I love these opening lines in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article this morning about the vigorous online conversation that has been taking place about race, Barack Obama, and the controversy regarding past remarks made by his friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In the church of the Internet, call him the preacher heard all around our YouTubing world, where believers not only watch the videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial and racially charged sermons but also edit them, comment on them, pass them around. And make them their own.
Wright’s homilies — including the one where he says “God damn America” — have taken on a new life, opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it. It’s about race, Sen. Barack Obama, the presidential campaign, us.
Think about that line for a moment: “opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it.” In a few of my recent essays about the annual State of the News Media report as well as Andrew Keen’s rants against “amateur” media, I have argued that we should appreciate just how much better our deliberative democracy is today thanks to the Internet, new media technologies, and user-generated content. Some critics bemoan the fact that we no longer have a handful of media intermediaries moderating or filtering that conversation, but this Obama-Wright issue provides us with a wonderful case study about why that thinking is so utterly misguided. As Vargas suggests, a conversation about race and politics is a conversation about us as a people; as a society. Shouldn’t, therefore, “we the people” all be able to have our voices heard in that conversation in one way or another? The Internet enables that, and we are better off for it. Thirty years ago, 3 big networks and a few newspapers would have determined the confines and duration of this discussion. Today, we do.
Earlier today I listed all the entries in my Media Metrics series, but I forgot to mention that all the images that you see in those installments are available on my Flickr account and can be downloaded there in multiple sizes if you find them useful.
I’m seeing more and more people joining Twitter and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it. My initial reaction to Twitter was skepticism, but I became a convert after I subscribed to Clay Shirky’s feed and received a tweet from him a couple hours later about his talk in D.C. that I would have never known about. That was useful, and since then I’ve found Twitter more and more useful.
First of, I’d like to explain what it is for the sake of those who don’t know. I’ll do so by way of video:
The first thing to note is that Twitter is a classic example of network effects because its usefulness increases relative to the number of users on it. Its usefulness also increases exponentially when people you know and care about make there way onto it. The network seems to be growing in concentric circles and while it’s been dominated by the elite digerati in Silicon Valley so far, it seems to be making its way to DC now.
The video presents Twitter as a way to let people know what you’re doing at the moment. In fact, Twitter itself suggests that you use the service to answer the question, “What are you doing?” But if we took that literally, like some do, Twitter would truly be dull: “Going to the bank,” “Eating ice cream,” “Going to sleep.” Alex King suggests that the “what are you doing” question be replaced with the imperative, “Say something interesting.” In practice that’s what most people have done.
My friend Julian Sanchez uses Twitter mostly to announce at which bar he is currently so that anyone nearby who gets his tweet on a mobile phone can drop in an join him for a drink. I’m sure people join him who otherwise wouldn’t have. Blogger Robert Scoble uses it to crowdsource. Recently he was scheduled to interview the CFO of Amazon on stage before a conference. He’s got about 13,000 people in his network and he asked them what he should ask the CFO. He got back many insightful questions he would never have thought up himself. (As an aside, I’m curious if you know of other innovative uses. Post in the comments.)
Ultimately the best thing about Twitter is that it’s a different experience for each user. You only see the tweets of the people you follow. If someone’s not your cup of tea, you can silently boot them. The result is a stream of interesting stuff that only gets more useful as more people you know get on it. In the short while I’ve been on it I’ve been pointed to more interesting article, sites, and videos than I could have imagined. Give it a whirl… and follow me!
A couple of scientists demonstrating voiceless communication. There’s a band around one chap’s neck that reads his brain waves. At present it has a vocabulary of about 150 words…
Wander down the street, wonder “where is the nearest restaurant?”, and hear the answer in your brain…?
I admit I’ve gotten so jaded by inventions (especially those in their early stages) that I can’t really get myself to react even over this one. But I did think it was worth noting. It has the potential to evolve into something that challenges concepts of privacy and property and calls for new ones. Rules on what others may feed into your brain, the default settings of commercial products that read in and out; whether such a device may ever be used against one’s will; the reliability of testimony based on on data read off of such a device.
Which is interesting, because at one time I would have thought that there really could not be new rules and basic rights, or ought not to be. One was pretty much stuck with whatever had evolved in a state of nature–for anything new like this, it would be a rule-less environment, a war of technology against technology. Want to keep someone out? Physically block it with your own tech… and so on.
But that sort of limitation on our rules of the game won’t do; it is far too limiting and arbitrarily so. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean anything goes. Difficult territory.
Can technology really help liberate repressed populations? I’d like to think so, although there are times when I’ve had my doubts. When it comes to speech controls and political repression, the David-vs-Goliath / cat-and-mouse interplay of citizens versus the State is an intriguing thing to study. I talked about how “technologies of freedom” are helping to slowly liberate citizens in some countries, and here’s a new story today from VOA about China struggling to cope with criticism before the Olympics.
The Washington Post’s outstanding columnist Anne Applebaum also has a piece today along these lines that discusses what’s happening in Tibet right now. She notes:
Cellphone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateurish, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others, burning buildings and shops; still others, monks in purple robes, riot police and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cellphone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China’s Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border? That covert cellphones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident….
Here’s a maxim for Supreme Court watchers: the high court likes to be entertained.
The justices’ decision to take the Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations case means that the court will finally hear a case pitting broadcast-style indecency regulation against the more recent rulings that the First Amendment forbids restrictions on the Internet and cable television.
The tension between the rules governing broadcasting and the rules governing cable television and the Internet has become extreme. The FCC has been vigorously enforcing broadcast indecency over the past five years — at the very time in which technological developments are making the broadcast versus Internet distinction meaningless.
Some First Amendment observers believe that the FCC v. Fox case could result in a decision overturning the entire framework of broadcast indecency.
Although the Supreme Court could rule more narrowly, the fact that it took the case may signal that the justices are finally ready to square what appears to be the single most glaring inconsistency in First Amendment jurisprudence.
Communications Daily reports that USTelecom has now rebranded itself as “The Broadband Association” (although apparently keeping the formal name USTelecom) . The group’s president, Walter McCormack, explained that the branding shift is simply “calling it what it is.” “The future of communications is in broadband”, he added.
The move is but the latest in a long series of name — and mission — changes for the group, which until the mid-1980s was known as the “US Independent Telephone Association,” and represented non-Bell System telephone providers.
USTelecom’s move mirrors a similar rebranding by CTIA — which was at various times the “Cellular Telephone Industry Association,” the “Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association,” and the “Cellular Telecommunications and Information Association.” Finally, a few years ago they decided it was all spinach, and started just calling themselves CTIA – The Wireless Association.
I realized it might make sense to have a single meta-link for all the installments in my ongoing “Media Metrics” series, so this will be it. To reiterate, the goal of the Media Metrics series is to paint the most thorough and objective portrait of the true state of the modern media marketplace using evidence, not emotion. Too often, media debates get caught up in rhetorical skirmishes based upon the way people “feel” about media. In this series, by contrast, I hope to replace feelings with facts and provide an objective assessment of where we stand today. My PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen are also in the process of compiling all of this material into a single database / report that we plan on making available shortly to policymakers, the press, and the public to use as a resource. Here are the online installments I have already posted:
Diane Mermigas, the editor-at-large of MediaPost and one of the most consistently insightful media analysts in America, has this sobering assessment of the predicament most traditional media operators find themselves in today:
Media companies, like many industries, are placing bets on new technology and business models while their traditional business models are deteriorating. They are increasingly resorting to a variety of new metrics and formulas to track their return on investment. The complexities of tracking traditional revenues under siege and emerging revenues not yet steadied will pose financial accountability problems that will become increasingly evident. Add to that heavy investing in digital infrastructure and the carryover (for some) of costly, increasingly ineffective legacy operations, and media has its own lethal financial squeeze in the making. No way will new digital revenues ramp to replace traditional revenues as rapidly as they are deteriorating. A weakening economy has made advertisers and consumers more conservative about spending money.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.