Symbsys 209

9 responses so far ↓

• 1    jarobb3 // Oct 22, 2007 at 9:12 pm

  (1) Benkler makes the point that we should buck restrictions on culture because “there is no Archimedean point outside of culture on which to stand and decide [what is best for our culture]” (298). Rather than supporting Benkler’s argument that no one has the right to regulate culture, I believe this point actually entails that no one can successfully steer culture one way or another. However, if Benkler wishes to denounce those who try, those who stand behind podiums and issue apocalyptic warnings regarding a culture that believes music is free, then Benkler should look no further than his own words to find a culprit. The final page (300) of the eighth chapter exemplifies Benkler’s own oratory on the proper direction of culture. Benkler explains his own position as fighting a “battle” so that “the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be permitted to build upon the outputs o fthe twentieth-century industrial model,” in which “the stakes are high” (300). By his rhetoric, this page could have been written by any copyright pundit, perhaps even Andrew Keen. (I have not read his book, but I did see him appear on the Colbert Report talking about his book The Cult of the Amateur. Lessig rips Keen apart here http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html). Just trying to contribute to the topology of the web.

  (2) Throughout chapter seven, Benkler cites the three stories (Sinclair, Diebold, Lott) to show how network-based media can respond when mass-media cannot or will not. I do not think that I came across a passage in which Benkler explicitly states that network-based media should replace mass-media, but his tone throughout the chapter suggests that mass-media should be put out of its misery. Some days, when the news is reporting something completely worthless when there is a genocide in Darfur, questionable trade policies between the US and China, and countless peoples around the world without a voice, I feel the same way. However, all three of Benkler’s anecdotes show how powerful mass-media is in our society. In all three examples, the ultimate goal of the unsung networked heroes was ultimately fulfilled when the media behemoths played their stories 24 hours a day for a week (cause that’s what they do). Referring to the Trent Lott story, Benkler notes that “It is possible that, absent the blogosphere, the story would have still flared up…[but] without the blogosphere, the story would have died” (264). Perhaps, I would like to suggest that, without mass-media, Trent Lott would not have felt pressured to reign his post as the Senate Majority Leader. We are just now beginning to see the political world begin to take web opinions seriously. I have not been keeping track, but I would say that the YouTube debates may be the ceremonial acknowledgment of the Internet’s presence in the political psyche.

  (3) A quick last point that we may discuss more in class. We should not be surprised that the political blogosphere has separated into liberal and conservative camps whose areas of contact are strained. I would to suggest that the Internet does not exacerbate the political divide in the country but merely expresses the strongly emotional division of the country that began with the 2000 election and became even worse during the early stages of the War in Iraq. I hypothesize that as the country begins to realize that neither side, Red or Blue, wishes for the destruction of the country, that the links between conservative and liberal blogs will increase. In other words, the topology of the blogosphere mirrors psyche of the country.

• 2    gnewman // Oct 23, 2007 at 3:33 am

  Benkler makes the claim that “in a network with a small number of highly visible sites that practically everyone reads, the discourse fragmentation problem is resolved. Because they are seen by most people, the polarization problem is solved too” (238). Now Benkler has defined discourse fragmentation as to “view the world through millions of personally customized windows that will offer no common ground” (235). Under this definition it would certainly seem that high concentration sovles the fragmentation problem, since at least people cannot be using a “millions of personally customized windows”. However, even by his own definition of polarization: “ [the network] makes each view more extreme in its own direction and increases the distance between positions taken by opposing camps” (235), could not be ruled out simply because there are few highly visible sites.

  It is unclear when Benkler says “in a network with a small number of highly visible sites that practically everyone reads” that he means: 1) almost everyone who uses the internet reads at least one of “highly visible” sites out there, or 2) practically everyone reads almost every highly visible site. If Benkler’s interpretation of the high concentration effect means the second interpretation, then yes he is correct in assuming no polarization effect in that situation. However, if his interpretation is more like the first than a polarization effect certainly could occur. One can easily think of a hypothetical situation where some sites are highly visible, but still only frequented by those of similar political mindset.

  This claim becomes important once we agree that the internet is not too highly concentrated, nor to spread out, but follows more of a bow tie model, because than a hypothetical situation where people only read sites of the same political tilt is a distinct possibility. I do not feel we a completely polarized effect occurs, but I do feel that the way political blogs out there operate allow someone of a particular mindset to be surrounded by people of the same view and simply bath in environment of positive reinforcement. The internet can easily help polarization if people from different sides of the spectrum can not to be bothered to look at views of the other side. I am also not convinced when Benkler mentions that sites with a particular leaning have 15 percent of the links to a blog on opposite of the political divide (248). I disagree with the implication that interlining like this some how helps political discourse because a link does not mean that you agree with the other sides view. It is much more likely that a link to the other side is in the middle of article where the blog writer is bashing what the link has to say. The problem of linking to demonstrate political views has been a problem for me since the UCLA study found that the Drudge Reprot was liberal, for the way it linked more frequently to liberal sites, organizations and people. (A summary of the study is here: http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-6664.aspx).

  On the whole I strongly agree with Benkler that the internet has done a great job with be a watchdog of commercial mass media, but I am not so sure about some of his other claims about its democratizing effects. Too often popular political blogs make valid points about the situation of our nation in one way or the other, but these political tilted sites also do a great disservice of their audience by simply covering certain topics in the news world and not attempting to engage in conversation with the other side. A careful look at either the dailykos or powerline, can show that, and they are but two in the whole world of political blogging.

• 3    dulcinea // Oct 23, 2007 at 1:26 pm

  I would like to take issue with Benkler’s pronouncement that state-controlled mass media are more conducive to authoritarian control, and that the architecture of the internet makes it harder to control communications. (266) On the face of it, this would seem to be obvious, as shown in many examples: Trent Lott, Radio B92 in Yugoslavia, and others. However, I think that Benkler misses an important point.

  Benkler’s focus is on access to information. He points out, rightly, that it is difficult to block information that disputes the official report. Even China’s extensive control of the internet within its borders has many limitations and allows access to sites that are potentially damaging to the regime (268). To block out information in the internet age, a government has to block every single occurrence of it (because an infinite number of occurrences can be duplicated nearly costlessly from one occurrence), which is nearly impossible to do.

  This just means that the techniques of oppression will have to change. State-run mass media can’t compete with the internet for the same reasons that non-state-run mass media can’t compete with the internet. So, what’s an oppressor to do?

  I think that Benkler underestimates the power of data-mining and other techniques to use the power of the internet to store and retrieve unprecedented amounts of information to turn the internet into a vast storehouse of information that can be used by oppressive regimes.

  Instead of trying to block out information, the government can use data-mining techniques to find who looked at it, who forwarded it to friends by email, who posted responses, and so forth, and then simply use other methods that will scare people away from responding to the information. If all of one’s communications and movements are online, and the government can see them at any time, they can then build a signature of the movements and postings of the people they want to oppress and then use the typical techniques of imprisonment and torture to punish them.

  This would create an environment of prior restraint for posting and responding. It wouldn’t matter if the information is available fo all to see online-—you would fear accessing it or responding to it, because your movements would be tracked and reported. Water would be everywhere, but none of it to drink.

  This is certainly a scary possibility, but I do not think that it is too far-fetched. In countries with low rates of internet access, limiting access is the technique of oppression. In more sophisticated places, access can no longer be limited. This does not mean that there are not many other techniques of oppression.

  I believe that Benkler’s view is born of the early, glorious days of the internet, in which the best aspects of human nature were the ones most prevalent in online discourse, simply because the larger, more authoritarian ones move more slowly and are more cumbersome. But I am concerned that they also grind exceedingly small.

• 4    dreadpirateroberts // Oct 23, 2007 at 2:50 pm

  The emergence of a new, higher end “folk culture” (p295) on the internet is a new thing, aside from the fact that links are a new currency of choice that is very easily traceable thanks to search engines.

  True, the internet makes it easier to track the very viewed sites versus the smaller, less viewed than Yahoo but still bigger than a blog site versus the vanity windows for personal use, but the idea that these links never existed before does not strike me as true.

  Instead of “links” for a pre-internet culture, think of “allusions” as the exchange of information and references given to add to one’s work. Pop culture at large can be alluded to by a part of culture with a cult following large enough such that it can be alluded to by even smaller niches of community, following the heavily connected “regions” that Benkler observed (p 248).

  Take the excellent cable show “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MST3k) (abbreviated MST3K) for example. For the unfamiliar, the show’s main format was a human host and his robot puppet comrades watching and mocking B-movies and shorts with their silhouettes visible in front of the movie for sight gags. Interspersed with watching the movie are small skits where the host and robots interact either commenting on the movie or completely disjoint (such as a series of these segments spoofing “Alien”). The jokes are usually centered on culture (“Our virtual pets are attacking us!” when a crowd flees during a Japanese movie) references as well as calling out the movie on its awfulness (“Help! I’m falling sideways breaking all the laws of physics!” when the rear projection is skewed). For example, Alan Hale Jr. appears in the movie being made fun of that episode there are many “Gilligan’s Island” jokes (“Dear Skipper, Please send rescue…” intones one robot while Hale’s character reads a letter on screen). MST3K would not be able to make this joke if they were not depending on their audience being familiar with who Hale is or his previous work or the movie “Alien” and thus sharing a common culture like the Rabbi and thief joke.

  Even as small a following MST3K might have compared with the audience aware of “Friends” or “60 minutes” it is popular enough that it can be alluded to in even smaller circles, such as the webcomic Krakow (http://www.krakowstudios.com/archive.php?date=20020830) and a short on homestarrunner.com (http://www.homestarrunner.com/cantsayjob.html).

  To put this in terms of the internet, MST3K can be seen as a popular blog, updating its content and sometimes being self-referential for the long time fans, but easily accessible to the first time viewer, assuming enough common culture to allow some kind of bond to be formed. Krakow and Home Star Runner can then be seen as smaller sites linking to the more popular MST3K, thus sharing the general culture at large, but also the culture of MST3K. Pop culture does not need to be aware of MST3K the same way that MST3K is not affected by the smaller, web based allusions.

  Given that culture at large works this way, it is not surprising that the internet as a whole, and blogs in particular, would follow the patterns observed in Chapter 7 and 8. I think that phenomenon of the big stars being alluded to by the cult-following stars being alluded to by small guys who allude to the middle stars, the bug stars, and the middle stars alluding to the big stars is how a kind of folk culture based on pop culture can be created on the internet (p 294 – 297).

  Linking to a source (as I’ve done here) lends some legitimacy to the statements (as Benkler admitted p 256) but to me, it appears that linking might just be the product of something old remodeled to fit into the new environment of the internet.

• 5    johnmagdaleno // Oct 23, 2007 at 5:08 pm

  In chapter 7, Benkler transitions from his critique off the commercial mass media into a focused discussion on the democratizing effects of the Internet, including three anecdotes that demonstrate the power of the Internet in terms of political action and a detailed response to the Babel objection. In chapter 8, he defines culture and discusses the importance of culture in terms of liberal political theory.

  For chapter 7, I thought the anecdotes were very effective at demonstrating the power of the Internet as a communication and storage mechanism that positively aided users in their pursuit of justice vis-a-vis political and commercial interests. However, his network topology argument was somewhat technical. My understanding is that by virtue of the in-links and out-links, we can analyze the collection of sites in terms of clusters (i.e., those sites that interlink at some density), and links to other clusters. Benkler uses this analysis to support his refutation of the Babel objection. One possible problem might be his focus on the structure of the linking between sites and not providing empirical information related to how users interact with the links. A possible counter-argument might be that sites interlink to improve their scores (i.e., relevance) in automated filtering and accreditation algorithms, which serves the authors and not necessarily the users. In the end, though, this is not a huge problem because Benkler’s claim is that the Internet is a better democratic medium than commercial mass media, which seems acceptable given the whole of his argument.

  I really liked chapter 8 — especially because I saw parallels between Benkler’s definitions of culture with an archaeology class. In fact, I loved his discussion related to corporate interests in marketing products that are culturally desirable, if not becoming a part of the cultural symbology. And then showing the contradiction in corporations being interested in restricting the use of those cultural symbols. My concern is primarily if these commercial icons displace nonmarket ones, which means that our culture truly becomes commercialized, controlled and opaque. If we accept Benkler’s hypothesis that “if there is a business reason to do anything about culture, it is to try to shape the cultural meaning of an object… in order to shape demand for it…”, i.e., to make us eyeballs for mass media, mouths for the food industry, etc., then we must analyze our reliance on market forces to solely moderate and configure our democratic society.

• 6    fwy08 // Oct 23, 2007 at 5:21 pm

  In challenging the copyright / royalties policies of our current society, one of the questions that must be on the minds of readers, one question that we’ve already asked is, “If we remove or disregard copyrights, will artists then get nothing in return for spending their livelihoods producing art that is enjoyed by others at no cost? (Will they be compensated for their contributions? Etc.)” Benkler has yet to directly propose a solution or perspective on this issue other than to mention in passing that musicians could receive their revenues from live performances or the like. In Chapter 7, he actually makes a point that leads to an interesting theory to answer the question.
  As Benkler has demonstrated, we no longer have to rely on mass media to popularize a person or idea. Our networked public sphere allows for anything of interest to shine brightly into the eyes of millions. There are obviously those who have easy access to the limelight, even if usually represented (or misrepresented, for that matter) by mass media; we call these people “celebrities.” They are pretty much identified based on that exact fact. For those who have contributed some copyright-able materials, this “celebrity-hood” is basically more than anyone can ask for. They become famous for some singular contribution and in return are given something even more valuable than monetary wealth; you cannot reliably buy the attention that celebrities get. “There is no obvious broadcast station that one can buy in order to assure salience. There are, of course, the highly visible sites, and they do offer a mechanism of getting your message to large numbers of people” (259). This is what our entire advertising machine is built around. Organizations with money can buy ad space or a celebrity’s face and voice, those without money, if their motives are worthy enough can ask celebrities to cooperate.
  As Benkler explained, mass media can boycott coverage of a certain issue or person, but in the end (especially because of our networked public sphere) what the people want to hear will be exhaustively covered until it becomes unprofitable for mass media (or uninteresting for nonmarket systems) to continue doing so.
  So perhaps, artists will not be compensated directly for their work, but will be given a greater power that money cannot buy and in that way receive their “reward.”
  (The question is trickier for scientists and innovators with their patents because there has not been a tradition of sensationalism on more esoteric matters, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar scheme could be proposed. Can you suggest one?)

• 7    lvmesa // Oct 23, 2007 at 5:38 pm

  I disagree with Benkler’s argument against Noam’s prediction that “money will end up dominating” the information network because I think that history has shown that money is a dominating force in our society: anyone can get what they want as long as they have the money to pay for it (238). Special interest groups and lobbyists are prime examples of our money at work, with the most well-funded movements, more often than not, achieving influence.

  Having a well-funded message, regardless of the veracity or propriety of the message, is key in political campaigns, advertising campaigns or marketing campaigns. Yes, the internet can work as a watch dog. But money can propagandize, and regardless of the size of the watch dog group, (the millions of internet users in this country alone) effective (ie expensive) messaging and propaganda will reach its audience and will, in most cases, do what it is supposed to do. The ‘x’ factor are those people that can read between the lines and see the message for what it is and have the ability to get their concerns heard over the din of free-flowing money.

  At face value, I do agree with the democratization of the information network and the ability for an individual user to be heard. But at the same time, Benkler seems to be a bit of an idealist. With the internet becoming its own economy, I think its almost impossible to argue that money will not continue to have an influence on the messages we receive. Google Ads, for example, is a prime example of a mechanism that controls the visibility of messages. Google gives prime visibility to those that can pay the price, thus giving the rich messenger an advantage over others. It is that advantage that is so valuable–and that advantage is directly correlated to the amount of money you can invest in the message.

• 8    benkr // Oct 23, 2007 at 5:51 pm

  In Chapter 7, Benkler discusses the power law distribution of sites and the number of other sites that link to them. Barabási and Albert claim that while sites are linked to preferentially based on how many links are already there, this does not doom new sites to obscurity in the face of already well-linked old sites because each has a different intrinsic growth rate (246). Benkler admits that money may play a role in giving a site a higher growth rate, but uses the Diebold and Boycott DSG stories as counterrexamples of sites that gained visibility without money.

  What, then, would cause a high growth rate? If we are to make a normative judgment of the networked information environment as a better information source than the mass media, we need to be reassured that sites which gain high visibility in the former will be better and more useful than pieces which would become visible in the mass media. I argue that this is not the case.

  Benkler’s suggestions for causes of high growth rates are “internal attractiveness to large communities of users (like Slashdot)” and “salience to the immediate interests of users (like Boycott SBG)” (247). However, the sensational fills those requirements far more easily than the truthful. Just check your inbox for all the items beginning with 20 “FW’s” to see how urban legends, because of their salience to our everyday lives (we could be in danger!), are circulated through the information sphere again and again despite their falsehood. To make a more specific and analagous comparison, for every Trent Lott story (263) that forces someone to answer for something they shouldn’t have said, there are Al Gore stories forcing someone to answer for something they didn’t say. Al Gore never suggested he had “invented” the internet, and any (traditional) media that spent time on fact-checking would have looked at the quote in context before printing something deliberately misleading. Instead, because the idea of Al Gore the Lunatic claiming to have invented the internet was attractive to the Republican community, and salient to all voters, the news spead from the original Wired article across the entire information network until if became a culturally-accepted fact, frequently referenced on the airwaves. Sports fans will recognize the same process in play when a blog invents a fictional trade rumor, and because it would impact the league so heavily if it were true, it permeates the internet and reaches so many people that the team in question is forced to issue a public denial.

  Finally, the ranking of a site’s visibility in terms of the number links towards it reminded me of Google’s PageRank algorithm, which determines sites’ relevance in the same way. We should take caution before celebrating the new media, then, upon seeing that, until competing sites were GoogleBombed, the most visible site relating to “Jew” was jewwatch.com.

• 9    clizzin // Oct 23, 2007 at 6:01 pm

  Benkler writes in Chapter 8 about how the networked information economy of the Internet provides opportunities for individuals to participate in culture by responding to, critiquing, and constructing the cultural significance of symbols and objects. At the beginning of the chapter, he writes a great deal on the nature of culture, cultural exchange, and culture’s impact on individual thought and behaviour, but when he gets down to applications of this ‘theory’ of culture to the new information economy, he primarily focuses on the distinction between market-based and social-releations-based cultural conversations and the ways in which transparency and participation allow individuals to critique cultural assumptions. However, I think his thoughts on culture itself have more to say about how individual involvement in the networked information economy plays out, and I’d like to play with some of those ideas here.

  As you probably figured out by now, I have somewhat of an axe to grind in regards to the fact that the digital divide currently excludes people of particular demographics (poor, female, nonwhite) while privileging the views of those with technological access and establishing these views as the baseline assumptions of individuals who participate in the Internet. I believe this is what Benkler refers to when he discusses the idea that “liberal theories that ignore culture are rendered incapable of answering some questions that arise in the real world and have real implications for individuals and politics” (280), and his reference to Gramsci’s hegemony theory relates to the previous criticisms I have levelled against peer information production on the Internet. Benkler finally provides an answer to this problem when he argues that transparency on the Internet allows for greater exposure to a wide range of views, opening objects up to become sites of cultural contestation and controversy. However, one important aspect that he misses is what makes Internet denizens *willing* to criticize certain things. Indeed, one benefit of the mass media being removed from individuals is that there is a distinct feeling that the cultural meanings assigned to objects in the market-based conversation of coroporations and mass media are not “of us.” The Barbie doll, to take Benkler’s example, is in fact a site of cultural contestation as a result of how it has been substantively used and treated in society, but part of the reason many are so willing to criticize it on Wikipedia is because it comes from “the establishment.” On the other hand, Internet projects like Wikipedia are more likely to be excused from criticism because of the sense that they are built by ourselves and others who are like us — psychologically, we are more willing to criticize “the establishment” or “mass institutions” than what we consider our own productions. As a result, it seems that transparency is of no use if people are not willing to criticize the cultural artifacts produced in the networked information economy in the first place. In that sense, I think Benkler should be wary of assuming that the content of cultural conversations stem purely from the substantive aspects of a contested object, and should pay more mind to the idea that contestations might primarily arise based on the social positions of the contesters (the little guy vs. The Man).

  I do see the Internet as a fertile feeding ground for greater cultural freedom and transformation in the area of language. When Benkler argued that culture is a “dynamic process of engagement among those who make [it] up…a frame of meaning within which we must inevitably function and speak to each other, and whose terms, constraints, and affordances we always negotiate” (282), I thought of the way in which language is deployed on the Internet and how that differs from the formalist styles of traditional academic commmunication and exchange. Specifically, the ideas of those in society who haven’t undergone traditional academic education are often dismissed because they are not expressed in the proper *form* — well-written, grammatical, and located in intellectually respectable publications. However, the Internet favours a looser approach to language and written style, with its continual use of loose grammar, abbreviations, and ad hoc neologisms to communicate. Instant messaging is a particularly fertile example of how the definition of ‘legitimate’ or ‘respectable’ styles of communication can flex on the Internet. Failure to use proper punctuation or capitalization is common in instant messaging, and people often do not IM with complete sentences, but rather use carriage returns as *part* of what they are trying to communicate, imitating the way in which people pause in real-life conversations. This more flexible approach opens the realm of ‘legitimate discourse’ to the uneducated, allowing them to participate in redefining the terms and affordances of shared cultural meaning.

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