Having said that, I am very excited about my new job at Google. As most of you probably know, the future of the internet and the networked public sphere is an issue I deeply care about and have dedicated much of my research to. I believe the upcoming period will be a critical juncture in the institutionalization of the internet. Now I am offered the opportunity to translate and apply directly into policy what I have learned over the past few years. Perhaps idealistic, but hopefully also without much illusions, I see it as a chance to “give back” to “the internet”, which has given me so much. In short, I am excited about the opportunities and challenges the policy team and I will be facing, and most of all, I look forward to work with you in my new capacity as policy advisor at Google.

But they’re done now, and the dissertation has been deposited and put online.

A big thank you to a lot of people, but to my advisor, Barbie Zelizer, and the incredible folks at Global Voices in particular.

Here is the abstract:

A Journalism of Hospitality

How would a newsroom look if we could build it from scratch, current technologies in hand? My project answers this question through a comparative study of legacy mainstream professional newsrooms that have migrated online, what I call “adaptive newsrooms”, and two “transformative” newsrooms, Indymedia and Global Voices. In particular, it takes up the challenge of rethinking journalism in the face of new technologies, by analyzing the cultures, practices and people of a new kind of news production environment: Global Voices, an international project that collects and translates blogs and citizen media from around the world in order to “aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online – to shine light on places and people other media often ignore.”

An ethnographic study of Global Voices spanning four years reveals that the internet enables a radical shift in several key facets of news production: its political economy, its sociology and its culture. The Global Voices newsroom, for example, demonstrates how the internet allows for different kinds of newsroom routines that are designed to bring attention to underrepresented voices, whereas it was previously thought routines determined the news to be biased towards institutional and authoritative voices. I argue that these changes in news production challenge us to judge journalistic excellence not only in terms of objectivity or intersubjectivity, but increasingly also in terms of hospitality. Roger Silverstone defined hospitality as the “ethical obligation to listen.” Understanding journalism through the lens of hospitality, the internet presents a unique opportunity as well as poses a radical challenge: in a world where everybody can speak, who will listen? I suggest that in a globally networked world, there continues to be a need for journalism to occupy an important position, but that it will require a process of rethinking and renewal, one where journalism transforms itself to an institution for democracy where listening, conversation and hospitality are central values.

You can also download the entire PDF. (300+ pages, 2+ MB)

I find that the early adopter mentality is widely misunderstood: Journalists going for a sociological angle on the people in line for iPads, for example, focus on a desire for status or attention, or to be first on the block. They completely miss the point. They don’t understand that the desire is for the thing itself and for what it can do; that we imagined this device before it was announced; that we’re constantly bumping up against the limitations of what’s available today; and that when these things finally appear in stores, we say “At last!” And then we buy them, and use them, and immediately get frustrated with its shortcomings and start waiting for the day when the next model comes out.

I hated using my iPhone in public when it was still considered new, and I still do not like using my iPad where other people might see it. You might not believe me, but I really do not care about the status or attention. I just wanna do cool stuff with it.

The quote explains a little bit more eloquently why I care: “we imagined this device before it was announced”. Well, that’s not totally true, I could imagine the device only once I had experienced the iPhone and the iPad was announced by Jobs. But then my imagination took off. I was already going paperless, and this would be the final piece to the puzzle. With the iPad, I now have at all times all my journal articles and academic e-books with me, I can annotate them using my finger, and I can feed these annotations back into a database so I can search for them when I need to write. It beats having to carry around a stack of papers, and it is a relief that I no longer have to go through stacks and boxes of papers just because I misremembered where I read that one particular quote I needed for my paper. That’s not to say that the iPad is perfect (really, what is?). I get the arguments against it (a closed system governed by a system best described as enlightened dictatorship, the case against generativity). But it also is truly transformative for how I manage my research and practice my writing.

People who are still asking “So what is the Ipad for?” or suggesting that it is just a bigger iPhone, even though it now has been out two months? Sorry, but maybe that’s just a lack of imagination.

The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

Why he doesn’t get it:

The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house … For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.

Arendt argued that plurality is the quintessential condition for an active and autonomous human life. It is the recognition that we all share a world, that we are different, and that what we have in common are our differences.

For Zuckerberg to dismiss plurality and fault those who demand it for a lack of integrity …

Facebook’s bottom line seems to be: “If you’re using our service to share intimate details of your life with friends and family, you’ll take whatever we give you, and we’ll change that whenever we want without warning“.

Like I said earlier, this is not so much about privacy, it is about freedom.

I finally decided to leave Facebook.

I won’t lie, that was not an easy decision. In fact, it was really hard. See, Facebook is the only place where all my friends are together. Leaving Facebook is not just quitting a website, but it also means saying goodbye to all my friends. I am afraid I will no longer be invited to birthday parties, see cute pictures of their babies, or be able to find out that they have graduated and congratulate them.

But I have also seen Facebook slowly change over the years, for the worse, a decline that is beautifully documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There are many good reasons why you might want to consider leaving Facebook. One of them is that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, apparently says that he “doesn’t believe in privacy”. Well, he just happens to be the guy who is in charge of the website where I hang out pretty much all the time with my friends. I compare this to being invited to a house party with all my friends, but where the owner secretly records everything we do and say, and tries hard to sell it to advertisers. When he gets caught, we rage, and he says “oops, sorry”. Again and again, like an abusive partner, he promises to clean up his act. At what point do we say “enough is enough”? Should we trust him never to do it again? Not if it is clearly against his financial interest. Why not leave?

Facebook effectively holds our friends as hostages. The ransom is not our privacy, but our freedom. Let me explain: I do have (some) privacy on Facebook. Most of my information on Facebook was not exactly secret. The problem is not privacy: it is not being in control of your own life. Facebook might give us privacy, but always on their terms. They make it incredibly hard to leave. They make it almost impossible to save your messages, photos and profile. We are talking about them refusing to give back our information, our photos, /our/ life! It is almost impossible to leave, so we stay and they will continue to take whatever privacy they feel they can get away with. How much do they feel they can get away with? Let me ask you: how much privacy are our friends worth to us?

Dear Facebook, freedom or friends? That’s not a choice. So I quit. Instead, I plan to write on this blog, twitter, and longer e-mails to friends. It will not be a perfect replacement, but it will have to do until a better option comes along (psst there was life before Facebook!).

Allow me to make a wild analogy, one I believe is not entirely out of left field. Many people know that there is censorship in China. Many people also tell me that 1) the poor Chinese must feel really repressed or 2) they must be okay with it. But if that’s the case, who in their right mind can be okay with censorship? They must be brainwashed.

Ask yourself this: if I decide not to leave Facebook, yet I know they do not care at all about my privacy, what does that mean? How is that different from the people who continue to use the internet in China day in day out despite the prevalent and prolific practices of censorship? This is not a rhetorical question. Of course I realize Facebook is not the Chinese government, but I do think there are similarities between them, in kind although perhaps not in degree. Are you still on Facebook, and if so, why?

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.

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.