New Media and Democracy

Jenny Kidd's Are New Media Democratic? is a neat little article wherein she tells the two narratives of new media. The first approaches the question positively and suggests that democracy is a constituent part of the internet - both in its inception and infrastructure. It gives everyone a voice and isn't moderated or owned by any one government and works in a bottom-up model rather than a top-down hierarchy. The second narrative concludes that new media are not democratic. They are capitalistic (if not by nature, then by design), which has led to "Big Media" institutions that control, in one way or another, the flow of information (e.g., Google, Facebook, IE8). Additionally, to say that no one government controls the internet is not to say that particular governments can't control their citizens' access to the internet. So, for example, while China has the majority of web users, they also employ more than 30,000 internetofficers to police users and restrict access to certain websites and Google search results (and, of course, the US government has the freedom to shut downsites that break US law). So the proposition of the first narrative - that no one can turn off the internet for users - is only true in a sense. If a person only sought to access certain portions of the internet that were subjected to government restrictions, then for that user, the government would have functionally shut off their internet (and, of course, a user's ISP retains the freedom to shut down their internet if they deem it appropriate). 

I liked Kidd's approach in providing two narratives that are both "true" in their information. In a sense her two narratives were also told in the Carr and Rosen debate from last week , albeit with more analysis. I happen to hear the truth of the second, more negative narrative a bit more loudly, but in true rhetorical fashion the debate swings on what aspects receive the most emphasis. It is ostensibly true that people can speak their minds much more easily on the web through blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, but if nobody is listening (as Kidd suggests in her second narrative), then what is the difference between web-published rants and those of the unheard TV viewer? Without a ripple-effect or some kind of public discourse then both forms of ranting are an exercise of free speech, but not necessarily democracy in any actualized sense. 

Carr and Rosen Debate

The Economist hosted a written debate between Jay Rosen and Nicholas Carr on the topic of the the internet's impact on journalism. Rosen sees the internet's impact as largely positive while Carr disagrees. The debate was broken up into four sections and below is my summary of Carr's points:

Opening Remarks

Carr opens by reporting the declining number of journalists employed by print-based news organizations. As more people go to their search engines for news, he argues, the less newspapers make in advertising and sales and the more journalists they have to let go. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem for people (unless you are one of the aforementioned, recently unemployed journalists); technology necessarily renders some jobs obsolete – we don't see many blacksmiths and typewriter repair shops anymore for a reason. However, Carr suggests that this decline in journalists reduces both institutional accountability (e.g., corporations, government, etc.), and fact checking and quality control within news organizations.

His second, and last, main point in his opening statement is simply that for all that has been lost in traditional print-based news, the internet-grown substitutions have not proportionately filled the gap.

Rebuttal

Apart from questioning some of Rosen's assumptions and definitions, Carr makes one primary point: rather than decreasing “pack journalism” as Rosen suggests, online journalism has actually increased the trend. He uses the examples of the Casey Anthony trial and the Anthony Weiner scandal – everyone was reporting on two domestic stories which hardly constitute informed citizens. Quoting the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, he suggests that “the new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.”

Closing Statements

Carr's final point is the simplest, and in my opinion the most important: opinions about online journalism are shaped by accessibility. He points out that Rosen spreads himself very thin all over the internet, and he is part of the elite in this way. He knows where to get information and has the time to seek after and interact with it. Rosen talks about the success of online journalism because of its democratic-orientation and ability to spark community-wide debates. According to Carr, this assumes too much. At the end of the day, the only people left debating issues and representing democracy are the elite who have access and time.

As a personal and anecdotal example, I've engaged in a number of online debates in comment sections, but ultimately the person who loses is whoever has to leave for work first.   

Networked Journalism, Postman, and What That Means for Your Work-Week

I couldn’t help but read The Value of Networked Journalism in light of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and particularly his chapter entitled, “Now... This.” Postman laments the fragmentation that is necessarily present in television-mediated journalism and demonstrates how the entertainment-oriented news had (at that point in the 80s) already infiltrated print media (as demonstrated by USA Today in particular). In a lot of ways, Beckett’s piece offers an alternative that should satisfy many (though not all) of Postman’s critiques.

It is important to begin with what seemed like a throw-away line from Beckett, but I think is important observation in any conversation with Postman’s writings: “Networked journalism is creating - or some would say reflecting - a new relationship between the journalist and the story and the public” (207). For anyone who has read Postman on budding technologies, this is an important point to make. Postman often overlooked the culture’s influence over the technologies and mediums they created and looked at things like television as outside agents working culture over. Not only would I want to echo other scholars who have observed that technology wells up from within culture, but I would want to be a part of the “some” that Beckett mentions here who see networked journalism as a resultant phenomenon and not a creative one. For all the speculation that Postman did concerning the future of news-media, Beckett demonstrates the actual state of things - and Postman wasn’t wrong about everything.

The most important aspect to networked journalism (from a Postman perspective) is that it allows for more in depth interaction. Postman recognized the “Now... This” nature of television news where coverage of killings or natural disasters were always quickly followed by a commercial about toilet paper or a bubbly weatherman pointing to smiley-faced sun icons. His point was that television journalism was sensational and entertaining and therefore short, fragmented, and anti-intellectual - the viewer was forced not to think about any particular story for too long.

After the inception of live-blogging, Beckett recognized “that there was an appetite for a more complex form of coverage” (207). He goes on to speak of networked journalism in general: “Unlike a TV news channel it allows the reader to control their consumption of the flow of news in a much more proactive way” (208). Networked journalism puts power back into the hands of the viewers and allows them to explore stories more thoroughly than a television snippet between commercial breaks would. In this way networked journalism answers Postman’s primary critique of “Now... This” news.

Interestingly, however, Postman inadvertently addressed Twitter-mediated news. Beckett talks about the strength of micro-blogging and its frequent use in networked journalism, and of course anyone who heard anything about the raid on Osama Bin Laden (and his consequent death) knows how important Twitter can be in journalism. Without negating the usefulness of Twitter and its role in journalism, I have to quote a section from Postman’s chapter on news when he is talking about USA Today’s television-influenced style:

The paper’s Editor-in-Chief, John Quinn, has said: “We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to win prizes. They don’t give awards for the best investigative paragraph.” Here is an astonishing tribute to the resonance of television’s epistemology: In the age of television, the paragraph is becoming the basic unit of news in print media. Moreover, Mr. Quinn need not fret too long about being deprived of awards. As other newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for the best investigative sentence. (Amusing Ourselves to Death pg. 112)

It seems like Beckett wouldn’t have too much to disagree about here. Newspapers have followed after USA Today and with the emergence of networked journalism the sentence is quickly becoming the basic unit of news in print media. How long before Postman’s prophecy is realized and an award is given for best investigative sentence?

****As far as my research interests are concerned I remain interested in asking Postman-like questions of Facebook (e.g., what kinds of content does Facebook appropriately carry? Can Facebook effectively transmit important cultural conversations? Is it an important cultural conversation in itself?). I am also interested, from a pragmatic standpoint, in updating my teaching philosophy that I had to do for RWS 609 so that it incorporates some of the points made in our readings that inadvertently made a case for a rhetorical education.

Tweets for Education?

Will Richardson approaches Twitter from a rather utopian posture whereby students can collaboratively learn 140 characters at a time. He bases a lot of his argument on his own experiences following other professionals which seems to illustrate a generation gap more than a new educational possibility.


Consider the top followed Twitter accounts and whether or not Twitter is for entertainment or education. And how do Twitter comments translate into other mediums? I concede the rest of my time to Josh Groban:

Utopian Tagging and the New iPhone 4S (oh... and Chris Cooley for good measure)

Our readings about tagging painted a beautiful picture of non-hierarchically organized knowledge and invited us into a world wherein knowledge is socially constructed through tags and their close cousins. new iPhone. While both authors gave some lip service to the obvious possibility of an incorrectly tagged post, neither of them dealt with the commercial motivations behind tagging - as if everyone uses tags to add to the social-bin-of-knowledge. iPhone 4S. Chris Cooley. 


Of course, tags also have some influence on where your post (or photos, videos, etc.) end up within a search engine's results (whether generally in Google, or within a community-specific search engine like Blogger or Flickr). new iPhone. At a rather innocent level, it could just be that people want their posts read more frequently but I can't help but notice at the top of my post-editor right now is a tab that reads: Monetize. Chris Cooley. iPhone 4S. Depending on how you have a site set up, more hits from search engines could mean more money for the tagger. 


Google is kind enough to let us in on what the most common searches are for any particular day, and today's happen to be "new iPhone" and "Chris Cooley." I talked to a popular blogger who received hundreds of thousands of hits a month from all of the world who also happened to make a little bit of money from allowing ads and linking to specific stores where people could buy items he mentioned - tools that he opted to include in his blog - and he said that the monetizing tools changed the way he tagged and composed his blog. new iPhone. Do any commercial considerations have to be considered before we look to a new digital way of compiling and organizing information? Is it any different outside the digital space? Chris Cooley.


I read the articles favorably, but I do think there are some questions that we should ask before we fully embrace the web-like, tag-dependent organization found on the internet.


For a real example of how I would use tags in a blog you are encouraged to visit my other blog. new iPhone Chris Cooley. 


Also I suggest taking a tour of Google Zeitgeist - it is pretty interesting.