global voices, one world

Zuckerberg in an interview:

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 …

“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.

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.”

“.. 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.

I’m reading Fraser and it’s really good. Quote on page 64:

Subordinate groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when they do, they discover they are not heard. [They] are silenced, encouraged to keep their wants inchoate, and heard to say ‘yes’ when what they have said is ‘no.’ [..] many of these feminist insights into ways in which deliberation can serve as a mask for domination extend beyond gender to other kinds of unequal relations, like those based on class or ethnicity. They alert us to the ways in which social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions.

In: Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80.

Reading her quote reminds us how access alone often is not enough for equal communication. Access, of course, is a first prerequisite that is a necessary but not sufficient condition. In this light, one can think about to what degree citizen media empowers or emancipates; that is to say, how being able to blog alone is not enough, one also has to be heard in a voice that does justice to the speaker – a proper voice. This problem gets only more challenging in a global context, where not just social inequalities but also linguistic and cultural, not to mention basic human rights to freedom of speech, are often an immense barrier to any remote possibility for a healthy conversation between different people, groups, cultures in an age of growing interdependence.

why do i study what i study? the video tells you why.

got back from new york yesterday; as always, new york leaves a deep impression. no, it’s more than an impression – it’s a feeling of being alive, as well as, a feeling of belonging. allow me to try to explain why this is.

it’s oddly strange in that way – many sociologists, not in the least Simmel, wrote about the city and the effect it had on human relationships – how the city introduced the idea of a society of strangers, a situation where one can live closely with people you don’t know much about. the city, as a sharp contrast to the small comfort of a town where everybody knows you. but the very comfort can also be confining – whereas the anonymity of the city can be liberating.

there’s another fundamental difference that nyc brings out in me: its diversity. earlier, i read an article that mentioned that there are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t (this statement being strangely meta paradoxical in its own way, of course).

one of the fundamental differences i believe exist that distinguishes people are their ability to deal with chaos, complexity or diversity. in other words, some people thrive in a more open but also more messy environment, while others have more of a tendency towards order. change and status quo; progressivism and conservatism; people who believe things can be better and/or will be better and people who believe in the status quo, or believe everything in the past was better.

some of these differences are confounded by power – those in power often tend to favor the status quo and everything that stabilizes the status quo. the older one gets, the more one tends towards conservatism and order. there is this classic “common sense” knowledge that young people tend to be more progressive and become more conservative over the years, with an interest in decreasing tax rates as one gets older being the main intervening variable. there are exceptions – people in power, who still favor change. if cynical, one can read this in a deterministic way as well, if you believe that these exceptional people in power realize that change is the way to stay in power. but if less cynical, one can read this as those in power realizing its responsibility towards society, to lead. consider how harvard law school is adopting, no, transforming itself, towards a policy of open access.

for that matter, there is literature in innovation research that qualifies two fundamental kinds of innovation: those that are disruptive, and those that are sustaining. models, structures evolve over time that give routine and stabilize our lives. think of how most of what we do, every day, is on autopilot. or for that matter, think of most of what guides society, are established rules that we don’t question.

consider how often we do things because they always have been done that way.
think how often “but this is how we have always done it” is served as a justification.

innovations are sustaining when they make ‘the things that always have been done that way’ more efficient. these are relatively easy to implement. these innovations do not disrupt or destabilize our routines, our work patterns, what we have come to do every day again and again until we don’t know better.

innovations are disruptive when they challenge what we do every day again and again. they are destabilizing when they force us to rethink the things we do because we don’t know better. innovations are disruptive when those who have authority, are in power because of the current routines will challenge, resist and fight back against these innovations.

consider to what degree peer to peer technology is being disruptive to the music industry.
consider citizen journalism being disruptive to what we think of as ‘journalism’.

but also consider the conditions that are more favorable to allow disruptive innovations to be created. it has to be generally open and inclusive – because more generally, those who don’t have anything to lose tend to come up with disruptive innovations – because they are not ingrained in the system and do not have the ‘common sense’ of routine. because they are not in power and have no power to lose; rather, they are more likely to gain from disruptive innovations.

jonathan zittrain has called this condition, this property, “generativity”. he refers to it as a property of a technology. swiss army knives are more generative than a regular butter knife. a computer that can go online is more generative than a standalone computer.

perhaps we can also consider generativity as a property of an ecology, a culture. democracy is a cultural form that has generativity built-in by allowing a certain degree of fundamental change (albeit every four years). obama is showing us this with his explicit focus on and belief in change.

to get back to my example of nyc: the city is more generative than a town. because of its more diverse population, because it allows for more experimentation, because it will find a wider appreciation of things. certain people thrive better than others in a generative environment, those with

• the ability to imagine gains currency in a generative environment.
• the ability to link seemingly disparate things gains currency in a generative environment.
• the ability to bridge clusters of ideas, likewise.

nyc allows me to further develop these abilities, to imagine, to bridge clusters of ideas. to link seemingly disparate things (one look at my recent mixtape shows you what i mean). to allow me to be both dutch and chinese, as well as dutch-chinese and chinese-dutch – as well as to expand what it means to be. that’s what makes me feel at home in nyc (or the internets, for that matter).

Summary of Michael Schudson, “What Is a Reporter?” in Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 228:245.

Schudson is interested in the ontology of the reporter as an occupational type, in other words, ‘what is a reporter?’ He turns to the bibliographies of two exemplary reporters to find an answer to his question, to see what two reporters themselves, Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) and Harrison Salisbury (1908-), had to say when they tried to make sense of who they were and what they did.

Schudson provides us several notions of what a reporter might be. He starts off with the idea that an important part of the answer to the question is that it depends in large part on the audience. Who does the reporter report to? Reading the bibliographies, he goes all the way back to when the reporters were still children, when they first realized their (future) role in society. By focusing on the genesis, he subsequently brings up the notion of reporting as craft and the importance of play and imagination, or as Schudson himself says: “making is not faking, not lying, but neither is it a passive mechanical recording. It cannot be done without play and imagination.” (230)

In contrast, for Benjamin Franklin, journalism was a trade. However, this was certainly not true for Steffens or Salisbury, for whom both reporting was a distinct way of experiencing the world. Steffens, on the one hand, was interested in the universal nature of human kind and looking for general laws, treating its subjects as instances, while Salisbury, on the other hand, resembled more the modern journalist who saw no general laws except perhaps in the instances themselves. For Steffens, reporting was a means to a greater goal, while for Salisbury the only aim was defined within reporting itself, to get better at it. Schudson had several explanations for these differences: first, Salisbury represented an increasing trend towards professionalism in reporting; second, Salisbury perhaps represented a kind of modesty in a world fragmented in more specialized roles; and third, he was part of a growing tradition, no longer a pioneer like Steffens and perhaps thus more modest ambitions. Together, they mark a shift from an individual with a mission, to an individual with a role within a profession that has a collective responsibility.

If reporting is done for an audience, we can consider definitions of reporting by looking at what kind of categories of content were kept away from the audience. (1) The first category is withholding confidential information as noted by sources, what Schudson refers to as short term compromises for a long term commitment; (2) information the reporter simply could not believe it was true; (3) information the reporter knew would not be printed by the editor and (4) the idea that news is only news from a newspaper point of view, but not, for example, the news form the point of view from a sociologist or novelist. News does not offer a totality of view. Finally (5) news that is constrained by competition and camaraderie of other reports

So then, what is a reporter? According to Schudson, “a reporter is someone faithful to sources, attuned to the conventional wisdom, serving the political culture of media institutions, and committed to a narrow range of public, literary expression.” (239)