Matthew Allen

Willson: public sphere and protocol

Notes that Habermas’s public sphere concept originally tied to physical space and embodied interaction; cites 1992 Habermas, however: uncouples the public sphere from space in this way.

“Protocol is a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships and connects life-forms” (Galloway) – protocol is both enabling and disabling – [ Foucault - power? protocol as language of power]

Basically, paper presenting a nice comparison of H’s public sphere and G’s protocol as two ways of conceiving this space outside of the structures and forms of state and citizen interaction. Suggests code is a layer between structures of politics and participation.

Jensen: Public Sphere 2.0
New data – internet as mediator.

contrasts Public Sphere 1.0 – classic political citizenship, old media; Public Sphere 2.0 cultural citizenship, new media – Denmark as the case study; presents information showing different kinds of media use – [problem - claims that the Internet is media - is it?]; focus is on how people get the news – TV 1st, Internet 2nd. Presents usual kinds of ‘what people do online’ data; deploys the old media / new media divide consistently.

Does this work? Perhaps not. Could the social media approach (Bruns for example) work better? – In other words, the difference between (say) TV and (say) Youtube is not old and new, but mass and social? A critical recent piece on the way the Internet doesn’t easily fall into dichtomous comparisons is Luders work on personal media, NMS 2007

Preliminary analysis presented considering the shift from classic political citizenship to cultural citizenship; not entirely clear whether there is a shift (but I am unsure if the survey is precisely acquiring information about this difference). Suggests the Internet is more important for cultural citizenship than political citizenship – there’s something about the information presentation and availability online that makes it work better for cultural citizenship.

Survey preliminaries suggest old media important (as it moves to the INternet for delivery).

Discusses online and offline particiation [is this the right question?]

[note the practical use Public Sphere 2.0 in Australia by net-guru politician Kate Lundy]

Breindl: Democractic potentials of the Internet
Early discussions – utopian / dystopia themes in 1990s discussions; they were flawed (based on techno-determinism, not empirical). 2000s – better literature which is more empirical and less pre-determined.

Internet – horizontal notion emerges more strongly. [Question: was hierarchy as important and dominating as it now appears in retrospect?]

Information is linked to citizenship – having information allows participation; has an implicit critique of mass media and governments not being open. Breindl emphasises that the internet doesn’t necessarily mean more better or other improvements in information. [Moreover, i'd add, the link between information and participation is dubious, politically - the search for information (eg its absence) probably motivates as much as having info; plus you need point of view!]. PLus, you still get overload and disinformation via the Internet in any case.

Reviews the public sphere idea, emphasising how public sphere is an often-deployed concept in analysing the internet and politics. Has some critical points – empirically hard to see net as public sphere; also theoretically public sphere has problems. Aligns interactivity and debate [not sure about this?]. Then moves to social capital and the whole strong ties idea for participation. Mobilisation / reinforcement hypotheses – networked ICTs can mobilise change or reinforce status quo – literature tends to favour latter, but both h. are common

Blogging Keith Herndon’s paper on newspaper industries and the Internet
(full disclosure; Keith is one of my graduate students)

Keith’s research is important for providing the ‘long history’ of newspapers and electronic information technologies (note, print news was itself an information technology!). Notes the 1970s – emergence of commercial databases, and the electronic publishing paradigm. 1980s – attempts to establish videotext as viable business model – Knight-Ridder, Viewtron “primitive by today’s standards, but cutting edge at the time”. Fails – not adopted by “early technology adopters”. There were similar projects. These projects – both experience of them and failure – left newspapers wary about investing in electronic ventures and perhaps meant they were unprepared for Internet and, indeed, resistant of it. Resistant, in particular, of the telecommunications industry moving into this field which was seen as ‘belonging’ to the news; then also attempted to defend their interests by creating alliances with companies like Prodigy.

This is why new media is not new; new media is a phrase that could easily describe events from 1970s onwards, not just the Internet. Moreover, the Internet disrupts what was already being done with ‘new media’.

In the 1990s, as the INternet emerges as a dominant paradigm for CMC and ICT-based info services, various major news organisations estyablished the New Century Network (NCN) which attempted to control the Internet and manage it to create a portal through which 75+ newspapers would be online via the net in 2 years. (from 1995). NCN fails because it is too slow, measured, full of discussion, rather than action. NCN also brings with it assumptions about how news online would look and work – NCN to create standards (eg what a banner ad would be) which would be followed by all. Complete misreading of what the Internet was and would be. Interestingly, its failure was largely because of infighting between NCN partners. Note critical importance of advertising. Ultimately NCN never got that the Internet was open platform.

Hooker “Are you an organisation that supplies newspapers or are you an organisation that supplies information?” – news couldn’t decide.

So, what then were the practices of news orgs as they attempted to embrace the Internet. “Failed to embrace the opportunities of new platform to create new medium” – newspapers shovelled print stuff to the internet. (Keith was part of this history). Also lack of innovation to remain competitive – eg completely misunderstood the importance of search. Newspapers also had no idea that users would be generators of content. “clung to one-to-many” model “did not embrace many-to many model”.

Concludes – newspaper industry reacted to the Internet by trying to preserve existing culture.

Internet was very hard to understand; it was read as ‘what we do already, only different’ by so many organisations – libraries; universities; newspapers etc; very few people – mostly individuals – saw it as transformative, because they had no investment in maintaining anything.

Questions –

one interesting thing emerges; news content via AP and similar is sold to Internet corps but at low price; too low, because newspapers who own AP didn’t realise that Internet would become PRIMARY, not secondary source for AP stories.

History of the Internet and newspapers – news orgs didn’t really think about intellectual property; that was not on their radar in 1990s and, probably, led to the situation where content ends up online for free and thus raises the kind of demands NOW (eg from Murdoch) for Google and others to pay for the content generated by journalists working for newspapers. (see my thoughts on Old media and Not Media).

“Desire to cling to the cultural form of the newspaper” – explains the current development of online multimedia that looks like the newspaper (page turning, structured pages, not database). USA Today is experimenting with this kind of pageturning style; but keith argues it will end up, not being a web-based phenomenon, but a play for the Kindle and similar market.

Is the natural form of the Internet to disintermediate the corporations that draw on the labour of journalists and extract surplus value? Eg – blogging means you don’t need Rupert Murdoch

Some of the founding cultural assumptions which sustain the legitimacy of the news business – eg be observers, not part of the news – are challenged by the Internet to the point where the business has no legitimacy. The news business is having to cope with the old question of what is legitimate and authoritative about ‘the journalist’ and ‘journalistic news’. Claims that Google is stealing profits etc are butressed by calls to the idea that journalists are a public good; but this emphasis on the business model actually conceals the very significant doubt as to the legitimacy of the necessary and unquestioned moral good of journalism. Some sources of evidence for this: ABC (US) reporter tweeting ‘off the record’ Obama comments; Hartigan (News Corp) decrying bloggers and citizen journalists in Australia.)

Meditations sparked by AoIR conference session on State of Internet Studies panel (part of Internet: Critical, IR 10.0).

Ess sums up the shift in thinking about identity (echoed by Consalvo): identity play, postmodern, end of meatspace in 1990s – it’s now clear that research into the Internet dominated by the Internet in Everyday Life paradigm.

Consalvo comments neatly that educational uses of 2nd Life, etc, started with ‘let’s re-present the classroom – chairs, lecterns etc – in 2nd Life’ but now is considering the manner in which the alternatives (flying, etc) can become educationally useful.

So there is something going on in our thinking about, and using the Internet, where we try to mirror ‘real life’ (and thereby define ‘real life’ by saying the Internet isn’t real life but simulates it), or we go through the mirror into a different, twisted place. Current dominant research and analysis probably rejects both of these alternatives, and yet do people using the Internet think as we do? Linking back to Buchanan’s comments on research ethics: agency of participants in research is crucial; and agency links to identity.

Thinking…

Discussions of user-generated content (UGC) construct the user in ways that assume a more traditional, modern, ‘fixed identity’ conception of identity – the agency implied by the term UGC seems to demand this; it is quite different to the playful, liberatory notion of identity online as different from other identity from the 1990s. So, perhaps, we’ve lost sight of the reason why the Internet was seen so positively as a place for identity play in previous decades; this reason was, largely, a sense of the structured, externall authored nature of identity – a kind of extension of Gramscian ideas about ideology into dark places (think Althusser and the ISA).

Baym comments on the way that people don’t live on ‘a’ social networking site or service. they blend various sites and services, across multiple facilities. Suggests that the ‘web presence’ notion – in which online identity is never centred within a place, but distributed unevely across many places and spaces – might work well to explore identity performance and management through numerous online services?

TL said some good stuff about games which I blogged at the time but my server crashed and I lost it. I think the main thing I got from it was the play / identity link, but that ‘gaming’ was an arena for identity formation which extended well beyond the ‘game’ itself (something which TL also alluded to in answering elegantly my awkward question).

Now, I also lost these thoughts

user-generated content and the content-generated user; these occur simultaneously. In part this is a way out of the structural bind from the 1980s which first led to ‘playing with identities’ as a kind of resistant or alternative practice to the strictures of everyday life (and which thus constituted cyberspace outside of everyday life). In the 1980s, I would assert, cyberspace became an appealing focus for the attention of left- and leftist postmodern / cultural critics who saw it as a liberatory place outside of the determining social structures (race, class , gender etc) and the way these structures were written on the body (and thus disembodiment was liberation). Of course there was a lot of liberatarian enthusiasm for cyberspace as a place without rules too. But identity formation doesn’t need to be either determined or within the agency of the individual; it can be both. Users generated content and, to the extent that such generation is enacting the self and thus performing identity, UGC continues (rather than steps away from) identity play (while noting the play is across network and physical spaces such that the distinction between the two is not entirely relevant anymore). At the same time content generates users. Who we are is what content we contribute (and content here might cover many things – google searches; chatting on facebook; youtube uploads; avatar creation) – this content is ‘us’, especially when farmed for value by companies like google, or when read out of context (think Stephanie Rice and Facebook photos).

My presentation at Internet Research 10.0 Internet : Critical on Experience of Connectivity

Draft full paper (not for direct quote) available: http://netcrit.net/content/aoirexperienceconnectivity2009.pdf

‘The Googlization of Everything and the Human Knowledge Project’
Keynote presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Blogging, Tweeting and backchanneling… hm…

Books about the Internet are a challenge because of the time from completion to publication and the speed of change in things Internet.

How long can you go without using Google? – Some google product will influence most of your online activities. Despite the short time of the company’s existence it has a profound impact on our lives.

Focus of concern is from the commencement of the Google scanning of millions of library books; worrying for Siva and, moreover, positive reaction from commentators (Kelly, Lessig) also worrying. Is this transformational? Why is it claimed to be? Does it realise librarians’ dreams for perfect digital information sharing?

And yet it seems Google is positively viewed – partly because they give so much, and no money changes hands. We are not Google’s customers, however, we are their product. Google learns from us. Googlization – “processed, rendered and represented by Google” – knowledge, communication and us can be Googlized. [Link to the notion of content-generated user I am developing]. Note the massive array of applications and services within Google. Brin says : perfect search engine would “be like the mind of God”.

So why the blind faith or, at least, significant unquestioning reliance on Google? – well remember the 1990s – how bad search engines were.

Long exposition of the gap between reality and expectation which can be good, but tends at the moment to be about trivial things like, eg, the speed of net connections – expect highspeed; bitch about midspeed, forget that 10 years ago it was probably NO speed.

Google research shows ‘speed’ matters to users; and more speed = more business for and through Google. To achieve that speed, massive computers, brilliant code underneath. This is hidden from users. What makes Google dangerous is less Google, and more our desire for immediate gratification without cost. Speed is part of the problem.

Generates a critique of Google against the idea of ‘evil’. But also emphasises that all companies need to do some things which, if not evil, are hardly ‘benign’. Basically critique is – Google is dishonest in CLAIMING to be altruistic and perfect and fun and good when it should just say, hey, we are a company and are here to make money. And, then, we as users buy into it, because we feel better contributing to the lie. Siva’s critique is principally that Google is committing the sin of hubris – to say ‘Don’t be evil’ is evil (Dante-esque).

Concentrates on the ‘first page’ of Google and everything to do with it. [This seems to me to miss the other point which he commenced with - that googe is everywhere and into everything, well beyond just 'search' and related stuff.]. Long critique of the page-rank approach and how it works: this is well known, but still – does it not also work? Adds the critique of google searches throwing up ‘bad’ results.

Overall: feel that the critique is relatively straightforward, and well put, but dated and presumes a fairly simplistic us and them model of politics.