politics | Peter Bihr

A Trainwreck Called SOPA

19-12-2011

The Washington Post just had a great article about the horrible train wreck called SOPA that we’ve all been watching:

When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it. As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.

And this just about sums it up better than anything, no?

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I just cast my vote in the Berlin state elections (Wikipedia de/en). No worries, I’m not going to go into politics here. And yet, I think there is something to elections, particularly those on state and local level.

I have an almost romantic notion of these elections. Not so much because I think the act of casting the vote in person is a particularly symbolic thing to do; it might be, who knows. No, it’s more because of the nature of the voting process that might just be the most unsexy of all elections.

The ballot boxes are placed in public schools, or nursery homes, or community centers. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with these places, it makes the process – or rather the setting, atmosphere – almost gorgeously unglamorous, fantastically functional.

It’s not that the volunteers on the ground run the show unprofessionally – far from it! It is the complete lack of polish that stands out. No show, no ads, no speeches. Nothing overly patriotic either. Just a few tables, makeshift stands to make your crosses on the ballot out of sight (to speak of privacy would be euphemistic). On some wall or closet or shelf, some flags are attached: Germany, Berlin, Europe. Even the flags look comfortingly small and unglamorous.

Elections on state level are tricky. While very important, they tend to be somewhat low-interest. If you polled folks about any party’s concrete positions on any issue, I’m fairly certain the answers would be based on the national party positions rather than state level, if anything at all. As someone who was involved in political campaigns before, this pains me, yet I’m not immune to it either; far from it, in fact.

And yet. When I got to the local church community center, in shorts and t-shirt as I was on my way to a run, there was a line there. There was a nun, a young dad with his daughter, several people who looked as if they might have come straight out of a club, an old man in a leather jacket and many others. They all stood there in line, paying little attention to the churchy advertisements in the hallway that smelled slightly of canteen food. They all went there, on a rainy Sunday, despite the alleged lack of interest in politics, and cast their votes.

There is something to that.

Being the politics geek that I am, I’ll watch an episode of The West Wing before the first election results will be published from 18h onwards. Plenty of glamor there.

ps. A shout-out: Anna-Lena will provide some waffle-based visualizations of the results at Wahlwaffeln.tumblr.com

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The Wikileaks Process

By: Peter Bihr

08-12-2010

How to work the internets (not), politics

I’ve been racking my brain over the last few days since the whole Wikileaks / Cablegate story began escalating. I’ve been trying, in short, to find my own take and standpoint on Wikileaks and the reaction to their recent publication of embassy cables. I’ve discussed it over and over with friends who have either a journalistic or a web background, and been reading a lot. And only now, and very slowly, am I even able to articulate a clearer, emerging position.

So bear with me while I try to sort out my own thinking. And believe me, it needs sorting out, as this whole situation touches on so many issues from media to political theory, from democracy to internet regulation. Yes, it’s that big, and anyone giving you a simple answer to any question here is full of it. This is not the time for simple answers, or even simple questions.

First of all, as a disclaimer: I can only speculate on Julian Assange’s motives or character. I never met him, so I’ll try to keep speculation to a minimum. That said, right on into the eclectic heap that these arguments represent.

Transparency vs Private Negotiations Transparency is good for democracy, and for mankind. However, not everything can (or should) be made transparent. Just like private conversations of citizens or individuals need to be protected from government (or corporate, for that matter) snooping, negotiations inside or between governments need some protection, too. In Clay Shirky’s words:

(…) human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities.

That doesn’t mean a free pass for backdoor deals, or that governments shouldn’t be held accountable – not at all. It means that in order to truly deliberate, everybody on the table needs to be able to voice their opinions without fear of repression or (in a media-driven age and context) publication. No space to do this means no open-minded, frank negotiations. Instead we’d get just another media theater, and truly that’s not what we need.

Who to blame? On a pure who-to-point-a-finger-at level – and that includes legal and moral finger pointing – we need to ask ourselves: who do we want to blame, and for what? The arguments bounced around are manifold, and they range from weakening the state to treason (on Wikileaks’ side) to intransparency, bullying or abusing power (on several governments’ side). The blame game is, of course, a game that only knows losers: If we decide to go down that path (and it seems like that decision was made awhile ago) then we all lose. Was Wikileaks wrong in publishing the cables? Was it the US government’s fault not to share the information voluntarily? Or maybe a single member of the US army is to blame? Are we to blame for being like Faust, who wants to know everything, and Assange is just like Mephisto, offering us the secret knowledge? This cycle of questions leads nowhere.

I am curious, though, to see where the legal discussions surrounding Assange’s prosecution and arrest will lead us – that might be a different story altogether. (Keep in mind that Assange as an Australian citizen and Wikileaks are not beholden to the US government, nor is the US government accountable to non-US citizens, yet all of them are wrapped into layers and layers of international law.)

Is Assange right or wrong, and who takes the bullets? A sister to the blame question, but with a slightly different focus: Was it “right” (whatever that means) that Assange sought out and published the cables? I think this question really missed the point: it just doesn’t matter at this point, it’s moot.

I’m wondering: who will take the bullets, who will end up owning the risks and costs associated with the whole mess? On a direct line of action-and-reaction, Bradley Manning, the US Army soldier who gave Wikileaks the leaked data, might be the most direct casualty (if that term fits here) of the leaks. Potentially there’s some political fall-out within the embassies and in diplomatic circles. More indirectly, though: could the leaked cables lead to major political fall-out regarding North Korea or Iran? (Not that this necessarily matters if critical information was withheld from the public.) What will happen to the supporters of Wikileaks, those inside and outside the core team that may, or may not, agree with Assange’s course of action?

We don’t know yet what will happen to Assange after his arrest. But I’d wager that he won’t (and can’t) take the bullets for all the others who are now out there, involved in many different ways, in a conflict that is complex at best, devastating at worst. And that is played out with no open, reliable ground rules at all.

Has Assange ruined Wikileaks? Has he ruined Wikileaks, and if so, is this maybe his right as the founder? (And I’m saying this without any idea how many people are involved directly or losely.) The whistleblower platform has, it seems, become important way beyond one person. Or has he become, more than ever, Wikileaks, now that some members are distancing themselves from the platform? It seems, though, that Wikileaks is taking a lot of hits about this affair; or maybe this is the whole point of Wikileaks: to create, or highlight, pain points of sorts, and pushing over the edge is an inherent part of the platform? I’m really undecided on this one.

Due process is key for democracies An absolute core point is that no matter how you twist and turn it, due process is key for democratic governments. In a democratic society there are clear rules (including, but not limited to laws). I strongly urge you to read Clay Shirky’s thoughts on this:

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.

That’s really it: as the government, you have to work inside the law, the system, your mandate. Never ever may a US senator lean on private corporations to circumvent the rule of law, like Joe Lieberman did when he pressured Amazon to remove Wikileaks from their hosting service. Any action like this damages democracy and trust in the democratic so badly it’s hard to imagine that it can be reversed. (Although I hope and guess that eventually it will.) It certainly legitimizes those undemocratic, repressive regimes that the US usually fights, and that the internet usually helps bring more freedom to.

This kind of mafia-style bullying just adds more oil to the fire, and to increase the gaps between even the moderates on both sides of the aisle. If you’re not for us, you’re against us? This time, both sides play it. (Or maybe there are more than two sides here? It seems like it.) The tone is growing more and more hostile the more the conflict escalates. I condemn parts of Assange’s actions, parts of the US government’s actions. Either way, I get (rhetorical) flac because I cannot, and do not want to, side with one side only. There simply doesn’t seem to be a right or wrong – both sides, I’d wager, are behaving grossly wrong and unethical at this point.

The conflict escalates As things unfold, the conflict is escalating quickly. After the initial political fall-out, and the US gov’t leaning on Amazon and (probably) other companies – resulting in Amazon not hosting Wikileaks, neither PayPal nor VISA or Mastercard accepting donations on their behalf – now new players are entering the equation. Anonymous, the global hacker group, have been running attacks on a number of sites including PayPal.

And this is still fairly early in the game: Expect more to come over the next few weeks. Will Sweden extradite Assange to the US? If so, what will they do with him? What’s going to happen on a global political stage regarding those cables, North Korea, Iran? How many lines will the executive branches of the US and European countries over-step?

The bigger picture: What happens to Internet regulation? What I’m most concerned about at this point is: what will happen six months from now? So far, the internet is regulated through some legal layers, but mostly through private/industry and technical agreements. It looks to me like this is going to change, quickly, and not to the better. Years of multi-stakeholder negotiations (think IGF and all) might be in vain now, if the US government pushed ahead in the same style they’ve shown so far in this conflict.

RWW’s take on Wikileaks and the open web:

The ability for Internet companies and Internet users to be able to create and share without government intervention is not just a mark of free society. The tech industry pays a lot of lip service to the “open Internet,” arguing that it is the very thing that has fostered innovation in and growth of the industry. The filters, monitors, blocks, and blacklists associated with repressive governments, so the argument goes, serve not just to prevent access to information but to stifle creativity and entrepreneurship. No matter how one justifies the actions of Amazon and the like – Terms of Service or otherwise – the events this past week have not simply demonstrated the spinelessness of certain companies to stand up to government and public pressure; they have pointed to some of the weak links in the “open Internet,” those points of control that are particularly important (and seemingly particularly vulnerable).

We’ll know very soon, I’m afraid, if our relying on US-based companies for all we do on the web will turn out to be a mistake, and if the web can stay free for all. My fear is, and I can’t stress this enough, that the web will be “collatoral damage” in this conflict, getting tracked and supervised and simply an un-free place.

Let’s hope it won’t.

However, there is an upside, too. In the wake of Wikileaks, at least we have a great, inspired even, debate on the role of traditional media:

Wikileaks has ignited a debate about the rights and responsibilities attached to freeing information.It has illustrated that Governments, however well intentioned, do not have the best judgement in terms of what it is right for citizens to know. It has shown that the established media no longer necessarily gets to make that call either, and forces us all to think about the consequences of that shift. These questions are more pressing even than the constant din about finding new business models to sustain purpose. Finally we are talking about purpose first. How many news organisations now feel differently about how to host and serve content across the web in the wake of Amazon using its commercial prerogative to kick Wikileaks off its servers? How many correspondents and editors would balk at ruining long term relationships with the State Department to publish classified material of the leaked cables-type? (…) Journalism is not just an intermediary in this, it is part of this. Journalists need to know what they think about the mission of Wikileaks and others like it, and they need to know where they would stand if the data dropped onto their desks and the government pressured them to be silent.

Phew. Curious to hear your thoughts.

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ZDF vs Google, Apple, Konsumenten

By: Peter Bihr

14-10-2010

How to work the internets (not), media, politics, web-based innovation

[A note to my international readers: This post has to be in German as it concerns mostly German media; the next one will be in English again. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

“Markus Schächter warnt vor Apple, Google & Co“, so die etwas verstörende Überschrift eines Interviews anlässlich der Münchner Medientage. Vorweg ein ausführliches Zitat von Herrn Schächter (Hervorhebungen von mir):

Ich hoffe, dass wir gemeinsam erkennen, was die Stunde geschlagen hat und dass jede rückwärtsgewandte Diskussion uns keinen Schritt weiter bringt. Wer einen Blick über die Grenzen wirft, der sieht, dass sich die Netzgiganten neu aufstellen. In den USA zeigen Google-TV und Apple-TV wohin die Reise geht. Suchmaschinen und Vertriebsplattformen saugen jeden Content auf, ganz egal von wem er stammt – Zeitungen, Verlage, Sender, Produzenten. Unsere Produkte werden zum Gegenstand fremder Geschäftsmodelle. Die heutigen Hersteller und Verbreiter publizistischer und kultureller Inhalte verlieren die Hoheit über ihre Produkte, wenn sie nicht sehr genau aufpassen. Ich sage es nicht zum ersten Mal: Es wird Zeit, dass wir in Deutschland endlich aufhören, die falschen Türen zu bewachen.

In diesem einen Absatz des Interviews steckt so wahnsinnig viel Verkehrtes, ich weiß kaum, wo ich anfangen soll. Also der Reihe nach, Satz für Satz.

Eines noch vorweg: Ich habe größten Respekt und vollste Hochachtung vor den öffentlich-rechtlichen Sendern und habe auch immer wieder mit und für diese gearbeitet. Viele meiner Freunde, Bekannte und Kollegen arbeiten als Journalisten oder Medienberater für privatwirtschaftliche oder öffentlich-rechtliche Medienbetriebe aller Art. Meine beiden Uniabschlüsse haben den Schwerpunkt Medien und Kommunikation, meine Magisterarbeit beschäftigte sich mit dem Medienwandel und dem Einfluss von Blogs auf die politische Berichterstattung. Anders gesagt, ich kann guten Gewissens sagen, dass ich mich ein wenig mit dem deutschen Mediensystem beschäftigt habe und mich sehr dafür interessiere. Niemals würde es mir in den Sinn kommen, den öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunk abzuschaffen.

Jetzt wo diese Frage aus dem Weg ist, gehen wir an die Substanz:

Markus Schächter: “Ich hoffe, dass wir gemeinsam erkennen, was die Stunde geschlagen hat und dass jede rückwärtsgewandte Diskussion uns keinen Schritt weiter bringt.”

Herr Schächter, ich stimme Ihnen voll und ganz zu. Lassen Sie uns die Zukunft diskutieren und die alten Streitreflexe zwischen öffentlich-rechtlichen und privaten Sendern sowie zwischen deutschen Medien und US-Internetunternehmen unterdrücken.

Markus Schächter: Wer einen Blick über die Grenzen wirft, der sieht, dass sich die Netzgiganten neu aufstellen. In den USA zeigen Google-TV und Apple-TV wohin die Reise geht.

Richtig, in den USA werden gerade die Spielregeln für die Zukunft des Bewegtbildes geschrieben. Besser gesagt: Dort ist das, was wir als “Zukunft des Bewegtbilds” bezeichnen würden längst Alltag: Netflix, Hulu und Co zeigen, wie einfach und gut Video-On-Demand-Dienste und Web-TV funktionieren können. Übrigens ohne dass sich dabei TV und Web in die Quere kommen würden. Hier gibt es diese Dienste nicht, nicht zuletzt da Medien und Politik in Deutschland als überraschend geschlossene Front gegenüber US-amerikanischen Onlineunternehmen auftreten. Damit schadet Deutschland gleich mehrfach – für Medien- und Internetunternehmen wird der Standort unattraktiver, Medienkonsumenten bleiben viele Spannende Kanäle unzugänglich.

Markus Schächter: Suchmaschinen und Vertriebsplattformen saugen jeden Content auf, ganz egal von wem er stammt – Zeitungen, Verlage, Sender, Produzenten.

Herr Schächter, bitte machen Sie doch Ihre Hausaufgaben. Eine Suchmaschine saugt keinen Content auf, sie indiziert ihn, macht ihn auffindbar. Was Suchmaschinen tun ist das Gegenteil dessen, was Sie hier faktenfrei behaupten: Sie stehlen diese Inhalte nicht etwa, wie Sie mit Ihrer Formulierung suggerieren, sondern sorgen dafür, dass mehr Menschen darauf aufmerksam werden. Sollte eine Zeitung, ein Verlag, ein Sender oder Produzent dies nicht wünschen, so gibt es einfachste technische Möglichkeiten, die Indizierung zu verhinden – nur sollten Sie sich bewusst sein, dass die Inhalte damit massiv an Reichweite verlieren. (Auf der Habenseite ließe sich freilich verbuchen, dass Sie Ihr Budget an SEO-Maßnahmen einsparen könnten.)

Markus Schächter: Unsere Produkte werden zum Gegenstand fremder Geschäftsmodelle.

Es ist wahr, andere Firmen verdienen daran, Ihre Inhalte zugänglich zu machen. Nur gehen diese Verdienste nicht auf Ihre Kosten, da wir hier nicht von einem Nullsummenspiel sprechen, sondern von klassischem Mehrwert im besten Sinne. Dies gilt ganz besonders für die öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender, für die Sie sprechen. Im Gegensatz zu ihren privatwirtschaftlichen Kollegen lässt sich wirklich nur schwer argumentieren, dass Ihre Mission dadurch gefährdet ist, wenn Google ein paar Werbungen neben Ihren Textteasern einblendet.

Markus Schächter: Die heutigen Hersteller und Verbreiter publizistischer und kultureller Inhalte verlieren die Hoheit über ihre Produkte, wenn sie nicht sehr genau aufpassen.

Die Hersteller verlieren keineswegs die Hoheit über ihre Produkte, lediglich über ihre Verbreitung – wenn überhaupt. Ich frage mich: wo genau liegt das Problem? Kontrollverlust ist eines der Kerncharakteristika des 21. Jahrhunderts. Dies gilt es als Chance zu begreifen.

Markus Schächter: Ich sage es nicht zum ersten Mal: Es wird Zeit, dass wir in Deutschland endlich aufhören, die falschen Türen zu bewachen.

Herr Schächter, hier bin ich wieder bei Ihnen. Bitte nehmen Sie sich Ihre eigenen Worte zu Herzen und hören Sie auf, die falschen Türen zu bewachen. So intuitiv der Ruf nach mehr Kontrolle auch sein mag, er ist an dieser Stelle nicht nur sinnlos, sondern schädlich. Ein Schelm, der Ihnen unterstellen würde, die allgemeine Angst im deutschen Medienbetrieb vor den Unwägbarkeiten des Medienwandels und den US-Webunternehmen auszunutzen, um den Schulterschluss mit den privaten Sendergruppen zu suchen und somit von der Kritik an den öffentlich-rechtlichen Sendern abzulenken.

Es ist ein Problem, das die öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender schon lange umtreibt: “Wie können wir unseren Erfolg messen?” Allzu häufig messen sie sich mit den Maßstäben der Privatwirtschaft: Reichweite, Page Impressions, Unique Visits. Nicht uninteressant, doch basieren diese Messgrößen auf der Grundannahme, dass Werbeplätze verkauft werden müssen. Das Paradigma im öffentlichen Rundfunk ist freilich ein anderes: Bildung, Information, Gebührenakzeptanz. Diese lassen sich nicht über Reichweite messen, andere Maßstäbe müssen her. Die öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender müssen sich nicht verstecken – aber sie müssen sich auch nicht schützend vor die Privatwirtschaft stellen. Google ist der Freund, nicht der Feind des öffentlichen Rundfunks.

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Google, the FTC and Germany: Public vs Private Media

By: Peter Bihr

21-07-2010

How to work the internets, How to work the internets (not), media, politics

There’s a war going on, and it’s not pretty. The old conflict between publicly funded and private media, and the fight about who regulates the whole sphere. Of course all of it was triggered by the internet. How could the net just allow information to be spread so easily and at such a low cost!

But jokes aside, there’s some seriously disturbing stuff going on right now. Namely, two focal points in this conflict about who should make media and under what conditions, and how should media be consumed.

Focal point #1: Google vs FTC

The FTC published a paper as basis for further discussion (“Staff Discussion Draft”, PDF) to evaluate the situation of news media today and to draft policy proposals. One of them: additional intellectual property rights to support news media against “free riding by news aggregators”. This by itself is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a while. News aggregators (read: Google News), of course, channel traffic to the media sites. There’s no cannibalization going on, it’s the other way round. It’s good to see – and just fair to point out – that the draft also states that “expanded IP rights could restrict citizens’ access to this news, inhibit public discourse, and impinge upon free speech rights.” Yes, that it might well do.

Google reply on their Public Policy blog and the response is well worth reading:

Comments to FTC 20 July 2010

If you prefer the summary, jump straight to Jeff Jarvis, who sides clearly with Google as well as I do: This is not really a legal battle, but one over business models. And protecting an old, broken system should not be in the FTC’s (or anyone’s) interest.

Focal point #2: German public broadcasters are “depublishing”

A similar problem is discussed in Germany these days, if maybe in slightly different environment. In Germany we’ve had strong (and well-funded, particularly compared to the US) public broadcasters. (Note: not newspapers.) These broadcasters have done a tremendous job in the past, and even though there has been a lot of criticism over budgets and spending and about certain areas of engagement, they have a fairly strong support on a societal level. They have a clear mandate to provide basic information in all areas (including entertainment), and at least kind-of-clear limits of their engagement (no dating sites etc). These limits are based mainly on protecting private companies from publicly funded competition.

And it’s this eternal conflict of interests (here: “the public” vs “private publishing corporations”) that’s at the core of the dilemma. Public broadcasters in Germany were always very limited on what they could do online. But now, content has to be “depublished”* after some time. (Depending on the kind of content, which is evaluated by a three step system of the more absurd kind of type, after a week, a year or some other time span.) The content won’t be deleted, but hidden.

(Links with some background in German: Tagesschau summary of the regulating Rundfunkstaatsvertrag, Tagesschau’s Jörg Sadrozinski’s take on Depublizieren.)

How much protection do private publishers need from the government?

Now this raises all kinds of interesting questions. (The biggest of which is of course: WTF? But let’s save that for another time.) Questions I cannot necessarily answer off the top of my head. Like: Should private broadcasters really be protected from public broadcasters? How much so? Are there certain fields where this protection should be stronger than others? (Sports? Mobile services?) But also: How can content that we paid for by our (publicly collected and handled) fees be locked away after we paid for it, and how can even more of our money be spent on locking it away? What happens to all the references in Wikipedia that linked to said public content? How can a generation of tax and fee payers be expected to pay for fees if the content won’t be available through the channels they use?

I cannot even remember the last time I watched TV at home, on a TV set, live, on the air. And I certainly won’t start now.

So we need to ask ourselves: How much protection do we want to give to publishers and broadcasters, and what price are we willing to pay?

There’s a war going on, and it’s not pretty.

The word makes me want to invoke Godwin’s Law. But I’ll hold back, I promise.

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Google Collaboratory Report #1

By: Peter Bihr

01-07-2010

collaboration, How to work the internets, politics

It’s done! Over the course of the last few months I’ve been part of the German Google Collaboratory “Internet & Society”. The expert group is part of Google’s effort to reach out to multiple stakeholder groups and discuss with experts the challenges and opportunities our society faces. We discussed a whole range of topics from privacy to media literacy to democracy, and conducted a survey among the German web community about all this. We crunched the numbers and interpreted the input we got.

Today, the final report was published. Download the report here (PDF, 1.9MB, language: .de). (Update: find all reports here.)

Together with Henning Lesch of eco and I focused mainly on privacy. You can find the results and essence of the research under the headline “Datenschutz & Privatsphäre”.

What really struck me – in the expert group as well as in the survey and in the discussions we had with politicians – is how hard it is to come to any clear solutions in this field. It almost seems like we, as a society, need to have some in-depth discussion on which exact questions to even ask, and how to define all the buzz words. Do we need anonymity online? How much? Absolute or relative anonymity? What exactly does anonymity entail? It’s really not all that simple.

Although I will say that personally I strongly favor an internet that allows for anonymity over one where all action can be tracked. In fact, I believe that the opportunity to discuss open and free and without fear of repercussion (in other words: in anonymity) is an important basis of a strong and free democracy. (Luckily, many, many of the participants of our survey hold a similar view.)

Long story short: I tremendously enjoyed working with all these smart folks. And I hope this report can help foster a good discussion about where we’re headed and how we’d best get there.

As it is today, there is much to discuss, and not all of the folks in a position to make the relevant decisions seem to be up to speed. (And you can’t blame them, there’s just too much on everyone’s plate!) In the US, Code For America exists solely to support the decision makers in DC with external expertise in all questions related to the web. If there’s demand for something similar in Germany, sign me up. We as the web community shouldn’t stand back and complain about politicians, but instead offer a hand to work with them. There’s no other way forward.

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Google Internet & Society Collaboratory and I worked with Google before.

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TV shows at the barber shop & why the internet isn’t the end of political discussion

By: Peter Bihr

20-04-2010

digital divide, media, politics

In a New York Times article about how the internet shapes political discourse, this lovely quote crossed my path (it paraphrases Professor Cass R. Sunstein’s ideas):

In the mid-20th century, Americans got most of their news through a few big networks and mass-market magazines. People were forced to encounter political viewpoints different from their own. Moreover, the mass media gave Americans shared experiences. If you met strangers in a barbershop, you could be pretty sure you would have something in common to talk about from watching the same TV shows.

The underlying question is, of course, one that’s been debated in media sciences for a long time: Are a few mass media essential for political discourse by both filtering the most relevant information and providing focal points for discussions – and if so, will an unfiltered internet lead to a fragmentation of the debate? Or are the mass media the bottle neck that really prevents open discussion and the internet with its lack of hierarchies takes democratic debate to the next level?

Going back to the quote, I’d agree to the first bit: In mass media, at least in the more balanced ones, people are forced to encounter political viewpoints different from their own. (Quite what they make of that information is another question. Look it up.)

The second part, though, strikes me not only as wrong, but also as sad. If you met strangers in a barbershop (A barbershop? Really?), and you’d only have some TV shows to talk about, what a sad world. How about exchanging ideas about the stuff that’s been fascinating to you, and ask for the other person’s inspirations instead? How about discussing politics, or arts, or video podcasts or even TV shows, but not by comparing notes on the same stuff, but by sharing the interesting bits you found consuming them? Why not ask about a good place to have lunch?

Seriously, if the only conversation you can strike up is about a TV show, then maybe it’s better to just let the barber do their job and be done with it.

Luckily, a recent study on ideological segregation on the internet mentioned in the same article has shown that all of this isn’t true at all. Instead of clustering around sites with their own political agenda and viewpoint, most internet users travel far and wide and expose themselves to plenty of different political viewpoints. The world is saved.

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Peter Bihr

A Trainwreck Called SOPA

Berlin votes

The Wikileaks Process

ZDF vs Google, Apple, Konsumenten

Google, the FTC and Germany: Public vs Private Media

Google Collaboratory Report #1

TV shows at the barber shop & why the internet isn’t the end of political discussion

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