ILAW: Nesson, Democracy & Weblogs
CN: So can I begin: will the bloggers come down the front?
So we started the day with Jonathan and Larry introducing the words of John Gilmore and JP Barlow. Their words have a wonderful democratic feel. This sense of disorderliness—this "unregulable" quality. But the impression at the end of Larry's talk was that it's all over—that from now on, the Net will all be structured, zoned controlled.
The question underneath all of this: what is digital democracy? We want to imagine a world where everyone can have a voice. Question: what about that vision is real and what is not?
To the bloggers, I ask: please identify the attributes of the Net that are democratic.
Frank Field: It's a forum for speech.
Lisa Rein: On the Internet, everyone is a first class citizen.
Aaron Swartz: No limits on connecting.
Zack Rosen: You make choices—it's a participatory environment.
Colin M.: The public is not passive—we participate and create the story.
CN: How much of these qualities have to do with architecture?
Lisa Rein: It all has to do w/arch. Packets are not distinguished from one another.
Charlie: How much of it is law?
[...]
David Hornik: Law can only play a slim role once a Napster gets started…it's like a virus that’s spreading.
CN: This is true about content as much as it is about technology and process.
Zach Rosen: It’s not just law, it’s norms. People who “provide” content don’t mean anything anymore. Others are getting the attention.
CN: This sense of democracy--Do you feel it?
[Majority of panel says yes.]
Jack Cranley, from the audience: How can the Internet be democratic when 90 percent of people use IE?
[...]
Lisa Rein: There is blatant anti-competitive technology. Designers make sites that only work with IE…I think that today, it’s incompetence that people create something that works only on IE. People on AOL thought they were on the Internet. So I think that in order for the Net to be democratic, we need consumer education.
And I'd like to say that it's a fallacy that there is no barrier to entry on the Net. There is only "no barrier" for certain people.
Jack Cranley: People create their own barriers, as well (i.e., incompetence w/tech). The Net is a reflection of that.
Colin M.: Most of the planet doesn’t even have an Internet. While the Web represents an opportunity, the fact remains that in an election we still can’t influence TV.
CN: Jon Zittrain, will you speak on access. Please talk about Tier Two—those parts of the world not serviced by Tier One. Who pays for that?
J: The most relevant place to look is the boundary between the general Internet "cloud" and the local ISP. An ISP in Africa says, "Hello, Tier One ISP—help us, that will help you, right?" Tier One ISP says, you are too short to peer with me. I will not peer with you. Sounds like Doctor Suess, I know.
So you might have to pay a non-African ISP for your service. The government also lurks here; what will it decide?
Charlie: So this idea of universality runs into the fact that most of the world isn’t hooked up. And it’s harder to do that than it appears.
[…]
Participant: I only have a local perspective to offer—but I am a UN volunterer. There was a link to an island. The government got upset; it wanted to grab finances from this zero-profit endeavor. So this is often a story of excessive red tape.
Charlie: And there may be a monopoly telephone service—in which case, a cheap way of doing things is a threat.
Participant [from India]: I was worried about how this program had seemed to have forgotten about the digital divide—I am glad it has come up.
CN: So it seems that what we’re talking about is something that’s still highly aspirational. Has the aspiration been compromised?
Participant: Can we agree on what democracy is? The Internet is a tool for individuals. But is it expressing the will of the majority? No. In that sense, it's the opposite of democracy.
Lisa Rein: Isn’t democracy about having an individual voice heard?
Participant: That’s freedom, not democracy.
Frank Field: I think you’re right. It’s a tool, not “democracy" per se. Q is what we do with it.
Terry Fisher: I would offer that democracy has three primary meanings: political, economic, and semiotic democracy. Most people think about political democracy. But is this changing? Canonical definition: elected officials, fair elections, adult participation—three conditions: freedom of expression, freedom of association, alternative sources of information.
[...]
Third zone: semiotic democracy. Widespread participation, distributed participation in meaning-making. Related but different from electing politicians. We need to think about the Internet’s relationship to each.
CN: Let’s talk about the Internet’s contribution to political democracy? Who knows about Moveon.org?
Blogger on panel: Many people who didn’t know each other were able to organize to make phone calls, organize broad targeted communication to our leaders.
CN: At one point Moveon.org did a near DoS on Capitol Hill. Muscular movement. Not muscular enough, but muscular.
Lisa Rein: Before we move on from move on; how about the primary? They didn’t get the 50 percent, but they were close. Television started showing more of these candidates. They got air time in the last two weeks. This was an extraordinary achievement.
Participant: That makes my point: the Internet is an excellent tool, not a democracy in and of itself. Nothing special about the Internet. Sometimes we want to find a different God. Some people want to think the Internet is a God. It’s a tool. RE: semiotic democracy. That was beautiful, and I admire Prof. Fisher. But let’s not dwell on semiotics. It’s about power. Power for individuals, happening or not.
Lisa Rein: It struck me some two years ago that the Internet is the only form of mass communication that we, the people, still have control of. That’s what got me involved in thinking about the DMCA—how it is quelling scientific discourse, for the corporate interest.
Jim Flowers: There’s a mixture of discussion here about the Internet as a place or a tool. I worked for someone whose campaign raised lots of money, but ended in defeat. It’s a tool. To ascribe democracy to a tool—that’s foreign to me.
Modalities constrain. We’re still bound by geography. I’d like to see a discussion of what the tool can and cannot do.
CN: Zach, you've got a tool I'd like you to tell us about. Describe what a tool can do…
Zach Rosen: The Internet is a tool and not a democracy—but a tool can have elements of democracy built into it.
CN: You’re working with Gov. Dean—and you have a plan about how to use the Internet as a tool in the election.
Zach [goes up to podium, brings up website]: This is AmericansForDean.com. There are 120,000 who support him. But I saw no tools to put these people to use.
I want to prove that they don’t need central control in a campaign. I think an autonomous campaign could work. Using this tool, we're organizing his campaign across the country. Nodes. Give each node open source tools…"communities in a box." We’re going to link them all together. We’re not going to control anything. We’re giving them all RSS—syndication, micro-communities. Dean at the top has a message, all the nodes get it; same with bottom-up. The people who create these communities will control this. One user at the bottom can submit something and it can go all the way up to the top. Democray imbued in it.
Jim Flowers: What you describe is a return to grass roots. But the tools you describe could be used for dictatorial means as well. How well can people use the information? People your age use the Internet as a primary means of information/meaning-making. But what about others--older voters?
CN: Let’s get Oliver in here.
Oliver [?]: This can be a tool not for democracy but for propaganda. Discussion forums have disappointed. No org. infrastructure to make it work. Maybe the Internet increases the possibility not for more democracy, but the opposite. Maybe the more people give their opinions, the less they will be heard.
CN: David, tell us your story.
David Hornik: I started a venture capital weblog. We thought demystification of this profession would be good, was needed; we started blogging about it. One of the nice things I can do as a venture capitalist is go to conferences. So I went to the Wall Street Journal conference. There was a rule: if you were willing to speak at the conference, you could tell the journalists what to write.
Some of us were not reporters, however. We were bloggers. We didn’t know the rules. The interesting thing is that the journalists could point to my weblog. I got quotes from Jobs, Gates, etc. Then the story of bloggers breaking news became the story itself.
CN: What do you take to be the significance of that?
David Hornik: I’ve been talking to a lot of bloggers. It’s an inherently self-referential community.
CN: Tell the audience what a weblog is.
David Hornik: It's a journal, easy to update, Google loves blogs. So you raise your profile through links. It’s cheap. There is also the power law thing—one of these curves. Once you pass a certain number of people reading you, you become more powerful, more like mainstream media. We have been around for 4 months, and have 101 blogs pointing to us, 5,000 + readers per day.
CN: Aaron, do you see the democratic possibility, here?
Aaron: Yes. […]
David Hornik: Technorati surpassed 100,000 blogs. Power law of blog references….with tools like Technorati, some weblogs become news creators.
Aaron: Quantity is not quality. It's the experts blogging on their area of expertise that may be giving journalists a run for their money.
Participant: In our day and age, being educated means certain things. In order to get all the positive out of the Net, we need to speak the same language. Computer literacy, digital literacy, etc.
Participant: I suggest to the panel that blogging is the antithesis of democracy, and of journalism.
Lisa Rein: How?
Participant: How do we determine credibility?
Frank Field: I came to weblogs through education…two years ago, I was just learning. I found out that the media does have its interests. I look at a relatively narrow set of questions…and I see this bias emerge. I share with people what I think is going on. I have read David Coursey and I try to expose his agenda.
David Hornik: I think the Internet does one thing very well—it's a reputation system. In the blog world, the reputation system is the network of links…… Ultimately everyone has a perspective, but this is a layer of filtering.
Aaron Swartz: If you only have the NYT & it screws up, you’re done for. With weblogs, you can read a dozen weblogs and get a sense of where they diverge. Determine the bias on your own.
Lisa Rein: You can practice journalism in weblogs. I link to traditional media to substantiate my claims. I will work weeks on a single entry, and I think that’s journalism.
Jack Carnley: Weblogs seem to me to be an extension of the old message boards. If you can find it, you can be influenced by it. But there is the problem of overwhelm. Right now, we can buy the right to be the first responder in some online fora. Lots of people don't know this. This is biased news. Information from the highest bidder.
Lisa Rein: Good search tools make the situation a lot better. More people find what they are looking for. Echo makes tools so that the average person can find what they want quicker and better.
David Hornik: This goes back to Professor Fisher’s comment—semiotic democracy. Look at memes that grow. A website called amihotornot has become a TV show.
Jonathan Zittrain: And the show was not hot. [Big laugh.]
Frank Field: Lisa Rein said something that seems a little scary to me. I've been looking into the NYT, Dave Winer's deal with subscription...this means the aggregator gets to choose what you see. I don’t like to read the Times in an aggregator. I like to read it on paper—because I like to be told about things I wasn’t looking for.
Participant: Yes: the info I need most isn’t what I am looking for. I am in academia; I don’t have time to weed through weblogs. There are people out there who do have lives. I let Slashdot accumulate for ten days. If can’t look at it then I have to make it go away.
Lisa: Aggregators are not controlled by anyone but the user! It’s hard for me to understand this problem of too much information, especially when we have better search tools and reputational systems.
Participant: There is no way for a normal person to access these reputation systems.
Frank Field: I think of what I am doing is applying a filter to the information out there. We do this because we think it’s something worth doing.
CN: Terry, your vision of semiotic democracy—does blogging feed it? Or clog it?
Terry: I don’t know yet. I am not yet sure. Oliver introduced a point early on—that you're either a speaker or listener. But you can be both. Democracy: One of Toqueville’s ideas was about participation—it draws one out of a private space. It's addictive, engrossing. The amount of energy you might have might actually grow as you get more engaged…so that is an argument for blogging as something that is not just stuffing the pipe.
One other theme on the table. There are those who see the Internet's multiplication of channels as valuably cracking the control of concentrated media. They are hunting for alternative perspectives.
The other side of the debate: what Cass Sunstein has argued. The Net encourages subsections of perspectives…not a shared politics. The temptation is to dwell with other birds of a feather.
Larry Lessig: I would emphasize the first part of what Terry is saying. It's about being engaged in an argument, as you are when you are a member of a jury…in a room with 12 other people, arguing, engaged. Doing that is a radically empowering. Jury members become more engaged citizens. Compare and contrast the campaigns of Dean and Edwards. Dean campaign has built a spae where many are talking about Dean. Worth more, potentially, than Edwards' broadcast email list.
The typical argument: it’s only powerful if it’s one to 100 million. But it could be just as powerful if there are a 100,000 different groups talking about the same issues. On the level of the individual becoming convinced, this could be much more persuasive.
Steve Guys [sp?]: But a newspaper defines a community. As Frank Field said. The weblog is a narrow channel of views. It's not a democratic channel. The mediums are much different. In weblogs, the tendency is not to create a community.
Lisa Rein: But blogs do have a community. BoingBoing, MetaFilter. These allow comments; they are undeniably communities.
Ray London: Southern CA…four corps control all the newspapers, radio stations, etc. Blogging is a way to get away from this.
[A brief wrap-up ensued, and we were finished for the day.]