Final Paper
Here is my final paper Download file
Here is my final paper Download file
One of the contrasts between Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and other works we have read is Benkler’s use of causality. Benkler, like many other authors, addresses the issue of technological determinism. Benkler notes, “Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations and institutions easier to pursue and others harder” (17). This quotation demonstrates a loose interpretation of causality that I find refreshing.
Unlike other authors we have read, Benkler does not seemed concerned to find variable X that causes Y or even to prove that variables A through X cause result Y. For example, rather than accept the logic of power law distribution, Benkler instead suggests that the success of websites such as StopSinclair.org are not “genuine flukes.” In fact, “intuitively, it seems unsurprising that a large population of individuals who are politically mobilized on the same side of the political map and share a political goal in the public sphere – using a network that makes it trivially simple to set up new points of information and coordination, tell each other about them, and reach and use them from anywhere- would in fact, inform each other and gather to participate in a political demonstration” (245).
From Benkler’s perspective, our intuition is correct and the power law is wrong. This seems quite startling. After all, even cultural theorist Raymond Williams went to great lengths to demonstrate the empirical, as opposed to intuitive, value of his work. For example, Williams provided both a long and short range empirical study of “flow” that he documented with evidence from American and British television (97-120). Perhaps the apotheosis of this approach was provided by Claude Fischer in his multi-variable multi-methodological approach to the telephone.
Why does Benkler seem less concerned with causality than other authors we have read? Benkler, as a law student, was almost assuredly required to take a class on torts that almost assured provided a legal perspective on causality. In the law, there are at least two forms of causality (actually, some would argue that there are three forms of causality, but to keep this simple, I am going to focus on the most recognized forms).
First, there is but for causality. But for causality can be explained best through an example. Let us assume that, god forbid, the State of Illinois Building in Chicago is bombed while I am in it. As the explosion occurs, I am eating some nachos that I bought at the Taco Bell in that building’s food court and I am killed. Is the location of a Taco Bell in the food court a cause of my death? Of course. I would not have been present in the State of Illinois building but for the presence of a Taco Bell. If there was no Taco Bell, I would have kept walking until I found a Taco Bell, or perhaps a Chipotle.
Yet, is Taco Bell legally liable for my death? Of course not. This relates to the second form of causality, referred to as proximate cause. Proximate cause is concerned with issues of forseeablity. Was it foreseeable when Taco Bell opened its restaurant that years later a terrorist attack would occur leading to my death? No, Taco Bell cannot be held responsible.
At this point, you may question my interpretation. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, one might argue that attacks on other tall buildings were foreseeable. Taco Bell should have realized that tall buildings were vulnerable and removed its restaurants from any tall building in order to save my life.
The proper response, yeah right. This brings us to issues of evidence that intersect with causality. What makes a violation of the civil law foreseeable? The best answer is that forseeability is a very ambiguous concept and it cannot be defined in advance. A more useful answer is that a violation is foreseeable if a jury (or in a bench trial, a judge) believes it to be so. This means that, depending on the state, if you can convince 6-12 people or one judge that something was foreseeable, it was. Good luck convincing them that Taco Bell caused my death.
This understanding suggests that you should present the evidence that a jury or a judge would find most convincing. For Claude Fischer this would seem to be a complex set of statistics, and even Williams attempts to provide this type of evidence. However, a law professor would have been taught in his studies that statistical evidence is not always the most convincing. For example, in McKlesky v. Kemp, the Supreme Court rejected David Baldus's empirical study of the death penalty in Georgia , an incredibly sophisticated regression analysis that statistically demonstrated that race influenced whether a criminal defendant was sentenced to death. Years later, Justice Powell said that he rejected the argument because he could not understand the statistics.
Therefore, the evidence presented in favor of your argument should be something that is simple and if the evidence is not simple, it should be explained in a manner that makes it as easy to comprehend as possible. Thus, in Benkler’s work the reader uncovers many examples and analogies. For example, the complex technology of the Internet is broken down into a physical layer, a logical layer, and a content layer (396-451). Likewise, Benkler proves himself to be a very structured writer. He includes previews and reviews of his argument in order to encourage retention in the reader. Lest readers get frustrated with his book, he even provides guidelines for sections that they can skip if they accept his premises or have a background in the material he is discussing.
The differences between Benkler and other authors we have read this semester is based on assumptions related to causality. Benkler wants to convince the reader that causality operates in the manner he describes. Fischer wants to prove that he is correct in an absolute, empirical sense.
This assumption results in different methodologies. Benkler relies on stories that a reader will likely find interesting and enjoyable. Fischer relies on statistics that scientists will likely find convincing. Williams seems to lack confidence in his own approach, and dabbles in the techniques of Fischer to bolster his argument.
Benkler would likely applaud Fischer for at least putting his most scientific evidence in appendixes and summarizing this information in easier to understand terms in the body of his work. Benkler would likely suggest that Raymond’s empirical of evidence of flow is unnecessary and if anything distracts the reader from his arguments.
Fischer would likely be unpersuaded by Benkler’s argument and accuse him of arguing without sufficient evidence. In contrast, were he alive today, Raymond Williams might read Benkler’s work and ponder, “Why didn’t I think to do that?”
Learning Goals: Students will recognize that ones viewpoint on issue is influenced by his or her standpoint. Students will obtain a basic understanding of file sharing.
Skill: Students will develop skills to argue and present an argument on an issue that does not necessarily reflect their own viewpoint.
Content (Prior to class): Benkler, 59-90 (Peer Production and File Sharing), Courtney Love, “Courtney Love Does the Math”
Content (In class): Excerpt from Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, 383 F. 3d (6th Cir. 2004).
Opening: Play a portion of George Clinton’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” and the NWA song, “100 Miles and Running,” the songs at issue in this case.
-Ask students if the songs sound similar.
-Ask students if they can define peer production or file sharing
-Ask students if they can see a connection between file sharing and sampling
-Explain that the NWA song contains a 3 second sample from Clinton’s work, and
that in a case they will read in class, a court found this sample to be illegal
Activity: Have students read the excerpt in class, hopefully this excerpt would only be a few pages in length. To summarize, in this case the court found that it was too difficult to determine how much sampling would be a violation of copyright laws. Therefore, the court found that any unauthorized sampling, even a sample that was three seconds long, was a violation of the law.
The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate to students that ones position may impact their perspective on a particular issue. In this activity, students are assigned to groups that represent various positions in the file sharing debate. Students may not develop a position that corresponds to the general perspective of the group they are assigned to. However, this is acceptable because some members of a group, such as Courtney Love, may not represent the dominant posiition in their industry.
Divide students into six groups which represent the following:
1. Members of the music industry.
2. Singers and performers.
3. Songwriters.
4. Members of the computer industry.
5. Students who download music.
6. Librarians.
Ask each group to write an outline for a brief speech they will give toward the end of class that represents the position of the group they were assigned to represent. Ask students to specifically consider how their assigned identity impacts their argument. Remind students that they should strongly consider citing examples from the assigned reading or other scholarly sources that they have read in the past.
Have each side present its position.
Discussion: The purpose of the discussion is for students to share their work with the class and uncover important principles related to file sharing and sampling. Likewise, students will develop basic skills in evaluating the credibility of evidence and arguments.
Ask students how their assigned identity impacted their argument.
Ask students if there were any arguments that they made in spite of their assigned identity.
Ask students what made each argument successful? Did the identity of the group represented affect their evaluation of the argument?
Ask students if they ever sample others work? Hint: what about when they write papers?
Closing The purpose of the closing is not only to summarize materials discussed in class but also to leave students with an idea to ponder after class is over. This closing encourages students to view activities they may have previously thought were apolitical, as potential forms of protest. This closer also encourages to recognize the poltiics involved in legal disputes over file sharing. It also emphasizes how strictly courts will punish sampling. I have heard the songs from Downhill Battle, and while they all contain the same three second sample, they sound nothing like Clinton's work or the NWA song.
Discuss the activism of Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson in regard to the Bridgeport case. Explore how sampling can be used as a form of cultural protest.
Play songs from Downhill Battle (if I could find them, the site has apparently been banned)
In his book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen, Philip Howard suggests that new information technologies in the political sphere are different from older technologies. Before proceeding further, it is important to note that Howard focuses his comparison on the relationship between new technology campaigns and the mass media campaigns that existed immediately prior to these developments. However, one should remember that prior to 1950, campaigns were not centralized and the media was generally characterized by partisanship (145), two ideas that correlate with the Howard’s new media campaigns. While contrasts and comparisons between these earlier forms of political campaigns and new media campaigns exist, this is not the focus of Howard’s book. Therefore, I will also focus my attention on the differences between post-1950 media campaigns and new media campaigns, rather than the pre-1950 campaign form, which I suspect provides a weaker contrast for new media campaigns than post-1950 mass media campaigns.
Howard contends that the new information technology campaigns are different from mass media campaigns because they operate at greater speeds and with more content than traditional media. Also, communications technology make symbols transient by allowing for simulations of offline interaction, quick circulation of signs and meanings, and allow messages to be rapidly transformed. These changes are qualified, because new media campaigns are structured “over and above” traditional media (207).
These changes are the result of technological and political developments that no longer require the self-reporting of data. Information is collected from data that has not necessarily been freely given and the individual is placed into a very specific and discrete identity category (128). This demographic analysis, similar to the rhetorical concept of interpellation, attempts to activate identities that the citizen is asked to recognize as already in his or her possession (141). Unlike mass campaigns, modern political campaigns activate existing identity traits rather than attempt to persuade the masses to adopt a particular position or support a particular candidate. In some ways, the connection to interpellation troubles Howard’s argument. For example, Maurice Charland, inspired by Louis Althusser, before the invention of many of the technologies explored in Howard’s book, was already exploring some of Howard’s ideas under the heading of interpellation in the development of Quebecois identity in Canada in the 1980’s.
However, Howard’s argument differs from or at least expands Charland’s idea because new technologies “make it less necessary for us to be attentive to our political lives” (176) whereas Charland’s argument is based on individual attention and connection to a public identity. Likewise, Howard’s argument is based on the idea of individualized, private consumption, rather than a form of mass consumption (184). Charland’s work recognized in the 1980’s that identity could be constructed through hailing rather than persuasion, by telling an individual, “You already support this position because you already have this identity.” Howard’s work suggests than by the 2000’s, individuals need to engage in even less “interpretive labor” and no longer need to be fully informed. Through data profiles, citizens do not even need to be aware that they are being represented or possess a specific identity (187), a distinct contrast from what Charland observed in the 1980’s. As Howard notes, “in an implanted campaign, lobbyists and politicians select voters to represent them (189); at times an identity need not even be activated.
Likewise, identity is much more transient than it appears in Charland’s work. Campaigns are evolutionary and “ [r]epresentation is no longer a singular event occurring in the act of electing a representative on election data but a continuous process of feeding data, sometimes unwittingly, to organizations that claim to represent us” (195). Unlike the political identity of the Quebecois as explored by Charland, modern political identity is easily changed and ephemeral. These technologies have led to decreased citizen agency because individuals have little choice in determining who can claim to represent them (197) whereas from Charland’s perspective, at least in the 1980’s, citizens had to recognize a pre-formulated identity as their own.
Furthermore, there are aspects of Howard’s argument that expand far beyond the role of identity creation. Unlike older forms of organization, new forms of communication technologies through their implementation by campaign participants have resulted in an epistemic heterarchic form of organization, (164-165) that contains some common elements with the forms of social organization associated with open source coding. These new technologies and the individuals who possess the skills to use them have led to a form of political campaign that is quite different from the hierarchic mass media campaign.
Finally, new technologies, and the manner in which they were implemented by campaign managers and coders contain normative values. The technology itself has been imbedded with normative assumptions related to ideas connected not only to how a campaign should be managed but to other normative beliefs, such as the importance of direct democracy (203). Communication technologies “embody value choices of their designers” and these value choices that have become embedded in technology have led to campaigns that are more individualistic and less mass-oriented.
Philip N. Howard, in his book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen explores the concept of political redlining. According to Howard, redlining occurs “when citizens use hypermedia deliberately to construct their informational networks or when campaigns use hypermedia to contextualize the information they provide to a purposefully structured public” (101). Redlining is a word that was previously used to describe the practice of identifying parts of a community that were difficult to serve. These neighborhoods were circled in red and became places where standards of service were lower, where banks provided loans at higher interest rates and where insurance companies would provide uncompetitive rates (132).
Modern political redlining demonstrates three characteristics. It includes determining which portion of the population is less likely to vote and designing information only for likely voters. Also, redlining encompasses the practice of filtering political information for website users who have registered for content. The message a user receives is based on his or her identity which is determined through the manipulation of data. Finally, redlining occurs when individuals favor some information sources over others, for example, by relying on Web rings (132).
Howard uses the concept of redlining to highlight some important ideas. He emphasizes the political implications of this idea. Through redlining a campaign might decline to serve a community if its votes are not in contest in the election. Likewise, redlining is discriminatory and factionalizes the public (133). For example, Howard explains filtering techniques that DataBank.com used as strategy in their campaigns. They focused on humanizing candidates by making the candidate appear similar to the potential voter exposed to a particular message. The message was simplified and several key themes were chosen based on the receiver’s traits. Furthermore, this information was emotionalized based on key words that were chosen based on the identity of the potential voter. Finally, the user is offered an increased status in exchange for participating (82). This reflects Howard’s conclusion that “political campaigns in the United States are increasingly manipulative” (3).
I find this idea analytically useful. Howard’s argument seems to focus on the disadvantages of redlining, as opposed to its possible positive aspects, which might be better expressed using a more positive word, such as “narrowcasting.” I believe that this concept is helpful because it emphasizes a common element found in all three elements of the definition. All three versions of redlining involve a decision to select some information and reject other messages. The idea of redlining highlights the dangers of moving from a mass to individualized campaign and from a more objective to a more partisan political environment.
One assumption that this concept seems to depend upon is newness. The modern form of political redlining appears to be the result of communications technology and the new technology professionals who have become involved in political campaigns. I question whether the modern form of political redlining is completely new. For example, Gary Wills, in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg, suggests that when Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for the Senate he tailored his message based on the region in which he was campaigning. Lincoln’s speeches more strongly opposed slavery when he was speaking in Chicago or in Northern Illinois and his language was more tempered when he was speaking in Southern Illinois. This corresponds to an early form of filtering. Although it was based only on one variable, geographic location, Lincoln filtered his messages and was engaged in an early form of political redlining. I do not believe that this seriously damages Howard’s argument. Howard demonstrates that redlining has become much more significant than it was a few years ago, let alone in the time of Lincoln. However, I am left wondering if redlining is a new practice or simply represents a return to a more partisan form of politics, similar to the political environment in the United States prior to the Twentieth Century.
Finally, this concept suggests a causal relationship that I find fairly credible. Redlining is understood by Howard as potentially leading to disenfranchisement (134). Simply put, some voters do not matter in the world of political redlining and campaigns ignore them. Other voters matter but they receive specific messages. Like Lincoln, politicians who adopt this technique support one set of issues, perhaps abortion and gay rights to one voter and support another set of issues, perhaps union rights and minimum wage increases to another. One question I have concerns what happens when a politician gets caught talking out of both sides of his/her mouth. Howard suggests that this will be uncommon, because many hypermedia users do not even realize they are receiving specially tailored messages. However, the circumstances would seem ripe for a rival politician, or a blogger who supports that politician, to scrutinize these messages of an opponent and uncover contradictions that could be used as political weapons.
Monroe Price, in Media and Sovereignty The Global Information Revolution and Its Challenge to State Power, understands technological and geopolitical determinism, the influence of trade, and ideology as the major factors causing the changes he describes (13). Other factors include demography and history (16) and a still later reference would require law and culture to be included as important causal agents (49, 57). Needless to say, there are a lot of potential agents, but few, if any, examples of direct causation.
This idea is further complicated because none of these elements can exclusively cause change. However, they merit attention because these factors can interact with each other in order to cause change. Price values their explanatory power when considered in relation to each other, or to employ his term, as “constellations of change” (13, 15). These factors intersect with politics. “A rhythm developed between the ideological and the actual, the motivation and the realization” (14, describing Russia).
Agency exists in Price’s account, and the most important agency resides with the most powerful entities. Price is interested in the agency of governments such as the United States and understands agency in terms of power. Those with a great deal of power are likely to possess more agency. For example, the V-chip corresponded to a demand for a V-chip like device among American politicians. These political needs led to the conception of the technology and its development (126). Political self interest can influence the development of technology.
Agency does not reside merely with the government. For example, a scholar such as Lawrence Lessig can possess agency and shape the law, especially when powerful entities, such as the Supreme Court, lack knowledge or experience with technology (151). In some ways, Lessig is an exception. Individuals and those with less power tend to have decreased agency in this account. However, the masses certainly do not lack agency. The powerful, and politicians in particular, are themselves influenced by public opinion, as seen in the information policy concerns raised by the World Trade Center attacks (177).
Furthermore, the products of agency, such as law and technology, seem to possess an interesting agency of their own. For example, Price states, “Media laws are to be evaluated not merely in terms of a relatively simplistic notion of cause and effect. Laws and their adoption have a pervasive aspect themselves, in structuring society that cannot be measured in terms of an occasional impact” (49). Price’s main point is that a law may not have its intended result, and even if it does so, the law may have unforeseen cultural implications outside of the courtroom. Likewise, technology may have a causal role. “Every new technology reorders the world around it.” (145). For example, the V-chip may block potential avenues for free speech (136).
Price discusses many variables, and the process of obtaining different results is complicated. It seems that one could change a variable and it could modify the web of relationships between these different causal factors in unforeseen ways. One could pass a law designed to promote the media and democracy only to find that the law has the opposite effect. Fortunately, Price provides some guidance. Price highlights what he sees as the most important agents. “The world is a kind of force field where blazing technologies interact with gargantuan media entities and transformed geopolitical realities. Together, these lead to new forms of social and governmental response” (228). If one wants to promote change, technology, the media, and government are of primary importance. It would help to have at least one of these factors on your side. Furthermore, Price understands most concerns to be settled through compromise. For example, self-regulation represents a compromise between media and government (104). From this perspective, those with agency (that are human) balance their interests. In order to change society, obtain a good bargain. Change is not so much about altering society as it is about reconciling competing interests.
A draft of my paper for this class may be found here: Download file