Too Long For Twitter, too Short for Nieman

Why Law and Economics Became the Dominant Intellectual Framework For Thinking About the Internet

(or, why Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig still rule our world.)

• They got there first: the material conditions for publishing and rewarding legal scholarship are totally different than those in other fields. It moves faster, for one thing. For another thing, it rewards a-empirical claims.
• Mainstream sociology and history have a bias towards thinking that nothing is new, ever, and thus ignored the internet. Plus, slow journals — see point 1.)
• The rational-choice discourse of the law & economics school has strong affinities with the economistic neo-liberal discourse that ruled the U.S. in the late 90s (and rules the Valley, still.)
• At the same time, though, L&E thinkers can justifiably claim to embrace a certain critical edge in their focus on a certain kind of  freedom (see Benkler on Wikileaks and Lessig on Aaron Swartz, for example. See also Indymedia.) They this are taken seriously by radicals as well.
• Lawyers talk about “policy” and are this Serious and Relevant to Serious People in a way that critical sociologists, for instance, are not.
• So in Latourian terms: they make themselves an obligatory passage point for multiple intellectual domains, including mainstream journal based scholarship, the Valley, policy makers, and a certain kind of radical.

One of the most interesting things Yochai Benkler ever wrote was this:

“Equally central from around that time, but at an angle, were a paper under Terry Fisher’s guidance on nineteenth-century homesteading and the radical republicans, and a series of classes and papers with Frank Michelman, Duncan Kennedy, Mort Horwitz, Roberto Unger, and the late David Charny, which led me to think quite fundamentally about the role of property and economic organization in the construction of human freedom. It was Frank Michelman who taught me that the hard trick was to do so as a liberal.”

Or finally: see this paper by @kreissdaniel et. al for the full story. 

(Sunday Writing)

[…]

The sixth chapter carries the story up to the present day through an ethnographic and qualitative analysis of Document Cloud and the Overview Project, two data-driven journalistic enterprises which unite the formerly disparate realms of document collection, computational journalism, and algorithmic information processing. Through an examination of these projects and the hacker journalists that build and maintain them, that chapter contends that we may be witnessing an emerging epistemological fusion between the idea of the document as “clue” and the document as “data,” a fusion whose occupational implications  may rival those that occurred two centuries ago when entrepreneurially-minded printers began to understand news as a report rather than a record. In both cases, these epistemological changes were paralleled by (and complicated by) ontological shifts in understanding the meaning of paper evidence. While this is the first (and only) chapter of the book based primarily on ethnographic, rather than historical, research, the history recounted in the previous pages helps me put the somewhat presentist discussions of hacker journalism in their historical context. With luck, this historicization of the present will keep us from seeing the emergence of big-data analysis in journalism as simply the happy synthesis of two previously incompatible ways of knowing the world. 

[…]

Journalism and Documents- A Preliminary Attempt To Start A New Project

So this is the first thing I’ve written about any of this.

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The material turn in the humanities and the social sciences is, by now, well underway. Perhaps surprisingly, the field of “media studies” — often wrongly understood the to be little more than the analysis what John Durham Peters described as “communication without embodiment, contact achieved by the sharing of spiritual (electrical) fluids” (139) (see also Packer, edited volume)— has played a key role in this materialist revival. What is less surprising, on the other hand, is the fact that the field of journalism studies has been both profoundly shaped by this larger materialist turn and largely unselfconscious about the shaping. Existing at the uncomfortable intersection been professional practice and hard social science, between popular punditry and occasionally rigorous scholarship, journalism studies is disinclined to spend too much time ruminating about its place in the byzantine world of disciplinary disputation (for an exception see Zelizer 2004; also see much of the work by scholars pioneering the study of communication as an academic field). Even when it does address specific questions of the role played material culture in the production of news (cite cite cite, specifically Zelizer 2008), journalism research usually displays an admirable dislike for overt academic scholasticism.

Insofar as this book is the study of the changing use of documents in journalism, both over time and on into the present day, however, it must necessarily grapple with larger issues of materiality at stake when one purports to analyze the role of a profoundly paper medium in the production of public knowledge. 

Data Journalism, 1911 Protestant Revival Style

From: Bateman, Bradley W (2001). “Make a Righteous Number: Social Surveys, the Men and Religion Forward Movement, and Quantification in American Economics.” History of Political Economy, Volume 33, Annual Supplement, 2001, pp. 57-85 

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The [1911] Men and Religion Forward Movement had  special features that no previous [Protestant] revival had employed. One of these was an explicit effort to use the press as a means of promoting the event. The Committee of 100 in each city was to have a Publicity Committee, whose work was of “the utmost importance.” […] it was to “furnish varied and live copy” (10– 11) each week to the local newspapers to insure maximal exposure for the Movement. As the actual event approached, the articles fed to the press were to increase and the Committee was to arrange for daily press coverage during the eight days of the revival. 

[…]

As it turned out, however, the content of those press releases was to include not only announcements of the speakers and revivalists to be involved, but also social statistics about the community in which the  event was to take place. In each of the seventy-six cities in which an eight-day event was held, a large-scale effort was undertaken to measure the “social and religious statistics” of the city.  All of this information was then to be channeled through the Publicity Committee to the press to impress upon the men and boys of the city the need for Christian social service.

Beware of Journalists Bearing Solutions?

The slightly longer version of my challenge to Jonathan Stray and Blair Hickman:

Background: Stray (“Journalism for Makers,”) Hickman (“Solution Journalism.”)

The challenge: By what right, and on what grounds, do journalists claim the authority to offer solutions to any particularly difficult problem? Journalists are neither elected, nor particularly accountable, nor all that expert in anything in particular. 

More: I find it amazing that at possibly it’s lowest moment— under threat of commercial collapse, challenged by “citizen journalists,” and distrusted by nearly everyone— journalism would raise the stakes and claim that it can do more for the public not less. This is powerful and admirable. As I think I noted in my initial tweet, I actually mostly agree with Stray and Hickman — but I want to play devil’s advocate and push the thought. 

Happy to see where the conversation goes from here. 

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UPDATED: Even more background (but no direct link, sorry). A similar challenge from the past. “What Public Journalism Knows About Journalism But Doesn’t Know About “The Public,” Michael Schudson, 1999. If I can find a pdf I will put it up, but as a book chapter it is tough. 

Algorithms and Journalism: A Very Short Starting Point

When we start thinking about documents, sources, and direct interviews as news objects— objects that present particular evidentiary claims and are embedded in specific historical trajectories— we can see that there might be additional objects that also constitute fragments of journalistic evidence, but which are less universally discussed by either journalism educators or journalism scholars. The spectrum of possible news objects, in other words, is far more complex than the usual rundown of “documents, interviews, and observations” might suggest, and might include public forums, links, databases, web metric reports, T-1 internet lines, and tweets as potential fragments of a larger journalistic network. It might also include algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for studying the relationship between journalistic practices, journalistic products, and one particular journalistic object— the algorithm.

My Elevator Pitch

The thing about ethnographic research is that it can take you a half-decade or more to summarize your findings. Seriously.

Anderson’s study of news production in Philadelphia is the first ethnographic analysis of news production to examine the entirety of a local news ecosystem, rather than a few key institutions within that ecosystem. Much of the current crisis in journalism is blamed on economic factors. However, Anderson’s study shows that journalists have long rested their occupational authority on their claims to embody the public through original reporting, and that in the digital age, both the idea of the “unitary public” and the meaning of “original reporting” is now in crisis.

Objects, Not Objectivity

Journalistic practices are methodological practices, even though scholarly researchers (and journalists themselves) do not often speak of them that way. Just as lawyers, sociologists, and physicists each weave together a diverse set of discourses, technologies, shards of evidence, and institutional frameworks to produce particular patterns of truth, so do journalists. To date, most of the conversation about journalism as methodology has focused on Meyer’s provocative interventions around the concept of a social-science oriented “precision journalism.” Insofar as the techniques, technologies, and personal networks that helped precision journalism solidify as a field in the 1970s are assuming new relevance in the age of computational journalism (Hamilton and Turner 2011, Cohen et. al. 2011, Diakopoulos 2011, Author forthcoming), this focus on Meyer’s quantitative understanding of journalistic practice is useful. Nevertheless, there are other visions of journalism in which a methodological lens is useful. Strange as it may sound, the “new journalism” of the 1960s and 70s had its own beliefs about reportorial technique, appropriate evidence, and truth-standards, as did the “public journalism” movement in the 1980s and 90s. And traditional journalism, of course, lays claim to the most dominant methodological system of truth-production, one that is all the more powerful by nature of its taken-for-granted status as the mainstream against which other journalisms rebel.  

To the degree that scholarly and professional debates about journalistic truth practices have taken place, they have been almost solely occupied with arguments about “objectivity” – the existence of an external truth, the internal state of mind which the journalist must embrace in order to gain access to that truth, and the various historical, economic, and institutional factors that encourage different kinds of “objective” journalism. This obsession with objectivity is unfortunate, and the debate about it is, by now, remarkably stale. This paper will propose an alternate framework for understanding the methodological practices of journalism, one concerned not with journalistic objectivity, but with journalistic objects. In other words: how do particular forms of journalistic evidence become accepted as valid pieces of ”true” knowledge? How have particular constellations of news objects aligned over time, some falling out of favor, while others rise in prominence? And what can these historical shifts tell us about larger communicative, economic, technological, and cultural systems at work in society, and about the ways that these systems are changing? 

Playlist: Classical Music Inspired by New York City

I’ve been keeping a running list in my head of classical music (and related) pieces either directly or indirectly inspired by New York City. Because New York is a (relatively) new city, the music that falls into this category is usually stuff I like quite a lot — modern, for one thing, often dissonant, but sometime very lyrical. Anyway, I have an iTunes list up and running of this stuff, but figured I might as well share the list with all of you. 

I have a lot of smart musical friends, and would also love any suggestions you might have of stuff to add to the playlist. Over the next day or so, I’ll roll out links from the list in a couple posts at a time, so as not to overwhelm the Tumblers. 

Playlist

Analog # 1 (Noise Study) (John Tenney, 1961)

Ameriques (Edgard Varese, 1918-1921)

Rhapsody In Blue (George Gershwin, 1924)

Cops and Buns (Frank Zappa, 1967-1968)

Lumpy Gravy (Parts 1&2) (Frank Zappa, 1967)

Central Park in the Dark (Charles Ives, 1906)

Fancy Free (Leonard Bernstein, 1944)

A Tone Parallel to Harlem (Duke Ellington, 1951)

Come Out (Steve Reich, 1966)

In the Country of Last Things (Heiner Goebbels, 1996)

City Life (Steve Reich, 1995)

Quiet City (Aaron Copland, 1940)