global voices, one world

“.. that what makes conversation democratic is not free, equal, and spontaneous expression but equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules for discussion, and a set of ground rules designed to encourage pertinent speaking, attentive listening, appropriate simplifications, and widely apportioned speaking rights.”

From Michael Schudson, “Why Conversation is Not the Soul of Democracy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997), 297-300

A(nother) great piece by Michael Schudson, although its title might be a bit misleading. I’d say he’s not necessarily arguing against conversation, but making sure we don’t take its role in democracy for granted. As the quote shows, he insists that for conversation to play an important role in democracy, it has to be worked hard for – there is nothing spontaneous about quality conversation.

I do wonder though – is any conversation that does not necessarily have all the ideal requirements Schudson sets out any less democratic? (equal access to the floor, equal participation in setting the ground rules, attentive listening, etc) We might want to think about what a minimum threshold could be for democratic conversation to be considered as such.

James Bohman stresses the importance of such an exercise. Thinking about what would constitute a minimum threshold for a political system to be considered democratic, just and free from domination, he coins the idea of a “democratic minimum”: the capability to initiate deliberation and thus democratic decision-making processes. But as we see from the above, even Bohman’s absolute minimum requirement to be able to initiate deliberation is not a simple or straightfoward matter.

In practice, no conversation is ever equal, whether it comes to access to the floor, or having a part in determing the rules of conversation. Starting with the simple choice of language. Growing up as a son of Hong Kong immigrant parents in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – I learned the lesson of how undemocratic conversation can be, especially in multicultural societies. Conversations in public were always an away game for me. And again, being an international student in grad school in the United States, I don’t have the luxury of enjoying a home game during discussions and conversations. What often aggravates this is that the opposite side often presumes conversation is equal, unaware that there is a home/away game difference. And therefore not quite capable to “listen to silences”. These are soft, rather than hard, constraints on speech – but unlike hard measures like censorship, they are also harder to spot and less visible. Not only are they undemocratic, to the untrained eye, it is also invisible that they are undemocratic.

What to do? Here Roger Silverstone’s idea of hospitality is useful. Instead of imagining a talk being conducted out in an equal and open field, hospitality signals to us that conversation takes place in the particularity of someone’s home, with a host and a guest. The host, out of hospitality, aware that this is home, becomes temporarily the servant of the guest, in order to make the guest comfortable. What we see here is a situation where the one holding the power, being aware of it, temporarily makes an effort to subvert the power relationship with the other, in order to create a situation where a democratic conversation can take place.

What I am thinking hard about: while the notion of hospitality is universal, the rules of hospitality are not. Each place, each group and each culture has its own specific rules of what constitutes hospitality. What we need in this current day and age is a way of making these rules of hospitality, these protocols, be able to talk to each other, to be interoperable. Ideas, suggestions, known examples and experiments in the broadest sense are welcome.

Some of you may know that I am doing ethnographic research for Global Voices, which includes becoming a participant myself. I finally cleared all hurdles to do so, including defending my proposal and getting approval from IRB (and this experience is probably enough fodder for another blog post).

Monumental: I just finished drafting my first post for Global Voices. Okay, so it is not exactly my first official blog post, since my contribution is part of a larger blog post that is a round-up of the issues discussed in the year 2008 in the Chinese blogosphere, with me being responsible for summarizing the part about the poisonous milk scandal. Nevertheless, if I did nothing majorly stupid, my first words will soon appear on the Global Voices website. Exciting!

Some thoughts on this first experience: it takes quite some time to write a thorough and comprehensive blog post. While I was just summarizing existing blog posts, it still took me a few hours to read them, to get the gist of them and string up a narrative that connects them all in a compelling manner (well I can hope it is somewhat compelling). A more regular post will most likely take more time since I did not have to do much original research because this was a round-up post.

I am also starting to learn how to get my ‘voice’ right for Global Voices (no pun intended). That is to say, how do I write in such a way that my post fits the ‘house style’, e.g. does not stray too much off the kind of style that is established there, while maintaining my own personal edge to it. Every publication has its own style – I write quite different on my personal blog, or on my professional blog here, or when I write for a journal targeted at a general audience, or compared to a paper I write that I submit to an academic journal. There is a style guide, but I expect I will learn how to write in the Global Voices ‘voice’ mostly through interaction with the editor and by reading how my colleagues/friends write for Global Voices.

Most of you know that I am writing my dissertation about Global Voices. They are currently looking for donations that will help them sustain the incredible valuable and good work they do. I ended up donating $77 dollar – why $77? It’s my birth year. It’s a small sum with a symbolic value that I hope will encourage others to chip in as well.

Why should you donate?

Donating to Global Voices helps tell them that they are doing a good job. The value here is symbolic, rather than material. This is not unimportant – they would never have gotten so big if most of their work was not ‘free’, free as in volunteer labor. Getting appreciation for the volunteer work you do is incredibly important. Vivian Zelizer has called this the crowding-in effect of money on volunteer work.

Donating to Global Voices helps them stay a bit more independent from big donors. And allow them to write about topics they think are important, as opposed to topics that will attract the biggest crowd. The question of how media organizations get funded is not a trivial one. Global Voices get funded through a combination of support from foundations, corporations and individual donations. Political economy, particularly work by scholars like Robert McChesney and Oscar Gandy to name a few, has pointed out how money shapes what media writes about, and what not. In a perfect world, media organizations would all be funded by many individual donations, so that they can maintain independence and write about topics without constraint. In reality, media organizations will often not write about topics that might offend their owners or advertisers. Also, they will write especially about topics that will get the attention of a lot of audiences in order to attract more advertisers. These are topics people might want, but not necessarily what they need. Consider how much words are devoted to Britney Spears and the iPhone, which are great topics, but they tend to drown out other regions, areas and topics.

To sum up, giving a donation is a good idea because they are great people that do important work nobody else is doing – we want to make sure they can continue to do this work as well as let them know we appreciate the work they do. Please consider making a donation.

Besides donating, there is another way to help and show your appreciation: by spreading the word. They have made some cool – and cute – badges you can use to put on your blog.

Craig Calhoun asks the question what the future of the newspaper is. As the president of the Social Science Research Council, he commands the awesome super power to be able to convene a discussion with many notable names in sociology and communications research responding to his question. (hat tip Rasmus)

UPDATE: the question could not be more timely, given today’s news about the seemingly pending bankruptcy of the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, LA Times).

It’s been a hectic few days. With the news about the horrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the unrest in Bangkok, there is plenty of (bad) news to be concerned about and pay attention to. The role of new technologies and citizen media have been particularly interesting to me, of course, and as such, I sometimes feel a bit like a vulture. Bad news, these days, seems to be good news for my dissertation and research. Nevertheless, it becomes crucial to understand what role citizen media play in news coverage of crisis events such as the Mumbai attacks.

Global Voices, the subject of my dissertation, has been doing a great job in providing us with information when the news about Mumbai broke. Immediacy is a crucial aspect of news coverage in crisis events and something citizen media in general and Global Voices in particular are well positioned to do. My colleague and friend Ethan Zuckerman points out that the well-connected social and technical infrastructure in Mumbai was instrumental in enabling bloggers and twitterers to provide a wealth of information upon an instant’s notice. In addition, Global Voices’ and especially Neha’s familiarity and insider knowledge of the social media space gave them a good sense of which sources to turn to and that had a reputation of being credible. This expert knowledge is particularly important for a quick response when one finds itself having to navigate amidst an explosion of information that erupts in a sudden crisis event such as the Mumbai attacks.

CNN International referred to Global Voices as the website to go to for further information when the news first broke. Global Voices is well positioned because it possesses this wealth of insider knowledge. That in turn can be attributed to the network structure of the Global Voices organization, where expertise, authority and responsibility is largely located in the edges, with the bloggers, much more so than in a command-and-control hierarchy of a traditional news organization. This fluid network structure based on volunteers allows them to act and respond much faster than other organizations in the case of events that are unpredictable and unscripted.

Furthermore, Global Voices quickly became a central hub in the network of social media. It set up a special coverage page indexing and linking to the different places to turn to for more information, while also as the first stop to get a constantly updated overview of what was going on. Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin was fulfilling a similar role as a key node in the blogosphere. Glynnis MacNicol of Fishbowl suggests that citizen media have become one step closer to mainstream media. Jay Rosen (through Twitter) thought it was notable that the reliance of the mainstream media on citizen journalism was without the “is this journalism?” hysteria this time around. 

Is this the coming-of-age of citizen journalism? CNN seems to think so. The fact that mainstream media no longer find it controversial to point its audience to citizen media websites such as Global Voices seems to indicate so. Both Clay Shirky and Vincent Mosco made the argument that technology only has become truly important when it has become trivial and banal. In other words, when technology’s so normal, so plain that we don’t even notice any longer that we are using it. Techcrunch, however, finds it noteworthy that news of Mumbai first broke on Twitter. So maybe it is not quite banal yet, but how long will this remain to be newsworthy? 

Where to go from here? Given the incredibly wired infrastructure and digital literate people in Mumbai, Gaurav Mishra suggests that there was really surprisingly little original reporting from citizens. Perhaps that’s the next challenge.