We The Media Chapters 7-12

CHAPTER 7

The idea of “off the record” information becoming fair game due to the relaxed standards of the blogosphere is an interesting notion, but also one I find threatening.  Standard journalistic practices—at least those I’ve been taught over two my college career—maintain that if a source says at the start of an interview that everything he says is off the record, you’re ethically bound to do nothing with the information he gives you.  This effectively renders him utterly worthless as a source, unless you can somehow wring another name out of him to go after.  The fact that your citizen blogger is not bound by those regulations means that they can ignore these attempts to wave information out of our reach and distribute news unavailable to the traditional reporter out there.  My worry is this: what does this fact mean for people who actually have a reason to declare their testimony as off the record for personal safety and privacy, and what does that freedom mean for the trained journalist whose carefully considered ethics keep him from taking advantage of these people?  What does this freedom among the competition mean for the future of journalistic ethics in their entirety?

CHAPTER 8

From the way that Gillmor was describing APIs, they seem to be the logical next step that will take place in web browsing.  Gillmor is right in saying that we’ve already had this technology for years in some form—the examples he gives are the Google search engine and using Amazon.com to buy books—but the way he envisions it is also already a standard feature of websites: the hyperlink.  The problem lies in the fact that they’re extremely unguided without human help, and sometimes even then.  Automated hyperlinking is already all over certain blogging services and entertainment sites, where every occurrence of “people” or some other extremely general topic is linked to the site’s categorization page without actually providing any more information to the subject at hand.  The man-powered version of this occurrence is best described as “the Wikipedia effect ,” where researching one topic allows a reader to become distracted by any number of vaguely related aspects mentioned in the article.  Gillmor’s vision of an automated service that sidesteps these impediments would obviously be a boon that could revolutionize and streamline the way in which we educate ourselves.

CHAPTER 9

“Trolls, Spins, and the Boundaries of Trust” covered at lot of the information I touched upon in my chapter 3 response, though of course in a much better informed and deeper manner.  In my opinion, it exposes what is, and may be for some time to come, the internet’s main problem: you just can’t trust anyone completely, least of all the posters.  This wouldn’t be so bad if you just had to be careful of the faceless commentators that fill space on the bottom of articles, but as Gillmor points out the actual information providers are doing this as well—the examples he gives are National Geographic’s truly absurd decision to move one of the pyramids into a more photogenic spot and the truly self-serving act of CBS digitally inserting advertisements into the background of an on-site news report, not that these are the only examples that exist.  There’s also the problem of stupid stories persisting long after being disproven because of the power headlines wield over people.  Just like the fake John Kerry affair mentioned in the chapter, concerned and poorly-informed citizens continue to oppose vaccinations because of the idea that they cause Asperger’s syndrome—despite the fact that the scientists who made the claim admit they lied about almost their entire study  and because a celebrity continues to perpetrate the lie .  On a related note, I find it equally sad and ironic that many of the Cracked.com (aka, “America’s Only Humor and Video Site Since 1958”) articles I’m linking to in these reviews are more reliable than the “official” news sources, despite the hosting site generally sticking to fairly sophomoric humor and the columnist of the last linked article typically presenting himself as a drug-fueled lunatic.

CHAPTER 10

The sad truth of reporting is that governments just don’t like free speech.  As insane as this sounds, especially in America, the fact remains that unbound opinion in general and influential reporters in particular are a threat to anyone in power, because they wear at the supports these people stand on and can rob them of their position.  I couldn’t help but feel rage at the story of the California-based bulletin board operators being dragged halfway across the country to be jailed by Bible-thumpers who found their postings disagreeable, or feel real fear at the idea of Internet zoning laws drawn up by Australian legislators.  People like this are why I have mixed feelings about the issue of anonymity online—in a perfect world, we could all use our real names and lambast whoever we liked as long as our accusations were true.  We don’t, though, and that anonymity is frequently all that stands between a normal person and those who can abuse their power to enforce injustice.  I find the Australian legislators especially frightening, personally—given their adversarial and frequently unreasonable stance towards electronic entertainment, this blog will eventually be dedicated to pointing out their foibles like theirs once it gets off the ground.

CHAPTER 11

I consider present-day copyright law to be one of the most significant corporate evils our generation faces, and I bet that a lot of people in my age group—or perhaps even the vast majority—feel the same way.  It doesn’t just limit our enjoyment of YouTube videos due to their audio component being lifted for fear of the big bad record companies coming to visit.  As Gillmor points out, initial copyright laws were meant to allow the original creators to retain some control over their own product while still allowing their audience to use bits and pieces for their own creative projects.  It’s a widely-held axiom that nothing is truly original, as even to most innovative and out-there pieces of art, technology, and everything in between owes what it is to whatever came before it.  Human creativity builds on itself to reach new heights.  Current copyright laws are specifically designed to knock down the supports afforded in the original laws and directly cause stagnation and static pools of information.  Hilariously, at least from my point of view, is the fact that in some sectors this means of protecting property is leading directly to its owners’ downfall.  PC gaming has a long history of this , but it’s only been recently that practices like invasive security software have led to disaster.  As the last comic and related rants in this particular series points out, it’s the consumer who ultimately suffers from the war between pirates and producers, meaning that the producing companies are losing money on two fronts.  As a result, PC-based gaming has been dying a slow and undignified death for several years.

CHAPTER 12

Gillmor taking the option to publish his book under the Creative Commons Copyright  comes in much appreciated—that’s probably ten or fifteen fewer dollars going to books this semester—but I also think that his decision to do so was obviously a step in the right direction.  The entire point of journalism is to allow information to be as free as possible.  His last chapter, and my previous chapter entry in this post, was dedicated to what happens when it’s not allowed to be.  As Gillmor points out, what happens when a piece of literature or art is given breathing room is a wonder to behold.  Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig’s latest work at the time of Gillmor’s writing had been turned into an audio file and reconstructed as a wiki.  With any luck, it’s possible that the progress recorded in ‘We the Media’ will eventually either lead to a reformation or simply steamroll the obstructions placed in front of liberated distribution of information.

We The Media Chapter 6 Response

The idea of a major network forcing one of its reporters to quit composing a personal blog seems laughable to me, but maybe that’s just because I belong to an age group that grew up with the internet and have been reading blogs, if not actively creating them, for a fairly significant portion of my life.  CNN’s decision to bear down on Kevin Site’s practice of blogging information about the war in Iraq is very obviously an attempt at monopolizing information, which sounds like an incredibly stupid thing for a news company to do.  At least, it does before you remember that CNN is as much of a corporation as Microsoft or any part of the music industry.  In this case, Site was seen by his own company as giving out his employer’s product for free.  While I understand CNN’s motives in this case, that doesn’t mean I agree with what they did at all.  Obfuscating the truth to serve their own interests sounds like a massive ethical breach, especially when the information being supressed was related to a war–that is to say, an event where people are dying.

We The Media Chapter 5 Response

If there’s any aspect of life covered by traditional news outlets that can’t even hope to compete with blogging, it’s politics.  I completely agree with Gillmor’s assessment that blogging possesses the flexibility necessary to cover all the issues that come up with every election that takes place or every bill that gets drafted.  He raises a good point when he says that newspapers as a whole only ever run three stories on a candidate’s views.  While I think it’s hyperbole myself (you could always buy a different newspaper to get three different stories on the candidates political positions), I do believe that the limited time and space afforded to television and print media means only the big stories get run.  We are guaranteed to hear what the next presidential candidate has to say about the economy or the war.  Blogging can cover that along with every tiny, believed-to-be insignificant detail about the particulars of scientific funding or whatever else may interest a reader.

We The Media Chapter 4 Response

Quickly skimming through chapter four of “We The Media” left me feeling a vague sense of disquiet.  A shallow look at “Newsmakers Turn the Tables,” even the title alone, left me feeling that nothing good can come of big companies and politicians adapting to the new way people communicate.  After all, the stereotype is that the powerful will want to keep that power, so they would naturally find some way to twist genuine blogs and news sources into shallow PR machines.  Of course, then I remembered what the entire rest of the book has said about what happens when ordinary people—like consumers and voters—freely swap information, and I think it’s pretty clear that at least we can get the whole story so long as “the man” doesn’t get its hooks too deeply into the blog service providers.  I was especially impressed with Robert Scoble’s list of “to do’s” on page 77, as he seems to understand what his audience expects and deserves from a corporate blogger.

We The Media Chapter 3 Response

I find it difficult to rationalize the rights to both anonymity on the internet as well as to criticize or correct sources of information.  On the one hand, if you really, truly know that a trusted news source has gotten something wrong, bringing it to the poster’s attention does more than satisfy your own ego; you’re protecting everyone else who’s reading from being misinformed or deceived.  On the other, you can’t be considered a trusted source if you’re just a voice ringing out from a faceless crowd—and on the third hand, the idea that anybody with access to a computer could easily find out who I am and where I live is incredibly frightening.  Ultimately, I think it’s going to come down to the issue of money.  The companies that provide blogging services are ultimately running a business, and, as this not-entirely-humorous article points out, they’re probably going to sacrifice its users perceived rights in favor of maintaining a civil and honest atmosphere.

We The Media Chapter 2 Response

The idea of journalism through blogging as a means of lifting a barrier of privilege is an interesting one.  The earliest days of journalism as we know it saw its practitioners come primarily from blue-collar backgrounds.  It hasn’t been offered as a major at colleges for more than fifty years or so, during which time most of the people we consider to be reporters have all started to come from middle- to upper-class backgrounds or at least have that relatively new college education.  The idea of the everyman retaking the reins of is a romantic one, but it’s also self-evident that this freedom done more to make information accessible than it ever has before.

We The Media Chapter 1 Response

I found myself agreeing strongly with Gillmor on the opinion that free agents on the internet are becoming increasingly equal to “big media” in the ability to conduct investigative journalism, but I also believe that the technology alone may not quite put a blogger on the same level as a station-backed reporter.  Anybody can post whatever they like on the internet, more or less.  In order to curtail trolling, intentional lies, and honest mistakes on the parts of sources, websites are forced to dedicate resources towards reviewing information.  Several readings I did for my ethics class all concerned how Wikipedia, a site that sees millions of visiters per day, allowed serious slander masquerading as true information to stay up on its website concerning John Seigenthaler for several months before being taken to task for not having any mechanics in place for dealing with such an issue.