Emily Shaw's Seminar Blog

Final Paper

2007-05-09T22:12:46Z

Howard and Benkler

2007-04-30T16:26:38Z

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.

Benkler teaching exercise

2007-04-23T17:24:05Z

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Howard, part 2

2007-04-16T16:30:10Z

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.

Howard part 1

2007-04-09T17:31:13Z

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”.

Price

2007-04-02T16:03:12Z

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.

Innis part 2

2007-03-26T15:09:52Z

An ‘idea file’ inspired by Innis

Innis would probably start by admitting that every author who approaches the subjects of information and communication technology is biased by those media that characterize the social environment in which he or she is situated (see the first pages of “The Bias of Communication”, “A Plea for Time”, “Industrialism and Cultural Values”, “Technology and Public Opinion in the United States”). It may be for this reason that histories of ICTs tend to have somewhat more enduring legacies than contemporaneous accounts and analyses of technologies in which the authors are perhaps too thoroughly immersed to gain the distance needed to at least convince readers that they wrote with a measure of objectivity. That said, Innis or anyone hoping to grasp the role of space and time in the development and functioning of the Internet would be hard-pressed to make generalizations. The Internet impacts the social, political, and economic on multiple levels.
Although it is far more decentralized and unregulated than other information and communications technologies, recent debates over Internet governance have exposed on the international stage just how much control (arguably monopoly control) lies with whomever assigns domain names, IP addresses, and controls root servers and the standards which make machines on the network communicate and inter-operate with one another. Scholars (and some journalists) have been writing for years to debunk the pervasive public myth of the web as free and un-biased; yet the depth and breadth of technical understanding needed to effectively engage in the boiling international debate is over the head of the average Internet users, and indeed over the heads of many of the people whose opinions and votes will determine the course of the Internet’s future. Since the divvying up of domain names and IP addresses was transferred from the control of the engineers and professors who developed it and made the purview of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in 1998, Innis might agree with many in the international community that despite its being a private-sector company and not a full-out government agency, the ICANN is a blatant example of American cultural hegemony (enabling what Innis might call a monopoly of knowledge). Transferring control over the Internet to an intergovernmental entity (eg. the UN) would reposition the monopoly of knowledge, perhaps creating smaller regional monopolies. As new IP addresses become a scarce commodity, it becomes increasingly clear that control over the domain name and IP address system means considerable control over who gets to participate in the Internet, where, and to what end.
Media consolidation (especially post-2003) is another lens through which Innis might look at knowledge monopolies in the context of the Internet. The “press” is little like the press Innis knew and described in his book. Today’s press is frequently called the “media”, reflecting the variety of ICTs used to disseminate the “news”, information about current events, and to shape the ephemeral “public opinion”. The same companies and individuals who own the biggest television shows also own the biggest music and movie production companies, Internet service and content providers, radio stations, newspapers, etc. etc. Though the agency of individuals to shape the content transmitted through these different channels should not be ignored, the litigious, corporate structure which structures media conglomerates concentrates the power to make the big decisions at he top of the massive corporate trees (an evergreen is the most appropriate image I can come up with).
Innis might also point to sharing and peer-production and sharing as another level of the Internet coming under the control of knowledge monopolies in the form of the aforementioned media conglomerates and publishing companies who seek to reign in the freedom of individuals to do what they wish with content on the Internet.
And on a final, somewhat related note, I’ve been messing around with GoogleBooks and A9.com lately, and I decided to search for all instances of the word “memory” in this text. The searches returned a couple of items, with page numbers, which a student of Innis might use to figure out if in fact he made coherent arguments, even if not in a coherent order. I will reproduce the statements in which the word “memory” appears:
p. xvii- “For Innis, the important feature of an oral tradition is not its aural nature…but the fact that it emphasizes dialogue and inhibits emergence of monopolies of knowledge leading to overarching political authority, territorial expanision, and the inequitable distribution of power and wealth. Writing, in contrast, yields a “transpersonal memory.”
p.9 – “The oral tradition emphasized memory and training.”
p.105- “Education involved training, cultivating, and strengthening the memory. The specialized reciter was the carrier of social traditions. The memory took the place of logical process in writing and supported an immense burden of vocabulary and grammatical complexity with the help of verse, metre, rhyme, and proverbs.”
p.119- “After the death of Mohammaed and the loss of many reciters at the battle of al-Yemama in 633, steps were taken to write down the tradition and to provide an official written text. The memory was the seat of the book.”
p.127- “Music was handicapped by limitations of writing ‘for is music is not retained by man’s memory, it is lost, since it cannot be written down.’”

I’m not sure how Innis would respond to full-text searching and the potential through them to dissect his arguments in a more systematic manner. Attempting to analyze Innis through this type of searching may prove to be frustrating and might not lead to a more thorough study of his writing, but the very ability to manipulate the time- and space-biases of his writing through Internet-based technology is certainly provocative.

Innis-first half

2007-03-12T17:03:08Z

I pretty much like Innis’s style. As much as he jumps around from place to place and civilization to civilization without offering us logical segues or explicit connections, I found it fairly easy to extract themes and recurrent motifs of his writing. In “Minerva’s Owl”, Innis lays out his main arguments early on, following with somewhat chaotic evidence from history. His central argument is that the character of knowledge in any time or place can be understood through the lens of the dominant communications medium, and that new communications media compel realignments of the monopolies and oligopolies of knowledge toward which human society has strong tendencies and a long history. He identifies law and politics, religion, learning (mostly of the organized sort), and economics as central institutions influencing the use of a medium and the knowledge regime which controls it. He uses Hegel’s quote (“Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk”) to argue that cultural production by scholars, artists, and musicians tends to flower in light of their societies’ imminent decline (this due to weakened protection of organized force, ie. war).
He continues by arguing that “the success of organized force is dependent on an effective combination of the oral tradition and the vernacular in public opinion with technology and science. An organized public opinion following the success of force becomes receptive to cultural importation” (5). The rise of TV in the U.S. is perhaps a compelling example of the first part of this statement, namely that after World War II (1950s), TV programming developed to woo the American public and promulgate a shared sense of the greatness of America and the American dream through the use of vernacular language and imagery. The second part, suggesting that organized public opinion lends itself to cultural importation, eludes me, and Innis doesn’t really develop an explicit argument in support of this contention. It seems perhaps more intuitive that a public with a strong and unified opinion such as might develop in support of the ruling party (a unified opinion against the ruling party would necessarily characterize an un-unified public opinion) would be more prone to reject cultural influences from the outside in the name of nationalism, and might promote the exportation of their own cultural forms.
This is perhaps where the frustration voiced by many scholars toward Innis’s work comes in; pulling out his main points is not difficult, but locating the appropriate evidentiary support in the chaotic jumble of historical information that surrounds these points is not only mentally taxing, but can also be a futile endeavor.

Miller and Slater 5-7

2007-03-05T17:23:10Z

A number of comparisons can certainly be made between the Internet and other information and communication systems, but the numerous differences between the role of the Internet in Trinidadian society and that of the television in the U.S. (for example) stem only partially from differences in the technology: the other critical part, which is arguably the central concern of any book that claims to employ an ethnographic approach, is the cultural context in which the system is situated. While I don’t intend to discount the importance of the technology in any system of communication, I’m more interested here in how conclusions about the societal role of telecom systems are very much dependent on context (perhaps an obvious point, but nonetheless worth discussing).
The authors identify “dynamics of positioning” as one of the dimensions through which to view the Trini Internet; this “dynamic” can be used as part of a framework for understanding the way in which people use the Internet in any location, or indeed how they use any communication technology in any location. Each of the other course texts (Williams on TV, Douglas on radio, and Fischer on the telephone) focused on the telecommunications systems in the pioneering countries (namely the U.S. and the UK) in which the specific technologies and their incorporation into a social system were first widely deployed; the early development of these technological systems had far-reaching impacts and these nations continue to dominate the international media landscape. Small nations such as Trinidad, though not without certain degrees of agency, have had to adapt as peripherals in a technological landscape shaped and controlled by institutions of dominant metropolises (to borrow Miller and Slater’s use of these terms).
The authors state at the end of chapter 5 that in the unique context of Internet development in Trinidad, “the issue is not one of choice – the Internet is regarded as fate; it is about strategies of positioning between freedom and control that will allow Trinidad to realize itself.” (142). Here, ‘freedom’ is represented by Trinidadians’ fetishization of a completely deregulated telecoms market, and ‘control’ is embodied by the telecoms monopoly TSTT. This tension differs somewhat from the core tension identified by Williams as defining the early history of TV, that of competition/contrast between the ‘public service’ and the interests of commercial entities (36-37). In the case of Trinidadian telecommunications, the distinction between acting in the public good and protecting the open market for business is not so easily made, as the local telecomm monopoly (TSTT) is a joint venture between the government and a multinational telecoms company.
Though most Trinidadians express frustration at the perceived inefficiency of the local telecoms monopoly (TSTT) in facilitating Trini Internet development, Miller and Slater describe the nearly impossible task of the government in deciding how to move Trinidad into the optimal position for facilitating the realization of the nation’s expansive potential. The authors argue that “The reason these values [of freedom and the immense Trinidadian potential] can dominate such powerful institutions as huge media companies and the government itself is because they are not mere creatures of the political economy….The deepest concerns of Internet provision overlap considerably with values such as national sentiment and freedom that we have met in quite different contexts” (142).The government seems to know that Trinidad’s telecoms service is not the absolute best it could be, but the alternative is an uncertain future in which Trinidadian ideals of individual freedom and competitive ability could be subsumed in the open international markets that operate through the Internet. Thus it is faced with a frustrated citizenry so fixated on deregulation of the telecoms market as the path to freedom that it cannot see the very real possibility of a small nation such as Trinidad getting quickly swallowed up by the massive tides of multi-national media conglomerates if the government completely deregulates the market. While the government still has control over national telecoms, it still has some say in the positioning of Trinidad in relation to the rest of the world; but the limited capacity of the current telecoms infrastructure restricts the freedom of individual Trinidadians and Trini businesses to determine their own positioning vis-à-vis the Internet. There is obviously no easy solution, and this perspective of a small nation trying to chart the best course through a complicated and treacherous landscape of international interests is certainly new for this course.

Miller and Slater 1-4

2007-02-26T16:33:25Z

Dynamics of positioning

Miller and Slater discuss the ways in which the Internet has enabled Trinidadians to develop understandings of their specific identities and agency and the position of Trinidad in relation to ‘others’. The authors approach the dynamics of (re) positioning within the framework of global flows (they refer to Castells’, but conspicuously do not mention Appadurai’s global “scapes “, which I think would have been quite useful to their arguments); within this framework, the positions of Trinidadians as individuals and of Trinidad as their nation and defining/unifying entity are engaged in a dogged fight to be seen, understood, and successful on the international stages created through the Internet. At the level of kinship, the authors describe Trinidadians’ use of email, ICQ, chat, and Trini-oriented websites to reclaim, maintain, and expand connections among diasporic families. Rather than forming Trini enclaves outside of Trinidad, at least in the case of UK Trinis, the Internet was used primarily to keep in touch with family and friends in Trinidad and to allow them to continue socializing in typically “Trini” ways (eg. the online “lime).
What I found most interesting is the repositionings of Trinidad and Trini identity in the context of Internet communication technologies. Trini-centered and Trini-created websites represent and replicated key aspects of Trini history (Carnival, calypso, steeldrum) and social structure (the “lime”), contrary to the predictions of many Internet researchers who foresaw the weakening of national identities in the context of the Internet. While early on, Trinidadians participated in regionalized Carribean online environments, until they reached a critical mass of online Trinidadians to create and sustain uniquely Trini online communities. The authors describe Trinidadians as highly aware that they are meting the rest of the world online as Trinis, anxious that Trinidad lags behind the developed world, surprised by the world’s ignorance of Trinidad, and confidant in their ability to compete in the global Internet and IT sphere and in the Internet as the ideal sphere in which to assert their identity as a developed first-world nation.

As a side note, I’m a little troubled by the authors’ repeated reference to Malinowski’s description of the “kula ring”; without going into too much depth, I believe the comparison between Trobriand Islanders’ exchange of prestige items and Trinidadians’ online presence is somewhat tenuous. Mentioning it once or twice as a show of anthropological knowledge would have been fine with me, but the authors’ repeated comparison of Trinidadians’ online activity to the kula ring gift exchange does little do bolster their argument and much to suggest that they are associate Trinidadians’ with a “primitive” form of exchange. If their point, as I understand it, is one about the exchange of symbolic goods, there are other authors with less historically racist baggage than Malinowski whose work they could rely more heavily upon (Bordieu perhaps?). I think that failing to fully expound upon their use of the kula ring metaphor is irresponsible. At several points the authors admit to having begun their project with false assumptions about the educational level and Internet savvy of the Trinidadians they encountered, and their unexamined reliance on the kula ring metaphor (among other things) suggests that they never fully abandoned some of their preconceptions.

Paper proposal

2007-02-19T14:34:51Z

i'm not confident that this proposal really reflects the amount of time I've already spent on this topic, but I'm sure the final version of the paper will...

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Fischer Ch 1-4

2007-02-12T15:58:39Z

Fischer’s argument for the rise and fall of rural telephony (or at least domestic subscription in rural areas) is based on a number of factors, which in combination make a compelling argument. Fischer paints none too flattering a picture of AT&T. Though Fischer’s language is gentler, the corporation essentially comes off as a money-hungry monster determined to crush all competition even at the cost of its own lost revenue, a manicured poodle barking up the wrong tree, and a classist, short-sighted bigot who didn’t grasp even half the power of his own product. Though he asks the question of whether industry skepticism retarded the diffusion of the telephone or sluggish sales discouraged the industry, Fischer’s own opinion on the matter is fairly evident. Fischer’s notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy of rural telephone usage (after the era of competition, AT&T largely ignored the rural market for perceived lack of interest and profitability, which in part caused the initially high demand for service to taper off) demonstrates the power of marketing decisions, especially with a product as important as the telephone (and I’d find it hard to believe that AT&T didn’t know how important their product was). Though the consumers quickly saw the benefits and uses of telephone service, the exclusionary attitudes of AT&T toward rural customers discouraged its diffusion. Fischer’s comparison of phone subscription (usage data would have been nice, though he recognizes that very little is available) with car purchases bolsters his argument for the power of both marketing and consumer choice. Compared to the elitist business of AT&T, the introduction of the cheap cars to the market, with accompanying broad-based advertising campaigns, the novelty and usefulness of the car, and subsidized road-building projects to encourage driving, there was hardly a contest as to which (telephone or car) came quickly to be seen as a necessary and worthwhile investment. Fischer’s argument is a strong one, though he is right in acknowledging the limitations of the available data in representing public opinion about the telephone and phone companies. Though comprising only a small part of the chapter, his anecdotes from interviews with elderly Americans, especially those describing the awe inspired by cars and their opening of a “whole new way of life”, do much to fill this gap.

Douglas

2007-02-05T15:28:27Z

A few plausible ideas of how the early history of broadcasting might have turned out differently:
1) the inventors
Douglas emphasizes the importance of three factors to the success of wireless’s early development: a strong business model and financial backing, media savvy, and scientific/technical expertise. She describes Marconi as embodying the first two, and compensating for his lack of the latter by borrowing and adapting the work of others and through tenacious experimentation. His international business goal for wireless was to develop a monopoly on wireless telegraphy apparatus and service to numerous countries, but his foreignness, lack of scientific knowledge, and insistence on non-intercommunication between his apparatus and other wireless ones ultimately outweighed his money, charm, and corporate drive.
Fessenden, on the other hand, was never described as a shrewd business or media man, but had extensive training and knowledge of electrical engineering and focused his work on wireless telephony and transmission of the human voice. Pupil of Edison, he was a pioneer of continuous wave transmission with his use of the alternator, but his work with NESCO faltered through a combination of bad luck and bad business and never figured out how to turn much of a profit.
Douglas describes DeForest as having the best feel for the public potential of wireless of all the early inventors, crediting him for developing the idea of broadcasting for public entertainment. But DeForest never made the press believe him or even really like him, and despite the importance of his audion, was a somewhat unsavory character who allowed himself to be a puppet to shady Wall Street stock scammers.
And finally, John Stone Stone, well-respected electrical engineer developer of the automatic telephone switchboard, was a man of science who never focused his attention on the business side of things but was central to the development of tuning.
Douglas repeatedly argues that Marconi was the early inventor who was by far best at striking the critical balance between business, press, and technology, but he was not entirely successful. Yet his pursuit of international monopoly power hurt his courtship with the American press and public. Without attempting to rewrite history, things might have turned out differently had the other inventors, all of whom surpassed Marconi in scientific and technical ability, had recognized the importance of a coherent business model and the cultivation of a positive relationship with the American media.
2) the Titanic
If the captain of the Titanic had acted more responsibly and turned off the ship’s engines in the midst of the iceberg field, as did the captain of the Halifax, Congress might have been able to hold off regulating wireless usage and amateur operators and their organizations might have continued to gain political strength, might not have been relegated to an undesirable chunk of the spectrum, and may have in some way effected the ways in which spectrum use was and is allocated.
3) World War I
If WWI hadn’t happened, the government wouldn’t have been able to call for a moratorium on patents for the privately owned wireless components which they then used to develop more coherent and efficient wireless systems for use during the war, nor would they have developed RCA after the war and thus effectively created a state-sanctioned communications monopoly which determined the course of broadcasting in the decades after the end of this book.

Television- Raymond Williams

2007-01-29T02:00:25Z

In Chapter 5 of Television, entitled “Effects of the technology and its uses”, Williams identifies the persistent debate in the social sciences about the relative merits of quantitative (ie. based on data) and qualitative (based on “value judgments”, “participation”, and “involvement of the investigator” p 121). Williams explicitly favors the latter, and offers a critique of many social scientists’ regard for “scientific method” above all other “modes of experience and analysis”. He argues that the isolation of television (or indeed any other communications medium) leads to over-simplified discussions and displaced identifications of cause and effect. Such an approach, as is often the result of analyses of data sets gathered by “sociologists of mass communication”, fails to acknowledge the centrality of intentionality and agency in the institutions that shape and define the medium of TV and its uses. According to Williams, studies of this sort essentially miss the point of sociological inquiry (theorizing about why people do things), focusing too heavily on the effects instead of examining the causes; he argues that very few of the effects of TV identified by empirical studies come near to “satisfying the criteria of scientific proof or even general probability” (p 119). He further differentiates between the “cultural science” which he practices, and the “sociology of communications”, the former type of research usually being funded by social interest groups and political or cultural authorities, while the latter is mainly funded by those groups whose actions and influence might be scrutinized by sociological research of the type advanced by Williams (eg. broadcasting companies, market research and ad agencies, and political parties). Williams’s argument can be framed as a warning against technological determinism and against determined technology, and promotes an examination of “real social, political and economic intention”.
Out of context, Neuman’s critique of Williams appears to place him on the other side of the argument about methods of sociological research. The “uneasiness” Neuman identifies is well-argued however, and Williams offers a sound theoretical basis on which future studies that employ methods of “gathering data to test” the ideas he proposes within. Perhaps one of the most significant points Williams makes in Television is that “the institutions and social policies which get established in a formative, innovative stage have extraordinary persistence into later periods, if only because they accumulate techniques, experiences, capital, or what come to seem prescriptive rights” (p 148).