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)

Votes are little messages that matter, but what exactly do votes say? According to Elizabeth Drew, our politicians routinely claim to know exactly what voters were saying with their votes:

After an election, there’s inevitably a variety of pronouncements of politicians on what they “heard the voters say.” They and the various pundits largely “hear” an echo of their own previously held views and find vindication of their particular hobbyhorses. It’s a subjective and self-serving exercise.

Perhaps we will learn somehow to send messages that are more precise, less easy for politicians to translate in such self-serving ways. To accomplish this, the ballot box is a necessary but not sufficient means of communication.

(“In the Bitter New Washington,” NY Review of Books, 12/23/10 issue)

I’ve been meaning to look back at “Recipe Redux: The Community Cookbook,” Amanda Hesser’s 10/6/10 account of working with New York Times readers to find the best recipes from the history of the paper to gather into a new cookbook. When I first read the piece in the food issue of the Sunday magazine I thought that some of the elements of reshaping news production had snuck up on her, uninvited, but that she had done a good job of noticing what was happening and making the most of it. So first I’ll summarize her story and then look more closely at some of the ingredients.

A quick summary, then: Hesser wanted to write this new cookbook drawing on a vast archive of information, found this impossible to do because of the size of the archive, then called upon Times readers to assist in the screening. Upon sending out the call, Hesser discovered a far more interesting and vigorous cloud of people out there ready to participate, a discovery which challenged her notion of the newspaper’s authority, eased her work substantially, and changed both the content and the shape of the final product.

Now, some of the themes and stages, plucked in sequence as quotations from the essay.

The story began with business as usual—the authority and creativity of the individual expert…

Six years ago, I decided to write a cookbook that would gather the best New York Times recipes ever. I was sure it was a great idea…

…and the authority of the institution:

…because the paper — which began publishing recipes in the 1850s— has been one of the leading voices in the evolution of American food.

However, the true scope of such knowledge was beyond even experts:

But it turned out to be a terrible idea logistically, because The Times has published tens of thousands of recipes.

And somehow she turned to a group of strangers, the readers of the Times, for help. This was no doubt against all of her training as a journalist, and it certainly felt strange to her.

So I turned to the paper’s readers — you! — a group of people I barely knew, for help, placing a small author’s query in the Dining section, soliciting readers’ “most stained recipes” from The Times.

The honest invitation to participate was received with overwhelming pleasure among the readers:

The following morning, coffee in hand in my gray cubicle on 43rd Street, I was greeted by a tidal wave of e-mail.

In these replies, clues came in that hinted of a rich and varied life on the other side of the expert/audience divide, the journalist/reader divide, the paper/people divide. There is more going on out there than the journalist has guessed:

The letters also contained readers’ passionate accounts of relationships with dishes they had been cooking for decades. They wrote me about recipes that held together their marriages, reminded them of lost youth, gave them the cooking bug and symbolized their annual family gatherings.

These readers were individuals with character, desire, history. Hesser’s old notion of the readership:

…as an amorphous, anonymous mass…

…began to erode. Happily so, since it’s not proper to believe you work for an amorphous, anonymous mass when that’s not the case. You make mistakes about them if you think of them that way. These people, she sees now, have traits, and she sees them:

…as bands of rabid partisans. There were the seasonal-cooking fanatics, the chocoholics, the Claiborne devotees. And there were simply readers who, for decades, waited each weekend for the thwump of The Times on their doorsteps so they could tear out the recipes and dash to the store.

Listening in this way changed Hesser as a journalist. These people with their individuality and their group identity and their active contributions:

…first led to this series of columns, which looks back at some of the most notable recipes. And then they changed the shape of my career.

The cookbook, published after about six years of work, came out of the contributions from the readers after testing and shaping by the two cookbook authors.

My talented assistant (and now business partner), Merrill Stubbs, collated all these reader suggestions into a document 145 single-spaced pages long, comprising more than 6,000 recipes.

The working papers reflected community values:

That file sums up what, exactly, Times readers really love to eat … and which writers’ recipes seemed most inventive and easiest to make.

The contributions were not predictable, since they came from a diverse group of real people with whose lives were unfolding over time on their own terms:

Four of the top five most-recommended recipes were desserts; more surprisingly, four of the five were more than 20 years old.

But these contributions were a lesson (of several kinds*) from the non-expert to the expert:

It was a survey course in the food of the last two generations in America.

Since people were involved, there were fads and fashions, discoveries and improvements, and the sad forgetting of worthy traditions:

We learned to cook pasta and to sauce it properly, as well as how to roast vegetables, but we left a lot of great Germanic foods like goulash and spaetzle by the curb.

When experts didn’t assert themselves overly in shaping the food columns of the older Times, odd and quirky beliefs had been asserted by the crowd:

None of this material seems to have been vetted by editors, so readers were free to propagate a conviction that noses should be wiped by alternating left and right sides to prevent “deformity,” or that anxious people should eat fatty foods because fat around the nerves “smoothes them out.”

The readers revealed themselves to be:

…a remarkably vigorous community…

…any one of whom might also be, for example:

…occasionally sexist and racist….

Hesser changed the kind of columns she was writing to incorporate the new-found energy of the readership:

Along the way, I created this column, Recipe Redux, to showcase both lost gems and reader favorites.

She invited other experts to tap into this vein of reader-provided, reader-shaped content:

…ask[ing] a chef to use the old recipe as a jumping-off point to create something new, as a way of capturing the evolution of recipes and recontextualizing the past.

She carried on with her project, but it changed, no longer reflecting the comprehensive scope beloved by the expert but something else:

It wasn’t going to be a dutifully comprehensive collection or a thoroughgoing history of American cooking. It was going to be an eclectic panorama of both highfalutin masterpieces and lowbrow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions. It was going to be by turns global and local, simple and baroque, ancient and prescient…

…because…

…its foundation would largely reflect the tastes of the thousands of readers who wrote in to guide me.

How, Hesser wondered, could this whole progression of surprising experiences possibly have come to pass? It went against all of her training and her understanding of the role of the journalist as expert. She decided to ask a new kind of expert what had just happened to her.

Andrew Rasiej … told me recently, “Newspapers think they’re just in the information business, but they’re really in the business of community building as well.”

She realized that the Times misunderstood its relationship to its readers. Her own section, for example:

The Times’s food section, which has been around in various forms since the 1940s, had always thought of itself as having had a planet-and-moons relationship with its readers.

Readers could write the occasional thumbs-up, thumbs-down letter, but journalists essentially worked in ignorance of their readership:

I essentially had two kinds of interactions with the Times “community”: the letters of praise, which perked you up, and the complaining, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about ones you wanted to forget, usually because it was too late to fix your mistake. But mostly I wrote in a vacuum.

It appeared that readers had no ambitions beyond the narrow confines of their own lives and no power to speak and act more widely anyway:

And Times food readers mostly talked among themselves.

But in working deeply in the archive of the Times food section, with the help of the suggestions of the many readers who wrote in, she began to understand a very different relationship between her audience and her section of the Times:

I began to see that readers had always been integral to the Times food pages, whether they contributed recipes [in the old days] … or were featured by people like [resident expert] Craig Claiborne, many of whose most famous recipes … came from friends and readers.

Not only the paper and its community but our whole culture, it turned out, worked differently than Hesser had ever imagined. Authority and judgment in culture works far differently, or can work far differently, than an expert is likely to believe it does:

…the shape of our food culture, I saw for the first time, did not live in the hands of chefs or the media. It lived in the hands of regular people — home cooks, foodies, whatever label you want to give them — who decide what sticks.

An accurate understanding of the relationship of institutions like the Times to readers in the movement of the wider culture requires a different metaphor:

It’s not planet and moons but a large asteroid belt.

Eyes now opened, Hesser saw the evidence all around her of judgment and authority dispersed, liberated from dominating expertise, at least in the area of food culture:

During my testing, I realized that not only did the 19th-century archive consist almost entirely of recipes by home cooks, but so did many of the most-recommended recipes. Four of the five most-recommended recipes — the apple cake, pancake, chocolate cake and lasagna — originated with nonprofessionals.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Taste of Home, the largest cooking magazine in the country, with a circulation of 3.2 million, is entirely made up of reader recipes. So were the beloved and often wildly successful community cookbooks of yore.

For those who have learned how to look, the Internet reveals layers of inventive food culture liberated from traditional limitations—including the journalist’s now dated understanding of audience—by new speed of publishing, connectivity, innovation:

…over the past decade the food movement and technology have converged, fundamentally changing the way recipes and food information were distributed. Suddenly there were regular people everywhere who were knowledgeable about food, and there was a new medium through which they could express themselves: blogs. The number of food bloggers has proliferated into the thousands, and a few of them, like the Pioneer Woman, Smitten Kitchen and101Cookbooks, have become brands.

Hesser’s team saw need, opportunity, and tools in place to create a new genre of participatory cookbook writing, too, on the Internet:

…an online platform for gathering talented cooks and curating their recipes … a new community-building venture…. It would be democratic and fun…

…and together they would produce cookbooks without giving all the authority back to experts. Once again, Hesser had the experience of asking people to join in and finding that they loved being invited:

We had no idea who would show up to our tiny atoll in the Internet sea … but soon enough … 100,000 or so regulars …. Week after week, there were exceptional entries …. People visited from Slovenia and Australia. People fought, and we gave them timeouts. People said we changed their lives and cried when the 52 weeks were over.

The Times once worked this way:

…for more than 150 years …. The paper provided a playing field with established parameters, to which readers like Aunt Addie and Claiborne’s followers conformed; they sent in their recipes and letters and expected little in return….

…but now the food writers, at least, discovered that they could work in an entirely different way:

Now it’s a different kind of conversation. The Internet’s elimination of geography means molecular-gastronomy enthusiasts can crawl out from behind their immersion circulators and find one another; so can the thousands of cupcake bakers. And its compression of time allows the community to make instant and intense connections. On food52, we just introduced the Foodpickle feature, inspired by StackOverflow.com, which allows anyone to ask a cooking question through Twitter and receive a prompt, informed answer from a fellow cook. Now you can take the community to the stove with you and get instant help with your pan sauce.

The old metaphors that describe the newspaper, and the wider culture, are dead, replaced by new ones. And readers are more inventive than the journalists can be on their own:

Today there is no defined playing field — you just give the viewers the ball, and they make up their own game. Our community members have organized potlucks in the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Tex., and Washington. They’ve debated authenticity and shared ideas for slow-cookers. And we like it this way. Merrill and I have gone from careers of broadcasting our work to collaborating with strangers. While we don’t believe the wiki model works for food — personal voice and style are invaluable — we are now total converts to the power of crowd-sourcing. We trust the crowd. And so far, at least, it hasn’t begun to obsess about asthmatic canaries.

Hesser concludes, as any food writer might, with a 43 year old recipe annotated both by the reader who sent it in and by the journalist herself.

In college, the psychology professor said that you can tell learning has taken place when you see a change in behavior.

*If you change your working relationship to your audience, you will understand that audience in a new way. The tools that support those two steps also support collaborations that produce insights not likely to be found any other way, framed in genres altered by collaboration and by the social tools that made it possible. Tools, genres, partnerships, models of authority and active citizenship all change, and so does the community’s understanding of itself and its history at the same time.

Bonus round: if one knowledge industry (journalism) must change as radically as this, what about another knowledge industry? I’m thinking of the one that employs me.

PS. And did the Obama campaign learn some of these lessons but forget them once the team started to govern? Did they assume that the new rules applied in one sphere but not the other?