Emily Shaw's Seminar Blog

Please excuse the casualness of this post (eg. absence of direct quotes and citations), but I need to conserve my more formal writing energy…

The hypermedia campaigners Howard quotes in ethnographic quips throughout his book voice a shared belief that their work helps foster more deliberative American democracy. From that shared assertion, their political, social, and moral values diverge. But its also a job, and while they’d all like to work only on campaigns that to support political objects (to use Howard’s term) with which they are ideologically aligned and which never step outside the boundaries of their own morality in any way, the fact of the matter is that the money doesn’t always land in the hands of their complete ideological allies. Howard and his interviewees give the impression that no one really thinks its completely ok to use people’s credit card histories and web transaction logs to pigeon hole them, but such methods are the means to an end of more representative politics, an aspiration that spans the ideological spectrum and for which some believe we should be willing to sacrifice our privacy.
What sort of model of production would describe the information produced in the hypermedia campaign? To be sure, private companies fill their data banks with specific personal information (“existing information”, in Benkler’s input model) about voters which they pay other firms for, and that employees then aggregate and analyze in the customized reports that are their products. This content is gathered by firms, but it is generated by users. When voters fill out surveys about their political beliefs in order for a computer program to perform a unique query to match them with allied candidates, how could we categorize the model of information production (and I define information very broadly as knowledge codified in some way, through writing, speech, etc.)? If an organization running an operation such as the one above is not in the business of turning a profit, what then? It’s reliant on a market of some sort (for political participation, perhaps?), but can user-drive information production of this sort be understood to fit any production model we’re familiar with? Some of the hypermedia campaign tools facilitate a sort of peer production through providing a forum for political debate, engagement, and participation; what sort of information product is made from this process, and what sort of wealth is created?
So which of the many different kinds of ‘information’ produced through networked ICTs do and do not qualify as being peer-produced? If the definition relies on decentralized production and modularized participation, then personal information gathered in violation of privacy might fit. But if they key elements of individuals’ decision to participate and how are removed from the picture, we have strayed from Benkler’s conception of the liberating new form of information production. Benkler argues that our information environment has always been comprised of a range of information produced through market- and non-market-based processes. The hypermedia campaigns described by Howard illustrate the complexity of different forms of information production, and demonstrates that while peer production is a useful model for understanding some of it, many methods that do not readily fit any one model of production are being employed through the use of networked ICTs.

Posted by efshaw2 at 10:26 AM | Permalink

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Posted by efshaw2 at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Howard builds a strong argument in support of his statement that “political hypermedia have altered the way political consultants, politicians, and academics understand voter behavior and the relationship between candidates and constituencies”; I think Howard intended to imply that not only has understanding of these behaviors and relationships changed, but indeed the very chains of action and reaction, causation, and effects, those behaviors and relationships themselves have changed with the increasing use of hypermedia in political culture. Howard uses the term “political hypermedia” throughout his book to essentially denote the use of various Internet- and computer-based technologies in the construction of political campaigns, be they candidate or issue centered. Hypermedia campaigns are characterized by the use of both out-of-the-box ICTs, as well as some that are built in-house in tandem with the campaign. The use of these new media, in contrast to the “mass media” campaigns in the days before the Internet and computer technologies, are characterized by small and fast feedback loops, low information waste, and low process toxicity (158). There is little doubt as to the relative efficiency of hypermedia info-gathering tools over more traditional methods, as reflected in the widely shared sentiment that “there are big differences between an individual’s policy preferences and what they reveal as survey respondents” (98). In other words, hypermedia allow campaigns to be more responsive, they take into account in the decision making process all data they gather, and citizens do not become impatient with providing the data because too frequently they do not know even they are providing it. Campaigns still use more ‘traditional’ methods of gathering information about the public (surveys, focus groups, etc.) and media to deliver their messages (tv, radio, print, phone, etc.), but the use of these tools is increasingly shaped by the information gathered and analyzed through new ICTs. This interplay and interdependence of the more traditional methods and media tools of political culture with types of hypermedia such as the ones described by Howard makes causal relationship difficult to define. And
Howard states that “there is still some mystery about the causal patterns, but the ability to predict outcomes has improved dramatically by refining the formula for legislative success, testing political messages, and studying personality psychographics on top of demographics” (93).
The types of technology and the ends to which they are used vary greatly, and grouping them all together into one category, “hypermedia”, to and from which we might draw causal relationships masks the sometimes significant differences between specific hypermedia tools. As Howard acknowledges, “political culture consists of both chosen networks and imposed schemata” (140). Consistent with this reality, some of the hypermedia tools described in Howard’s book deal in the precious currency of data, and in order to secure that data, the employees of many campaigns and other entities of American political culture are more than willing to rely on what sometimes represent gross invasions of privacy, such as using credit card purchase histories and Spyware to overlay basic demographics with “psychographics” in order to better ‘understand’ their constituents. One campaign worker expressed a common belief that “politics has always been driven by data; it’s just that the data on the electorate [were] never very accurate” and hypermedia can help campaign workers ensure that the objects of their political campaigns know and are responsive to their constituents through data that is not self-report, as in the case of surveys and focus groups, but which directly reflects the behavior of individuals and groups.
A central part of the shared culture of campaign workers is this belief that the “more data they collect on citizens and candidates, the more transparent and responsive this dyadic relationship will become” (94). Although people frequently do not know that their personal information is being gathered and analyzed in the construction of political campaigns, the campaign workers Howard interviews rationalize invasions of privacy with the firm belief that such information leads to tighter feedback loops between citizens and political objects, and thus a more responsive political culture. It is difficult to stomach the thought that the best way for our political system to effectively represent its constituents is to use personal information gathered in disingenuous and arguably unconstitutional ways; is it really the case that privacy is the toll we must pay (more often than not unwittingly) in order to pave the least “toxic” (156) path to a ‘deliberative democracy’? Howard agrees with many other scholars (including Fischer from this course) in stating that “users have an important role in defining how technologies will be used, such that the story of how a technology is intended to be use is incomplete without the story of how it is actually used” (172); but, in the case of data-intensive hypermedia tools, what role can the “users” (ie. the public) whose interests they are supposed to promote, possibly play in shaping the use of data-gathering technologies like Spyware and spider programs, when they don’t even know they are using them?
In contrast to those forms of “hypermedia” which rely heavily on amassing and analyzing personal data, there are hypermedia tools which seem to take more of a citizen- and discourse-centered approach (rather than a campaign-centered one) by allowing citizens to knowingly formulate and strengthen their political beliefs and policy stances, and connect them with those of other citizens and of specific candidates and campaigns. The most notable of this is the lively peer-reviewed debates in the Agora on GrassrootsActivist.org, which are of a markedly different character and technical structure than the data-mined reports of DataBank.com. In the Agora, citizens have a forum in which to voice their opinions, respond to those of others, or just watch and learn. So several questions linger: the first is whether or not this type of forum helps anyone figure out their stance on an issue who doesn’t already have their mind made up, and whether or not this type of deliberative hypermedia leads to a more representative democracy; and the second is whether or not American citizens, if they knew of these invasions of personal privacy, would be willing to allow them in the name of a more "transparent" democracy.

As a side note, I'm pretty sure the community of American librarians would go nuts over the issues of privacy and the models of information provision described in this book. The foundation of their profession consists in helping individuals find the information they need on their own terms, and facilitating the perpetual construction of a more active and informed citizenry while respecting the rights to privacy encoded in the Constitution. Also, I wonder what sort of connections can be made between the invasions of privacy in this book, the USA Patriot Act, and the relative use by Republican and Democratic campaigns of this highly personalized voter data from organizations such as Databank.

Posted by efshaw2 at 10:30 AM | Permalink

I generally find Howard’s definition of political culture useful, but I kind of hate the way he organizes his arguments in the pages in which he lays out this definition (~p55-80). He states: “Political culture is a set of cognitive and material schemata for organizing the movement of socially significant objects through scripted political process in political events and for organizing the way we remember those objects, events, and processes” (71). Yet I would have found his definition more useful had he offered it up earlier and then proceeded to explain his use of the undefined terms; this way readers would be able to refer back to the definition they had already read, instead of questioning certain parts of his arguments that seemed to contradict one another until finally arriving at the definition of “political culture”, and then wondering why he didn’t just say so in the first place. Perhaps this was an intentional move on his part to get his readers riled up and ready to attack his argument at every turn only to eventually agree with him. Yet he seems somewhat careless with terminology, at the same time that he is criticizing other social scientists for their carelessness in this area.
The most glaring example of this is his fumbling through a somewhat off-handed justification for his own interest in culture as stemming from what he sees as a newfound interest in the importance of the culture concept (variously used and ill-defined as it is) among social scientists. At the risk of sounding like an evangelist of anthropology (which I am not, but I am steeped in its tradition and find much of value there), culture has been at the center of the discipline for far longer than the “recent years” which Howard identifies on page 66. Although anthropology’s place in the social sciences is uncomfortable at best, an author who purports to write a “network ethnography” and borrow a methodological frame rooted in anthropology ought to be more sensitive to the work that has come before him. He moves freely between talking about “culture” (seemingly in a general sense) and “political culture” more specifically, and I was frequently confused about which he was referring to. I was so distracted by what seems to be a conspicuous glaze over theories of culture in his claim that “its greatest usefulness has been to distinguish between ‘human’ and ‘material’ development” (67) and his lack of clarity in referring to “culture” (generally) and “political culture” as interchangeable terms that I had trouble following this rest of his argument about different approaches to political culture.
Howard is right to call for greater attention to the interdependencies of the social and the material, and to argue that “an analytic frame for political culture needs to integrate both the capacities of human agency and the constraints of material structuration” (70). To be sure, there are a defined group of people, some of whom he describes in the ethnographic material throughout the book, who use information and communication technology to constrain and enable the rest of us (voters, politicians, and their staff alike) to think and act in certain ways and not in others with respect to the political objects and processes of our government. I find his definitions of political objects, processes, events, and memory (p.55) apt for the discussion of political culture as conveyed through any medium (not just hypermedia). Yet he variously defines political culture “as a kind of exostructure” (70), placing the social and ideological dimensions of political engagement outside of this definition, and then almost immediately says that political culture consists of both material and social structures (71). Although I liked his definition of political culture in the end, I was left confused about how well his arguments in support of the definition actually justified it. While I don’t necessarily believe that an author must explicitly define all of his terms, I do believe that he must be consist in his use of them if he is to build a clear and convincing argument for a critical audience. It seems then that my problem is not with Howard’s definition of political culture and its various interpretations, per se, but with the rhetorical style which he adopts to build his arguments and his lack of consistency with terms that are important to his concept of the role of hypermedia in contemporary “political culture”.

Posted by efshaw2 at 11:31 AM | Permalink

In Price's account of national and international media restructuring, much agency lies predictably with the usual suspects: the world's most powerful states (especially in terms of technology, and trade) and the multinational media conglomerates and international organizations and agreements they head up. Generally speaking, some degree of agency in deciding how to resist or participate lies with states, defined as the interconnected structure of political institutions exercise authority over a certain geographic territory. Yet looking at the often heavy-handed "influence" of these international organizations (media, trade, financial), it becomes clear that agency in this context does not mean that states are free to do as they please, or even necessarily as they believe will be most beneficial to the citizens within their borders. To be sure, states can and do make media decisions we might normally consider an enactment of agency; yet knowing that decisions that contradict the goals of more pervasive and powerful organizations could negatively impact international relations, state leaders are hardly faced with a real choice. Agency in global media structures is a complicated interplay of law, politics, culture, technology, trade, and ideology, and it is nearly impossible to pin down.
Transnational forces permeate physical borders, shaping the media decisions of states both from the outside (including satellites, Internet, development and reform models/metaphors, and trade agreements), and the inside (for example, "deregulation" and "self-governance" of domestic media companies whose interests and direction are closely aligned with the government). Price describes an increasing interdependence of media and government, leading to the "toleration of even greater tendencies to monopoly" (p.13). Price also urges us not to discount to power of words and images (media content) on the "market for loyalties". While locating agency in this account is a challenge, Price does not seem to give much agency to the individual citizens and groups of citizens, the shaping of whose behavior, beliefs and "loyalties" is the goal of media restructuring. A more thorough account of how various individual, national, and international agents are resisting the forces describes by Price would provide a valuable counterpoint.

Posted by efshaw2 at 10:03 AM | Permalink