Before January 21^st was the inauguration of Barack Obama, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But yesterday’s celebration of our first black president and of a civil rights martyr is more than simple coincidence: 2013 is the 50^th anniversary of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” When Dr. King was arrested in Birmingham for protesting Jim Crow, a group of white clergymen published a statement. “A Call for Unity” acknowledged the injustice of racism but insisted that segregation was an issue for the courts. Social activism was not the path to equality; public spaces were not the proper place for struggle. In anticipation of Dr. King’s arrest, Harvey Shapiro, then editor of The New York Times Magazine, had extended an open offer to Dr. King: if Dr. King found himself in jail again, he could write a letter for the Times. Yet Shapiro could not convince his colleagues to print “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King’s response to “A Call for Unity.” File the incident under “unfortunate rejection slips sent to great authors.”

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a lucid discussion of justice and law. The central questions of the essay are, is racial segregation a just or unjust law, and, if racial segregation is an unjust law, how are we to respond?

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

I have introduced Dr. King’s exposition on just and unjust laws so as to ask a question unrelated to racial segregation: is copyright law just or unjust, insofar as it applies to the exchange of information on the Internet? 

I have posed this question because freedom of information will be a pressing problem for Obama and the administrations that follow. Although racial, gender, religious, class (etc) inequalities continue to trouble the progress of human freedom, the fight for equality is migrating to virtual spaces. File sharing and piracy are symptomatic of this shift. A denial of access to the Internet, like the denial of education or medicine, suppresses the individual as political actor. Policy issues like copyright law, antitrust legislation, and censorship define the parameters of behavior on the web. These laws determine what can and cannot be said, where and how and by whom. 

That is not to suggest that file sharing is “right” or that copyright laws are unjust. Rather, the terms of the debate need to change. Conversations about intellectual property set the rights of the consumer against the rights of the artist. In fact, “the rights of the artist” is a shibboleth. When we speak of “the rights of the artist” we speak of “the rights of the corporation,” the distributor of artwork, whether music, books, or photographs. The regulation of information exchange, that is, the designation of limited rights conferred upon ownership, implies a new relationship between the consumer and the corporation. Instead of obtaining a material object, the consumer acquires a contract of “fair” and limited use. In effect, the consumer does not own the object in its entirety, but only a peculiar and arbitrary application of the object. It is as though a person, having heard a song on the radio, had his tongue cut out for whistling it on the street.

I do not want to pass judgment on the relative injustice of copyright laws after such a preliminary analysis. But I do think we can ask how Dr. King would have responded to illegal file sharing:

“In no sense do I advocate evading the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” 

In his second term, Barack Obama will have the opportunity to reset the assumptions governing Internet freedoms. Perhaps unfortunately, the free Internet cause does not have a Dr. King to pen missives from cold jail cells. Needless to say, I do not think Dr. King would have approved of Kim Dotcom. As long as dialogue about file sharing and copyright circles around greed, from either the consumer or corporate position, the cry for justice is nothing but crocodile tears.

• Tags
• justice
• freedom
• Internet
• file sharing
• politics

Digital democracy is not a utopia. It is merely a more perfect organization of citizens within the field of new media.  In its first meaning, digital democracy references the actual practice of democratic politics in digital spaces, for example, discussions of Presidential debates on Twitter. In its second, digital democracy references the democratization of content production and distribution. The first, political meaning points to what is said, the second, to how it is said. Despite an obvious distinction between these two layers of democratic practice, the second is implicated in the first. In order to be political online, the citizen must be able to create a political statement and disseminate it. Unfortunately, both social networks and legacy media outlets have failed to democratize the digital world, at least to a sufficiently comprehensive extent. There are six best practices for getting from the status quo, which possesses a veneer of democratic freedom, to a digital democracy.

1. Access to the Forum: In order to write or read anything at all, the citizen needs access to the material forums in which writing and reading happen. That is, if you don’t have a computer or Internet, it is awfully hard to participate in a digital democracy. It remains difficult for disadvantaged or otherwise impoverished communities to access hardware and software. In April 2012, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans making less than $30,000 a year are online. Among those without high school diplomas, that figure is 43 percent. The divide between high-speed Internet and more restricted Internet access has created an invisible second class within those who do have access. Improving the availability and affordability of computer and Internet services should be a priority. Lack of computer and Internet access is a human rights issue, both in America and on a global scale. When official government information, political news, and public discourse are increasingly confined to digital spaces, those without computer or Internet access become disenfranchised.

2. Equal Authority: We need to stand against an emerging technocracy. The status of professional journalists as information gatekeepers has created a clique of political trendsetters. Although Twitter and Facebook have devolved more control to consumers, social media has been colonized by old media. Who are the most influential voices on social networks? Authority emanates from the media powers that be, not the media powers that are becoming. Admittedly, Reddit and DIY journalism projects have destabilized an old media orthodoxy. But we must always be wary of new, ascendant orthodoxies. Does one person, one vote entail one person, one voice? We do not need to prevent coalitions and interest groups from forming organically. Rather, we should remain aware of who credentials digital political messages. 

3. Accountability of Representatives and Citizens: There is no room for anonymity in digital political discourse.  Elected representatives and the citizens who elect them must be held accountable for their digital political statements. The Internet has the capacity to bring strangers together in public forums. Consensus and reasoned disagreement are impossible unless those strangers can trust each other: trust that each speaks the truth to his or her best ability, does not deceive for personal gain, and respects the worth of all conversation partners. 

4. Question the Usefulness of Nation as Political Category: Just as the Internet brings together strangers of the same national citizenship, it builds a common forum across national lines. That forum remains imperfect due to censorship and asymmetrical access to computers and Internet. Nevertheless, the constant border crossing of Internet conversation discloses the limited usefulness of national identifications. There is no place for jingoism in a digital democracy. Instead, digital democracies ought to allow citizens to imagine a world where sovereignty is an individual and communal but not a national right.

5. Freedom of Information: News is not a commodity. Access to political news is a human right. Denying citizens access to political news affects a kind of disenfranchisement. For how are citizens to make political decisions and to contribute to political discourse without the relevant facts? Moving towards a true freedom of information will require entirely new revenue models for legacy media companies. Paywalls are not an acceptable solution, as revealed by the response of media outlets during the Hurricane Sandy disaster. News does not toggle between commodity and basic right according to a relative state of emergency. Withholding news from the public is not sometimes ethical and sometimes not.

6. Cybernetic Politics: Digital democracy should infiltrate real political forums and vice versa. The borders between a digital political life and real political action are permeable. Digital democracy will only be realized once digital conversations are given equal exchange and use values to real conversations; once the face-to-face becomes equivalent to the tweet-to-tweet; once digital political interaction and real political action are indistinguishable. 

• Tags
• digital
• democracy
• technology
• politics

by Jason Bell

Halloween Is Cancelled:

At 8:30 p.m. Monday night, Hurricane Sandy was starting to get scary. Windows were rattling, rain was flying sideways, and my friends from Florida were fondly reminiscing about driving from Miami to Boca in a Category 2. I casually glanced at my TweetDeck Twitter feed. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, or some hapless aide-de-camp tweeted:

If conditions are not safe on Wednesday for Trick or Treating, I will sign an Executive Order rescheduling #Halloween.

— Governor Christie (@GovChristie) October 30, 2012

By proclaiming authority over a holiday—’he can disrupt the temporal logic by which Halloween always falls on the 31st’—Christie assumes the position of omnipotent leader. He who is capable of moving Halloween is capable of saving his constituents from Frankenstorm. Christie’s claim to salvation seems peculiar and endearing; it is couched in a rhetoric of benevolence and paternalism. He is like Mike Brady, kind and stern and willing to fight for his kids.

Sandy’s Political Spotlight:

Using Parse.ly’s “Web-wide Trends,” it is possible to see an amazing graph of Sandy’s political impact. Our “Web-wide Trends” feature displays the comparative volume of media attention directed on specific topics and celebrities. Sandy itself generated a massive amount of news coverage, but also turned the media’s gaze on certain public figures.

From this first graph, it is apparent that as Sandy’s press spiked, the politicians at the heart of the storm, including Christie, experienced an independent bump. Mitt Romney’s comparatively limited increase in attention is particularly notable; it would suggest that Romney was at best a peripheral figure. Romney’s total slip from the spotlight is even more obvious here: 

In contrast to Romney, Obama enjoyed an increase in coverage that is directly correlated to Sandy:

Over the days leading up to Sandy, Obama was actually trailing Romney in terms of total media volume. Thanks to Sandy, however, Obama has gotten a quantifiable press and media coverage bump.

In times of crisis, the public seeks guidance and reassurance from politicians. Disasters are inherently political events because they demand a political response. Is the distinction between the political response to disaster and the politicization of disaster for personal gain without difference? 

Reflection: From Twitter to the Times

Twitter is Christie’s forum of choice, ostensibly because it provides the most direct pathway to the people. Newspapers and television stations that reported on Christie’s proclamation picked up the information from Twitter. Thus, Christie could appear to speak to his children, ahem, constituents, promising that Christmas, I mean, Halloween, was saved. No artificial mediation whatsoever. Social media was such a potent political tool during the storm because it fostered a comforting sense of intimacy between governmental authority and those in danger. Hurricane Sandy was the first fully “social” disaster, in which rumors, lies, and life-saving assistance were circulated between victims, emergency responders, and elected representatives.

Yet news media was not so easily left out of the game. Consider, for example, the New York Times, which capitalized on Sandy to lower their paywall and initiate a live feed chockfull of great reporting and interactive features. For the Times, Sandy represented an opportunity to provide the public with critical information and to demonstrate the value of its content.

If Twitter is an information distribution machine, a kind of gaping mouth that sucks in raw reportage and spits out finished news stories, then traditional media outlets are the articulated tongue, determining all that’s fit to print (or say) online. While the storm itself was the bulk subject of news coverage, Sandy turned the spotlight on the public figures responsible for disaster relief. On Twitter, those figures, like Christie, addressed those in need—ironically, many of whom lacked power and Internet. And on the New York Times, political addresses were canonized as political action. “On Christie’s Tour, Hugs, Tears and a Personal Touch,” according to the Times.

In effect, digital news coverage, whether social or conventional, became a means of comforting those removed from the immediate sites of trauma. Even Parse.ly’s CTO channeled his feeling of helplessness to build Parse.ly News, a tool that he and others have used to monitor the latest dispatches from top online media frontpages. Commenting on how it came about, he said: “There was a certain tragedy to it. I was stranded in an apartment in Queens — with the sounds of howling winds, strong rains, and falling trees around me. But my power and Internet stayed on. I wasn’t going to sit around and watch the tube, when thousands were likely flooded out of their homes. I was lucky to be online, so I felt I had to make something useful out of the time I had.”

At the scenes of disaster themselves, the most pertinent news coverage provided practicable directions or immediate assistance. Well-fed and dry in Morningside Heights, but comparatively powerless to help those in need, I felt guilty and good reading about how if “Gov. Christ Christie’s aerial tour alongside President Obama on Wednesday of New Jersey’s storm damage was being observed in intensely political terms…down on the ground, earlier in the day, the governor’s interactions with displaced residents displayed the personal gifts that have won him a broad following.” This framing of Christie’s schedule, split between the hyper-politicized and the personal, manages to color “hugs, tears and a personal touch” with a political implication.

That is not to denigrate the political as somehow nasty or malevolent. “Political” implies the gesture that simultaneously comforts the poor and serves a selfish end: reelection. How confusing indeed. Are we to castigate the self-serving politician, or celebrate his selfish compassion?

Sandy is both a disaster that politicians must address and an opportunity for politicians to consolidate respect and admiration. At stake is a tricky negotiation of mutually incompatible values: the politician’s ethical responsibility to his constituents, and the politician’s ascendancy to power. To fulfill his ethical responsibilities, the politician must have power; but to be powerful, the politician must be unethical, insofar as he must take advantage of disaster for political gain. 

Chris Christie has tried to talk his way out of that dilemma. This morning, Christie said on Fox News (and later tweeted), “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.” But it is hard to believe that a politician’s necessary and even noble responses to disasters are a-political. The demonization of political gamemanship and the unavoidable demand for political disaster response set up a lose-lose scenario for politicians like Christie, who may have the best of intentions. Christie’s denial of politics, which can only be read as facetious or terribly naive, is an evasive maneuver. Otherwise, he would have to admit that all perceived goodness points towards self-serving motivations.

Want more updates? Follow us on Twitter: @Parsely

• Tags
• Hurricane Sandy
• Sandy
• disasters
• Parse.ly
• Web Wide Trends
• Chris Christie
• Mitt Romney
• Barack Obama
• politics
• ethics

As the Presidential election approaches, the deployment of political messaging on social media platforms will draw more commentary from who else but those very parties responsible for political messaging. The solipsism of journalism is really a variety of well-deserved narcissism. The gulf between private life and journalism is rapidly shrinking, especially as social media empowers non-journalists with the power of public speech.  This phenomenon has captivated journalistic attention, because the imminent ontological threat to journalism—as a medium of political discourse, and as a material medium itself—is playing out in the most visible of arenas. Average Joe and Jane, curating their personal Twitter accounts, have become involved, however inadvertently, in the battle for the continued relevancy of conventional journalism in an election year. What else can professional journalists and Joe and Jane do but rubberneck. 

Despite the fixed interest on “Twitter politics,” I am not convinced that this fall is unlike any other. Sure, the volume of political messaging on social media platforms has clearly reached new heights. It seems impossible to log on without encountering a barrage, no, slurry, of partisan and polemical utterances. So yes, in terms of usage patterns, in terms of what exactly gets posted when, October promises a decidedly different Twitter landscape. Yet, I would like to argue, provisionally and in an extremely constrained space, that political messaging on Twitter is irrelevant to its joint temporal and historical topology. I am not discussing Facebook for reasons that will become apparent in the course of the argument.

My first proposition is that Twitter does something quite different from Facebook to the divide between private and public life. Of course, I am excluding locked Twitter accounts, which function to a great degree like Facebook statuses denuded of profiles. Ordinary Twitter accounts are great equalizers: they position Average Joe on the same stratum as celebrities, politicians, and journalists. While the currency of Twitter, followers, varies wildly based on personal popularity and exposure, “branding” so-to-speak, in theory, Twitter allows civilians equal access to public fora as their more powerful peers. Thus, again, in theory, Twitter ought to facilitate a more actualized practice of democracy, a “better” kind of political activity, wherein citizens meet and strive for glory in a commons. However—and this is entirely anecdotal—I have observed a curious equalization of messaging itself, regardless of relative follower wealth, regardless of retweets, favorites, etc. That is to say, I grant approximately equal attention to the messages of friends and celebrities alike, which is to say, none at all. Honestly, I find myself not really caring about what people say on Twitter about anything, be it news, politics, or their personal lives. My disaffectation—perhaps, disillusionment—is not a desirable state of mind. I think my detachment is intimately related to the unfulfilled promise of Twitter-ized democracy. Although quarrels, productive conversation, and full-scale rhetorical wars break out on Twitter, they never seem to move towards any discernible conclusion. Tune in to the Twitter chatters, the Twitter news as it were, any day any hour of the week, and it’s the same chatterers chattering the same news. Slight variations, yes, but mere perambulations on a theme. Turn on the Twitter tube and you’ll find impassioned discussion happening around the clock. It’s just the same talk repeating itself on infinite loop.

My second proposition is that Twitter does something quite different from Facebook to the experience of time and history. On Facebook, there is a clear delineation of temporal sequence; heck, the entire Facebook interface is organized around the “Timeline.” Beginning, middle, and end. Facebook has a narrative structure, one not so dissimilar from Jane Austen’s. Twitter, however, is divested of temporal and historical context. There are quotidian and seasonal cycles of Twitter use-patterns. In the morning, people Tweet about coffee and the hot new content hitting the aggregators. In the afternoon, people Tweet about lunch and the hot new content hitting the aggregators. In the evening, well, you get the idea. Extrapolate across the seasons and other recurring periods, like election years, and the banality “history repeats itself” seems true in a sense more than figurative: Twitter actually does repeat itself, and Twitter’s reflection and representation of history thus repeats itself.

To read Twitter is to immerse yourself in a continuous flux of information that constantly changes on a microscopic scale. People do, after all, Tweet different things. But I would suggest that in aggregate, people Tweet the same things. I think reading Twitter is like reading a series of really bad novels. You probably couldn’t even call them novels. Pulp fiction. There’s a semblance of variation, of difference, but it’s all an illusion.

During this election cycle, I think that we will discover the a-historicity of Twitter. Like a theater of the absurd, Twitter has escaped the boundary lines of historical consciousness. Twitter is a solipsistic, narcissistic dream. Political messaging on Twitter happens under the flimsiest of historical parameters. On Twitter, one election is really every election. Different names, different faces, maybe different issues?—but the political discourse stays the same. Insofar as Twitter is kind of boring, I think its long-term potential as a democratic forum is limited.

• Tags
• Twitter
• politics
• social media
• news
• journalism
• history
• theory

The most irrelevant question to ask about a technology company is whether it’s a media company.

Is Twitter a media company?

Is Facebook a media company?

And now, is Google a media company?

The great anxiety motivating these questions is the concern that technology companies are not supplementing, but rather substituting for media companies; that Twitter, Facebook, and Google are not improving content generation and distribution, but edging out conventional content in favor of a nasty user-generated slurry.

This line of inquiry puts much needed pressure on the definition of media itself. Insofar as “media” has become an anti-democratic term—a signifier of privilege and elitism—social media platforms seem antithetical to the media ethos. Twitter and Facebook have branded themselves as open and free spaces for the exchange of social information and ideas. That’s the party line, at least. Asking whether Twitter and Facebook are media companies—a question invariably advanced by the representative of a media company—expresses a fear that social media will “democratize” old media. But—but but but—the question is also an act of aggression, a weapon to weaken the heavily qualified “democracy” of social media. By suggesting that Twitter and Facebook are media companies, old media competitors suggest that Twitter and Facebook aren’t democratic at all. The questioner imposes his own weakness on his enemy: the assumption that a media company is an instrument of exclusion. Like accusations that a media company is “liberal” or “conservative,” the accusation that a social media company is a media company implies an ulterior and malfeasant motivation. The forthcoming launch of app.net, which will remove advertisers from the social media equation, will provide a testing ground for these complex issues: because app.net will require users to pay, it occupies a more overtly anti-democratic position, but it promises to eliminate the “hidden” agenda that inform the relationships between media companies and their advertisers.

Although there are aberrant instances of democratic behavior on Twitter and Facebook, the democratic production of content happens within the confines of anti-democratic institutions. Social media platforms, particularly Twitter, are populated by elite tastemakers, influencers, and media professionals. So-called “social media rockstars,” like the corrupt capitalists of the Gilded Age, control most of the available capital, in the form of followers. The high concentration of followers around a small number of individuals means that the redistribution of user-generated content depends on a system of “gatekeepers” who monitor, arbitrate, and filter content. The “democracy” that seems to describe a utopian social media ideal would be closer to anarchy or communism, wherein the power of content production and distribution would be randomly or equally distributed across the user base. In reality, content production and distribution is controlled by a privileged class of elites. The democratic promise of social media is, I am afraid, a lie; and worse, a lie being told to the supposedly democratized masses by the very class of elites that regulates the flow of information. The new partnership of Twitter with corporations and media companies continues to shift power in favor of institutions instead of individuals. While in its earliest moments Twitter may have been close to that utopian ideal, now, it has been converted into a mirage of old media. The main distinction is that consumers are brought into closer proximity with producers. What’s the difference between a celebrity occasionally retweeting a nobody and old-skool letters to the editor? 

Therefore, asking whether Twitter and Facebook are media companies is as far from provocative as one can get.

Google, though, is another matter.

Commenters have been asking whether Google is a media company since at least 2001. Fast Company, GigaOM, Advertising Age, the New York Times, and now Forbes have gotten in on the action. The question has been revived recently because of Google’s purchases of Zagat and Frommer’s. The Forbes article, linked to above, ends with an inherently flawed variation on its title question: “How long can Google be a fair arbiter of all the world’s information when it increasingly has information of its own that it wants to promote?” Since when has Google been a “fair arbiter of all the world’s information?” Last I checked, Google employs a complex—and game-able—algorithm to surface search content. It’s not necessarily a failure on Google’s part that it is not a “fair arbiter”—such a burden would be unfair and unrealistic. What is disturbing to me, however, is that anyone has been deluded into believing that Google is such an arbiter. 

Google’s acquisition of Zagat and Frommer’s included the acquisition of their original content. Zagat’s brand is grounded in a “user-generated” ethos, whereas Frommer’s brand is slanted in a professional direction. With Zagat, Google repackaged that content into promoted search content. Google’s intent with Frommer’s remains unknown. Suffice to say that acquiring original content does not make a media company . Google is resistant to the tag, “media company,” because Google doesn’t come close to doing any of the things we think a media company ought to do.

More than Twitter or Facebook, Google might have the potential to reinvent “democratized” media. But we should stop asking whether Google’s a media company, before it’s too late. Imposing an artificial label like “media company” could tilt public opinion against Google for no good reason. Calling Google a “media company” forecloses the possibility of real democratic activity. Ironically, it is not irrelevant to ask whether Google is a media company. Nevertheless, we need to refrain from pursuing that point.

• Tags
• media
• Google
• Facebook
• Twitter
• social media
• democracy
• politics