brian boyer

like i know how the hell to title an essay… i haven’t written anything substantial in ten years!  so, i hope this will get me into a very cool new media / journalism program at northwestern. please forgive how poorly the footnotes translate to the web, and cross your fingers for me!

extra special thanks to carleton, ilyana, beth, dan, danielle, and jessica!

Ever since Edmund Burke pointed to a gallery of reporters in the House of Commons, saying, “yonder sits the Fourth Estate, more important than them all,” the media has been understood to play a key role in the democratic process. But the digital age has brought new challenges to traditional journalism. Public confidence in the media is at a low point and the ability of traditional journalism to provide a platform for public discourse is being questioned. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil of the Project for Excellence in Journalism blame this decline on the spectacle necessary to fight for attention in the Mixed Media Culture.(1) Such competition has forced traditional media sources toward sensationalism and candy-coated rubbish. Yochai Benkler, Yale law professor and author of The Wealth of Networks, suggests that the commercial mass media has failed democracy because of its tendency to oversimplify and soothe, ridiculous power to shape opinion, and inability to attend to the full range of relevant issues.(2)

But the very same technologies that brought us Matt Drudge and the 24-hour news cycle may yet save that which they threaten to destroy. Citizens are using the defining technologies of the digital age, computers and the Internet, to build novel mechanisms and media for journalism that, if not stymied, could create a more democratic public sphere.

Professor, writer, and Internet guru Clay Shirky’s observation that the “threshold for having a weblog is only infinitesimally larger than the threshold for getting online in the first place,” only a few years later looks quaint.(3) This transformation is bigger than blogs. The low threshold today applies to myriad forms of content creation and sharing, including podcasting, social networking, and collaborative t-shirt production.(4) As the threshold to production has plummeted, the quantity of content has exploded.(5) Professor Brian McNair’s description of the modern public sphere as a “communicative space of infinite size” is more accurate every day as the torrent of content in blog posts, forum messages, and wiki articles continues unabated.(6) Fortunately for consumers of the media, new methods have been devised to address information overload.

Sites like Slashdot, where news is selected and commented upon feverishly by other members of the uber-nerd community, provide relevance as well as accreditation to members of a particular niche interest group.(7) Sources like Wikipedia go beyond filtering, and provide a central repository for information by enabling social creation of content, with remarkable accuracy.(8) The Internet has even enabled the distribution of new primary sources. In the case of the Diebold voting-booth controversy, raw information in the form of voting machine source code, and emails were distributed online, and analyzed by the amateur community.(9) Such citizen journalism takes all of the above forms, and brings us to why all this stuff is good for democracy.

Benkler includes the aforementioned novel journalistic media and mechanisms and peer-production and the like as elements of the “networked public sphere,” in which deliberative democracy is invigorated by enabling citizens to participate in the conversation online.(10) This new citizen-driven dialog succeeds where the media owners have failed by being significantly less corruptible by money.(11) Shirky agrees, and posits that “digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly.”(12) Clearly, we’re on to something good. Internet technologies are not trivial. They are the key elements of the networked public sphere, and represent the newest stage in the evolution of journalistic and communication technology.

Unfortunately, vested interests are determined to thwart this progress. Efforts to provide universal access to the Internet are under constant attack, as in the fight by municipalities like Philadelphia for the ability to provide free wi-fi to its citizens.(13) More recently, the idea of “network neutrality,” that your service provider should treat all Internet content equally, has been under attack in Congress.(14) Authoritarian regimes like China, as well as Western democracies like Germany and France, are actively censoring their citizen’s’ access to the Internet, with the help of “Don’t be evil” Google.(15) But, free speech isn’t just being threatened in search results. As highlighted in the case of Apple v. Does, the question is still on the table if rights afforded to journalists will even apply to speech on the Internet.(16) And even if truly free speech is available online to all the citizens of the world, there’s still the problem of digital rights management.(17) DRM threatens information’s very nature by enforcing ownership, destroying fair use, and making archiving very difficult.(18) Future journalists will lose the ability to cite historical documents if they are locked to someone long dead.

Fortunately, in the spirit of participatory democracy, citizens are organizing online to defend their rights. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose mission is to “defend freedom in the digital world,” actively fights for blogger’s rights and against DRM.(19) Amateur and professional filmmakers produce and freely distribute videos to support causes like net neutrality.(20) Hugely popular blogs like BoingBoing post stories about the fight to provide free Internet access, and teach citizens about routing around censorship.(21)

The bloggers and other members of the new generation of journalism may not at all resemble the men milling around in the gallery of the House of Commons, but their role in the democratic process is more important than ever. Digital-age technology does not just enable the creation of new tools for journalism. It has given us powerful ways to realize the more democratic public sphere those tools have the potential to create.

1. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil, Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media
2. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p 10
3. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
4. http://threadless.com/ is genius. And they’re local!
5. Shiny graphs, plus grand statements about the future, singularities, and other topics not covered here: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html
6. Brian McNair, Journalism and democracy: An evaluation of the political public sphere, p 40
7. http://slashdot.org, see http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky.html for more on how Slashdot actually accomplishes this.
8. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_Britannica_about_as_accurate_in_science_entries,_reports_Nature
9. Benkler 225-232
10. Benkler 271
11. Benkler 11
12. http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/old-revolutions-good-new-revolutions-bad/
13. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/18/municipal_wifi_what_.html
14. Even worse, the lobbyists pretend to be grassroots organizations: http://www.handsoff.org/, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm and http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/2/Rudolf220-222.html
16. http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/, see http://www.eff.org/bloggers/ for much more.
17. See http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt for an excellent talk on the topic.
18. http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/2006/02/drm_and_the_damage_done_to_lib.html
19. http://www.eff.org
20. The video at http://foureyedmonsters.com/neutrality/ is absolute genius – required viewing.
21. http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html