Howard Rheingold's Public Library

23 Nov 09

PopTech: blog

"We keep hearing that multitasking is bad, he points out — that our brains can’t do it, that society is going to change for the worse. A book recently cam out arguing that it’s going to put us back into the Dark Ages. But our brains multitask all the time. “Right now I’m breathing, I’m thinking about my next slide and my last slide, I’m wondering why I didn’t go to the bathroom earlier.” But there are limitations. We can’t read two books at once.

Brodmann’s Area 10 is an area in the brain, the border between the two different things one can’t do simultaneously. “With the next generation, a lot of scientists believe that this area is going to start working faster and faster” — it allows us to oscillate between two things at once. Bilton mentions technochondria, fear of new technology. When the railroad first came into being, people believed that you could asphyxiate and die if you went 20 miles an hour, and if you went 40 miles an hour your bones would explode. “We make these dumb assumptions all the time!”

We are multitasking, Bilton says. “I want to look at why we’re doing it.” One reason is the interfaces we’ve built. When you get a text, your phone vibrates, or beeps, or a window pops up. “It works too well; it’s jarring.” Another reason is that we have a tremendous amount of media to consume. So we simultaneously consume it.

To explain how we got here, go back to before the printing press. No one read. People stood around in bars or on soapboxes. The largest library in Europe had 122 books. “Along comes the printing press.” Which didn’t change everything; it changed a little bit, slowly. Gutenberg’s Bible was 2 volumes of 50 pounds each. “It’s like computers 50 years ago. You couldn’t carry it around, lay in the park and enjoy it.” Aldus Manutis in 1502 said, “why don’t we make these things smaller, so we can put them in our pockets? That’s how we got the mobile book, equivalent of the mobile phone. That’s when people started to read.”

And then along came the radio. “We put our books down, put our newspap

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attention multitasking

We keep hearing that multitasking is bad, he points out — that our brains can’t do it, that society is going to change for the worse. A book recently cam out arguing that it’s going to put us back into the Dark Ages. But our brains multitask all the time. “Right now I’m breathing, I’m thinking about my next slide and my last slide, I’m wondering why I didn’t go to the bathroom earlier.” But there are limitations. We can’t read two books at once.

Brodmann’s Area 10 is an area in the brain, the border between the two different things one can’t do simultaneously. “With the next generation, a lot of scientists believe that this area is going to start working faster and faster” — it allows us to oscillate between two things at once. Bilton mentions technochondria, fear of new technology. When the railroad first came into being, people believed that you could asphyxiate and die if you went 20 miles an hour, and if you went 40 miles an hour your bones would explode. “We make these dumb assumptions all the time!”

We are multitasking, Bilton says. “I want to look at why we’re doing it.” One reason is the interfaces we’ve built. When you get a text, your phone vibrates, or beeps, or a window pops up. “It works too well; it’s jarring.” Another reason is that we have a tremendous amount of media to consume. So we simultaneously consume it.

To explain how we got here, go back to before the printing press. No one read. People stood around in bars or on soapboxes. The largest library in Europe had 122 books. “Along comes the printing press.” Which didn’t change everything; it changed a little bit, slowly. Gutenberg’s Bible was 2 volumes of 50 pounds each. “It’s like computers 50 years ago. You couldn’t carry it around, lay in the park and enjoy it.” Aldus Manutis in 1502 said, “why don’t we make these things smaller, so we can put them in our pockets? That’s how we got the mobile book, equivalent of the mobile phone. That’s when people started to read.”

And then along came the radio. “We put our books down, put our newspapers down, and would sit in the living room.” And radio became successful, and we start to see the first signs of multitasking; we don’t have enough time in the day to listen to shows and to read books and newspapers, so we do them at the same time. Same thing happens with television — and then the radio moves into the car, and we’re multitasking even there. Now we’re liable to be on our laptops, writing email, texting, tweeting, watching tv, and playing Nintento at the same time!

Our brains are adapting. “This is not evolution,” he assures us. Evolution doesn’t happen this fast. Maryanne Wolf has written, “After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.” And yet we do. There’s a study that came out in Nature in 2009; a gentleman wanted to understand why people read and what happens in our brains when we do. They found a group of people in South America who are literate, and found new parts of their brain that grew and existed after they had done reading. “So our brains are still learning.”

Another study shows net naive people and net savvy people, reading a book and surfing the web, and the net savvy people’s brains light up twice as much as do the net naive people’s when they’re surfing the web. There’s a new kind of comprehension at work. Yet another study shows that playing Tetris increases attention, hand-eye coordination, working memory, visual and spatial problem solving. “Internet and games are a new form of narrative we’re learning how to do.”

Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Cyburbia: How search engines are changing us

"Is it possible that this rapid information loop between sending out messages into Google and the responding feedback, is changing the way that we want to process and respond to information?"

www.charliebeckett.org/?p=2135#more-2135 - Preview

search attention

Is it possible that this rapid information loop between sending out messages into Google and the responding feedback, is changing the way that we want to process and respond to information?

Boeder

firstmonday.org/...1200 - Preview

In the digital age, the discussion about the public sphere has at the same time become increasingly relevant and increasingly problematic. The validity and relevance of post–modern critique to Habermas’ concept of the public sphere cannot be denied, yet the concept of a public sphere and Habermas’ notion of a critical publicity is still extremely valuable for media theory today.

The public sphere is subject to dramatic change; one might even argue that it is on the verge of extinction. Computer–mediated communication has taken the place of coffeehouse discourse, and issues such as media ownership and commodification pose serious threats to the free flow of information and freedom of speech on the Web. I don't believe the situation is quite that serious. I
Jürgen Habermas published Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, his critical investigation and analysis of the public sphere in civil society, in 1962. The work describes the evolution from opinion to public opinion and the socio–structural transformation of the latter. According to Habermas, the emergence of the mass press is based on the commercialisation of the participation of the masses in the public sphere. Consequently, this ‘extended’ public sphere lost much of its original political character in favour of commercialism and entertainment.

This shift is documented with regard to the public sphere’s pre–eminent institution, the press: Habermas diagnoses an integration of the once separate domains of journalism and literature, and an increasing blurring caused by the mass media in their response to the emergence of a consumerist culture:

"Editorial opinions recede behind information from press agencies and reports from correspondents; critical debate disappears behind the veil of internal decisions concerning the selection and presentation of the material." [1]

The emergence of the electronic mass media in the public sphere made things even worse. "The news is made to resemble a narrative from its own format down to stylistic detail; the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned." Yet at the same time they have an impact more penetrating than the print media, yet their format effectively prevents interaction and deprives the public of the opportunity to say something and to disagree, leading Habermas to the conclusion that "The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only" [2].

At the same time, as a result of the changing communications environment, the public sphere is discovered as a platform for advertising. A new class of participants in the public debate emerges: The practitioners of public relations, distinguished from the advertisers by their claim to the public sphere. Advertising limited itself by and large to a simple sales pitch; public relations goes further. It invades the process of public opinion by systematically creating or exploiting news events that attract attention. Engineering of consent is its central task, which leads to a staged "public opinion" and the false assumption among the public that "as critically reflecting private people they contribute responsibly to public opinion" [3].
17 more annotations...
- The character of the public sphere is increasingly restricted; the media serve as vehicles for generating and managing consensus and promoting capitalist culture rather than fulfill their original function as organs of public debate. Publicity loses its critical function in favour of a staged display; arguments are transmuted into symbols to which one cannot respond by arguing but only by identifying with them.
- Published well before the digital revolution, the work addresses the implications of modern communications technologies only in a cursory and fragmentary fashion. Habermas’ work on the public sphere is frequently attacked by post–modernists who question the emancipatory potentials of its model of consensus through rational debate.
  
  It must be noted and emphasised that the term Öffentlichkeit, the original term for its better known translation "public sphere," is conceptual rather than physical. The public sphere is "not a marketplace, nor is it a coffeehouse, a salon, an organisation or a newspaper" (Hinton, 1998). Rather, the public sphere transcends these physical appearances as an abstract forum for dialogue and ideology–free public opinion, a lively debate on multiple levels within society.
- Growth of information inequality threatens basic human rights; the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals. New forms of citizenship and public life are simultaneously enabled by new technology and restricted by market power and surveillance. One might, for example, draw from Foucault’s concept of the panoptic society to argue that the spread of information technology is likely to lead to a loss of autonomy in many realms of political, economic, cultural and social life (Friedland, 1996).
- Do the new media like the Internet, then, merely offer a shallow substitute for "authentic" discourse, or do they contribute a new quality to the public sphere? Can virtual communities contribute to the revival of the public debate, the öffentliche Auseinandersetzung — or are they merely distracting simulations?
- Rheingold (1998), although generally quite upbeat about the opportunities of the new medium, believes this conclusion to be premature. He stresses the importance of active participation: Electronic media do offer a unique channel for publishing and communicating, which is fundamental to democracy. Communication media are necessary but not sufficient for self–governance and healthy societies: "When we are called to action through the virtual community, we need to keep in mind how much depends on whether we simply ‘feel involved’ or whether we take the steps to actually participate in the lives of our neighbours, and the civic life of our communities."
  
  Earlier, Rheingold (1994) argued that the ICT industry is a business like any other, viewed primarily as an economic player: "Telecommunications gives certain people access to means of influencing certain other people’s thoughts and perceptions, and that access — who has it and who doesn’t have it — is intimately connected with political power. The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near–ubiquitous high–bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications. Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power."
  
  Two powerful and opposed images of the future of communications technology exist. There is the utopian vision of the electronic agora made possible by new technology and implemented through decentralised networks: "This technology, if properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential" (Rheingold, 1994). Rheingold stresses the importance to hear from the other side: "We owe it to ourselves and future generations to look closely at what the enthusiasts fail to tell us, and to listen attentively to what the skeptics fear."
- What these "skeptics" fear is primarily the classical argument in mass media research of commodification, the way electronic communications media already have pre–empted public discussions by turning media content into commodities. The consumer society has become the accepted model both for individual behaviour and political decision making, Rheingold (1994) argues, yet consumerism poses a threat to the public sphere: "The consumer society, the most powerful vehicle for generating short–term wealth ever invented, ensures economic growth by first promoting the idea that the way to be is to buy." Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs. What dies in this process is the rational discourse at the base of civil society.
- The public sphere is not just a "marketplace of ideas" or an "information exchange depot," but also a major vehicle for generating and distributing culture.
- The second argument focuses around the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged by the "transparency" of digital information and the potential of interactive networks for gathering information, for panoptic surveillance, for control and misinformation of citizens, a process which could possibly undermine or even eliminate discourse within the public sphere. Michel Foucault’s describes the concept of Bentham’s panopticon, the inspection house, as a metaphor for social surveillance. His examination of the constructions by which elites exercise and maintain power in order to control the masses greatly influenced the debate on the public sphere.
  
  The panopticon, Foucault argued, is not a value–neutral technology. It is a technology that allows a small number of people to control a large number of others that comes in many guises:
- "Compared to the traditional media, many more people have access to debate and opportunities for the formation of political will. They also have access to information that is hard to obtain from traditional news media." Yet she considers commodification of the Internet as inevitable, and that the Internet will become commodified; "the process has already begun." The original Internet custom of sharing information freely within the community is diminishing (Thornton, 1996).
  
  As for the participants in the public sphere on the Internet, Thornton diagnoses a tendency towards reframing identities, a shift from "citizens" to "consumers": Publicity becomes more prevalent as a mode of discourse, "Public" slides into "publicity" as the notion of "character" is steadily replaced by "image." Yet the Internet, Thornton concludes, does provide opportunities for revitalisation of the public sphere. Limited to privileged groups, they still represent an increase in the activities of the public sphere, however modest: "If Internet use expands into middle–income groups, lower–income groups and women, it may yet present a real opportunity for greater participation, democratic communication and a true revitalisation of the public sphere"
- "What public relations does, in entering public debate, is to disguise the interests it represents — cloaking them in appeals such as ‘public welfare’ and the ‘national interest’ — thus making contemporary debate a faked version" [7]. For Webster it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that "As far as information is concerned, communications and corporations’ overriding concern with the market means that their product is dedicated to the goal of generating maximum advertising revenue and supporting capitalist enterprise. As a result their content is chiefly lowest common denominator diversion"
- It has often been stated that the traditional functions of journalism will erode even further as media technology advances. The most current developments suggest that critical journalism is becoming redundant. Large companies tend to dominate the information business, primarily because brand names like Time and the Chicago Tribune provide a link with journalistic integrity, argues Christopher Harper (1998). He believes that the Internet can reverse the tide of public disdain for the media by providing a user experience that is immediate, interactive, and intimate. Bardoel (1996) points out that because of the increasing individualization and segmentation in communication such notions as "community" and "public debate" should be taken less for granted: The traditional task of journalism will shift from collecting information to directing the social flow of information and public debate. Next to this "orientating journalism," the new media offer scope for "instrumental journalism." Habermas stresses the importance of a sphere of "critical publicity" [12].
- New communications technologies are being used in ways that extend democratic communication practices. As networks become structurally decentralised, ever wider publics gain access to them in ways that lead to an increase in the rate and density of public exchange. New citizens’ movements and practices have emerged, whose community–based technology projects democratic potential has been rarely explored.
- New technologies increasingly play a central role in the mediation of social networks. Any socially grounded theory of the public sphere will have to take into account these social network structures and the communications systems that bind them. The digital public sphere may be richer and more complicated than the existing literature suggests (Friedland, 1996): "By treating communities as social capital networks, rather than strictly as discourse communities, we can begin to ground the connective elements of new information technologies in social life and social structure."
- Not just the structure of the mass media, the entire society is subject to change as new network structures come into place. The technological infrastructure of communication networks is influencing the social structure of society; its development is closely related to the development of social structures in a process of interchange and mutual dependence [13].
  
  Theoretically, a network is both able to disperse and to concentrate power. In practice, however, there is a definite tendency towards concentration of power when no adequate measures are taken to counteract this process, van Dijk argues. He concludes that society is increasingly organised in network structures, which fulfil vital economic functions in increasingly complicated systems [14]. As modern society’s dominating structure, networks are quintessential to the future of the public sphere.
- Poster questions the traditional notion of democracy as an adequate qualitative determinant for the future of the new media:
  
  "In the absence of a coherent alternative political program the best one can do is to examine phenomena such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our embeddedness in the present. (...) The colonization of the term by existing institutions encourages one to look elsewhere for the means to name the new patterns of force relations emerging in certain parts of the Internet."
  
  Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy?
  - Poster's reframing is provocative and powerful. When we voice concern for the future of democracy, what are the core values we are assuming? I would nominate individual liberties and freedom of information and association -- the Bill of Rights. But there are also other issues -- who decides policy and how are those decisions made and influenced? How are those people chosen? How are minorities protected from the tyranny of the majority? What if these values could be protected in some form other than what we now consider to be "democracy?" - about 17 hours ago
  Add Sticky Note
- The national embeddedness of the public sphere and public opinion no longer goes unquestioned and the formation of public opinion increasingly takes place across national boundaries. A transnational if not global public sphere has emerged as a forum for political discussion and opinion formation. Although news media increasingly transcend national borders, this process does not automatically create a public sphere at a transnational or global level.
  
  At the same time, Hjarvard argues, it is often the case that major decisions and actions concerning transnational or global matters take place without intense public attention. They may often receive news coverage, "but rarely do they induce a transnational dialogue involving people other than cosmopolitan elites."
  
  Clearly, processes of globalisation and media concentration affect the public sphere. Hjarvard identifies the process of globalisation as a powerful factor in the gradual deterritorialisation of the public sphere. At the same time, he points at the danger of its fragmentation: Media globalisation does not automatically entail the creation of a singular global public sphere, but rather a process of gradual blurring and differentiation of the public sphere to a multi–layered media structure, accompanied by an increase in interconnections: "Media are becoming independent institutions that do not share the social geography of other political or cultural institutions" (Hjarvard, 2000).
- We have seen that the emergence and convergence of the electronic mass media have radically changed the notion of the public sphere. Its concept transcends these physical appearances, it has survived post–modern critique and it is still very much alive in the network society today. Its strength lies in the presumption of reason, the human ability to define and solve problems.
  
  The public sphere is alive and well, although it will never be quite the same. Habermas’ coffeehouse discourse has evolved in the direction of mediated communication within electronic networks: Its future is with the digital media, which offer exciting possibilities as digital networks enhance and change social structures. In a sense, the public sphere has always been virtual: Its meaning lies in its abstraction. Habermas’ classical argument that the public sphere is intermittently threatened by — latent — power structures that attempt to inhibit and control the individual is undoubtedly correct. Yet at the same time, groups and individuals can indeed accomplish change by communicative action, and digital communications technology may empower them to do so.

Boeder: Habermas' Heritage

The public sphere is subject to dramatic change; one might even argue that it is on the verge of extinction. Computer–mediated communication has taken the place of coffeehouse discourse, and issues such as media ownership and commodification pose serious threats to the free flow of information and freedom of speech on the Web. I don't believe the situation is quite that serious. I will give an introductory overview of Habermas’ theoretical concept and point out that it is conceptual rather than physical.

I will describe why Habermas’ key concept is valuable for media theory today. Further, I will give an overview of the main issues, debates and problems that arose around the concept of the public sphere in the decades that followed. I will conclude that the notion of the public sphere is not a static one, but subject to change, and show how the theoretical concept of the public sphere is being used to work out viable options for a digital future and models for positive change.

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public_sphere

Treating communities as social capital networks, as Friedland suggests, is important: Political effects may be indirect if online discourse enables formation of trust networks and spread of norms of reciprocity. - hrheingold about 17 hours ago

ccording to Habermas, the emergence of the mass press is based on the commercialisation of the participation of the masses in the public sphere. Consequently, this ‘extended’ public sphere lost much of its original political character in favour of commercialism and entertainment.

This shift is documented with regard to the public sphere’s pre–eminent institution, the press: Habermas diagnoses an integration of the once separate domains of journalism and literature, and an increasing blurring caused by the mass media in their response to the emergence of a consumerist culture:

"Editorial opinions recede behind information from press agencies and reports from correspondents; critical debate disappears behind the veil of internal decisions concerning the selection and presentation of the material." [1]

The emergence of the electronic mass media in the public sphere made things even worse. "The news is made to resemble a narrative from its own format down to stylistic detail; the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned." Yet at the same time they have an impact more penetrating than the print media, yet their format effectively prevents interaction and deprives the public of the opportunity to say something and to disagree, leading Habermas to the conclusion that "The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only" [2].

At the same time, as a result of the changing communications environment, the public sphere is discovered as a platform for advertising. A new class of participants in the public debate emerges: The practitioners of public relations, distinguished from the advertisers by their claim to the public sphere. Advertising limited itself by and large to a simple sales pitch; public relations goes further. It invades the process of public opinion by systematically creating or exploiting news events that attract attention. Engineering of consent is its central task, which leads to a staged "public opinion" and the false assumption among the public that "as critically reflecting private people they contribute responsibly to public opinion" [3].
The mass media, Habermas argues, have mutated into monopoly capitalist organisations. Their role in the public debate has shifted from the dissemination of reliable information to the formation of public opinion. Habermas stresses the importance of a vital and functioning Öffentlichkeit, a sphere of critical publicity distinct from the state and the economy, consisting of a broad range of organisations that represent public opinion and interest groups, to counter these developments and as a conditio sine qua non for a pluralist democratic debate in an open society that is not entirely dominated by the mass media.
19 more annotations...
- It must be noted and emphasised that the term Öffentlichkeit, the original term for its better known translation "public sphere," is conceptual rather than physical. The public sphere is "not a marketplace, nor is it a coffeehouse, a salon, an organisation or a newspaper" (Hinton, 1998). Rather, the public sphere transcends these physical appearances as an abstract forum for dialogue and ideology–free public opinion, a lively debate on multiple levels within society.
- Growth of information inequality threatens basic human rights; the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals. New forms of citizenship and public life are simultaneously enabled by new technology and restricted by market power and surveillance. One might, for example, draw from Foucault’s concept of the panoptic society to argue that the spread of information technology is likely to lead to a loss of autonomy in many realms of political, economic, cultural and social life (Friedland, 1996).
- Do the new media like the Internet, then, merely offer a shallow substitute for "authentic" discourse, or do they contribute a new quality to the public sphere? Can virtual communities contribute to the revival of the public debate, the öffentliche Auseinandersetzung — or are they merely distracting simulations? Fernback and Thompson’s critique (1995) of the democratic potential of virtual communities interrogates the claim that online communications can actually strengthen civil society: "It seems most likely that the virtual public sphere brought about by [computer–mediated communication] will serve a cathartic role, allowing the public to feel involved rather than to advance actual participation.
- Rheingold (1998), although generally quite upbeat about the opportunities of the new medium, believes this conclusion to be premature. He stresses the importance of active participation: Electronic media do offer a unique channel for publishing and communicating, which is fundamental to democracy. Communication media are necessary but not sufficient for self–governance and healthy societies: "When we are called to action through the virtual community, we need to keep in mind how much depends on whether we simply ‘feel involved’ or whether we take the steps to actually participate in the lives of our neighbours, and the civic life of our communities."
- Earlier, Rheingold (1994) argued that the ICT industry is a business like any other, viewed primarily as an economic player: "Telecommunications gives certain people access to means of influencing certain other people’s thoughts and perceptions, and that access — who has it and who doesn’t have it — is intimately connected with political power. The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near–ubiquitous high–bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications. Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power."
  
  Two powerful and opposed images of the future of communications technology exist. There is the utopian vision of the electronic agora made possible by new technology and implemented through decentralised networks: "This technology, if properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential" (Rheingold, 1994). Rheingold stresses the importance to hear from the other side: "We owe it to ourselves and future generations to look closely at what the enthusiasts fail to tell us, and to listen attentively to what the skeptics fear."
- Discourse degenerated into publicity, and publicity used the increasing power of electronic media to alter perceptions and shape beliefs. What dies in this process is the rational discourse at the base of civil society.
- The second argument focuses around the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged by the "transparency" of digital information and the potential of interactive networks for gathering information, for panoptic surveillance, for control and misinformation of citizens, a process which could possibly undermine or even eliminate discourse within the public sphere. Michel Foucault’s describes the concept of Bentham’s panopticon, the inspection house, as a metaphor for social surveillance. His examination of the constructions by which elites exercise and maintain power in order to control the masses greatly influenced the debate on the public sphere.
  
  The panopticon, Foucault argued, is not a value–neutral technology. It is a technology that allows a small number of people to control a large number of others that comes in many guises:
- Thornton fears a potential repression of subordinated groups by those with stronger agenda–setting capabilities, effectively excluding them from the debate. "If their ability to form political will, debate issues and influence society is expanded by the Internet, this is no way resembles a truly participative discourse of democracy."
- "Compared to the traditional media, many more people have access to debate and opportunities for the formation of political will. They also have access to information that is hard to obtain from traditional news media." Yet she considers commodification of the Internet as inevitable
- As for the participants in the public sphere on the Internet, Thornton diagnoses a tendency towards reframing identities, a shift from "citizens" to "consumers": Publicity becomes more prevalent as a mode of discourse, "Public" slides into "publicity" as the notion of "character" is steadily replaced by "image." Yet the Internet, Thornton concludes, does provide opportunities for revitalisation of the public sphere. Limited to privileged groups, they still represent an increase in the activities of the public sphere, however modest: "If Internet use expands into middle–income groups, lower–income groups and women, it may yet present a real opportunity for greater participation, democratic communication and a true revitalisation of the public sphere" (Thornton, 1996).
- Habermas was among the first to point out the intimate connection between the existence of public sphere and the foundations of democratic society. Public opinion can only be formed if a public that engages in rational discussion exists. The key to understanding the Habermasian concept of public sphere is in separating it from the medium in which it develops.
- The traditional task of journalism will shift from collecting information to directing the social flow of information and public debate. Next to this "orientating journalism," the new media offer scope for "instrumental journalism." Habermas stresses the importance of a sphere of "critical publicity"
- ohn Hartley (1992) makes the bold argument that the media are the public sphere: "Television, popular newspapers, magazines and photography, the popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where and the means by which the public is created and has its being." In the post–modern world, he argues, the image has triumphed over the word. It is the popular media where the public sphere resides. The Habermasian notion of public sphere is clinically dead: Reduced to an image–saturated space, which is at the same time personal and abstract.
- New technologies increasingly play a central role in the mediation of social networks. Any socially grounded theory of the public sphere will have to take into account these social network structures and the communications systems that bind them. The digital public sphere may be richer and more complicated than the existing literature suggests (Friedland, 1996): "By treating communities as social capital networks, rather than strictly as discourse communities, we can begin to ground the connective elements of new information technologies in social life and social structure."
- Theoretically, a network is both able to disperse and to concentrate power. In practice, however, there is a definite tendency towards concentration of power when no adequate measures are taken to counteract this process, van Dijk argues. He concludes that society is increasingly organised in network structures, which fulfil vital economic functions in increasingly complicated systems [14]. As modern society’s dominating structure, networks are quintessential to the future of the public sphere.
- Poster questions the traditional notion of democracy as an adequate qualitative determinant for the future of the new media:
  
  "In the absence of a coherent alternative political program the best one can do is to examine phenomena such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our embeddedness in the present. (...) The colonization of the term by existing institutions encourages one to look elsewhere for the means to name the new patterns of force relations emerging in certain parts of the Internet."
  
  Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy?
- The national embeddedness of the public sphere and public opinion no longer goes unquestioned and the formation of public opinion increasingly takes place across national boundaries. A transnational if not global public sphere has emerged as a forum for political discussion and opinion formation. Although news media increasingly transcend national borders, this process does not automatically create a public sphere at a transnational or global level.
- The concept of the civil society appears to be dated in what is essentially a network society. Van Dijk distinguishes three conditions of the public sphere that are likely to disappear in the new media environment of a network society. The alliance of the public sphere with a particular place or territory diminishes: "Members of a particular organic community or a nation are no longer tied to a given territory to meet each other and build collectivities" [15]. The unitary character of the public sphere is transforming into an amalgam of different "sub"–spheres: The distinction between public and private spheres is blurring.
  
  The conventional notion of a single, unified public sphere is likely to disappear in favour of a more segmented, pluralist model: Something like a "complex mosaic of differently sized overlapping and interconnected public spheres" (Keane, 1995). What binds people in this contemporary public sphere is a "diversified and shifting complex of overlapping similarities and differences." The Internet itself forms the perfect example of this new structure [16].
- We have seen that the emergence and convergence of the electronic mass media have radically changed the notion of the public sphere. Its concept transcends these physical appearances, it has survived post–modern critique and it is still very much alive in the network society today. Its strength lies in the presumption of reason, the human ability to define and solve problems.
  
  The public sphere is alive and well, although it will never be quite the same. Habermas’ coffeehouse discourse has evolved in the direction of mediated communication within electronic networks: Its future is with the digital media, which offer exciting possibilities as digital networks enhance and change social structures. In a sense, the public sphere has always been virtual: Its meaning lies in its abstraction. Habermas’ classical argument that the public sphere is intermittently threatened by — latent — power structures that attempt to inhibit and control the individual is undoubtedly correct. Yet at the same time, groups and individuals can indeed accomplish change by communicative action, and digital communications technology may empower them to do so.

Programs | Digital Democracy

"Handheld Human Rights uses mobile phones to connect human rights workers around Burma’s borders. Using mobile text messages connected with a detailed computer interface, HHR helps aid workers quickly and securely share critical information in order to coordinate responses and save lives.

HHR allows groups to:

* Disseminate key information and messages to field workers.
* Facilitate communication between groups.
* Collect data that can be mapped on an international website.
* Rapidly disseminate news of human rights violations to the international community and advocacy groups."

www.digital-democracy.org/programming - Preview

smartmobs ict mobile_devices

Santa Cruz taps social media, citizens to help fix city budget

"A ballooning city budget deficit and a dwindling tax base led the City of Santa Cruz to rethink its governing methods. By using an Online collaboration tool, city officials tapped their electorate to help resolve a budget crises and set an economic development strategy that would preserve the city’s unique cultural and environmental hallmarks. "

civsourceonline.com/...tizens-to-help-fix-city-budget - Preview

collaboration social_media public_sphere

Nieman Reports | Taking the Big Gulp

"Before the Web existed, there was (and still is) the Internet. From the get-go, the Internet was a solution-oriented medium: Ask a question, get an answer. And it was an interactive medium: No longer were you sitting back and waiting to be told what you needed to know. You asked the question. The Internet was participatory: You and all of those other people out there were connecting—and sharing and talking—with everyone else.

Along came the Web, and not only were these basic traits—solution-oriented, interactive and participatory—expanded with new technologies, but other facets emerged. Rather than go through the chronology, here are the characteristics as they apply to news organizations: "

www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx - Preview

digital_journalism

Before the Web existed, there was (and still is) the Internet. From the get-go, the Internet was a solution-oriented medium: Ask a question, get an answer. And it was an interactive medium: No longer were you sitting back and waiting to be told what you needed to know. You asked the question. The Internet was participatory: You and all of those other people out there were connecting—and sharing and talking—with everyone else.

Along came the Web, and not only were these basic traits—solution-oriented, interactive and participatory—expanded with new technologies, but other facets emerged. Rather than go through the chronology, here are the characteristics as they apply to news organizations:
Solution-Oriented Stories: No longer can news organizations just point out the problem. They've got to address a solution, including looking at other communities that have solved the problem.
6 more annotations...
- Context: The Web is infinitely deep and all points on it are connected. That means stories no longer stand alone. They're embedded in a matrix—a Web shell—that connects to stories done in the past, to data, to all the players and organizations involved in the story or the issue addressed, and to resources.
- Real Time = Continuity: For the first time, a communications medium mirrors life. Artificial constructs of 24-hour newspaper deadlines or multiple daily TV or radio deadlines are gone. Most news organizations figured this out a while back and have established continuous news desks or are busy doing so now. This also means the end of "been there, done that" journalism.
- Participatory: Blogs, ratings sites, wikis, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. To traditional top-down journalists, this looks like a cacophonic community at its best and communication anarchy at its worst. To those who embrace the Web, it looks like a dynamic opportunity for continuous worldwide conversations. The bottom line: News organizations need to embrace and integrate the community's conversation.
- Personalization: Stories embedded in a matrix of data and resources enable people to "personalize" the story to pursue their own interests and questions that arise when they read, see or experience it. The BBC's Iraq site, for example, provides links to maps; updated graphics of oil production, civilian deaths, and school openings; timelines; photographs; historical information, and others involved in the conflict.
- Multimedia Stories and Information: On the Web, storytelling and information become multimedia stories and information.
- By understanding the medium, a news organization can set goals for a transition to a Web-centric newsroom, which is oriented to doing stories for the Web first, then spinning off text, photos, audio, video and infographics for print, PDAs, iPods, iPods with video, cell phones, and any other communications platform.

Find Your Voice

"What is a public voice? A public voice is the synthesis that lies halfway between two extremes: a private voice and a commercial voice. A private voice makes no concession to others: the only priority is honest expression, regardless of whether anyone will comprehend or identify with your words. A commercial voice wants only to produce a predetermined effect in the audience: study the audience and then tell them what they want to hear. Private voices and commercial voices both have their place, but they serve no useful purpose in the public sphere. To have a public voice, you must learn to combine two seemingly contradictory goals: being true to your own experience and values while also serving as a consciously designed intervention in an ongoing public debate. In other words, having a public voice means saying what you want to say while being confident that your audience will understand it. "

polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/...zine.html - Preview

public_sphere

What is a public voice? A public voice is the synthesis that lies halfway
between two extremes: a private voice and a commercial voice. A private
voice makes no concession to others: the only priority is honest expression,
regardless of whether anyone will comprehend or identify with your words. A
commercial voice wants only to produce a predetermined effect in the audience:
study the audience and then tell them what they want to hear. Private voices
and commercial voices both have their place, but they serve no useful purpose
in the public sphere. To have a public voice, you must learn to combine two
seemingly contradictory goals: being true to your own experience and values
while also serving as a consciously designed intervention in an ongoing public
debate. In other words, having a public voice means saying what you want to
say while being confident that your audience will understand it.
2 more annotations...
- In order to have a public voice, you have to care about something. So figure
  out what you care about. A provisional guess will do, since your interests
  and identity can only be discovered as your voice starts to grow. Caring
  about something is a big deal, and it's hard for some people. It's not just
  being against something, and it's not just wanting to have a community. It
  means having values that make the world make sense. Once you know what you
  care about, then you can hunt for a community. Maybe that community already
  exists, or maybe you have to build it. The point is that your voice is not
  just your own voice -- it is also the voice of a community.
- (1) Say something interesting right away. You can't noodle around with ten
  paragraphs of prefatory throat-clearing. If your readers don't know who you
  are, you'll have one paragraph to say something. Otherwise they will move
  along to the next page, or the next message. Interesting to who? To you.
  
  (2) Say something new. Meaning, new to you. If you've heard it before, so
  has your audience. It should be real and spontaneous, so that it's your voice
  and not someone else's. Notice the tension between this rule and the strategy
  of copying someone else's voice for a while.
  
  (3) Have a point. Know what it is.
  
  (4) Talk about current events. If attention in your community is focused on a
  breaking news story or an ongoing controversy, use that issue as the point of
  departure for your reflections. That's what pundits do.
  
  (5) Give voice to the community's values. Give people words to explain what
  they care about. These words should communicate clearly to members of the
  community, and they should also communicate to others. You can provide a
  public service by learning how to explain your values to people who don't yet
  share them, thereby developing a public voice, and then sharing your voice
  with others.
  
  (6) Speak to the healthy part of the person. Maybe your audience has bought
  some propaganda, or maybe they are wounded and acting out a trauma. Don't
  talk to those parts. Don't fight with them, don't sympathize with them,
  don't persuade them. Talk to the parts that share your values. Find ways of
  talking to the healthy parts of the person without pushing the buttons of the
  other parts. If your audience has developed antibodies against a certain word
  or phrase, find some other word or phrase.
  
  (7) Don't flame. Ranting is okay, but not flaming. The difference is that
  ranting communicates a coherent and original argument, whereas flaming is pure
  redundant negativity. If you do rant, be sensible most of the time.
  
  (8) Try things. Find a voice that you're comfortable with, but keep pushing
  it in different directions. See what it feels like. Keep doing the things
  that feel good.
  
  (9) Let it become part of your life. You'll find yourself spontaneously
  rehearsing things to say. Say the good ones. It gets much easier with
  practice. The vacuum and paranoia will dissipate.
  
  (10) Let it take time. Keep sending your voice out there. As time goes by,
  one by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say how much they like
  your work. One by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say that
  you've changed their life.

MapLib.net - About

"Maplib.net turns pictures into zoomable& panable views in easy steps and enables new ways of viewing pictures, just like Google Maps does.
Features

1.

It's simple and professional knowledge is not required.
2.

Make annotations on pictures with legend.
3.

Various icons for markers, as well as uploading your own icons.
4.

Social network system. You can join groups and post topics, and share pictures with group members.
5.

Easily to embedded into your own website, for both atlas and pictures.
6.

Using tags and atlas to organize picture more efficiently.
7.

Full permission control system. Your atlas, pictures and groups can be open to specific users only.

Maplib.net can be used to

1.

Create geographic maps, for example, campus maps and so on.
2.

Create game maps, and share it with those who also love this game.
3.

View digital pictures in a whole new way, and invite your friends to make annotations on it.
4.

Introduce products. Just upload the picture of a product, and make annotations on parts of this product.
5.

Create flow charts that can be used for snapshots of web pages and softwares and so on.
6.

View huge pictures and save the loading time.
7.

And more... "

maplib.net/about - Preview

mapping comm217

NiJeL | Community Impact Through Mapping

"At NiJeL, we create maps that tell powerful stories and have real community impact. Across the globe, NiJeL uses high performance mapping to identify and mitigate social, economic, and environmental problems in poor communities now so they don't become humanitarian disasters later. We think our maps can be potent decision-making tools that can, among other things, help communities advocate for better living conditions. So, if you're working to make the world a better place, we're looking to help you tell your story though maps. "

www.nijel.org/ - Preview

mapping

22 Nov 09

Your Brain on Books: Scientific American

"One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact.

As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process. I began to wonder how it was even possible that our brain could adapt to reading, given it obviously never evolved for that purpose. The search for an answer resulted in this book. And, in the end, reading forces us to propose a very different view of the relationship between culture and the brain.

COOK: What is this “new relationship”?

DEHAENE: A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms.

What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems -- all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling. "

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm - Preview

neuroplasticity

One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact.

As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process. I began to wonder how it was even possible that our brain could adapt to reading, given it obviously never evolved for that purpose. The search for an answer resulted in this book. And, in the end, reading forces us to propose a very different view of the relationship between culture and the brain.

COOK: What is this “new relationship”?

DEHAENE: A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms.

What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems -- all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.
In the case of reading, the shapes of our writing systems have evolved towards a progressive simplification while remaining compatible with the visual coding scheme that is present in all primate brains. A fascinating discovery, made by the American researcher Marc Changizi, is that all of the world's writing systems use the same set of basic shapes, and that these shapes are already a part of the visual system in all primates, because they are also useful for coding natural visual scenes. The monkey brain already contains neurons that preferentially respond to an “alphabet” of shapes including T, L, Y. We merely “recycle” these shapes (and the corresponding part of cortex) and turn them into a cultural code for language.

21 Nov 09

GoodGuide lets you scan barcodes to find the most ethical products | VentureBeat

"GoodGuide, one of my favorite applications for the iPhone, just got a cool new feature — barcode scanning. Users could already consult the app for data on whether a product was healthy, environmentally-friendly, and socially-responsible, but now you don’t have to type in a search. Just scan the barcode, and the app brings up the relevant information.

The San Francisco company also announced a $5.5 million second round of funding led by new investor Physic Ventures, with participation from New Island Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. GoodGuide previously raised $3.73 million."

digital.venturebeat.com/...odes-to-find-the-best-products - Preview

mobile_devices smartmobs

Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution - tech - 18 November 2009 - New Scientist

"CELLPHONES could soon be used to fight noise pollution - an irony that won't be lost on those driven to distraction by mobile phones' ringtones.

In a bid to make cities quieter, the European Union requires member states to create noise maps of their urban areas once every five years. Rather than deploying costly sensors all over a city, the maps are often created using computer models that predict how various sources of noise, such as airports and railway stations, affect the areas around them.

Nicolas Maisonneuve of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, France, says that those maps are not an accurate reflection of residents' exposure to noise. To get a more precise picture, Maisonneuve's team has developed NoiseTube, a downloadable software app which uses people's smartphones to monitor noise pollution. "The goal was to turn the mobile phone into an environmental sensor," says Maisonneuve."

www.newscientist.com/...e-maps-of-noise-pollution.html - Preview

sensors mobile_devices

Steelworkers Form Collaboration with MONDRAGON, the World’s Largest Worker-Owned Cooperative

"The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”"

www.usw.org/...releases_advisories - Preview

cooperation

"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

"Consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media and you will see where Web2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful. Living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being in flow with information is different than Csikszentmihalyi's sense, as it's not about perfect attention, but it is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.

As of late, we've been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you're living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.

Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools.

For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination, of accessing information as a process, of producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes? While things are certainly clunky at best, this is the promise land of the technologies we're creating. This is all happening because of how our information society is changing. But before we talk more about flow, we need to step back and talks about shifts in the media landscape."

www.danah.org/...Web2Expo.html - Preview

attention media

Twitter StreamGraphs

"A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. The default search query is 'data visualization' but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the '@' symbol to see the latest tweets from that user. A parameter to the URL can be used to specify the initial search word. For example, use http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php?q=coffee to see the latest tweets about coffee. "

www.neoformix.com/...view.php - Preview

twitter visualization

People Search | Find People | Spokeo

"Learn something new about your friends... GUARANTEED. Find People instantly through the best people search tool on the internet. Try it Free! You can also search for people and find hidden photos and videos.
Want to see something juicy? Spokeo searches deep within 48 major social networks to find truly mouth-watering news about friends and coworkers. "

www.spokeo.com - Preview

privacy social_networks

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

"There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers."

www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/...iif-you-happened-to-being.html - Preview

journalism media public_sphere

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
11 more annotations...
- I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
- There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
- There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
- The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
  I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
- The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
- In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
  But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve.
- So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce.
- So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the re
- Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now.
- The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
  This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:
- we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
  So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things

Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution | Media | guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/...whyjournalistsmustlearnthe - Preview

The debate over blogging's usefulness to journalism tends to get stuck in a cul de sac, mainly because too few people - well, too few journalists - treat it seriously.
What is also clear, most obviously in peer to peer blogging, is that people are engaged with each other as never before. Without any institutional or corporate coaxing, people are forming cyber communities in which they converse endlessly about their interests.
I say this as a preliminary to explaining why journalists, especially print veterans like me, are so suspicious of bloggers. We have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that's wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.
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- In that old paradigm - to which many editors and journalists still cling - news was one-way traffic. We conceived it. We gathered it. We published it and broadcast it. It was justification enough that people bought our newspapers or tuned in to our radio and TV channels.
  Blogging turns that model on its head. It allows people to question the information we provide. It allows them to produce their own information. It offers them a space to air their own views.
- I have tended to predict that future news organisations will consist of a small hub of "professional journalists" at the centre with bloggers (aka amateur journalists/citizen journalists) on the periphery. In other words, us pros will still run the show.
  I'm altogether less certain about that model now. First, I wonder whether us pros are as valuable as we think. Second, and more fundamentally, I wonder whether a "news organisation" is as perfect a model as we might think.
  The growth of media in the last century or so has been dominated by the growth of big media, which really means the growth of big media people, whether they be individual entrepreneurs or corporate chiefs. It is entirely conceivable that the digital revolution may, in the fullness of time, sweep the media mogul aside.
- Blogging is all about personal voices interacting with one another, not about personal voices lecturing.
- It's all too easy for people from a traditional media background to see community as a place - something off to the side where the readers go, while the journalists sit over here in the real part of the site. They are content-focused, not people-focused. After all, that's what the job's been all about for the last century or so.
- When we journalists talk about integration we generally mean, integrating print and online activities. But the true integration comes online itself. The integration between journalists and citizens. Of course, there should be no distinction between them. But journalists still wish to see themselves as a class apart.
  We have to open ourselves up to a new thought process. There is no us and them. I had a sudden thought to end this posting with a Marxist-style call to arms: "Bloggers of the world unite". But it is the lack of unity that makes blogging so vibrant, so critical and also so self-critical. And, of course, so revolutionary.

Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, And Vannevar Bush's Memex

"Vannevar Bush's famous paper "As We May Think" (1945) described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, unhistorically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This paper attempts to reconstruct the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when "As We May Think" was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otlet (1934) and Walter Schuermeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined."

people.ischool.berkeley.edu/...goldbush.html - Preview

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