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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.