The powerful love the silence of others, and the powerful love to listen. On 5/11/11, Freedom ♡ (@tweets4peace) writes:

“#childhoodmemories Probably before learning my abc I knew I couldn’t say a word about Syrian politics or Assad family.” [ http://is.gd/2CPHcX ]

And this:

“Families have been asked to go into the streets as homes are searched. Also many state security are situated on top of the buildings. #syria” [ http://is.gd/5gK7fE ]

Emily Bell on “the live updating stream of thought and reaction” that is available to most of us: http://wp.me/pZdr6-2j @EmilyBell

This “live updating stream of thought and reaction” matters as it hooks into lives, groups, and institutions. http://t.co/zUlaEWa @EmilyBell

Schools in a democracy should teach citizens how to create “little messages that matter” in this way.

Žižek on the ongoing commercialization, that is, destruction, of the Open Web, where “Everything thus becomes accessible, but only as mediated through a company which owns it all.” Via @evgenymorozov. Some, such as Dave Winer, call this the creation of a silo or walled garden.

I notice that the Guardian’s editorial this week celebrating 190 years of the paper’s existence manages to stay calm about what to call these people who participate in new ways in the work of informing others. In the last paragraph, the writer acknowledges that in this time of industry revolution, the names change, necessarily, as roles change, calling “users” those who an earlier generation of journalists would have called “readers” and noting that whatever their name they are not so interested in the largely passive role that papers customarily assigned their readers. Still calm, the editorial writer asserts a string of core journalistic values that are unchanged by the upheaval in news distribution, and then the writer quickly and quietly names the more deeply revolutionary fact: that journalism is finding within its grasp “the ability to amplify, celebrate and harness other voices” that would previously have found no audience and no civic use.

The passage itself:

In March the Guardian was read by the largest audience in its history – more than 49 million unique users, as Scott didn’t call his readers. He thought of his paper as a pulpit. Readers today are less taken with sermons. Technology has revolutionised the way news is distributed – but also the ability to amplify, celebrate and harness other voices. The next 10 years – between now and our bicentenary – will see even more rapid and radical changes in the media. It is good to pause and reflect that the things that matter most – truthfulness, free thought, honest reporting, a plurality of opinion, a belief in fairness, justice and, most crucially, independence – do not change.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has been refining his claims for the new journalism in a series of speeches over the last few years, including one in which he describes a new “joint authority” that no doubt owes its power to the traditional skills of professional journalists, the tools that create opportunities for worthy acts of independent reporting as well as collaboration by tens of thousands of non-professionals, and the additional value that can be created when the professionals help amplify and perhaps even guide that reporting alongside their own.

In “What I Think I Know About Journalism,” Jay Rosen’s 25th anniversary reflection on what he’s learned about his field, the fourth point keeps calling me back. I notice the tightly worded section title, where similar phrases represent very different meanings. That means we can’t think our way through the problems of journalism today, which are also society’s problems, without attending to the precise meaning of words. How we say it, how we think it, matters. We’ll need to be at our best to work it through. He begins:

[#4] Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.

So, information—facts—made public: we misunderstand how this process works. “Making facts public” seems like putting a few coins on the counter at the store, a simple transaction in which the coins mean about the same thing for one person as for another. They—coins, facts—just move about, and sometimes they are here and sometimes they are somewhere else, and they are simple. But that’s not right, Rosen’s section title suggests. Handing over facts as if we were conducting a simple transaction will not turn a herd made up of consumers into a public made of citizens. Something more transformative must take place.

Perhaps the facts must be tested and transformed as they pass through the digesting intelligence of the citizens; perhaps the citizens must be challenged and transformed by their encounter, if it is deep enough, with the facts; perhaps people must abandon their private lives and risk becoming members of an active community. Rosen’s 4th item suggests that mechanical understandings of journalism and the public sphere fail because they do not reflect how information actually works in a transformative fashion in our lives, when things are going well. It’s not a mechanical process.

It is a challenging one, he suggests in his first two paragraphs (“There’s a reason why … ‘… out of the loop.’”), because a glut of information is difficult for a person to handle, and competing perspectives battle it out for our attention rather than for our understanding. Much of what we see is meant to gather ratings from us rather than inquire into truth with us.

In the third paragraph, the long quotation from Lasch makes a fuller sketch of the process by which people in community actually can, and sometimes do, think and learn together. That’s the goal, but it can’t be achieved through mechanical transactions:

In The Lost Art of Argument, Christopher Lasch said we should invert the usual order of information and debate. “We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually understood as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of information. Otherwise, we take in information passively– if we take it in at all.”

In the comments, Bob Calo provides another Lasch quotation, from Revolt of the Elites. Lasch tries to explain the alienation of the citizen, now largely just a consumer, I imagine. If you can’t participate meaningfully, why bother digesting the mass of information?

In the “age of information,” the American people are notoriously ill informed. The explanation of this seeming paradox is obvious, though seldom offered: Having been effectively excluded from public debate on the grounds of their incompetence, most Americans no longer have any use for the information inflicted on them in such large amounts.

If everybody is right here, then the role of our best institutions, such as journalism, higher education, local government, and so forth, should be to help people engage. To engage with people in ways that our fellow citizens would find useful, as Rosen says, so they—we—engage back. I think in an early Rebooting the News Rosen spoke of the role of journalism being to help people participate in their own democracy. That insight is lurking here too.

So “making a public” is an activity far more involving than simply placing a coin on a counter or a newspaper on the doorstep. When we get it right, readers become “the people formerly known as the audience,” and chances are that more and more of those people come to understand why citizenship grows more interesting when it is more than reading the paper and occasionally voting or shooting the breeze in a coffee shop or on a blog. For a member of a healthy public, there is much active and interesting work to be done. Journalism, rightly practiced, helps create a public and get us there.

The sixty second video version of parts two and three of last year’s public lecture on literacy and active citizenship, or to put it another way, how citizens make their words matter in a Facebook/Twitter world.

_______________________________
Photo credits. Freisler saluting (German National Archive). Otto Hampel (Gestapo file). Postcard (Appendix, Every Man Dies Alone). Guillotine (Wikipedia). Parliament (Steve Harris). Rusbridger (The Guardian). African child (Candace Felt, NY Times). Twitter graffiti (Steve Crisp/Reuters). Tahrir Square (CBC, submitted photo). University of Iowa (Doug Hesse). South Bend graffiti (photo by Ken Smith). [This video is meant for educational use and should qualify for fair use of images, but I welcome contact from copyright holders.]

At my earlier blog, Elizabeth Edwards joined a 2003 conversation about the quality of political discourse, making a distinction between political speech that is essentially marketing and speech that creates “a community of thought, analysis, and exchange.” Here is her entry:

As someone who has participated in online dialogues for years (previously in newsgroups, now in blogs), I have found there is an element on online dialogue that is inhibiting to political candidates (and surrogates) and maybe also inhibiting to productive analysis generally — and that is tone. There is an entertaining edge to online dialogue. In fact maybe there is an imperative of an entertaining edge — for it is easier to scroll past a dull online entry than even to reach for the remote to change the television channel. Maureen Dowd would be good at combining content and edge, but we are not all blessed with that talent or that license.

Even naming the entries on a weblog or a forum has become a form of marketing — “come, read me” — so the writer, blogger, poster feels compelled to whip up interest with a teaser and then feels to compelled to try to live up to the tease. (Of course, like many Hollywood trailers, often if you have read the title of the entry, you have read the best the author has to offer.) The compulsion can not be satisfied either — because each day the last day’s offering becomes stale and a new teaser is needed. Maybe even Maureen Dowd could not keep pace.

And for many bloggers and commenters, it is not about dialogue, it is in fact about marketing — in my present world, a candidate, and ultimately in every field, our point of view. The desire then to influence aggravates these structural shortcomings — more tease, more edge, more readers, more baiting responses so there are more comments — and with all of this, the elements of productive dialogue become less and less useful.

But I don’t despair. Serious blogs, and Lessig’s comes to mind first, have really become a community of thought, analysis, and exchange. Is that the model? I don’t know. I suspect there is not a single model. All I know is this comment is already too long for the medium and with each new sentence I lose yet another reader.

Concerning the Wikileaks work of Julian Assange, Misha Glenny writes about the traditional imbalance between a government’s access to information and the access of the rest of us:

[K]nowledge translates into power and influence. For most of history, government has enjoyed an easy superiority in adjusting the ebb and flow of information. Now the rules of the contest have changed.

Against this traditional control, Glenny sets an equally long-standing human desire to know and to tell the story of what we know. The powerful, however, consider it bad form for others to have a chance to tell the story.

And it is a sign of a properly worldly world leader, it seems, to want this control to be tightly held. “Is this not the curse of power, forever compelled to conceal and dissemble?” Glenny asks. In a lovely detail, she notices a seemingly older and wiser former British prime minister returning (as the powerful should) to the savvy fold:

In his recent memoir, Tony Blair berates himself for introducing a Freedom of Information Act. ‘‘You idiot. You naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop,’’ he writes.

The powerful are foolish to want information to circulate in the world, according to Blair. He once thought otherwise.

(“The Gift of Information,” NY Times, 12/4/10)

In the NY Times Diagnosis feature this week a key element of the story is a husband who tells a doctor that she has to reconsider the diagnosis and treatment being given his wife because it is not working. “We can’t go on this way,” he tells her.

For whatever reason, Dr. Lisa Sanders is able to hear his remark seriously, and she returns to the details of the woman’s medical history, where she discovers a new pattern and is able to make a fresh and successful diagnosis.

Doctors know that they should be open to the ideas and opinions of non-experts, and in fact they should rely quite a bit on them, Sanders notes:

In medical school, I was often told that if you listen, the patient will tell you what she has. It turns out that sometimes the patient’s husband will, too.

It appears, then, that experts are tempted by the tools of their expertise–the diagnostic tests, say, and the machinery and the science–tempted so fully at times that they might forget that the patient, and even the patient’s friends and family, may have in hand vital clues and even accurate judgments about a course of treatment. In an expert-dominated society, we need customs by which non-experts are granted their turn to speak in every arena, and we need experts who understand the limitations of their training and the science of their field. Sanders shows ways that one kind of expert can forget the lesson.

In fact, part of the problem might be a misunderstanding of the nature of science–a faith in its powers that is not accurately aligned with the amazing extent as well as the real limits of its powers. Possibly, too, experts play the odds, letting their science tell them the most likely diagnosis but forgetting that they are making a wager with a person’s life, not carrying out a rigorously logical methodology that always leads to truth.

(“A Heart Loses Its Way,” 12/3/10)

Imagine that you owned the digital data produced by your own life, Indhira Rojas asks with the help of NY Times writer Rob Walker. You know, the data produced whenever you do business with a credit card, operate your smart phone, visit a website. Other people are gathering this information and using it.

A quick example from Walker’s opening paragraph: the grocery store gives you a small discount for using a card that lets them track the pattern of your shopping. This information must be of some value to them, and might be of some value to each of us. Right now, we give this information away, and we couldn’t easily get it back anyway. But maybe we could get it back. Maybe we should.

Rojas has in mind new ways to spot the patterns of our own behavior, that is, to improve our own lives. But couldn’t you also sell the data? After all, it is, in some way, yours. But for now we can’t even easily have access to it.

(“Wasted Data,” 12/3/10)