Workshop #10

Another blustery Monday evening ushered in our final meeting, again with champagne and anchovies. Sarah Gottesdiener brought a box of chocolates. Sadly missing were Sarah Boss (we hope your daughter feels better soon) and Marc Moscato, who got a “real job” that takes up his evenings.

We discussed You Witness News, a user-generated service of Yahoo and Reuters in which amateurs are encouraged to post their video and snapshots of important events and viewers can see whatever the site’s editors let through for “broadcast.” It includes simple tutorials on videography and encouragements and rewards for successful posters. Many in the class thought this was a regrettable instance of volunteer staffing of a for-profit business which both degraded the quality of the work and could put professionals out of jobs. It was compared to the Willamette Week’s recent call for volunteers to contribute to their blog in exchange for free event tickets and other perks.

On the bright side, we wondered if it might also be an instance of the democratization of media, placing the means to produce news into the hands of an ever-wider band of the general population. Professionalism need no longer be a barrier to the populist production of news. However, the editorial control exercised on the site and the fact that they are making money off volunteer contributions made the workshop feel this was not an instance of democratized media. Again, the ideal of symmetrical relationships was invoked, suggesting that a non-profit site that does the same might be more laudable.

Colin was reminded of Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that, in the Culture Industry, a few select “amateurs” will be soaked up into the ranks of the professionals, and this will give everyone false hope.

This brought up the general question of whether we see the vast network of user-driven web content as a kind of de-centralized realization of Raymond Williams’s ideal, which he called democratic communications. These sites present a condition in which all expression, even that which makes no money, is enabled and the means of production extend broadly into nearly every corner of the culture. Williams, living in a different time, presumed that democratic communications would depend on a centralized socialist authority to make media production available to all, regardless of profit. Instead, the means of production have become so cheap and ubiquitous that ownership is no longer a prerequisite for production. Everyone produces regardless of who owns it.

This brought to mind Williams’s insistence that there are two rights: to produce culture and to receive it. Is it still culture if what we receive is an avalanche of unfiltered information?

Danah Boyd’s work on “friending” was discussed. She sees ways that the virtual world gets filtered and organized — turned from formless information into shared culture — by the process of selecting “friends” on the internet. This happens literally, as with MySpace and Friendster and other “socially networked systems” (SNS), and it happens in effect whenever we select links and associations on the web. Boyd comments that this form of social organization is “egocentric” and differs from the social formation of interest groups. With friending, one chooses the friends that suit your sense of self (egocentric) and this constellation of friends can change and shape your interests. Boyd’s description is very winning and undermines a criticism I had been making — that the web is an engine which turns the world into a mirror reflecting back only your own tastes and interests. Friending can widen and change your interests, even as it shapes a clear and meaningful context for ingesting what the web has to offer.

Marcus offered us some very detailed and intriguing descriptions of the web’s capacity to organize information without an intervening editor, so that it presents a coherent and interesting picture of the world to each of us. He explained the operation of Google Ads, those modest bands of suggestions that stream down the right-hand side of most Google pages, shifting in response to what we have written or received or asked about. It was agreed that these are intriguing and non-intrusive, though very few of us ever click on them. He also said we could all own a “piece of internet real estate” by hosting a server in our own homes, for very little money. This diffused ownership of the actual means of production is radically different from industrial economies.

Workshop members will notice that in this report I am truncating and cleaning up a conversation that was in fact much rangier than our norm. It might be that we have all become accustomed to the workshop setting and each other, so are more voluble and at ease, or perhaps our conversation has somehow replicated the logic of our subject — the internet — and become immensely associational and quick. Or else it might have been the excellent champagne and anchovies.

To skip ahead, I asked if anyone had habits or rules of behavior to suggest for engaging the internet as a medium of expression. Did anyone feel, for example, that posting pseudonymously is either a right or a wrong thing to do?

Chris likes to post as himself and maintain a close correspondence between his online and real life personae. He enjoys meeting those he encounters online in life. That said, he did admit to posting under a pseudonym on certain community blogs that make him angry. Stephen complained that other people’s anonymous or pseudonymous postings had led to his being accused of creating certain malicious sites, such as the PDX Art Mafia site, for which he was never responsible. He enjoys the fugitive nature of web-based publishing and readily creates fictional characters that live on the web, but he does this more in the manner of a novelist and not as a way to hide his identity. No one proposed any rule about anonymous or pseudonymous posting, either pro or con, but once again context and symmetrical relations were invoked as useful yardsticks for judging when such a strategy is the right strategy.

We wondered what other rules of behavior or habits were helpful for users of the internet. Colin offered “don’t use the internet” — it is too thin or too full of froth. He recalled his search for overseas volunteer programs, in which the internet presented a great heap of nothing, while a handful of books and person-to-person conversations revealed a whole world of opportunities. Sarah commented that she had booked an entire band tour on the internet in just a week and wondered how anyone ever booked tours before. Colin amended his advice to “don’t ONLY use the internet.”

I tried to summarize some of the characteristics of culture mediated through the internet — its quickness; its obscured, multiple origins (like a blackberry plant whose shoots can return to the ground and become roots); its rhizomatic spread; its conflicted terms of ownership — but Marcus cautioned that the internet is an enormously flexible tool that can be many things. To attribute characteristics to it can be misleading, like attributing characteristics to language or books. This is exactly right, and is in fact one of the goals of our class — to characterize and compare the habits and predilections of various media, such as spoken language, books, or the internet.

Marcus suggested that we teach HTML to all schoolchildren, and this was endorsed by the whole workshop.

We closed our final session by reviewing some of the pleasures and perils of the workshop and checking our progress against the initial proposed curriculum. Workshop members will provide me with profiles and information to add to our resource data base, so they can continue with us in the virtual realm of our website. They (and all subsequent participants) will form an ever growing pool of skilled, interested parties available to one another through the mechanism of this resource-sharing tool, comprising a modestly-sized global coop, of sorts. The next session begins in late January.