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Daithí Mac Síthigh: The Right to Communicate

The Right to Communicate

essay by Daithí Mac Síthigh, a response to Freedom of Listening by Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde’s thoughtful essay on network neutrality and the trials of 18th-century preachers-without-pulpits is a timely reminder that the issue of net neutrality is not one that should be the sole business of a small group of Internet activists and lobbyists. It’s about time to acknowledge that, while increasingly vehement disagreements between economists on how to stimulate the development of broadband in the US are undoubtedly fun to watch, a broader conversation on the cultural and political impact of new technologies is slowly emerging from the confusion that is net neutrality.

There is something poignant about Benjamin Franklin’s idea that the privately-funded lecture hall would “accommodate … the Inhabitants in general”. It is a simple and elegant notion of public service that can exist in any organisational or regulatory context; an ethos that accommodates the contradictory and puzzling whims of the community is, after all, the ultimate in corporate social responsibility. Yet there is also a strong similarity between the decisions of the debate-favouring friends of Franklin and the millions of hours spent by developers, programmers, moderators, designers, bloggers and more in building a vibrant, chaotic and global Internet. It is unsurprising, therefore, that there has been significant popular participation on the “pro-neutrality” side, and arguably less so on the opposite side.

Those opposed to legislation on net neutrality often argue that the law should not get involved in a matter like this. They forget, though, that the pride and joy of much of the US Internet industry, the broad immunity from suit granted by the Communications Decency Act, is of course a privilege granted by law, not something that came down from the sky above. Indeed, the expansive interpretations of the key section (47 USC 230c) by successive courts serve as a reminder that without a law tailored to the needs of service providers, we would have a very difficult environment for online speech. It may be sensible, then, for lawmakers elected by the people to say that if carriers wish to benefit from the legal protection of being treated like passive carriers (immunity), they may also have to act like passive carriers (neutrality).

On the other hand, it’s important to avoid falling into the trap of “ISPs bad / providers and platforms good”. Of course, for those who support a statutory or regulatory basis for net neutrality, the support of big players is welcome, particularly from a tactical point of view. However, if their dreams came true, and the ISPs were brought under control, the question of the control of content, expression and innovation by culturally significant (and in certain cases, essentially hegemonic) business in the areas of social networking, search and user-generated content would still be on the table. This is not to say that we should be demanding that Google be run by government - but to emphasise that net neutrality is part of a spectrum of issues relating to media, speech and freedom. Indeed, “divided sovereignty” itself, as cited with approval by Hyde, is surely threatened when users must play by the rules of the platform if they wish to interact with their “friends” who have all joined it. Jerome Barron shook the world of First Amendment scholarship in the 1960s by arguing for the right of “access to the media” and the reading of those famous words as a positive right. If the net neutrality debaters return this issue to the centre of the political debate, they will have done us all some service, whatever our creed or views may be.

As Jon Garfunkel points out in the comments to Hyde’s essay, though, our friend Franklin didn’t turn to the legal system. Instead, he took decisive action, bringing others on board and circumvented the status quo. The point I would make, however, is that the question should be not just a matter of where and how steps should be taken - Franklin was not averse to the role of Government acting pro bono publico where appropriate - and more a matter of why. From a non-US perspective, then, we need our own Franklins, to make sense of it all. I would suggest that one aspect, particularly valued in the European Union (and indeed elsewhere), is the idea of public service broadcasting (PSB) - an interesting but marginalised aspect of the US media environment, but a source of national pride in the case of some broadcasters like the BBC in the UK. The role of PSB in providing a cultural space for diverse political, artistic and social expression is a hugely important part of European media history. It is not just about the legal provisions that founded and developed the BBC, though, but the voices and ideas that came over its airwaves, and the impact they had on the community. Similarly, the quiet and determined work of the states that developed the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity shows that the idea that new media has a positive role to play in sustaining and amplifying the range of perspectives and languages, however commercially unfeasible or politically controversial, is getting the recognition it deserves at the level of international law and policy. The challenge facing defenders of PSB and cultural diversity is to build common ground with those who have joined the debate on net neutrality, and to ensure that - through legal or non-legal means, as appropriate - the ideas and vision common to Greek democracy and tumultuous Philadelphia remain a part of the future of the Internet.

Daithí Mac Síthigh blogs at http://www.lexferenda.com and is completing a PhD on comparative new media law at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. A participant in the 2007 Summer Doctoral Programme at the Berkman Center, he worked in community and alternative media while studying law in Dublin and Toronto. From August 2008, he is a lecturer in law at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Posted 09 June 2008 § Daithí Mac Síthigh ‡ Comments (0)

Jean-Claude Guedon: A Take on Peter Suber’s “The Opening of Science and Scholarship”

A Take on Peter Suber’s “The Opening of Science and Scholarship

essay by Jean-Claude Guedon, a response to The Opening of Science and Scholarship by Peter Suber

There is much to be liked in Peter Suber’s piece, but one of the most important facets of his argument certainly lies in his beginning: “Who controls access..?” Indeed, the issue of control is closely related to access. Placing it center stage as Suber does reminds us that power is at stake in the quest for Open Access. Discussing the issue of power is not always appropriate in polite company, but in the case of Open Access, it cannot be avoided.

Open Access is not a completely novel process coming out of nowhere; on the contrary, it stands at the end of a long string of transformations in human communication that stem back to the beginnings of writing. Writing is a form of coding. It can be used to hide or to expose. It depends on one’s mastery of the needed arts. Scribes, therefore, wield power.
With writing came control over access to the capacity to write, and over meaning (through reading and commenting). Eric Havelock has argued that if Plato advocates the overthrow of the poet (or bard) by the philosopher, it is because he stands on the side of scribes (unlike Socrates) and wants to locate political power in writing. Preserving the collective memory and local traditions became the province of writers. It also affected the power structure of society. In other words, a political revolution was afoot.
Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams have documented a similar phenomenon in relationship with Origen’s Hexapla. Origen made a massive use of codices to compare and critique texts, and to select a canon that could stand further rebuttals. In imitation of Peter, Origen wanted to build the Church on his Hexapla. What emerged was the Christian Canon. But he also repositioned the reader with respect to texts and thus achieved a somewhat paradoxical result: to generate orthodoxy, he developed critical tools which he probably treated as mere scaffoldings needed for his grand edifice. However, the scaffoldings somehow survived in the form of critical thinking.
Print also opened opportunities for revolutionary shifts. The Thirty-Years War and the development of the “public sphere”, to use Habermas’ terminology, bring support to this claim. In establishing a new alternative to approach reality and truth, the scientific revolution also sowed revolutionary seeds that were quickly disseminated by newly invented print objects, such as scientific journals .

We can now jump to the end of Peter Suber’s first sentence : “…in the age of the internet”: it is indeed the presence of the internet that opened up new revolutionary possibilities for scientific publishing. But let us remember that a revolution corresponds to a shift in power.

Scientists and scholars quickly sought to take advantage of the internet around 1990. They generally wanted to communicate better and faster. As a result, they also began to converge on Open Access solutions.

In listing the advantages of Open Access, Peter Suber brings out characteristics that correspond to the non-contentious meaning of “revolutionary” (and he does not use the word). However, the publishers’ resistance to Open Access is not easily understood from this non-confrontational perspective. Only the quest for power can account for their fierce reactions and their intense lobbying efforts, both in Washington and Brussels.

In his Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig brings out the concept of “architecture of control”. In the print world, the architecture of control rests on the difficulty of copying while laws continue to prohibit copying and costs are covered by turning documents onto commodities. The copying machine began to weaken this structure, but the rise of the internet removed almost all obstacles to copying, including time and cost. To preserve their role (and revenues), publishers felt that the architecture of control inherent in the print world had to be adapted to the digital world. Key elements of the new architecture of control include centralized servers protected by passwords and licensing schemes rather than outright sales. Moreover, publishers want their copy of the scientific or scholarly article to be the reference copy, the only copy that can be cited.

Why do authors submit manuscripts to publishers although they restrict their dissemination so much? Simply because the architecture of control also includes the branding capacity of journals. Based on the average number of citations per article over a two-year period, a quantified index called the “impact factor” has been developed. It purports to measure the visibility of journals as seen through citation behavior. In turn, visibility is related to quality. Finally, the alleged quality of the journal is equally distributed over all of its authors. In this questionable and indirect chain of reasoning, journals claim the capacity to brand authors. Administrators of universities and their proxy bodies, for example tenure and promotion committees, have bought into this reasoning, largely because it facilitates the evaluation work and decreases the possibilities of divisive arguments. So have juries working for a research granting agency. The net result is that authors have no choice but to submit to this curious game.

Open Access does not frontally attack the situation just described. Some of its supporters are even careful to chart a path around it. However, Open Access is not an end in itself; it is merely a symptom of deeper processes linked to the growing role of digitization in our civilization. It is digitization that brings about opportunities for profound shifts in power. Open Access simply defines a battle front that refers to the challenges being thrown at the architectures of control supported by publishers. Like a litmus test, the quest for Open Access reveals an architecture of control on the wane.

To conclude, the deeper phenomenon behind Open Access has to do with the internet itself. The networked, distributed structure of the TCP/IP protocols harbors an architecture of control of its own which challenges other modes of control. These challenges emerge in various fields, for example free software and the distributed production of knowledge as in Wikipedia. It also reveals itself in the ways in which scientists and scholars want to work and recover full control over the mores of their tribe.

In short, Open Access is a wonderful observation platform to study how an old architecture of control unravels and a new one emerges. For this reason, it is important not only in itself, but also as a way to question the unfolding of the digital age and to meditate on its future.

Jean-Claude GUÉDON received his PhD in History of Science. He is presently Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal. He served as Programme Co-Chair for Inet’96 98 and 2000, and was a member of the Programme Committee for Inet ‘97. Advisor to the Minister of Culture and Communication of Québec for the francophone meeting of the ministers in charge of infohighways (Montreal, May 1997), he was also Program Committee Chair for the AUPELF-UREF meeting on “Education and Internet” that took place in Hanoi in October 1997. Since then he has served on the Sub-Board of the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (2002-6) and on the board of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) from 2003 until 2007. Presently, he is vice-president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Posted 05 June 2008 § Jean-Claude Guedon § Access § Peter Suber ‡ Comments (0)

Melissa Hagemann: Open Scholarship

Open Scholarship

essay by Melissa Hagemann, a response to The Opening of Science and Scholarship by Peter Suber.

Who controls access to educational materials in the age of the internet? Today many students are priced out of an education, not because of the cost of tuition, but because of the price of textbooks.

Lessons from the open access movement, which Peter Suber has played a pivotal role in developing, are now being applied to open education. Building upon the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first defined open access in 2002, educators, internet pioneers, and foundations launched the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in January 2008. The declaration calls for publicly funded educational materials to be made freely available over the internet, the use of open content licenses, and the collaborative production of materials. In addition, over 1,000 professors in the U.S. recently signed a statement supporting the use of free, online open source textbooks.

Open educational resources (OER) are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. OER have the potential to improve the quality and reduce the costs of educational materials.

The promise of open education and collaborative production is exemplified by the Connexions project developed by Rice University. The Connexions’ content commons contains educational materials produced by the community and organized into small modules that are easily connected into larger courses and textbooks. To provide quality control, the project employs lenses which are being developed by universities, professors, and professional societies to tag content they deem to be high quality. Connexions has partnered with on-demand press Qoop to deliver hard copy textbooks, developed using material from the Connexions content commons, that can be purchased for as little as $15. For-profit open textbook projects, such as Flat World, are also in development. Flat World Knowledge will offer free online textbooks, while selling supplemental materials and hard copies to generate revenue.

Encouraged by the success of open access mandates to research literature such as the recent U.S. National Institutes of Health mandate, OER advocates are forming grassroots open education advocacy groups. In Poland the Association of Polish Librarians, Polish Wikipedia Association, Creative Commons Polska, and Modern Poland Foundation have formed an OER working group which has already received the support of the Deputy Prime Minister. They will organize a meeting on open education policy in the Polish Parliament in August. Globally, the movement advocates for taxpayer-funded educational resources to be OER and for preference to be given to OER in textbook accreditation and adoption processes. Open education policies will stipulate that if an author takes public funding and uses it to produce educational materials, then the materials will be made freely available online. Authors, such as those receiving substantial royalties, would be free to opt out by not accepting public funding.

Similar to open access, open education has the potential to play a leading role in the democratization of the internet. No longer will access be controlled by publishers. As Peter Suber rightly notes in “The Opening of Science and Scholarship”, “In the age of print, publishers could control access to research they did not conduct, write up, sponsor, fund, or purchase. One reason is that publishers controlled the most effective channel of distribution; but that has changed.”

While replicating the success of the open access movement will not be easy, OER advocates are working with the open access community and learning from their success. Together open access and the blossoming open education movement have the potential to create a truly global learning and knowledge commons which can lay the foundation for open scholarship.

Melissa Hagemann manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute/ Soros Foundations. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 that led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OSI has been active within the Open Access movement, which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature.

Posted 04 June 2008 § Melissa Hagemann § Access § Peter Suber ‡ Comments (0)

John Willinsky: Might the Age of Information Graduate into an Era of Public Knowledge?

essay by John Willinsky, a response to The Opening of Science and Scholarship, by Peter Suber

Some forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan spoke in his now predictably prescient manner of an “age of instant information,” while others at the time held high-speed computing responsible for an “information revolution.” And while it is tempting to say that they hadn’t imagined the half of it, I think there is an optimistic distinction to be made in what has taken place over the last four decades. In those days, it was indeed information that was computed. Today, with the advent of networked information systems facilitating global collaboration, a good deal of knowledge is being hammered out and openly shared online today. It is tempting, at this early stage, to imagine that the openness of this knowledge is contributing to the educational and democratic quality of our lives and, in this optimistic and perhaps naive vein, to look for ways of supporting its development.

Now, of course, the better part of Internet traffic is taken up with financial and commercial information, augmented by a good deal of shopping and other, less savory, activities. But what distinguishes today’s information flow in a more promising way is how people are coming online to discover, read, review, revise, instruct, and comment. It is like a massive second wave of the public library movement that swept large and small communities more than a century ago, only this time with annotation, commentary and marginal notes invited. Pundits may decry the ineptness to be found in much of it, but I come at this as an educator. Teachers work hard to foster just such engagement, interpretation, and judgment because it speaks to an educated sensibility and concern. It speaks to a democratic exuberance that will take some getting used to, much as did the idea of teaching every child to read and write, as a human right.

Thus, I am fascinated by the 5,000th review added at Amazon of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the five years of editing that has gone into Wikipedia’s entry on the Japanese American Internment. I am encouraged by the federal government efforts to support knowledge’s newfound public sphere by providing freely accessible indexes to the latest research in medicine (PubMed) and education (ERIC) by requiring National Institute of Health sponsored researchers to archive a copy of all related publications online, and by having the Energy Department share climate change data, as well as by citizen’s responding with 1,800 blog entries, up to this point, discussing this data, according to the blog index Tenchnorati.

If scholars remain concerned about quality and value of the ideas shared online, then they should indeed be heartened by the open access movement that Peter Suber describes in “The Opening of Science and Scholarship”. While this opening is principally a boon for the circulation of knowledge among academics, especially those at less-well-endowed institutions, they should see it as an opportunity to both move a greater part of their work into this new public marketplace of ideas, raising its overall quality in the process. After all, the sharing and reviewing of knowledge is the scholar’s very business, even if the prospect of doing it on so vast a public scale is at first a little intimidating.

As to what we can expect with this opening of science and scholarship, studies that I and others have conducted suggest that readers of Wikipedia will look at more of the scholarship related to the entries that they are consulting, teachers will bring fresh ideas to the high school classes, health professionals will consult more of the research concerning conditions that stymie them, and policymakers will assemble a greater new depth of background materials on the current issues they are addressing.

What, then, of the scholarly publishers’ fears that this open access approach to scholarship threatens the viability of the peer-review journal? Well, it needs to be said that both authors and researchers do not ask publishers to be paid for their work, as part of their commitment to openness (and review). We understand, as well, how incredibly dear research is at every point, from the years of training it takes to participate in this enterprise, through the public or tax-exempt support of the institutions in which it takes place, to the copy-editing and proof-reading of the article prior to publication.

In fact, when it comes to the publishing stage, it appears that there is more than enough money on the table to make all that is published freely and universally available. I say more than enough, because studies by Ted Bergstrom show that in economics the scholarly societies are publishing the highest quality journals for a fifth of the cost (on a per-page basis) of the corporate publishers who currently hold a majority of the titles in this field. Add to that the 60 or so economic journals that make their contents open access, and it would indeed seem possible for librarians, societies, and publishers to sit down together and hammer out a fair price for publishing this literature in a form that would be universally available. As hopelessly naïve as that may sound, the high-energy physics community of researchers is well on its way at arriving at just such an agreement.

Whether we stand before an age of public knowledge or not, I would have to be a McLuhan to pronounce with any confidence. I do know what I would prefer, and I know what is possible. Such an age can only happen if we increasingly imagine and act on this newly extended right to know, that is, the right to know what is known as a result of public support and in the name of a greater public good. If we take this as the way things should be, and work smartly and hard on making it happen, then chances are very good that what universities have long done with knowledge will transform the public sphere for the educational and democratic benefit of all.

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006), and directs the Public Knowledge Project, which is the developer of Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems that offer open source approaches for improving the scholarly and public quality of academic research.

Posted 04 June 2008 § John Willinsky § Access § Peter Suber ‡ Comments (0)

Peter Suber: The Opening of Science and Scholarship

The Opening of Science and Scholarship

essay by Peter Suber, response by Melissa Hagemann.

Who controls access to peer-reviewed research in the age of the internet? How are the relevant norms and interests evolving?

Some key variables are unchanged from the age of print. Scholarly journals usually don’t pay their authors, referees, or editors. Journals still typically ask for full transfer of copyright and authors still typically give it. Researchers want to publish in high-prestige journals and their universities reward them for doing so. Journal subscription prices continue to rise faster than inflation.

But the internet has forced changes to other key variables. Most journals now have online editions, with access limited to paying customers, and there is a clear trend among them to drop the print editions. As the first-sale doctrine becomes increasingly irrelevant for digital content, it becomes increasingly irrelevant for cutting-edge research. Libraries no longer own, but merely license, the digital editions of the journals to which they subscribe, and the licenses often limit digital interlibrary loan and fair use. Above all, it is now possible to make perfect copies of a digital file and distribute them to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost.

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. OA is now possible: physically, legally, and economically.

There are two large ways to provide OA to peer-reviewed literature. First, the peer-reviewed journals themselves could adopt a new business model allowing them to stop charging for access to their articles, much as broadcast TV networks don’t charge for access to their broadcasts. Today there are more than 3,400 peer-reviewed OA journals, about 12% of the worldwide total of peer-reviewed journals. Second, non-OA journals could allow their authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository, for example, hosted by a university. Today about two-thirds of non-OA journals grant this permission in advance and many others are willing to do so on request.

Authors benefit from OA at least as much as readers. Studies in more than a dozen disciplines show that OA articles are cited 50-250% more often than non-OA articles published in the same issues of the same journals. However, most authors are unaware of these studies and generally unaware of the benefits of OA.

While OA is demonstrably superior for impact, conventional publication is superior for prestige, at least during the current transition period. But there needn’t be a trade-off. We can combine OA and prestige in the same ways in which we combine OA and peer review: a growing number of high-prestige peer-reviewed journals are already OA, and most of the rest already allow their authors to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository. However, most scholars are unaware that there needn’t be a trade-off. Most scholars are not familiar with the options for providing OA to their own work.

The legal basis for OA to copyrighted literature is the consent of the copyright holder. OA journals usually allow authors to retain copyright, while non-OA journals usually ask authors to transfer copyright. Increasingly, scholars, universities, and funding agencies resist routine copyright transfers and try to hold on to the rights needed to authorize OA. But they are still the minority. Most authors are unaware that publishers don’t need full copyright, unaware that giving publishers full copyright also gives them the OA decision, unaware that many publishers are willing to modify their standard contract on request, unaware that there’s no harm in asking, and unwilling to take any step that might jeopardize their chance at a new publication.

Authors control the rate of OA growth, for three reasons. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals, they decide whether to deposit their work in OA repositories, and they decide whether to transfer rights to a publisher.

Two large trends are determining the future of access to research. First, scholarly authors are gradually coming to understand the benefits and opportunities of OA. Second, a titanic struggle is taking place among institutions in a position to influence author decisions: universities, funding agencies, and publishers.

More and more universities directly encourage authors to deposit their peer-reviewed journal articles in the university’s OA repository. Today, more than 30 universities encourage this kind of OA, and more than a dozen positively require it (including Harvard, as of February 2008). Nevertheless, university promotion and tenure criteria tend to create incentives for faculty to publish in well-established journals, most of which are non-OA, and to sign any contract that publishers put in front of them.

More and more funding agencies directly encourage grantees to deposit articles arising from funded research in OA repositories. Today, more than 30 funding agencies encourage this kind of OA, and public funding agencies in 10 countries positively require it (including the US National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest, as of January 2008). Nevertheless, when awarding grants in the first place they tend to use the same conservative criteria as university promotion and tenure committees.

The only opponents of OA are publishers, and publishers are not monolithic. Some publishers already provide OA, some are experimenting with it, and some are carefully watching the experiments of others. Some have converted, some are opposed, and some are merely unpersuaded. Most non-OA publishers fear that OA will undermine subscriptions. Some are actively investigating non-subscription business models compatible with OA, and some are actively lobbying to thwart OA. The publishing lobby to delay or dilute government OA policies is well-funded and aggressive.

In the age of print, publishers could control access to research they did not conduct, write up, sponsor, fund, or purchase. One reason is that publishers controlled the most effective channel of distribution; but that has changed. Another reason is that the other stakeholders had not aroused themselves to pursue their own interests; but that is changing.

Universities and funding agencies are upstream from publishers. When they want to guarantee OA for their research output, and require their faculty or grantees to retain the rights needed to authorize OA (even if they transfer all other rights to a publisher), they can do so and publishers must accommodate them.

The short-term outlook is turbulent. But long-term, there are good reasons to think that OA will become the default for new peer-reviewed research literature. Support for OA is growing among scholars, universities, libraries, learned societies, funding agencies, and governments. Even non-OA publishers are increasingly willing to experiment with it. We can implement OA today, without reforming or violating copyright law. OA publishing costs less than conventional publishing and even these costs don’t require new money; long-term, they can be covered by redirecting money now spent on non-OA journals. The economics of prestige temporarily favors older journals, and therefore non-OA journals, but high-quality OA journals are inexorably acquiring prestige to match their quality, and new OA journals launch every week. While non-OA publishers can still influence author decisions, they are powerless to stop the rise of lawful OA from those who are determined to seize rather than spurn the opportunities created by the internet.

Peter Suber is an independent policy strategist for open access to research. Most of his work consists of research, writing, consulting, and advocacy. He is a Senior Researcher at SPARC, Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project of Yale Law School, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge and author of the Open Access News blog and SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Posted 04 June 2008 § Melissa Hagemann § Access § Peter Suber ‡ Comments (2)

Daisy Pignetti: Computers and Writing: Lessons in Literacy from the New Orleans Blogosphere and the Composition Classroom

an essay by Daisy Pignetti, a response to Principles of New Media Literacy, by Dan Gillmor

Daisy Pignetti: Computers and Writing: Lessons in Literacy from the New Orleans Blogosphere and the Composition Classroom

In 2006 I wrote a piece about the burgeoning New Orleans blogosphere for the launch of Placeblogger.com. The crux of that essay, and of the site itself, was to call attention to the value of local voices when representing the lived experience of a particular place. I argued that after witnessing the breakdown of communications on local, state, and federal government levels, not to mention the loss of composure on the part of the news anchors and talking heads, there was no better way to raise awareness of the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans than through alternative media genres. Now approaching the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the list of NOLA bloggers has grown to over 300, representing a myriad of neighborhoods and highlighting the voices of those who refuse to move elsewhere, thereby reaffirming these locals’ passion for their beloved Big Easy.

Dan Gillmor defines the principles of a new media literacy for journalists as skepticism, judgment, understanding, and reporting. NOLA bloggers embody these principles, quite transparently, with many of their entries, photos, and videos repeating the sentiment of being neglected, misunderstood, and misrepresented. They use their blogs to share their painful memories and their daily triumphs. Building on the trust quotient their virtual community has established, they use listservs and wikis to organize face-to-face efforts and to reach out and teach others how to access information.

The statistics collected by the Pew Internet and American Life Project document that since the tragedies of September 11th the number of networked citizens has increased, and those with access now have greater means to push the boundaries during a breaking story. As we create an infinite archive from which worldwide audiences can learn about crisis communications, we may eventually be able to prevent loss instead of only documenting it. For instance, I wonder how the Katrina response might have differed now that a number of New Orleanians are using services such as Twitter and Brightkite to broadcast their actions and locations. The established channels (Red Cross, FEMA, and news agencies) would obviously have to be aware of and monitor these sites when a disaster arises; otherwise, these utterances would continue to go unheard by the powers that be that control the necessary resources. The scenario is an intriguing one to consider.

I do think that every medium has its limits; e.g., documentary films and mass media coverage of national and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina can only expose so much because they often interview small populations of survivors, clip their responses into sound bites, and/or edit out the long pauses that come when victims try to speak of the trauma and loss they suffered. Blogs and other Web 2.0 hosting sites allow users to document both immediate and extended chronicles, but the same affordances that make these technologies valuable can also transform them into echo chambers. For example, NOLA bloggers are quick to reveal their biases when “writing the wrong” in the comments section of an uniformed outsider’s post on whether or not the city should receive federal assistance; however, their own individual blogs do not always reach an audience beyond the already interested and informed Gulf Coast.

Thanks to the aggregator at Placeblogger.com, I realize that New Orleans is not unique in being a city that uses technologies to define itself; however, I believe that these NOLA bloggers speak more freely and with greater urgency. Although they may not receive the national exposure they deserve, their writing exposes a range of opinions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Much of the importance of these permanently archived postings is that they can be read by those who actively search the Internet in order to better understand the rebuilding efforts. Indeed, these postings provide a deeper, truer reading of what is going on in New Orleans than what the nation is reminded of only every few months by celebrity remarks and anniversary specials.

As Dan Gillmor asserts, being skeptical and transparent are vital qualities of new media producers and consumers; however, I must contend with his point that we are starting from a deficit and that teachers who advance critical thinking are risking their jobs. As a member of the vibrant computers and composition community, I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the empirical research published on the topic of digital literacy, primarily in online journals such as Computers and Composition Online and Kairos.

Granted, those of us in higher education often face opposition from tenure and promotion boards when we integrate digital technologies into our scholarship, but more and more universities are assuming that their students enter the classroom technologically literate and willing to write in public spaces. As a result, writing programs across the nation are asking their first-year and upper-level undergraduates to analyze the content and design of webtexts and to reflect on how their ability to use computers to improve their learning has evolved. Microblogging tools and social networks allow those new to teaching with technology to learn—alongside their students—valuable lessons in hypertext linking, concise word choice, and active reading as well as the positive and negative consequences of public writing and collaboration. In addition, some faculty members utilize the many open source downloads available online and the applications that digital cameras and mobile devices come with in order to create with their students a wide range of multi-modal compositions.

As a teacher, blogger, and Internet researcher, my career is focused on engaging students and remaining relevant. By enacting these principles of a new media literacy—as the New Orleans bloggers continue to do—we have the ability to enhance our understanding of what it means to be part of a democratized media. As members of an open network, I encourage us all to enter into dialogues and take risks, for it is only by doing so that can cultivate the “trust meters” Gillmor describes.


Daisy Pignetti’s research consists of qualitative inquires into why people write online, particularly in the aftermath of disaster, and what psychological benefits “documenting the daily” through new media genres may have for both the producer and consumer. She shared interview data from her dissertation project on the post-Katrina blogosphere with the Berkman Center last year as part of the 2007 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme.
This fall she will receive her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of South Florida and begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Posted 04 June 2008 § Daisy Pignetti § Foundations for Participation § Dan Gillmor ‡ Comments (2)

Lewis Hyde: Freedom of Listening: An Eighteenth Century Root for Net Neutrality

Freedom of Listening: An Eighteenth Century Root for Net Neutrality

essay by Lewis Hyde

In 1739 the Methodist minister George Whitefield arrived in Philadelphia to preach evangelical Protestantism. At first the local clergy shared their pulpits with the visitor, but soon they turned against him and forced him to deliver his message in the streets and fields. Benjamin Franklin, though he did not usually agree with Whitefield, objected to the way that the established churches denied him a roof and thus he and a group of friends raised a fund to build a large lecture hall —

expressly for the Use of any Preacher of any religious Persuasion who might desire to say something to the People of Philadelphia, the Design in building not being to accommodate any particular Sect, but the Inhabitants in general, so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a Missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a Pulpit at his Service.

This hall later became the initial building of the Philadelphia Academy and that Academy eventually became the University of Pennsylvania.

At its inception, this space would seem to have belonged to religious expression, but oddly so for all are invited (else it would have been a church); more properly it might be said to have belonged to religious difference or–when it eventually became part of a university–to difference in general as it arises in and among the branches of knowledge.

When the rival ministers of Philadelphia denied Whitefield their pulpits they suppressed a contending voice, one that called their sense of the truth into question. Arguably they were right to do so; not every human congregation is obliged to admit other values, especially those flatly in disagreement with its own. I see no reason to fault the ministers whose antagonism to Whitefield led them to draw the line.

At the same time, those who created a space where real difference could be spoken and explored made a useful contribution, and a distinction is in order, then, between the antagonism that closes the door, silencing opponents, and this other thing that welcomes conflict, entertains it, enjoys it even. One line of political thought now calls this latter category not “antagonism” but “agonism,” an agon in ancient Greek drama being a verbal contest between two characters on stage, both of whom appeal to the audience, neither having any clear claim to the truth.

More broadly, Greek democracy would seem to have borrowed from drama in this case, for democracy flourishes whenever antagonism can be converted into agonism. Antagonism pits enemies against one another, each side trying to destroy or silence its opponent; agonism, on the other hand, is a conflict among equals and while some will be more persuasive, none are silenced, all are in play. Seen in this way, the space that Franklin and his friends built belongs not so much to religion as to democracy, where democracy is conceived as an experiment in agonistic pluralism.

Agonism or discord–a welcome plurality of voices–was built into the governing structure of that Philadelphia lecture hall. In appointing the trustees, Franklin reports, care was taken “to avoid giving a Predominancy to any Sect, so that one of each was appointed, viz. one Church of England-man, one Presbyterian, one Baptist, one Moravian, &c.” The hall was clearly meant to accommodate freedom of speech, but as long as that speech is sectarian, and where at the same time no sect can dominate, it would be better to say that it was dedicated to freedom of listening. Individual speakers present singular views, but individual listeners entertain plurality. Listeners get the synoptic view, or rather the synauditory hearing. Over time they get to hear the multiplicity of Christian sects and of the non-Christian as well. The hall was thus built to serve the eighteenth-century ideal of replacing the individual or partial self with a public or plural one, one who is a host to many voices, even those otherwise at odds with the singular self you might have thought you were when you first walked in the door.

If we take free listening to be the true end of free speech, then freedom itself takes on a different aspect. The freedom to listen we have in our collectivity, not in our individuality. It is a common freedom, not an individual one. For the Greeks, each of us belongs to two realms of life, the private home and the public square, and we each must distinguish what is private from what is common. And for the Greeks, Hannah Arendt reminds us, “a life spent in the privacy of ‘one’s own’ (idion), outside the world of the common, is ‘idiotic’ by definition….” Intelligence, on the other hand, belongs to common spaces, and is available only to those who can master the difficult art of plural listening.

The trustees of Franklin’s auditorium were, as I say, divided such that no sect by itself could set policy or approve or disapprove of speakers. Their tasks were simple: to keep the door open and to preserve audibility. In this regard, their trusteeship was a model in miniature for what later came to be called the “divided sovereignty” of American governance. In practice, divided sovereignty can almost appear to be no sovereignty at all, for with it comes no center of power, no one leader with the kind of full command we associate with monarchs and dictators. However it gets described, the point here is that such intentionally diminished power is of a piece with plural listening and the practice of democracy.

And that means–to draw a line from the Founders to the present–that in regard to the governance of the internet, service providers should be common carriers, obliged to deliver content to the public without discrimination. In general, but especially where providers enjoy local monopolies, their first task is to allow “the Inhabitants in general” to hear one another, and to hear that “Mufti of Constantinople” as well. The Founders would have understood the opposite–allowing supposedly common carriers to discriminate among speakers–to be a form of tyranny.

Lewis Hyde is a Fellow at the Berkman Center, in addition to being a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Hyde is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

Posted 30 May 2008 § Foundations for Participation § Lewis Hyde ‡ Comments (3)

Kenneth Neil Cukier: Muddling Through Internet Governance

essay by Kenneth Neil Cukier, a response to “ICANN’s Constitutional Moment” by Susan Crawford

Kenneth Neil Cukier: Muddling Through Internet Governance

The debate over Internet governance and the foundation of ICANN represented the Internet’s first “civil war” — but all sides lost.

The only thing bonding the fractious “Internet community” together in the talks that led to ICANN a decade ago this year was an interest in keeping government away. The technical community tried to retain control of their creation from commercial interests and governments which they feared would erect toll booths or checkpoints, but saw their power whittled away. Meanwhile, “users” — an ambiguous concept ranging from ordinary web surfers to major businesses that rely on the web — wanted more say, but won only symbolic crumbs. A handful of Internet entrepreneurs pushed to open the market for domain names, but only one part was liberalized (retail registration) while another was basically protected (wholesale registry services) and new top-level domains remains largely closed. Finally, governments wanted more say — and got it, though not as much as most would like.

This abridged history provides the context with which to consider Susan Crawford’s excellent essay. It raises troubling questions. ICANN fails to uphold the aims that were expected of it, she asserts; its “operation is not matching its design.” So was the model unworkable, or the way it was executed? Is private governance of a “critical” public resource such as the Internet even possible? Computer science deals in binary logic (everything is either 0 or 1); likewise Susan’s analysis admits little gray. The model was right, she says, the problem was the people who turned the institution to their own ends.

My view is more optimistic and less black and white. Has ICANN failed? Yes and no. Despite terrible errors and unnecessarily ugly actions, in large part ICANN has not failed. It has been a rough birth, but the institution lives and policies are established, albeit far more slowly and erratically than they should. Yes, ICANN hardly upholds its initial aims — but institutions are forced to change with their environment. Were the same standard applied to American democracy, the Great Experiment might have been declared a failure at the advent of Hamilton’s central bank.

So is the problem the model or the way it is executed? Both, perhaps. The model is right, but is faulty (it is inherently cumbersome, conservative and lacks sufficient oversight). At the same time, the execution has been uneven, and the low points have been quite low (ICANN imposed too much centralization too quickly, its board was passive and it occasionally short-circuited its own processes, among other things). Susan identifies three areas where ICANN was designed to act: setting consensus-based policies, creating new top-level domains and keeping governments at bay. Mapped onto three specific issues, ICANN’s operations have been found wanting: the privacy of domain name registrations, creating new internet domains, and government influence over “international” domains that use scripts other than the Roman alphabet.

A bit of history is useful to understand why ICANN failed to live up to its expectations in these ways. The model ICANN chose was based on what it replaced: the “rough consensus” of the Internet engineering community — yet formalized as befits a non-profit corporation, but not so formal as to be stultifying like an intergovernmental organization. It is true that today it is largely a fiction. The inability to enact basic privacy protections on domain registrations or create new domains underscores this. (Susan’s third plank of ICANN’s model, that the US “would act as a good steward for the rest of the world” slightly misstates the issue: at the time the US planned to devolve its role altogether.)

This flows naturally to Susan’s second question: whether critical resources can be handled by private institutions? The uncomfortable conclusion for the Internet community, but the most responsible one, may be: not completely. Again, an answer that falls outside the binary extremes of yes or no. Is it not in the nature of any “critical” resource that some degree of governmental oversight or control is essential — or at least, considered to be essential — to ensure that the public interest is protected? Why should we expect any less from the Internet?

Why indeed? To answer this question, it is necessary again to recall the situation when ICANN was born. The year 1998 was when the Internet economy took off in full force. There was a widespread feeling that governmental control over the nascent medium might choke it. Moreover, the person overseeing Internet governance in the Clinton administration was Ira Magaziner, who had been previously blasted by Congressional Republicans for trying to “socialize” America’s healthcare system; he needed to avoid seeming too governmental at all costs. And there was a view that just as the Internet posed new challenges to businesses and governments, that it therefore required new approaches in the way in which it was regulated.

Thus ICANN’s self-regulatory model was a both a victor and a victim of its times. It was specifically established to handle tasks that in an earlier era were done by intergovernmental organizations. Yet it was only a matter of time before governments would want to reassert themselves and question ICANN’s responsibilities vis-à-vis their own. In fact, ICANN was established with little input from other countries. Other than the EU, which was on board, if the US administration talked to other countries, it was to mid-level telecoms officials who favored deregulation and liberalization, to which ICANN’s creation seemed in line. The higher-level foreign diplomats either didn’t know about it, couldn’t understand it, or didn’t care — until later.

Now that the Internet is clearly a mainstream medium, governments want a bigger seat at the table. They are a class of stakeholder that the original ICANN model did too little to satisfy since they were unaware of ICANN’s importance at the time. And much of ICANN’s reforms in the past decade has been aimed at remedying this deficiency.

Why was the model created as it was; why so little global buy-in? It is important to recall that ICANN was meant as a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. And the negotiations took place under a merciless stopwatch: the agreement between the US government and Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), the domain name register for .com, .net and .org, was poised to expire and there was no institutional arrangement to take its place. So the design was rushed — and was never meant to be definitive. On top of this, the white-bearded (and silver pony-tailed) professor who formerly ran it all, Jon Postel, passed away on the eve of ICANN’s creation. So ICANN’s staff lacked the fatherly oversight that was always presumed would exist — and hence its conduct was initially poor.

The crux of the problem, Susan explains, is that the ICANN model “underestimated the tendency of people to turn institutions to their own ends.” But we can sympathize with how that happened. Here’s the hidden history: In looking for an initial board, there was a debate among insiders — basically, the technical community that ran the system and US government officials who were reforming it — over whether it should comprise people of unassailably high stature (to ward off NSI, which played dirty) or people with deep Internet knowledge (to ward off the loudly critical domain-name entrepreneurs). It was decided that NSI — rich, powerful and organized — represented more of a threat to the new entity than the Internet-community loudmouths.

Besides, if the Internet were indeed entering a phase of mainstream adoption as testified by the institutionalization of Dr. Postel’s system, then it only made sense that leaders from wider society than just the technical community serve on the board, the thinking went. So the first directors included the president of Radcliff College, an American telecoms CEO and a retired EU official — people unscarred by the domain-name wars, but also clueless as to its history (with the notable exception of its chairman, Esther Dyson who is a technology expert).

In essence, ICANN took people who knew law and politics and applied it to the Internet (with all the misfortune that created), rather than take people who knew the Internet and could carefully apply it to law and politics. They were not so much turning ICANN to their “own ends” as simply deferring to the mechanisms with which they were most familiar. The result has been two-fold: the shortcomings that Susan so aptly describes, and the evolution of a new institution that albeit imperfect, is nevertheless underway.

Ultimately, I am not sure I agree with the Susan’s premise and that of the Publius Project, that there is a singular “constitutional moment” or “moments” of cyberspace, or of Internet governance specifically. There may be many small, fleeting legal milestones — but the very multitude seems to argue against the idea of a central powershift (perhaps in the same way as the network itself is fluid and decentralized, not monolithic or prone to the primacy of singular events).

Indeed, the very concept of a constitutional moment is a strong part of the American experience of governance, but it is also unique to it. It does not always apply well in other contexts and traditions. For Internet governance, the British approach of “muddling through” might be more fitting. More than 700 years since the Magna Carta, there is still no constitution per se. Now that’s procrastination. God save the queen!

Kenneth Neil Cukier is a business writer at The Economist. He has covered Internet governance since 1996, based in Paris, London and Hong Kong. In 2002-04 he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is currently based in Tokyo for the newspaper. Some of his writings on Internet governance are online at: www.cukier.com

Posted 20 May 2008 § Kenneth Neil Cukier § Institutions § Susan Crawford ‡ Comments (0)

Susan Crawford: ICANN’s Constitutional Moment

essay by Susan Crawford, with a response by Kenn Cukier

Susan Crawford: ICANN’s Constitutional Moment

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, coordinates name and number identifiers for the Internet. In a nutshell, ICANN coordinates actors who make sure that there is only one .com in the list of top level domains (like .com, .net, .org, and .edu) to which most Internet access providers around the world refer. ICANN also makes sure that these top level domains are linked to the “right” Internet Protocol addresses of the machines that have information about second-level domains underneath them (like google.com). It’s also responsible for coordinating the allocation of IP addresses, although the Regional Internet Registries do the work. It has contracts with the registries and registrars who provide, respectively, wholesale and retail services in connection with registering domain names. (It has looser relationships with the country-code top level domains like .de and .fr.) ICANN’s source of contractual authority comes from its status as a provider of services to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

And that’s it. Names and numbers; very simple; and it used to be that just one man with a long white beard named Jon Postel did this work on his own. Now, as of mid-2008, ICANN has a US$61 million budget and more than 100 employees.

As one of very few structures on the landscape of internet governance, ICANN gets both more and less attention than it deserves. At ICANN’s founding, amidst a swirl of rumors and complicated myths (many of which were probably true), many people expressed concern about ICANN’s power to act as a chokepoint. The internet is just a logical architecture, not a network with a manager, but ICANN’s ability to condition registration or use of a domain name or number on compliance with particular content-related (or law-enforcement-related) rules provided a place for policing that seemed risky. Then, after a few years of articles about ICANN, U.S. scholarly interest in ICANN died down; indeed, writing about ICANN became a kind of career-poison. “Who cares about domain names?” became the refrain. “People use search engines to find online sources, so names don’t matter any more.” It is also extremely difficult to follow what ICANN is up to, because much of the work of ICANN happens at week-long meetings (three per year) held in always-different places around the world. Although ICANN’s web site is much better than it used to be, its complicated structure and insider’s jargon can be off-putting.

This year, 2008, is a constitutional moment for ICANN, and I suggest to you that ICANN is now getting less attention than it deserves.

ICANN is often pointed to as a model of private governance for internet resources. First, it adopts “consensus policies” that bind the private actors that provide domain name registration services, and the idea is that these policies are actually formed by consensus of relevant internet stakeholders rather than being crammed down by the Board. Second, it is supposed to open up new top level domains to encourage competition with .com, which gained an enormous advantage in the early years of domain name registrations. And third, it was designed to keep governments at bay. The idea was that the U.S. government would act as a good steward for the rest of the world, so that no government would be able to carry out its content-related desires by using the domain name system as a chokepoint. Kenn Cukier is right that the stated plan of the U.S. government at the time of ICANN’s founding ten years ago was that ICANN would eventually become a fully-private organization; as of mid-2008, it is not clear that this plan will actually be carried out in the near future.

I am personally concerned that ICANN’s actual operation is not matching its design in all three of these areas. This prompts a question: was the model unworkable, or has its execution not had adequate oversight? And a second question emerges: Is private governance of things that people think are “critical internet resources” possible?

First, on the “consensus policy” point. Right now, as a condition of registering a domain name individuals have to make public their address and other contact information. This seems like a lure for spammers and an affront to personal privacy, and there is no worldwide consensus in favor of retaining this policy. But because intellectual property interests and law enforcement authorities would like to keep this database public, and because the retention of such a public database is the status quo, it has been extremely difficult to change this policy. The idea behind the consensus policy regime was that ICANN would be a forum for the creation of those very few global rules that were necessary for stability and security of the internet, and everything else would be left to local control. Yet here we are, with a special-interest rule that imposes costs on people around the world and is seemingly impossible to change.

Second, ICANN does not have a very good track record with respect to opening new top level domains, and it is on the verge of adopting a thickly-restrictive, full-of-compromises regime for this process going forward. It is almost as if ICANN would like to perform desired censorship for anyone with an objection to a proposed string – to keep those objecting from being upset with ICANN. I find this difficult to understand; no one is forced to look at the list of top level domains to which network access providers point.

Third, ICANN can no longer be said to be keeping governments at bay. Both the U.S. government and other governments exert a great deal of power within ICANN through the Governmental Advisory Committee, a sort of mini non-treaty organization of governments that must be consulted in detail before ICANN can do much of anything. The most recent step down this path is an apparent agreement to short-circuit ICANN’s policy processes in favor of governments who would like a “fast track” for adoption of internationalized (non-ascii) top level domains that they would control. This is a superficial summary of a long story, but the reality remains: governments have a great deal of say over ICANN’s processes.

So: was the model unworkable? Should centralized resources of internet names and addresses become subject to government control, because this is the kind of thing for which governments are traditionally responsible? Was the private model subject to such non-democratic pressure by large companies that it could never have worked in the first place? Or has the implementation of the ICANN model been the problem?

Let me try to answer the questions I’ve posed. Is the theory that rules imposed globally should be rare and supported by almost everyone wrong? No. Is the mechanism of using contracts to ensure enforcement on a global basis wrong? No. Is the theory that non-governmental parties will be better at developing dynamic policies that reflect knowledge of the technology wrong? No. Is the theory that opening up more competition for top level domains would be good wrong? No. So what’s the problem?

The creators of the ICANN model may have underestimated both the tendency of people to turn institutions to their own ends and the tendency of governments to ensure that their needs are addressed. ICANN the institution may have had the right theories at its core, but it needed to be peopled with those who cared about preserving the free flow of information online and were willing to put energy behind a private model. Kenn Cukier is right that ICANN is continuing to muddle along; its budget continues to grow, and its meetings are well-attended. But what is it accomplishing, and how are its activities undermining the “avoid chokepoints” model? There are great challenges ahead. At any rate, before the ICANN experiment is pointed to as a model of private internet coordination it should be examined carefully. Its actions this year are likely to be revelatory.

Susan Crawford is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaching internet law and communications law. She is a member of the board of directors of ICANN and is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22. She is the author of the Susan Crawford blog.

Posted 20 May 2008 § Kenneth Neil Cukier § Institutions § Susan Crawford ‡ Comments (3)

Dan Gillmor: Principles of a New Media Literacy

essay by Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor: Principles of a New Media Literacy

The democratization of media is no longer in doubt. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of media creation at all levels, most notably from the edges of networks. These networks have provided vast access to what people have created — potentially a global audience for anyone’s creation.

But the expanding and more diverse media ecosystem, which includes various kinds of citizen media alongside traditional forms, poses some difficult challenges alongside the unquestioned benefits. A key question: In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust?

How we govern ourselves on the Web depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways.

It comes down, in significant ways, to some principles, both for media consumers and creators. They add up to a 21st Century notion of what we once called “media literacy.” But media literacy has generally lacked the kind of participatory piece that is so essentially a part of digital media.

Even those of us who are creating a variety of media are still — and always will be — more consumers than creators. For all of us in this category, the principles come mostly from common sense. Call them skepticism, judgment, understanding and reporting. More specifically:

Be skeptical of absolutely everything. This means not taking or granted the trustworthiness of what we read, see or hear from media of all kinds, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos or any other form.

But don’t be equally skeptical of everything. We all have an internal “trust meter” of sorts, largely based on education and experience. We need to bring to digital media the same kinds of parsing we learned in a less complex time when there were only a few primary sources of information. A news article in New York Times or Wall Street Journal starts out in strongly positive territory on that trust meter. An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts with negative credibility. Anonymity is an important thing to preserve, because it protects whistleblowers and others for whom speech can be unfairly dangerous. But when people don’t stand behind their words, a reader should always wonder why and make appropriate adjustments.

Understand and learn media techniques. Teenagers and children already know how to create media; they are digital natives. Older people are learning. But younger and older alike are, for the most part, less clear on how communications are designed to persuade if not manipulate. It’s fine, if not essential, to know how to snap a photo with a mobile phone. It’s just as important to know — and to teach our children — how media creators push our logical and emotional buttons.

Ask more questions. This goes by many names: research, reporting, homework, etc. The Web has already sparked a revolution in commerce, as potential buyers of products and services discover relatively easy ways to learn more before the sale. We need to recognize the folly of making any major decision about our lives based on something we read, hear or see — and the need to keep reporting, sometimes in major ways but more often in small ones, to ensure that we make good choices.

All of the principles above are part of the toolkit of every responsible journalist. So are a few more, including the ones that every traditional journalist of any honor would embrace, namely thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independence. They boil down to simple but important notions: Get as much information as possible. When you say something, be sure your facts are correct. Be fair to people and interests from all angles. And be as independent as possible, especially as an independent thinker who knows how to listen, not just lecture.

In the digital world, even more than the analog one, we need to add transparency to that list, because the thinking behind the media deserves exposure in addition to the work itself. Nowhere will this be more important than with citizen journalists — though the traditional media need to adopt more transparency as well, for their own sakes. They may be paid, individually, not to have conflicts of interest. But that doesn’t mean they work without bias.

Transparency in the traditional ranks has scarcely existed for most the past century. It’s difficult, in fact, to name a business as opaque as journalism, the practitioners of which insist that others explain their actions but usually refuse to amplify on their own.

Scandal, for the most part, has forced open the doors to a degree. The Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times led the newspaper to describe in lurid detail what had happened. It also led to the creation of a “public editor” post — also called ombudsman in other cases.

Bloggers, through their own relentless critiques, have made traditional-media transparency more common as well. However unfair bloggers’ criticism may often be, it has also been a valuable addition to the media-criticism sphere.

Bloggers, too, need to adopt more transparency. Some, to be sure, do reveal their biases. That gives readers a way to refract the writers’ world views against the postings, and then make decisions about credibility. But a distinctly unhappy trend in some blog circles is the undisclosed or poorly disclosed conflict of interest. Pay-per-post schemes are high on the list of activities that deserve readers’ condemnation — and, one hopes, less readership.

All these principles — for audiences and creators, who are often the same people — lead to an inevitable reality. We are doing a poor job of ensuring that consumers and producers of media in a Digital Age are equipped for the tasks. This is a job for parents and schools. Yet in America, a teacher who teaches critical thinking risks being fired as a dangerous radical.

If we really believe that democracy requires an educated populace, we’re starting from a deficit. These are dangerous times to push conformity and routine acceptance of what others say. Are we ready to take the risk of being activist media users, for the right reasons? A lot rides on the answer.

Dan Gillmor is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Director of the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project with the Berkman Center. He is also director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. His book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, explained the collision of journalism and technology and why it matters. His Citizen Media blog is here.

Posted 16 May 2008 § Foundations for Participation § Dan Gillmor ‡ Comments (8)

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