Tonight, four students in ILC are presenting their reaction papers to our I&S conference in December.
Charlie Nesson has his Red Sox cap on.
* What are the relationships between blogging and television? Susie Lindsay, the first presenter, says that blogs were mentioned a total of four times over the course of three entire conferences on the television industry that she’s been to over the past year. And yet, she showed us the “blog swarm” story about Eason Jordan on CNN — a merging of the two mediums. There’s something limiting about the cost to present high-production-quality content only, Susie thinks. Trust and credibility loom large as issues for the class. They’re interested in transparency: who is more transparent between TV news and online. As an aside, if you want real transparency, check out what David Berlind is doing over at ZDNet.
(Curiously, I’ll be on Channel 4’s nightly news tonight about social media software and what people could learn about you. I suspect that the reporter chanced upon me via this blog.)
* Tim Armstrong wonders about a world in which every person can produce their own segment. He’s wondering if, in fact, the Supreme Court shuts down the p2p networks via an overrule of the 9th circuit in Grokster, the expansion of creativity and personal publishing and the like will fail to occur. “People have built better-looking applications on top of BitTorrent,” Tim adds, which is yet another form of generativity. “It’s too new to be a business segment unto itself,” Tim says, “it’s more of a protocol at this stage.”
* Eric Priest is thinking about whether internet architecture itself could have a politically transformative effect. Even apolitical speech can have a politically transformative effect over time, he says. Bloggers in China and Iran and [fill in the blank with an authoritarian regime] who are talking about soccer or recipes or anything else — on innocuous topics — are in fact seeding a kind of democratic movement. (I remember Hoder making this point at the December conference.)
* Joon Oh asked in the class wiki to follow Eric. He’s eager to delve into the potential of internet technologies. Does the potential lie in the techs being used for greater degrees of communications (more societal connections, with different people) or is there something inherently “political” about the way people use the technology? Does the “nature” of the technology lead to the development of democratic norms? Joon is playing devil’s advocate — he’s not convinced. Blogs can be used for authoritarian campaigning (or commercial campaigning) just as they can be for democratic campaigning, he challenges.
Terry Fisher brings it in for a landing, starting with a story from US history. The concentration in political power in parties, he
says, paralleled the concentration of economic power in a small number of large corporations at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Then think about the internet. It bypasses the concentration.
Take the music example. It promises the reduction of the strategic position of the intermediaries and maximizes the ability to create of consumers. Analogously: eBay is transforming the sales process, away from the Sears model to a decentralized set of suppliers and purchasers. The internet allows the bypassing of modes of power. We would not think it revolutionary if what it does was to allow us to choose between Sears and Wal-mart. It’s transformative if it changes the structure. With some imagination, you might imagine a political analogue. It’s not to campaigns for president that we ought to look. It’s the
relocation of the kinds of activity that were concentrated in the national government. Never is defense going to be decentralized. But think about transportation systems, which governments did in the 19th century. The communicative medium is our present-day analog. It is not being built that same way. It is built by us. It is managed by different means. As yet, a little-known example of a classic government function being carried our by a decentralized system. We might make a list, looking at all the things that governments do. Could the tech help do these things differently? It might then make us think about democracy differently — the assembly of voice and deliberation.
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