Lewis Hyde, poet, critic and intellectual historian, has been hard at work on a book about “the commons”, and specifically the notion that ideas should be part of a cultural commons, not treated as private property, as they often are today. The idea of commons is an ancient one, from medieval Europe, where lands, streams, and forests were treated as common property by villagers

We’re challenged to offer a definition of property, and most of our definitions center on our ability to make use of a property. Lewis confirms that this is a valid way to think about property – as a right of action. “I have a right of action to drink this cup of tea, to sell it, to pour it out.” Property can be thought of as a bundle of rights of action. But there’s a strong tradition of property based on exclusion – Lewis quotes Lord Blackstone and his description of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” where one asserts rights above and over all other rights. The right to exclude, in western jurisprudence, is asserted as a core property right. Lewis, on the other hand, believes that the right to exclude is a subset of the rights of action.

Many Americans know about the commons from Garrett Hardin’s essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons“. Hardin wasn’t a historian, but a population biologist, who was concerned with problems of population growth. Lewis argues that Hardin’s prediction – that individual economic maximization will destroy collective resources – is based on a fantasy of a commons. In reality, commons had serious limitations on rights. You could only cut wood between Christmas and February, for instance. And commons were local entites – locals could exclude those from outside the region. These customary use rights meant that commons weren’t tragic – in fact, they lasted for millenia in Europe. (I interjected here to ask why Hardin’s idea has had such currency. Lewis offers two speculative reasons why – it’s a great phrase, and it came out at a moment where the Cold War was in full swing, and Hardin’s idea was a strong defense of private capital against communism.) Lewis suggests a different way to look at the commons, quoting Carol Rose, who talks about “the comedic commons”, one with a happy ending. As such, the commons was a site of action, a space for citizens to act on their own rights.

Enclosure was the practice of converting commons into private property. In England in the 18th and 19th century, there was a widespread enclosure movement, and pushback from commoners. Law protected rights to “tear down encroachment” – if someone’s hedge was growing into the common field, you had a right to prune it back. A community ritual of “beating the bounds” was a convivial affair, designed to celebrate the commons while tearing down anything that infringed upon it. Critical legal documents like the Magna Carta and the Great Charter of the Forest contained extensive references to preservation of common rights, forbidding the fencing of land that prevents access to common lands.

The connection of property to exclusion was a challenge for defining the idea of “intellectual property”. The “non-rivalrous, non-excludable” nature of ideas led to an argument that published works were, automatically, not property because they meant someone else would have acces to those ideas. Other arguments pointed to the ancients as a commons, “where you have a free right to fatten your muse.”

As the monopoly on publishing in England – granted by the Crown to a selected set of publishers – was challenged by Scottish printers, who created cheaper editions of works, three theories emerged for protecting intellectual property:

- The labor theory – I made a work, and therefore I own it and can constrain how people use it
- The moral rights argument – The book is an extension of me, and you can’t affect it without affecting my personal rights
- The utilitarian theory – We wish to incentivise creation, which may require us to protect rights so that people can monetize them.

Jamie Boyle argues that, in the past twenty years, we’ve seen a rise in enclosure of intellectual property, exemplified by changes to US copyright law which means that there’s no need to register works to gain copyright and term extension that’s essentially indefinite. Lewis argues that Boyle is actually talking about a second enclosure – an earlier enclosure surrounded the emergence of intellectual property legislation under crown copyright. And he wants to argue that there’s a third enclosure, the “enclosure of the wilderness of the mind.”

Lewis is worried that a lot of our IP rules instantiate a certain model of the human self, the self as a creator and owner of property. But this isn’t the only way to create. He quotes Dogen Zenji, a 12th century zen master: “We study the self to forget the self. And to forget the self is to wake up to the world around you.” Creativity can come from self-abnegation; he quotes a letter from Elizabeth Bishop describing her admiration for Darwin as someone who stared at a mass of material and forgot himself to come up with something new. “To get to something truly new, you can’t work from the known.”

We usually think of what’s outside of intellectual property as “the public domain”. But public domain, Lewis tells us, is a domesticated sphere, a space filled with things we are familiar with. Beyond that is a which is not yet explored. He explores the idea that human beings need to go into silence, to experience solitude to emerge as human beings.

To explain about the enclosure of silence, he cites John Cage and his visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard. Cage experienced two sounds, a high whining which was the sound of the nervous system operating and a low rumble, the circulatory system. Silence, for Cage, is non-intention. It’s the things you don’t mean to happen. And silence, as explored in pieces like 4’33″, is that makes you listen to that which you don’t intend to listen to.

You may be surprised that silence can be litigated. But Lewis tells the story of a rock album, “Classical Grafitti” by The Planets. To separate two sections of the album, the producer, Mike Batt, put a minute of silence between the two sides and credited it to “Cage/Batt” as something of a joke. But then mechanical royalties from the recording started accruing to Cage. When Cage’s published got a check for £400, he sued Batt for copyright infringment, specifically for the violation of Cage’s moral rights, a right not to be misattributed. The suit was settled out of court with the producer cutting a check to the John Cage Foundation. Lewis sees this is ironic – Cage’s intention was to remove his intent from the work, as he did with chance operations. But intellectual property legislation is designed to protect the personality of the author.

We enclose silence – unknown possibility – at our own risk. Jonathan Zittrain demonstrates in his recent work on generativity that the value of systems often comes from unknown uses – the Apple II became succesful when Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, was written for the platform. If you want generative uses for a technology, Zittrain warns that you need to be careful what you lock down. Lewis also cites a case in which cell biologists patented a particular series of amino acids. They had no idea their purpose, but “purifying and describing gives you a right to own.” A later set of researchers speculated that these aminos bloc the growth of cancer cells – on publishing their research, the first researchers sued them for many millions of dollars. This can very effectively prevent exloratory science, he argues.

“When we enclose wilderness, we begin to give property rights in areas where we have yet to understand what’s happening.” An enclosure of silence affects the human self and the world we inhabit. How do you become a creative actor in this world? How do you beat the bounds of this commons?

As he so often does, David Weinberger has excellent notes of the same talk, which may offer a different perspective.

• mySociety Blog Archive What the government doesn%u2019t understand about the Internet, and what to do about it
  Provocative Tom Steinberg essay on what the (UK) government doesn't understand about the internet and how the government could use the net better
  (tags: internet activism web2.0 uk change egovernment government policy mysociety tomsteinberg)
• Monitor: Mapping a better world | The Economist
  Excellent Economist overview of mapping and social activism, helping explain why it's often critical to map data to understand underlying economic, racial and demographic patterns. Includes a nice mention of Ushahidi
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• Chinese-language newspaper launched in Botswana – Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Blog
  Chinese language newspaper launches in Gabarone to serve the Chinese-speaking population in southern Africa
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Omar Bongo is dead. He died while undergoing cancer treatments in a Barcelona hospital. Can’t say I’ll be sorry to see him go. The late leader of Gabon could be proud of the fact that his oil-rich nation was significantly more stable than others in West Africa. But his 41-year rule was a naked kleptocracy, and he ruled in classic “big man” fashion, subverting and paying off all opposition. He was a nepotistic crook… and that’s not my opinion, but the headline in the New Zealand Herald about his death.

The Onion’s brilliant “Our Dumb World” – their farcical atlas – describes Gabon as “President Bongo’s Private Residence”. That’s a bit off – while he certainly ran the country for his personal benefit, his most impressive residences were in France, where Bongo and his family owns 33 properties valued at over $190 million. His taste for French property gave the French arm of Transparency International a brilliant opportunity to seek legal action against him for corruption - alas, the other leaders TI is suing probably won’t ever be brought to justice either.

You’d think that the passing of a man who systematically looted his country for four decades would be the cause for celebration. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon. Several African big men have passed on in the past decade, and the situation hasn’t improved much for their beleaguered subjects. When Togo’s Eyadema Gnassingbe died in 2005, the military installed his son, Faure… who was “elected” soon after. Lansana Conté died in December 2008, and within six hours of the announcement of his death, a military government voided the constitution and took over in a coup d’etat. No one’s predicting a coup in Gabon – the minister of Defense is Ali Ben Bongo, Bongo’s son and almost certain successor. (Reuters has a good set of reactions from Africa experts on Bongo’s death – it’s interesting to see how many reference Guinea and Togo in talking about the transition.)

Even if there were elections in Gabon, it’s hard to believe they’d be competitive. Bongo systematically paid off opposition politicians so succesfully that the running joke was that the best way to become a millionaire in Gabon was to start a political party. The country isn’t even a one-party state – it’s a one-man affair. When Bongo died, officials were so afraid of announcing his death that we saw the Prime Minister insisting Bongo was alive and well hours before AFP and other French media made clear that this was no longer the case. It’s going to take years to develop an independent political culture in Gabon… and that will likely only happen if the younger Bongo doesn’t create a similar government structure to his father’s.

Elia Varela Serra has a good roundup of Francophone bloggers reactions to Bongo’s death, including a quote from commenter Akin on AfricanLoft: “The greatest indictment of his lamentable regime of 42 years is that Gabon does not have hospitals that could treat either himself or his wife. What kind of leadership is one that cannot bring any appreciable benefits to its people whilst the leaders jet off to foreign lands for the slightest sign of discomfort?” While most are excited to see another “crocodile” go, few predict Gabon will be a democracy any time soon. The estimable Elizabeth Dickinson of Foreign Policy Passport notes that stores have been closed in Libreville in anticipation of insecurity and AFP is reporting that the country’s land, sea and air borders have been closed.

A closing note – as Gabon works through the transition away from the rule of Africa’s longest serving dictator, watch France. ELF has an enormous presence in the country, and Bongo worked hard to maintain his relationship with the former colonial power. Whether or not France meddles in Gabonese politics, they will be accused of meddling… and I’d be very surprised to see a leader emerge who wanted to remove France’s continuing military and commercial presence.

I’m having a blast at Beyond Broadcast despite fighting off a bad cold. The organizers have done a great job of moving beyond the usual suspects and bringing in people I’m thrilled to listen to, like Nouneh Sarkissian of Internews Armenia, talking about the innovative work her group is doing linking Georgian, Armenian and Azeri youth around media production camps. And I just got to meet a hero of mine, Tonyo Cruz from TXTPower in Manilla.

But I’m also working my ass off. I moderated a session earlier today on “Global Media’s Role in a Digital Era”, which Ivan kindly blogged here, and I’m speaking in today and tomorrow’s wrap-up sessions, which is forcing me to take good notes and put slides together.

And so… not so much blogging from me. Sorry. There’s a pretty good twitter stream. Jessica Clark in particular is kicking ass and taking names. And I’ll post when I’m able.

The opening panel discussion at BeyondBroadcast is titled “Local Perspectives” and it invites citizen media innovators from around the world to show off their work. Unfortunately for the schedule, the panel includes six terrific speakers, roughly twice as many as could fit in the allotted time.

Myoungjoon Kim of MediaAct in Korea, a community media center, tries to explain the unique features of the Korean media climate. Korea has a level of bandwidth that makes the US look pretty pathetic. Actvist media emerged at the same time as Korea reformed along neoliberal lines. Media was deregulated, and there was a recognition that community media couldn’t just include traditional broadcast media, but needed media education, community radio, and community centers that allowed people to create media. The work his organization does offers more than 200 courses to more tha 5000 members who work to create media in a South Korean context. He tells us that for his work to succeed, he’ll need broad alliances, need for reforms in policy structure and increased infrastructure to teach media.

Lova Rakotomalala, Global Voices correspondent for Madagascar, talks about the relationship between citizen media and the political crisis in his come country. 2009 has been extremely trying for Malagasy – the two cyclones that have left thousands homeless have barely made the news. Instead, the little international attention that focuses on Madagascar has focused on a political crisis – public protests which have led to a military takeover. Not only has there been little reporting on the crisis – media companies have been providing divisive propoganda, not helpful reporting.

This situation has led Malagasy to fear democracy – less than 24% of the popular now express enthusiasm for democratic government. There’s widespread resentment towards the international community for perceived meddling in Malagasy affairs. And it’s clear that Madagascar needs a comprehensive agricultural policy.

Lova was one of the founders of FOKO Madagascar – founded in the wake of TED Africa in Arusha by Harinjaka, a prominent Malagasy blogger, the goal of the project was to help Madagascar become more digitally literate and present, and to send the message that Madagascar is “open for business”. Lova quotes Mike Tyson – “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.” As the crisis spread in Madagascar, Foko began documenting protests in the street, trying to fill the gap in international reporting.

Citizen media in Madagascar includes not just the FOKO bloggers on the ground, but a network of 55 bloggers living in five countries. They use blogs, Flickr, twitter and SMS to communicate, and their perspectives are aggregated on Rising Voices and Global Voices. By working with Ushahidi and Frontline SMS, the project is able to involve a much broader group than just the 160,000 internet users in Madagascar – it reaches 2.2 million mobile phone users. This work has led to international attention, including stories on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. This is great, but there’s still only news coming from Antananarivo in mainstream media, while Foko reports from five different cities.

While the internet reaches very few Malagasy, it’s critical for the diaspora, and for the public perception of Madagascar. The current government wants international recognition and has proven willing to intimidate journalists and bloggers – there’s a desperate need for a structure to protect these reporters. But we’re also seeing evidence that social media helps organize social movements, like the movement to free Razily, which ultimately succeeded in releasing the young man who led Madagascar’s “Tiananmen moment.”

Juana Ponce De Leon of the New York Community Media Alliance talks about finding ways to amplify voices that must be heard. Her organization represents 350 weekly and bimonthly populations, representing 90 communities and 50 languages. The organization began as a set of programs for the New York independent press association, but took on special importance in the wake of 9/11, helping bring voices and stories from the Muslim world into the press during a tense and stressful time.

NYCMA doesn’t focus on original reporting – their work is primarily about translation. “It’s a forum for people who make this media” to bring coverage of communities to a wider audience. While the website doesn’t get overwhelming traffic – about 20,000 visits a week – it’s read heavily by NY city and state government agencies.

Ponce De Leon explains that the economic slump has hit her members hard. Little businesses that support community media are having financial problems, and they’re sometimes unable to support local media. There’s a shift from print to internet, but it’s much slower than in mainstream media. Roughly 39% of the organizations she works with have strong, interactive websites. Some are moving directly to internet radio, which is likely to serve as a hub to facilitate connections for diaspora communities.

In the near future, the main focus is on the 2010 census. New York has at least 150 languages represented in the school system – it’s extremely worrisome that the census is being conducted only in seven languages.

Daudi Were, legendary Kenyan blogger, starts his talk with a story about Kenyan prisons. Every ten years or so, Kenya’s prisons explode in violence. Each time, the minister of home affairs is dispatched to the prison to write a study on what’s going on. Daudi tells us that, decades ago, a prisoner tried to hand the minister a letter – he turned away, not acknowledging it, and the prisoner was later beaten. Fast forward to today, Daudi tells us, when some of the ministers had been in prison in the 1980s. They can ignore what’s going on in the prisons, but video ends up being released and news gets out – newsrooms get mobile phone footage of wardens beating prisoners to death.

Digital tools, he tells us, are bringing people into conversations even when people are reluctant to address the issues at hand. Democracy is government by discussion, and Daudi tells us, it’s based around the idea that the other person has something to say that’s worth listening to. Decisionmaking by discussion is very African – if you marry a woman, you may end up spending a long day negotiating her dowry. You could probably complete the debate in ten minutes, but the discussion takes forever because you’re avoiding conflict. That’s what decisionmaking structures like Indabas are about – we have discussions until we can work through most conflicts.

Blogs today create a new space for discussion. “Blogging is probably the most African thing you can do online today. I’m pretty confident that if my grandmother had the internet, she would have been a blogger.”

It’s not content that’s king, Daudi tells us – it’s content and community. This is one of the strenghts of Global Voices, he argues – bloggers discover that there’s a community that has their back. This is also a strongly African idea – “Ubuntu means ‘You are, therefore I am’”. Identity and existence is a function of community.

The rise of new media in Africa is exciting, but it can be very scary. It’s fun to watch the Kenyan government put exam results online and have servers taken down from the load of proud grandparents in Canada logging online to read them. But when Kibaki declared himself the winner of the 2007 elections and began naming ministers, Daudi tells us, the new ministers’ farms were burning before Kibaki finished reading the statement. Violence can spread as well as opinion, information and news. The lesson, Daudi tells us, is that people want to be relevant and want to be heard – if we can’t find ways to let them speak, they’ll burn things instead.

Antonio Cruz introduces himself as being from the country of the country of Manny Pacquiao. If you don’t know who that is, you’re not a boxing fan, but you’ve got something in common with most of the folks in the USC audience. The Phillippines are an enormous country, the 15th most populous, and it’s a country that’s has a huge diaspora and a population scattered over thousands of islands. It should come as no surprise that the country has embraced the mobile phone, with 70 of 90 million residents owning phones.

TXTPower, the organizatio that Cruz helped to found, helps organize citizens and consumers via mobile phones. Huge demonstrations helped topple the previous government and bring President Gloria Arroyo to power… and a clever ringtone campaign almost toppled her. And major consumer movements are organizing against mobile phone tarrifs and taxes.

TXTPower’s methods are pretty funny. To protest a special SMS tax – which would affect the 2 billion SMS sent in the country per day – TXTPower circulated the Speaker of the House’s personal mobile phone number. The thousands of messages received caught attention from the most important local newspaper. In the wake of a fiscal scandal about vote rigging, an audio clip of the President (allegedly) asking a colleague whether an election had been correctly fixed became a hit political ringtone, and TXTPower’s server was taken down by the interest.

TXTPower turns eight years old this August, and “we’re confident of winning more battles.” One of the co-founders (Mong Palatino, the Southeast Asia editor for Global Voices) was just elected to parliament. And new campaigns focus on the costs of mobile phone service, on training people to learn how to get more out of their phones, and on a political campaign to ensure that Arroyo doesn’t turn into “an eternal leade” – actions on are being coordinated on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social media.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach, professor at USC Annenberg, is interested in the ways in which communities use media to tell stories to themselves and to others. In introducing her, Dean Wilson notes that she refuses to look at one media at a time – instead, she looks at complex communications infrastructures and their interaction with “geo-ethnic communities”, groups of people with a common ethnicity in a particular community.

Storytelling networks matter because they lead to a sense of belonging, towards collective efficacy and towards actual civic participation. Networks include community organizations and NGOs, the geo-ethnic media and the residents and families of these communities. A community NGO holds an event on diabetes. It’s reported on in ethnic media, and leads to conversations about the issue. This is a conversational model of media – it succeeds when it promotes conversations.

Ball-Rokeach challenges us to think about how public service media fits into this equation. Social media can serve as a space for conversation, much in the same way as a safe neighborhood park can provide a space for people to meet and greet, and eventually share conversations about what’s going on in a neighborhood. An unsafe neighborhood, where people can’t sit on their front porches, inhibits storytelling and undermines civic engagment. How can public service media open itself as an approachable space?

Through the Metamorphasis project, Ball-Rokeach is trying to buck the trend of public media to produce a product and invite people to come. Instead, they are trying to design a citizen media model where the model is driven by the residents and local institutions. This involves doing lots of focus groups, intervies and onsite observations and letting the design be driven by the residents.

Lots of cities around Los Angeles have complex, multiethnic communities. Glendale has three main populations – Armenians, Anglos and Latinos. Each has a separate communication ecology. Anglos rely heavily on newspapers, especially the Pasadena Star News. Local television is important to all communities, but geoethnic television reaches only Armenians and Latinos. The internet only really reaches Anglos. You’d need to study and understand these dynamics if you wanted to reach the whole community with media. Metamorph needs to find ways to understand and work within these dynamics to produce media that builds bridges.

She identifies ethnic media as a form of public service media – while these papers are often for profit, the main priority is serving the community. This media allows readers to have complex identities, both living in Los Angeles and in their homeland. As her research yields a book, “Understanding Ethnic Media”, a major focus of her thought will be the way ethnic media enables and empowers this dual identity, allowing you to be both here and there.

• Global Voices Online Global Lullabies: The Arrorr Project
  Beautiful Global Voices post on lullabies around the world
  (tags: globalvoices lullaby culture music)
• Episode 80 – June 3 & 6, 2009 | Spark | CBC Radio
  My conversation with Nora Young on social translation. Interview on CBC radio
  (tags: radio mine cbc translation language)

Beyond Broadcast 2009, the fourth edition of a conference that focuses on the future of public service media in a digital age, starts today in Los Angeles at the USC Annenberg school. Dean Ernie Wilson notes that it’s a rainy day in the middle of an economic depression, a tough time to get excited about the future of public media. But there’s reasons for hope – as this conference has moved from the Berkman Center to MIT to American University, and now to USC, the issues on the table have shifted. Our focus here is on hyperlocal media and “hyperglobal”, the ability to share ideas across international borders using digital media. As such, Dean Wilson and his team have made an effort to internationalize the conference, bringing speakers and participants from around the world and focusing much of the program on community media across the world, both in American communities and in other nations.

Wilson offers some challenges for the audience:
- How do scholars of media provide insights that are actually useful and informative to local communities?
- How do we build a future that’s more digital and more democratic?
- How do we take advantage of the success that media is having in countries like India, where increasing incomes and education are helping newspapers succeed?
- What’s the role of public media in countries where public-funded media has historically been propoganda?
- How do we maintain public broadcasting in the face of fiscal pressures? And is public media just what we see on PBS? Or what’s on blogs?

Most critically, Wilson offers a call to action: “If we don’t link digital change and democracy, who will do it?”

Dean Wilson introduces Henry Jenkins, who’s appearing for the first time on a USC stage. He tells us that, after 20 years at MIT, he’s hoping to be at USC for the next twenty. Jenkins explains that he’s a highly visual speaker, and often looks for images to inform his speeches. This led him to think about images of democracy. The images we have tend to be pretty retro: pictures of the American revolution or of 1930s popular protests. Jenkins offers the Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom of Speech”. The figure, a man in a public meeting, nervously standing up to ask a question of authority. “Put this guy in pajamas and we’d recognize him as a blogger.”

How does this image of democracy change if we look at a pink Hello Kitty mobile phone? It reminds us that Rockwell’s picture is all white, almost all male. That the public sphere positied there is public and highly rational, a fixed space and time. This other image juxtaposes a model of citizenship which is more mobile, more mundane, and brings in issues of gender and generational politics.

Jenkins points to Clay Shirky’s recent writings on journalism, quoting him at length: “Society doesn’t need newspapers – what we need is journalism.” We need to shift from saving newspapers to saving society, and that means we’re going to see a blurring of boundaries between professional and amateur media. Jenkins shows us a quote from Morley Safer: “I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery.” This is a false understanding of citizen media, a belief that somehow bloggers are driving journalists our of business. “Increasingly, we’re going to see ‘citizen journalism’ as a phrase like ‘horseless carriage’” – it’s useful for understanding the transition, but it’s not how we currently think about cars. We should expect to see hybrid affiliations, like bloggers working with CNN.

But the real problem with the phrase is the idea that journalists aren’t citizens. Or that civic participation can be reduced to journalism. There are new participatory functions, some of which need to be done and have nothing to do with what journalists do. Jenkins invokes the late James W. Carey, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School. Carey considered journalism in terms of two models – transmission and ritual. Journalistic rituals can shape our feelings, make us feel connected to other citizens. This notion of connection with other citizens informs almost every model we have of public spheres, from Benedict Anderson’s newspapers, to Habermas’s coffee shops, McLuhan’s global village and Putnam’s bowling league.

Jenkins defines citizen media as “any use of technology for the purpose of increasing civic awareness and engagement, enabling the exchange of meaninful information,” increasing social connectivity and enabling a wide range of responses to problems. He invokes Jessica Clark of American University, who defines “pubic media 2.0 as the ability to generate publics around problems.”

This idea raises questions about fragmentation – do we have one public sphere or many? Cass Sunstein is worried that digital media will break down a single public sphere. Jenkins invokes a former MIT colleague, Dana Cunningham, who worries that the black public sphere in the age of Obama is losing critical institutions while black voice still isn’t fully integrated. The example of the Reverend Wright controversy shows how the porous nature of digital media can make it harder for discussions to remain within a specific sphere.

Jenkins sees civic media as extending to include online games, wondering how we can learn techniques from online gaming and apply them to realworld problems. He talks about a group in Brisbane, Australia, where the process of taking pictures of the city turns into a group that explores and envision the city in new ways.

Fan communities are finding ways to mobilize as activists. The fans of the TV show, Chuck, rallied behind their cancelled show and organized a “buycott”, going to Subway (the show’s main sponsor), buying sandwiches and leaving behind cards that said, “Chuck sent me”. The show survived, and grew. Jenkins points out that the fans needed to bring a public together, educate them, come up with tactics, and deploy them, all very rapidly. We’re seeing the emergence of groups monitoring copyright takedowns on YouTube, and a Harry Potter fanclub that’s organized 100,000 young people as “Dumbledore’s Army” to fight Proposition 8.

He looks at the spread of Susan Boyle’s remarkable performance on Britain’s Got Talent as a study in civic media and civil engagement. 170 million people have watched the video of her performance, roughly three times as many as watched the finale of American Idol. And these sorts of shows are an introduction to democracy in countries like China, where the idea of choosing between multiple candiates is a political novely.

Boyle’s story, Jenkins argues, teaches us that the model of “viral media” is wrong. Yes, her story spread via blogs, twitter, Wikipedia and Facebook. But it wasn’t viral – he forwarded it on to people for specific reasons, not involuntarily. And Susan Boyle became a deeply political figure, meaning something different to mothers or church groups than to karaoke communities and fashion blogs. The spread of this attention, faster than mainstream media could react, is an indication of what to expect in the future: demand will aggregate and dissipate before the mainstream media turns its attention to the phenomenon.

The emergence of these new communities and their new ways of engagement will ultimately be a boon for democracy, Jenkins argues. His project is to document the ways it happens, and his new book is going to focus on these questions.

What do you choose to study when you’re a Dutch media scholar of Chinese descent? You could focus on Chinese internet filtering, a rich, provocative and depressing topic of study. You could study the ways in which Dutch society is wrestling with cultural difference and cultural complexity, with the emergence of nationalist attitudes in the wake of the deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. As the son of Chinese immigrants to the Netherlands, raised in Amsterdam, Lokman Tsui doesn’t think much of these two choices: “Would you prefer to have your left or right arm chopped off?”

Searching for a topic for his PhD dissertation, Lokman found himself talking to Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American media scholar who’s research has focused on the Wikipedia community. Lih urged Lokman to study something emergent, exciting and positive, helping explain how an unknown system actually worked. And so Lokman found himself studying Global Voices and the people behind it. “Global Voices solved my identity crisis,” he offers.

(Some disclaimers are in order for me to blog Lokman’s talk at the Berkman Center yesterday. I’m one of the co-founders of Global Voices, so I’ve been one of his research subjects. Lokman is also a good friend and a valued colleague – he’s part of a group called “the book club” at Berkman which provides critique and moral support to those of us working on book-length projects, which means he’s reading the book proposal I’m struggling with. He and I are working on a couple of papers together, and he just oranized the China Internet Research Conference where I presented a paper. I’m in no way, shape or form objective about Lokman or his work.)

Lokman sees Global Voices as a community of internationalists committed to curating, amplifying and aggregating conversations that other media ignore. In the process, Global Voices serves as a community for people whose identities are complicated, for bridge figures who’ve got their feet in different communities, like the Netherlands, China and the US.

Much of Lokman’s talk seeks to situate the work Global Voices is doing in a theoretical framework, looking at theories of journalism and what each model values, and examining how Global Voices aligns and differs from these models. He quotes Hannah Arendt, who worries that we may lose a public sphere if people embrace “freedom from politics as a basic freedom”. This withdrawal from the public sphere might not harm individuals, but it harms society as a whole, because “the world lies between people”. How does this world – the one that lies between people – come to know itself? How does the internet help create and realize this in-between space? These are the questions Lokman hopes to address by examining Global Voices as a case study of cross-cultural connections possible in a digital age.

The public spheres described by Habermas around coffee houses and by Benedict Anderson around daily newspapers may be giving way to new, virtual spaces. “The internet challenges us to rethink and reimagine journalism and democracy,” though we’ve not yet done a good job of picking up this challenge. In particular, Lokman worries that we’re doing a disservice to the field by looking at the internet as harming journalism – more interesting questions focus around building journalism for a world of strangers united by the internet. “How do we designing better instituions fit for a cosmopolitan age?”

There’s a great deal of literature that seeks to understand journalism by engaging in ethnographic study of newsrooms. Lokman sees his work following in this tradition, though with Global Voices, the newsroom has been replaced with rowdy annual meetings and lively online discussion groups. When scholars like Herbert Gans analyzed newsrooms in terms of modes of news production, they established that biases in the production of news had a great deal to do with the processes involved. Journalists weren’t seeking to silence certain voices – they overemphasized government sources, for instance, because they helped journalists avoid credibility issues and because these sources learned to carefully package news for consumption by journalists. By studying Global Voices from a newsroom perspective, Lokman hopes to identify some of the value judgements that are at work in the course of our production of news. He argues, though, that these techniques can’t apply too directly, because we can’t measure new systems with standards designed for older systems.

This tension comes up most clearly around the question of whether what Global Voices does is journalism. Lokman notes that my co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, is insistent that GV is not a journalistic organization, because we don’t have methods for fact-checking, don’t seek to be objective (though we do seek to be transparent and fair) and because most participants don’t see themselves as journalists. (My take on the question isn’t quite as strident as Rebecca’s. I think GV frequently commits acts of journalism, thugh I think we often provide helpful, non-journalistic content.) Lokman would prefer we not ask the question, because it’s not that interesting.
“It’s like asking me if I’m Chinese or not – I just shrug my shoulders.” Instead, it might be useful to see GV as a complement to journalism, a different way of seeing. (Here he quotes Susan Sontag, who describes photography not as seeing, but as a way of seeing.)

Lokman identifies three schools of thought about journalism, each of which contains – he asserts – a democratic theory and an implicit purpose for journalism. A professional theory of journalism – as advocated by scholars like Walter Lippman – implies a belief in liberal democracy. In this case, the purpose of journalism is to provide information, either to the public or, as Lippman seems to imply, to an elite group of decisionmakers.

Alternative media is based around participatory democratic theory – democracies function best when they represent a broad range of actors. The purpose of this media is representative. We can judge the success or failure of journalism by how well it represents different groups in society, especially marginalized groups. Public media, advocated by scholars like Jay Rosen, is based around the idea of deliberative democracy – democracy functions when we have the space to discuss and argue, seeking common truths. The purpose of journalism, in this model, is to offer a space for conversation.

This model of three types of journalism and their implicit value-spheres gets complicated by technological constraints, which Lokman points out have changed over time. It used to be extremely costly to access multiple voices and incorporate them into journalistic discourse, so we engaged in “representative journalism”, asking professional journalists to represent the perspective of the individuals they interviewed. But the costs of speech and of production have changed dramatically, and we haven’t really figured out what peer-produced journalism might look like. We need to revise how we judge and value journalism, Lokman believes.

He proposes that we move beyond objectivity as a key journalistic valye towards hospitality. Objectivity as a gold standard makes sense when information is your goal. But if what you’re hoping to do is manage an inclusive conversation, perhaps we need different standards – we need to focus on whether spaces are hositable to conversation.

Lokman invokes Iris Young’s idea of a communicative democracy, a space in which groups are able to find meeting grounds for conversation. Habermas is interested in these spaces, but believes they are neutral grounds – everyone’s equally comfortable or uncomfortable at a coffee house, right? Lokman doesn’t buy this – there are always power dynamics between people having conversations. But hospitality allows a good host to level these power imbalances. He cites a conversation with me at my house – I’m obviously more comfortable in my home than he is, and I have the power to invite him into my space or throw him out… but if I’m a good host, I’ll work to level the playing field and allow as equal a conversation as possible.

This suggests a new model for excellence in journalism, Lokman believes – one way of judging journalism is the extent to which it creates a space for conversations to take place. Good spaces include mechanisms for greeting and welcoming participants, acknowledging where they’re coming from and what their differences are. It values storytelling and narrative, often as an alternative to deliberation. This requires solving some difficult challenges, like the problem of inclusion. Lokman argues that Indymedia’s failure is that it’s never figured out how to tolerate the intolerant. At the same time, hospitality doesn’t insist on unrestricted access, ala Wikipedia – the door is open, but that openness is conditional.

Lokman doesn’t believe that hospitality is a form of philanthropy – it’s a right, granted by the fact that we all share a common world. He traces this idea back to Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”, where Kant argues that one cannot refuse a visitor if this would lead to the visitor’s destruction. This has implications for asylum, immigration and for language, and offers a rather strong condemnation of hostility – he shows a sign hanging in Gino’s, a legendary cheese steak joint in Philadelphia This is America – when ordering ‘speak English’”. The irony, of course, is that the restaurant is owned by a long line of Italian immigrants who adapted foods of their home to fit local tastes, and who now insist on a badly punctuated form of American English.

Hospitality is about who you let in and keep out, but it’s also about how you include them. Lokman suggests that we analyze spaces in terms of access, recognition and appropriate response. We want to build spaces that are accessible to a wide range of people, we want to realize that they’re coming from different cultures and interpretive frameworks, and we respond appropriately to these contributions. Global citizens, Lokan believes, understand these rules of hospitality better than most.

How could the idea of hospitality change journalism? Most likely through approaches that complement existing, information-focused approaches. Lokman examines a movie critics site, Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got an objective component – the synopsis of the movie – and a deeply subjective component – the reviews. We don’t ask reviewers to be objective – instead, we realize the value of aggregating and curating these perspectives and bringing them together. Global Voices does something very similar – many stories include a couple of paragraphs, often derived from other news reports, explaining the current political situation in Madagascar, then followed with excerpts from blogs offering different opinions on the situation. The value is in aggregating these different perspectives around a base of objective reporting and providing a hospitable space for these other opinions, including the opinions of commenters and linkers.

Lokman acknowledges that a version of journalism based around hospitality can seem hokey or “new agey”. It’s an aspiration, not a reality, and he recognizes that the world is far from hospitable. It’s easier to be hospitable to friends than to strangers, harder with enemies than with friends. But hospitality recognizes that we “need to subvert power relationships to have conversations.” In turn, this means that hospitality is a duty and an obligation, but that we shouldn’t pretend that we can prevent exclusion from some spaces.

David Weinberger wonders why hospitality used to be such a critical part of our collective culture – the Old Testament is full of stories about hospitality. Why has hospitality slipped away? Is it because we’re experiencing the false intimacy of a globalized world? Lokman suggests that we’re seeing a paradox of choice emerging online – as we’ve got more choices, we often make decisions that isolate and cucoon ourselves. Part of this may come from the biggest way in which we isolate ourselves – we restrict the flow of people across national borders to a much greater extent than we restrict financial or cultural flows. Perhaps we’ve become better at accomodating a person’s CDs or movies, but less good at accomodating the person herself.

Jason Kaufman offers the argument that journalism is best understood in terms of professionalism – in the last century, journalism became a profession, and has reinforced the idea that not anyone can write the news. Lokman argues that we’d do better to see journalism as craft, a practice that can be engaged in by professionals or amateurs.

Dorothy Zinberg worries that Lokman is overfocusing on theory and failing to see the reality of journalism – it’s the practice of hard-drinking guys looking for stories that will sell newspapers. She suggests he look closely at Erik Erikson’s work on childnood and society – what is it in human experience that allows us to identify ourselves by difference? These ideas may be increasingly important in a connected world.

I took advantage of my moderator’s role to offer a closing critique – I think Lokman is vastly too kind to Global Voices and that his analysis needs to look at the ways in which we’ve failed as well as those that have succeeded. We may have created a new way of doing something like journalism, and it may be a particularly hospitable space, but it hasn’t had the influence we’d hoped to have. We’re not making measurable progress in changing the news agenda of large media outlets – we may be introducing a new paradigm, but a framework that evaluates our work needs to be critical rather than just celebratory. All that said, I think it’s incredibly helpful to examine the world of journalism and new media with new tools that recognize that global conversations may follow very different rules than those we’ve seen in the past, and I think Lokman’s analytic frame adds a great deal to these discussions.

See as well.

A UN report on extrajudicial executions in Kenya has recommended that Kenya’s police chief and attorney general both resign. At issue in the report are more than 500 killings of civilians by police, in the wake of the 2007 elections, in a campaign against a regional land rights movement and a campaign against a criminal gang. Human rights advocates are celebrating the report, pointing out that Kenya’s judiciary is far from independent, and that the executive is able to use police forces as a tool of political violence. The president of the Oscar Foundation, an NGO which accused the police of political killings, was assasinated in Nairobi earlier this year.

Unsurprisingly, the report is splitting Kenya’s coalition government. Mwai Kibaki, who was unwilling to step down from power in the 2007 elections, condemns the report and rejects it as “paternalistic”. Raila Odinga and his supporters, the head of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement – which joined the Kibaki government in coalition after months of violent standoff – are more receptive to the findings.

The Kenya report is a useful reminder that transforming a political culture goes well beyond holding democratic elections (though free and fair elections certainly help, and Kenya’s elections were far from exemplary.) Other unelected institutions have enormous power, and their institutional culture helps shape the politics and the everyday life of a nation. Kubatana, a coalition of Zimbabwean civil society organizations, is sharing a disturbing video of police training. Police inductees are being forced to assume a push-up position, then are beaten by senior officers, eventually kicked out of the way to allow another trainee to take their place.

While one might dismiss this as am ugly form of hazing, it’s worth remembering that the Zimbabwean police have eebn powerful political actors, savagely beating opposition figures and their supporters. This “training” looks like an organized program to train security authorities to behave as political thugs – it’s a video disturbing both for its content and for its implications, the idea that a new generation of Zimbabwean law enforcement are being prepared to abuse citizens.

It’s depressing to write a post about police violence in two countries I care deeply about and whose people I so admire. If there’s an upside in news like this, it’s that this violence is now being documented, and that pressure around these reports could lead towards this institutionalized violence being eliminated. I think it’s particularly significant that the video from Zimbabwe was shot with a mobile phone – as cameraphones become more pervasive, it’s more likely that unacceptable practices like this will be documented and addressed, rather than hidden.