I realized after uploading my final paper that I missed the last blog assignment from 4/30/07- so here it is to make up for my oversight.

After completing Yochai Benkler’s impressively titled work, “The wealth of Networks: how Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” I felt that his incredibly optimistic take on the decentralization of knowledge and labor because of new communication technology was out of touch with the social realities that this decentralization causes. Certainly there is new wealth being created out of the ability to transit and broadcast information and capital instantly to anywhere in the world to a well educated, and trained workforce. While corporations greatly benefit from this flow of information, those who lose their jobs don’t see this development as such a great example of progress. I am sure that this anxiety that is felt with the continued exportation of manufacturing jobs overseas was similar to the social upheaval of labor during the industrial revolution, but at least during that time corporations viewed their workers as assets, not as liabilities. Company town’s were established in close proximity to the factories to aid in productivity. Health care, dentists, teachers and schools were all provided by the companies such as the Lever Brothers, Cadbury or Pullman to make sure that their workers were well cared for and looked after. Today, the pressure is coming from industry for the government to provide universal heath care not out of concern for the workers, but corporations heath care as an unfair competitive edge that foreign governments supply their competition.

Philip Howard’s examination on how the new hypermedia campaign occurs is a further example of the “thinning” of citizenship and privatization of the political process. In it he remarks on the same new technologies that Benkler seems to admire, but provides us with a stark warning on how little political power we actually posses.

The Decline of the Public Sphere and Hypermedia Campaigns.

While indeed communication technologies have played a critical role in the political life of campaigns for generations, there has been a fundamental shift in not only how “new” communication technologies are applied within campaigns in shaping and targeting their audience, but those applications have also altered the notion of the public sphere itself. Howard, in his work, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen, notes three essentials that are required for a healthy public sphere. They are:

1.) It requires the fact of shared text, regularly published and generally accessible- citizens must be confident that the text is indeed shared across the polity so that everyone has access to the same quality of information. (p. 182)

2.) It requires the act of conservation through which we constitute the public sphere when we discuss the affairs of state and share the floor without discrimination. (p. 182)

3.) It requires the space for action: legislatures, courts, voting booths, and places of administration where decisions are made and enacted. Howard notes that one commentator believes that “the more of these spheres the better, so that different people can communicate their needs to one another.” (p. 183)

It would appear the new communication technologies support all of these three critical aspects for guaranteeing the health of the public sphere, however as Howard quite deftly indicates, the hyper campaign manager is not really interested in the health of the public sphere, and perhaps, not even that vested in the success of either major political party. Rather the managers main concerns is the success rates of each of their campaigns, so that they can then continue to sell their services to those that are willing to pay top dollar, and thus guarantee their further financial and political successes.

Howard details how the political messages are “narrowcast”, and thus modified depending upon the intended audiences race, class, gender, zip code, income level, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), and educational background. In turn he notes that “ The tools of a political campaign, the choices that campaign managers make about manipulating data, ideas, and people, reflect their own political norms.” (p. 203) Given the necessity of having the same information available for everyone in the interest of the public sphere, the campaign manager’s interests are in direct conflict with that essential. Similarly, online candidate blogs, youtube press announcements, electronic “meet and greets” all do provide greater access to political candidates, but that is at the loss of real life interactions with the voting public. That is why we have seen a resurgence and political realignment of when the primaries occur across the states, moving them eariler and eariler so that they might get a glimpse of a political candiate running for president, other than them spending all of the time and capital in Iowa and New Hampshire. Political campaign messages are becoming more and more unidirectional, broadcast to us via the internet. When this used to occur on television, it was at least parsed by geographic region, now there are multiple subgroups being tracked, and distinct messages are crafted for each. Online political chats are as scripted as political conventions, and they usually only pose softball questions that are begging to be hit out of the political park. While one could argue that this has been going on for decades, with the new communication technology available today, the effects are magnified and are eroding the very notion of the public sphere. Do you doubt that it this erosion is happening? Then come and join me in the "free speech zone" located a mile and a half away from the convention centers for the Democrats and the Republicans in 2008, and tell me that these developments are good for democracy.

As we saw through www.mybestsegments.com no one, including Howard fit the data profile based on zip code. He does not drive a mercedes, and no one in class fessed up to reading the WWE Magazine. While one of the data mining politico guru's could argue that those studies used on the website are the bluntest of instruments, specifically those that are free- it does not sit well with any of us that believe that we are more complicated than the websites that we visit, the things that we buy, or the geographic area where we live. Don't think that these firms really matter? Check out this link and pay particular attention to the line "pushing democracy forward."

Lastly, did anyone else find it ironic the number of Canadians involved in the dicussion about American democracy? I guess this is what happens when your national motto is "Peace, Order, and Good Government."

In Philip N. Howard’s text, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen, he provides an expose of the political culture of the ”hypermedia campaign manager”, and how the values of this particular subset of politicos have changed the tone, discourse, research and funding structure, and actual practice of politics in the last few election cycles. Care should be taken here as Howard’s definition of “political culture” is really focused upon the ideals and values of those who create political discourse these “hypermedia campaign managers”, rather than citizens, consumers or narrowcasting subjects. While Howard notes “ there is no correct or even consensus about the definition of political culture” (p. 54) his project is to reveal how “ their (hypermedia campaign manager’s) choices about an exostructure of media and information management shaped the way the rest of us experience and participate in political life.” (again, p.54)

Howard provides the following description of these campaign managers, they “ … are men under the age of thirty who graduated in political science and love being involved in the new economy. More important, most have worked with one another on projects or appeared together in conference panels. They regularly met for happy hour, and several marriages within the community help to solidify identity”. (p. 47) Consumer models, the amassing of data shadows, and the collection and parsing of information culled from consumer credit card companies drive the campaign manager’s attitudes towards the citizen/consumer. They believe that “citizens are political and genuinely interested in specific issues that affect them” (p. 46) and these managers assume that the direct, digital democracy is superior to representational democracy as it removes any possibility of miscommunication, or misintereptation of the message that their political masters wish to project to sway public opinion. Is this really a “better” form of democracy? Cannot people acknowledge that they might not have a personal stake in an issue, or even vote against their own “best” interest? Since when is “public opinion” the normative equal of “informed consent” to be governed or even democracy itself?

All of which leads me to my frustration with the way that Howard has approached this book- Yes this is critically important subject matter, but by “pulling back the curtain” on the current trends of contemporary campaign management in the form of an expose, he has framed the debate in particularly stilted terms. If you are troubled or angered by the narrowcasting that is occurring, Howard implies that you are either misinformed or naïve about the current trends in campaign fundraising and management. Troubled by the deep implications that these trends have for our democracy, and notions of citizenship? Well, isn’t that quaint. The fact that over half of the eligible public does not vote can be explained by the campaign managers by the fact that they are still working on refining their profiling metrics or that the consumers do not see the national elections as holding any aspect of self interest, or by a cynic as that these citizens, to use Price’s terminology “have left the market.” Regardless the consequences are the same…

I feel obligated to remark on the ramifications of Price's work in Media and Sovereignty and the events that are currently unfolding in Iran and Britain concerning the detained British sailors and marines. We are witnessing the intersection of traditional concept of national sovereignty in terms of a nation state's right to protect and guard its borders and territorial waters, with the political assertion of sovereignty played out on an international level through the broadcasting the "confession" of the British marines of violating Iran's territorial waters some six times. I am using quotation marks not to assign any kind of truth value to the statements as being an admission of guilt, but to use the tone that is expressed in much of the western media reports on the validity of these statements. (Examples to be found at CNN, The BBC, CBS News, and of course, the "fair and balanced" Fox News. It is also interesting to see how other western media are reporting this story and how they are dealing with the "confessions". (The CBC, ABC, Der Spiegel On Line with a particularly biting commentary from Monty Python's Terry Jones in the Guardian)

While the specific area of the territorial waters has been under dispute for some time, the growing issue is the actual broadcast images and video of the detained sailors /marines internationally directly against the terms of the Geneva Convention concerning the rights and treatment of prisoners of war, yet as many political observers and cartoonists have noted, the United States seems to no longer adhere to these standards in the international "War on Terrorism". (See image below) Furthermore, President Bush is furthering his own political "axis of evil" agenda by referring to the detained sailors as "hostages- which conjures a host of images concerning the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that ultimately cost Jimmy Carter the Presidency of the United States. [Speculation has it that this hostage crisis was guided and resolved because of Ronald Regan's secret deal to sell arms for hostages (aka Iran-Contra Affair).]

As for the question of agency within Price's Media and Sovereignty it appears to me that Price does his utmost to avoid assigning any real agency to any particular actor, be they nation states, NGO's, multinational corporations, or perhaps the most frustrating vague terminology in the entire work, "citizen consumers". I felt as if Price wanted to issue some powerful warnings and testimonials about the current trends in the monopolization of media power, but ultimately, he seems to only offer tepid statements such as "... there are assertions of national identity in the interstices of commercials in their depiction of idealized home life, opportunities to travel, or of a certain idea of traditional family values. "Free and independent media," because of their dependence upon advertising, alter citizen priorities as between the state and consumerism". (p 38) His introduction of the concept of a "market of loyalties" seems to be useful in discussing the shifting developments of communication technology and concepts of statehood and national sovereignty, yet I feel particularly disturbed by its implications and its utter abandonment of the concept of the "marketplace of ideas". I believe that the adornment of the market place of ideas and the construction of a market of loyalties are direct result of the interdependence and mutually beneficial relationships that multinational corporations, media monopolies and nation states have with one another. Reducing citizenship to consumerism is one of the deep implications that this strange, new market holds, yet Price avoid talking about the inherently hegemonic nature that the "Market of Loyalties" encourages and breeds. We may indeed be reduced to mere consumers instead of citizens, but that title still provides us with a certain level of economic agency that Price does not seem to admit. Commercial boycotts are effective ways of expressing social and political desires, and are unfortunately often more effective in providing real change than voting in civic elections.

Indeed, while the concept of the marketplace of loyalties may be on the rise in the brave new world of multinational media conglomeration, but it ultimately appears that Brand America is not selling like it used to.

It is not necessarily the best short to come out of Jib Jab Studios (my personal favorite is Big Box Mart) but it does show the toll that politicalization of the news has had on meaningful public discourse, and holds up a huge mirror to reflect our own desires for spectacle and entertainment over difficult and substantive reporting.

My "real" entry for Price is forthcoming shortly....

Number Five, with 17, 328, 599 views is "guitar" (Well at least it is Pachelbel's Cannon)

Number Four, with 18,275, 607 Views is My Chemical Romance "Famous Last Words"

Number Three, with 18, 955, 780 views is a SNL Digital Short (UNCENSORED) "A Special Christmas Box"

Number Two with 21, 674, 208 Views is the "Pokemon Theme Music Video"

and Number one with over 45 Million Views, 26, 374 comments and "favorited" 169, 673 times: "Evolution of Dance"

Considering the number of times the video was viewed is 45,104,925 and the entire length of the video is six minutes long, that equals roughly 513 YEARS of time spent watching the content if everyone watched the full length of the video.

I can now fully understand why Harold Innis was a cultural elitist and made frequent references to the destruction and fall of socities and his preoccupation with atom bombs....

Given Harold Innis’ text, The Bias of Communication, it is easy to associate the rise of new communication technology as a necessary outcome of technological, political and social change. His chapters are full of examples of how new communication technologies overthrow traditional forms of media precisely because the new communications technology offers either an administrative or technical edge over the old. Paper is more durable than papyrus, and allows for greater uses and ease of transportation, and allows for greater cultural and artistic expression through the medium than papyrus ever could allow. Innis charts the rise of newspapers and how through technological advances of paper production, the cost of publication and production dropped on a consistent basis. Innis remarks on the radio, and how it has allowed “national leaders to remain in power for unusual lengths of time is a fact not unrelated to the use of radio.” (p. 202) So, at first glance, it appears that Innis would have viewed, and perhaps even predicted, the internet based on the practical necessity of having a global communications medium that is instantaneous and ubiquitous as the global capital markets themselves. However, this “precognition” of the future should not be confused with its blind acceptance.

Innis clearly favors “time binding media” such as hand written media and oral traditions over “space binding media” such as the mass media of newspapers, radio and television, because “time bound media” reinforces intimate dialog of person to person communication. It is no accident that Innis focuses on the role of education within a society, as it is clear that he favors this personal, Socratic method of education. For Innis, personal dialog with a handful of students is the basis for a true and meaningful education. Innis states, “We should, then, be concerned like the Greeks with making men, not with overwhelming them by facts disseminated with paper and ink, film, radio and television. Education is the basis of the state and its ultimate aim and essence is the training of character.”(p. 203) He quotes Lord Elgin, remarking that “ the purpose of education not to prepare children for their occupations but to prepare them against their occupations” provides a refreshing contrast to the modern universities preoccupation of “credentialing” rather than educating. Perhaps the most biting criticism that Innis offers at the prospect of “the internet” is his quote, “mechanical devices become concerned with useless knowledge of useful facts” (p. 205) I cannot think of a more succinct, culturally relevant criticism of the internet than his quote.

Harold A. Innis in his work, The Bias of Communication, indicates that the mode of communication and its inherent ability to traverse space is an essential reflection of the political and economic organization of the society that produces and manipulates that communication medium. This assertion provides an essential groundwork for Innis’ protégé, Marshal McLuhan and his bold assertion that in fact it is not the content of communication that is of any particular interest, but rather that “the medium is the message”. While it is very easy to read that notion throughout Innis’ work, credit should be granted to McLuhan to reducing Innis’ lengthy discourse into a compact, pithy sound bite.

What is particularly surprising in Innis’ work is the central role that time plays within communication and how that factor reverberates within political administration, social organization, technological advancement, economic development and power. Until now, most of the class readings have dealt with how communication technologies have collapsed the vast distances of the world to allow almost instantaneous communication, be it by wireless, radio, television, email, ICQ/IM, on social formations. Innis however takes a very broad perspective that links these developments in communication technology with vastly older communication technologies that range from stone and clay tablets, to the development of ink and papyrus, the printing press and paper, celluloid and the newsreel, to radio broadcasting equipment and receivers. For Innis, the medium of communication determines the easy of which the information contained within is transmitted and disseminated. Also inherent within the medium is a notion of durability, an ability to speak across the passage of time to future generations. “Our knowledge of other civilizations depends in large part on the character of the media used by each civilization in so far as it is capable of being preserved or being made accessible by discovery as in the case of archeological expeditions.” (p.33)

Innis indicates that thorough these various technological advancements, they had noticeable and important ramifications on commerce, class, political organization and power, knowledge and religion. He establishes the broad claim that “We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine (my emphasis) the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually a civilization in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization.” (p.34)

Can we thus assume that Innis is expressing a kind of technological determinism? Perhaps. It is noteworthy to indicate the implicit union and codependence of economics and technology has for Innis and his scholarship. We can easily adapt the line of argument that Innis supplies to note that today’s instantaneous forms of electronic communication (IM, email, etc) are reflections of the rapid and ever moving markets of capital that are expressed in the 24/7 “globalized” world. However, if one was to step back and examine the original formation of the “internet” and its creation through governmental funding to forge close associations with military and scientific research, it seems to offer little in spurring international trade and the movement of capital. In fact, some may predict that the development and establishment of web 2.0 is going to have such widespread ramifications on society that the very notion of democracy will be changed, thus the US government through funding the precursor to the “internet” sowed the seeds of its own downfall. It appears to me that Innis is as much of an economic determinist as he is a technological one, and it is this mutual dependence and interplay that makes it difficult to argue otherwise.

Deregulation, the dynamics of normative freedom and “those pesky whiz kids”. (Or “All the young dudes, Carry the news.”- David Bowie)

Miller and Slater, in their work, The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach, establish fundamental frustrations that the citizen’s of Trinidad have with their local telephone monopoly of TTST, which is widely viewed has having “restrictive practices” that are preventing Trini’s from “properly capitalizing on the internet.” (p. 17) This “capitalization” rests with the notion that the internet provides wide and direct access to free markets and, in turn “as an opportunity to be grasped as new freedoms that increase people’s potential.” (p. 17)

From Miller and Slater’s work, it can be viewed that those that have benefited the most from this “increased potential” are young teenage Trinis that have some html coding, and web design experience. Miller and Slater note, “web design had very low entry costs… and was therefore … a major career opportunity for the web designers.” (p. 153) They chart out case after case of how young Trinis set up web pages for businesses that want to have a web page, but fail to grasp the inherently interactive nature of the medium itself. In turn, the author’s note that few businesses rapidly progressed from the notion of the web as a advertising medium, to a “catalogue” of their goods and services to a “node” of interactivity. This technological lag meant that these teenagers were subject to low pay and a lack of opportunity to develop their organizational and “back end” skills that were necessary for the emerging uses of the internet for inventory control an new applications of ecommerce.

What starts to be revealed is a frustration that the government of Trinidad, with it’s very opaque business relationship with TTST, has allowed if not readily encouraged technological foot-dragging by couching the arguments in distinctions between voice traffic vs information traffic and the expense of the “last mile” of service. What is noteworthy is that we have seen through the course readings a similar situation about the role of “whiz kids” and governmental regulation, although with very different outcomes.

In Susan J. Douglas’ work, Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922, she charts out the argument made by the Navy for strict regulation of the wireless medium using the threat of interference from “amateurs” to the possible risk of human life. Douglas carefully pulls testimony from congressional hearings on the regulation of wireless stating that, “Amateur wireless… may readily interfere with messages from a ship in distress with hundreds of lives aboard.” (p. 224) which ultimately led to government regulation that imposed harsh fines for any “wireless meddler” (p. 233) that interfered, or even occupied the “most desirable portion of the broadcast spectrum.” (p. 233) Douglas notes that the amateurs had effectively becomes scapegoats over what was a larger legal and technological struggle of competing wireless manufacturers and social institutions unable or unwilling to adapt to technological change. The Navy was particularly irritated at the presence of these amateurs as they were often faster and more talented in their wireless skills than were the navy’s own wireless operators.

Thus in Douglas’ account regulation was passed to limit the freedom of amateurs- effectively allowing them to “listen but not to speak” in a medium that they had direct access to through their own efforts of building their own wireless sets. Miller and Slater, however indicate the important role that the youth play in the formation of ecommerce for Trinidad, yet they are “limited” by the state granted monopoly of TTST. While the net effect across these to works are similar- the limitation of youth to a larger communication medium, they are formed through very different governmental means. It appears that the limitation of Trini youth to the “expansive freedom” of the internet is perhaps a mere growing pain of the state telephone company and may be a cultural artifact as other ISP’s gain a foothold into the marketplace.