Scrutiny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just saw a presentation of an amazing online resource called Metavid. It is overseen by Warren Sack at UCSC and designed largely by his students Michael Dale and Aphid Stern. Its funded by the Sunlight Foundation and a grant from the NSF.

The site houses every second of video footage from the Senate and House floor since January 2006. All of it is searchable online by the text of the speech (scraped from the closed captioning of the CSPAN broadcast), the name of the speaker, the session. You can search, with a really simple and effective interface, not only for what a certain person said on a certian topic on a certain date, but also cross-referenced by some of the information the Sunlight Foundation offers — so, you could request any mention of “health care” by anyone recieving more than X dollars from pharmaceutical industry donors.

Any clip can be very simply embedded into a blog or website. You can jump to the stream of footage and indicate the start and finish point of the clip you want, and that can be added to a blog or website. You can help label clips for content, or even repair text errors in the closed caption transcript. You can combine clips (in an astoundingly nimble drag-and-drop interface) together, and put the montaged clip into your blog or website.

I’m really, really impressed.

Maybe I’m in a grouchy place, from jetlag or lack of coffee or too much coffee. But I think I’ve decided to never use the term “Web 2.0″ again, except maybe to speak critically about it as a construct. I know its almost as popular to bash the term as to use it, so I’m not cutting any edge here. But I’m finding it exhausting in this conference, and I realize that I may have used it in my own presentation - in fact, I’m not even sure if I did or not, which is disturbing.

This is partly inspired by David Berry’s talk, in which he critiques the term as an “imaginary technology,” one that, in fact, was meant not as a category but as a manifesto of principles when Tim O’Reilly first coined it. David made an excellent point, which is that it is dangerous for scholars to turn to study a phenomenon, and do so by accepting a term manufactured to describe it, and manufactured by interested parties. (I particularly loved that he kept calling it “2-point-naught.”) But its also a reaction to the way this term has so insinuated itself into this conversation. Precisely because the conference called itself “Politics 2.0″ has made it such this term, on a regular basis, gets used by presenters as not a manufactured term, or even a set of principles, but a matter-of-fact category of technologies out there.

It is a singularly useless and shamefully promotional term, and plays into our worst habits as academics, intellectual laziness and over-simplification as insight.

I just think its pretty exciting news: WikiCandidate just got covered in New Scientist, and subsequently got picked up in an AFP report. Which means its now been heard about by a whole lot of people, and the site is finally getting  lots of hits and some real activity.

Fenwick McKelvey, a graduate student from Ryerson, working with Greg Elmer, posed an interesting question after our panel. What do we mean exactly when we talk about a new media “platform”? I use the term, but probably not in a particularly analytical way. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of “platform” as sites that act as vessels for user contributions: YouTube, Flickr, even Craigslist, eBay. Wikipedia suggests that the term does not refer to such sites, but to hardware or software platforms that allow other tools to run, but I feel like I have often heard it used to describe sites that host content, not just tools.

This is worth thinking through. In fact, the main point of my talk today may actually beg that very question. I suggested that there’s a paradox for new media platforms for political involvement, where they may offer up their site as a certain kind of space, but it is the users who end up defining in powerful ways what the site offers and what kind of deliberation it hosts, because each subsequent user arrives at the site filled with their contributions, may only be true because I am thinking about new media “platforms” that have to be offered up first as an empty vessel, a la YouTube or Flickr. But of course, in those cases, the site provider can post their own content if they so choose, and may have at the start in order to get things going — though as the site grows, their contributions are dwarfed by the content provided by others. In our WikiCandidate project, we did not want to “prime” users in any way by putting even space-holding text — but this is an artifact of our particular desire to see what gets built, and to be able to ask communication questions as well as technology and politics ones. I could imagine other sites, like Remix America, where the very point is to fill the site with a certain kind of content, in order to encourage further contributions.

Is “platform” on of those terms, like “peer” or “amateur,” that is being adopted because it does some very particular cultural work in this mew media environment? Is it another discursive way to appear open, to make a promise of technological neutrality? The metaphor of a platform is a pretty compelling one: it raises you up, but it is flat and without walls, so its open to all and privileges no one. Its also worth remembering that the term has been long used in the political venue, in terms of a party’s platform, to suggest that the candidate stands on these principles. Is it a term that needs unpacking, as well as being more analytyically rigorous about it when we do scholarship on such tools?

I’m currently attending the Politics 2.0 conference being held at the Royal Holloway University of London, organized by Andrew Chadwick. The Wikicandidate project that my students and I have been developing made it a natural fit, and we were lucky to have a really good audience for our panel. So while I’m here, I may throw some thoughts to the blog, about the implications of new media phenomena for political involvement.

One issue that emerged from our panel and the discussion that followed, is the tension between engagement and consensus. There is a tension in the ideas about public political involvement and the “public sphere,” between whether the value of public participation in debating the issues of the day is the value of engagement for its own sake, or engagement in order to accomplish something, to reach consensus or resolution. I don’t know Habermas’ body of work as well as I should, so I don’t know if he addressed this directly or not. But it seems to be a persistent but often implicit question when we actually build for political involvement. Are we building spaces for people to come together to debate, because debate is a good thing, because it makes us better citizens overall, because it is the symbolic heart of democracy as an ideal? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want that debate to accomplish something, to reach a resolution on some pressing issue, to take an informed vote on some bill, to set the agenda of an governing body? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want people to reach consensus, to agree?

One point a made in my presentation was that wikis, and especially as instantiated in Wikipedia, seem to emphasize consensus over engagement for its own sake. Though some trumpet Wikipedia for its collaborative nature, the priorities at Wikipedia are about the resource produced – I think Wikipedia would prefer an encyclopedia entry that is fair and accurate but written by one person, to an entry that’s flawed and incomplete but built by many. And the wiki is technologically designed to highlight the consensus produced over the discussion that produced it: the tool foregrounds the entry and backgrounds the discussion, history, and edit functions. (You could imagine an alternative-universe Wikipedia where, when you go to the entry on “democracy” you’d arrive first to the page where users debated how to present the concept of democracy, then could click to see what they came up with. This is just as technologically possible as the one we have, but already seems counterintuitive. Its not so far from the way a Usenet threaded discussion on democracy would look.)

So if there is a tension between engagement for its own sake and engagement for the production of consensus, and remains an open question about which has greater value (or what combination of the two we require), new media platforms are being built today that decide on an answer to this question, without the question being asked.

One of the most important steps we can take as scholars is to demand that, as new answers are being offered to old questions, the question at least gets asked.

I liked this brief discussion on the design of Obama’s campaign website, especially his use of the Gotham font. Since my students and have been working on WikiCandidate for the last few months, a lot of our discussion have been about how to design the site to most closely approximate the sites set up by the current presidential candidates. We’ve tried to draw from all of them to find what is apparently the convention these days for candidate sites — not far from the conventional “content management” site, the obvious profusion of red and blue, plus some surprising commonalities of site categories, button location, and aesthetics. But I have to agree with Heller and Collins, Obama’s use of the Gotham font does do something for his site that the others do not quite match.

I think I could be a font nerd, if I knew a little more about them.

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

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

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

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

In case you haven’t seen it:

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

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

One of the most challenging tasks in teaching a class on new media is to get past Internet-centric stories about contemporary change. We could call this “technological determinism,” the tendency to explain social change by pointing to the Internet as the cause, but I think that actually doesn’t help. There are many claims made about how a new technology causes change — “hey, the web is changing politics!” But even when scholars and critics are trying not to simplistically pin their explanation on the technology, there is a convention of using technologies to discursively mark and comprehend moments of change. It’s a kind of shorthand, like “The Industrial Age,” where the author may not actually think that the cotton gin or the assembly line changed everything, but they need a reference point to make sense of a broad period of time when ceertain kinds of things mattered and took effect. Its also an acknowledgement that certain technologies, the Internet certainly one of them, often motivate a public attention to changes, changes that may already have been underway but that become clear or problematic around a new technology. And, as new technologies emerge in certain moments, amidst change, they often become playgrounds and battlegrounds for the exploration of contours of that change, and so become entangled with it.

But this does tend to do an injustice to the process of understanding these changes and the forces behind them, because the technology often figures way too prominently in the discussion, and can often stand in as a shorthand explanation. So how do we talk about the Internet and politics, or new media and journalism, or online advertising, without incessantly telling a pre- and post-Internet story, and without having to claim that nothing has changed?

In the course of teaching this class, I’ve noticed one tactic I find useful: drawing attention to changes that were already underway, that predate the Internet, but that got taken up around new media. This draws on a tradition in the sociology of technology, that suggests that technologies are the product of social negotiation rather than the other way around, and from a lesson I learned from Phil Agre in graduate school, when he said “instead of studying the Internet, study the social phenomenon you’re interested, then consider the 5% of that phenomenon where the Internet matters.” (I’m paraphrasing; its been a few years.) Of course, one of the challenges is that you have to really know the social or political phenomenon in question, and you need a sense of history, something I find under-emphasized in my department’s curriculum.

This insight keeps arising for me, even in surprising ways. So I’m re-reading Zizi Papacharissi’s article “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere,” from New Media & Society 4.1 (2002), where she astutely examines the question of whether online political discussion is fostering or undermining a public sphere, in Habermas’ sense of the term as well as his critics’. She works through lots of the issues around how online discussion spaces work (or worked: the article pre-dates blogs, wikis, and social networking), including issues of access and overload, diversity and fragmentation, and commercial pressure. In her conclusion she notes a concern raised by Breslin, that “the internet promotes a sense of sociality, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into solidarity.” (21) But her reaction is excellent: that while we may wonder if online communities and political debate can match the kind of organized solidarity that communities or unions or political organizations or rallies could, that may in fact not be how political engagement works anymore. Forty years of “identity politics” have moved the political discourse from solidarity to individual expression as a political gesture. And the political use of the Internet may fit much more neatly with that version of political discourse. So its not, “is the Internet helping or hurting the political process?” but rather “as the politicla process continues to struggle with structural tensions, for instance around communal versus individual political engagement, how does the Internet get taken up in this process, play into or against that tension, and afford unanticipated opportunities that other communication technologies did not?”

The most striking moment in the course so far, where I felt like a rich sense of cultural history would help focus us on a long change that predates but tangles with the Internet, is around journalism. We discuss the question of whether newsblogging is a form of journalism, mostly because it helps reveal the complexity of journalism as a social category, how it has always tangled with the shape of the dominant media form, and how ideals and arrangements get re-thought in light of a new medium. But as we discussed the history of media journalism, especially around the superb Frontline documentary “News War” (part three is especially relevant, but its all good), it became clear that, rather than thinking about blogging as this radical new form that throws journalism into disarray, that it was useful to think about two longer-term trends (maybe others are relevant here as well): the intersection of news and entertainment under increased pressures on news organizations to turn a profit, and the increasing public skepticism around the ability of mass media journalism to take an independent and forceful position in relation to government.

Journalism once enjoyed high regard in the public eye in the days of Watergate, it has squandered that in the days of a de-fanged Reagan press corps, the embrace of infotainment formats like newsmagazines, a series of scandals about falsified news reports, and cost-cutting in the newsroom while demanding higher profits. As David Simon, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “The Wire,” put it in a recent Salon interview, the Internet isn’t exactly what is killing newspapers:

“Making an 18 percent profit and thinking that there was nothing else on the horizon and you were the only game in town … You can’t tell me that they were saving the money for a rainy day. Nobody knew that the Internet was going to be what it was. Nobody at my paper did, anyway. And now it is what it is, and there is no money, and they didn’t spend the window that they had building something that was so essential and so vibrant and so necessary to understanding the world well that you couldn’t do without it.”

And, in competition with more and more outlets for news, especially with the rise of cable, news providers needed to distinguish themselves, one of the ways they did so was to emphasize punditry, political stripe as brand, a la Fox News. The rise of talk radio in the 1980s and television news punditry in the 1990s, combined with the emergence of “citizen journalism” and “peace journalism” all highlight a call for more user involvement to break the chokehold that professional journalists had on the agenda and presentation of wordly events.

To see newsblogging in this context suggests that, rather than blogging emerging from what the Internet offers technically, it is the expression of some long-brewing frustrations with traditional mass media journalism, and does so by, not surprisingly, extending those shifts that were already bubbling up: subjective voice, the blurring of news and commentary, user involvement.

If we want to extend our historical lens even further, this in fact situates blogging as just the latest step of a very long back-and-forth in American journalism, about whether the provision of public information should be political or commercial or independent, amateur or professional, local or institutional. I’m cribbing here from the masterful work of Michael Schudson on the history of American journalism and political participation.

So the question I’m left with is, how to best incorporate this perspective in the classroom? How do you know enough history, and teach enough history, to really put these changes and tensions into sufficient context? There’s a part of me that’s tempted to teach classes not in the Communication framework, but like American Studies classes: that to understand the Internet you need to understand Western society, culture, and politics of the last century — maybe longer, and maybe beyond the Western context even. My courses have always had a historical dimension, but only in the sense that phenomena we were examining were always understood as historically situated. But if your class is full of kids who were born in the 1990s, how do you give them a rich enough sense of the historical context itself, for them to get that the contemporary phenomena they know emerged from it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would your ideal presidential candidate be?

I don’t claim that this is original, and I bet I could guess who’s already said something like this, if I had an afternoon to go look at their books/blogs/articles. This is just a thought, walking out of my class today, a way I found I could make sense of something worth making sense of.

The topic this week was whether the classic concerns about media concentration around broadcasting and publishing, i.e. the worry that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies, applies and raises the same implications in new media industries, such as the search business. The point I think I closed with today, though it’s only coming clear in my head now, is that the concerns we had for traditional media emerged from the “economic imperative of mass appeal”: If your business model depends on helping an advertiser get the same message in front of as many eyes as possible, and the economics are such that it costs a whole lot to make the movie or show that’s going to draw them in but cheap to get that show to a huge audience, then the tendency is to try for a mass audience, make one thing as appealing to as many as possible, and be sure its something tht advertiser won’t shy away from. And from that, the risks and abuses that can come from media concentration are of a certain kind: shying away from volatile topics, homogenizing the content, chasing past successes, failing to report on news that might damage your own business or that of your advertisers. (This is not to say that this always or even endemically happens, but that it can, and does.)

On the other hand, in the search industry, the business model is to attempt to give each user what they’re looking for, not give them all the same thing. And advertisers pay to associate themselves to specific terms and pages, not to be everywhere for everyone. So the business logic, and with it the risks that emerge from economic concentration, come not from mass appeal but from the “economic imperative of comprehensiveness”. The best search engine will be the one that catalogs the most of the web, or the most of the web that’s relevant to the most people, and serves that index up in a way that satisfies users requests, or seems to. The goal is to give every user to the right advertiser, every advertiser to the right user. And it benefits the search company to find ways to bring users to them and to keep them there, not just by doing search well, but by building themselves into other services so users are channeled back to them. (Google does this by building its search into a browser toolbar, into other websites, by building the search into GMail and YouTube and Picasa and Google Maps and Google Books and iPhones and so on…) This is the “googlization of everything” that Siva Vaidhyanathan has been writing about.

And, thus, all the kinds of risks and abuses that have emerged around Google’s dominance in the search industry and around concentrated corporate ownership in the new media realm all stem from this economic imperative of comprehensiveness. It is not about content control or political timidity, as it can be with traditional media. Instead, its Google choosing to scan books first and letting copyright owners opt-out (rather than asking them all for permission first, which would have been legally safer) — the value of that library will depend in large part on being able to say that its “everything,” or close to it. Its the temptation to mine GMail messages and search queries and Deja News posts as consumer data to better fit ads to users and search terms, because Google needs to know as much as it can about every user and every kind of interest, no matter how obscure. Its the Google Maps “street view,” where privacy concerns come second to the impulse to document every inch of every street corner.

This framework, I’m sure, was inspired by Elizabeth van Couvering’s dissertation work on search engines, part of which was assigned reading for my class today.

I just wanted to share with everyone the syllabus for my new course, 320: New Media and Society, which is offered in Communication and cross-listed in Information Science. I’m pretty proud of it, and hope it will be of some interest to those who might be reading this blog. Here’s the blurb:

We are all immersed in a complex and pervasive media culture, which makes it particularly difficult for us to recognize the complex relationship between media and society: how what we see, hear and read is in some ways the product of our society and its particular political, economic, and cultural shape, and how it also shapes our understanding of ourselves, our community, and our world. And at the moment, our media culture is undergoing a series of transformations - as new forms of entertainment, new venues for political debate, and new models of journalism emerge online, and as the established producers of media struggle to adapt to the challenge.

This course will interrogate how the cultural landscape has changed in relation to media and information technologies, how broadcast media and traditional publishing are converging with networked computing, and what implications these changes may have for society, politics, and culture. It will focus on cases drawn from new, information-based media - online news, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, mashups, social networking applications, TiVo, video gaming, etc - but will examine them so as to understand the underlying relationship between media and society.

 http://www.tarletongillespie.org/syllabi/320.S08.html

I love when the world takes care of my teaching responsibilities. Next week, in my new course on “new media and society” (I’ll share the syllabus here soon, I’ve been slow getting it into web form), we’re supposed to talk about ownership, concentration, and convergence: do the scholarly concerns about traditional media ownership, that concentration in the content and information industries poses a problem for the character of public discourse, apply in the new media environment? Does it matter that Google owns so many features of the new media landscape, in the way that it seems that Time Warner or Disney/ABC or News Corp does? Well, in the timeliest fashion, Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid of $44.6 billion dollars to purchase Yahoo. This doesn’t answer the question we’re tackling in class, but it certainly gives us new food for thought.

Radiohead has been pretty tight lipped about how much fans volunteered to pay for their latest album In Rainbows when it was made available online for whatever price you chose. But according to this all-things-Radiohead blog, Thom Yorke told BBC radio 2 host Jonathan Ross on his show that the average was 4 UK pounds. At the moment, that’s $7.93 US dollars. According to my calculations, that’s a very generous sign of support for this exercise, albeit one with a very specific band with a very specific fanbase.

This is an amazing document, that I’ve only just begun to really explore, but I already highly recommend. In an age in which our president is unable / unwilling to admit his mistakes, when “flip-flopping” is a political liability rather that a sign of intellectual growth, it is refreshing to see scientists and scholars humbly and generously responding to the question: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?” posed by Edge.

In particular, and not surprisingly based on my scholarly training, I’d recommend Colin Tudge’s comments questioning “The omniscience and omnipotence of science” and Irene Pepperberg on “The fallacy of hypothesis testing“. I apparently haven’t changed my mind on that.
And then, related to interest in new media and society, you might look at Kevin Kelly’s (perhaps not surprising) “Much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia“, Xeni Jardin’s “Online communities rot without daily tending by human hands“, Sherry Turkle’s intriguing “What I’ve changed my mind about“, Esther Dyson insights on on “Online privacy“, and Douglas Rushkoff’s recomsideration of “The Internet“.
And, as a nice epilogue, A. Garrett Lisi on “I Used to Think I Could Change My Mind“.

I don’t know if I condone this or not……

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