global voices, one world

“The projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in society” is the third requirement for what it means to have a “free and responsible press”, according to the 1947 report by the Hutchins Commission.

That seems an almost obvious requirement, not exactly provocative. But upon a closer inspection, the requirement raises hard but important questions: What is “representative” and when is it sufficiently representative? Who are the “constituent groups” in “society”?

The report is woefully naive about answering these questions:

Responsible performance here simply means that the images repeated and emphasized be such as are in total representative of the social group as it is.

Simply? And what does it mean to be “total representative”? Not considering the fact that this is philosophically and theoretically impossible, assume for a second it does: How in the world are we going to be able to absorb all this information? Who has the time and attention?

The other part of the requirement talks about “constituent groups in society”. What does that mean in an age of globalization, where potentially any group is constituent? What are the implications for those who produce news, and those who consume news? What obligations does this impose on journalists and citizens?

Tough questions, some of these I am trying to answer in my dissertation (in other words, wait for it!). Here’s the report on why this matters:

People make decisions in large part in terms of favorable or unfavorable images. They relate fact and opinion to stereotypes, Today the motion picture, the radio, the book, the magazine, the newspaper, and the comic strip are principal agents in creating and perpetuating these conventional conceptions. When the images they portray fail to present the social group truly, they tend to pervert judgment.

Such failure may occur indirectly and incidentally. Even if nothing is said about the Chinese in the dialogue of a film, yet if the Chinese appear in a succession of pictures as sinister drug addicts and militarists, an image of China is built which needs to be balanced by another. If the Negro appears in the stories published in magazines of national circulation only as a servant, if children figure constantly in radio dramas as impertinent and ungovernable brats the image of the Negro and the American child is distorted. The plugging of special color and “hate” words in radio and press dispatches, in advertising copy, in news stories such words as “ruthless,” “confused/’ “bureaucratic” performs inevitably the same image-making function.

The truth about any social group, though it should not exclude its weaknesses and vices, includes also recognition of its values, its aspirations, and its common humanity. The Commission holds to the faith that if people are exposed to the inner truth of the life of a particular group, they will gradually build up respect for and understanding of it.

Re-reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment, which has a beautiful opening paragraph:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

I recently had to make a difficult and complicated decision, one that would affect my future, the life of my family and friends, my own and others’ happiness. Asking for advice, some people would say: “Just think what’s best for yourself”, implying I should decide on the basis of what I want, ignoring others. But as Smith argues, however selfish we are or even aspire to be, we do care about the happiness of others, and this applies even for “the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society.”

The second paragraph is equally beautiful:

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. .. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situa-tion, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.

Smith argues that it is the ability to reflect, to imagine yourself to be the other that is at the heart of morality, of how we learn about right and wrong. We learn this through our personal relations with other individuals, and how others react to our behavior.

It is this lack of imagination that gives rise to horrors, Elaine Scarry would argue. Her fabulous book The Body in Pain illustrates how pain can be political, how the lack of imagination between the observer and the person in pain makes torture and war possible. There is a saying: “kill one person, it’s murder, kill a thousand and it’s war”. Smith helps us understand that once we lose sight of the individual, imagination fails us, and right and wrong gets obscured. Levinas attaches similar importance to the personal relationship, the face-to-face encounter: “The face is a living presence; it is expression … The face speaks. .. [it] is what forbids us to kill.”

That’s why it is impossible, not to mention wrong, to just think about what I want, or what is best for me, when making a decision. I see the faces of my mum, my dad, my brother, my family, my friends, the people I care about. And that is a good thing.

Is imagination merely a talent, such as a good singing voice, the ability to “make things up: or “think things up” or “get ideas”? Or is it, like science, a way of knowing things that can be known in no other way? We have much reason to think that it is a way of knowing things not otherwise knowable. As the word itself suggests, it is the power to make us see, and to see, moreover, things that without it would be unseeable. In one of its aspects it is the power by which we sympathize. By its means we may see what it was to be Odysseus or Penelope, or David or Ruth, or what it is to be one’s neighbor or one’s enemy. By it, we may “see ourselves as others see us.” It is also the power by which we see the place, the predicament, or the story we are in.”

– From Wendell Berry, “God Science, and Imagination” in Imagination in Place.

Simply terrific.

Professor Lessig is presenting on Institutional Corruption today at the Kennedy School as his first public appearance at Harvard since his return a few months ago.

Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility.

Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control that he used in Code, Professor Lessig explains how the law, markets, norms and architecture together exert influence, and that depending on your policy objectives, these four forces can be complementing or conflicting. He suggests that together they form an “economy of influence” that we need to understand if we want to make effective policy.

He continues to explain “independence”, in the sense that something is not dependent on something. Independence matters, because it means that you try to find the right answer for the right reason, as opposed to doing so for a wrong reason you might be dependent on.

Independence, however, does not mean dependence from everything. Lessig reframes independence as a “proper dependence”. In legal terms, it means that a judge depends on the law for her judgment. So independence is about defining proper dependence, and limiting improper dependence.

Responsibility is the third concept Lessig goes into. He tells us about a case he represented in 2006: Hardwicke vs ABS. It was a case that focused on a series of events concerning child abuse, all perpetrated by a single person. The question that was raised: Who is responsible? Lessig makes the argument that responsibility does not lie with the individual, that this individual has no power to reform, and that this is pathological. Instead, he makes the case that responsibility in this case is all the people who knew about the wrongdoings, but refused to pick up the phone. Nevertheless, the focus of the law was on the one pathological person. Lessig suggests it is more productive to focus responsibility on those who have the power to make changes, instead of those are pathological and are not in a position to reform. He notes it is ironic that the one person who is least likely to reform is held responsible, while the one entity who could do something about it, was immune.

He raises another example of “responsibility” gone awry. He cites Al Gore and his book “The Assault on Reason”, and lambasts its narrow perception of responsibility. It focuses on former president Bush, arguably the man least likely to reform, and instead forgets those who could have done something about it, suggesting that they also have been critically responsible.

His argument is one of “institutional corruption”. What it is not: what happened with Blagojevitch; it is not bribery, not “just politics”, not any violation of existing rules. Instead, institutional corruption is “a certain kind of influence situated within an economy of influence that has a certain effect, either it 1) weakens the effectiveness of the institution or 2) weakens public trust for the institution.

He explains the system of institutional corruption using the White House. Referring to Robert Kaiser’s book “So Damn Much Money”, he argues how the story of the government has dramatically changed in the past fifteen years and how the engine of this change has been the growth of the lobbying industry. He illustrates this with numbers: Lobbyists pay with cash which members use as support for their campaigns. The cost of campaigns have exploded over the years, and subsequently, members have become dependent on lobbyists for cash – he cites that lobbyists make up 30-70% of campaign budgets! This is not new, he carefully explains, but citing Kaiser again, what is new is the scale of this practice has gotten out of hand. Members /need/ and take /much more/, becoming /dependent/ on those who supply. This is only during the tenure, but institutional corruption also needs to be understood as something after tenure: 50% of senators translate their senate tenure into a career as lobbyist, while 42% of the house do the same. This suggests a business model, focused on life after government, that perpetuates itself, and influential people who end up becoming dependent on this system surviving, both during and after their time in Congress.

He goes on to give example after example of institutional corruption. He mentions the important work done by maplight.org that tracks money in politics, who have shown that members who voted to gut a bill had 3x times the contribution from lobbyists than those who voted against. Simply put, policies get bent to those who pay. He cites a study by Alexander, Scholz and Mazza measuring rates of return for lobbying expenditures, who conclude that ROI is a whopping 22,000%! He again cites Kaiser, who suggests that lobbying is a $9-12 billion industry.

Why does this matter? It matters if it
1) weakens effectiveness of institution or
2) weakens public trust of institution

In the first case, he argues how lobbying can shift policy. He cites a study by Hall and Deardorff “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy” on how the work of congresspersons shift as a result of lobbying. Imagine you’re a congressperson and you see it as your goal to work on two issues: one is to stop piracy, the other is to help mums on welfare. The line of lobbyists that will happily help you with stopping piracy is long, whereas not so many will help you with the latter – so work of the congressperson shifts, and thus work of Congress shifts.

Lessig suggests it also bends policies. Does money really not change results? Citing the Sonny Bono case of October 27, 1998, he shows how in copyright lobbying power had a powerful influence in getting the copyright term extended for another twenty years. Does this advance the public good? A clear no. Lessig backs this up by telling how in the challenge at the Supreme Court, an impressive line-up of Nobel Prize winning economists, including Milton Friedman, supported this and that it would be a “no brainer” to sign the support that copyright extension did not advance the public good. But he concludes that there were “no brains” in the House. An easy case of institutional corruption. There are two explanations: Either they are idiots, or they are guided by something other than reason. He suggests of course it’s the latter. It is not misunderstanding that explains these cases.

Lessig continues to explain how corruption can be seen as weakening public trust. He tells us about how the head of the committee in charge of deciding the future of healthcare is getting $4 million from the healthcare industry. Or how a congressperson ended up opposing the public option even though the majority of his constituency supports it. The idea is not that there might be a direct link between the money and the vote, but that if you take money to do something that is against the public interest, people will automatically make that link, and this weakens public trust. If you don’t take money and you go against the popular vote, that won’t reek of corruption.

Lessig goes on to discuss different fields: medicine and the healthcare industry, citing research by Drummond Rennie from UCSF that shows how there is an overwhelming bias in favor of sponsor’s company drugs. How there are 2.5 doctors to 1 detailer (a detailer being someone who is like a lobbyist for the pharmaceuticals, promoting the drugs to doctors, often giving “gifts”). How the budget for detailing tripled in the past ten years.

Lessig asks us: how can we find out whether these claims are true? Do detailing practices either weaken the effectiveness of medicine, or weaken the public trust for it? What would it take to know?

There is also the issue of “the structure of fact finding” that Lessig suggests is corrupt. Again, he argues we need to understand whether this is a process by which results are affected or trust is weakened. He cites how sponsor funded research can cause delay, and mentions the case of “popcorn lung”.

Lessig makes a strong case that we need more than intuition. That we need a framework or metric to know for sure. Because we all have ideological commitments, that we need to escape this in order to have a proper understanding of corruption. This is, in short, the aim of his new project: The Lab. It should be a neutral ground with a framework that determines whether and when institutional corruption exists, to develop remedies for institutional corruption when it exists. He sees the initial work having three dimensions: 1) data – necessary to describe influence and track its change; 2) perception of institutional corruption and understand how it has changed;
and 3) causation – what can we say about what causes what in these contexts in alleged corruption. Having this information, we can then design remedies.

I was recently asked why hospitality matters. Whether diversity was not enough in itself. That is, if we have a media system that is diverse, where we have different outlets that, while not individually, but together cover a broad array of ideologies, perspectives and viewpoints, isn’t that sufficient? Why would we need every news organizations and journalists to be open to multiple perspectives if the totality of the media system itself is diverse and encompasses MSNBC, FOX, Michelle Malkin, Daily KOS etc?

A great question, and one I see essentially underpinning the difference between hospitality and diversity. I understand hospitality as a responsibility that has at its heart hierarchies in communication power. Some are more powerful and command more attention than others. But while we all have to some extent a responsibility to hospitality, an obligation to listen, those with more power have an even bigger responsibility to carry on their shoulders.

Benhabib argues that journalism at its best does this: “it extends your vision of the world by making you see the world through the eyes of the others.” Towards this goal, we need journalism that embraces hospitality, not just diversity.

The two concepts, hospitality and diversity are related, but not quite the same. A crucial difference is that hospitality requires, demands a “home”. Hospitality is based on a host who serves a guest, who is visiting. The host, recognizing he is at home, and as such is holding power, temporarily reverts the power relationship and serves the guest. Hospitality is based on a hierarchical relationship between two actors. You have to be hospitable to someone. Diversity, in contrast, can exist without a counterpart. A media system can be diverse, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s hospitable.

Take a hypothetical media system that consists of three outlets: one Left, one Right, one Center. From a democratic point of view, is that a desirable media system? Using diversity as a yard stick, it’s pretty decent. Measuring with hospitality, however, a media system where the three outlets never encompass each other’s views is inadequate. In Benhabib’s words, it doesn’t extends our vision of the world by making us see the world through the eyes of the others.

You might still not be convinced. Surely the good citizen can simply visit each outlet and get different perspectives that way, right? No. There are empirical as well as normative arguments why this would not work.

The empirical argument is based on a long line of research that shows that citizens have a hard time living up to the informed citizen ideal. It is unrealistic to expect every citizen to follow the news everyday and read several newspapers. The internet only makes this problem worse by exploding the number of potential outlets. Not to mention that from a global point of view, you theoretically can access the news sites of the world, but really, besides the time, do you have the necessary language skills or the cultural context to understand all the news from the world?

The normative argument then. This one is a bit more complex. But let’s say citizens have the time, the interest, the discipline, the required languages and cultural knowledge to read a wide diverse array of news outlets everyday. Wouldn’t that be perfect for democracy? Depends on what kind of democracy you prefer. There are huge debates about the pros and cons of liberal democracy versus deliberative democracy. In short, whereas liberal democracy sees the primary role of the media to provide information to its citizens, deliberative democracy judges the media on its ability to foster discussion and conversation.

Information versus conversation – which one do you prefer? Liberal democracy, a model of democracy that emphasizes information, is content with a diverse media system and probably does not require a hospitable one. In contrast, deliberative democracy that favors conversation demands more than a diverse information system. Mere information, however diverse, is necessary but not sufficient for a good conversation. That requires hospitality.

Does that mean I prefer deliberative democracy over liberal democracy? Probably. But one can disagree and argue that liberal democracy is more efficient, more pragmatic. It requires less of citizens who have neither the time nor expertise to make complex decisions. But from a pragmatic point of view, it would make more sense to strive for hospitality rather than just diversity. That is to say, by demanding more from the journalistic institution, we lessen the load of the citizen who is already overburdened. Unless you think journalism is not intended for citizens but only the elite, one could make a case for hospitality even when you favor liberal democracy.

I vote for GV Advocacy, because I have long been concerned with questions of censorship and control. I believe the internet has great potential to change and improve the condition and constraints of the public sphere, but that does not mean this will happen by itself – governments that seek to restrict websites such as YouTube, Flickr act out of fear and by doing so severely limit the potential of civil society. 

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

After attending ICA in Chicago then going back to Philadelphia for the 7th Chinese Internet Research conference I helped organize, I will finally have some rest in a few hours once I am done with my public talk at Harvard! 

The talk will be webcast live. Hope you can join me on the interwebs.

Here’s the teaser:

This project attempts to help us understand the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that brings together and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to, “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore.”

Drawing on Global Voices as an exemplar, I argue that we need to move beyond objectivity towards “hospitality” in pursuing the potential of journalism in a networked world. Roger Silverstone defines hospitality as the “ethical obligation to listen.” Indeed, in a world where the internet makes it so much easier for everybody to speak, Global Voices asks us: “The world is talking. Are you listening?” What is ultimately at stake is perhaps best described by Silverstone, who argues that, “it is only by attending to the realities of global communication, but also and even more so to its possibilities, that we will be able to reverse what otherwise will be a downward spiral towards increasing global incomprehension and inhumanity.”

Global Voices shows us that we would do ourselves a disservice by limiting our imagination to the ideal type of journalism from a previous era. Without expanding our imagination, we cannot hope to understand how the internet might alter the constraints of the relationship between journalism and democracy for the better. Indeed, communication scholar James Carey helped us understand that “the meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change.”

The closed third day session “Chinese Perspectives on Internet Governance” is going on now and about to wrap up. Over the last two days, we had provocative presentations and thoughtful conversations. Thanks to all for making this a great conference.

Next year’s Chinese Internet Research conference will be held at Peking University, the first time this conference will be held in Mainland China. No doubt it will be exciting!

Hongmei Li first wants to address the concept of nationalism, which was borrowed from the West by scholars such as Yan Fu, and closely related to issues of racial hierarchy. Many 21st Century nationalists call for the expulsion of Manchurian barbarians to purify the nation. Is it possibly to assert China as a unified nation given that it has 56 ethnic groups, class and gender divisions and the like? If not, why, and what are the differences? Also, who has the power to define national interests and actively promote such an agenda? Jeffrey Wasserstrom and many others have done research on how women have been comandeered for national campaigns that places them in a secondary role. Louisa Schein (author of Minority Rules) that Miao women have been framed in a submissive, feminine role of the idealized minority. What is the desired Tibetan identity for Chinese nationalists? Often nationalism is characterized in terms of inferiority and superiority complexes, and Li asks if the panel has considered it in these terms. Duara, she points out, argues that nationalism and transnationalism are often posited as binary ideas, but interactions and connections can be seen following the Tibetan incident. Communism, as well, was a transnational movement and simultaneously used for nationalist purposes. The distinctions between state and popular nationalism must also be clearly delineated, and Li suspects that nationalist groups are influenced by China’s cyberpolice, which she estimates at 50,000. Finally, she opens the question of the impact of the financial crisis on nationalism and nationalists, and to what extent do nationalists really represent the Chinese public?

Rebecca MacKinnon, in question time, points out that it seems that many papers throughout the conference dance around the fact that China’s public sphere is almost entirely online, and if that was the situation in the U.S., for example, “God help us”, since online discussion often has greater extremes of opinion as a “silent majority” goes about their lives and does not participate. Lu Chen says that HFS participants feel they have a tool not available before to bring to justice those who are outside the reach of the law. Fan Dong points out the government censors both anti-government and pro-government speech. Moderator Ang Peng-Hwa talks about picking up the Chinese constitution in a secondhand bookstore and in its free expression section it actually allows the creation of “big character posters”, and that in some ways this prefigures the sort of expression found on the Internet.

Moral Panics and Nationalism

Examining the Factors that Influence College Students’ Attitude towards Human Flesh Search in Mainland China, LU Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese Cyber-Nationalism: The Case of 2008 Tibet Uprising Discussions on Facebook, Dian PARAMITA, London School of Economics
From nationalism to emerging public sphere: The case of global Olympic torch relay dispute online, FAN Dong, Annenberg School for Communication, USC
Respondent: Hongmei LI, University of Pennsylvania/Georgia State University
Moderator: ANG Peng Hwa, National University of Singapore

Fan uses Dalgren 6 dimensional theoretical framework to do content analysis of a time line of events from the Tibetan incident on March 14 to the Sichuan earthquake in May, which covers three phases, moving from outward to reflective to tentatively cooperative.

Netizens created lists of principles including using DIY slogans and avoiding government ones to create an autonomous image from the state and economic power, believing it would then alter the government’s policy. The exchange and critique of criticizable moral-practical validity claims can be found in YouTube videos, posters and critical evaluations of media reports such as BBC webpages. They often involved humor and juxtaposition.

With this exchange came reflexivity, as both sides, Chinese and Western, became more accustomed to criticism from the other side and more mature. On the other hand, identity building among online nationalists breaks individuals into different categories, and questions other credentials and authenticity (such as asking overseas Chinese “why did you come back? You always said foreign countries were better?)

Domestically, they conceive of themselves as the public sphere. But internationally, their stance is that as the dissenting counter-public.