pantless bunnymuffin's beminar slog

If I learned one thing in our class this semester, it is that academic studies of communication technologies depend mostly, if not wholly, on the author's initial feelings about the development and the use of that technology in society. Now, prior judgments are obviously motivating forces for almost any form of research, but our books in this course have shown such a wide range of conclusions that the studies all seem almost like opinion articles. This is the great thing about the field of communications, I guess... Let's find out what I mean.

Since we had to pick only one book out of all in this blog entry (in addition to Benkler), I'll just run quickly through the rest of the books and then spend a bit more time on a comparison between Benkler and Howard.

Raymond Williams: Reflects a Birmingham School-type insecurity about the arrival of a new form of technology which will surely have a negative effect on society -- but his analysis is rather blurred and unclear.

Susan Douglas: Probably my favorite book of the semester, mostly because it it a wholly historical piece that is very well researched. Points out the faults of industry-friendly government regulation, yet still comments on the social uses of the technology. I have little qualms here...

Claude Fischer: The only book in this course that spends an extended period of time on number crunching and statistical analysis instead of pure theory. Fischer tries to focus on the user -- on how the average person used telephony technology. Moral of the story: people use communication technologies in unpredictable ways that lead to no fixed conclusions at all. Yikes.

Miller and Slater: Ethnographic analysis of Internet use in Trinidad, demonstrating most of the ways ethnography should not be used. Little can be learned when the authors use a research method whose results can be steered.... and then proceed to steer them.

Harold Innis: Not to disparage Innis' knowledge and expertise in economics and history, but even if he has a strong interest in ancient cultures, it is convenient to use such a distant time period in academic arguments. No one can refute any of his grandiose claims even if they have no factual evidence. Thus he is immediately considered the sole person with all the answers and the book instantly becomes a masterpiece.

Price: His book touches on a highly contested topic, and it is really up to the researches whether s/he sides with globalization and transnational media flows or state sovereignty.

This quick and mindless critique of the books we've read isn't meant to ridicule them. I am simply pointing out the fact that approaches to the analysis of communication technologies range all over, are largely motivated by the author's initial judgments, and do not contain very much statistical, quantitative analysis. The only book that does so fails miserably in reaching a solid conclusion.

What this says about communication technologies is that they are infinitely complicated both in their development and their use within society. We all have initial reservations and opinions about the way particular media forms are used, but these feelings range all over and are determined by our own lifestyles as well as the practices of the people that surround us, in real life and in the media. Attempts to prove one reservation against another will most likely fail, as Fischer's account demonstrates.

With that, let's touch a bit on Benkler and Howard:
Benkler's Wealth of Networks provides an optimistic picture about the Internet as a new democratic medium. Benkler believes the Internet differs from older communication technologies in a revolutionary way, because it allows users to interact in a kind of barter system where information is exchanged freely within the online network without being tied to monetary cost. In a sense, he believes the arrival of the Internet is the arrival of a largely democratic form of communication. He engages in a lot of theoretical analysis but also examines some situations in which such non-market transactions occur. However, his work also does not contain much factual evidence, and he is not successful in really proving this point. Much of his analysis, rather than getting the views of Internet audiences and content providers, is more based on his own use of the Internet and his knowledge of various websites and online services.

Howard, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to provide an ethnographic analysis of a certain kind of online content provider, and his conclusions are quite distinct from those of Benkler. Through spending an extended period of time studying datamining organizations from within, he points out that the Internet can be used for quite restrictive and undemocratic purposes. Howard, however, does not engage in much big-picture analysis of the Benkler kind. Instead, he overemphasizes these negative aspects of the Internet.

Once again, the divergent conclusions depend on divergent research methods, which in turn are influenced by the author's initial opinion about the communication technology at hand.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 10:34 AM | Permalink

I changed my teaching assigment a bit, so here's the second version.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 1:21 PM | Permalink

For this teaching assignment, I chose to create an active-learning question for an undergraduate course in communication technology, to be given preferably to a smaller group such a discussion section. I think these types of questions really help to engage each individual with the readings by forcing them to think on their own. So...

What is the role of policymaking as it relates to society’s use of communication technologies? Work in groups of 4-5 to discuss how at least three of the readings in this course have approached policymaking. How do these approaches signal any underlying views the authors may hold about the influence of policies on the manifestation of communication technologies in everyday use? In your analysis, consider the entire life span of the communication technologies discussed, from their creation to their mainstream use. Discuss for 15 minutes, then explain your views in a 5-minute group presentation.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 5:26 PM | Permalink

Howard believes the use of the internet for hypermedia campaigns differentiates online political practices from traditional political communication in a considerable way. Beyond hypermedia’s more direct differences, such as the lack of information waste in online communication, a heterarchical organizational structure, and the short-term existence of these types of campaigns, Howard thinks hypermedia also fundamentally limit the possibility for democratic political communication.

He argues that “in redlining some constituents and communities and then narrowcasting political content, hypermedia campaigns diminish the amount of shared text in the public sphere.” In his view, hypermedia limit citizens’ ability not only to learn about a variety of political views and information for themselves, but also to share their knowledge to broaden the scope of discussion within the public sphere. He also states, “Even though new media technologies have diffused quickly, there are still significant portions of the population either without the technology or without the informational skills to participate in the public sphere online” (183). The digital and educational divide, he argues, also influence the amount of information that enters public sphere dialogue.

I am conflicted about Howard’s position. On the one hand, I find his argument useful to contradict the early starry-eyed views of the Internet’s unlimited potential for democratic involvement. Hypermedia, at least in the way that Howard portrays it, is indeed exploitative and undemocratic. But another part of me doesn’t fully believe that things are really this black and white. Just because certain portions of the population get targeted with certain messages that they, based on their purchasing records and online activities, are supposed to be supportive of does not imply that the Internet itself, outside of the hypermedia sphere, cannot be used to gather further information. It does not mean that the Internet itself is wholly undemocratic for the purposes of gathering political information.

Howard does point out a unique characteristic of Internet-based political communication. The ability to control what portion of the whole picture is received by whom does create a more one-on-one relationship between the individual and the campaign. Such a space does privatize political communication in a market-based fashion. However, citizens still have the ability to find alternative information sources, and indeed they have a hard time avoiding other sources in day-to-day interaction with other citizens and with mass media. The public sphere doesn't have to be limited to certain sectors of communication -- they can be broad, or, at least, information learned in one can be combined with the influence of life's many other public spheres. Howard’s argument would make more sense if all people were tied to their computers with no person-to-person contact with society. Thankfully, real life isn’t symptomatic of the Parable of the Cave. A political campaign, which is designed to attract audiences even when it does not personalize its messages, is by no means the only outlet from which people gather knowledge about politics. Let’s hope things stay this way.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 12:32 AM | Permalink

A definition of any notion creates a category, or better yet a lens, through which that notion can be understood. When explaining a certain idea, therefore, one must attempt to address as many different definitions of that idea as possible to avoid the risk of narrowing its scope or perception.

Philip Howard attempts to explain and engage in this method of analysis in his insightful book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. In his definition of the notion of “political culture,” he combines what he views as two separate mainstream views of the term and creates a new, more nuanced understanding of it.

He argues that an explanation of political culture cannot be restricted to “hard cultural determinist” analysis, which argues that culture and value systems are “rarely, if ever, composed afresh” but “form slowly under the weight of history,” and individuals have little or no ability to take part in shaping them (68). Nor, he believes, is a definition of political culture completely up to “free will,” in which all people work together to create and mold culture day by day in a collaborative fashion (69).

Instead, he prescribes to a “soft cultural determinist” description of the concept. He says political culture can only be understood through acknowledging the existence and influence of the communication technologies that relay political information to the citizen, as well as of the power of campaign managers in control of those technologies to manipulate the shape of the political information they transmit. As such, political culture is defined as both participatory because of citizens’ ability to take part in political campaigns, voting, and other “democratic” activities, but also as restricted because everyday citizens do not and cannot know how much information they receive from the communication technologies controlled by campaign managers (71).

Although identifying communication technology as both a vehicle and a gatekeeper for political information is essential to understand political culture, Howard’s definition of this term is by no means comprehensive, though he seems to suggest it is so. One method of viewing political culture that he does not thoroughly include, for instance, is the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. Habermas' view of the world of politics is popular for a reason: it includes citizen deliberation as an important part of the culture of political decision-making. Howard does not consider what citizens do with the information they receive, how many outlets they consider when researching information on issues or candidates, and how they collaborate outside of new media campaigns to come to their decisions. In this sense, it may not be as crucial to consider the influence of communication technologies in the spread of information as it is to analyze information received from various campaign is assessed within the public sphere.

In short, despite Howard's rather depressing point of view of the lack of agency that hypermedia campaigns leave everyday citizens with, I am not willing to give up on the power of public deliberation just yet. I believe in the ability of groups of citizens to help themselves, to turn politics on its head and reshape democracy in their favor, even if the organizations they are supposed to trust manipulate the information they receive. People are smart, they converse, and they don't like hypodermic injections.

But Howard's quote of political consultant Phil Noble may certainly be right: "The amusement of youth is that they can remake the world."

Posted by kkovacs2 at 8:21 PM | Permalink

Monroe E. Price's book Media and Sovereignty describes different ways in which state sovereignties around the world have been affected by media globalization and increasing communication across national boundaries using old and new media forms. Price analyzes the new conceptions and self-conceptions of nations as a result of the interplay of domestic and international communications and the increasing interrelation of domestic events on a global scale.

He mentions several ways that states have tried to redefine and reassert themselves as they both gain and lose their power to govern populations, it appears from his writing that state governments' relations with domestic and transnational businesses serve as an overarching, determining factor in how globalization of media structures and messages plays out. States seem always to react to changes in the market. At times they support and promote increased corporate influence on the media, exemplified by new European Union member nations where commercial media ownership and programming have increased exponentially in recent years to catch up to EU business standards. At other times, they attempt to assert control over media forms, as in the case of the recently proposed indecency legislations and the V-chip, in which a government attempts to control media messages coming from outlets owned by large telecommunications companies.

At first glance, Price's description makes it seem that states and corporations are equally vying for power. Indeed, in the case of propaganda use to achieve certain foreign policy outcomes, it seems that the major players are the state governments themselves, who control media messages in deliberate ways (to mitigate war, to influence foreign public opinion, or for other uses). But in most cases, corporate influence plays an important defining role in how certain uses of media within globalization play out, while governments can often do little except react. Increasing interstate economic flows (in telecommunications as well as other areas), and states' loss of power and control resulting from corporate-driven modernity and globalization, are therefore at the heart of the redefinition of sovereignty that Price describes.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 2:43 PM | Permalink

(Sorry this is so late, I've felt like complete crap all day, but now decided that a fever-dreamish blog posting is better than no posting at all. My apologies.)

Even though Harold Innis, author of Bias of Communication, may be a bit confused about how to categorize the Internet at this point in time, I believe he would assume that the Internet is space-biased. Some have called the Internet a “series of tubes” (Sen. Ted Stevens), others believe it is a network whose infrastructure encompasses the entire world in a kind of “infinite space” (p. 111). It is mostly considered in the present tense, as opposed to printed written works that are considered to have a much longer history. Even though some Internet content is monitored and recorded by the U.S. government, most people do not record much of what they read on the Internet for a lengthy period of time. As such, the Internet is not very durable.

Also, despite the fact that many people today consider the Internet to be a democratic form of medium, we can see from the examples of other communication technologies discussed in this course (Douglas, Fischer) that the democratic potential of a new media form is often over-exaggerated. Congress has been making fervent attempts to regulate Internet content, and Internet access, especially that of broadband Internet, is still severely limited within and outside of the United States. Although it is possible that a more democratic medium will result than any we have seen in the past, historical precedent and current Congressional actions imply that the Internet will most likely stay in the hands of large telecommunications companies and state governments. This kind of elite control also points to what Innis would call a space-biased communication technology.

Posted by kkovacs2 at 8:15 PM | Permalink