Public Please

So far, the computational journalism symposium at Georgia Tech has been thought-provoking. It has provided an opportunity for me to provoke the corporate media with democratic theory.

Chrisopher Barr, a senior editor at Yahoo offered his dream list of information innovations. One of these ideas struck me: self-identifying content. This is related to my thesis about online petitions. The idea is that the digital artifact indicates how it was created and who created it. In a sense, self-identifying content automates signature signing. Are you signing a document if you consent to it signing itself? Does a digital artifact express your personality if you allow it to decide which parts of your personality to record? Barr was not asking these questions, but they explore the idea of self-identifying content.

Barr also asked us to come up with technologies to manage behavior tracking. He suggested that behavior tracking was all the rage these days, and that Yahoo would love to be able to predict and modify user behavior. I didn’t have a chance to ask him if Yahoo would be willing to publish all of the data they were gathering from an unsuspecting public, or whether it was ethical to manipulate people based on secret statistics.

However, I did have the opportunity to publicly ask Anton Kast, lead scientist at Digg, to clarify his claim that the Digg rating system was egalitarian, but not democratic. Kast said that he thought egalitarianism was a “shameful” form of democracy. Apparently, Kast thinks that Digg protects individual speech, whether this speech is inane or brilliant. He made it very clear that Digg is not designed for informed discussion, but is designed for popular discussion. Moreover he argues that Digg technologically provides a fair popular discussion, protecting the chance for any person to be heard by everyone. He thinks that democracy requires more than popular discussion, which I agree with. But I am not sure that popular discussion entails egalitarianism. Digg is not designed for egalitarianism because it does not aim to make everyone listen to everyone; Digg is designed for everyone to listen to a few people, people that have won a popularity contest. From what I gathered from Kast, Digg is agnostic to the cultural and epistemic norms that govern popularity, with one major exception, pornography. Digg will not publish pornography, but happily publishes controversy, even if it is only rumor. I do not know the extent of misinformation on Digg. I do know that Kast accepts the legitimacy of vulgar popular culture, and argues that Digg protects its rightful place on the Net.

I also had several opportunities to publicly ask critical questions about corporate media and democratic design. After the online editor of CNN debuted his I-Report website, I publicly asked him about the business realities of citing news sources with the simplest of web technologies, a technology that is not available in print: hyperlinks. I asked him why CNN did not provide hyperlinks to the legislation they report on. This seems like an incredible oversight and departure from journalistic ethics. For those of us who care about rational discourse, we need access to external justification. We need access to the reasoning behind a report in order to evaluate its bias. The profession of journalism has a bias for the truth and these ideals can be largely realized through hyperlinks. Citing news sources with hyperlinks is not rocket science. I want to know why CNN and other online news sources ommit hyperlinks to their news sources, especially when obvious and accessible primary sources, such as federal legislation, are available online.

During the wine and dine session after the symposium, I had the opportunity to debate Michael Skoler at American Public Media about the concept of citizen journalism and his effort to use citizens as a fount for factual input, using a trademarked method called Public Insight Journalism®. I was expecting Skoler to argue that Public Insight Journalism, while not a fully developed model of citizen journalism, was nonetheless an early institutionalized prototype of citizen journalism. Much to my chagrin and suprise, Skoler disclaimed the trajectory and intent of citizen journalism for American Public Media. Instead of highlighting the similarities between citizen journalism and public broadcasting, Skoler made an effort to distance Public Insight Journalism from the concept of citizen journalism. Skoler wanted to keep a strict boundary between citizen authorship of news and citizen information for news. Why is Skoler and American Public Media so resistant to the idea of citizen authorship of news? Why do they want to centralize control of how the public voice is filtered? What are they really afraid of in letting the public reclaim their brand? In talking with Skoler, I was shocked by Skoler’s conception the public journalism.

In summary, Skoler maintains that his organization does not do citizen journalism, that reporting is not primarily about public education, that reporting does not need to negotiate or prioritize the truth with the public, but that public journalism at its heart is about fact-finding, and that it can and should be done by professionals. I pointed out that he was assuming that citizen journalists are not and cannot be professionals, that they are essentially amateurs and that corporate journalists are essentially professionals. I challenged his conception of professionalism - noting that professional journalism has both economic and epistemic dimensions. I argued that a person is primarily a professional in virtue of their process of creating knowledge, and not by the sole fact that this process pays the bills. I argued that professionals maintain certain values and practices which demonstrate those values. For example, I contended that professional journalists value the truth and that they strive to report it by citing sources, double checking their claims, and communicating their findings in persistent media, media that can be archived and reviewed.

Skoler seemed to agree with many of these professional standards, but he maintained his view that public journalism should still be controlled by a relatively few corporate professionals. He argued that citizens, in general, do not want to do the hard work of journalism, so a few corporate professionals must do it, professionals that work for non-profit or for-profit corporations. I pointed out that public journalism is fundamentally about civic engagement, and that there are many duties we may not want to do, but which we must do in order to live in a civil society. Amongst those duties, is our responsibility to publish our most pressing concerns so that we can make the most informed decisions about how to live. Citizen journalism, at its core is a civic institution in which the public publishes information to improve civil society. We do not need, as I argued to Skoler, any private judiciary of editors to steer the news. We do not need a caste of philosopher kings to think for the people.

While much of the public is uninformed about the overall state of affairs in the world, most of the public can make informed perspectives about the world. We may not know every angle of an issue, but we can learn enough about an issue to contribute in a meaningful way to an informed world view. It is possible and probable for the general population to analyze and synthesize the news, news which frames and shapes the way we live. But we need to raise the standards of civic education and discourse. We need to stop pre-empting the potential of public discourse. Instead of predicting and accepting ignorance and neglect, we need to remedy this social pattern by persuasively demanding universal education and participation. In general, as citizens, we need to remind each other of our information gathering and sense-making capabilities and responsibilities.

Some say that information wants to be free; I agree, but I would add that people also want to be free, and that their freedom is not an autonomous affair, but relies on the cooperation and communication of pressing public information. It relies on our ability to share the news with each other. Some argue that we must save corporate journalism to save journalistic ethics. I argue that we must liberate journalists from corporate rule in order to preserve and promote an ethical profession of journalism. Some argue that citizen journalism is basically a way for amateurs to help the news room. I argue that citizen journalism is about citizens becoming journalists and journalists becoming citizens, where citizenship is not a national or geographic status, but one’s status as a civic–minded individual, working for the public good.

To be a citizen does not require any overt congregation; a solitary man can be a citizen if he works for the well-being of random strangers. And the community inherent in civic participation does not sound the death knells of individualism. Community is about understanding and respecting others, people who are necessarily different than you; it does not imply uncontested consensus or robotic majority rule. In fact, citizens should debate with each other in a constructive and respectful dialectic. They should challenge and critique entrenched ideological majorities. Citizen journalists exemplify these ideals.

As we continue to think about computational journalism and its relationship to citizen journalism, we should consider ways in which we can empower citizens with tools that encode the ideals of the journalistic profession. We should move beyond the debate of whether ordinary people can produce high quality news. They can. We should not devote our time to designing private corporate hierarchies of information gathering and sensemaking. Those already exist. We need to focus our creative energy on new ways to organize, fund, and network citizen-generated media. As we move in this direction, we will have to confront our deep-seated stereotypes of the public. But this process of rethinking public networks is not news to those who use the Internet. As we design and configure computational tools to unify our divided intellectual labor, we will be redesigning and reconfiguring society: Technologists vs. Artists, Professionals vs. Amateurs, and Persons vs. Corporations. Instead of averaging these social roles, or specializing in these roles en mass, let us individually cherry pick the best aspects of each to design a more democratic culture.