Shane Greenstein, Kellogg Chair in Information Technology at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, discusses his recent paper, Collective Intelligence and Neutral Point of View: The Case of Wikipedia , coauthored by Harvard assistant professor Feng Zhu. Greenstein and Zhu’s paper takes a look at whether Linus’ Law applies to Wikipedia articles. Do Wikipedia articles have a slant or bias? If so, how can we measure it? And, do articles become less biased over time, as more contributors become involved? Greenstein explains his findings.

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Related Links

• Is Wikipedia Biased?, Greenstein, Zhu
• Harvard Business School Biography, Greenstein
• Harvard Business School Biography, Zhu
• The Irony of Public Funding, The Virulent World of Mouse

Patrick Ruffini, political strategist, author, and President of Engage, a digital agency in Washington, DC, discusses his latest book with coauthors David Segal and David Moon: Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet. Ruffini covers the history behind SOPA, its implications for Internet freedom, the “Internet blackout” in January of 2012, and how the threat of SOPA united activists, technology companies, and the broader Internet community.

Download

Related Links

• Patrick Ruffini, Engage
• Patrick Ruffini, Huffington Post
• Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet, Goodreads

In my Cato paper, “Publication Practices for Transparent Government,” I talked about the data practices that will produce more transparent government. The government can and should improve the way it provides information about its deliberations, management, and results.

“But transparency is not an automatic or instant result of following these good practices,” I wrote, “and it is not just the form and formats of data.”

It turns on the capacity of the society to interact with the data and make use of it. American society will take some time to make use of more transparent data once better practices are in place. There are already thriving communities of researchers, journalists, and software developers using unofficial repositories of government data. If they can do good work with incomplete and imperfect data, they will do even better work with rich, complete data issued promptly by authoritative sources.

We’re not just sitting around waiting for that to happen.

Based on the data modeling reported in “Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices,” and with software we acquired and modified for the purpose, we’ve been marking up the bills introduced in the current Congress with “enhanced” XML that allows computers to automatically gather more of the meaning found in legislation. (Unfamiliar with XML? Several folks have complimented the explanation of it and “Cato XML” in our draft guide.)

No, we are not going to replace the lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C., quite yet, but our work will make a great deal more information about bills available automatically.

And to build society’s capacity “to interact with the data and make use of it,” we’re hoping to work with the best outlet for public information we know, Wikipedia, making data about bills a resource for the many Wikipedia articles on legislation and newly passed laws.

Wikipedia is a unique project, both technically and culturally, so we’re convening a workshop on March 14th and 15th to engage Wikipedians and bring them together with data transparency folks, hopefully to craft a path forward that informs the public better about what happens in Washington, D.C. We’ve enlisted Pete Forsyth of Wiki Strategies to help assemble and moderate the discussion. Pete was a key designer of the Wikimedia Foundation’s U.S. Public Policy Initiative—a pilot program that guided professors and students in making substantive contributions to Wikipedia, and that led to the establishment of the Foundation’s Global Education Program.

The Thursday afternoon session is an open event, a Wikipedia tutorial for the many inexperienced editors among us. It’s followed by a Sunshine Week reception open to all who are interested in transparency.

On Friday, we’ll roll up our sleeves for an all-day session in which we hope Wikipedians and experienced government data folks will compare notes and produce some plans and projects for improving public access to information.

You can view a Cato event page about the workshop here. To sign up, go here, selecting which parts of the event you’d like to attend. (Friday attendance requires a short application.)

For some Wikipedians, particularly, this may be their first direct experience with the Cato Institute. We are known, of course, for policy positions that contest the current size and scope of government, but transparency, and the hope with getting data on to Wikipedia, is meant to provide the public with neutral information tools that all communities can use to oversee the government and advocate for what they want.

From Cato’s first event on transparency, and again in “Publication Practices,” I’ve emphasized that transparency is a sort of win-win bet.

Government transparency is a widely agreed-upon value, but it is agreed upon as a means toward various ends. Libertarians and conservatives support transparency because of their belief that it will expose waste and bloat in government. If the public understands the workings and failings of government better, the demand for government solutions will fall and democracy will produce more libertarian outcomes. American liberals and progressives support transparency because they believe it will validate and strengthen government programs. Transparency will root out corruption and produce better outcomes, winning the public’s affection and support for government.

Though the goals may differ, pan-ideological agreement on transparency can remain. Libertarians should not prefer large government programs that are failing. If transparency makes government work better, that is preferable to government working poorly. If the libertarian vision prevails, on the other hand, and transparency produces demand for less government and greater private authority, that will be a result of democratic decisionmaking that all should respect and honor.

…

By putting out data that is “liquid” and “pure,” governments can meet their responsibility to be transparent, and they can foster this evolution toward a body politic that better consumes data. Transparency is likely to produce a virtuous cycle in which public oversight of government is easier, in which the public has better access to factual information, in which people have less need to rely on ideology, and in which artifice and spin have less effectiveness. The use of good data in some areas will draw demands for more good data in other areas, and many elements of governance and public debate will improve.

Hope to see you March 14th and 15th.

Very cool little video here by Jess3 documenting Internet growth and activity. Ironically, Berin sent it to me as Adam Marcus and I were updating the lengthy list of Net & online media stats you’ll find down below. Many of the stats we were compiling are shown in the video. Enjoy!

• 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; an 18% increase from the previous year.^[1]
• 81.8 million .COM domain names at the end of 2009; 12.3 million .NET names & 7.8 million .ORG names.^[2]
• 234 million websites as of Dec 2009; 47 million were added in 2009.^[3] In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.^[4]
• There are roughly 26 million blogs on the Internet^[5] and even back in 2007, there were over 1.5 million new blog posts every day (17 posts per second).^[6]
• In December 2009, 86% of the total U.S. online population viewed video content.^[7] The average online viewer watched 187 videos (up 95 percent from the previous year), while the average video length viewed grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes.^[8] The majority of online video viewing (52%) occurred at video sites ranked outside of the top 25, suggesting the increased fragmentation of online video and the emergence of sites in the “long tail.”^[9]
• YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute,^[10] and 1 billion videos are served up daily by YouTube, or 12.2 billion videos viewed per month.^[11]
• For video hosting site Hulu, as of Nov 2009, 924 million videos were viewed per month in the U.S.^[12]
• Developers have created over 140,000 apps for the Apple iPhone and iPod and iPad and made them available in the Apple App Store.^[13] Customers in 77 countries can choose apps in 20 categories, and users have downloaded over three billion apps since its inception in July 2008.^[14] Apple’s iTunes Store has a catalog of 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes, and 8,500 movies. It has sold more than 10 billion songs.^[15]
• Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its 400+ million users upload more than 3 billion photos, and create over 3.5 million events. More than 3 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also more than 3 million active Pages on the site.^[16]
• There are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia every seven weeks.^[17]
• Twitter users send out 50 million tweets per day, an average of 600 tweets per second.^[18]
• 4 billion photos hosted by Flickr as of Oct 2009.^[19]

[2] Id.

[3] Id.

[4] Gavin O’Malley, Comcast Taps Hispanic Web Portal, MediaPost News, Online Media Daily, March 8, 2006, www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=40714

[5] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[6] David Sifry, The State of the Live Web, April 2007, www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

[7] comScore, The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review – A Recap of the Year in Digital Marketing 10, Feb. 2010, http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/2/comScore_Releases_2009_U.S._Digital_Year_in_Review.

[8] Id.

[9] Id. at 12.

[10] Ryan Junee, Zoinks! 20 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute!, Broadcasting Ourselves: The Official YouTube Blog, May 20, 2009, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html

[11] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[12] Royal Pingdom, supra.

[13] Apple, 140,000 apps at your fingertips. From day one., www.apple.com/ipad/app-store.

[14] Press Release, Apple, Apple’s App Store Downloads Top Three Billion (Jan. 5, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html

[15] Press Release, Apple, iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold (Feb. 25, 2010), www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html.

[16] Facebook, Statistics, www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[17] Katalaveno, Edit growth measured in time between every 10,000,000^th edit, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Katalaveno/TBE (last accessed Mar. 2, 2010).

[18] Twitter Blog, Measuring Tweets, Feb. 22, 2010, http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html.

[19] Royal Pingdom, supra.

Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Gregory Galant has a wonderful post about “18 Awesome Tech Things We Didn’t Have 10 Years Ago.” It serves as another great example of the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade.  He’s asking people for suggestions for what else should be on the list, so head over there and let him know. Seems like wi-fi technologies should be on there somehow. FiOS deserves a shout-out, too. And where’s Firefox & Chrome? Also, I’ll put in a special word for some amazing new home theater technologies: high-def flat-screens and projectors; media servers & Windows Media Center; BluRay; and 3 incredible gaming / media consoles (Wii, PS3, & XBox). Anyway, here’s Galant’s list:

Wikipedia Gmail Facebook YouTube Twitter AdWords Amazon AWS RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s) Meetup iPod Google Maps Podcasts Mint Skype/VOIP iPhone Google Docs Creative Commons Flickr

The Internet is massive. That’s the ‘no-duh’ statement of the year, right?  But seriously, the sheer volume of transactions (both economic and non-economic) is simply staggering.  Consider a few factoids to give you a flavor of just how much is going on out there:

• In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average of 120.5 Web pages each day.
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
• Social networking giant Facebook reports that each month, its over 300 million users upload more than 2 billion photos, 14 million videos, and create over 3 million events. More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week. There are also roughly 45 million active user groups on the site.
• YouTube reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute.
• Amazon reported that on December 15, 2008, 6.3 million items were ordered worldwide, a rate of 72.9 items per second.
• Every six weeks, there are 10 million edits made to Wikipedia.

Now, let’s think about how some of our lawmakers and media personalities talk about the Internet.  If we were to judge the Internet based upon the daily headlines in various media outlets or from the titles of various Congressional or regulatory agency hearings, then we’d be led to believe that the Internet is a scary, dangerous place. That ‘s especially the case when it comes to concerns about online privacy and child safety. Everywhere you turn there’s a bogeyman story about the supposed dangers of cyberspace.

But let’s go back to the numbers. While I certainly understand the concerns many folks have about their personal privacy or their child’s safety online, the fact is the vast majority of online transactions that take place online each and every second of the day are of an entirely harmless, even socially beneficial nature.  I refer to this disconnect as the “problem of proportionality” in debates about online safety and privacy. People are not just making mountains out of molehills, in many cases they are just making the molehills up or blowing them massively out of proportion.

Go back to those Facebook numbers, for example. 300 million users uploading 2 billion pieces of content each week, plus 45 million user groups.  Now, how many “incidents” do you hear about in the course of an entire year involving privacy and child safety on Facebook? A couple? A dozen?  I doubt it’s that many, but for the sake of argument, let’s be preposterous and say the number of incidents is 10,000.  Doing some quick math: 10,000 “incidents” divided by 2 billion pieces of content shared each week = 0.001%   In other words, there would need to be hundreds of thousands of privacy or child safety “incidents” taking place on Facebook each week before one could legitimately claim the trend was statistically significant in proportion to the total volume of transactions.

Of course, there’s no way to be scientific about this since I can’t crunch the numbers to get an exact calculation for Facebook or the entire Internet since it’s hard to even define or collect info about online “incidents.” And this is not to say there are never any incidents online where some harm might come to an individual or a child.  Defining “harm” can be contentious, however, especially when it comes to what I regard as the conjectural theories about advertising or provocative media content “harming” us or our kids.

Of course, others could claim that the sheer volume of information that we put online about ourselves is problematic for a variety of other reasons. The best argument about potential harm coming of all this information being online is that the sheer volume of data sharing and collection opens up the door to identify theft, or that some government agencies could get their hands on it and use it to do nasty stuff to us.  That first problem can be a legitimate one, and deserves more attention and greater consumer education. But that latter problem should be addressed by putting more constraints on our government(s), not by imposing more regulations on the Internet. Government powers should be tightly limited when it comes to monitoring the habits of websurfers or collecting information about them.

Nonetheless, it is my contention that an infinitesimal percentage of all daily online transactions and interactions involve serious privacy violations or harm to children.  Until they can prove otherwise, we need to demand that our policymakers and folks in the press put these issues into some perspective before they jump to conclusion about online life.  Enough of the fear-mongering and techno-panics!

There was a very interesting front-page article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey Fowler wondering whether Wikipedia, the wildly popular online encyclopedia, was dying because of new posting guidelines which have apparently led to a drop off in the number of volunteers contributing to the site. In their article (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“), Angwin and Fowler note that:

In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages. Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to “the sum of all human knowledge,” the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia’s ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.

The article suggests that new posting and editing guidelines may have something to do with the drop:

But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp. “People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Let’s say it’s true that the new guidelines have resulted in fewer people contributing.  Is that that automatically a bad thing?  I suppose it depends on other variables that are harder to measure. Namely, quality metrics. This is where every discussion about Wikipedia gets sticky. Personally, I’m a big Wikipedia fan and think it represents crowdsourcing and online collaboration at its finest.  But I’m not one of those Internet pollyannas who claims Wikipedia represents the pinnacle of human knowledge or some sort of proof that the collective “hive mind” produces better results that individual or proprietary efforts. Rather, I think both models and modes of production have their place and their own strengths and weaknesses.  The value of Wikipedia lies in the sheer diversity of human interests covered. The staggering array of topics for which someone has seen fit to create an entry never ceases to amaze–and inform–me.

But not all entries are equal, and some are downright pathetic.  That being said, if you treat Wikipedia as a launching pad– and not the ultimate destination–for your investigation of an issue, then this isn’t a problem.  Most people understand that there are other sources out there to consult, and Wikipedia entries typically do a nice job pointing readers to many of the best things to look at for additional information or perspectives. And even if the entry does not offer outbound links, you’re still free to search for other sources!  But for the vast majority of topics under the sun, a Wikipedia entry now exists and offers a great place to begin–again, not end–your search for enlightenment.

Nonetheless, the quality issue for Wikipedia remains a problem for many. Personally, I welcome Wikipedia’s recent changes and think it’s a sign that the Wikimedia Foundation takes quality control seriously.  If, in an effort to improve the quality of entries, new posting guidelines result in small drop-off in the number of contributors, some of us can live with that.  The question is: Does it diminish Wikipedia’s overwhelming strength–diversity.  I’d hate to think that certain niche topics go uncovered because new guidelines are overly restrictive.  Regardless, I think the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation are on the right track here.

Post script: Over at ZDNet, Larry Dingan asks “Is Wikipedia Maxed Out?” and wonders whether crowdsourcing has certain inherent limits. But he points out that even it it does, it still has benefits:

The larger question is whether crowdsourcing has a cap or not. Is there a point where crowdsourcing gets so big that it crumbles under its own weight? It’s a worth asking the question, but let’s put this in a little perspective. If Wikipedia somehow imploded it would still be one of the best examples of the Web at work. For corporate purposes, you could crowdsource R&D, get huge, perhaps create some neat products and dismantle if it got unwieldy.

I think that’s spot on.

Cory Doctorow has called for a Wikipedia-style effort to build an open source, non-profit search engine. From his column in The Guardian:

What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It’s ideological mindshare. It’s relevance… It’s a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It’s too much power for a handful of companies to wield. The question of what we can and can’t see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There’s no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People. Put that way, it’s obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public.

He goes on to claim that “Google’s algorithms are editorial decisions.”   For Doctorow, this is an outrage: “so much editorial power is better vested in big, transparent, public entities than a few giant private concerns.”

I wish Doctorow well in his effort to crowdsource a Google-killer, but I’m more than a little skeptical that anyone would actually want to use his search engine of The People.  My guess is that, like most things produced in the name of “The People” (Soviet toilet paper comes to mind), it will probably won’t be much fun to use, and will likely chafe noticeably. (For the record, I love and regularly use Wikipedia; I just don’t think that model is unlikely to produce a particularly useful search engine.  As Doctorow himself has noted of Google, “they make incredibly awesome search tools.”)

But I’m glad to see that Doctorow has conceded an important point of constitutional law: The First Amendment protects the editorial discretion of search engines, like all private companies, to decide what to content to communicate.  For a newspaper, that means deciding which articles or editorials to run.  For a library or bookstore, it means which books to carry.  For search engines, it means how to write their search algorithims.

Doctorow’s “We’ll build our own darn rocket ship in the backyard!” response  to his deep concerns about Google’s dominance of search does not, of course, impinge on Google’s editorial discretion—and for that, I commend him.  But others, most notably Frank Pasquale, have indeed proposed government action to address such concerns in ways that most surely would impinge on the First Amendment rights of all search engines.

Pasquale’s comlpaint about Google is essentially the same as Doctorow’s, but rather than proposing an innovative (if unrealistic) alternative (like Doctorow), he  has called (PDF) for the “creation of a Federal Search Commission to parallel the Federal Communications Commission” and declared that ” In order to reduce opportunities for clickfraud and unfair treatment of indexed entities, qualified transparency will be needed in order to open up the ‘black box’ of search engine operations to at least some third parties.”   He focuses on search algorithms because:

The heart of a search engine and the key to its success is its search algorithm. Effective algorithms are protected by a veil of secrecy and by various intellectual property rights. As a result, new entrants cannot easily appropriate existing algorithms. Moreover, many algorithms are trade secrets. Unlike patents, which the patent holder must disclose and which eventually expire, these trade secrets may never enter the public domain. Search algorithms may be analogous to the high-cost infrastructure required for entry into the utility or railroad markets.

He diagnoses the problem as follows:

given the emphasis on secrecy in the search engine business model, no one can verify that such rankings have not been manipulated or that subtler biases in favor of search engines’ partners are not being worked into the search algorithm… If search engines are to be accountable at all, if their interest is to be balanced against those of the various other claimants involved in search-related disputes, and if social values are to be given any weight, some governmental agent should be able to peer into the black box of search and determine whether or not illegitimate manipulation has occurred.

But what about editorial discretion?  Why should Google be forced to change its PageRank algorithms any more than The New York Times should be forced to change how it decides which stories to run?  Moreover, why should Google be forced to disclose how this process works?  Assigning a government monitor to sit in on meetings of the Times‘ editorial board “to detect bias” would clearly impinge on their editorial discretion.  Similarly, I don’t see why forcing a Yahoo!, Microsoft or any other search engine to disclose their equivalent processes for ranking search results should pass constitutional muster.

Editorial discretion means getting to make your own decisions, even if they might seem biased to those wise elites who “know better” because, well, it’s your decision and not the government’s!  Saying that speakers can make whatever decisions they want as long as they’re not biased means speakers don’t really have editorial discretion after all.

So, if recognizing that search algorithms are a form of editorial discretion is a problem (as Doctorow implies), it’s only insofar as this might frustrate the desires of those who would regulate search.

As Berin mentioned last week, we have a new paper out on proposals to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.   We generically refer to those COPPA-expansion efforts as “COPPA 2.0.” Hence, the title of our paper: “COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech.”  To recap what Berin already noted, in the name of improving online child safety, some legislators and state attorneys general (AGs) are advocating the expansion of COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” model of age verification before certain sites or services may collect, or enable the sharing of, personal information for children.

Unlike “COPPA 1.0,” however, which only applied to children under the age of 13, “COPPA 2.0” would apply to all minors up to age 17.  Moreover, the range of sites covered by the new law would generally be expanded to include just about any site or service with social networking functionality.

Since Berin has already summarized our general concerns with efforts to expand COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” online age verification system to cover more online users and sites, I thought I would focus here on what I believe will be the most controversial (and important) part of our paper — our discussion about how COPPA 2.0 affects the speech rights of both adults and adolescents.

Remember COPA?

To understand why COPPA expansion will raise serious First Amendment issues, we first need to step back and recall the legal battle over the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA.  Both COPPA and COPA rest on a stratification of users by age, but the approach of the two laws is very different: While COPPA requires age verification if content is “directed at” minors under age 13, COPA would have required that all website operators restrict access to material deemed “harmful to minors” by minors under the age of 17 and therefore requires age verification of all users who attempt to access such content (in order to identify minors). COPPA is focused on certain kinds of potentially harmful contacts while COPA is focused on potentially harmful content.

But by expanding the age range of COPPA to include adolescents, COPPA 2.0 proposals essentially converge with COPA, reaching the same practical consequence: age verification mandates for large numbers of adults as users (not as parents). Only the scope of sites covered by the laws is different: under COPA, sites deemed “harmful to minors,” and, under COPPA 2.0, adolescent-oriented or certain social networking sites. Thus, to the extent that COPPA 2.0 proposals require age verification of adults, they would be subject to constitutional attacks similar to those against COPA.  But COPPA 2.0 proposals would also burden the rights of adults to communicate with adolescents and the free speech rights of adolescents.

Finally, the fact that COPPA (like COPA) applies only to commercial sites would do little to protect it from constitutional attack, because in a world of user-generated content, the commercial nature of a site has little to do with the commercial/non-commercial nature of the speech carried on it. For example, obviously commercial sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as platforms for a wide variety of not-for-profit and political communications.

How COPPA 2.0 Would Impact the Free Speech Rights of Adults

After a decade-long court battle over the constitutionality of COPA, the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2009 rejected the government’s latest request to revive the law, meaning it is likely dead. Three of the key reasons the courts struck down COPA would also apply to COPPA 2.0 proposals.

(1) First, like COPA, COPPA  2.0 would raise burden the speech rights of adults to access information subject to age verification requirements, both by making speech more difficult and by stigmatizing it.  In 2003, the Third Circuit noted that age verification requirements “will likely deter many adults from accessing restricted content, because many Web users are simply unwilling to provide identification information in order to gain access to content, especially where the information they wish to access is sensitive or controversial.” In 2008, in striking down COPA for the third and final time, the Third Circuit approvingly quoted the district court, which had noted that part of the reason age verification requirements deterred users from accessing restricted content was “because Internet users are concerned about security on the Internet and because Internet users are afraid of fraud and identity theft on the Internet.” The district court had held that: “Requiring users to go through an age verification process would lead to a distinct loss of personal privacy” by threatening their anonymity.

By imposing broad age verification requirements, COPPA 2.0 would restrict the rights of adults to send and receive information anonymously just as COPA did. If anything, the speech burdened by COPPA 2.0 deserves more protection, not less, than the speech burdened by COPA: Where COPA merely burdened access to content deemed “harmful to minors” (viz., pornography), COPPA 2.0 would burden access to material by adults as well as minors not because that material is harmful or obscene but merely because it is “directed at” minors! Thus, the content covered by COPPA 2.0 proposals could include not merely pornography, but communications about political nature, which deserved the highest degree of First Amendment protection.

(2) Second, like COPA, COPPA expansion threatens the speech rights of website operators. The necessary corollary of blocking adults from accessing certain content anonymously — and thereby deterring some users from accessing that content — is that COPPA 2.0, like COPA, would necessarily reduce the audience size of websites subject to age verification mandates. Furthermore, such mandates would encourage websites to self-censor themselves to avoid offering content they fear could be considered “directed at” adolescents because doing so might subject them to an age verification mandate — or to legal liability if they fail to implement age verification. The substantial cost of age verification could significantly impact, if not make impossible, the business models of many personal information-collecting (PI) sites, which generally do not charge for content and rely instead on advertising revenues. The Third Circuit cited all of these burdens on the free speech rights of website operators in striking down COPA.

(3) Third, less restrictive alternatives are available to COPPA 2.0, just as they were for COPA.

The Third Circuit drew on the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision striking down COPA on the grounds that “blocking and filtering software is an alternative that is less restrictive than COPA, and, in addition, likely more effective as a means of restricting children’s access to materials harmful to them.” Similarly, parental control software already empowers parents to restrict their kids’ access to PI-collecting sites. (It’s particularly easy for parents to restrict access to the leading social networking sites that seem to be driving so much of the push for COPPA 2.0, so that their kids.)

Thus, the free speech rights burdened COPPA 2.0 proposals are at least as important as those burdened by COPA, and blocking software already empowers parents to restrict their kids’ access to PI-collecting sites, just as it allows parents to restrict access to pornography. Of course, if COPPA 2.0 laws were actually enacted and subject to legal challenge, the outcome of the case would depend largely on the level of constitutional scrutiny involved. COPPA 2.0 advocates might argue that, whatever the rights at stake, a lower level of constitutional scrutiny should apply because COPPA 2.0 does not target a special category of content. If true, this could mean that, although age verification mandates to restrict access to “harmful” material are unconstitutional, far more sweeping mandates restricting access to non-harmful information could be constitutional. Such inconsistency is indeed a perverse consequence of the fact that our First Amendment jurisprudence focuses not on the rights at stake, but on whether a regulation is “content-neutral” in deciding what level of scrutiny to apply—which, in turn, often determines the outcome of the case. But in this case, COPPA 2.0 proposals likely would be subject to strict scrutiny to the extent that they are, like COPA, focused on a certain category of content: that “directed at” adolescents (rather than “harmful to minors”).

Legislators who attempt to escape strict scrutiny by defining the scope of their bill not by its targeted audience but by reference to specific functional capabilities (in the definition of “social networking site”) will likely find that a court will see through such window-dressing: If they recognize that such bills are nonetheless aimed at a certain category of adolescent-oriented content, they will apply strict scrutiny anyway. But even under intermediate scrutiny, COPPA 2.0 proposals would be subject to serious attack.

Minors Have Speech Rights, Too!

In addition, in COPPA 2.0 approaches, the government would restrict the ability of adolescents to access content, not because it could be harmful to them or because it is obscene, but merely because it is “directed to” them. While the First Amendment rights of minors may not be on par with those of adults, adolescents do have the right to access certain types of information and express themselves in certain ways. The Supreme Court has held (in Planned Parenthood of Cent. Mo. v. Danforth) that “constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority.” It remains unclear how an expanded COPPA model might interfere with the First Amendment rights of adolescents, but it is clear that privacy and speech rights would come into conflict under COPPA 2.0, as they do in other contexts.

For example, how might the parental-consent based model limit the ability of adolescents to obtain information about “safer sex” or how to deal with trauma, depression, family abuse, or addiction. Would an abusive father authorize a teen to visit a website about how to report child abuse? Would a parent of an adolescent struggling with their sexual identity let their kid participate in a self-help social networking page for gay and lesbian youth? What rights are at play here and how do we reconcile them?

Maintaining the ability of kids to participate online interactions goes beyond content that most people would recognize as “serious”—from the perspective of both First Amendment values and the education of children. As a recent MacArthur Foundation study of the online youth Internet use concluded:

Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture.

It was at least in part in recognition of such difficult First Amendment questions that Congress removed the requirement in the initial legislative draft of COPPA that would have required PI-based sites to “use reasonable efforts to provide the parents with notice and an opportunity to prevent or curtail the collection or use of personal information collected from children over the age of 12 and under the age of 17.”

Even if parents have an absolute right to block their adolescents’ access to such data, they can already exercise that right by applying strict controls on the computers in their home. COPPA 2.0 proposals go well beyond recognizing this right by setting the default to “parental consent required” for adolescents to access a wide range of content—meaning that parents must “opt-in” on behalf of their children before their children can participate in PI-collecting sites. This, in turn, burdens the ability of adolescents to communicate, because their parents might censor (rightly or wrongly) certain information, or simply fail to understand the technologies involved or to be actively engaged. But whatever the free speech rights of adolescents, if anyone should be interfering with those rights, it should be their parents — not the government.

Some parents may object that, however effective parental control software may be in the home, it does not allow parents to control what their kids’ access outside the home. This argument is understandable on some level, but in the end, it amounts to a demand that roadblocks be put up everywhere for the sake of particularly sensitive parents at the expense of everyone else in society, including potentially huge numbers of adult users — and of online anonymity in general.

But Illinois’s COPPA 2.0 proposal goes even further, not merely expanding COPPA to cover a particular variety of social networking sites, but requiring that such sites “allow the parent or guardian of the minor unrestricted access to the profile webpage of the minor at all times.” Congress considered just such a parental access mandate in the initial draft of COPPA legislation back in 1998, but ultimately removed it from the final version of the legislation, apparently because even some of COPPA’s supporters worried, given the bill’s initial application to the 13-16 age bracket, that “The establishment of a parental right to access all personal information about a teenager may intrude on older minors’ privacy, rather than protect.”

What about Communication between Adolescents & Adults?

Finally, COPPA 2.0 could infringe on the free speech rights of adults to communicate with adolescents online by driving PI-collecting sites to segregate users by age or to attempt to block access by adolescents. The vast majority of adult-minor interactions online are not of a harassing or predatory nature—indeed, they generally involve adults looking to help or assist minors in various ways. As the MacArthur Foundation study cited above concluded:

In contexts of peer-based learning, adults … have an important role to play, though it is not the conventionally authoritative one. In friendship-driven practices, direct adult participation is often unwelcome, but in interest-driven groups we found a much stronger role for more experiences participants to play. Unlike instructors in formal educational settings, however, these adults are passionate hobbyists and creators, and youth see them as experienced peers, not as people who have authority over them. These adults exert tremendous influence in setting communal norms and what educators might call “learning goals,” though they do not have direct authority over newcomers.

A substantial portion of those interactions involve parents talking to their own kids, older and younger siblings communicating with one another, teachers and mentors talking to their students, or even co-workers of different ages communicating. Even when adult-minor communications involve complete strangers, there is typically a socially-beneficial purpose. Think of two people — one an adult and one a minor — debating politics on a discussion board, or creating a Wikipedia entry together. What about a presidential campaign website that involves millions of volunteers of all ages communicating and collaborating to a common purpose? There are countless other examples. How would such interactions be affected by COPPA 2.0? Restricting such interactions would raise profound First Amendment concerns about freedom of speech as well as of association.

In any First Amendment analysis, a court must consider not only the free speech rights at stake and the availability of less restrictive alternatives to regulation, but the governmental interest being advanced. Again, neither COPPA nor the COPPA 2.0 proposals discussed herein (e.g., the New Jersey and Illinois proposals) requires exclusion of older users from a website, nor directly governs the sharing of personal information among users (where that sharing does not also constitute collection by the site itself). But separation of adolescents from adults is likely to be an indirect effect of COPPA 2.0 requirements—as COPPA 2.0 advocates probably realize—because, once PI-collecting sites are required to age-verify users, they will face reputational, political and potentially legal pressure to make interactions between adolescents and children more difficult in the name of “child safety.” More subtly, if PI-collecting site operators have an incentive to avoid being considered “directed at” adolescents, they will also have an incentive to discourage adolescent participation on their site—which achieves a similar result.

Here, one must further ask if attempting to quarantine children from adults (however indirectly) actually advances, on net, a strong governmental interest in child protection. Such a quarantine is unlikely to stop adults with truly nefarious intentions from communicating with minors, as systems designed to exclude participation by adults in a “kids-only” or “adolescents-only” area can be easily circumvented. Given the lack of strong identity records for minors, it’s much easier for an adult to pretend to be a minor than vice versa. The effect of age stratification on truly bad actors is likely to be marginal at best—or harmful at worst: Building walls around adolescents through age-verification might actually make it easier for predators to target teens, since a predator who gains access to a supposedly teen-only site will be less likely to be exposed as a predator by targeting an adult they think is a teen. So for the sake of marginal (if any) gains in child protection, would we not be excluding beneficial interaction between adults and minors?

To hear some of the advocates of COPPA 2.0 talk about how teens currently behave online, one might think that online environments in which adolescents were left to their own devices—imagine a “Teen MySpace” for the 13-17 crowd, walled off from the rest of MySpace—would be far worse, perhaps an online version of Lord of the Flies. These concerns are clearly exaggerated: The critics frequently complain about “the way kids talk to each other these days” while looking at their own past adolescent banter with rose-colored lenses. What is clear is that adolescents (and young adults) behave better in online environments where adults are present, too. Perhaps the best demonstration of this fact has been the uproar from adolescents and young adults that has accompanied Facebook’s explosive growth in popularity among older users in recent months. Many kids hate the idea of adults joining Facebook precisely because the presence of adults encourages kids to “self-regulate” by exercising better judgment and following better netiquette.

Anne Collier, founder and executive director of the child safety advocacy organization Net Family News, Inc. and editor of NetFamilyNews.org and ConnectSafely.org, suggests that the push for “segregation” by age (e.g., creating a teen-only version of Second Life) for safety’s sake is “losing steam” because:

it’s a response to the predator panic teens and parents have been subjected to in U.S. society, not to the realities of youth on the social Web. What nearly a decade of peer-reviewed academic research shows is that peer-to-peer behavior is the online risk that affects many more youth, the vast majority of online kids who are not already at-risk youth offline. Segregating teens from adults online doesn’t address harassment, defamation, imposter profiles, cyberbullying, etc. It may help keep online predators away from kids (even though online predation, or abuse resulting from online communication, constitutes only 1% of overall child sexual exploitation…), which is a great outcome, but it’s not enough unless all that parents are worried about is predators.

Collier discusses the particularly acute problem of “actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender expression,” which the Salt Lake Tribune has noted are “two of the top three reasons secondary school students said their peers were most often bullied at school.” This kind of harassment recently attracted widespread public attention after two 11-year-old boys committed suicide after experiencing anti-gay harassment and bullying at school. Nationwide, “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.” This child safety risk is painfully real, with anti-gay harassment being only its most obvious form. But “segregating” teens from adults seems likely to aggravate this problem by removing adults from the mix as a potential source of discipline.

Of course, adults play a critical role in disciplining interaction among the 0-12 age bracket, but not as direct participants in on-site interaction. Again, how many adults actually want to use Club Penguin? Instead, parents can supervise what their kids do online through parental control software. Parents could, of course, use that same software to monitor what their adolescent kids do, too. But as kids get older, most parents realize that the training wheels have to come off at some point. Few parents will want to spy on their 17-year old until the day before the kid starts college (or enlists in the military or gets married). But most parents probably would prefer that, if their kids are interacting in an online environment, they think twice about what they do and say online. It is by no means clear that restricting online interaction between teens and adults will serve that end.

My problem with what Nick Carr is saying about Wikipedia here — as well as in his book The Big Switch — is that he always seems to assume that Wikipedia constitutes the totality of most searches for information online. I suppose it does for some people, but I have a hard time accepting the argument that everyone’s search for enlightenment ends there, even if Wikipedia does rank high in many search results today.

For me, Wikipedia is just a launch pad; a great starting point in the search for truth. I take much of what I read on Wikipedia with a large grain of salt, however, because I know not every entry is as trustworthy as others, and entries could change at any moment. But that’s true of much of what one finds online!  If one adopts a sort of caveat emptor attitude toward Wikipedia, and then uses it to seek out truth from alternative sources found in each entry, or from other searches, then were is the harm?  Only if one could show that the search for truth ends with Wikipedia would I be as concerned as Carr and other Internet pessimists and Wikipedia critics (like Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen). But I just don’t believe that is the case.

Moreover, it is impossible for me to believe that we have fewer authoritative sources of information at our disposal today than we did in the past.  When I was growing up in the 1970s and attending a tiny school in the middle of a rural Indiana cornfield, my version of Wikipedia was named “Mrs. Flowers.” She was the nice little old lady who ran our school’s library. When I began at search for information back then, I would often ask Mrs. Flowers to help me work my way through the mysteries of the Dewey Decimal System to find whatever we had in stock at Winfield Elementary regarding astronauts and rockets (a particular boyhood obsession of mine). Our “search results” were pretty miserable. (I probably have more books in my basement right now than were in that school’s library!) We had Britannica on hand and would grab whatever we could there, and there was a book about the Mercury program and another about the moon landing, but there wasn’t much else. That  really was it. Our search was for enlightenment ended that quickly. No other books. No newspaper or magazine archives to search through (expect an incomplete set of National Geographic). No video or audio tapes. No computer software. Just nothing more.  Consequently, I think I checked out that same book about the Mercury program a dozen times before the 4th grade started.

Contrast that dismal state of affairs with the homework project I just helped my 1st grade daughter with, which required me to help her find out 3 interesting facts about Squanto. Did we stumble upon Wikipedia with our first Google search? Yep. Was that the end of it? Nope. There were 236,000 more search results for us to figure out how to sort through! So, I tried first jumping every 10 pages or so just to randomly see what else showed up, and then refined our search to see what other hits we could get. We spent over an hour just walking around cyberspace learning all sorts of fun facts about Squanto.

Nick Carr may have a different word for it, but I call this progress. And if he doesn’t like the fact that Wikipedia entries often come up first in most search results, than there’s an easy solution: Just skip those links and peruse the hundreds of thousands of hits that follow.

[Note: Tim has addressed similar Wikipedia criticsms here many times before, including Carr’s earlier rants about it.]

A few months ago, I penned a mega book review about the growing divide between “Internet optimists and pessimists.” I noted that the Internet optimists — people like Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Kevin Kelly, and others — believe that the Internet is generally improving our culture, economy, and society for the better. They believe the Net has empowered and liberated the masses, sparked unparalleled human creativity and communication, provided greater personalization and customization of media content, and created greater diversity of thought and a more deliberative democracy. By contrast, the Internet pessimists — including Nick Carr, Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and others — argue that the Internet is destroying popular culture and professional media, calling “truth” and “authority” into question by over-glamorizing amateurism and user-generated content, and that increased personalization is damaging deliberative democracy by leading to homogenization, close-mindedness, and an online echo-chamber. Needless to say, it’s a very heated debate!

I am currently working on a greatly expanded version of my “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay for a magazine in which I will draw out more of these distinctions and weigh the arguments made by those in both camps. I plan on concluding that article by arguing that the optimists generally have the better of the argument, but that the pessimists make some fair points about the downsides of the Net’s radically disintermediating role on culture and economy.

So, this got me thinking that I needed to come up with some sort of a label for my middle-of-the-road position as well as a statement of my personal beliefs. As far as labels go, I guess I would call myself a “pragmatic optimist” since I generally side with the optimists in most of these debates, but not without some occasional reservations. Specifically, I don’t always subscribe to the Pollyanna-ish, rose-colored view of the world that some optimists seem to adopt. But the outright Chicken Little-like Ludditism of some Internet pessimists is even more over-the-top at times. Anyway, what follows is my “Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed” which better explains my views. (Again, read my old essay first for some context about the relevant battle lines in this intellectual war).

The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed

I believe that the Internet is reshaping our culture, economy, and society – in most ways for the better, but not without some heartburn along the way.

I believe that the world of information abundance that has dawned is vastly superior to the world of information poverty that we just left. But I also understand that not all information is equal and that that the rise of abundance raises concerns about information overload, objectionable content, and the role of “authority” and “truth.”

I believe the era of traditional Mass Media is coming to an end, but “professional” media institutions and creators continue to play a vital role in the creation, aggregation, and dissemination of news, information, culture, and entertainment. The Internet, however, will force gut-wrenching changes on traditional media institutions and some of the more vital ones (ex: daily local newspapers) will struggle to re-invent themselves, or may wither away entirely.

I believe that “professional” journalism faces very serious challenges from the rise of the Internet and user-generated content, but I also believe that hybrid forms of news-gathering and reporting are offering society exciting new ways to learn about the world around them.

I believe Wikipedia is an amazing example of collection action / intelligence at work, but I also understand it is not without flaws and limitations. I believe Wikipedia is a wonderful complement, but not a complete substitute, for other media and information sources and inputs.

I believe that free and open source software (FOSS) has offered society enormous benefits, but I do not believe that FOSS (or “wiki” models) will replace all proprietary business models or methods. Each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

I believe the Long Tail is a powerful phenomenon, but not “the future of all business.” It is now a more important part of the future of business, but not the entirety of it.

I believe there is a difference between “remix culture” and “ripoff culture.” Remixing (including mash-ups of all sorts) generally enhances and extends culture and creativity. Blatant content piracy, on the other hand, can discourage the creative efforts of the masses. Likewise, hacking, circumvention, and reverse-engineering all play an important and legitimate role in our new digital economy, but one need not accept the legitimacy of those activities when conducted for nefarious purposes (think identity theft or chip modding to facilitate video game piracy.)

I believe that the Internet has empowered the masses and created a world of “pro-sumers” that gives every man, woman, and child a soapbox on which to speak to the world. But that does not mean that all of them will have something interesting to say, and I won’t praise user-generated content as a good in and of itself. It’s quality, not volume, that counts.

I believe that the Internet’s empowering nature has changed much about society and culture, but I do not believe in the romanticism espoused by some about how the Net “remaking man” or changing human nature in a fundamental way. The Internet does not liberate us from all earthly constraints and it cannot magically solve all of humanity’s problems.

I believe that the Internet is reinvigorating deliberative democracy and giving us increased exposure to a breathtaking diversity of views that were previously inaccessible, at least for most of us. On the other hand, I understand that some Netizens will often seek out only those views that reinforce their pre-existing biases.

I believe in the power of freedom of speech and expression, and appreciate that the Internet and the rise of user-generated content has given us a world of unprecedented information and cultural riches. I also understand, however, that unrestricted freedom of speech and expression permits an increase in the prevalence of objectionable, even harmful, speech and content. On net, however, (excuse the pun) the Internet is the most important medium of human communication and expression that the world has ever known.

In sum, I believe there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic about the Internet and its role in shaping our lives, culture, economy, and society. But that doesn’t mean it will be all roses going forward.

Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.  It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel’s book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.

Siegel’s book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen’s leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture (2007).  I posted a two-part review of Keen’s book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here’s a quick taste of Keen’s take on things.  He argues “the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0” and that “our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake.  Gravest of all,” Keen continues, “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well.”

As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Keen and Siegel are both essentially channeling the ghost of the late Neil Postman, the one-time dean of the modern school of techno-pessimism. Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, was the first major anti-Digital Age diatribe and it remains the reigning champion of anti-technology screeds. “Information has become a form of garbage,” Postman argued, “not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” If left unchecked, Postman argued, America’s new technopoly — “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Although Lee Siegel doesn’t bother citing him, he owes much to Postman’s brand of social criticism. Indeed, in large part, Siegel is simply bringing Postman’s critique of the Information Age up to date. Like Postman and Keen, Siegel is concerned about the “destructive side” of the Internet and the Information Age, which they all feel is being overlooked. Specifically, the attack these authors mount on the Information Age and the Net can be boiled down to two major themes:

1. The Net is destroying (or at least greatly diminishing) the role of experts, authority, “truth”, and traditional societal norms and institutions. This is having (or eventually will result in) dangerous ramifications for our culture, economy, and democracy.
2. The personalization and customization that the Information Age and the Internet have spawned is an unambiguously negative development for our society and culture. Moreover, in large part, the entire Web 2.0 experience is largely just about commercial interests furthering their ends.

Let’s take a closer look what Siegel says about each.

Experts, Authority, and “Truth”

Like Postman and Keen, Siegel doesn’t mix words when it comes to his contempt for the disintermediating influences of modern information technology. He is particularly concerned about the loss of “truth” and “authority” in our new environment. “Culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper; it needs them both to protect its critical, independent spirit and to make sure that culture’s voices heard in the louder din of more powerful economic and political entities.” (p. 140-1) By empowering the masses to have more of a voice, Siegel says, “unbiased, rational, intelligent, and comprehensive news… will become less and less available.” (p. 165) “[G]iving everyone a voice,” he argues, “can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.” (p. 5)

Like many other Net skeptics, Siegel views Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, and almost all user-generated content with a combination of confusion or contempt. “[S]elf-expression is not the same thing as imagination” or art, he argues. (p. 52)  Instead, he regards the explosion of online expression as the “narcissistic” bloviation of the masses and argues it is destroying true culture and knowledge. “Under the influence of the Internet,” he says, “knowledge is withering away into information.” (p. 152) Our new age of information abundance is not worth celebrating, he says, because “information is powerlessness.” (p. 148).

One reason Siegel gets nostalgic about the age of scarcity is because elites like him — and others who were lucky enough to have access to mainstream media — had a more privileged place in the old media world.  As a social / cultural critic, he can’t be happy with all the competition he now faces in that field from the blogosphere and online media outlets.

But it’s difficult to sympathize with Siegel’s position that others should be excluded from having a voice now in an effort to preserve the old order. After all, for the past seven decades, public policy has largely been preoccupied with getting society out of the scarcity mess (even though public policy created much of that mess!) by ensuring that citizens had more choices and outlets. Now that we have more options, some people like Keen and Siegel aren’t happy about the fact that the hoi polloi have been empowered. But, even if some traditional institutions lose the dominant position they once held in society, plenty of “authoritative” and “professional” media options and outlets continue to exist. Our new Information Age simply empowers millions of other voices to join the conversation and offer alternative perspectives and input.

But Siegel also disputes what he regards as such romanticized notions of “online participation” and “personal democracy.” To him, everyone is just in it for the money. “Web 2.0 is the brainchild of businessmen,” and the “producer public” is really just a “totalized ‘consumerist’ society.”  But what about all those bloggers who (like me!) are in it for the love of the conversation and debate?  Well, says Siegel, we just don’t realize the harm we are doing by trying to have our say!  “[T]he bloggers are playing into the hands of political and financial forces that want nothing more than to see the critical, scrutinizing media disappear.” (p. 141) And as for those true believers and Net evangelists who believe that something truly exciting is happening with our new online conversation, according to Siegel, they are simply “in a mad rush to earn profits or push a fervent idealism.” (p. 25-6)

It’s difficult for me to imagine anything more insultingly stupid than those last two statements.  The insulting part about them is that Siegel is essentially telling us all to shut up!  We all need to put down our pens — or, rather, our keyboards — and understand that we are doing great harm to those journalists, institutions, or other enlightened few who are really providing the “critical, scrutinizing” function so essential for a healthy democracy and culture. It’s just blatantly elitist for Siegel to suggest that only a select few have any business sharing their views with the world, and he even acknowledges that several times in the book. But he wears that elitist tag like a badge of honor as he stares down his nose at the newly empowered masses, snorting in disgust at everything he sees.

And the stupid part about those statements above is that the vast majority of bloggers or online participants are absolutely not in it for the money, or even out to take down mainstream media. They just want to be heard. But, again, Siegel believes that what you all have to say is not worth hearing anyway.

The Supposed Perils of Personalization

Indeed, Siegel’s primary gripe with the Web 2.0 world is that while most of us appreciate the growing personalization of information and content as well as the increasingly participatory nature of the Internet, he sees that as an unmitigated evil.  “The Internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, asocial individual.” (p. 6)  The “Daily Me” (personalized, instantaneously delivered content) that Nicholas Negroponte predicted and longed for in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, is viewed by Siegel as nothing more that the creation of a “narcissistic culture” in which “exaggeration” and the “loudest, most outrageous, or most extreme voices sway the crowd his way; the cutest, most self-effacing, most ridiculous, or most transparently fraudulent of voices saw the crowd of voices that way.” (p. 79)  He goes so far as to refer to it as our “democracy’s fatal turn” in that, instead of “allowing individuals to create their own cultural and commercial choices,” Web 2.0 has instead created “a more potent form of homogenization.” (p. 67)

In this regard, Siegel is channeling another Net skeptic, the prolific Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School.  In his 2001 book Republic.com, Sunstein also referred to Negroponte’s “Daily Me” in contemptuous terms, saying that the hyper-customization of websites and online technologies was causing extreme social fragmentation, isolation, and alienation, and could lead to political extremism. “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. As I said in my review of his book in Regulation magazine that year, Sunstein was essentially saying that the Internet is breeding a dangerous new creature: Anti-Democratic Man. “Group polarization is unquestionably occurring on the Internet,” he proclaimed, and it is weakening what he called the “social glue” that binds society together and provides citizens with a common “group identity.” If that continues unabated, Sunstein argued, the potential result could be nothing short of the death of deliberative democracy and the breakdown of the American system of government.

Siegel continues this line of reasoning in Against the Machine but, like Sunstein, completely fails to offer anything more than a few random anecdotes in defense of their thesis that the Net is leading to close-mindedness, homogenization, and the death of deliberative democracy. Worse yet, they also both completely fail to look at the other side of the story, which is that the Internet and Web 2.0 may be having the exact opposite effect. I made that argument in my 2005 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership (p. 39):

The reality is that citizens do face an overwhelming number of media choices today, and that probably does make it somewhat more difficult for them to have “shared experiences” involving any individual news or entertainment program. But that isn’t really such a lamentable development. Government need not take steps to make sure everyone watches or listens to the same programs each night so they can all talk about them around the watercooler at work the next day. It’s just as good that everyone can discuss something different that they saw or heard the night before. And the very fact there are so many distinct media options available to citizens is better for a healthy democracy than a limited range of media options. Again, regardless of who owns what, the fact remains that we have more sources of news, communications, and entertainment than ever before in this country. Still, some media critics wax nostalgic about a mythical time — a supposed “Golden Age” of newspapers, radio, or television — when the populace was more closely linked or unified in some grand sociological sense by common reporting or programming options. But that is a stretch. The days when William Randolph Hearst dominated media, or when only three TV networks brought us our news at a set time each night, could hardly be labeled the “Golden Age” of those respective mediums. If that’s the world media critics want us to return to, then this represents, as Jonathan Knee argues, “an argument for homogeneity hiding under the pretext of diversity.”

And, indeed, that’s exactly what Siegel is proposing in his book, as Keen also does in his. They want to roll back to clock and return us to the mythical “good ‘ol days” of media. Again, when were those days? I simply cannot fathom how anyone can claim that the age of media scarcity — with its limited outlets and opportunities — was truly better than the world we find ourselves in today. As I noted in the first part of my two-part review of Keen’s book, which was entitled “Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity”:

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough. But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance — warts and all — still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it?

I believe it is. And as I concluded in my review of Keen’s book, which seems like an equally sensible way to conclude this review of Lee Siegel’s tedious screed:

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

Although it will be easy for many in the blogosphere to side with the Internet optimists — and I would count myself as generally being in the optimist camp — I think the Net pessimists make many fair points about the disruptive nature of the Internet and how it forcing individuals and industries to completely reconsider the way they live their lives or organize their business affairs. Many Net optimists have a tendency to paint an excessively rosy picture of the transformative nature of the Net. In the extreme, the optimists seem to imply that the Net is somehow remaking man, altering human nature, and changing the economy only for the better. Among the Net optimists, there’s often a lot of romanticized talk of collective action / intelligence overcoming all barriers to knowledge or progress, and so on. (Sometimes I am guilty of a bit of that myself in my writing here). Net optimists need to be careful about overstating their case, especially on the economic front, and we would be wise to read the work of the Net pessimists with that criticism in mind.

The problem with the Internet pessimists, however, is that their skepticism often borders on Chicken Little-ism or outright Ludditism. I thought Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur was about as over-the-top as things could get in this regard. (See my 2-part book review here and here), but then I worked my way through Lee Siegel’s tedious screed, Against the Machine. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Nick Carr is probably the most reasonable and respected of the Net skeptics. He is an enormously gifted writer and I always enjoy reading his books, articles, and blog entries, even when I disagree with him. In The Big Switch, he makes many valid points about the downsides of the gut-wrenching changes that the Net is bringing about. Similarly, in his provocative recent Atlantic article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, he wonders how the Net is negatively affecting our minds and attention spans. Carr also argues that the Internet economy is increasingly built on a “sharecropper” model that essentially exploits the free labor of the multitudes to make just a handful of major Net operators rich. He makes some interesting points but, ultimately, I think he overstates the problem. Most of us feel we get a lot back as part of this value exchange. Sure, Google, Facebook, and a lot of other Net middlemen are getting big and rich based on all the user-generated content flowing over their sites and systems, but we extract enormous benefits from the existence of those (mostly free and constantly improving) platforms and services.

Nonetheless, the Net pessimists (especially Carr) raise some very legitimate questions about the limitations of the “free culture” mindset. They are on stronger ground when the highlight the problems associated with online piracy, however, than when they are critiquing Wikipedia and the occasional limitations or errors of collaborative endeavors like it. But Wikipedia in particular seems to be an obsession for many of the Net pessimists, especially Carr and Keen.

It is also true, however, that Net optimists like Tapscott and Benkler sometimes make too much out of “wiki” / collective intelligence models, seemingly implying that proprietary business models, private firms, and potentially capitalism itself are passé notions. I disagree. While I think wiki / collective intelligence approaches have their place and play a vitally important role in our new digital economy, the old ways of doing things are still alive and well and producing some wonderful results. For example, “The Dark Knight” wasn’t the product of spontaneous collective action, and I still don’t see any truly compelling open source video games to compete with the likes of “Madden 2009” or “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.” I think some of the Net optimists get a bit carried away at times when the place too much faith in the “Wikipedia-ization” of everything, or the idea that the Long Tail is somehow “The Future of Business,” as the subtitle of Chris Anderson’s book suggest. I think that goes much too far. On the other hand, I am huge fan of Wiki & Long Tail models and, like most others, understand their limitations. Those models will play an increasingly important role in the Net economy moving forward whether the Net pessimists like it or not. Bottom line: each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

Perhaps when I have more time I will return to this discussion and fill it out more with some passages and quotes from each book. I just don’t have the time right now but I will try to do so at some point in the future. Anyway, these are important books that deserve your attention if you are following the debate over the impact the Net is having — for better or worse — on our culture and economy.

Over at Techdirt (and here on TLF), Tim Lee takes issue with my post suggesting that Wikipedia should consider selling ads instead of asking for donations. He has a good point, which is that right now the only reason to volunteer to work for Wikipedia is because you’re passionate about it, but that might change if money became involved. But I think Tim overstates his case:

Being a member of the Wikipedia board would no longer be a thankless exercise in public service, but would be a relatively glamorous opportunity to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to one’s pet causes. Over time, the senior leadership positions would be sought out by people who are more excited about doling out largesse than editing an encyclopedia.

I’m not sure why that would be the case. By that rationale we could never have large philanthropic foundations because they would attract self-interested directors. As long as their actions are transparent and they are accountable to the wikipedians, I don’t see why the money couldn’t be directed for the benefit of Wikipedia. And if the directors enjoy some vicarious “glamour” as a result, then I think that’s a fine reward for hard work—it might even attract better candidates than are interested today.

Since it’s Sunshine Week I’ll stress that the key is transparency. And Tim is right on this point, too: institutions matter. Right now Jimmy Wales is taking some heat for conducting his Wikipedia business in a less than transparent manner. If that’s how Wkipedia is going to operate, them perhaps money will corrupt it and Tim is right that “there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars.” Still, I guess I’m just more optimistic about what the Wikipedia community is capable of.

P.S. Yeah, I love Twitter! Check me out at twitter.com/jerrybrito.

In a previous essay, I critiqued Andrew Keen’s thesis that our culture was better off in the age of scarcity than it is in today’s world of media and cultural abundance. In this essay, I want to make a few comments about his latest anti-Web 2.0 rant regarding how, in addition to destroying art and culture, the age of abundance and “amateur” content creation is going to result in the death of advertising.

In an AdWeek guest editorial this week, Keen argues that:

Web 2.0 is, in truth, the very worst piece of news for the advertising industry since the birth of mass media. In the short term, the Web 2.0 hysteria marks the end of the golden age of advertising; in the long term, it might even mark the end of advertising itself.

[…]

[F]or the advertiser, media content is indeed losing its value, a value historically derived from its scarcity. This devaluation of media isn’t hard to quantify: It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models. No new technology—neither the false dawn of mobile, nor the holy grail of personalized, targeted advertising—is going to save the advertising business now. No, the truth is that advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity. That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.

Oh my, where to begin…

Well, Keen is right about one thing (and only one thing) here: The end of the age of scarcity is certainly shaking up the advertising world. Bob Garfield of Ad Age wrote an interesting set of articles on this issue recently under the title “Chaos Scenario.” (Part 1 and Part 2.) When Bob called me for a comment for Part 2 of that series, here’s what I told him:

“It’s a very different kind of world. The problem is, the expectations are there to capture that mass audience that long ago disappeared. We are witnessing the gradual death of the business models that thrived in that age of scarcity.”

So, in a sense, I agree with Keen that the death of scarcity will challenge traditional advertising arrangements and media business models. Unlike Keen, however, I am not Chicken Little-ish in my outlook of things and I certainly do not believe that the end of scarcity “might even mark the end of advertising itself.” Just because media and advertising are changing doesn’t mean they are dying. They are just evolving. As John Gartner of the Marketing Shift blog notes, “Advertising won’t die. But it will never be the same.”

Indeed, there are some incredibly innovative advertising strategies being developed today in response to the changing nature of media development, distribution, and consumption. For example, I knew the world had changed in a major way when a friend sent me the link to the latest Geico ad that had been posted on YouTube and I spent the next twenty minutes watching a whole batch of new and old Geico ads. [I don’t know who developed those ads, but they deserve a raise! Brilliant stuff.] But I’ve also found myself watching ads in other strange places lately. The Microsoft XBox 360 Marketplace, for example, has many ads and promo clips that I find myself viewing regularly. And yes, I’ve even clicked on a few ads I’ve found on my mobile phone.

But Keen doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that such innovative changes are occurring or that they might be a perfectly healthy evolution of the marketplace. Instead, he makes the preposterous argument that “advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity” and that “The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.”

There are times when I am reading Keen’s book and articles like this and I find myself wondering: Does he really believe this stuff, or is he just a savvy idea marketer who understands that the best way to sell books its to be more over-the-top than the last guy?

Sadly, Keen seems to be a true believer in the Coming Cultural End Times and the collapse of all things once sacred (at least that which he holds sacred). As I pointed out in my previous essay about Keen, his view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. Indeed, he is the living embodiment of what Virgina Postrel calls “the stasis mentality.”

Keen’s work really got me thinking about Virginia Postrel’s wonderful book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, which is now almost ten years old. In her book, Postrel paints a brilliant picture of how many debates about technology and progress will unfold in the future. She contrasts stasis thinking with dynamism, and her work is worth quoting extensively here because it perfectly unlocks the mystery behind Keen’s thinking:

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? Do we declare with Appelo that “we’re scared of the future” and join Adams in decrying technology as “a killing thing”? Or do we see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape. The central question of our time is what to do about the future. And that question creates a deep divide.

Indeed it does, and that is the divide that now exists between Andrew Keen and most of the rest of us who have fully embraced (or at least learned to cope with) the sweeping changes brought about by the rise of the Internet, user-generated content, and “amateur” culture in general. No doubt, as Keen suggests, disintermediation has been a destabilizing force. The death of scarcity and the rise of abundance have shaken up the old order. But it is not all for the worse. While the creative destruction of the capitalist marketplace is always difficult, in the long run, it typically brings about better business models and modes of thinking.

But Keen wants to wind back the clock and “re-create scarcity” to save traditional business models. How would that even work? He never seems to get around to providing clear answers to that question, and for good reason: It would likely be incredibly intrusive and destructive. Virginia Postrel perfectly identified the logical implications of the stasis mentality that Keen represents when she wrote:

Stasist social criticism… brings up the specifics of life only to sneer at or bash them. Critics assume that readers will share their attitudes and will see contemporary life as a problem demanding immediate action by the powerful and wise. This relentlessly hostile view of how we live, and how we may come to live, is distorted and dangerous. It overvalues the tastes of an articulate elite, compares the real world of trade-offs to fantasies of utopia, omits important details and connections, and confuses temporary growing pains with permanent catastrophes. It demoralizes and devalues the creative minds on whom our future depends. And it encourages the coercive use of political power to wipe out choice, forbid experimentation, short-circuit feedback, and trammel progress.

And therein lies the ultimate danger of the stasis mindset that Keen embodies: It isn’t just silly, it’s downright destructive and a significant threat to our liberties.

Andrew Keen is the web’s favorite whipping boy these days, and in some ways he has it coming. His latest book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is an anti-all-things-Web 2.0 screed. Keen lambastes “Internet democracy” (specifically the Wiki model of collaborative creation) and decries the rising tide of user-generated everything. When you get right down to it, Keen’s view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. He’s angry that there are fewer intermediaries minding the culture. As a result, he argues, “professional” media (by which he means to say “better” media) is giving way to “amateur” media (which he regards as synonymous with, well… crap).

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has fought back with a vengeance and called Keen every nasty name in the book. But the best and most level-headed critique of Keen’s work is still this old essay by the ever-insightful Clay Shirky. Clay’s response rightly concedes that Keen in correct in pointing out that some important things have been lost with the rise of the Internet. There certainly are fewer intermediaries filtering our culture for us, and that will sound like a great thing to many of us. But it’s important to realize that some of those mediating forces serve a valuable role. Editors, for example, play an important, but often overlooked, role in terms of improving the quality of great deal of media content of all varieties (journalism, books, movies, music, etc). The blogosphere is becoming an editor-free zone, and at times it really shows. There are times when some particularly insulting things are said or silly mistakes are made that probably would have been corrected had a good editor been responsible for overseeing the final product.

On the other hand, the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience is wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to see what the uninhibited exchange of ideas results in. Regardless, the bottom line is that the editing profession (broadly defined) is changing because of the Internet. That is undeniable. And other mediating forces or institutions are seeing their power or relative importance in the cultural creation process diminished as the Internet-spawned disintermediation continues unabated.

Will that create short term problems? Undeniably. But Keen thinks these developments are contributing to a sort of cultural catastrophe and that we are collectively much worse off because of this disintermediation and empowerment of the “amateur.” This goes much too far in my opinion.

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough.

But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance–warts and all–still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it? Think about the big picture. As I pointed out in my recent City Journal essay on “The Media Cornucopia”:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

Moreover, the old mediating institutions aren’t dead yet. There are still plenty of large-scale media operations and content creators / editors that are alive and well producing a wide variety of culture. It’s just that they now face a lot more competition than ever before, and from sources of a very different nature (small-scale, independent, and wonderfully “amateur-ish.”)

Finally, let’s not forget that the age of scarcity and mediated culture that Keen seems to put on pedestal created a lot of crap too! Sure, the Internet era gave us Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and plenty of pathetic, time-wasting YouTube videos. But the age of media “professionalism” gave us “Three’s Company,” the Bay City Rollers, and “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Each era produced its fair share of quality and crap. There’s just more of both these days and that’s what Keen doesn’t seem willing to accept. But I’ll take that deal any day over the limited choices of the bygone scarcity era he seems eager to reestablish.

[Note: Part 2 of this essay can be found here.]