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.

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.

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.”

HU Yong, 眾生喧嘩 (The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age), Peking University

the book is written in chinese. about the book title, he thought for a long time for the translation. he used the term, Cacophony, in a positive way. three meanings of this word. in china, internet emabled informed citizens. but in a lot of circumstances, you dont know there is a society. e.g., tangshan earthquake and sars. the appearance of informed citizens is thus a big breakthrough. mass media as the first channel, neican from xinhua news agency as the third channel, letters and visits as the forth channel. internet ecourages the formation of public opinion. internet makes freedom of assembly and association possilbe in china (they are extremely rare in china). such as fans groups and gathering of signitures. internet is not an expressing medium but also an organizing medium. there are two chinas, online and offline, real and virtual. online china is not exactly representation of offline china but it is more true. the true dimensions of china is only reviewed in virtual china. internet becomes a public opinion tool subject to control by various interest groups who have different agendas. a garden becomes a jungle. a war of public opinion is seen online. public opinion in cyberspace is officialy incorporated into the party system, which is good news. e.g., President Hu visited renming net and made a speech. internet breaks down the barrier bt citizens and officials.

four mechanisms – posts replicated on the net, snowball effect; controversial topics and heartbreaking stories catch attention; langauge itself, net speak; …

conclusion – china’s public sphere is established onlne. internet is less regulated than the traditional media. it will certainly help to develop civil society.

YANG Guobin, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, Columbia University

the book is scheduled to officially publish in 2 weeks. inspiration goes to many of the colleagues. yang will read a few passages in the book.

introduction chapter: two misleading images of china internet – control and entertainment. internet-related struggles that is called online activism. a world of carnival, community and contentions. this book is about ppl’s power in the internet age. why is popular contention growing under increased internet control? what cultural forms does online acitivity take? what is the power of online activism as a force of social change?

chapter 7 on online community: utopian realism from anthony giddens. how to understand modernity in an dystopian age. 3 popular images with online communities – image of square, openness; image of home, solidarity; image of martial arts. rivers and lakes refer to a world away from the established social and political world. the heros in this world seek for justice. xia, knight warrior, has been an important part of pop culture. this chapter argues that chinese ppl impose their imagination to the online communities. this imagination has been long embedded in the history. it serves as a critique to the reality.

Jack QIU, Working-class network society: Communication technology and the information have-less in urban China, Chinese University of Hong Kong

first book panel in the circ series. a forth book on chinese telecomm and revolution came up this year too. worked since 2002. 2003 was the first circ. many of the content in the book was presented in circ series. this book grew up along circ.

will show pictures coz internet means dif things for dif ppl. lots of working class, or the info-have-less, are very dif from maoist proletarians and those british working class. the new working class in 21st century. working class is silent online but they are making the tech equipments, they are pursuing a more democratic society.

structure of the book – part i networks materialized, tech diffusion, internet cafe, wireless tech; part ii have-less ppl, not fully class-conscious, most of whom are migrants, the young and the old working class, child labor; part iii class formation, space clustering, classic events.

demonstates a map of this book.

Monroe Price’s comments - market for loyalty. gov plays as a manopoly in the market. we have seen here the efforts to enter the market. altering the structure of the market is what we have seen here. carnation, contest and conquest in katz and dynan’s book media events. geopolitical interaction and china’s intervention in other spaces such as africa.

Q&A

Q1 – how about cultures? Jack – entertainment is among the most important things. working class chinese are so bored that they spend tons of time on online activity such as qq. but the entertainment need is not fulfilled by mainstream media such as cctv. entertainment can serve as a gateway or the alternative tool for creativity. e.g., qq as entertainment and later turned into a social and political mobilization tool later. Yang – much of the internet culture is entertainment. but the social aspect about entertainment is oftne ignored. game communities are also about society. he tries to link the political to other aspects including culture. gamers also have to face censorship.

Q2 – connection bt gamine and other online communities. pseudo real china? Yang – the formation of new identity. Li Yonggang mentioned after sichuan earthquake, games use games to operate relief efforts.

Q3 – rivers and lakes are all about repurtation. Yang – yes, about honor and bravery. online comunity members use langauge to construct certain events. e.g., tianya event of a young girl seeking to save her mother via selling herself. netizens went to her city to verify this case. as soon as one is recognized as xia, he has to follow the rules of containing the honor.

Done!

(Live blogging from the “From Social Network to Social Movement” conference)

What is the role of narrative in mobilizing people? Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Kennedy School starts with Alexis de Tocqueville and tells how he was so impressed with the rich associational life here in the United States, and how participation in associations drove people into relationships with each other, so they could learn about their common interest. Common interest that was the result of learning about each other, not as an aggregation of individual interest – there was a synergistic quality to association. The promise of democracy is an equality of voices for distribution of resources – and while this does not always happen in practice – it does highlight the importance of people coming together with common interest so they can act on it, and thus exerting power. It is crucial that associations are voluntary – they participate not because of coercion.

What makes social movements different from fashion and trends? They are different because they are collective and organized.They are efforts of purposive action, of mobilization, of translation power into action. They are not only about winning the game, but also about changing the rules. They are a hopeful response to conditions being intolerable. They make moral claims. Throughout history, they have been major drivers of political reform.

There is no social movement without leadership. Leadership is to accept responsibility to create conditions that will enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. Key here is uncertainty – there is no leadership needed if things are routinized and going their way – leadership is needed when things break down.

There is the idea that social movements are about one charismatic leader that everybody follows. That is far more myth than truth. Leadership does require a critical density. Marshall believes that command and control organizations require less leadership, as opposed to what he calls commitment organizations, where distributive leadership is crucial. Social movements are models of distributive leadership. What they do? They do five tasks: 1) bring people together around shared values; 2) bring people together in the form of relational commitments – people make commitments to each other; 3) it provides structure for collaboration; 4) it provides strategies – to turn power into outcome and 5) there has to be action on the ground.

Social movements exist in the face of injustice, but there is also a requirement for hope, otherwise no action is possible. People just don’t act and make change without hope. They also don’t act without provocation – people often remember the dream part in Martin Luther King’s speech, but forget the nightmare part he talked about. It is when nightmare and dream come together that action happens.

But what has narrative got to do with this? The subject of narrative is agency. The core mission of narrative is to teach us how to exercise agency. Agency is exercising choice in the face of uncertainty. It’s in conditions when we don’t know, when things are unclear, in novel times of challenges – that’s when agency matters, that’s when we can exercise choice, which is both exhilarating and frightening.

Narrative teaches us how we become agents. The exercise of intentionality occurs under certain emotional conditions – we don’t begin to exercise agency until we experience anxiety, when we have to deal with something but we don’t know how. Anxiety causes us to pay attention.

In the context of social movements, urgency and anger are often stand-ins for anxiety. To get attention, to provoke indignation. How we respond is the next question. If we respond in fear, we will withdraw, freeze, strike back, in general we will not have productive responses. On the other hand, if we are in a hopeful state, we will explore, get more information, learn how to deal with this novelty. So it is crucial whether we experience anxiety from a fearful or hopeful state. Whether we experience it from a state or alienation or empathy, from self-doubt or confidence. Emotive conditions are what facilitate intentionality (Marshall makes a reference to George Marcus’ book, the Sentimental Citizen). Narrative does the emotional work to exercise agency. This is especially critical, when conditions of uncertainty are great or when your agency is in question.

Plot, what initiates plot? Not surprising, it is uncertainty. What makes a plot is the unexpected. That’s when we get engaged – the reason why we get engaged is because we as agents, as human beings, the texture of our being is to cope with uncertainty – big or small. A plot recreates this.

The protagonist allows us to emphatically identify – we therefore get emotive affect, so that it is not just conceptual content – but instead we enter the affective reality of the moment, thus we can learn affectively, not just cognitively. Stories teach not just the head, but through the heart. The moral lesson that comes out – is through experience, and it is not just conceptually. We use stories – to make a point – to cause something to happen.

Stories are not true or false, but they work or not. The affective meaning you try to convey occurs in different kinds of settings. In the context of social movements: they are about creating agency where there have been none. Change does not occur without risk or uncertainty.

Public stories: Moses. Moses asked: Why me? Who are these people? Can’t this wait? Really, right now? Marshall compares this to the first 7 minutes of Obama’s speech – explaining why he has been called, where he comes from, choices his parents made that influenced him. He remind what we as a nation are called to and confronts us with challenge of action required now – through a series of small stories – and couples the challenge with hopefulness so people know what to do.

Stories are about reflection on choices one has made in the past. Retrieving these moments so listeners can experience the significance these stories had for you. Going through specific episodes – this is episodic memory rather than semantic memory – and it’s enhanced by visualization, because it raises affective reality. If you are in public life, and you don’t tell your own story, well, see what happened to John Kerry.

The story of us – is about what constitutes collective identity, and is a shared experience. Social movement leaders tell stories of us, and often draw on established stories to do so. Social movements are not simply a set of relations, nor strategies, nor a set of practices or actions, not just structures – they are narratives. They do the work to craft new identity – and are transcending – they are not just about changing the world, but also changing ourselves – what connects the two is narrative.

—

Please also see the impressive liveblogging of this talk and other panels at this conference by my friend and colleague Corinna di Gennaro

Finally, you can also track this event on twitter with #HLSsocnetworks

What is post-national solidarity? According to Seyla-Benhabib, it is

“about creating the enlarged mentality, by teaching us to see from the standpoint of others, even when we do not agree with them. We extend the boundaries of our sympathy by understanding the conditions of others who may be radically different than us. At its best journalism does this; it extends your vision of the world by making you see the world through the eyes of the others. it informs you, as well as stretching your empathy across time and space. The best kind of journalism has this capacity of uniting the dignity of the generalized other with the empathy for the concrete other.”

From a great interview between Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Seyla Benhabib in the latest issue of Journalism Studies (9.6, 2008, pp 962-970) “On the Public Sphere, Deliberation, Journalism and Dignity”.

Two weeks ago was the first cyberscholars meeting of 2008. The cyberscholars is a group that was originally founded by Urs Gasser and is now a monthly meeting composed of the fellows and affiliates at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the Yale Information Society Project and the good people from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program.

We had some amazing people speak. Benjamin Mako Hill from MIT was the first speaker and talked about the educational value of errors in unexpected places. He has a blog where he documents all these, Revealing Errors. His argument is that when errors occur out of context, they make you realize that software, hardware and computers are not ‘natural’ but are constructed; things can go wrong, errors are man made, just like the actual device is man made. He thinks that errors are useful in showing people they can empower themselves by learning to take control of these devices, of technology. Later on, I had a talk with kxu about whether people /should/ be empowered: what if they don’t want to? We were drawing the comparison to how some people prefer a full manual photo camera where you can adjust all the settings to a full automatic camera that just snaps pictures for you. Is it fair to draw a similar analogy to free software?

The second speaker was Ben Peters, who had a fascinating talk looking into the question why the internet failed in the Soviet Union. His short answer: decentralization. Peters juxtaposes decentralization versus centralization, but more importantly, he also distinguishes decentralized networks from distributed networks. He goes on to show how the mentality of a decentralized structured network was prevalent in many fields and spheres, including how roads, but also the government was set up. His argument is persuasive, but I was also left thinking about the premise of his question. Two questions come to mind: if the Soviet Union had more familiarity with distributed networks, would the internet then have succeeded? Did the internet in the United States succeed because of an existing mentality and institutional culture that was comfortable with the idea of a distributed network? I’m not sure what the answers are; partially because I don’t know any network that comes close to the distributed ideal besides the internet, partially because I’m not sure whether prior familiarity and comfort with distributed networks explains why the internet in the United States took off. In any case, it was an interesting and provocative talk. (Peters also attributes the prior important work done on this topic by MIT historian Slava Gerovitch, who has the brilliantly titled paper “InterNyet“).

I also presented; hope to blog about it in a next post. You can watch the video in the meantime.

The videos of our presentation can be downloaded and viewed on the Berkman Interactive site. It has the videos of Benjamin Mako Hill’s presentation, Ben Peters’s talk and my own presentation on Global Voices and hospitality.

“How can we best explain the differences between altruists and the paradigmatic self-interested individuals who exist at the heart of disciplines as wide-ranging as psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, and rational actor theory? The most important and consistent difference centers on systematic similarities in perspective. All altruists have a particular way of seeing the world, and especially themselves in relation to others. All the altruists I interviewed saw themselves as individuals strongly linked to others through a shared humanity.”

In Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity, 1996. page 213.

What explains ethical political action? Why do certain people do things for other people? The important insight Monroe gives us is that self-interest and reason are unable to give us a comprehensive answer to why people perform acts of altruism. This is not an insignificant finding, since a wide range of scholarly disciplines have as a fundamental starting point that humans are rational actors, and act out of self-interest (economics, political science, etc). Instead of self-interest, she proposes to consider perspective as a crucial variable for explaining altruism. Perspective, as one’s self in relation to others, not merely one’s sense of self.

One can then proceed to ask how journalism contributes to a larger understanding of the world; in other words, what role does journalism play in forming and shaping the view we have of the world, of ourselves, of others, and of ourselves in relation to others? What does it mean for perspective formation that objectivity is the main guiding principle for news making? Herbert Gans has long advocated for a “multiperspectival” approach to news making, rather than objectivity. How are alternative and citizen media different in this regard, and what potential might they offer for changing and improving our perspectives?

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.