“It is a new story, there was never one quite like it before” Moments in Media History

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This week, I have learned effective means of  encoding criticisms of repressive governments, as well as how to distribute these messages in a distributed, non-hierarchical way that avoids the original source being located.  I have also become enlightened about the potential of individual citizens to transform a new technology into an alternative channel of communication, in contravention of local laws.  Finally, I’ve been reminded of the gap between the visions of the high-tech industry produced during economic bubbles, and the realities that they present for consumers.

All in a week’s work for a scholar of contemporary social media?  No, this week I’m reading communications history, which is my favorite way to reflect on the significance of changes to mediations of society, past and present.  The first example above is useful for thinking about what’s new about WikiLeaks and participatory media:  as Robert Darnton describes, when the Parisians of the Ancien Regime were forbidden to publish newspapers or anything containing news of the king, they created novels and songs that buried the un-knowable knowledge in rhyme and anagrams.  Because the songs changed every time someone sang them, the police were never able to find the “original” songwriter.  Instead they found a web of relationships that they tracked through tiny scraps of paper. (Note to student readers – we’ll discuss this next week.  Hopefully no spoilers here)

And lest we become too excited about the “single person organizations” facilitated by participatory culture and open-source, Susan Douglas reminds us of the popular furore about the “radio boys” in the first decade of the 20th century, when young men (note, never women, and see some of Susan’s later work) built their own crystal radio sets and formed an international brotherhood that also helped them to gain jobs and legitimacy in the new industrial economy – but also resulted in them breaking, and then changing, wireless transmission laws.  She also describes how the radio industry itself was a product of boom and bust, much like the Wi-Fi networking boom of the early 2000s.  Throughout the history of radio in America is a familiar narrative about innovation, progress, and American values.  There’s also a strong sub-plot in which the same rugged individualist inventors seek monopoly control, and the people struggle for rights to the airwaves.

Now I’m not saying that there’s nothing new under the sun.  As I wrote last time, some of the key things that has changed since the Ancien Regime and even since America in the 1900s are the structures of power.  18th century Paris was slowly industrializing but still shaking off feudal relationships and the chains of absolute monarchy.  19th century America invented broadcasting – and with it, the “mass public” of undifferentiated consumers as well as the monopoly communications companies that served them, and made money from connecting content and carriage.

The point I’m trying to make here is that every story is simultaneously an old story and a new story.  We keep remaking the world. Industrial and post-industrial human societies have amazingly persistent narratives of technological progress as positive, and individual innovation as the motor of that progress.  But beyond, and under these narratives are our sometimes scurrilous means of making do, speaking truth to power, putting status in the system, whatever you like. These small actions make changes:  they become part of the bigger stories.  And in order to see them, we have to be able to see both forward, and back.

* the title quotation is from Harper’s Weekly, January 30, 1909, and quoted in the always-excellent Inventing American Broadcasting by Susan Douglas (1987, p. 200)

Theorizing WikiLeaks and New Journalism. Updated.

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Inspired by David’s comments and this slideshow by Charlie Beckett, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the relationship between WikiLeaks and the mass media.  Charlie argues that Wikileaks is “new” because it disrupts networked forms of power. Certainly it points out the difficulty in establishing a binary distinction between “old media” and “new media.” Journalism has been destabilized by WikiLeaks, but it’s also been reinvigorated, as this Columbia Journalism Report article explores through its discussion of the working relationship between Julian Assange and the newspapers that published the diplomatic cable leaks.

Given this complex relationship, perhaps some more nuanced theory is required.  I’m starting to think that the media scandal that we’re experiencing is an example of what Galloway and Thacker describe as “exploit” – which is the event, within a network, that destroys the power of the network.  Their 2007 book The Exploit: A Theory of Networks argues that decentralized networks do not necessarily route around control; instead, they have their own logics of control, which can be most effectively subverted by an “exploit” or disruption from within. The DdoS attacks that have been propagated both by opponents and purported supporters of Wikileaks are examples of exploits, meant to undermine the function of a network’s control, or what Galloway elsewhere identifies as “protocol”. Galloway and Thacker write:

To be effective, future political movements must discover a new exploit. A whole new topology of resistance must be invented that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in relation to power centres. . . .The new exploit will be an ‘anti-web’ (2007, p. 22)

Behind the web, the network doesn’t look as well-determined as a form of control or organization. Previous theorizations of emergent social and ontological forms have included Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the appearance of rhizomatic forms of organization and cultural expression, as distinct from tree-like forms. The rhizomatic form has been used to explain tactical media which in the networked age has included Indymedia and it’s open access and open source journalism. In this case though, a more apt metaphor might be the swarm, where particles are interconnected but autonomous, and where the direction of movement is influenced by a larger law or principle of collective intelligence. Galloway and Thackeray thus identify the swarm as the future of the control structure now enacted by protocol.

Galloway and Thackeray argue that the network is merely a condition of possibility for the operation of protocol, which can direct control around the network. Using the exploit (if I understand this correctly) is the way of disrupting the management system that is associated with the network. Discovering holes in existing networks can thus be a way of creating change. This is one thing that WikiLeaks has effectively done; by identifying the logic of control underlying both secrets and their media representations. The exploit in this case occurs on several levels at once. First, it facilitates the power of the swarm by hosting leaked information. Second, it takes over the mass media by slowly and dramatically leaking information which is subject to editorial control both by WikiLeaks itself and by mass media journalists. The mass media is still fulfilling its function, but its logic of control has been undermined – perhaps this is something like the way a zombie computer is mobilized by a botnet – or an organism that has suffered a neurological virus (gesturing at my previous attempt to frame WikiLeaks as a parasite).

The WikiLeaks’ “exploit” is thus more effective than it would be were it less well integrated with the mass media’s networked forms of power. Indeed, WikiLeaks is not itself rhizomatic. It is organized, and with a carefully planned interventionist strategy. It has a figurehead who has acted as a focal point for the media while the real work of undermining state control of information carries on. With the complicity of newsrooms, WikiLeaks intervenes in the power structures behind international news.

The exploit, if this is what it is, disrupts the existing logic of networked control and allows the swarm to intervene in the protocols underpinning news production. This is precisely why it has been so effective.  It is a hack – in the non-technical sense.  It uses the rules of journalism to break journalism.

As I’ve been thinking about this more, I am more taken by how the exploit, or hack, (yes, the noise in the system) has disrupted several things in several different ways.  It’s disrupted the pretense of secrecy around government information.  It’s exploited the same network of influence that is normally responsible for filtering government scandals and transforming them into headlines.  And the DDoS attacks by Anonymous,  whether pointless or amplificatory or dramatic also exploited protocol systems established to govern the web.  So there is an exploit within the technical governance level as well as an exploit within the media system. Of course, WikiLeaks’ own resilience through its web presence  is also the result of an exploitation of the network, and of the reproducibility of digital content.

When constructing the WikiLeaks case, then, it’s tempting to come up with a way of accounting for the different kinds of interventions made in technical, policy, media, and governmental networks.  Despite the fact that I’ve used this post to think through how to use the “exploit” to do this, I’m not convinced it’s the only way.  Using Milton Mueller’s 2010 Networks and States might be a way of framing the aspects of the case focused on governance by technology – but Mueller has little understanding of journalism and so wouldn’t be able to comment on the shift in power relations in that area.  So far, most commentators in this area have focused primarily on one aspect of WikiLeaks, often from one philosophical perspective.  I’m wondering if it might be more fruitful to think of WikiLeaks as a kind of prism for thinking through how (or if) exploits take place in similar ways across different kinds of networks.  We may find that the case is less significant than we thought.

New Media Power, redux

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So now that Anonymous, the hacker agglomerate that gathers on 4chan messageboards but that remains anonymous, online, and multiple has launched Operation Payback, and now that Visa.com has gone down under a denial of service attack, now that the companies are losing money and business because individuals can’t access their websites, should we declare that new media power wins the day?

Or should we instead notice that new media power works the other way around as well:  the WikiLeaks group has been booted off Facebook, and the Visa situation was sparked by Ebay’s PayPal cutting WikiLeaks off.

David Weinberger argues we should be “standing with the net.” We should definitely be standing for freedom of expression.  What we need to understand is that the same thing that makes the internet a platform for freedom also makes it powerful in a way that we haven’t seen yet on a large scale.  Yes, we understand that state barriers are dissolving and individual networks are becoming ever more important.  But is this the first major case of new media power?

Mass Media Parasite. WikiLeaks and New Media Power

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Everyone, including Umberto Eco, has now weighed in on the impact of Wikileaks.  Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens have advanced a set of hypotheses about WikiLeaks.  Aaron Bady has identified the cybernetic obsessions of Julian Assange.  Blogs, newspapers, and the beloved BBC are licking their chops talking about new media and the seemingly unstoppable drip of scandals and secrets over the internet, and the counterattacks depriving WikiLeaks of hosting, funding, and Julian Assange’s freedom.  But I think that the narrative thus far has focused too much on the dichotomy between new media openness and the enclosure of old media, state power, and secrecy.  There’s actually something else happening – a shift in power that depends on new media power’s parasitism on mass media.

Through the summer, internet scholars, security specialists and hacktivists gleefully discussed the tidbits of scandal and deluges of data that WikiLeaks released.  This ranged from Sarah Palin’s e-mail to thousands of pages on the US involvement in Afghanistan.  As others, including Julian Assange himself have identified, the goal of WikiLeaks was partly to open up the information structures of conspiracies, to defang ministries of secrets by revealing their secrets to all.  This goal, and its execution, is an exquisite representation of the distributed nature of power in a network society.  Power cannot be exerted only from above: someone can glean information, post it to a wiki, and *presto* the information is openly available, undermining state power and revealing its illegitimacy.  This is WikiLeaks reconfiguring media power – and redefining media democracy.

Beginning in July, there were attempts to undermine the effectiveness of this counterpower.  One of the features of distributed forms of power is that it is difficult to censor them using strategies designed for broadcast or more centralized forms of distributing information.  As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, when such conventional strategies fail, the strategy is often to take out the individuals – since even though communication networks can be self-healing, individuals who hold important positions in small organizations are not.

But this week’s events, which have escalated far enough that WikiLeaks is the top evening news story, reveal something interesting about why this exercise of new media power is so effective:  it is a parasite on the mass media, and through the mass media, it blows open many of the power structures established around both information (as Assange points out) but also communication.

Whereas in July the leaked information about Afghanistan was so voluminous that only a few media stories broke, this month’s leaked cables were sent out to selected media sources including the Guardian, Das Spiegel and Libération, creating dozens of headlines and well-written primary sources that trained investigative journalists have been investigating.

The mass media then, has been the host for the WikiLeaks parasite, which, like a virus, is transforming the building blocks of the media organism.  The journalists salivate at the leaks, and publicize them.  This keeps the new media power in the mass media sphere, while simultaneously discrediting them. As Aaron Bady writes,

The way most journalists “expose” secrets as a professional practice — to the extent that they do — is just as narrowly selfish: because they publicize privacy only when there is profit to be made in doing so, they keep their eyes on the valuable muck they are raking, and learn to pledge their future professional existence on a continuing and steady flow of it. In muck they trust.

WikiLeaks, as long as it slowly drips muck towards mass media journalists, is the parasite living on the host.  But it is also making the host change its shape.  It is making the mass media ask, even as it publishes the WikiLeaks cables, what journalists should do.

More importantly, the WikiLeaks story, with the help of the mass media press, is revealing that the relationship between new media and mass media (not to mention diplomacy) has entered a new phase.  Perhaps the release of the cables will indeed destroy the “invisible government” of corrupt secrecy, as Assange wanted.  But it cannot do this without the mass media.

I am not alone in thinking that this week, and this case, will likely define a key moment in the future history of media, information, and democracy.

Where do good ideas come from?

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If you’re a new reader here, you might wonder why I’m not posting here as regularly as I used to.  There are several reasons.  First, I’ve just finished my first term of full-time teaching, and I’ve been spending a lot of time working on ideas with the students in my seminars.  Second, and perhaps because of this, I’m feeling like a lot of my ideas are wearing out.  Rereading posts from a few years ago, I recognize shapes of big ideas that are still sailing through my consciousness.  I still think they’re good.  I just don’t know that I have all that many new ones.

I’ve been wondering this for years:  do we only get one (or two) really good, big ideas in our lives?  Where do they come from?  What do you do when your ideas run out?

Starving the Future

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 I walked in the largest “student” protest in generations yesterday.  Around 50,000 people walked through central London. Although we walked peacefully, I suspect that many people carrying signs and filling the streets were angry.  Some were angry about having to go into debt to get a university degree, some were angry at having voted for an unbreakable promise that was broken, and some, like me, were angry because government, the one we voted for, has starved the future.

Cutting core funding to education eliminates one of the key investments in future innovation and economic growth.  Like funding to the arts, in the short term education funding creates jobs and promotes sectoral growth, but in the long term it also contributes to better decisionmaking, governance, and economic and political strategy.

The anger shared by the thousands of protesters and perhaps even the hundreds that engaged in civil disobedience can be generalized as anger at starving the future.  ‘Austerity’ measures suffered more by the vulnerable are saddening, but even more so when presented with the government’s seeming lack of hope or enthusiasm for the future.  Without investment in education, who will think?  Who will lead?  Who will decide?  Will these core social values be privileges accorded only to the financial and social elite?

If not, social action might be necessary — as  K-Punk notes,

 “This is definitely not the time to recline into the leftist version of capitalist realism, the defeatist counterpart to the Bullingdon club’s bullishness. Now is the time to organise and agitate. The cuts can provide a galvanising focus for an anti-capitalist campaign that can succeed. Protests in these conditions won’t have the hubristic impotence of anti-capitalist ‘feelgood feelbad’ carnivals and kettles. This is shaping up to be a bitter struggle, but there are specific, determinate and winnable goals that can be achieved here: it isn’t a question of taking a peashooter to the juggernaut of capital.”

In other words, it’s time to fight for the future.

Policy-based Evidence-making

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Like many of my colleagues across the UK, I’ve been in a state of shock for the past few weeks, reeling from the proposals in the Browne report for the massive restructuring of academia, which includes shifting education from being funded as public good, with benefits accruing to society as a whole, to being funded as a market, where students act as rational consumers and “competition drives quality.”

Beyond the fact that this strategy is weak and technocentric, as John Naughton suggests, it is also problematic in another way.  We KNOW that public goods do not accrue using the logic of the market.  We KNOW that students don’t act as rational consumers.  Thus, this is a proposal made entirely on ideology, not on evidence.

This means that instead of making evidence-based policy, we are going to start seeing policy-based evidence.  In a mad rush to make reality conform to narrow assumptions, it’s quite likely that the actual benefits of public education will stop being measured.  Society won’t just be weaker and thinner, we won’t necessarily even know about it.

History provides numerous lessons about how tenacious policy-based evidence-making can be.  For example, Marilyn Waring has proven that economic success (even of developed nations) has depended on unpaid labour, often done by women.  She calls the systematic lack of measurement of this labour the “patriarchal economic paradigm.”

Canada’s census will stop measuring unpaid labour, under new rules made by its Conservative government.  In a Toronto Star article, Waring comments on this decision:

“I see this mirrored in so many conservative governments in the post-recession period,’’ says Waring. “They want to rule according to ideology not according to evidence. So one of the most important things they can do is to obliterate evidence so they can operate on the basis of propaganda.’’

From higher education to labour force statistics, the public is going to have to start paying attention.  All governments would like to make decisions based only on their ideologies.  But responsible ones use evidence to check that ideology and prevent it from having too much influence.  Beware of policy-based evidence-making.

The Royal Mail Internet? Ofcom and Postcomm merge

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This morning the UK government published the Postal Services Bill, which details how the regulatory authority for the postal sector has been transferred to Ofcom.  The joint statement from the two agencies blandly notes that the two regulators are working together to ensure continuity in their regulatory activities.

But how, exactly?  As governments around the world have noticed by separating postes and telecoms (although some anachronisms remain)  communications systems have not been similar to postal systems for over a century (let’s say, since the telegraph).  Converged media in the Internet age is no Royal Mail.

Given that the government MUST know this, I can only conclude that saddling Ofcom with an unrelated set of regulatory duties is a preliminary action in advance of winding down the entire regulator.  And then what?  The government may want perfect deregulation, but radio spectrum allocation, network neutrality and citizen’s rights to communicate (not to mention broadcast content !) will not manage themselves.

UPDATE! It appears that one of the functions that will be changed is the review by Ofcom of Channel 3 TV licenses – so effectively removing the public service broadcast requirement and allowing the Minister of Culture much more direct control over new TV licenses.  Though I’m no broadcast TV expert, this deregulation agenda seems quite similar to that of the USA in the 1990s . . . which led to more media consolidation, rather than a diversity of voices.

The Real Contribution of Sharing Culture

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A historian from the future is perusing my library shelf.  She leafs through some books, scrolls through some PDFs.  Hm, she thinks “they were really obsessed with sharing.  Here’s a study of how sharing software code changed the software industry.  Here’s a book about how sharing wireless networks led to new ways of providing communications access.  And here’s a whole folder full of articles and books about the culture of the time, describing people sharing images, and ideas, more quickly and more easily than they could have before.  But I don’t understand – what was so important about that kind of sharing?  It’s fine to share media that are stored in a format that makes them instantly reproducible at extremely low cost, but how did this change their cuture?”

My imagined future historian is struggling with determining how the low-barrier to entry sharing that is so central to digital culture might have broader and more distributed cultural effects.  Sharing software code is easy: it can be duplicated perfectly and used over and over.  There’s a magic to this kind of sharing – everyone can use the information, without diminishing the original source.  But using this kind of sharing as a model for digital cultre is perhaps risky.  Sometimes there are physical barriers, as in the case of wireless – it’s easy to share connectivity, but it’s harder to do in a way that doesn’t diminish the amount of bandwidth.  Sharing culture (videos, images, ideas) has happened forever.  The difference now is that ideas in the form of data are much more easily available, and easy to manipulate.

So far, our historian concludes that the success  sharing is intrinsically related to the properties of digital data; either its reproducability or the low barriers to participation that plentiful data provide.  But she observes something else – that we are fascinated by the culture of sharing even when it doesn’t have anything to do with these properties.  When the barriers are high, and the objects physical.  That explains this recent report by Latitude Research, which investigates whether sharing online makes people more likely to share offline.  They conclude that online sharing does inspire people to share offline – citing examples such as Freecycle, which I’ve used to give away various cumbersome household objects.  They also argue that people are willing to share “office space, travel accommodations, textbooks, kids clothes, parking spaces, garden plots, private planes, camera lenses, luxury handbags, boats, household items, and more“.  It’s not just stuff that we feel we want to share – it’s knowledge as well.  My research on community wireless revealed that wireless groups can be incubators for policy change and knowledge exchange, even when they don’t succeed at connecting their communities.

But, my historian asks, “what’s distinctive about this, now?  People have shared forever.  Digital culture does not inspire us to lend our neighbour a drill.”  She goes to the park, sits down and thinks about what happened in (our) time:  Global restructuring of capital kept people in work, made cities more cosmopolitan, and changed the likelihood of meeting one’s neighbours.  Formal education systems became more rigorous.  Major financial institutions failed.  Across all of this continued the practices that were first associated with digital media.  It almost began to seem as if digital media made sharing possible.

It hasn’t, of course.  An economy based on shared code has emerged because of the properties of code, the norms surrounding its production, and the cultural shift that our historian is investigating.  But one of the things that she’s observing is that these norms, and this culture, are powerful, and impacting a set of things from “open” movements to “open source hardware” to “coworking” and “hacklabs” that are not exactly new but which have a new cultural inflection.  In investigating the opportunities and limits of these norms and culture, she has more than enough to work on.  Doesn’t she?

Internet at Liberty

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I’m in Budapest at the invitation of Central European University and Google, at a conference of activists called “Internet at Liberty.” The conference features discussions about the possibilities and limits of free speech on the internet. Given its main sponsors and its topic, I wanted to think carefully about how the conference was positioning both the internet and -because it’s such a weighty term – liberty.

First, liberty comes across as being about liberal democracy and economic liberalization. These are connected in the internet space: liberal democracy underpins the development of the internet as a medium and as a (commercial) platform, and the development (democratization) agenda of the United States in the world.  Sami Ben Gharbia has an interesting perspective on this.

So it makes sense for Google as a commercial entity that depends on a liberalized regulatory framework, that has a reputation at stake as a progressive company, to fund an event like this. Google’s market expands when internet content is not blocked, and the company has an interest in supporting free expression – as evidenced by their recent action in China.

But the focus on liberty and American-style freedom of expression are linked to economic liberalization as well. They should remind us that libertarian and liberal politics are not the only means by which media is democratized – or for that matter, potentially regulated.

Liberal views of power normally see power struggles as being about obvious struggles – people not getting what they say they want. But there are other views of power that see greater importance in t is NOT being disucssed. As media scholars know, what gets left off the agenda is as important as what issues are directly introduced. Here are a few things I thought were missing from the first day of Internet at Liberty:

    1. It took most of the day to start talking about privacy online – which is significant because privacy and anonymity is essential for gaining control of one’s expression.

    2.More importantly, not a lot of discussion about the infrastructure level of access. The discussion of freedom was not all that much about the design of the internet. This is signficant in two ways: one, a certain amount of autonomy and control over the structure and function of our media, and two: the convergence of media practices across internet and mobile services. Google, remember, published a policy paper this summer with mobile operator Verizon that stipulated that mobile operators could prioritize services and block others without being subject to any provisions that protect net neutrality in the “wired” internet.

However, there was a significant amount of discussion about media platforms – Facebook and Google. This is both encouraging and distressing. Encouraging because it created a real dialogue about technological choices and user autonomy when using these platforms, and distressing because it reiterated to me that these corporate-owned platforms are now the main way that people experience interactive media. They are, essentially, the infrastructure. And thus, real media democracy would involve appropriate governance of them. But unlike the public internet or other media, there is no opportunity for governance.

These lapses, and this shift of interactive media towards free services that make money by mining social connections raises bigger questions about power, and who gets to ask what kinds of questions. Working from the title of the conference, liberty itself becomes more complex. Indeed, it is possible to have both positive and negative liberty. Much of the discussion has been about negative liberty – the lack of barriers, especially to free speech. Activists and politicos talked about the right not to have blogs and speech blocked, and urged companies and governments to remove these impediments. But POSITIVE liberty, at least as far as Isaiah Berlin is concerned, is the right to have control over your life. This includes the right to communicate, the right to establish your platform for expression, and the right to live your life as you please (which includes the right to privacy)

We didn’t talk much about positive rights in the conference. Maybe because positive rights pose a real struggle for regulators and for the development of the internet. Regulation is often couched in ideas of negative liberty. Something more radical – governance? – might take a broader view of power. This would require a better understanding of how people negotiate the terms under which they communicate

This is where I think the philosophical questions have real pragmatic importance. If the only thing we can do to negotiate our stake and our right to communicate is to complain about Facebook terms of service, we have lost our positive rights. Real liberty is having a stake in how we communicate.