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.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

blogging delivered by att

Mark Jones, global community editor at Reuters, has a fabulous post on whether blogs have to be opinionated or not, suggesting that most top blogs are actually more about providing information than giving an opinion.

Way back when, when blogs first appeared on the scene, I remember the excitement about blogging being a personalized filter for the web. Literally, a weblog would log what a person was browsing on the web, linking to interesting sites with maybe a line or two of commentary and description. Weblogs were highly personal – the initial promise was that if you found a person similar to you in taste, you could follow this person’s weblog and you would likely be offered links to websites you might find interesting but otherwise would not come across yourself. As Mark Jones argues, the top weblogs still follow this spirit of sharing the best of the web.

As weblogs evolved, and more people joined the fray, the blog as a medium turned more towards a style resembling “writing an e-mail to the world” (as overheard from David Sasaki). Where people share their stories with the world, however mundane or exciting. You might call this the point where blogs where no longer solely about information (if they were ever) but increasingly about narrative, story and opinion.

But to think about blogs as information or opinion misses part of the picture. Blogs are also about conversation and communication. At one point, comments as a function of weblogs became indispensable to the idea of a blog, that is to say, a blog has to have comments, and those who don’t are the exceptions. Blogs evolved into a medium where conversation and communication became important narrative forms, not just information and opinion. They became a two-way mode of communication, not just one-way. Unfortunately, spam comments largely drowned out most conversation a blog was fostering (my ratio of spam to real comment is maybe 99 to 1, I’d have to check my Akismet stats). Conversation also started to flow to more private and less public venues – where it is more clear who you are talking with (not just talking with ‘the world’), venues such as Facebook and Twitter.

Paul Boutin from Wired argues that this means blogging is dead. But blogging is changing – it is true that some of the earlier things you would do with blogs are increasingly moving to other venues – “bookmarks + comments” is now delicious, while “immediate comments” is now twitter and where “sharing with friends” is moving to facebook. So what are blogs these days? Robert Scoble succinctly states in the Wired article that he keeps his blog mostly for long-form writing. Long-form writing? That’s fascinating. We have come full circle. Blogging used to be about links, comments and immediacy – that is twitter now. Journalism was/is about long-form in-depth writing. What Scoble suggests is that blogging is increasingly moving into this space. Where twitter is now the new blogging, blogging is now on its way to become the new journalism.

EDIT: the spam to “ham” (real comment) ratio is not 99 to 1, but more like 999 to 1. Crazy.

“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”.

“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?

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.

Follow the Summit on twitter, irc (#globalvoices on freenode), liveblog, video stream, facebook, flickr, and slideshare (I am sure I am still missing some!).