4.30.2004
Just had a long interview with Shayne Bowman, co author of WE Media and consultant on Web-design and content for media companies. Bowman is also the former Chief of Development for Belo Interactive, the 9th largest media company in the U.S., with TV stations and newspapers in cities ranging from Dallas to Phoenix to Seattle.
It was a great discursive conversation on participatory media, the future the mainstream press, and how on-line relationships spill over into the off-line world.
A good place to start is on how the ideas behind the Internet – communication, participation, and collaboration – morph into new incarnations, ie: from Usenet to blogging.
“Too often we think blogs are the example of everything, but our report (“We Media”) tried to show that blogs are one aspect of all that is happening in the participatory space. That has been at the heart of the Internet since day one. People use the Internet as a communication tool. Its all about sharing content and information with each other. These activities are the reason why people get the Internet. Why do they go out and get the high-speed access, because they want to become content creators. Fundamentally that is what people want.”
So, from Usenet to list servs, mailing lists, bulletin boards, on-line forums, and blogs, all of these ideas have remained at the heart of the use of the Internet, although they have taken on new forms and incarnations as people create new technology and new ways of communication.
For Bowman, who has a degree in journalism from Auburn University, blogging is just one aspect of the participatory environment on-line, albeit an important one. He first became interested in blogs when as a freelance contractor/consultant for various media companies he found himself getting most of his meaningful information related to graphic design on blogs. This led to him beginning to dig into the meaning of blogs for journalism.
Bowman worked on ”Amazoning The News" with Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis, which set out to look at the new participatory journalism environment just beginning to emerge three years ago. There were maybe a hundred thousand blogs then, now there are in excess of seven million, according to Bowman. And in his view, participatory journalism threatens and infringes on the role of the mainstream press.
“I was at a conference about two months ago, a bunch of really smart people from Yahoo!, MSNBC, were talking about media and whatnot. Talking about how about any given story, online now, the average user will go out and get ten different sources of information on this story. You don’t just go to one source to get the story. You go to five primary sources, and then you go to your discussion communities, then you go to your blogs. All of this is reporting, and collaborated reporting, a collective.”
In Bowman’s view, we all have obsessions, or passionate interests, that we are going to spend time thinking and writing about, studying, and talking to other people about. Blogging and participatory journalism is about sharing commonalities with other people in ways that no one mainstream media outlet can respond to. Think of it as a trade journal, but in a much more radically open and participatory form where the writing can be created by professionals and non-professionals alike.
“Newspapers take these threads (of passionate interests) and ties them together under one big umbrella. Now that can happen on a smaller scale. Now people can assemble their own news reports on the fly. In the old days a newspaper had at least 50 percent of the market share. Now they can hit ten given places on any given topic.”
I have my own little saying that you need to stay at least a month or so ahead of the New York Times on your own passionate interest – because that is how long it takes these mainstream outlets to catch up to what people creating the news, or observing it closely, are doing or watching. People tend to read about their own professions in the newspaper (and there are journalistic studies of this, although their names escape me now) even though they already know the information. So think of participatory journalism as this writ large – on demand information from a community that is passionately interested in that subject or topic.
So what are the consequences for the mainstream media when they can no longer “own” the production of news, or the “reading” of news when people accessing content can go through an aggregator like GoogleNews and go “deep” on any given subject? Bowman argues that they will begin adapting and changing to a new environment that calls for avenues of audience participation.
“The BBC is arguably more authoritative than the New York Times in the world. They have put front and center participatory journalism as one of the key principles of their organization. They are not in the same media business as the New York Times, (the BBC is) funded by their people and for their people, they have a vechicle to be a cooperative and collaboratively produce news in an interesting and powerful way.
We are moving away from the top down structure to the bottom up structure. Their true power is that they are still broadcasters. That is the value that the media organization gives to me. The value to the media organization is that they are tripling and quadrupling their staff through me. Slashdot is a phenomenal site, have the commentary and half is new information.”
Bowman asks whether these aggregation and participatory journalism sites have to be run by journalists. If you can judge content based on new reputation systems that emerge – like Blogdex.com and Technorati.com – then you do not need a professional journalist to tell you what is important.
It is interesting that this then is almost like a hyper-market of ideas version of content production. So if someone has ideas that are unorthodox or out of the mainstream, how do they get heard if through reputation they might not be dubbed credible? But then again, they don’t really do so now either. For instance, we talked about how the production norms of journalism (ie: relying on “official sources” and “beats” where news “happens”) gave journalists a tough time of covering the lead up to the War on Iraq. There were no “officially sanctioned” sites of opposition to the war in government, so journalists had a much tougher time writing opposition into their news coverage – even though a million people may have marched on New York City, very few came from a position that would have the same degree of “credibility” in a journalists’ eyes as a congressional staff member.
The audience that demands more and more participation, and turns to other and deeper sources of information than an aggregator like the New York Times will pose new challenges to these mainstream outlets. Bowman argues that as more reporters begin to blog as well, the outlets need to respond to both their employees and their audience. He cites a report called: "Media and Entertainment 2010" – an IBM strategy paper that looks at the open media company of the future and argues that existing companies have to learn how to better partner with each other and their audience.
“Companies that will not change because they are stuck or are too big become marginalized because they will no longer be credible or do not enable people to take part in new and interesting ways. There will be a massive influx of small, nano media – I believe it is poised to explode. I don’t believe blogging is poised to die. It might turn into something else as things become more mobile."
As for what the implications are for off-line relationships, Bowan says the there are many, but we are still figuring them out. For instance, he cites a recent Pew Report that chronicles how Americans translate on-line community and interest groups into off-line social relationships. Howard Dean, while obviously losing the election, was able to create something resembling a movement around progressive politics.
“It has implications for the way we do political and legal movements. The Internet is almost like an introduction, it’s a way to meet people in the real world, it is my passionate interest, and I want nothing more than to get more of that in this world. People will do that to satisfy their passionate interests.”
As people look to satisfy these interests, it also has consequences for journalism. Bowman thinks that the false value we assign to “unbiased” and “fair and balanced” reporting will change – in part, because it was always impossible to have this objectivity, especially given the ways news is “produced” in a newspaper. This also hearkens back to models of the press that comes from an older journalistic tradition in America, and what is often in play in other countries.
“Bottom up media has shown that we can have an opinion and a point of view and that may be more important to an audience, create a more receptive audience. The worst thing that can happen is the audience becomes more engaged and involved.“
Given the trustworthiness of the media, it is hard to argue with him.
In my own view, it is a lot better to have a dialogue than a presentation of fact. I see news as a conversation, as a process, more so than I see it as being information or a story. Stories do not have meaning unless they have life outside of the printed word, and it is creating this life that is the strongest asset of participatory media.
“Historically we want to get as close as we can to the story teller. You want to be closer to that person, the important thing is our relationship with the storyteller. Storytelling is how we entertain each other. What is good about conversation, news as a conversation, is that it views it as a story. Not as a news article, but as a story that you can share and extend as time goes on. The story becomes shared by the audience.”
It was a great discursive conversation on participatory media, the future the mainstream press, and how on-line relationships spill over into the off-line world.
A good place to start is on how the ideas behind the Internet – communication, participation, and collaboration – morph into new incarnations, ie: from Usenet to blogging.
“Too often we think blogs are the example of everything, but our report (“We Media”) tried to show that blogs are one aspect of all that is happening in the participatory space. That has been at the heart of the Internet since day one. People use the Internet as a communication tool. Its all about sharing content and information with each other. These activities are the reason why people get the Internet. Why do they go out and get the high-speed access, because they want to become content creators. Fundamentally that is what people want.”
So, from Usenet to list servs, mailing lists, bulletin boards, on-line forums, and blogs, all of these ideas have remained at the heart of the use of the Internet, although they have taken on new forms and incarnations as people create new technology and new ways of communication.
For Bowman, who has a degree in journalism from Auburn University, blogging is just one aspect of the participatory environment on-line, albeit an important one. He first became interested in blogs when as a freelance contractor/consultant for various media companies he found himself getting most of his meaningful information related to graphic design on blogs. This led to him beginning to dig into the meaning of blogs for journalism.
Bowman worked on ”Amazoning The News" with Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis, which set out to look at the new participatory journalism environment just beginning to emerge three years ago. There were maybe a hundred thousand blogs then, now there are in excess of seven million, according to Bowman. And in his view, participatory journalism threatens and infringes on the role of the mainstream press.
“I was at a conference about two months ago, a bunch of really smart people from Yahoo!, MSNBC, were talking about media and whatnot. Talking about how about any given story, online now, the average user will go out and get ten different sources of information on this story. You don’t just go to one source to get the story. You go to five primary sources, and then you go to your discussion communities, then you go to your blogs. All of this is reporting, and collaborated reporting, a collective.”
In Bowman’s view, we all have obsessions, or passionate interests, that we are going to spend time thinking and writing about, studying, and talking to other people about. Blogging and participatory journalism is about sharing commonalities with other people in ways that no one mainstream media outlet can respond to. Think of it as a trade journal, but in a much more radically open and participatory form where the writing can be created by professionals and non-professionals alike.
“Newspapers take these threads (of passionate interests) and ties them together under one big umbrella. Now that can happen on a smaller scale. Now people can assemble their own news reports on the fly. In the old days a newspaper had at least 50 percent of the market share. Now they can hit ten given places on any given topic.”
I have my own little saying that you need to stay at least a month or so ahead of the New York Times on your own passionate interest – because that is how long it takes these mainstream outlets to catch up to what people creating the news, or observing it closely, are doing or watching. People tend to read about their own professions in the newspaper (and there are journalistic studies of this, although their names escape me now) even though they already know the information. So think of participatory journalism as this writ large – on demand information from a community that is passionately interested in that subject or topic.
So what are the consequences for the mainstream media when they can no longer “own” the production of news, or the “reading” of news when people accessing content can go through an aggregator like GoogleNews and go “deep” on any given subject? Bowman argues that they will begin adapting and changing to a new environment that calls for avenues of audience participation.
“The BBC is arguably more authoritative than the New York Times in the world. They have put front and center participatory journalism as one of the key principles of their organization. They are not in the same media business as the New York Times, (the BBC is) funded by their people and for their people, they have a vechicle to be a cooperative and collaboratively produce news in an interesting and powerful way.
We are moving away from the top down structure to the bottom up structure. Their true power is that they are still broadcasters. That is the value that the media organization gives to me. The value to the media organization is that they are tripling and quadrupling their staff through me. Slashdot is a phenomenal site, have the commentary and half is new information.”
Bowman asks whether these aggregation and participatory journalism sites have to be run by journalists. If you can judge content based on new reputation systems that emerge – like Blogdex.com and Technorati.com – then you do not need a professional journalist to tell you what is important.
It is interesting that this then is almost like a hyper-market of ideas version of content production. So if someone has ideas that are unorthodox or out of the mainstream, how do they get heard if through reputation they might not be dubbed credible? But then again, they don’t really do so now either. For instance, we talked about how the production norms of journalism (ie: relying on “official sources” and “beats” where news “happens”) gave journalists a tough time of covering the lead up to the War on Iraq. There were no “officially sanctioned” sites of opposition to the war in government, so journalists had a much tougher time writing opposition into their news coverage – even though a million people may have marched on New York City, very few came from a position that would have the same degree of “credibility” in a journalists’ eyes as a congressional staff member.
The audience that demands more and more participation, and turns to other and deeper sources of information than an aggregator like the New York Times will pose new challenges to these mainstream outlets. Bowman argues that as more reporters begin to blog as well, the outlets need to respond to both their employees and their audience. He cites a report called: "Media and Entertainment 2010" – an IBM strategy paper that looks at the open media company of the future and argues that existing companies have to learn how to better partner with each other and their audience.
“Companies that will not change because they are stuck or are too big become marginalized because they will no longer be credible or do not enable people to take part in new and interesting ways. There will be a massive influx of small, nano media – I believe it is poised to explode. I don’t believe blogging is poised to die. It might turn into something else as things become more mobile."
As for what the implications are for off-line relationships, Bowan says the there are many, but we are still figuring them out. For instance, he cites a recent Pew Report that chronicles how Americans translate on-line community and interest groups into off-line social relationships. Howard Dean, while obviously losing the election, was able to create something resembling a movement around progressive politics.
“It has implications for the way we do political and legal movements. The Internet is almost like an introduction, it’s a way to meet people in the real world, it is my passionate interest, and I want nothing more than to get more of that in this world. People will do that to satisfy their passionate interests.”
As people look to satisfy these interests, it also has consequences for journalism. Bowman thinks that the false value we assign to “unbiased” and “fair and balanced” reporting will change – in part, because it was always impossible to have this objectivity, especially given the ways news is “produced” in a newspaper. This also hearkens back to models of the press that comes from an older journalistic tradition in America, and what is often in play in other countries.
“Bottom up media has shown that we can have an opinion and a point of view and that may be more important to an audience, create a more receptive audience. The worst thing that can happen is the audience becomes more engaged and involved.“
Given the trustworthiness of the media, it is hard to argue with him.
In my own view, it is a lot better to have a dialogue than a presentation of fact. I see news as a conversation, as a process, more so than I see it as being information or a story. Stories do not have meaning unless they have life outside of the printed word, and it is creating this life that is the strongest asset of participatory media.
“Historically we want to get as close as we can to the story teller. You want to be closer to that person, the important thing is our relationship with the storyteller. Storytelling is how we entertain each other. What is good about conversation, news as a conversation, is that it views it as a story. Not as a news article, but as a story that you can share and extend as time goes on. The story becomes shared by the audience.”
I couldn't resist: check out the "Create Your Own Thomas Friedman OP-ED Column" featured on McSweeney's. Excellent work.
In a paper presented last weekend, Helmut Norpoth, Political Science Professor at SUNY Stony Brook predicts that based on a study of how presidential well candidates did leading up to the nomination by their respective parties, George Bush will win the November election. His analysis includes candidates of the incumbent party as well as candidates of the party out of the White House. This is from his introduction:
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In addition to the primary support mustered by the major-party nominees, this forecast model relies on long-term partisanship and a vote cycle arising from the presidential term limit. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated with data from presidential elections since 1912 (n = 23), going back farther, and thus covering more elections, than any other forecast model. The model fits quite well (R2 = .92) and the standard error is only 2.5. The accuracy of the vote model is such that it correctly picks the winner in all but one election. The miss occurs in 1960, the closest contest in the 20th century.
With all the predictors known at this moment, the model is able to make an unconditional forecast of the Bush-Kerry race. The prediction is that George W. Bush will defeat John Kerry by 54.7 to 45.3 percent of the major-party vote, with the odds of a Bush victory being better than 20 to 1.
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This was passed along to me by Shanto Iyengar Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford and Professor of Communication and Political Science. Iyengar argues (at least in class the other day) that with the ongoing war Iraq this is not a representative election year, and believes that John Kerry will definitely win. Here is the latest NYTimes/CBS poll, with some great graphics on movements in the polls.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In addition to the primary support mustered by the major-party nominees, this forecast model relies on long-term partisanship and a vote cycle arising from the presidential term limit. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated with data from presidential elections since 1912 (n = 23), going back farther, and thus covering more elections, than any other forecast model. The model fits quite well (R2 = .92) and the standard error is only 2.5. The accuracy of the vote model is such that it correctly picks the winner in all but one election. The miss occurs in 1960, the closest contest in the 20th century.
With all the predictors known at this moment, the model is able to make an unconditional forecast of the Bush-Kerry race. The prediction is that George W. Bush will defeat John Kerry by 54.7 to 45.3 percent of the major-party vote, with the odds of a Bush victory being better than 20 to 1.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This was passed along to me by Shanto Iyengar Chair of the Department of Communication at Stanford and Professor of Communication and Political Science. Iyengar argues (at least in class the other day) that with the ongoing war Iraq this is not a representative election year, and believes that John Kerry will definitely win. Here is the latest NYTimes/CBS poll, with some great graphics on movements in the polls.
4.29.2004
I have a new article I did recently on Lawrence Lessig and copyright law up on my site.
Let me know if the orange/gray thing is a little worn...
Let me know if the orange/gray thing is a little worn...
By the way, here are two interesting (and Stanford) additions to the informal Blogroll:
Gross Anatomy: a Stanford Medical School Web-blog.
H Blog: a blog run by a South African journalist and Benetech-funded fellow at the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford.
That is the sum total of Stanford-related bloggers I know of, let me know if you hear of more.
And I fixed my links!
Gross Anatomy: a Stanford Medical School Web-blog.
H Blog: a blog run by a South African journalist and Benetech-funded fellow at the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford.
That is the sum total of Stanford-related bloggers I know of, let me know if you hear of more.
And I fixed my links!
So, a very discerning reader just e-mailed me and pointed out that my links pretty much do not work. At all. I am going to fix that problem. I promise.
Outside from that, I have been wrapped up here in working on a rough draft of this fabled thesis. It is due on Wednesday. I have a conversation scheduled tomorrow with Shayne Boyman one of the co-authors of "We Media." It is an interesting study relating to news production and de-centralized journalism.
AND, two other projects being worked on right now. One is on AfroFuturism in music (Sun Ra, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and George Clinton) and these artist's relationship with technology and the 1960-1970's counterculture. I am fascinated by how black and white artists and musicians approached technology with similar metaphors, but it had very different meanings for both -- more on that later. If you have thoughts let me know.
Finally, I am doing a content analysis of Iowa newspaper reporting during the Democratic Primary. I interviewed Stephen Elliott during my Stanford radio show just after the elections. He told me that just after Dean's downfall in Wisconsin, the reporters aboard Press Bus One distributed T-Shirts that read "Old Media" on the front, "We have the Power" on the back.
I missed that story in the Times.
Outside from that, I have been wrapped up here in working on a rough draft of this fabled thesis. It is due on Wednesday. I have a conversation scheduled tomorrow with Shayne Boyman one of the co-authors of "We Media." It is an interesting study relating to news production and de-centralized journalism.
AND, two other projects being worked on right now. One is on AfroFuturism in music (Sun Ra, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and George Clinton) and these artist's relationship with technology and the 1960-1970's counterculture. I am fascinated by how black and white artists and musicians approached technology with similar metaphors, but it had very different meanings for both -- more on that later. If you have thoughts let me know.
Finally, I am doing a content analysis of Iowa newspaper reporting during the Democratic Primary. I interviewed Stephen Elliott during my Stanford radio show just after the elections. He told me that just after Dean's downfall in Wisconsin, the reporters aboard Press Bus One distributed T-Shirts that read "Old Media" on the front, "We have the Power" on the back.
I missed that story in the Times.
4.28.2004
Now this is so cool that I just had to share it. One of my Web-pages from my Ivory Coast project ended up cited as a resource in the teaching guide of Frontline's "Ghosts of Rwanda" series.
The New York Times ran an interesting piece on Thabo Mbeki yesterday in advance of his swearing in. Despite the poor coverage of the run up to the latest round (the third) of elections, it has been good to see them do lengthier pieces yesterday and on Monday.
I was in Durban, South Africa on Freedom Day in 1998 – unfortunately at the time I was on a ten-day wilderness hike through the Umfulosi Game Reserve, a pristine area about six hours from the city.
Perhaps it was fitting that my time was spent on this hike, because it was to be the first and largely only time that I was to spend a considerable period with a white South African. The thing that most struck me about the Mbeki’s profile in the Times was how much his thought and action is centered around dealing with racism, especially the implicit racism that to react against sometimes engenders disastrous public policy decisions (ie: AIDS.)
To illustrate the complexity of race in South Africa, here is a journal entry from my third day on this hike with our guide Bruce. This is written and presented here in all its unedited 20-year old authorial glory, so please forgive the self-indulgence of a college student.
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I totally misjudged Bruce, though his thinking is complex. The problem is his strict adherence to a biological difference, which so frequently gives way to oppression. Some of his statements are contradictory. But I realized in a flash of insight that he is a conservationist, anthropologist, and observationist. He is well read, I think he lacks intention and just is, forming his judgments based on his sense of the natural world and how the world works. I would like to say “social Darwinist” but more benign that that. It is like Africa has hardened him somewhat, and he is left as a man where reason so often fails. So frequently we forget our contingency upon history acting as players, actors, rather than movers, but it is the collective total of individuals which moves things…
The problem with sensing a natural order to things is that is so often used to justify oppression. Can one still make moral judgments in this context? I guess we have to and hope history is not a totalitarian process. But if free will dictates the individual level, and history is left to the collective, then this opens numerous sites for struggle.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My embarrassing language like “Africa has hardened him,” (I sound like Kipling!) is telling of my uneasiness around him, which was constant during our days and nights. Being in a place that is so seductively and falsely beyond politics, guided by a strong man with a notion of a natural order, of a pace of life in the bush, it is easy for someone to fall in with his thinking; to buy into the notion that there is order and instinct in nature that is divorced from social construction (translated into “black” means “noble savage,” “white” means “rational” and “urban” in this context.) I was only vaguely honest about my own fetishes at the time, and the rest of my journal from this time in the bush is a continual playing out of the tension between a sense of “natural order” and “social construction.” It is that same tension which persists in any fundamentally racist or unequal society. Just look at the myths behind the American dream.
I was in Durban, South Africa on Freedom Day in 1998 – unfortunately at the time I was on a ten-day wilderness hike through the Umfulosi Game Reserve, a pristine area about six hours from the city.
Perhaps it was fitting that my time was spent on this hike, because it was to be the first and largely only time that I was to spend a considerable period with a white South African. The thing that most struck me about the Mbeki’s profile in the Times was how much his thought and action is centered around dealing with racism, especially the implicit racism that to react against sometimes engenders disastrous public policy decisions (ie: AIDS.)
To illustrate the complexity of race in South Africa, here is a journal entry from my third day on this hike with our guide Bruce. This is written and presented here in all its unedited 20-year old authorial glory, so please forgive the self-indulgence of a college student.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I totally misjudged Bruce, though his thinking is complex. The problem is his strict adherence to a biological difference, which so frequently gives way to oppression. Some of his statements are contradictory. But I realized in a flash of insight that he is a conservationist, anthropologist, and observationist. He is well read, I think he lacks intention and just is, forming his judgments based on his sense of the natural world and how the world works. I would like to say “social Darwinist” but more benign that that. It is like Africa has hardened him somewhat, and he is left as a man where reason so often fails. So frequently we forget our contingency upon history acting as players, actors, rather than movers, but it is the collective total of individuals which moves things…
The problem with sensing a natural order to things is that is so often used to justify oppression. Can one still make moral judgments in this context? I guess we have to and hope history is not a totalitarian process. But if free will dictates the individual level, and history is left to the collective, then this opens numerous sites for struggle.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My embarrassing language like “Africa has hardened him,” (I sound like Kipling!) is telling of my uneasiness around him, which was constant during our days and nights. Being in a place that is so seductively and falsely beyond politics, guided by a strong man with a notion of a natural order, of a pace of life in the bush, it is easy for someone to fall in with his thinking; to buy into the notion that there is order and instinct in nature that is divorced from social construction (translated into “black” means “noble savage,” “white” means “rational” and “urban” in this context.) I was only vaguely honest about my own fetishes at the time, and the rest of my journal from this time in the bush is a continual playing out of the tension between a sense of “natural order” and “social construction.” It is that same tension which persists in any fundamentally racist or unequal society. Just look at the myths behind the American dream.
4.26.2004
This should be the last thesis-related post for a little while as I make the transition from the research into the writing. That said, I had a wonderful sprawling talk today with Meg Hourihan who is wonderfully upbeat, hopeful, creative, and as she puts it “a doer.”
As many of you know, I am relatively new to this whole world of tech, so it was great to get her perspective on the valley in the mid-1990’s, her work as one of the co-founders of blogger, and the evolution of digital social networks.
A couple of interesting points she made. First, Meg directed me to Elizabeth Lawley’s blog, which has an interesting narrative about how she came to start blogging and what that process of discovery is like. Certainly, in my own case it was not just something that I did – like Meg said happened to her – but I had to think about it for a while first: what I wanted it to be, what value I wanted to add to what was out there, what I defined as the “public” that I was communicating to (and that concern might be an outgrowth of my recent journalistic training.)
Perhaps those of us who are adopting late are approaching this from a very different perspective than what happened four years ago; as the exponential growth in blogs almost forces newly minted bloggers to define their focus more narrowly if we looking outside of the journal model?
Dovetailing nicely with my last post Meg really drove the point home that it is important to distinguish between the questions of audience and the intent of bloggers. Having watched blogging morph and splinter in different directions over time, she has also seen it in its many simultaneous incarnations, from the Live Journal diaries to the political reporting and commentary of other sites, to the niche communities where users share their interests and convene around topics. These all exist at the same point in time, and it seems to me that regardless of whether it is possible or not to get traffic, different bloggers define their purpose of posting in different ways depending on their interests, intent, and how they see their audience.
“The interesting thing is the small groups that can be really niche, I don’t think it (power law) can keep them from getting attention. It’s possible that if you are writing good stuff around certain areas of interest, and if you participate in good stuff and areas of attention, if you participate and introduce yourself, if you are doing a good job you can build up your traffic. It seems very American to me, hard work, you put in effort, and you get traffic – if you want it.”
As for what the future holds, Meg says she is beyond analysis, and we had a long conversation about how youth are growing up with these new communicative tools (this is something I blogged from the conference. I think that educators have to adapt to new technology and help kids think about it and guide them through how they communicate. Otherwise, we risk a situation – which is already the case – where we “teach” kids through a one-way flow of information, and we speak at, and do not engage with, a generation that was raised on the interactivity of video games.)
“It will be interesting to see. It (the future) goes far beyond weblogs. What happens when these kids have spent their whole life connected? They are always able to communicate with anyone they want, there are few barriers to communication and sharing. A whole mindset we have not been able to see yet is emerging. Being 10 or 15 years older is enough that we will not be predicting things, we are coming from a different world.”
She says that kids didn’t like Blogger because they thought it was too slow. They saw blogs as conversational channels, they thought it was dumb in an environment where you could IM and text with people. As Meg puts it, kids thought it was “too slow and archaic and weird.”
At the heart of blogging Meg sees the potential for a radically democratic form of communication, but she is aware of the limitations of any purely technological vision. People still need to do the groundwork, which is why she has been interested in bringing technology into public schools (and hopefully we can collaborate together on this in the future.)
A couple of examples; for instance, she cites the Iranian bloggers who are young and pushing for democratic change. And, closer to home, the Democratic Party suggests that people looking to volunteer “start a Webblog” in the Oregon primary voter guide .
Meg just finished a stint at Kinja and is interested in how people navigate the web. But she is also concerned with being a “compassionate capitalist,” a phrase I love.
“There is a whole lot of potential but it is limited by competing visions, of what it (blogs) could be or what it wants to be. I am much more of an idealist/socialist. I find profit in it, but it is as a compassionate capitalist. I think there are definitely ways to make money and you don’t have to screw everybody in the process.”
As many of you know, I am relatively new to this whole world of tech, so it was great to get her perspective on the valley in the mid-1990’s, her work as one of the co-founders of blogger, and the evolution of digital social networks.
A couple of interesting points she made. First, Meg directed me to Elizabeth Lawley’s blog, which has an interesting narrative about how she came to start blogging and what that process of discovery is like. Certainly, in my own case it was not just something that I did – like Meg said happened to her – but I had to think about it for a while first: what I wanted it to be, what value I wanted to add to what was out there, what I defined as the “public” that I was communicating to (and that concern might be an outgrowth of my recent journalistic training.)
Perhaps those of us who are adopting late are approaching this from a very different perspective than what happened four years ago; as the exponential growth in blogs almost forces newly minted bloggers to define their focus more narrowly if we looking outside of the journal model?
Dovetailing nicely with my last post Meg really drove the point home that it is important to distinguish between the questions of audience and the intent of bloggers. Having watched blogging morph and splinter in different directions over time, she has also seen it in its many simultaneous incarnations, from the Live Journal diaries to the political reporting and commentary of other sites, to the niche communities where users share their interests and convene around topics. These all exist at the same point in time, and it seems to me that regardless of whether it is possible or not to get traffic, different bloggers define their purpose of posting in different ways depending on their interests, intent, and how they see their audience.
“The interesting thing is the small groups that can be really niche, I don’t think it (power law) can keep them from getting attention. It’s possible that if you are writing good stuff around certain areas of interest, and if you participate in good stuff and areas of attention, if you participate and introduce yourself, if you are doing a good job you can build up your traffic. It seems very American to me, hard work, you put in effort, and you get traffic – if you want it.”
As for what the future holds, Meg says she is beyond analysis, and we had a long conversation about how youth are growing up with these new communicative tools (this is something I blogged from the conference. I think that educators have to adapt to new technology and help kids think about it and guide them through how they communicate. Otherwise, we risk a situation – which is already the case – where we “teach” kids through a one-way flow of information, and we speak at, and do not engage with, a generation that was raised on the interactivity of video games.)
“It will be interesting to see. It (the future) goes far beyond weblogs. What happens when these kids have spent their whole life connected? They are always able to communicate with anyone they want, there are few barriers to communication and sharing. A whole mindset we have not been able to see yet is emerging. Being 10 or 15 years older is enough that we will not be predicting things, we are coming from a different world.”
She says that kids didn’t like Blogger because they thought it was too slow. They saw blogs as conversational channels, they thought it was dumb in an environment where you could IM and text with people. As Meg puts it, kids thought it was “too slow and archaic and weird.”
At the heart of blogging Meg sees the potential for a radically democratic form of communication, but she is aware of the limitations of any purely technological vision. People still need to do the groundwork, which is why she has been interested in bringing technology into public schools (and hopefully we can collaborate together on this in the future.)
A couple of examples; for instance, she cites the Iranian bloggers who are young and pushing for democratic change. And, closer to home, the Democratic Party suggests that people looking to volunteer “start a Webblog” in the Oregon primary voter guide .
Meg just finished a stint at Kinja and is interested in how people navigate the web. But she is also concerned with being a “compassionate capitalist,” a phrase I love.
“There is a whole lot of potential but it is limited by competing visions, of what it (blogs) could be or what it wants to be. I am much more of an idealist/socialist. I find profit in it, but it is as a compassionate capitalist. I think there are definitely ways to make money and you don’t have to screw everybody in the process.”
Crashing Back Down to (a Realistic) Earth
Had a long chat with Seth Finkelstein last night. He has some fascinating insights/arguments into blogging, and why it’s a myth that the journalistic gatekeepers are gone.
“It’s a big big mistake thinking that gatekeepers are gone. There is a reason people say this. Those people saying it are those who have overcome all the barriers except for the production barrier. They have the connections, the paying job; all the barriers have been removed except for the editorial publishing barrier. When it shifts they think they have Christmas everyday. But that barrier is replaced by a noise barrier. The barrier is exactly the same, one gatekeeper has become another. There is a shift in one place, but there is a corresponding loss in another space.”
Finkelstein argues that what happens can be mathematically mapped and predicted. The gatekeeper of production is replaced by the gatekeeper of audience, (ie: a few bloggers with a lot of traffic have a disproportionate share of readers, which makes for there being no real “average”. In short, because of the spike among the top few, the vast majority of blogs actually have a readership below the mathematical average.)
Clay Shirky, a adjunct professor of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and consultant on the social and economic effects of the Web, wrote “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”, which became a widely discussed piece in the blog world.
Shirky’s thesis is:
“In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”
For Finkelstein, the distribution of readers hovers around a few blogs for an obvious reason: “you can’t read everybody.” There is a class of people who sort through the information that is out there – which rises exponentially in an age when it costs very little to become a producer – and through this sorting, these people become very powerful. Professional journalists/bloggers no longer have a monopoly on the means of production, but they come very close to having a monopoly on the audience of that production.
In Finkelstein’s view it is complete and utter nonsense to say that blogging will herald a new era of “participatory democracy” or communication where everyone has a voice. And he traces a similar technological utopianism into all the previous incarnations of the internet, as the “bubble blowers” always argue that a new world and society is being shaped.
Finkelstein says that while at MIT in 1984 he was connected to the Internet, and he can trace this utopianism throughout its 20-year history. For instance, he says that he has kept a Usenet press card from 1996 as a joke; the idea of the press card was to ask what happens when a Usenetter goes to a press conference, and its conclusion is that everyone is a reporter similar to the journalists at CNN. For Finkelstein, this is the same logic behind World Fairs, the counter-culture that built the internet, and now, bloggers.
In looking at the evidence, like the theory of power law, Finkelstein (who uses terms like “calculated” when discussing theoretical arguments; for instance, in his view Cass Sunstein calculated his social theory of the internet wrong) says he is the describing the world as it is, which is backed up by the data he is looking at.
“Power law seems to be extremely true. You have the mathematical evidence in front of you. They (bloggers) can’t explain why that is not true. And people who speak against bubbles are not treated kindly inside the bubble.”
This is a markedly different perspective from that of many of the people that have appeared in this space previously, but the evidence is compelling and observation of how people use the Web seems to support it as well. Finkelstein argues that the “barrier of noise” that swells in such an information saturated environment is not heard by those who are above it, thus the bloggers who are read can proclaim a new participatory communication while simultaneously being benignly ignorant of the real social hubs -- and thus sites of power -- that are being created.
I tend to agree that power law is a good description of how users are reading the web, but I also have a sense that this model does not adequately amount to a theory of digital communication. Communication also has a tendency to percolate back up (trickling perhaps, but it is happening none the less) to the gatekeepers of audience, or beyond that into other social relationships.
For instance, my own newbie gestures at blogging at the time of this post have resulted in a grand total of two citations! Does that mean I am not heard, that I do not have a voice? Perhaps. But this might not be the end all measure of communication. This is not meant as a grand gesture here, but perhaps my ideas or reporting influenced someone’s thinking, which then got passed onto their own blog, with or without the citation, and then around from there both off and online in their dealings with other people. My communication would then implicitly have an audience and power to it, even though I might have no idea or concept of the boundaries of that audience. The kids on Live Journal might only speak to family and friends, but that has consequences for social relationships, social relationships have political consequences, and so on.
So reading Joshua Farber’s blog and his thoughts about education has influenced my own thinking about pedagogy, just as Jay Rosen has influenced my thinking on journalism.
Farber is a self-described non A-lister, but his ability to publish has consequences for my own thought. So regardless of the gatekeepers of audience, all communication has the potential to be implicitly powerful in how it is spread; and we do not have a good means for tracking this. True, some people are the social entrepreneurs in network theory, but there is always a dialectic at the micro level of communication (and this also does not account for the mere fact that people writing consistently, about anything, has implications in and of itself.)
There is a danger however, and Finkelstein is right to forcibly point this out. When people blow bubbles there is a distortion that occurs inside the bubble – and whether that is traced through the stock market, the Dean campaign, or by ignoring the very real sites of social, economic, and political power, the promise of technology needs to be realistically combined with the cold hard historical reasoning that tells us there will never be a purely technological fix for what ails us.
Thus, we should advocate, and as strongly as ever, for the structural changes (like public subsidies for media outlets) that will create a more responsive, and responsible, media in this country.
Had a long chat with Seth Finkelstein last night. He has some fascinating insights/arguments into blogging, and why it’s a myth that the journalistic gatekeepers are gone.
“It’s a big big mistake thinking that gatekeepers are gone. There is a reason people say this. Those people saying it are those who have overcome all the barriers except for the production barrier. They have the connections, the paying job; all the barriers have been removed except for the editorial publishing barrier. When it shifts they think they have Christmas everyday. But that barrier is replaced by a noise barrier. The barrier is exactly the same, one gatekeeper has become another. There is a shift in one place, but there is a corresponding loss in another space.”
Finkelstein argues that what happens can be mathematically mapped and predicted. The gatekeeper of production is replaced by the gatekeeper of audience, (ie: a few bloggers with a lot of traffic have a disproportionate share of readers, which makes for there being no real “average”. In short, because of the spike among the top few, the vast majority of blogs actually have a readership below the mathematical average.)
Clay Shirky, a adjunct professor of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and consultant on the social and economic effects of the Web, wrote “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”, which became a widely discussed piece in the blog world.
Shirky’s thesis is:
“In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”
For Finkelstein, the distribution of readers hovers around a few blogs for an obvious reason: “you can’t read everybody.” There is a class of people who sort through the information that is out there – which rises exponentially in an age when it costs very little to become a producer – and through this sorting, these people become very powerful. Professional journalists/bloggers no longer have a monopoly on the means of production, but they come very close to having a monopoly on the audience of that production.
In Finkelstein’s view it is complete and utter nonsense to say that blogging will herald a new era of “participatory democracy” or communication where everyone has a voice. And he traces a similar technological utopianism into all the previous incarnations of the internet, as the “bubble blowers” always argue that a new world and society is being shaped.
Finkelstein says that while at MIT in 1984 he was connected to the Internet, and he can trace this utopianism throughout its 20-year history. For instance, he says that he has kept a Usenet press card from 1996 as a joke; the idea of the press card was to ask what happens when a Usenetter goes to a press conference, and its conclusion is that everyone is a reporter similar to the journalists at CNN. For Finkelstein, this is the same logic behind World Fairs, the counter-culture that built the internet, and now, bloggers.
In looking at the evidence, like the theory of power law, Finkelstein (who uses terms like “calculated” when discussing theoretical arguments; for instance, in his view Cass Sunstein calculated his social theory of the internet wrong) says he is the describing the world as it is, which is backed up by the data he is looking at.
“Power law seems to be extremely true. You have the mathematical evidence in front of you. They (bloggers) can’t explain why that is not true. And people who speak against bubbles are not treated kindly inside the bubble.”
This is a markedly different perspective from that of many of the people that have appeared in this space previously, but the evidence is compelling and observation of how people use the Web seems to support it as well. Finkelstein argues that the “barrier of noise” that swells in such an information saturated environment is not heard by those who are above it, thus the bloggers who are read can proclaim a new participatory communication while simultaneously being benignly ignorant of the real social hubs -- and thus sites of power -- that are being created.
I tend to agree that power law is a good description of how users are reading the web, but I also have a sense that this model does not adequately amount to a theory of digital communication. Communication also has a tendency to percolate back up (trickling perhaps, but it is happening none the less) to the gatekeepers of audience, or beyond that into other social relationships.
For instance, my own newbie gestures at blogging at the time of this post have resulted in a grand total of two citations! Does that mean I am not heard, that I do not have a voice? Perhaps. But this might not be the end all measure of communication. This is not meant as a grand gesture here, but perhaps my ideas or reporting influenced someone’s thinking, which then got passed onto their own blog, with or without the citation, and then around from there both off and online in their dealings with other people. My communication would then implicitly have an audience and power to it, even though I might have no idea or concept of the boundaries of that audience. The kids on Live Journal might only speak to family and friends, but that has consequences for social relationships, social relationships have political consequences, and so on.
So reading Joshua Farber’s blog and his thoughts about education has influenced my own thinking about pedagogy, just as Jay Rosen has influenced my thinking on journalism.
Farber is a self-described non A-lister, but his ability to publish has consequences for my own thought. So regardless of the gatekeepers of audience, all communication has the potential to be implicitly powerful in how it is spread; and we do not have a good means for tracking this. True, some people are the social entrepreneurs in network theory, but there is always a dialectic at the micro level of communication (and this also does not account for the mere fact that people writing consistently, about anything, has implications in and of itself.)
There is a danger however, and Finkelstein is right to forcibly point this out. When people blow bubbles there is a distortion that occurs inside the bubble – and whether that is traced through the stock market, the Dean campaign, or by ignoring the very real sites of social, economic, and political power, the promise of technology needs to be realistically combined with the cold hard historical reasoning that tells us there will never be a purely technological fix for what ails us.
Thus, we should advocate, and as strongly as ever, for the structural changes (like public subsidies for media outlets) that will create a more responsive, and responsible, media in this country.
Rebecca MacKinnon was the former (as of December) CNN Bureau Chief in Beijing (at age 28!) and Tokyo, and had spent the last twelve years covering northeast Asia. She is now a media fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
We had a fascinating conversation about blogging, the mainstream media, and participatory communication. In the end, like myself, she believes that there needs to be some playful people thinking about how all these things relate and where the media and communications environment is heading.
Her reporting blog, North Korea Zone, is an extension of her work as a correspondent for the last twelve years, albeit in a radically different format. She sees herself as an aggregator of content as a blogger blogging from outside of North Korea; she is compiling information that the mainstream press is missing in order to create an “informed discussion of the issues.” Freed from the constraints of newsworthiness, space/time, “breaking news,” this journalist is able to communicate in a new way.
“It is so hard to get in there, so hard to cover. It's very difficult to cover, the way all media organizations are set up. It’s basically your person doesn’t get into a place, you don’t cover it. As a result all coverage of North Korea is done from outside of North Korea. Meanwhile, you have a situation of where it’s one of three countries as part of the axis of evil, and there is a nuclear standoff. Not much informed discussion of the issues takes place in the media”
MacKinnon offers a compelling critique of the way news organizations are forced to cover these countries within the constraints listed above. That is why her model of becoming a “niche” site for information on one country is fascinating. It allows for readers, journalists, and policymakers to have one access point of information on a regular basis, tracing policy and events in time and continually, rather than just reacting to events like a train collision. The site also offers an implicit critique of regular media coverage, in that it gives a context and transparency to the process of reporting – which often reveals more about a country than the official statements and press releases.
“Basically, I see myself both a moderator and a commentator. I provide analysis, from my own reporting experiences I can add information, put things in context for people. In the last couple of days, the train explosion, random information coming out. In a newspaper or when you are on TV you have to be very consistent about what version you are reporting. (As a journalist) it is kind of hard to say we don’t know what is going on really.”
"You have more freedom in a webblog to be honest about it. It is more derivative reporting, because you are bringing in a variety of sources. Pictures (of the train collision) are of only what the aid workers want to take photos of. The news reports are not pointing this out. This is something that the people ought to know, the media has not been up front about this.”
So then blogs, in their ability to bring together multiple sites of information (at least under the “aggregate model”) create transparency in the reporting process, but also add to the sum total of “factual” information by being able to contextualize information in an easy way. They are also able to add additional information, repackage it, provide links, and make communication something new.
Some blogs are also doing original reporting outside of the aggregate model. There are numerous points of impact for this phenomenon. Firstly, it allows blogs to “correct” a record of reporting in the mainstream press. Secondly, it affords people a deeper view of a country, place, event, or issue. Thirdly, it allows users to be not audiences, but participants in the process (ie: on MacKinnon’s blog, users are encouraged to send in their information, travel logs, photographs, etc. of North Korea.)
“Definitely more people are turning to the Iran bloggers, the Iraqi bloggers. To supplement information on what is going on. It gives you a sense of what ordinary people think. It enriches a persons ability to understand a place. It also enables people to have conversations with people in countries very far away in ways that wasn’t possible before.”
MacKinnon says that in the short term this participation has an impact on elites (Trent Lott,) but in the long term the function of the mainstream media will change towards more participatory communication as well. Some journalists now are reading blogs that are related to their beat (MacKinnon cites her own examples of story ideas originating in blogs,) other journalists are beginning to blog. Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee told me that he does it to let readers in on the process of reporting and politics, but also because he has more information than what gets published (and as Mackinnon says, the role of the journalist is to share, not hoard, information.)
There is also the demand, especially among the younger media consumers, for participation. The “audience” (Dave Winer would shy from even using this term, a topic I have discussed in my reporting from BloggerCon II) wants a two-way flow of information.
Which brings me to the most interesting part of my conversation with MacKinnon, mainly how journalists are responding to this, and how their professional training, education, and model of news creation and distribution is preventing them from keeping up with electronic media.
“It’s all about journalists loosing control over journalism and that scary to a lot of people. But it’s inevitable. Over the coming decades, the ones who try to maintain control are going to fall behind. The people who are out in front of this, are thinking about it and interacting with it, are those who are going to stay around.”
Being in a journalism program right now gives me some perspective on this (although I make no claims that Stanford is representative of all journalism schools in the country.) We seem to be straddling a line between old print media and new media, with few crossovers in between. For instance, we learn reporting in the inverted pyramid style, but we do not necessarily learn writing in a format that is better suited for a web page or a blog. We know how to find a balance of sources for objective reporting, but we do not (often) talk about how links provide a nonlinear path to information that is “deep” content. This entire masters project is aimed at getting us a glossy clip in a magazine; that is why this blog is here for me, to share these ideas in a digital environment.
The point is not about Stanford, but is about older models and notions of journalism that persist in a rapidly changing media environment. For instance, MacKinnon is the only fellow at Shorenstein working in digital media. It seems to me that people do not know how to teach and think about these things, and the implications for journalism as a profession is enormous.
“The whole concept of an aggregator is way beyond. Journalism schools are going to hit a real crisis. Faculty’s job is to teach these kids how they did journalism. And that is all going out the window. Journalism schools will be completely useless.”
So the roles of the journalist as aggregator, facilitator of conversation, and provider of context – the information worker – will be their new roles. And there is a potentially large role for the journalist on-line.
“The people out there really appreciate the fact that they can go to one place and get everything they think is relevant. The linking function provides such a new dimension, the whole participator thing. It is so nonlinear, I guess the conventional news media is basically linear. You have the ability to pull in everybody and be all inclusive and be really focused”
And "journalism" as a profession, and as practiced by professionals, also offers credibility…
“That is going to be the big test, credibility. One reason I don’t think professional journalism will die. We need professional journalists, people whose identity is really clear, with zero conflicts of interest reporting what they have been hired to report about.”
MacKinnon left CNN after getting frustrated with the media herd focusing only on Iraq and Al Qaeda: the only international topics that it seems like Americans are interested in. In her view, editors and producers know people are not going to watch or read other news, and they have the numbers to prove it. So this gives her an outlet for deeper reporting.
Perhaps if we change the content, we change what people are interested in?
We had a fascinating conversation about blogging, the mainstream media, and participatory communication. In the end, like myself, she believes that there needs to be some playful people thinking about how all these things relate and where the media and communications environment is heading.
Her reporting blog, North Korea Zone, is an extension of her work as a correspondent for the last twelve years, albeit in a radically different format. She sees herself as an aggregator of content as a blogger blogging from outside of North Korea; she is compiling information that the mainstream press is missing in order to create an “informed discussion of the issues.” Freed from the constraints of newsworthiness, space/time, “breaking news,” this journalist is able to communicate in a new way.
“It is so hard to get in there, so hard to cover. It's very difficult to cover, the way all media organizations are set up. It’s basically your person doesn’t get into a place, you don’t cover it. As a result all coverage of North Korea is done from outside of North Korea. Meanwhile, you have a situation of where it’s one of three countries as part of the axis of evil, and there is a nuclear standoff. Not much informed discussion of the issues takes place in the media”
MacKinnon offers a compelling critique of the way news organizations are forced to cover these countries within the constraints listed above. That is why her model of becoming a “niche” site for information on one country is fascinating. It allows for readers, journalists, and policymakers to have one access point of information on a regular basis, tracing policy and events in time and continually, rather than just reacting to events like a train collision. The site also offers an implicit critique of regular media coverage, in that it gives a context and transparency to the process of reporting – which often reveals more about a country than the official statements and press releases.
“Basically, I see myself both a moderator and a commentator. I provide analysis, from my own reporting experiences I can add information, put things in context for people. In the last couple of days, the train explosion, random information coming out. In a newspaper or when you are on TV you have to be very consistent about what version you are reporting. (As a journalist) it is kind of hard to say we don’t know what is going on really.”
"You have more freedom in a webblog to be honest about it. It is more derivative reporting, because you are bringing in a variety of sources. Pictures (of the train collision) are of only what the aid workers want to take photos of. The news reports are not pointing this out. This is something that the people ought to know, the media has not been up front about this.”
So then blogs, in their ability to bring together multiple sites of information (at least under the “aggregate model”) create transparency in the reporting process, but also add to the sum total of “factual” information by being able to contextualize information in an easy way. They are also able to add additional information, repackage it, provide links, and make communication something new.
Some blogs are also doing original reporting outside of the aggregate model. There are numerous points of impact for this phenomenon. Firstly, it allows blogs to “correct” a record of reporting in the mainstream press. Secondly, it affords people a deeper view of a country, place, event, or issue. Thirdly, it allows users to be not audiences, but participants in the process (ie: on MacKinnon’s blog, users are encouraged to send in their information, travel logs, photographs, etc. of North Korea.)
“Definitely more people are turning to the Iran bloggers, the Iraqi bloggers. To supplement information on what is going on. It gives you a sense of what ordinary people think. It enriches a persons ability to understand a place. It also enables people to have conversations with people in countries very far away in ways that wasn’t possible before.”
MacKinnon says that in the short term this participation has an impact on elites (Trent Lott,) but in the long term the function of the mainstream media will change towards more participatory communication as well. Some journalists now are reading blogs that are related to their beat (MacKinnon cites her own examples of story ideas originating in blogs,) other journalists are beginning to blog. Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee told me that he does it to let readers in on the process of reporting and politics, but also because he has more information than what gets published (and as Mackinnon says, the role of the journalist is to share, not hoard, information.)
There is also the demand, especially among the younger media consumers, for participation. The “audience” (Dave Winer would shy from even using this term, a topic I have discussed in my reporting from BloggerCon II) wants a two-way flow of information.
Which brings me to the most interesting part of my conversation with MacKinnon, mainly how journalists are responding to this, and how their professional training, education, and model of news creation and distribution is preventing them from keeping up with electronic media.
“It’s all about journalists loosing control over journalism and that scary to a lot of people. But it’s inevitable. Over the coming decades, the ones who try to maintain control are going to fall behind. The people who are out in front of this, are thinking about it and interacting with it, are those who are going to stay around.”
Being in a journalism program right now gives me some perspective on this (although I make no claims that Stanford is representative of all journalism schools in the country.) We seem to be straddling a line between old print media and new media, with few crossovers in between. For instance, we learn reporting in the inverted pyramid style, but we do not necessarily learn writing in a format that is better suited for a web page or a blog. We know how to find a balance of sources for objective reporting, but we do not (often) talk about how links provide a nonlinear path to information that is “deep” content. This entire masters project is aimed at getting us a glossy clip in a magazine; that is why this blog is here for me, to share these ideas in a digital environment.
The point is not about Stanford, but is about older models and notions of journalism that persist in a rapidly changing media environment. For instance, MacKinnon is the only fellow at Shorenstein working in digital media. It seems to me that people do not know how to teach and think about these things, and the implications for journalism as a profession is enormous.
“The whole concept of an aggregator is way beyond. Journalism schools are going to hit a real crisis. Faculty’s job is to teach these kids how they did journalism. And that is all going out the window. Journalism schools will be completely useless.”
So the roles of the journalist as aggregator, facilitator of conversation, and provider of context – the information worker – will be their new roles. And there is a potentially large role for the journalist on-line.
“The people out there really appreciate the fact that they can go to one place and get everything they think is relevant. The linking function provides such a new dimension, the whole participator thing. It is so nonlinear, I guess the conventional news media is basically linear. You have the ability to pull in everybody and be all inclusive and be really focused”
And "journalism" as a profession, and as practiced by professionals, also offers credibility…
“That is going to be the big test, credibility. One reason I don’t think professional journalism will die. We need professional journalists, people whose identity is really clear, with zero conflicts of interest reporting what they have been hired to report about.”
MacKinnon left CNN after getting frustrated with the media herd focusing only on Iraq and Al Qaeda: the only international topics that it seems like Americans are interested in. In her view, editors and producers know people are not going to watch or read other news, and they have the numbers to prove it. So this gives her an outlet for deeper reporting.
Perhaps if we change the content, we change what people are interested in?
4.24.2004
Phil Lucas, Executive Editor of the News Herald in Panama City, Florida, wrote this about his paper's decision to publish photographs of the mutilated bodies of American contractors.
I am not sure what is more breathtaking. You can choose:
a) his blantant racism
b) his utter lack of historical knowledge -- except perhaps his grasp on the imaginative world of "Lord of the Rings"
c) his "man the ramparts" of Christianity ideal
d) his ability to be so ignorant and yet still rise to be the Executive Editor of a newspaper
e) all of the above
I am not sure what is more breathtaking. You can choose:
a) his blantant racism
b) his utter lack of historical knowledge -- except perhaps his grasp on the imaginative world of "Lord of the Rings"
c) his "man the ramparts" of Christianity ideal
d) his ability to be so ignorant and yet still rise to be the Executive Editor of a newspaper
e) all of the above
4.23.2004
Just got off the phone with Matt Stoller (you can catch him on the Blogging of the President site) who is one of the most articulate thinkers I have come across on social networking and organization on-line.
"What is happening now is a digital transformation of the way we communicate. The way they (digital technologies) have created a public space for people to aggregate into communities is what is important."
He pushed my thinking in new directions, namely around looking much more explicitly at the people who have the vested interests in the hierarchical power structure (Stoller cites the NRA as being a proponent of self-organization, they have a stake in their members having this power.) What struck me is the remarkable potential for the synthesis around self-organization between the ideological right and left on, say, internet policy. For instance, the FCC battle on radio regulation over the past year saw a remarkable convergence of interest between proponents of local control and the vested corporate interests. The self organization made possible on-line is an extension of that battle for local (not necessarily geographic, but also affinity communities) control.
"Its not the form that matters, it’s the ability to have groups self-organize into communities, sliced and diced in ways that we could not conceive of 20 years ago," in Stollers view.
The implications of this are enormous, not just in journalism. Ideas are radiating outward from these communities that are affecting a wider discourse. The Dean campaign is an example of this, ideas were moving upward and outward from these sites of self-organization. And because they become reinforced community spaces (by "reinforced" I mean their language and ideas are stronger because through a digital dialectic space they become clearer and more forceful) what emerges is a cultural discourse that is not mapped on off-line space. At least yet.
But it also has consequences for how ideas get circulated. I interviewed Dylan Greene yesterday, who told me how an author had just asked him for permission to use a blog post he did on RSS in an upcoming book. It seems to me like the potential of blogs, for journalists and citizens more generally, lies precisely in the ability to tap into this communication.
"The Internet is good at mapping social network on itself," said Stoller. "It's not complete, but that does not mean it does not affect this thing. Figuring out where these social networks link with each other…People are looking to their friends to create value for them, they need to. A monetary system looking to measure value. When some people are able to produce crappy content and get paid for it, and others produce great content and don’t get paid for it."
So what is interesting in Stoller's view, and I think you see this in journalism, is the distribution network changing. Movies, films, conversation, content, reporting, political discussion can now at least have the potential to be in everyone's hands, and the value of the content will depend on the social network producing and supporting it. For instance, I interviewed David Appell, a free-lance science writer in New Hampshire. I was struck by his OWN awe at how much value he sees himself as getting from a network of bloggers that are supplementing the mainstream press -- much to his own surprise.
"It changes the way I read news and mags, when I wake up in the morning I read the New York Times and The Washington Post. I also read blogs like Kevin Drum and Atrios. I get 25% of what I know from blogs, and I have a few select bloggers who I read everyday, whose opiunions I trust and whose news I trust. And that surprises me. Because it is a bunch of guys, there is nothing special about them, but I find myself going to them for the news."
When I asked Appell how he came to "trust" these bloggers he really did not have a clear answer, other than a general sense that by famililarizing himself with these writers he comes to trust them. That, I think, is the essence of a social network. It is a relationship bounded by contact and not by brand. And just as you would not immediately trust someone you just met, there a slew of signifiers that inspire trust (which may be institution, position, class, status, race) but there is also a "built" trust that comes from communication.
Which is precisely what regular bloggers build.
"What is happening now is a digital transformation of the way we communicate. The way they (digital technologies) have created a public space for people to aggregate into communities is what is important."
He pushed my thinking in new directions, namely around looking much more explicitly at the people who have the vested interests in the hierarchical power structure (Stoller cites the NRA as being a proponent of self-organization, they have a stake in their members having this power.) What struck me is the remarkable potential for the synthesis around self-organization between the ideological right and left on, say, internet policy. For instance, the FCC battle on radio regulation over the past year saw a remarkable convergence of interest between proponents of local control and the vested corporate interests. The self organization made possible on-line is an extension of that battle for local (not necessarily geographic, but also affinity communities) control.
"Its not the form that matters, it’s the ability to have groups self-organize into communities, sliced and diced in ways that we could not conceive of 20 years ago," in Stollers view.
The implications of this are enormous, not just in journalism. Ideas are radiating outward from these communities that are affecting a wider discourse. The Dean campaign is an example of this, ideas were moving upward and outward from these sites of self-organization. And because they become reinforced community spaces (by "reinforced" I mean their language and ideas are stronger because through a digital dialectic space they become clearer and more forceful) what emerges is a cultural discourse that is not mapped on off-line space. At least yet.
But it also has consequences for how ideas get circulated. I interviewed Dylan Greene yesterday, who told me how an author had just asked him for permission to use a blog post he did on RSS in an upcoming book. It seems to me like the potential of blogs, for journalists and citizens more generally, lies precisely in the ability to tap into this communication.
"The Internet is good at mapping social network on itself," said Stoller. "It's not complete, but that does not mean it does not affect this thing. Figuring out where these social networks link with each other…People are looking to their friends to create value for them, they need to. A monetary system looking to measure value. When some people are able to produce crappy content and get paid for it, and others produce great content and don’t get paid for it."
So what is interesting in Stoller's view, and I think you see this in journalism, is the distribution network changing. Movies, films, conversation, content, reporting, political discussion can now at least have the potential to be in everyone's hands, and the value of the content will depend on the social network producing and supporting it. For instance, I interviewed David Appell, a free-lance science writer in New Hampshire. I was struck by his OWN awe at how much value he sees himself as getting from a network of bloggers that are supplementing the mainstream press -- much to his own surprise.
"It changes the way I read news and mags, when I wake up in the morning I read the New York Times and The Washington Post. I also read blogs like Kevin Drum and Atrios. I get 25% of what I know from blogs, and I have a few select bloggers who I read everyday, whose opiunions I trust and whose news I trust. And that surprises me. Because it is a bunch of guys, there is nothing special about them, but I find myself going to them for the news."
When I asked Appell how he came to "trust" these bloggers he really did not have a clear answer, other than a general sense that by famililarizing himself with these writers he comes to trust them. That, I think, is the essence of a social network. It is a relationship bounded by contact and not by brand. And just as you would not immediately trust someone you just met, there a slew of signifiers that inspire trust (which may be institution, position, class, status, race) but there is also a "built" trust that comes from communication.
Which is precisely what regular bloggers build.
I was at a fascinating talk by Anne Balsamo of the Stanford Humanities Lab Wednesday night. Her forthcoming book, Designing Culture, is about a project that she worked on at Xerox PARC around on-line reading and design. Stanford is also host to some of the projects that came out of that research, (and I am horribly managling the language here, I do not remember their technical names) which include single-text reading programs, flat-screen table-top reading formats (that can be read like non-linear scrolls,) joystick driven almost "choose your own adventure narratives" based on images that open "points" in the narrative.
She is an academic of the humanities, and also the co-founder of Onomy Labs, a technology design firm. So it's humanistic design, or an active-engineering of culture in a conscious way. I know I am not doing this justice, but I was really struck by the research, design, and the ideas behind digital reading. I walked away with the appreciation that all these forms of reading that we tend to think of as being new are historically-based, whether it is in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, the Rosetta Stone, or the message board at Yale Law School.
She is an academic of the humanities, and also the co-founder of Onomy Labs, a technology design firm. So it's humanistic design, or an active-engineering of culture in a conscious way. I know I am not doing this justice, but I was really struck by the research, design, and the ideas behind digital reading. I walked away with the appreciation that all these forms of reading that we tend to think of as being new are historically-based, whether it is in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, the Rosetta Stone, or the message board at Yale Law School.
4.22.2004
The Bush administration fired the contractor -- and her husband -- who took the photograph of the flag-draped coffins on a military transport plane that recently ran in the New York Times.
The control of this administration is frightening.
The control of this administration is frightening.
Its about time the issue of economic diversity on college campuses started getting some attention. The New York Times reports that in 2000, 55% of college freshman at the 250 most selective universities were from the top quarter or earning households.
This disparity is as much cultural as it is economic. As the former director of an after-school program, most of the very talented, and very bright, high school students I hired could not even conceive of taking out loans that sometimes would amount to more than a year's income for that family. There is no sense of ever paying something back on that scale.
Racial diversity is easy to talk about, because it lumps everyone into a classlessness where no one, white, black, hispanc, has to give anything up to move ahead -- despite the protests of white folk who feel victimized by affirmative action. but this playing field is inherently unequal, and disingenuous. diversity of race alone does very little for a true diversity of thought, perspective, or culture.
I still am incensed when anyone driving an SUV or BMW at 18 years old claims that they represent any sort of real diversity of all -- of a wealthy elite perhaps, but not much more. There is more similarity at the top between races, then there is between the top and bottom of class.
This disparity is as much cultural as it is economic. As the former director of an after-school program, most of the very talented, and very bright, high school students I hired could not even conceive of taking out loans that sometimes would amount to more than a year's income for that family. There is no sense of ever paying something back on that scale.
Racial diversity is easy to talk about, because it lumps everyone into a classlessness where no one, white, black, hispanc, has to give anything up to move ahead -- despite the protests of white folk who feel victimized by affirmative action. but this playing field is inherently unequal, and disingenuous. diversity of race alone does very little for a true diversity of thought, perspective, or culture.
I still am incensed when anyone driving an SUV or BMW at 18 years old claims that they represent any sort of real diversity of all -- of a wealthy elite perhaps, but not much more. There is more similarity at the top between races, then there is between the top and bottom of class.
4.20.2004
now i am sure that Julie Flaherty was writing about BloggerCon II from a business perspective, but I must admit that among all the conversations with people I had (and which I wrote about here) not once did making money from blogging become a "hot topic." it would have been nice to hear some wider recognition of the more substantive issues being talked about (or perhaps this just reflects my anti-market bias) like education, journalism, religion, and academia at the conference, and not the crassness of how to support oneself off a blog.
besides, it seems to me that the overwhelming sentiment expressed at the conference was in favor of the democratization of blogging as a form of communication, whether that is a realistic ideal or not, not necessarily in the monetary side of things. perhaps i am naive (or idealistic, i have been accused of that before) but it is more important to get kids learning new technology and communicating to a wider public than it is to jump right into how to "sell" your thoughts.
besides, it seems to me that the overwhelming sentiment expressed at the conference was in favor of the democratization of blogging as a form of communication, whether that is a realistic ideal or not, not necessarily in the monetary side of things. perhaps i am naive (or idealistic, i have been accused of that before) but it is more important to get kids learning new technology and communicating to a wider public than it is to jump right into how to "sell" your thoughts.
4.19.2004
a couple of the really interesting folks i met at BloggerCon II:
Ryan Overbey: The sanskrit boy tag is just that, a reflection of an amazingly polygot acadmic pursuing his PHD in Buddhism at Harvard. Very very bright, and kind. It just kind of exudes from him.
Joshua Farber: As I wrote earlier, it was so refreshing to see so many educators at the high school level at the conference. And while I can forgive him for working at a private school (he did both, and I understand that where he is now enables him to pursue a higher level of academic inquiry with his students,) he is unbelievably smart in thinking about pedagogy integrated with technology. I would love to see BloggerCon spin off another conference for educators in the future and he is the man to do it. BTW, a shout out to all the people with liberal arts educations, why are the people I meet from these schools consistently the most engaging (that is rhetorical, I know exactly why.)
Christine Eslao: She is just great and aware and snarky in that east coast way which i miss so dearly with all the earnestness of California.
Oh, and much respect to my dear friend Liz and her fiance Travis for hosting me in Cambridge...
Ryan Overbey: The sanskrit boy tag is just that, a reflection of an amazingly polygot acadmic pursuing his PHD in Buddhism at Harvard. Very very bright, and kind. It just kind of exudes from him.
Joshua Farber: As I wrote earlier, it was so refreshing to see so many educators at the high school level at the conference. And while I can forgive him for working at a private school (he did both, and I understand that where he is now enables him to pursue a higher level of academic inquiry with his students,) he is unbelievably smart in thinking about pedagogy integrated with technology. I would love to see BloggerCon spin off another conference for educators in the future and he is the man to do it. BTW, a shout out to all the people with liberal arts educations, why are the people I meet from these schools consistently the most engaging (that is rhetorical, I know exactly why.)
Christine Eslao: She is just great and aware and snarky in that east coast way which i miss so dearly with all the earnestness of California.
Oh, and much respect to my dear friend Liz and her fiance Travis for hosting me in Cambridge...
4.17.2004
So, a couple of the folks who have been facilitating:
Jeff Sharlet (From NYU's center on Media and Religion)
Michael Watkins: (from Harvard Business School)
Rebecca MacKinnon: (former CNN journalist)
Dan Gillmor: (SJ Mercury News' tech blogger)
I should speak a minute about the Presidential bloggers session. First, interesting assembly of people, Matt Gross and Zephyr Teachout from the Dean campaigns, someone from Clark (people are not always good at identifying themselves before they speak) and Dick Bell, the "Official Blogger" for the Kerry Campaign. Sounds like an advertisement.
Shoot over to the Kerry Campaign blog Kerry Campaign blog and contrast it with the old Dean Blog (http://www.blogforamerica.com/) and you can see some of the ideas that were talked about this morning. First, the distinction between candidate blogging where ideas "trickle up" to candidate platforms and those designed to convey "official information" to get voters to the polls. It is a question of ends. I would argue that Dean's blog, which was participatory and empowering, convened people around a candidate rather than "spoke to" a voting public. It encouraged engagement rather than lever pulling (maybe that is why they lost, but you know my feelings on that: http://www.stanford.edu/~dkreiss/iowa.html)
This distinction is contentious. Dave Winer who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society here at Harvard (and who is coincidentially looking to bring BloggerCon III to Stanford next year, which I think should be sponsored by the Department of Communication...ted, if you are reading this...he has spoken to Lessig, but why should they get all the fun?) makes the point that traditional notions of "public" politicans speak to miss the point of blogging. Speaking to a public as if they need to be educated sets a barrier to participation. It gets back to the form of deliberative communication I wrote about earlier.
Dean attempted this, and he build a base of activists who it turned out had a lot to offer. Kerry does not do this nearly as effectively, and maybe this is why he strikes so many here as being so patrician. The medium is still new, but perhaps people will begin to demand this voice now if the technology enables people to have a "public" voice for the first time.
Imagine what would happen in local geographic communities if people could be mobilized around issues through participatory communication that allows for shared conclusions to be arrived at and political pressure to be applied. Perhaps we would get a public high school in East Palo Alto?
Jeff Sharlet (From NYU's center on Media and Religion)
Michael Watkins: (from Harvard Business School)
Rebecca MacKinnon: (former CNN journalist)
Dan Gillmor: (SJ Mercury News' tech blogger)
I should speak a minute about the Presidential bloggers session. First, interesting assembly of people, Matt Gross and Zephyr Teachout from the Dean campaigns, someone from Clark (people are not always good at identifying themselves before they speak) and Dick Bell, the "Official Blogger" for the Kerry Campaign. Sounds like an advertisement.
Shoot over to the Kerry Campaign blog Kerry Campaign blog and contrast it with the old Dean Blog (http://www.blogforamerica.com/) and you can see some of the ideas that were talked about this morning. First, the distinction between candidate blogging where ideas "trickle up" to candidate platforms and those designed to convey "official information" to get voters to the polls. It is a question of ends. I would argue that Dean's blog, which was participatory and empowering, convened people around a candidate rather than "spoke to" a voting public. It encouraged engagement rather than lever pulling (maybe that is why they lost, but you know my feelings on that: http://www.stanford.edu/~dkreiss/iowa.html)
This distinction is contentious. Dave Winer who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society here at Harvard (and who is coincidentially looking to bring BloggerCon III to Stanford next year, which I think should be sponsored by the Department of Communication...ted, if you are reading this...he has spoken to Lessig, but why should they get all the fun?) makes the point that traditional notions of "public" politicans speak to miss the point of blogging. Speaking to a public as if they need to be educated sets a barrier to participation. It gets back to the form of deliberative communication I wrote about earlier.
Dean attempted this, and he build a base of activists who it turned out had a lot to offer. Kerry does not do this nearly as effectively, and maybe this is why he strikes so many here as being so patrician. The medium is still new, but perhaps people will begin to demand this voice now if the technology enables people to have a "public" voice for the first time.
Imagine what would happen in local geographic communities if people could be mobilized around issues through participatory communication that allows for shared conclusions to be arrived at and political pressure to be applied. Perhaps we would get a public high school in East Palo Alto?
Along the same lines of the themes I have been developing, I want to take a step back and talk about how blogs are fundamentally relationship oriented. For those unfamiliar, bloggers read and have conversations with each other based on links that point to and from sites. In this sense, it functions as a network of communicators.
Cass Sunstein worry that they all point in the direction of small, self-selecting, ideological communities. In my own study, I think this is largely true, but underneath it all is the old school mainstream press that provides a starting point for shared discussion. So bloggers still rely on the mainstream media, they simply take this conversation, critique and extend it. And it feeds back into the mainstream press through new information and “takes” on things. So there are smaller publics within a larger shared identity (and its form of communication) of being American, watching the American press…etc.
So within those relationships, blogs are clearly participatory communication, and not just communication between a “creator” and an audience. There are blogs like this as well, and they have their place, but the more widespread format for blogs are those that focused on more relationship-based communication.
One final note for now. THERE ARE A LOT OF EDUCATORS HERE. Not just college professors, but educators at the high school level. That is key in thinking about blogs emerging as a new form of communication with the necessary structure, purpose, and theory to be useful for cultural evolution.
Cass Sunstein worry that they all point in the direction of small, self-selecting, ideological communities. In my own study, I think this is largely true, but underneath it all is the old school mainstream press that provides a starting point for shared discussion. So bloggers still rely on the mainstream media, they simply take this conversation, critique and extend it. And it feeds back into the mainstream press through new information and “takes” on things. So there are smaller publics within a larger shared identity (and its form of communication) of being American, watching the American press…etc.
So within those relationships, blogs are clearly participatory communication, and not just communication between a “creator” and an audience. There are blogs like this as well, and they have their place, but the more widespread format for blogs are those that focused on more relationship-based communication.
One final note for now. THERE ARE A LOT OF EDUCATORS HERE. Not just college professors, but educators at the high school level. That is key in thinking about blogs emerging as a new form of communication with the necessary structure, purpose, and theory to be useful for cultural evolution.
After coming out of a session blogging and academia, facilitated by Michael Watkins (who has had his own interesting story of using the blog to challenge tenure at Harvard http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/MichaelWatkins/,) a couple of themes of this conference are emerging.
The first is the relationship between communication that is participatory and that of which it is information based. The primary role of journalism in the mass media is to convey information, often to voters, so people can make informed decisions within a limited scope of possible action (ie: voting.) A blogging journalism, as a participatory medium, is more of a discursive form of communication. The conversation, deliberation, and, hopefully, the shared process of communication (that comes through the “exchange” of ideas) is what could potentially be important in this new medium.
So the majority of people here (and there certainly a lot of skepticism) would see this value as being essential to education, not on the individual level, but on a more cultural/societal level of discourse.
This is not to say that within the blogging community itself that these ideals are represented. The diversity in terms of quality of writing and content are vast, and there is widespread agreement around the utility of filtering mechanisms.
The second has to do with the use of that communication. There seems to be the widespread hope, if not faith, in blogs becoming a form of “institutional check and balance” (in Watkins phrase) on the forms of power in society, be they political, institutional, or any other ways. In making communication open, you then create the transparency necessary for actors constrained by that power to work for radical innovation. For instance, in Watkins’ blog, it is against the institutional power of the academy.
But it also extends to the micro level. For instance, if I were to sit in a class at Stanford and critique it over my blog with an audience of fellow students, would that create a critical mass of shared dialogue (if they then communicated with me) to then influence the way that course is taught? Does that shared dialogue create a bolder collective or individual voice that then allows us to take action?
This is the second strain that runs through this thought on blogs. Communication, wildly unfettered from those who own the press, becomes a collective exchange that enables not only action, but pushes a society-wide critical discourse in new directions that compels action.
This is why I am uncomfortable with the lack of wider representation I mentioned earlier. As the Dean campaign demonstrated, if that communication is a tool among certain circles and not others, the gap between cyberspace and reality distorts local communication, and creates a huge disconnect in communication based on geography or place because “shared” understandings are so different. This is, I think, what you had happen in Iowa. And the makes opening the medium imperative.
The first is the relationship between communication that is participatory and that of which it is information based. The primary role of journalism in the mass media is to convey information, often to voters, so people can make informed decisions within a limited scope of possible action (ie: voting.) A blogging journalism, as a participatory medium, is more of a discursive form of communication. The conversation, deliberation, and, hopefully, the shared process of communication (that comes through the “exchange” of ideas) is what could potentially be important in this new medium.
So the majority of people here (and there certainly a lot of skepticism) would see this value as being essential to education, not on the individual level, but on a more cultural/societal level of discourse.
This is not to say that within the blogging community itself that these ideals are represented. The diversity in terms of quality of writing and content are vast, and there is widespread agreement around the utility of filtering mechanisms.
The second has to do with the use of that communication. There seems to be the widespread hope, if not faith, in blogs becoming a form of “institutional check and balance” (in Watkins phrase) on the forms of power in society, be they political, institutional, or any other ways. In making communication open, you then create the transparency necessary for actors constrained by that power to work for radical innovation. For instance, in Watkins’ blog, it is against the institutional power of the academy.
But it also extends to the micro level. For instance, if I were to sit in a class at Stanford and critique it over my blog with an audience of fellow students, would that create a critical mass of shared dialogue (if they then communicated with me) to then influence the way that course is taught? Does that shared dialogue create a bolder collective or individual voice that then allows us to take action?
This is the second strain that runs through this thought on blogs. Communication, wildly unfettered from those who own the press, becomes a collective exchange that enables not only action, but pushes a society-wide critical discourse in new directions that compels action.
This is why I am uncomfortable with the lack of wider representation I mentioned earlier. As the Dean campaign demonstrated, if that communication is a tool among certain circles and not others, the gap between cyberspace and reality distorts local communication, and creates a huge disconnect in communication based on geography or place because “shared” understandings are so different. This is, I think, what you had happen in Iowa. And the makes opening the medium imperative.
i am finally here at BloggerCon II in Cambridge after a day of cross-country flight, marked by my first air-line meal in a long time. i wish i had known the yanks were in town, would have loved to catch a game...boston is a baseball city -- and the fervant following of the sox fans only make my desire for them to lose stronger.
the opening sessions were interesting. Jay Rosen of PressThink and NYU facilitated a conversation on blogging and journalism. It was a lively discussion, and the people assembled here are an impressive and diverse (professionally, not racially, but I will make more points on that later.) Essentially, Rosen argues (and many agreed) that journalism is about a relationship with a public, an audience, and that communication with that public is what defines journalism. There were some interesting challenges to this, mostly along the lines of the "ethical framework" that underpins the practice journalism (ie: sourcing, objectivity.)
it seems to me that blogging is too diverse to get bogged down in this question at all. it is fundamentally a communicative act, framed by the "medium," defined more by format than content. blogging could be journalism, at least in terms of reporting, sourcing, objectivity; it could also be an op-ed rant, a conveyor of information, and a tool for organizing a community. all of these things are available, and the category of "journalism" is limiting.
so along the lines of observation, the participants here (about 75 or so) are 1) mostly white, 2) mostly in the 30-40 range (and primarily male, but mixed.) Which begs the questions of if, as the Pew Center study on blogs reveals, half of the public blogs out there are run by teenagers (of which there are none here,) what is the relationship of this conference to a blogger elite? are we communicating just to ourselves?
in speaking with a couple of people here who are former or current educators, this is a concern. the early adopting young public has a stake in being brought into institutitions like Harvard for theoretical conversations about the medium they are adopting. these spaces of critical thought are necessary, and we all need to do a better job of bringing these people (and not just limited to age, but race and class as well) into the process.
if not, we will get another dean effect, and grossly over-estimate the impact, scope, and representation of our on-line conversations.
the opening sessions were interesting. Jay Rosen of PressThink and NYU facilitated a conversation on blogging and journalism. It was a lively discussion, and the people assembled here are an impressive and diverse (professionally, not racially, but I will make more points on that later.) Essentially, Rosen argues (and many agreed) that journalism is about a relationship with a public, an audience, and that communication with that public is what defines journalism. There were some interesting challenges to this, mostly along the lines of the "ethical framework" that underpins the practice journalism (ie: sourcing, objectivity.)
it seems to me that blogging is too diverse to get bogged down in this question at all. it is fundamentally a communicative act, framed by the "medium," defined more by format than content. blogging could be journalism, at least in terms of reporting, sourcing, objectivity; it could also be an op-ed rant, a conveyor of information, and a tool for organizing a community. all of these things are available, and the category of "journalism" is limiting.
so along the lines of observation, the participants here (about 75 or so) are 1) mostly white, 2) mostly in the 30-40 range (and primarily male, but mixed.) Which begs the questions of if, as the Pew Center study on blogs reveals, half of the public blogs out there are run by teenagers (of which there are none here,) what is the relationship of this conference to a blogger elite? are we communicating just to ourselves?
in speaking with a couple of people here who are former or current educators, this is a concern. the early adopting young public has a stake in being brought into institutitions like Harvard for theoretical conversations about the medium they are adopting. these spaces of critical thought are necessary, and we all need to do a better job of bringing these people (and not just limited to age, but race and class as well) into the process.
if not, we will get another dean effect, and grossly over-estimate the impact, scope, and representation of our on-line conversations.
4.15.2004
heading out to bloggercon II tomorrow morning...look for updates and other misc writings.
as for now, its a double johnnie walker red on the rocks and some louie prima, at none other than maddelena's (check out the lead story off my home site for a profile of a truly remarkable man.)
thats it for now, tired of lobbing verbal bombs, having people spring new identities on me, and looking for gainful employment. but, if you are interested check out David Dill's work at www.verifiedvoter.org for some touch-screen voting work, big issue in CA right now (especially san diego, where they spent 31 million dollar on the new technology -- according to Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation -- and yet, they are resisting attempts to mandate paper trails.) why, well because they BOUGHT they want it to WORK, even if the reality is that it does not.
so the solution? great machinery, untrained poll workers, and 18th century facilities...and we expect it to work.
and while i am on the subject of california politics; workman's comp. it is just so interesting to me, a new yorker (although some of you will protest and say i am from new jersey) that ballot measures are negotiating tools. what ever happened to public policy debates? it all seems so juvenile.
AND, indian gaming...down to two measures on the ballot: one by the Agua Caliente Indians, the other by racetrack interests. both are contradictory. what happens when two ballot measures, each calling for conflicting things, end up on the ballot? i don't know.
and what happened to matt gonzalez...is it just because Newsom can control the political game so thoroughly now after the gay-marriage thing that he just did not want to play along? smart move if it is, it is easier to be a critic from the outside than cannon fodder inside.
enough...on the rocks.
as for now, its a double johnnie walker red on the rocks and some louie prima, at none other than maddelena's (check out the lead story off my home site for a profile of a truly remarkable man.)
thats it for now, tired of lobbing verbal bombs, having people spring new identities on me, and looking for gainful employment. but, if you are interested check out David Dill's work at www.verifiedvoter.org for some touch-screen voting work, big issue in CA right now (especially san diego, where they spent 31 million dollar on the new technology -- according to Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation -- and yet, they are resisting attempts to mandate paper trails.) why, well because they BOUGHT they want it to WORK, even if the reality is that it does not.
so the solution? great machinery, untrained poll workers, and 18th century facilities...and we expect it to work.
and while i am on the subject of california politics; workman's comp. it is just so interesting to me, a new yorker (although some of you will protest and say i am from new jersey) that ballot measures are negotiating tools. what ever happened to public policy debates? it all seems so juvenile.
AND, indian gaming...down to two measures on the ballot: one by the Agua Caliente Indians, the other by racetrack interests. both are contradictory. what happens when two ballot measures, each calling for conflicting things, end up on the ballot? i don't know.
and what happened to matt gonzalez...is it just because Newsom can control the political game so thoroughly now after the gay-marriage thing that he just did not want to play along? smart move if it is, it is easier to be a critic from the outside than cannon fodder inside.
enough...on the rocks.
4.14.2004
It was nice to see NPR reporter Don Gonyea get the chance to ask a question of Bush last night. Too bad he sounded so poor.
And, what is it with this apology thing? The press corps are obsessed with getting Bush to apologize, to the extent that they waste three questions on it, three different ways. Forget about policy and where we go from here, its the redemption that is important.
Aside from Bush's performance, the press is once again idiotic.
And, what is it with this apology thing? The press corps are obsessed with getting Bush to apologize, to the extent that they waste three questions on it, three different ways. Forget about policy and where we go from here, its the redemption that is important.
Aside from Bush's performance, the press is once again idiotic.
4.07.2004
a couple of things. first, i am entraced by CyberJounalist.net. tons of info, and for all those of you who know that i am researching blogs and its relationship with the media, invaluable.
second, Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is available for free at http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/. how ironic. not that everyone shouldn't support his work -- you should -- but if you are already shelling out hundreds of dollars on academia free, essential reads, helps.
third, rebecca blood notified the world of an Austin American Statesman article about the geographical isolation of political preferences. i second the notion that it should be publicized (http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/greatdivide/0404divide.html?urcm=y)
btw, i am really remiss on creating hyperlinks on blogger. i need to work on that.
second, Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, is available for free at http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/. how ironic. not that everyone shouldn't support his work -- you should -- but if you are already shelling out hundreds of dollars on academia free, essential reads, helps.
third, rebecca blood notified the world of an Austin American Statesman article about the geographical isolation of political preferences. i second the notion that it should be publicized (http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/greatdivide/0404divide.html?urcm=y)
btw, i am really remiss on creating hyperlinks on blogger. i need to work on that.
4.06.2004
Jay Rosen's discussion on blogging and journalism heightened my interest, so here are some comments from the practioners from interviews I have been conducting:
Kevin Drum, formerly of Calpundit.com, now a "professional" blogger at the Washington Monthly (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/):
"I think it (journalism) is more like talk radio, it depends on whether you consider journalism or not. I think to a large extent blogging is not journalism. It would be tough to have a real blog sponsored by a newspaper. The quality of the sourcing, or the editing, these are things that do not fit with blogs. If forced to fit with a newspaper blogging becomes boring. If a newspaper has to fit with blogs than they can get into trouble. Blogging is commentary, the amount of original reporting done by blogs is tiny. If it was journalism it would have to have a piece of original reporting. That is why I called it a lot closer to talk radio."
Daniel Weintraub, columnist from the Sacramento Bee and blogger (http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/insider/):
"Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Is a newspaper columnist who does not do his or her own reporting a journalist? If it is, than a blogger is. If it does not apply to someone who does not dig up his or her own information than there is less of that. I think it is journalism, and over time it may evolve into small "d" democratic journalism, where every person out there with access to the interenet becomes a writer and reporter if they want to be."
Rebecca Blood, blogger of Rebecca's Pocket (http://www.rebeccablood.net/):
"Most of the time it is not journalism. I am sort of the designated contrarian. I was writing in 2000 about "participatory media," that is my preferred term. For me the heart of journalism is reporting, even opinion columnists talk to sources. Most bloggers do not have the time or resources to do that."
Jay Rosen, NYU Journalism Professor and blogger (Press Think, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/)
"It depends on the purpose. Reporting is rare, it happens but it is rare. You can find it obviously in people who are professional journalists and then became web-bloggers. From the top reporting is occasional among a small number of journalistic webblogs.
On the other end, the citizen end, people are turning to a local reporting of their own.
The third kind, most advanced journalism and weblogs, adding information, scrutiny, background, questions, contexts, to the stories that have been discovered by the press and reported. Parasitic to the original work. This is journalism which is understood as the raw materials of the public discussion itself."
Kevin Drum, formerly of Calpundit.com, now a "professional" blogger at the Washington Monthly (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/):
"I think it (journalism) is more like talk radio, it depends on whether you consider journalism or not. I think to a large extent blogging is not journalism. It would be tough to have a real blog sponsored by a newspaper. The quality of the sourcing, or the editing, these are things that do not fit with blogs. If forced to fit with a newspaper blogging becomes boring. If a newspaper has to fit with blogs than they can get into trouble. Blogging is commentary, the amount of original reporting done by blogs is tiny. If it was journalism it would have to have a piece of original reporting. That is why I called it a lot closer to talk radio."
Daniel Weintraub, columnist from the Sacramento Bee and blogger (http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/insider/):
"Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Is a newspaper columnist who does not do his or her own reporting a journalist? If it is, than a blogger is. If it does not apply to someone who does not dig up his or her own information than there is less of that. I think it is journalism, and over time it may evolve into small "d" democratic journalism, where every person out there with access to the interenet becomes a writer and reporter if they want to be."
Rebecca Blood, blogger of Rebecca's Pocket (http://www.rebeccablood.net/):
"Most of the time it is not journalism. I am sort of the designated contrarian. I was writing in 2000 about "participatory media," that is my preferred term. For me the heart of journalism is reporting, even opinion columnists talk to sources. Most bloggers do not have the time or resources to do that."
Jay Rosen, NYU Journalism Professor and blogger (Press Think, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/)
"It depends on the purpose. Reporting is rare, it happens but it is rare. You can find it obviously in people who are professional journalists and then became web-bloggers. From the top reporting is occasional among a small number of journalistic webblogs.
On the other end, the citizen end, people are turning to a local reporting of their own.
The third kind, most advanced journalism and weblogs, adding information, scrutiny, background, questions, contexts, to the stories that have been discovered by the press and reported. Parasitic to the original work. This is journalism which is understood as the raw materials of the public discussion itself."
4.02.2004
Jay Rosen (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/) brings up a lot of interesting questions about journalism and blogging in advance of the BloggerCon conference at Harvard Law School in a couple of weeks (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/)
I do not agree that many journalists will say theirs is not a “profession.” I think people do officially “qualify” as journalists, and the profession does restrict the practice to those licensed to practice it; just take a look at the credentials that any young journalist, looking to get paid for his or her work, has to go through: the long-houred unpaid internships, the teeth-cutting obits, the inverted-pyramid format. Also, the professional training that is mandated – but that is not always practiced – like standards of “objectivity,” verification, accuracy, are part of the journalist’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Americans.
We cannot ignore the “production” of journalism, which is far more important than any notion of a free press and free speech as an ideal in that it works against an open, participatory environment of communication. These traditional production methods – often the remnants of a distribution process in the off-line world that was aimed at profit – are justified by their claim on these professional journalistic standards cited above.
This is evident in the initial reaction of the mainstream media towards blogs, as they were thoroughly discounted as being the bastion of unverified, biased opinion not conforming to journalistic standards. And blogging as a medium – as a format – is increasingly being picked up by this mainstream press, and their credibility and reputation, which will impact their readership, is their strongest suit – which takes us back to the way that journalistic norms are sanctioned as a profession more “worthy” of the public’s attention.
The other thing that needs to be taken into account is the journalistic model of “objectivity” as specifically relates to the role the press has played in the last 80 years in terms of democracy. Journalism has served for the better part of the last half of the century as a tool for providing information to the public so citizens can participate in democracy; journalism was not conceived as being a “purely human and expressive act,” but rather a process – rooted in the scientific method – of gathering information and facts that the public and elected officials could then act on.
Blogging moves the “informational” model of journalism to serve a more “deliberative” notion of democracy. I would argue that it the mainstream press still largely sets the “news agenda,” and blogs are still reliant on this primary source reporting as a starting point for deliberation, but they extend the conversation further, set new paths for political communication, and serve as a check on the mass-media. It is participatory deliberation, and thus, it heralds a changing notion of what journalism is.
But we are at a point where these old values of “objectivity” and professional norms still have wide-spread credibility for the vast majority of us in America. They have no innate claim to be truth, but they are perceived to be a standard of legitimacy. So when you write that blogging would be well-served to incorporate these norms I thoroughly concur; in fact, I think it is necessary if blogging is going to remain an open process not dominated by the new blogs of major media outlets.
I do not agree that many journalists will say theirs is not a “profession.” I think people do officially “qualify” as journalists, and the profession does restrict the practice to those licensed to practice it; just take a look at the credentials that any young journalist, looking to get paid for his or her work, has to go through: the long-houred unpaid internships, the teeth-cutting obits, the inverted-pyramid format. Also, the professional training that is mandated – but that is not always practiced – like standards of “objectivity,” verification, accuracy, are part of the journalist’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Americans.
We cannot ignore the “production” of journalism, which is far more important than any notion of a free press and free speech as an ideal in that it works against an open, participatory environment of communication. These traditional production methods – often the remnants of a distribution process in the off-line world that was aimed at profit – are justified by their claim on these professional journalistic standards cited above.
This is evident in the initial reaction of the mainstream media towards blogs, as they were thoroughly discounted as being the bastion of unverified, biased opinion not conforming to journalistic standards. And blogging as a medium – as a format – is increasingly being picked up by this mainstream press, and their credibility and reputation, which will impact their readership, is their strongest suit – which takes us back to the way that journalistic norms are sanctioned as a profession more “worthy” of the public’s attention.
The other thing that needs to be taken into account is the journalistic model of “objectivity” as specifically relates to the role the press has played in the last 80 years in terms of democracy. Journalism has served for the better part of the last half of the century as a tool for providing information to the public so citizens can participate in democracy; journalism was not conceived as being a “purely human and expressive act,” but rather a process – rooted in the scientific method – of gathering information and facts that the public and elected officials could then act on.
Blogging moves the “informational” model of journalism to serve a more “deliberative” notion of democracy. I would argue that it the mainstream press still largely sets the “news agenda,” and blogs are still reliant on this primary source reporting as a starting point for deliberation, but they extend the conversation further, set new paths for political communication, and serve as a check on the mass-media. It is participatory deliberation, and thus, it heralds a changing notion of what journalism is.
But we are at a point where these old values of “objectivity” and professional norms still have wide-spread credibility for the vast majority of us in America. They have no innate claim to be truth, but they are perceived to be a standard of legitimacy. So when you write that blogging would be well-served to incorporate these norms I thoroughly concur; in fact, I think it is necessary if blogging is going to remain an open process not dominated by the new blogs of major media outlets.
Oh, and as I also hope to throw critiques of the media in there, we can start with an easy one: Details Magazine and their recent ill-advised and blatantly racist and stereotypical piece by Whitney McNally (available at http://www.koarecords.com/details_asian.jpg.) I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but both the gay and Asian communities are right to be up in arms. Also, KQED ran a report on it tonight with commentary by two Asian-American comedians, including one they described as the “world air-guitar champion.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but I find it hard to believe that KQED could not find better sources for a critique of this article – in the selection of these two commentators they framed the issue right on Details’ defense that it was humor. The interviewer focused on whether it was humor or not, and when humor is okay. I understand what they were trying to do, but it came off as flip – when a commentator makes the “air guitar” comment are we supposed to take it in any other way? There are larger issues here: racism, gay and Asian-male stereotyping, and editorial policy that lets this crap slide in magazines. I expect more from public radio. God forbid we use this incident as a discussion point for stereotypes in the media, shoddy editorial policies, and questioning the cultural assumptions we make everyday.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I find it hard to believe that KQED could not find better sources for a critique of this article – in the selection of these two commentators they framed the issue right on Details’ defense that it was humor. The interviewer focused on whether it was humor or not, and when humor is okay. I understand what they were trying to do, but it came off as flip – when a commentator makes the “air guitar” comment are we supposed to take it in any other way? There are larger issues here: racism, gay and Asian-male stereotyping, and editorial policy that lets this crap slide in magazines. I expect more from public radio. God forbid we use this incident as a discussion point for stereotypes in the media, shoddy editorial policies, and questioning the cultural assumptions we make everyday.
So its April 1st, the start of a new month and a new quarter here in the stanford masters program in journalism. As promised, I spent a blissful week in nyc (half) thinking about this niche of the web, my career, and where all of this digital journalism is going.
But enough of the testimonial, if you are in nyc check out the Biennial at the Whitney and the Byzantium exhibition at the MET. Both are extraordinary (if one can ever say that about the Biennial, lets stick with “more even than usual.) Also, a plug for the profile of A..J. Liebling in the New Yorker last week by David Remnick (and the entire March 29th issue,) and finally the work of Web-artist Jess Loseby available at www.turbulence.org, which I found last night for the first time. Its incredible.
The blogging community, for all its heralded “de-centralization” of communication away from the mainstream press, is lacking in local reporting. Other than sites that focus on regional politics like CalPundit or others on topical issues like Dan Gilmor’s San Jose Mercury News Tech blog, I see very few avenues for local reporting. Reporters at the smaller community papers do not have blogs; so the blogging world necessarily focuses on political campaigns, national and state politics and especially campaigns, and punditry, with few exceptions.
I have yet to find a good local blog covering local news, if you know of one, let me know. But then again, with all the media consolidation in the off-line world of print, television, and especially radio news, the local is disappearing as well. But if we want to truly herald in something new in the blogging world, we need to account for this lack of local reporting.
This space will try to fill that gap in the Bay Area. My goal is to combine my journalistic background (and all that entails in terms of actually “reporting” on local sources and stories) with the digital freedom of self-publishing.
I was recently taken on as an intern with KALW (91.7 in San Francisco, or www.kalw.org), a small, under-funded radio station that runs NPR content and some of its own shows, and tries – in the face of limited staff and zero resources – to focus on local content. No one else here on radio in the Bay Area does a particularly good job on local content.
I will be doing a whole bunch of election work for them, trying to look at the national, state, and local elections through the lens of the local – hopefully in the communities that get missed in reporting on radio or television, unless of course there is a particularly egregious police brutality case or shooting.
My goal is true local reporting in the journalistic sense, with of course the patina of opinion and voice the web calls for. I am sure I will stumble, call me on it.
But enough of the testimonial, if you are in nyc check out the Biennial at the Whitney and the Byzantium exhibition at the MET. Both are extraordinary (if one can ever say that about the Biennial, lets stick with “more even than usual.) Also, a plug for the profile of A..J. Liebling in the New Yorker last week by David Remnick (and the entire March 29th issue,) and finally the work of Web-artist Jess Loseby available at www.turbulence.org, which I found last night for the first time. Its incredible.
The blogging community, for all its heralded “de-centralization” of communication away from the mainstream press, is lacking in local reporting. Other than sites that focus on regional politics like CalPundit or others on topical issues like Dan Gilmor’s San Jose Mercury News Tech blog, I see very few avenues for local reporting. Reporters at the smaller community papers do not have blogs; so the blogging world necessarily focuses on political campaigns, national and state politics and especially campaigns, and punditry, with few exceptions.
I have yet to find a good local blog covering local news, if you know of one, let me know. But then again, with all the media consolidation in the off-line world of print, television, and especially radio news, the local is disappearing as well. But if we want to truly herald in something new in the blogging world, we need to account for this lack of local reporting.
This space will try to fill that gap in the Bay Area. My goal is to combine my journalistic background (and all that entails in terms of actually “reporting” on local sources and stories) with the digital freedom of self-publishing.
I was recently taken on as an intern with KALW (91.7 in San Francisco, or www.kalw.org), a small, under-funded radio station that runs NPR content and some of its own shows, and tries – in the face of limited staff and zero resources – to focus on local content. No one else here on radio in the Bay Area does a particularly good job on local content.
I will be doing a whole bunch of election work for them, trying to look at the national, state, and local elections through the lens of the local – hopefully in the communities that get missed in reporting on radio or television, unless of course there is a particularly egregious police brutality case or shooting.
My goal is true local reporting in the journalistic sense, with of course the patina of opinion and voice the web calls for. I am sure I will stumble, call me on it.
