Media, Technology and Society

The Future of the Blogosphere?

I just received this excellent post from a fine gentleman by the name of Kevin B. Its right on the money I think. One of the reasons why I think the blogosphere is interesting though, is because of the kind of democratic, widely available communication it makes possible.

Whereas Television for example is a unilateral medium; you have two choices 1. Watch/change the channel or 2. Turn it off.

With blogs/internet, its a multilateral medium involving enormous chances for participation, writing, creating etc.

And as Kevin so validly points out, because of the variety of purposes and intentions people have for their blogs, its unfair to hold a particular blog or set of blogs to the standard one might have for an academic journal. Its really kind of silly to actually.

What could work though, if people did want to have serious discussions, is there could be an organization of blogs that are 'regulated' according to some of the same peer-review processes that regulate academic journals. Even newspapers, and especially TV media are not even remotely comparable to academic journals in presenting current events issues, politics, economics etc. Some political magazines, and some newspapers come close (WSJ, Economist, etc for right wing views, the Nation etc, for left wing views) though.

In any case, would blogs still be blogs if they were regulated? Its interesting to think about. I really think the blogosphere will continue to evolve, and the discussion we had here will most likely have unearthed some issues that will continue to be present and plague the blogosphere for some time to come.

Great post Kevin :)

"Peter,

For what it's worth, I specifically read Mahatma's blog because he doesn't pigeonhole himself to one party, perspective or persuasion. In short, he makes me think and re-examine my own perspective.
I read yours, when you do post, because I like your scholarly/logical/analytical methodology (which is always in the back of my mind and challenges my standards of writing when I post on my blog, knowing you'll read what I say) even though it's not always as juicy of a read as say, a WMD post or Generation Why, which I enjoy for the exact opposite reasons that I read your blog. Which is not a slight to WMD-- I understand when I read Matt's posts, that he has a lot of passion for the topics he comments on, and that passion makes for a lively read. And he does often make a salient point in the midst of his enthusiasm.
I really shouldn't speak for Mahatma or Matt & Mark, but for myself: I post in my blog simply to put down in words the things that are in my heart & mind that matter to me, relevant to current events. The writing in itself is an enjoyable process to me. It's an additional level of gratification if someone else appreciates the writing, though it's not necessary. It's an even further level of gratification if one's thoughts influenced the thoughts or actions of another in some positive way, though I'll not pretend that my blog is that important or my thoughts or writing ability that amazing (contrary to my frequent claims to my fiance' of being as amazing as I am humble.)

I should point out that, on one level, your post is ironically self-reflecting. While you note that once formed, political/religious views rarely change and that the discussions you initiated on these blogs generally served to reinforce the author's opinions rather than sway them, you also mention that you yourself went into this experiment with an existing hypothesis and came out with that hypothesis strengthened.

Further, depending on the intent of the author, for a blog to be, as you conclude, "flagrant editorial" is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if that's all one intended it to be. Admittedly, one does gain credibility if his or her editorial follows the constraints of "Reason and Argument" over rabid partisan ranting. But even so, an editorial which is intended as an editorial is not going to carry the intellectual weight of, say, an anthropological thesis, nor the pretended impartiality of mainstream journalistic reporting-- because it was intended to be neither of those. Case in point, the subtitle of Loonatic Left: "The satyrical ramblings of Mahatma"... no obscurity of intent there.
Nor, likely, does one set out to write a post on something they do not feel strongly about and will be easily persuaded otherwise, or is specifically soliciting arguments which will change their mind on the topic.
One cannot then evaluate a blog on it's impartial scientific methodology when none was intended, and not be dissapointed.
Contrary to scientific experiment in which a puzzle is noticed and an objective explanation sought for the puzzling phenomena, bloggers tend to see an issue which is running contrary to their opinion and want to set the record straight, according to their own perspective, for whomever is willing to read that perspective.
Legitimate truth-seeking should be the ultimate admirable goal, of course, but not every blogger aspires to this, and not every blogger who aspires to it succeeds in it.

In short, we all have opionions or perspectives which color our perceptions and influence, subtly or blatently, our own actions and consequently our sphere of influence. Rupert Sheldrake in his book "Seven Experiments That Could Change The World" has stated that even scientists' attitude towards their experiments affect the results of the experiment.

Some, like Matt of WMD, are content to let their attitude show freely."

Did I just pigeon-hole myself as an e-democracy/blog champion?

I just read this insightful article by Sandy Starr, who critiques the point of view that blogging is necessarily so politically important, which is a position advanced by myself in my previous post, but also by stanford's lawrence lessig, who starr critiques. Quite an interesting read, and a good counter-point to my previous post...

Assessing Popular Political Involvement in the Blogosphere

I have a lot of hope for the blogosphere. I regard it as having tremendous potential in that it enables everyday, ordinary people to publish their thoughts and feelings about the world. Yes, critics have called the blogosphere 'self important', i.e. how dare the common person publish their own writings! They clearly aren't worthy. And obviously they are correct in some ways. We can't roam the blogosphere with its plenitude of authors of varying writing capability and expertise and expect the same (perhaps less variable, but still variable) level of "professionalism" that defines quality broadsheets. That said, the blogosphere is made up of people who write voluntarily and that's a remarkable thing. Writing - especially good writing - isn't necessarily an easy task, and doing so voluntarily indicates that those who blog do so because they are so interested in an issue that they are willing to expend the time and energy to express their own views on the matter. Whether they are motivated to chronicle interesting (or uninteresting!) events in their lives, or for the satisfaction of creating something that will become the reading interest of an unknown audience, what matters is that large numbers of people are nonetheless compelled to write. When I consider this developent, I am reminded of technology critic Neil Postman's nostalgic yearning for the 'Typographic Public' of 18th and 19th century America: the kind that public that was socially expected to read newspapers every day and was capable of listening to a presidential debate for 7 1/2 hours (Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas). Could we be seeing the re-emergence of a public that actually wants to write and express itself proactively instead of passively receiving information from unilateral media such as television? If so, this is an exciting moment to be witnessing.

However promising this development might be, I see the potential in the blogosphere for enlightenment-era utopianism insofar as that utopianism is defined by a rational public so interested in politics that they make it a part of their lifestyle. A part of their daily routine. In some sense, I would be pleased to see bloggers regularly taking a part of their day to write about how stupid liberals are or how dumb conservatives can be. That in and of itself is great (politics is obviously more than just this classical dialectic), but can't we expect more? Before outlining what I see as the promise and challenge of the blogosphere, its important to recognize the politics of what the blogosphere has already achieved: a publicly controlled sphere of information exchange which operates apart from the mainstream. Before even addressing what is 'said' in the blogosphere, the fact that it exists is political in and of itself: it is a channel for information distribution outside of the vertically integrated distribution channels of mainstream television/radio news and debate. It is fundamentally "uncontrolled". This context of non-regulation and widespread inclusivity for anyone with the infrastructure and training enabling them to contribute (electricity, a computer, familarity with how to use that computer, etc - these are not insigificant 'entrace criteria') results in both self-important and amateurish writing but also stunning polemics and a newly emerging public with the willingness to both write and read published material which has never entered an institutional context. I would like to think this has all sorts of positive implications for democracy, debate and the development of an idealized Rousseauian rational citizen.

However, I can't help but be skeptical. First, I think I am being unfairly utopianistic and/or historical in looking at blogs as a 'return' to a typographic culture. That culture, in which the written word enjoyed monopoly status just doesn't exist today, and what affect will the absence of such a culture have on the typographic nature of the blogosphere? Despite the emergence of the internet as a popular phenomena, we still live in a television culture to a large degree. For over 50 years, our primary mode of recieving information about the world (including politics) has been the television. We are best equipped to watch tv and understand the world in the context of the argumentative style we see presented on tv. We understand political debate as structured around television commercials and 60 minute segments. We have never stood in an open air gallery watching politicians debate a subject or range of issues for seven hours (It would be similarly remarkable if we could take part in duscussion ourselves for this length of time). If we did, and became used to it, would we recognize politics as it is constituted (now) in a television medium? For clarity, the 'politics' I describe here is debate between elected representatives about the familiar issues of health care, foreign policy, trade, education, national security (but it could also be the broader and more personal politics of every-day life). I ally myself with Postman's view that citizens of de Tocqueville's America might not recognize the simplistic and reductionist argumentation and debate employed by politicians in our era of television. I am making a crude generalization, but feel relatively comfortable comparing the speeches of Lincoln with those of George W. Bush as evidence of a decline in the sophistication of political language. At age 28, Lincoln exhibited a remarkable, almost essay-like use of language in his Lyceum speech, in which he spoke out against vigilantism. One could make the argument that yes, the expressiveness and complexity of the ideas has changed, but the ideas themselves are relatively similar in utility and value. Perhaps, I don't want to substantially argue the point - Postman does a far better job of it in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business". The changing complexity of the speeches used by major politicians is not the major issue: whether the citizenry is satisfactorily engaged in all matters of importance to the nation, politics and policy is of greater importance. If nothing else, one can isolate the last half of the 20th century as having coincided with a decline in such indicators of citizen involvement as (mostly youth) voter turnout in major industrialized democracies if nothing else. Whether this coincidence is causally related to the emergence of television, the decline in newspaper readership, or the rise in youth centred entertainment and fashion industries is another debate.

So does the blogosphere have the potential to reverse this trend? To increase the capacity of the citizenry to become critical engagers of politics, and to demand a better political language? A language or grammar less defined by simplistic dichotomies or mellifluous triumphalism. I would argue that it does, but also that merely that having the capacity to engage in rational debate and discussion doesn't mean that as individuals and a society that we would choose to do so. I don't think its arguable that as a society we are cultivated to express ourselves politically by buying things as opposed to expressing a coherent opinion or siding with a political point of view through debate and action. The media environment we live in has a role to play in facilitating this active involvement, especially when the range of conflicting views about the world is large enough that we can find a voice for our own beliefs among them. Are blogs capable of emulating a society where each citizen had not one or two information/news sources, but literally hundreds? I may be giving the blogosphere a tremendous amount of credit in making this comparison while they are still at the level of a 'technological fad' (their history is still quite young) but as a medium of communication, its arguable that they have the potential to (1) perform a role similar to that of the penny press in expressing an enormously wide range of views and (2) encouraging widespread participation because the costs associated with 'publishing' are drastically less than that required to opening a conventional newspaper. Other parallels can be drawn between the status of most blog writers as amateurs and the elite view of the (19th century) penny press as predominantly the 'toiling ink stained hacks': there was no professional 'ethos' for press journalism in much of the 19th century. Conrad Black as a press baron almost epitomizes this old world contempt for the 'mere' journalists or 'hacks' of the press trade. Whether amateur or not however, the central question is whether the writers and readers of the blogosphere are motivated by the same passion for heated political debate as were many of the writers of the 19th century labour and penny press.

It seems there are significant barriers that lie in the way of the blogosphere's evolution into a new public sphere, if we mean an arena for enlightened, rational debate. Can the blogosphere exceed (or atleast supplement) the heavily commercialized and centralized fourth estate we have now in facilitating a more authentic rational, enlightened public discourse? And why would we wish to supplement or replace the press we have now? Who needs the blogosphere? One answer potentially follows from the criticism that the press we have now is only marginally committed to the potentially damaging ideals of democracy and Rousseauian 'natural rights'. As Professor Robert Hackett writes,

"the ninteenth-century labour press adopted fragments and strands of this democratic discourse, which was in turn, later in the century, appropriated by the emerging popular commercial dailies. From this democratic discourse, the popular commercial dailies developed the first version of journalistic objectivity: an independent, universalizing stance that looked at the world and the body politic from the viewpoint of the ideal citizen: a prudent, rational, fair-minded individual, committed to individual rights, political democracy, a market economy, and progress through science and education" (Hackett & Zhao, p. 18)

Could the blogosphere adopt the stance of the idealized traditional media (expressing a political view on issues and news in the world from the standpoint of the ideal citizen), while more authentically articularing those concerns which fail to conform to the commercial imperatives of the current (private) fourth estate? How could the blogosphere as a burgeoning realm of public discourse be viewed as an attractive alternative to the conventional fourth estate? As professors Robert Hackett and Yeuzhi Zhao write concerning the supposedly 'neutral' role of the mainstream 'objective' press and the elitist model of the 'informed citizen':

"...although [Walter] Lippman debunked the ideal of the fully informed citizen, the smorgasbord concept does fit all to neatly with his competitive elitist model of democracy in at least one sense. The concept of a amarketplace of ideas and political options reduces citizens to the role of consumers of information provided for them by professional communicators and to choosing between the options provided for them by political parties. The excluded alternative is active popular participation in the production of political meanings and options" (Hackett et al, p. 185)

It is in viewing the blogosphere as a site in which "active popular participation in the production of political meanings and options" that I see the greatest potential, and the greatest challenge. Will the blogosphere create its own meanings and options or merely recycle the same standard narratives and opinions available from 'professional communicators'? What barriers lie in the way of the blogosphere's functioning as a seperate realm for the active production of alternative political meanings and interpretations?

Most obviously perhaps, there are the often-overlooked technological and physical barriers obstructing popular participation in the blogging experience (not everyone has the resources, training, etc to participate). While almost everyone might be capable of reading or having access to a newspaper, less of an audience may have access to the hardware and infrastructure to access a network of relevant online discussion. Also, what are the implications of online participation in 'democracy', if that democratic debate involves people from multiple nationalities and geographic regions with largely disparate concerns? These are also challenges that potentially obstruct the political power of this alternative sphere of meaning-making (even if millions of online citizens 'vote' with their opinions toward particular policy directions, their electoral power may still be limited within their electoral regions).

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the blogosphere is tremendously ambigious in its purpose. While the labour and penny press of the 19th century had the more or less clearly defined purpose of preaching to an interested public in the language of the all-encompassing and univeralistic discourse of the enlightenment (whether social or economic freedoms were stressed) and according to the political desires of that public, the blogosphere is at once a networked community with a broad purpose to discuss issues of importance to individuals and at another level, an atomized series of loosely inter-connected personal diaries. I believe this is where the accusations of self importance come in? Critics ask, whose listening (or reading) to all these people writing about whatever it is they wish to write about? Who decides what is important? How are heirarchal structures and selectivity attained in terms of deciding what is democratically important/most valuable?

Some argue that the amount of links that lead to a website is one method (a la google) for determining its value for a community. For some online news/editorial sites, such as Kuro5hin this seems to function effectively in prioritizing the articles of democratically determined importance to a community. Perhaps a similar device can be used by blogging communities to 'elect' certain blogs as particularly worthy of comment and debate (for the purposes of this discussion, the 'comment' feature on most blogs is where the dialogue and feedback is obtained. Authors of blogs have priority and censure power in editing comments of course, in a similar way that radio callers and newspaper editors select which calls and letters to hear/print. Blogs may be democratic, but most blogs tend to place the editorial power solely in the hands of the author at the (potential) expense of the community. So, there are some analogies that can be found between traditional media and blogs that support the view that the blogosphere can facilitate discussion and interchange in a way that traditional media are seen to (with the same editorial drawbacks). Their major feature however, is they have radically lower boundaries to entry than are seen in traditional media (it costs millions to open a newspaper, and a few dollars a month to publish a blog).

The last and most significant aspect of blogging as a potentiall burgeoning democratic public sphere is the problem of assessing the capability of bloggers to engage in debate on matters of politics and other issues relevant to a democracy, and whether or not these issues are of importance to this public. Its worth asking, just because each person can publish, do they choose to discuss boring stuff like politics, or something else? Are politics important to the blogging public? Whether they are or not, are they equipped with the tools (as the popular press of the 18th century was accused of not having) to engage in Rousseauian debate? Or are the 'self important' political commentators of the blogosphere more interested in elevating themselves as subjects before any and all 'opponents' (parties, political ideologies) that they disagree with?
I must say, in my wanderings through the blogosphere I have seen a discussion model that more closely resembles Bill O'Reilly than Jean Jacques or Voltaire in terms of its respect for and attention to the claims of the 'opposition'. In politics there is always an opposition (generally) which one challenges and critiques, but in rational debate and discussion, one attacks the opposition in good spirit - by attacking arguments and premises and not individuals. And this is a crucial observation, whether it's true or not that the political commentators of the blogosphere are prone to taking sound-byte positions on issues, and attacking opponents personally rather than intellectually.

Case in point will be Jibjab media's popular satire of the US presidential debate - This Land. While a banjo tune strums along (a tune which is the subject of an intellectual property lawsuit) Kerry and Bush call eachother the names that have come to identify and stereotype 'liberal' and 'conservative' debate in the United States. Liberals are reduced to tree huggers and hippies, conservatives to war-mongering nuclear fanatics. The right is a bunch of nutbags, and left is a bunch of loonies. Both 'sides' (there is nothing else? no happy medium between nuclear-war fanatics and flower-power hippies?) are monolithic and all-encompassing. Granted this is a satire, but these accusations "the looney left" for example, are frequently used in popular political discourse and by political commentators in the blogosphere. This is the kind of language which, when offered seriously, completely obstructs any coherent political discourse. There is nothing wrong with taking a right-wing position, in fact, the world is better for having individuals willing to take up and challenge ideas of any political spectrum.

However, in taking a position, authors in the blogosphere must strive to 'be better than the mainstream media' in the sense of having respect for the ideas and people that are being criticized. This respect entails giving your opposition the space to flesh out their views and not minimizing, censoring them for disagreeing with your or taking a position so 'radical' as to be 'lunatic'. If the blogosphere fails to rise above the damaged political discourse we have inherited from the age of television, it will likely fall far short of its potential for a new rational, democratic public sphere. Its one thing to have the tools which enable anyone to publish their views, and quite another to have those views conform to the general rubric of beneficial democratic discourse (whether the topic is politics, or popular culture, or what you had for breakfast in the morning).

References:

Hackett & Zhao "Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity" Garamond Press: Toronto, 1998

Note: Other references are directly referenced by hyperlink.

How Valid are Attempts to Define our Society as Informational?

How Valid are Attempts to Define our Society as Informational

By Peter Konefal

While new to the notion of the “information society” and debates around whether it “exists” or not, it might be helpful to consider how this debate arose in the first place. Namely, why do we need to define our current age with a singular, seemingly all-encompassing and representative term, and by what criteria did we arrive at “information society”? Part of it might have to do with a sense of anticipating the future, or of a desire to foresee the ‘big picture’ entailed by all the manifestations of evolving digital technologies. There is an appeal it seems to being on the ‘cutting edge’ of things, and what better place to be, both academically and professionally than proselytising about the “information revolution”? But most importantly I wish to draw attention to the artifice of taxonomy: this debate is here because many have felt it necessary to answer this question prematurely and in doing so have left others to question this vague and expansive definition of our “age”.

So, abandoning our first question for now, we might turn to the next one, the broad debate over attempts to define our current society as an “information society”. We might look at this term as a product of a long tradition of historiography wherein human societal progression is chronologically organized according to the defining technological paradigms of the period. For example, the stone age, the bronze age… steam age, the electronic age, and now the information age? How did we arrive at “information”? What sort of technology is information? What is implied by the information age? Global communication networks? E-mail? The world wide web? None or all of them? Perhaps it is appropriate but somehow it doesn’t seem to fit. To revisit our historiographical method of outlining human technical achievement according to the defining ‘new’ technology of the period, somehow information seems disjoint. Author Wade Rowland proposes a more historical and escalating view of the digital information technologies of today.
For one, this term implies a less problematic disjunction with previous societal ‘epochs’ and avoids the problem of defining a historical era according to a technological function. As Frank Webster writes,

“how can it be acceptable to take what is regarded as an asocial phenomenon (technology) and assert that this then defines the social world? It is facile… technology is in truth an intrinsic part of society…”.

To return to my alternate suggestion, is it any less facile to label our current society ‘digital’? The age when ‘digital technologies’ redefined society? Digital technologies imply computers and the Internet as we know it, but avoid the problems involved in “quantifying” a previous epoch “non-informational” and subsequent one as “informational”. Although our new term certainly doesn’t prevent us from making facile distinctions between ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’ economic production, it doesn’t lend itself to the same grand definitional imperatives that have occurred on behalf of the “information society”.
Webster criticizes the efforts of some to install distinctions between a new class of “knowledge workers” who exist in this new “information age” and the kind of work conducted by everyone else and writes:

“…in fact the allocation of occupations to these distinct categories is a judgement call that involves much discretion. The end product – a bald statistical figure….hides the complex processes by which researchers construct their categories and allocate people to one or another”

The advantage of the term ‘digital’ is its modesty – it doesn’t beg definitions about how society is now ‘digital’ in all respects (it would be ridiculous to say that it is), or that all social interactions and processes are somehow digitalized – but rather it suggests profound new technologies (communicative or otherwise) have as their basis digits. It is true that a confluence of historical factors led to the inception and widespread dissemination of digital technologies and of their role in facilitating international communication networks. It is not true that the “internet” or the speedy and widespread dissemination of information indicates a radical departure from society before the invention of the first modern digital computers (or worse, before the “information age”). Far from it, the Internet and the digital technology that facilitates information transmission is part of a long history of technological innovation and a relentless desire to connect far off places with roads and bridges, telegraph poles, transcontinental cables and many other “Global Information Infrastructures”.

In short, the reason why “the digital age” is a more preferable definition to “information society” is precisely why it was passed over in the first place. It suits the purposes of futurists such as Negroponte, Gates and others to presume the radical existence of a new age, in which upcoming technologies mark new evolutions in the techno-historical timeline. The only real mistake such techno-philosophers could make is in not being grandiose enough.

Bibliography

References Cited

Rowland, Wade Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet

Webster, Frank Theories of an Information Society
US: Routledge, 2002

References Consulted

Gates, Bill Business at the Speed of Thought
US: Warner Books, 1999