shouting loudly

The Christian Science Monitor is running a story today about a new Congressional Research Service study showing that more Republican Members of Congress (MoCs) are signed up for Twitter than their Democratic counterparts.  The story’s headline, “Social Media Domination: Republicans rule Twitter,” has led to some furious retweeting from the political left and the political right and is quickly getting blown out of proportion.

Let me start by noting that I see nothing wrong with the study itself.  The CRS counted the total number of MoCs on twitter in September and October ‘09, counted total tweets, categorized by content-type, and packaged it all into reader-friendly graphs.  It’s exactly what the CRS is *supposed* to do, and I’m not objecting to it.

But the media framing is a little bit silly.  Consider this passage in the Christian Science Monitor piece:

“It’s the House that’s the Twitter GOP hotbed. Fully half of the Capitol Hill Twitterverse is composed of House Republicans. Obviously they’ve got some organized Twitter strategy going on in the GOP caucus. (emphasis added)

Is it only Decoder that finds this counterintuitive? It’s Democrats who are the party of young people (who text a lot), and Change, with a capital “C,” and MoveOn, and Web-based fundraising, and so forth.”

The problem here is that “get more MoCs to tweet” isn’t a strategy, per se.  Generally speaking, strategy involves making choices about the mobilization of resources to accomplish, y’know, a goal. Furthermore, the Democratic coalition does include lots of young people, MoveOn, web-based fundraisers, etc.  But the success of those actors has very little to do with Tom Perriello’s (D-VA) twitter activity.  CRS isn’t looking at the Republican and Democratic coalitions, it’s looking at Republican and Democrat Congressmembers.  Those Congressmembers, on average, don’t even have a very large following (the median House member had 1,297 followers, the median Senator had 3,536 followers), and we have no information on how frequently they are actually interacting with their followers.  Bottom line: if more Republican elected officials are contributing content in 140-character bursts… so what?

This isn’t to dismiss Twitter’s utility in the broader social media universe.  I’ve been amazed at how twitter has evolved in the past year and a half.  It’s now an important means of directing traffic to blogs, with an astonishing clickthrough rate.  But Twitter is an ecology in which communities of practitioners can interact and spread information.  Raw numbers of accounts or tweet totals just aren’t very interesting or useful data.  In the rush to embrace the newest and shiniest of the social media tools, twitter is also a bubble, being misapplied in areas where 140-character bursts just aren’t all that useful.

*If* Republicans actually rule Twitter, we should see that show up in meaningful action rates.  Show me twitter-directed donation numbers, or twitter-mediated protest activities.  Those are areas that have genuine strategic importance.

It’s entirely possible that Republicans do lead in these areas, but we can’t tell from the CRS study.  That wasn’t its purpose or design.  In the meantime, it would be great if journalists and the twitterati would tone down the rhetoric a bit.  We have no evidence of Republicans “dominating” or “ruling” twitter.  There are just more  Republican Congressmembers using the microblogging tool.  That’s a little interesting, but hardly newsworthy.

In his iconic novel “1984”, George Orwell envisioned omnipresent “telescreens” in every home, business and on every street that could be monitored by the government.  These screens were especially powerful because the subject never knew when the screen was being monitored or if, in fact, monitoring ever occurred.  One had to live as though one were watched at all times.

As is often the case, truth seems to lie somewhere between the totalitarianism of Orwell’s “1984” and the hedonistic consumer dystopia of Huxley’s “Brave New World.” As two recent stories point out, our actual telescreens cost hundreds of dollars and have designer labels.

The useful GPS technology that allows us to navigate our way through city streets also allows government agencies to track our movements.  Not in theory, but in practice.  A recent story notes that agencies have made rampant use of cellphones to track the physical movements and identities of individuals.  As long as we are not up to any wrongdoing, who cares?  Except that the definition of “wrongdoing” is a tricky one.  One Alabama sheriff used the technology to track his daughter’s whereabouts when she stayed out too late.  Even more unsettling is the story of Michigan police who used the technology to note the identities of protesters at a labor union rally.  And these are just the abuses that had been reported thus far.

Having taken part in many marches and protests during the Bush years, I observed that police utilized cameras as weapons of intimidation, recording the faces of each and every protester for purposes that remain unknown.  Did they do this to create a record or merely the belief that such a record might exist?  Was their object to record identities, prevent illegal activity or to intimidate peaceful protesters?  In any event, it seems that these tactics have moved from digital cameras to mobile telephony.  So while tools like Twitter and text messaging have been used by protesters around the world to organize and mobilize, mobile telephony may be just as useful for officials to monitor protest and “chill” dissent.  

 Meanwhile, do you know that little camera that sits on top of your computer screen or laptop–the one that may be pointed at you right now?  How do you know that nobody can see you through it?  If that seems silly, then you should read this story from CBS News about a high school sophomore who was spied on in his home by his school using the webcam in a school issued laptop.  In this case, the danger is that this technology is not only exploitable by overeager officials, but by child predators either within the school system or who may hack into the school’s system.  That is, it might not only be Big Brother who is watching, but Big Pervert.  The FBI is investigating the incident, but it is unclear if they are looking for wrongdoing or pointers.  

 When a Philadelphia mainline school district starts taking pages from the playbook of Orwell’s Oceania, privacy advocates and consumers should take note.  With mobile computing on the rise, hundreds of millions of Americans are using objects that may be used to track their movements and to view their lives.  As cameras and GPS systems become more prominent in these devices, there is every reason to suspect that our personal devices may not be as personal as they seem.

It’s 100% legal for me to post this picture:

It’s an official US government document, so copyright does not apply–at least not in the US. (See 17 USC § 105.) It’s galling, then, that the official White House Flickr account has been adding language incorrectly claiming copyright-like restrictions on pictures.

The language reads:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

The only true part of the statement is that the photo may not be used to suggest commercial or political endorsement. The rest is balderdash.

You can print a thousand posters of this picture and sell them for profit. [Ed. Feb. 13: MAYBE. See below.] You can crop out Joe Biden’s face, insert your own, and use that for your Facebook profile picture. You can print a photobook using this and dozens of other official photos. It would be polite to credit photographer Pete Souza, but even that’s not required.

Just don’t do anything that implies endorsement of your product or political cause. (For instance, don’t sell your poster as an official White House poster.)

I’m sad to see yet another instance of the administration not delivering the government transparency we were promised. Willfully misrepresenting the law to constituents is bad form indeed.

Of course, it’s nothing compared to the fiasco that is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The negotiations continue, with the goal of a signed treaty this year, but ACTA draft proposals remain “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12598.”

It’s enough to make willful misrepresentation of the law look downright charming.

[Ed. Feb. 13: Here's where "I'm not a lawyer" should just be auto-added to the top of all my posts. There's no FEDERAL law that would keep you from reproducing and even selling government document photographs. There is, however, a state law issue of the "Right of Publicity."

I think some applications of this right can be troublesome, but others make good sense. In any case, I failed to account for it in the first version of this post. Here's a good post discussing the frequent uses of Obama's image as a question of the right of publicity.

Short version: Politicians have a right of publicity according to state rights, though uses are more likely to raise First Amendment concerns, and enforcement is such a PR nightmare that it almost never happens. Which is why I was able to buy Obama handpuppets at the inauguration--and why you'd still be effectively able to sell your posters, but it may technically be illegal depending on your state's law, and an attorney would likely discourage you from doing so.

But it's still 100% legal to photoshop your face over Biden's and use that as your Facebook profile. In fact, I have Photoshop...]

You’ve probably seen or heard something about Carly Fiorina’s “demonsheep” commercial.  Here it is, in case you haven’t:

The payoff from this 3:21 second campaign “commercial” comes at the end, when a person in a homemade sheep outfit with laser-demon-eyes appears behind a tree, supposedly indicating a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It’s hilariously amateurish, and has become an immediate hit among political campaign professionals on twitter.

In the course of receiving ridicule on the cable talk shows (or at least Olbermann and Maddow, which I’m currently recording for a new data collection project), Fiorina’s ad has also gotten heavy play.  Therein lies its brilliance.  This campaign commercial was obviously never meant for the mass media airwaves.  It’s 3:21 long!  What the Fiorina campaign has done is craft something goofy enough to go viral — based not on its message, but on its amateurish nature.  In so doing, clips from the video get bootstrapped into the mainstream media and the major political blogs.

Now this approach has its downside.  The news frame is around how ridiculous Fiorina’s campaign is, rather than around her opponent’s fiscal record.  Stories about campaign mismanagement are not generally viewed as a positive.  Likewise, I personally can’t recall the name of the opponent in this attack ad, and I’ve watched it several times already.  For attack ads to stick, your audience probably has to know who is being attacked (particularly in a big open primary where we can’t just default to “the other guy”).

Nonetheless, I’d be interested to see just how much this “campaign ad” cost to produce.  If I had to guess, I’d say “peanuts.”  And at a cost of peanuts, I’d say the payoff is pretty impressive.  Fiorina’s opponent as “FCINO – Fiscal Conservative in Name Only” is approaching meme status, and getting heavy play in youtube remixes.  Compare that to the costs and payoffs from an everyday attack ad, produced to be actually aired, a few weeks before the election.  They almost belong as separate budgetary line-items.  There are “real” ads, which seek to move the dial through resource-intensive mainstream media political persuasion, and there are “youtube” ads, which seek to go viral and thus attract a lot of earned media (campaign-speak for free coverage on the news shows) at practically no cost.

To the extent that youtube ads are a new genre in and of themselves, “demonsheep” is a hit.  It’s a hit specifically because of its lo-fi feel, inviting ridicule of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 variety.  In this new arena of campaign communications, the goal is to be remixed, mocked, or copied.  As with so much of youtube’s content, it seems that “be original, be humorous” is the categorical imperative.

[This is a draft blog post as submitted to SaveTheInternet.]

Academic associations tend to be politically conservative.

I don’t mean they revere Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, though plenty of scholars do. Rather, each group–representing a field’s professors and graduate students–tends to evade controversy, rarely taking a public stance on an issue that might divide the membership.

Thus, it is remarkable that the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has declared its support for network neutrality.

The issue is too important to stay on the sideline any longer.

AEJMC represents a diverse group of scholars who research and teach nearly everything related to mass media. Based on our research–and, in some cases, years of industry experience–we know the media business, and letting ISPs pick online winners and losers is bad policy.

Nearly all revolutionary internet ideas–from Amazon and Google to Skype and Twitter–came from cash-strapped outsiders. Somewhere in the world right now, another tinkerer is developing what might become the next big idea. Before it catches on, though, ISP demands for a broadband toll might strangle this idea in its crib.

Also, some of the best stuff online never turns a profit. Imagine if, in 2001, Wikipedia had to pay through the nose just to compete on a level playing field with Encarta. It may have stalled, and even today, forcing Wikipedia into the slow lane would harm and might kill the project.

AEJMC is also concerned about the slow death of the daily newspaper’s business model. We embrace the internet age, but we also hope to ensure financial viability for “print” journalism. ISP tolls would make this much harder.

MSNBC and FoxNews could afford to pay extra for the rapid delivery of rich, interactive media. Most newspapers could not, forcing them to choose between deeper debts and worse user experience. Citizen journalists and exciting nonprofit experiments would also be muted by ISPs.

In addition to concern about the media system in general, we also have a selfish motivation to support network neutrality: Our roles as scholars and teachers. Academics in all disciplines depend heavily on the internet, and most of the educationally valuable content is not backed by big corporations.

If ISPs choose winners and losers online, the online content we professors assign would not often win. Would ISPs bend over backward to ensure my students’ access to the PDF of James Boyle’s Creative Commons-licensed book? Or the Internet Archive audio of WWII-era radio broadcasts?

Boyle and Archive.org are great, but I don’t expect them to pay off Verizon just to make my students’ downloads faster. This means my students have less access to educationally valuable content, they learn less, and the educational value of the internet drops. The same will be true of my research productivity.

As students of the media system and as researchers and educators, we have deep value and respect for the neutral internet. It is a privilege to have contributed to the drafting of the AEJMC statement, and I thank AEJMC President Carol Pardun for having the courage to lead this charge.

P.S. As if ISP profiteering weren’t enough, other interested parties are muddying the issue. The copyright industries, for instance, are desperately trying to force and cajole ISPs into serving as the copyright cops.

P.P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I am the co-author (along with Minjeong Kim of Colorado State) of a research project examining the online framing of network neutrality. This project won a competitive research grant from AEJMC, though this is in no way related to my long-established opinions on this issue.

I was excited when Carol Pardun, President of the Association for Education and Journalism and Mass Communication, told me that the group would be issuing a statement supporting network neutrality. I was ecstatic when she asked for my input on the statement.

Now, the statement is out, and I’m listed as a contact. Later today, thanks to the good eye of Josh Stearns at Free Press, I’ll be writing a post for the SaveTheInternet blog.

Here’s the text of AEJMC’s statement on net neutrality:

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 26, 2010

Contacts:
Carol Pardun, AEJMC President (803) 777-3244, pardunc@mailbox.sc.edu
Bill Herman, AEJMC Member and Media Law Scholar, (215) 715.3507 (mobile), billdherman@gmail.com

AEJMC Supports Net Neutrality

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) urges the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules preserving open and nondiscriminatory access to the internet.

The debate about network neutrality is complex and contentious, but we wish to address a specific myth advanced by network neutrality opponents: that this regulation would stifle innovation and create disincentives for investment in next-generation broadband networks.

The AEJMC rejects this claim.

The most important internet innovations have not come from network providers, but from creative outsiders who built their inventions on top of a neutral network. Requiring network neutrality is vital to preserve competition and investment in internet content, services, and applications.

The FCC should codify the internet openness principles that already guide the agency, and Congress and the courts should support this move. The rules would protect both consumers and innovators of content, services, and applications from unfair discrimination by internet service providers. Perhaps most importantly, these rules would help preserve and develop the internet as a key tool for communication that serves our democracy.

This statement was issued by the President of AEJMC and through the President’s Advisory Council.

Related links

* Federal Communications Commission
* Network Neutrality (Wikipedia)
* “Net Neutrality” in the news (Google)

About AEJMC

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

# # #

This is brilliant on so many levels.

Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I noticed the following tweet from Tom Mattzie (@tommatzzie), formerly of MoveOn.org:

I hope all my progressive groups and friends remember #Haiti today. I’d be bummed if they didn’t.

Mattzie has backed up the talk himself, pledging to match up to $1,000 in disaster relief donations from his fellow twitter-donators.  As the day has progressed, I’ve already seen online appeals from Color of Change and MoveOn (both urging their lists to donate to groups such as Oxfam and Doctors without Borders).  Nothing so far from the single-issue political advocacy groups, though of course Red Cross and others have appropriately sprung into action.

I don’t mean this to be a critique of the single-issue groups, but it does bring one point to mind that bears examination.

In the presentation that I’ve been giving about my research, I use the phrase “Headline Chasing” to describe the distinctions between MoveOn-style targeted fundraising and the direct mail funding appeals that fueled advocacy groups for the past 40 years.  It’s an intentionally provocative term.  The new generation of advocacy groups organize around whatever issue is at the top of the public agenda, whereas the earlier generation of groups mobilize around specific issue topics, regardless to their immediate salience.  That proves very effective as a fundraising tactic, but it implies a sort of nimbleness and fluidity that may or may not be such a good thing.

I think today’s fundraising appeals are an important example of the unquestionably positive side of this “headline chasing.”  MoveOn isn’t making a buck off this tragedy.  They are mobilizing their large supporter list and asking them to help out through other organizations.  When tragedy strikes, tragedy rules the headlines.  And in that moment, unless the tragedy impacts an issue group’s central focus, the large majority of organizations remain silent, clearing out of the way while the red cross and others take center stage.  The new political economy of advocacy organizations allows the progressive netroots to get behind the red cross, doctors without borders, and other center-stage organizations and quietly help out.  Internet-mediated organizations are performing mitzvahs right now, because their structure allows them to.  Older organizations, progressive or not, remain sidelined because the logic of their structure demands it.

Let’s hope that organizations, governments, and individuals do all they can to come together in the wake of this tragedy.  A 7.0 earthquake is a reminder of just how fragile many social institutions actually can be.  Unpredictable tragedy like this can happen anywhere, and national boundaries should not stand in the way of efforts to aid our fellow human beings.

I’ve become interested in the manner in which private ownership of digital interfaces has altered our understanding of what constitutes a medium.  Traditional media integrated hardware and interface and allowed a greater division between the roles of manufacturer, content programmer and user.  But new technologies have challenged those conceptions.  I’ve been thinking about these in terms of the “micromedium” and the “monomedium.”

MICROMEDIUM

We can think of digital interfaces like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other virtual platforms as “micromediums”—media that are:
1. Private
2. Unique
3. Convergent

Private

Televisions, radios and telephones are distinct mediums that could be produced by a variety of manufacturers.  The programming that came through these as either one way (radio and television) or two way (telephones) could be produced by a variety of communicators and bore no direct relation to the manufacturer.  But digital interfaces privatize mediums. You may have hundreds of “friends” and “followers” but there is a unitary Twitter, Facebook etc.  When the popularity of these micromediums fade, as fade they must (remember when everybody you knew was on Friendster?), then the micromedium itself will fade.

Unique

Micromediums are so unique in their capabilities as to often bear little resemblance to one another, even within categories like microblogging and social networking.  Despite their clear lineage and similar function as “social networking sites” Friendster and Facebook are worlds apart.  They have unique terminologies and tools that define not only how the user interacts with them, but how the user understands communication.  This is why a company like Squidoo insists on calling its user generated webpages “lenses.” This is why Twitter “Tweets” and Facebook “Friends”.  In naming a thing, we both mark it as our own and distinguish it from similar products.  The highly competitive, global and growing nature of the web demands that these differentiations manifest through both unique language and function.

 Convergent

Micromediums are not so unique as to be truly distinct mediums (in the way that the telephone was).  They are often variations, remixes and evolutions of preexisting mediums that come together in new and changing ways.  The open source nature of applications that may run on these micromediums only increases this blurring and converging of technologies.  This technological convergence, combined with corporate conglomeration leads to walled gardens of compatible technologies such as the Google owned Blogger, which integrates the Google owned Picasa/Gmail/YouTube/etc. into a single format that is both recognizable as a micromedium but still belongs to the larger medium of the blog.

MONOMEDIUM

While digital interfaces have fragmented and become highly specialized, the physical objects on which we access them have changed as well.  Mobile computing tools like the iPhone are characterized by their flexibility rather than functionality.  They cede control of their interface to the digital micromedia that they channel.  A heavily mechanical device like the Blackberry, with its tiny keypad and other strong physical attributes is looking antiquated in comparison to the blank and fully plastic interface of the iPhone.

As microcomputing brings our screens and processors closer together and physical objects like mice and keyboards cede to touchscreen technology, we can look forward to a future in which our virtual interfaces are more real and recognizable to us than the physical interfaces through which we access them.

 *

Anyway, these are a few thoughts I’ve been having.  They aren’t fully matured to the point where they might constitute an article.  I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts and suggestions for evolving this subject.

[This is more of a holiday-cheer post than my usual academic blog entries.  'Tis the season...]

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins’s excellent work on the various effects of digital media on media production/culture, “convergence” takes on multiple meanings.  Part of what makes it such a good book is that all of these meanings are true.  Media convergence includes both the rise of mass media conglomerates and the rise of read/write culture.  It is the interaction of those forces that determines the shape of media power in the 21st century — we can’t just focus on one or the other.

That said, there’s also the normative question of “is it a good thing or a bad thing?”  Social scientists are trained to duck this question, but we all have our opinions.  And particularly for those of us who deal with YouTube and other “user-generated content,” it’s easy to get swallowed up by the junk and the horrendous comment threads and bemoan the lack of quality that comes as we move from a filter-then-publish world to a publish-then-filter one.

And then there’s the “JK Wedding Dance.”

You’ve almost certainly seen it.  It’s been viewed over 33 million times, making it the third most-visited YouTube clip of 2009.  Cute couple.  Wedding in a chapel.  Chris Brown’s “Forever” starts playing.  The groomsmen and bridesmaids start dancing down the aisle, followed by the rest of the wedding party and ending with the bride and groom.  It’s engendered numerous spoofs, and was directly referenced in The Office’s wedding episode.  It’s hard not to smile, watching this outpouring of joy and affection.  These people were having fun.

I can’t help but compare the JK Wedding Dance to “The Real Wedding Crashers.”  This was a short-lived reality show on NBC in 2007.  It’s pretty much the perfect antithesis to the wedding dance.  Launched after the Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson pic, “Wedding Crashers,” the premise of the show was that soon-to-be-married couples would secretly sign up to have their nuptial events ruined by the “crashers.”  Hidden cameras would capture the crowd’s disgusted reactions, and we the people could watch and entertainment.  After months of constant/heavy promotion, the show lasted 4 episodes before joining the rotting husks of so many of its fellow bad-idea reality shows.

“Real Wedding Crashers” always left a bad taste in my mouth.  You can just imagine the pitch meeting: “it’s just like the movie hit, but with real people!  Imagine a cross between Survivor and Wedding Crashers…  It’ll cost nothing to promote and be a cross-platform event!”  This is 15-minutes-of-fame at its worst, taking one of the most storied moments in a relationship and turning it into a mean prank on friends and family.  It’s crass, it’s mean, and it appeals to the worst in each of us.  Oh, and it’s over-promoted on primetime television, probably replacing a cult favorite broadcast television show that had high production costs and a niche, devoted fan base.  It’s hard to think about “reality” shows like this (which are, in actuality, the antithesis of “real”) and not wish a speedy collapse upon the media conglomerates who visit them upon us.

And then there’s the JK Wedding Dance.  Semi-spontaneous, joyful, fun, making a special event more special and more memorable for the community that’s present.  Zero production costs, zero promotion, and reaching a viral audience of 33 million.

I don’t want to make too much of the juxtaposition — just share it because it so often occurs to me.  These are only two cases, interesting because of their symmetry.  But when I consider the normative question of whether the paired rise of participatory media and destruction of revenue streams that supported cherished older media, I cannot help but reflect on this pair of examples.  Most of YouTube is a combination of junk user-generated content and clippings from the mainstream media.  There are very few gems like this one, and bountiful examples of the fundamental flaws in the human character, I’m sure.  But the same is true for network television.  Given the choice, I find YouTube and other social media far less depressing than the economic logic of mainstream media convergence.  Democratizing production allows for more beautiful ideas to see the light of day.  As a researcher, I’m not sure how to count, prove, or disprove any of that.  But as a citizen, it sure does bring a smile to my face.