Media

Virtual Democracy Could Kill Millions

Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur and previously mentioned on J’s Notes here, here and here, argues that Obama’s plan to provide all American’s broadband internet access could be very dangerous:

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then (in the 1930s). Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

Keen sees parallels between the economic situation faced by the world and particularly Germany in the 1920s-30s and today.

The question is: In our democratized world of individual empowerment, how will the newly unemployed millions, the victims of the meltdown, react to their economic disempowerment? In a culture that prioritizes the personal, how will the masses vent their rage against a system that no longer personally works for them?

Keen displays a complete lack of faith not only in individuals to make right and rational decisions, but also in communities to do the same. But this also smacks of a fear from those in power in empowering those without power, an argument that has been made against Keen for a while as he has argued that there is a need for “gatekeepers” for information. When gatekeepers merely fact check this is not a problem. But if they seek to limit access to information, you deny people the right to be fully informed (or even mis-informed, such is life).

The largest issue here is the fact that access to broadband internet is already available – at a price.

Keen’s argument steers away from mere access to information to questioning the ability of entire classes of individuals to properly filter that information. Broadband access by those that can afford it in New York or San Francisco is OK, but broadband access by those who currently can’t affort it in Nebraska or Arkansas is dangerous?

His examples are also faulty:

For another sneak preview of digital fascism, it’s worth looking at South Korea, another country with universal broadband infrastructure. In April, the new democratically elected South Korean President, Lee Myung Bak lifted a ban on imported American beef. This resulted in an eruption of anger on the Internet—first amongst teenage girls, then on the popular online portal Daum, and finally through teenage “citizen journalists” on blogs, videocasts, and social networks. The rumor spread that all the American beef was tainted with mad cow disease and an online petition for Lee’s impeachment got 1.3 million signatures in a week. And for an even more real-time example of digital fascism, take a look at the way in which this week’s raging anti government violence in Greece by the young and unemployed (already at over 9% in the Greek economy) has been coordinated by Facebook, Twitter and other viral digital networks.

In the South Korean example Keen ignores assorted pro-business reforms that Lee instituted and fed into this movement and huge protests as well. This also shines a light on the inability of the South Korean government to properly inform and educate the populace with an alternate message. In Greece, you’re looking at a simmering situation that reached a boiling point that, yes, was able to use the internet to coordinate, but lack of access to these services would not guarantee that this movement would not have happened.

As a counter to Keen: Just imagine what more Paul Revere could have done if he’d had Twitter and Facebook.

You do not empower and better a society by limiting it’s access to information. By opening up the Internet, you allow people not just to find more information on what they already believe or what to hear (Cass Sunstein’s “Daily Me”) but also opens the door to the opposing viewpoint.
Certainly there is an argument to be made as to whether or not it is the responsibility of the government to provide broadband access when the free market is perfectly capable of determining it’s demand and production, but that argument can not be made on fear mongering based on elitism and a desire to keep the masses uninformed.

UPDATE: Another counterpoint, when accepting the Nobel Prize this past December, Jean-Marie Gustave said:

‘Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler’s criminal plot would not have succeeded – ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day,’ he said.

Where Are The Gatekeepers?

Eric Fehrnstrom gives an account of what Republican candidates faced from netroots activists in 2008 and in closing asks:

Where are the online gatekeepers? Gatekeeping is the most important function for the offline media. Editors decide which stories get published. They make sure rumors aren’t printed. Sensitive information is double- and sometimes triple-sourced. Gatekeeping serves an important purpose in establishing the ethics of journalism. Sadly, it doesn’t exist on the Web.
What can be done? Citizen-journalists and bloggers need to provide links to websites that contain factual data backing up their assertions. These connections add credibility. And while Internet libel suits can be difficult to win, they should be pursued more often.
Moreover, it would help if TV and newspapers resisted the temptation to get edgier in their own reporting. If you can’t be “first” with the rumors, be first with the most comprehensive and factual account. In the current Wild West state of political reporting, you will be rewarded with loyal readership in search of honest and objective coverage.

He’s not entirely wrong, though I think it’s naive to believe that many bloggers and other citizen-journalists will put forth that extra effort to confirm the facts of what they’re writing before the jump. And that no one expects it from the other side means they won’t raise themselves up to provide it on their side. Fire with fire. But we have got to break from that mold.

As the internet comes of age in how its used during campaigns, more and more people are going to be asking the same question though: where are the gatekeepers? What has gotten blogging and online activism this far is the lack of a gatekeeper – thousands of voices shouting so many things that once in a while one sticks. Or a bunch of people starting to talk about the same thing, creating a story where there wouldn’t be one normally.

The media has proven to be gullible to these tactics. But they’re starting to get burned, and a lot of blogging talking heads who try to sound and act professional but end up putting their foot in their mouth are going to find themselves locked out.

Since blogging’s not about to go away, gatekeepers will emerge as people realize who make up the cream of the crop and those people are promoted. These individuals will be the self-policiers who put function before form and seek out the facts before fame.

This may take time, though. Blogging is still new in terms of impact on media and elections. Everyone is still getting a feel for how it works and what place citizen-journalists hold in the conversation.

It’s up to the citizen-journalist to help properly define their role, not by words but by acts.

Bloggers Win A Lot Of Lawsuits

In an article concerning insurance and blogging, Christopher Boggs tosses out an interesting bit of information concerning lawsuits against bloggers:

Nearly 77 percent of ALL civil cases were found in favor of the blogger or saw the charges dropped by the plaintiff. And 92 percent of blog-related suits making it to trial end in blogger triumph (additional information availble at Media Law Resource Center). Odds at trial are overwhelmingly in the blogger’s favor, but there is no guarantee that this propensity towards blogger victory will continue.

As Boggs notes, nearly all of these victories have been on the grounds of the First Amendment. But that will only hold up as long as the bloggers themselves are responsible:

First Amendment protection requires, among other standards, bloggers, like journalists, to practice and prove due diligence in the gathering and reporting of “factual” information. Bloggers must also prove that no actual malice was intended by statements or information ultimately found to be incorrect or untrue. Opinions, stated as opinion and not fact, published by bloggers are also potentially immune from charges of libel under the First Amendment since there is no such thing as a false opinion.

The article specifically looks at a SLAPP, a lawsuit that is meant not necessarily to win but to scare others out of the conversation. A “don’t talk or we’ll sue you, too,” type thing. There are anti-SLAPP statutes in 27 states. Virginia is not one of them.

Net Ranking By Time Spent

Nielsen is changing it’s webranking system from counting page views to length of visit:

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

Interesting and probably more accurate, at least for already heavily visited sites. If you only have ten views but each of those are for an average of ten minutes, that doesn’t really make you better than the guy with 5000 views for around five minutes each.

It’s interesting to see as the two measurements would benefit sites differently. Number of visits are greater for sites that tend to update more often while length of visits would benifit sites with longer content that tend to not update as frequently. (UPDATE: Valleywag’s thoughts off a Computerworld article.)

But let’s take this handy measurement and see how Virginia blogs measure up. Taking the top ten posted by NLS back in April:

1. Not Larry Sabato—- 2,447 Visitors Per Day
2. Raising Kaine———-1,883 Visitors Per Day
3. BVBL————————-635 Visitors Per Day
4. Bearing Drift————–432 Visitors Per Day
5. Virginia Progressive—-330 Visitors Per Day
6. Bacon’s Rebellion———328 Visitors Per Day
7. 750 Volts——————–93 Visitors Per Day
8. The Ward View————85 Visitors Per Day
9. SLANTBlog——————67 Visitors Per Day
10. BYP—————————-42 Visitors Per Day

Length of visits (as of today):

1. BVBL ———————— 4:50 min/visit
2. Raising Kaine ————— 4:12 min/visit
3. Not Larry Sabato ———— 4:07 min/visit
4. The Ward View ————— 3:31 min/visit
5. Bacon’s Rebellion ———– 3:07 min/visit
6. Bearing Drift ————— 2:59 min/visit
7. Virginia Progressive ——– 1:16 min/visit
8. 750 Volts ——————- 1:15 min/visit
9. J’s Notes ——————- 0:41 min/visit
10. BYP ———————— 0:39 min/visit

I can’t find SLANTBlog’s SiteMeter link. You lose, Terry, so instead I listed myself. I average 61 unique visitors a day, so that should mean something!

NLS and BVBL swapped spots. The Ward View had the biggest jump of four spaces, from 8 to 4. Short of listing every single blog in the VAblogosphere, the whole thing still holds pretty even.

Sacramento Bee: Real People Commenting Only

The Bivings Report is, er, reporting that the Sacramento Bee is requiring commenters on its website to start using their real names:

At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms. However, to a few people’s surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of “provocateur” as they slung vitriol of all types at those who disagreed with them. Some site participants stopped participating out of annoyance and disgust.

To counter the provocateurs, the Bee will soon require all commenters to user their real name on the site. While, as ombudsman Aramando Acuna notes, this will likely lead to fewer comments, many readers support stripping anonymity away from commenters. Further, the paper hopes that this policy will lessen the need for it to monitor and approve or reject every comment before it is publicly posted.

Fewer commenters is not necessarily a bad thing. Quality over quantity.

It’ll be interesting to see how exactly the Bee goes about confirming these identites but I can’t fault them for setting up the restrictions. Blogs and commenting on blogs is little different than writing a letter to the editor, something very few (if any) papers take and publish anonymously.

Shirky On Data

Relating to my last post, Clay Shirky follows up yesterday’s essay with one that concludes as such:

As Scott Bradner put it, the Internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it. The upshot is that the internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom.

What Andrew Keen seems to be trying to argue through “The Cult Of The Amateur” is that the data is not the problem but that there is no one filtering it. There are no editors or publishers to ensure quality or even accuracy. And it is dangerous to assume the general public can judge this themselves. If all you get is unfiltered, flawed data, at what point can you craft a solid, well rounded, well founded opinion or even begin to get the actual truth or definition of something?

Data is subjective and selective. The audience needs to have a source of solid, certifiable information that presents something as close to the truth as possible or it will never learn.

Data is not bad. It is the lack of a filter that is dangerous.

Currently Reading: The Cult Of The Amateur

Andrew Keen discusses the dangers Web 2.0 and mob rule. While I’m only a little ways into the book, so far his talk so far on blogging and Wikipedia and what it can do at its worst is very interesting. I don’t agree with some of his statements in the introduction on matters such as declining music sales related to piracy but I’ll give the rest of the book to flesh that out.

Excerpt available here. Choice cut:

Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.
…
I’ve spent the last two years observing the Web 2.0 revolution, and I’m dismayed by what I’ve seen.
I’ve seen the infinite monkeys, of course, typing away. And I’ve seen many other strange sights as well, including a video of marching penguins selling a lie, a supposedly infinite Long Tail, and dogs chatting to each other online. But what I’ve been watching is more like Hitchcock’s The Birds than Doctor Doolittle: a horror movie about the consequences of the digital revolution.
Because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent. As I noted earlier, it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.
I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people—more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.

Read the NYTimes review here.

Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.

Visit Andrew Keen’s site here.

Web 2.0: The Sleep Of Reason

Part I

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

…

Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do. The second kind of learning comes from either personal contact with living people—teachers, gurus, etc.—or through interaction with the human record, that vast assemblage of texts, images, and symbolic representations that have come to us from the past and is being added to in the present. It is this latter way of learning that is under threat in the realm of digital resources.

Part II

The flight from expertise is accompanied by the opposite of expertise—the phenomenon that Andrew Keen has called, in his new book of the same name, “the cult of the amateur.” This cult, says Keen, “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone—even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us—can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves.” He is referring to the impulse behind Web 2.0, but his words have a wider resonance—a world in which everyone is an expert in a world devoid of expertise.

Interesting reading. I hope to have more thoughts once I have time to digest this.

Kottke On July

Last week I linked to Miranda July’s site for her new book No One Belongs Here More Than You where the site is nothing more than her messages as written on household appliances in dry erase format.

Jason Kottke shares his thoughts on the site:

The really intriguing thing about the site is that it breaks pretty much every rule that contemporary web designers have for effective site design. The site is a linear progression of images, essentially 30 splash pages one right after another. It doesn’t have any navigation except for forward/back buttons; you can’t just jump to whatever page you want. July barely mentions anything about the book and only then near the end of the 30 pages. There’s no text…it’s all images, which means that the site will be all but invisible to search engines. No web designer worth her salt would ever recommend building a site like this to a client.

There’s more (though not too much, just another paragraph, still worth a read) and I agree completely. Though I’m also one for sites that don’t quite fit the mold of regular webdesign for creative promotion and the like. Sites like dontclick.it make me stand up and take notice because they’re different and show what you can do if you are willing to play with the web just a little bit. And the sites remain interesting and engaging to the viewer. Sure, cookie cutters help greeting new folks, but sometimes they’re a turn off, every site looking and working the same way. It’s a format that works for certain models but if you’re going for something more creative, like the promotion of a book or even a blog, you should be willing to break out of the typical mold and really play with the medium a bit more.

Site Shut Down For Anonymous Posts

A bulletin board out of Wisconsin has been shut down due to content provided by anonymous posters:

Fond du Lac County Judge Robert Wirtz on Thursday ordered local Web site owner Dennis Payne to cease operations of the bulletin board site, fullofbologna. com, based on the allegations of a libel lawsuit filed by Winnebago County Clerk of Courts Diane Fremgen.

As part of the temporary injunction, Wirtz also prohibited Payne and other defendants listed from operating any similar Web sites until the order is lifted. Failure to abide by the order would be considered contempt and could be punishable with jail time and fines, according to the order.

…

Fremgen on Thursday filed the lawsuit based on two sexually explicit comments that were written about her and posted on the site by an anonymous user. She will seek $100,000 in monetary damages and $500,000 in punitive damages, according to the civil complaint.

In addition to the complaint, Fremgen filed for the injunction for reasons including that Payne not only allowed the defamatory statements on the site, but also failed to remove them.

…

According to federal law passed as part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Phillips on Thursday said a full injunction removing the site from the Internet was the only way to stop more libelous statements from appearing. The anonymity factor created an attitude where users of the board felt they could write whatever they wanted, he said.

Easily applicable to blogging and quite a dangerous precedent were this to succeed.