All Networks are Created Equal?

I want to use this space to elaborate on a point I made during our discussion of Inventing the Internet . Not only did military funding (i.e. DARPA) contribute to the creation and development of the Internet, it continues to play a central role in its advancement (i.e. Carnegie Mellon's $66 million of DoD funding in 2007). The ways in which Benkler describes the "networked information economy" does not only apply to the media, or the academy, or social interaction, but to warfare , and it has for a long time. DARPA researchers John Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt created the buzzword "netwar" to describe the new type of modern warfare. No longer do we see guerrillas against central states, we see networked guerillas versus networked states. In one of the innumerable scary passages from their 1994 project The Advent of Netwar they write, "Netwar is blurring the line between peace and war, offense and defense, and combatant and non-combatant. As a result, the United States will face a new generation of nettlesome challenges that, in our view, will require new doctrines and strategies to combat them" (2). Well, yeah. Good call, DARPA.

The point here is that "the wealth of networks" that Benkler argues for is not only the "wealth of democracy" but the war all-the-time ideology of the something we may try to define as the Network-Industrial-Complex. In fact, the democracy Benkler calls for may be part of the need to implant democracy in intransigent nation states, or even the need to continue manufacturing nation-states at all. Arquilla and Ronfelt characterize netwar as: "about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico's Zapatistas more than Cuba's Fidelistas, the Christian Identity Movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, the Asian Triads more than the Sicilian Mafia, and Chicago's Gangsta disciples more than the Al Capone gang" (5). They don't mention Al Qaida, but one cannot help but read them into this list. But the scariest thing about their proposition is that not just "sleeper cells" and "rogue agents" but western democracies as well. We can create our own list. EU more than France, League of Democracies more than UN, Coalition more than US, etc. Networks are not inherently resistant anymore than they are inherently imprisoning. The scary reality is that they are hegemonic.

Read more about the dystopian future for free at RAND.org! Get RANDY! http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR789/index.html

When I was a girl, we sent our emails on long sheets, made from trees - calld it "paper"!

While I had my issues with certain aspects of Benkler's argument (frequent use of vagaries like "anyone can publish" or "attractive public sphere"), It nevertheless made me nostalgic (in advance) for disappearing forms of mass media.

In sections 13 and 14, he describes blogs and wikis as "weighted" - meaning they vary in the degree of moderation exercised by the person in charge. I wished at this point that I could remind Benkler that the idea of a moderated forum for comments on a media source is not entirely new. Letters to the editor, in fact, offered a similar model, although as Benkler points out later, the criteria for endowment with this kind of editorial power is different on the internet. In a sense, though, I think our perception of newspapers as invariably heavily moderated is skewed by a general scholarly overepmhasis on metropolitan, bourgeois media. Small town and working class media emphasize different degrees of control and offer an outlet for different kinds of commentary, for a variety of small or large audiences, much like blogs and wikis. Granted, you didn't have the totally unmoderated end of the spectrum in, say, newspapers, but that's pretty rare on blogs and wikis anyway. All I'm really trying to say is that this kind of claim often perpetuates the myth that modes of communication on the internet are often seen as wildly different from their predecessors, and we might do well to pay attention to residual practices once in a while too.

This led me to wonder how long the residual form will stick around - who writes letters to newspaper editors now? Newspapers and letter-writing alike seem to me like nearly extinct phenomena. But I'm not fully convinced that the technology was the driving force behind this shift. It seems that generations x and y had been accused of carrying an overwhelming sense of apathy even before we lost interest in writing angry letters. Perhaps the technology arose out of our desire for instant gratification, as well as our desire to dispel these suspicions of apathy without having to do a lot of work.

the revolution will not be televised, but it might be blogged

In his valiant attempt to gauge the democaticizing effects of the Internet, Yochai Benkler places a lot of emphasis on user-created and regulated content. Indeed, this is a hot topic in the Internet world, a phenomenon commonly known as "Web 2.0." Personally, and I think Benkler would agree, the whole "Web 2.0" concept, inaugurated in 2004 at O'Reilly Media's eponymous convention, is a little too optimistic. It is certainly not the "revolution" that founder Tim O'Reilly claims that it is. Rather, "Web 2.0" is just a fancy name for recent trends in Internet usage, in which collaborative work, open source material, and user control are common goals. So I would like to take this opportunity to use one of the "Web 2.0" crown jewels, the blog, to examine the blog. Initiate meta-blog.

In my mind, this is the big difference between the blog as a source of information and the mass media as a source of information. A blog can be boring and irrelevant to 99% of potential readers -- meaning anyone with an Internet connection -- yet continue to exist. It is important as a medium because it allows into broader circulation (though not necessarily demographically) a whole set of discourses that would never be considered "air worthy" in the traditional mass media sense. Television, radio, newspaper and magazine companies only disseminate information that they consider to be worth the capital necessary to do so. As such, they generally feel an obligation to air or publish things that will yield returns. Even entities like the Washington Post, known for printing daring and revelatory material, stake their claim for validity on the fact that they produce hard-hitting stories. If a subject is not particularly arresting, mass media entities are often obliged to "punch it up" a bit. I'm thinking here of the weeks upon weeks of repackaged Natalee Holloway coverage on FOXNews, long after all the other networks had moved on. The issue I am talking around here is sensationalism, and though it may not always take a form as obvious as purple prose or yellow journalism, it is always, to some degree, present in the mass media.

Blogs need not be sensational and most are not hard hitting. They are valuable because they allow into circulation a whole set of ideas that would never be considered worthy of airwaves or newsprint. Blogger.com does not depend on this post to receive a certain amount of hits, create advertising revenue, and pay for itself (at least partially) the way other media do. So I argue, blogs are not innovative because they can be posted by anyone and read by anyone. The forte of the blog is its ability to reach a targeted number of readers, while at the same time being generally ignored by everyone else. A blog need not be interesting to the public at large (I dare say ours is probably not). Thus freed from the obligation to be entertaining or arresting to a wide set of readers, a blog (like ours) can actually get down to the business of addressing issues. 

Benkler's first two case studies are exemplary. No mass media outlet would dare publish thousands of corporate emails. Why? The answers, ordered from most relevant to least in terms of media concern (1) it would not sell (2) it's illegal. Until they had been made sufficiently salient issues through the investigative efforts of concerned citizens, no media outlet would touch the Sinclair and Diebold scandals. However, those small groups of concerned citizens who coalesced into full-fledged movements would never have had access to the information had it not been made available online, where it passed unnoticed by the public-at-large.

In sum, I'm happy that most people will not read this blog, nor care to. It is a forum for our group to discuss issues that we find relevant to our course, our readings, and our papers, without having to strike a hard-hitting or sensational pose. If some net stumbler happens across it and finds it relevant and intriguing, great. But, if not, our little blog is still a success if only for this reason: I would rather speak thoughtfully and productively in a small group than recklessly shout to hold the attention of a large one.

The internet's not all that

Yochai Benkler has a good strategy in this chapter. He addresses the criticisms that are most frequently levied at the claim that the internet democratizes by suggesting that we compare our contemporary networked public sphere with the previous, mass-media dominated one, not some idyllic world in which everyone can speak and everyone will be heard. Benkler argues, “There has never been a complex, modern democracy in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media” (¶ 61). This move allows Benkler to assert that the networked public sphere does democratize; Benkler takes a position best characterized as “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we had.” I like this claim and even agree with it, but I want to look at it in closer detail. I’m just not sure about the dichotomy of “networked public sphere” vs. “mass media.”

Buttressing Benkler’s “ better than what we had” claim is his suggestion that more people have the ability to produce and publish in the networked public sphere than in the old, mass-mediated model: “Computer literacy and skills, while far from universal, are much more widely distributed than the skills and instruments of mass-media production” (¶ 42). I think this is an important point. Certainly it’s much easier for average people to voice their opinions online than to get them in television, radio, or a newspaper. But, as Benkler acknowledges, the ability to voice your opinions online is “far from universal.” This whole accessibility issue is a big concern of mine, and it’s related to my questioning of the dichotomy.

Benkler tries to be fair here, but he’s too hasty. The "networked public sphere" leaves many people out: those who can’t afford computer technology or internet access and those who aren’t computer savvy. In addition, one problem I have with Benkler’s approach is that he’s so focused on people creating information that he forgets about people receiving it—the community of readers. Anybody with grade-school reading skills and thirty-five cents can read a newspaper. Even less, perhaps, is necessary to watch television or listen to the radio. The community for these media seems large and heterogeneous. The networked community, on the other hand, might be smaller and more exclusive. Some people don’t access the internet at all. Some are only casual users. It just seems inevitable that, at least for now, the networked community is not as large and inclusive as what we typically imagine as the public sphere at large. This is part of why I question Benkler’s suggestion that the “networked public sphere” is an altogether distinct—and superior—public sphere in itself.

I want to respond to Benkler’s “better than what we had” reorientation with a reorientation of my own. Benkler always assumes that the internet has its own public sphere—what the calls the networked public sphere—but it seems to me that instead the internet is simply another medium alongside radio, television, newspapers, and so on. Why would its community be a necessarily distinct “public sphere”? Benkler’s dichotomy of new, networked public sphere vs. old, mass-media model suggests that the internet isn’t a part of mass media. But that’s hardly true. For instance, look at the extent to which radio, film, television, and news overlap with the internet: Youtube, movies online, news websites, television shows online, radio shows online, commercials archived, etc. If anything, the internet seems like an especially indistinct medium considering how much it borrows from and overlaps with other media. I think the internet is a medium rather than a public sphere in itself, and the characteristics that Benkler discusses could simply be conventions of a medium or genre rather than indications of a distinct public sphere.