the phrase ‘I don’t know’. I experienced this twice, once on TV directly when an anchor asked me if the media was important to the primary, and I said “I don’t know”. There was a pause, I gabbered on, and then the right-wing pundit began giving credit to Rush Limbaugh for Clinton winning Pennsylvania. Yeah, I know. The second time was in Philadelphia on primary day. During the pre-interview, and I said that no one really knows what is influencing voters. The interviewer looked shocked, and then I realized she couldn’t absorb that notion. So I turned it into something about how there’s a media narrative, and a series of conversations among voters, and it’s unclear how they intersect. She was ok with that.
Because of the nature of the medium, it’s critical on TV to look earnest and self-important and say things like ‘this next move from Obama is a game-changer’, even if there’s no evidence or certainty that anything in this primary contest has changed in two months. This is the nature of a mass media system, which thrives on dramatic narratives, but it is accentuated when a media system is corrupted, as ours has been.