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.

I was recently asked why hospitality matters. Whether diversity was not enough in itself. That is, if we have a media system that is diverse, where we have different outlets that, while not individually, but together cover a broad array of ideologies, perspectives and viewpoints, isn’t that sufficient? Why would we need every news organizations and journalists to be open to multiple perspectives if the totality of the media system itself is diverse and encompasses MSNBC, FOX, Michelle Malkin, Daily KOS etc?

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.

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.”

It’s been a hectic few days. With the news about the horrible terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the unrest in Bangkok, there is plenty of (bad) news to be concerned about and pay attention to. The role of new technologies and citizen media have been particularly interesting to me, of course, and as such, I sometimes feel a bit like a vulture. Bad news, these days, seems to be good news for my dissertation and research. Nevertheless, it becomes crucial to understand what role citizen media play in news coverage of crisis events such as the Mumbai attacks.

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.

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

many people have written about the relationship newspapers have with blogs. some say blogs are going to replace newspapers (although this is an argument that newspapers people make more than the bloggers themselves do). others say the two can be complementary. yet others are saying bloggers are leeching off, or are parasitic on mainstream media.

at first sight, there is certainly grounds to say bloggers are parasitic on mainstream media. after all, bloggers often link and comment on content that originally appeared in mainstream media, and without them, bloggers certainly would have less to write about.

but let’s reverse the question for a second. instead of thinking of bloggers as being parasitic on mainstream media, let’s turn it around and say that bloggers add value to the mainstream media. a useful analogy can be drawn to open source software, used by many people around the world. we don’t say that users of open source software are parasitic, so why do we say that of bloggers? we also don’t say that programmers who have helped linus torvalds build and develop linux are parasitic on his work. so why can we not think of bloggers as building upon, developing further and extending the work of mainstream media? news, just as software, after all is a public good – the more people use it, the more value it has for everybody.

In an interesting forum on the future of newspapers and the net, hosted by the Britannica that (admittedly, in a to me a bit of a strange twist) picked up blogging, Nick Carr is arguing that the new economics of culture have led to a decline of newspapers.

In quite-to-the-point style, he asks: are newspapers doomed? He points to the newspapers’ continuing decline of circulation and advertising revenue and argues that one phenomenon, among many others, is a driving force: the unbundling of the newspaper. In other words, whereas the newspaper in the past was a collection, a package of content sold to you – a set of daily comics, weather forecasts, classifieds, domestic news, foreign news, sports news, book reviews etc – the newspaper is now being disassembled and sold as separate parts. Think of a stolen car – instead of being sold as a whole – it is often worth more to sell the parts separately. This trend of unbundling has caused advertising revenues to drop – as the audience scatter around the different disassembled, unbundled parts, so do the advertisers.

Unbundling also gives rise to another concern that Carr does not mention: the public no longer is served what I call ’serendipitous’ content – content that you don’t know you would want or could not know in advance that you find interesting. We should not overstate this – many people selectively skim the newspapers or only turn to the sections that they are interested in (sports section ..). But still, if you were bored or had more time, it was only a page turn away to see what the rest of the newspaper had to say. Related, reading the frontpage and other sections of the newspaper often fueled the so-called water cooler conversations – those conversations you have when you run into someone and that creates what Putnam has called social capital.

Carr’s story pretty much ends here and it is a stark and dreadful story. But does the story really ends with the unbundling of the newspaper? I suggest that we should consider the many ways a trend of re-bundling is taking place. We can ask on what principles these acts of re-bundling are taking place. Personal interest is one of them – and it is this principle of self-interest that most people turn to when selecting blogs and other online feeds for their RSS reader. Serendipity can be another principle – and this is the principle that guides Global Voices – how it selects the news it produces. It is trying to give you a story you would not have heard about, or a perspective you would not have considered. In many ways, it is that foreign news section in the newspaper – but instead of a page turn away, it is now a click away. While Carr is painting a depressing picture, the good news is that the potential for serendipity is certainly not much worse off than in the past – is it less effort to click than to turn a page? The bad news is that even that one click might be too much – how do we get people to click? What drives serendipity? Is this something public policy should be involved with and/or be concerned about (one can think of public media taking an active role in this, a la BBC)? One thing for sure is, the story does not end here. Exciting times ahead.

Last weekend I was attending a wonderful conference organized by the Berkman Center and USC Annenberg on participatory media. One of the plenary sessions was moderated by the inimitable Jonathan Zittrain, and as the moderator, he reserved the right to poll the audience at the end of the session. He asked us: “will it be easier to find information in 2013?” Most people raised their hands. And what about those who disagree with that statement? I raised my hand. As the only one. That was, uhm yes, a little bit awkward.

The session came to an end and, as all good conferences, time was running out and I didn’t have a chance to actually defend myself. So I am taking this opportunity to give a rough sketch of what answer I would have given if I had been asked to speak up at that moment:

I too believe it will be easier to find information in 2013. This is without doubt true for anybody who is currently in this room and attending this conference. But will it also be true for everybody else out there?

As David Weinberger eloquently explained: we live in an age of abundance. The way we solve the problem of information overload is through meta-data: in other words, we have information about information; we use information to organize our information. We create tools that will help us create that metadata – tools like social tagging, better search, social networking.

But better tools doesn’t mean that most people will be able to take advantage of it. Eszter Hargittai has done much impressive work on how people actually use links – expertise, her research suggests, is really important in helping people make sense of links – which ones are bad, which ones are good? The irony is that the hyperlink originally was ofcourse conceived to be a tool to help us navigate (literally) through the information. A lot of people just cannot seem to distinguish bad from good links – there is a gap in ‘link literacy’. Now if some people already have trouble using links, can you imagine them using social tagging or other more sophisticated tools? Tools by themselves are not enough to empower people. Left without education, literacy and expertise, the rich will only get richer and the poor only .. poorer.

But let’s accept for the sake of argument that it indeed will be easier. Does easier in this case also mean better? That’s not necessarily the case. As Markus Prior shows in his research on cable television, faced with an abundance of choice, two things will happen: the news junkies will read more news, while the rest will read more entertainment and less news. Ironically, people generally read more news when there is less choice: if there is nothing else, people will read news, but faced with a choice? It’s like the equivalent of having a balanced meal with vegetables, proteine, etc or a meal where it is all-you-can-eat-dessert (and I live in Philadelphia).

So there you go. Even if we develop better tools, for most people, it does not necessarily mean that it will be easier to find information. And even if it does become easier, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily be better.