Archive for October, 2005

Jay Rosen of PressThink asked six of us to comment on CBS News President Andrew Heyward's thoughts about the future of network news. 

Here's the post:  “Andrew Heyward: The Era of Omniscience Is Over“.

I want to expand on my remarks, which I've pasted in below.  What news organizations can do for us is aggregate, judge, visualize, and order — use their expertise to make it easier for us to get reliable news.  But that may involve opening up to (and, indeed, encouraging) other sources of information that haven't been generated by the news organization itself.  This will take leadership (see yesterday's post).

===

The three points that Andrew Heyward made were delivered with firm emphasis and short phrases. He was hunched over the table, looking up at us as he read, and when he was done he leaned back definitively. He had been watching the proceedings with some bemusement, and he knew that he was saying something important.

Heyward understands that framing the discussion as one about how “bloggers” and “journalists” interact is hopelessly shortsighted. The role of media news is under assault from many directions – people don’t trust newspapers or even the evening news the way they used to. He understands that we now live in an age of networks that don’t belong to CBS. And so he is willing to suggest that we are far from the time of a trusted, omniscient Walter Cronkite, and he accepts that an authoritative, smooth-faced news voice no longer resonates with the American public. So he calls for authenticity, acceptance of complexity, and multifaceted coverage.

But he is not willing to acknowledge real changes. Heyward is a very smart man, but he’s being dragged into this new world and his strong beliefs were fixed some time ago. Notice that his three points shore up the role of “real” journalists (“accuracy, fairness, and thoroughness,” “reporting without fear or favor,” “strongest exemplars of mainstream commercial television news”). He believes that journalists will continue to do the job of news reporting, with some tweaking to ensure they’re using colloquialisms and having a point of view. He is willing to take one step down from the pedestal, but he still believes that the pedestal exists and is important. He does not understand that the “people formerly known as the audience” (in Jay’s lovely turn of phrase) now have the upper hand.

Heyward’s remarks came towards the end of a quite polite, almost clubby exchange of views between acceptably middle-aged and well-behaved bloggers and media executives. Most of the bloggers cared deeply about the culture of mainstream media, and were looking for ways to help out. Absent from the room were the twenty-somethings (much less teenagers) who could have brought life to the room via a few rude remarks or stories about their own relationships to “news”. In this context, Heyward’s three points sounded brave.

In the swirling world of bits and constant exponential technological change that exists outside that clubby room, Heyward’s three points may end up sounding like the last deep chants of a vanishing priesthood.

Someone told me today about a corporate leader who would, after making official remarks to the employees, throw his arms wide and say loudly, “The bar is open!” This signaled that the formal part of the program was over and the chatting was about to begin.  The people working for this guy would have walked over hot coals for him.  He would spot people across the room and shout their names.  He was a convincing manager.

It's not the shouting that makes a leader.  A conductor can be a great and inspirational leader without ever raising her voice.  It's something else — some ineffable combination of strength and garrulousness and conviction.

The current astonishing Times crisis seems to have thematic links to the stories of cronyism [link will expire soon] in the Bush administration.  We know leadership when we see it, and we're not seeing it at the moment.  Leadership doesn't have to involve saying “the bar is open,” but it does have to include making good management decisions, drawing lines, being willing to be questioned, and facing controversy.

In the last two days, I've been to three musical events:  a meeting of the board of a music camp in New England yesterday, a concert by the Orion string quartet earlier this evening, and a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra tonight.

The music camp makes playing string quartets seem like the coolest thing you could ever do as a teenager (at least for the kids who go there, I guess).  The string quartet gets to play some of the greatest musical literature around — tonight, Beethoven Op. 132.

The Cleveland Orchestra combines all of this.  They play like cool teenagers and like a string quartet.  You can see the string players watching each other, and the wind players watching the string players. (This is unusual — most of the time orchestral players look bored and pained.)  I have never heard a sound as soft as the entire Cleveland string section playing pianissimo pizzicatos.  Unbelievable.  Everyone in the hall just had to be still.  And then at the end (this was Brahms 1) the triumph was complete and joyous.  It was a thoroughly wonderful evening.

Eliot Spitzer was sitting a couple of rows behind me tonight.  I hope he had a good time too.  I wonder what he thought of the pianissimos.  

There's a good argument that the two relevant mindsets in today's internet world are “cellhead” and “nethead.”  Cellheads are happy with walled garden mobile networks, in which all services are approved, all devices are authorized, and spam isn't a problem.

Netheads, by contrast, are looking for open, public networks of user-generated (or at least -commented upon) content and metainformation, in which applications don't have to be approved and to which any device can attach if it knows the protocol.

IMS/NGN represents the standardization of the cellhead mindset and the suggestion that it will enter into the nethead world.  We need empirical evidence that cellhead approaches lead to less dynamic growth — the mobile world is certainly growing quickly, but arguably won't provide as rich and interesting a future as the nethead network.  Back to layers again:  emergence and metainformational growth depend on the existence of independent layers that allow experimentation and mistakes.

On the other hand, as Martin Geddes says, asking for all  networks to be “neutral” networks (in which layer independence and nondiscrimination are mandated) can be extraordinarily pernicious.  We should only do it in markets for internet access that are clearly broken because they are dominated by one or two players — where a choice of plain vanilla access just isn't available.  That appears to be the situation in the US generally (albeit not, perhaps, in San Francisco).

So let some network providers go into the IMS/NGN world (which will foster more ads like this one, asking you to tell your broadband provider to let you have a particular service).  As long as there are choices, we'll be fine.  If there aren't choices, we'll need to mandate nondiscrimination.  But it won't be easy.

====

Planes are the new libraries.  On my way back to NY yesterday, a woman in front of me opened up her laptop and started watching a 1930s American musical with subtitles.  It was loud.  The people around me stirred uncomfortably.  They were all reading — books, Bibles, magazines.  The man next to the laptop-lady removed the headphones from his ears and offered them to her, showing her where they could attach to her computer.  He then took out from his bag an extra pair for himself.  Planes are the places to read these days, and we all settled down again for a few more hours of quiet.

Now I'm at Willow Glen Coffee Roasting Company in San Jose.  Drop by if you're around – I'll be here for some time. [Tags: onewebday]

The Chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin, recently wrote a brief letter to Sen. Frist:

You asked whether Congress should consider the scope of the Commission's authority to implement content protection rules for digital broadcast radio together with the scope of the Commission's authority to do the same for digital broadcast television.  . . .

The increasing use of digital technologies by both radio and television broadcasters raises almost exactly the same content security concerns.  Thus, while I respect that ultimately Congress will decide precisely when and how to legislate in this area, to the extent that Congress provides the FCC with authority to address content protection over one digital broadcast platform, it would be helpful for the Commission to have similar authority over the other broadcast medium, as well.

The rationale behind the broadcast flag was that it was essential to further the transition to digital television.  Digital radio doesn't have the same policy framework.  But now the two are tied together.  If Congress goes along and gives the Commission the authority it seeks (details here), we'll be in a brave new world of ad hoc technical mandates for devices promulgated by the FCC.

I appreciate the “it would be helpful” phrase used by Martin.  Sure, yes, it would be helpful to have the broadest possible powers over all possible devices that have anything remotely to do with digital content.  And all applications.  And all online access routes.  And all uses of data in connection with those services.  We're the FCC, and we're here to help.

I was really touched by the Battelle post a while ago about his visits to Google.  Today I got to make my own visit to Google, and it was just great.

Google has a parking problem.  There are far too many Googlers for the spaces available (8X the previous population of the same buildings, in some cases).  So Google has wifi-enabled buses running back and forth from SF, and special carpool parking places.  Plus parking attendants busily shuttling cars around to make room for (and block) other vehicles.

Google has busy people.  So Google has breakfast, lunch, and dinner available for them, including a huge selection of designer waters.  Hey, if you're sensitive…

This problem-solving, smooth-the-friction approach has a lot to recommend it.  Combined with great visualizations (I saw the electronic version of the Google globe — beautiful), smooth interfaces, and an overall openness to doing good by users, it's irresistible.  I did not resist.  There appeared to be thousands of clever, bright-eyed people roaming around freely.  Yes, there were scooters.

One of the meetings I had was in an odd oval-shaped small conference room off the main lobby in the main building (there are many buildings).  It was a tight space, and the people in the room were tightly scheduled.  But they focused when they needed to, and we had a fine, short, tight brainstorming session.  Highly constrained yet effortless improvisation. Afterwards, I had to be careful to leave the room quickly right behind someone else — you needed an official employee badge to get OUT of that conference room. 

Lots of double monitors.  Bright colors.  Glaring sunlight.  Yoga classes glimpsed through the window.  Many many shared cubes.   

Soon I'll be back in NY, where it's raining.  I hope I can visit again.

I'll be here at 4:30 tomorrow, Thursday, to meet with the OneWebDay staff (not a huge staff):

Amberjack, 1497 Church St, SF

Come by if you'd like to talk.

I'm speaking tomorrow at Boalt Hall's IP Scholarship Seminar.  Here's what I'm thinking of saying.

What’s motivating me to write in the communications area?  The copyright concerns that scholars have been focused on for the last ten and more years are proxies for the central problem facing the internet:  private control of our internet experiences.  We’re moving from the conceit of owning information (the problem of IP, the problem taken on by Jamie Boyle in his 1996 Shamans, Software, and Spleens) to the conceit of owning the public internet itself – or, in other words, the conceit of owning flows of information. 

The commodification of the internet may not happen, but there are plenty of people who want it to.  We are moving into an era of a vision of romantic ownership which exalts property above all and seeks to reward the company that provided the fiber we use to reach the public internet.  Telcos and cablecos would like to manipulate and distribute intentional, monetized internet experiences (connections we should by now be accustomed to making for ourselves) and are well along in creating a discourse of entitlement and justification.

So, in my mind, communications law has to become our central concern.  Communications law may bear the same relationship to the networked society as IP law bore to the information society and (as Boyle points out), labor law bore to the industrial age.

What follows draws heavily on the basic steps laid out by Boyle in 1996, and extends his work to the issue of network control.

I’m trying to create a normative map that will help reveal the assumptions at the heart of the network providers’ arguments.  The key issue should be:  is access to the internet a public goods problem, for which incentives are necessary to ensure buildout and maintenance?  or — Is access to the internet a monopoly problem, for which you have to find ways to ensure frictionless competition?

Right now, we can’t tell what the right answer is. I am trying to reveal what is actually happening as a rhetorical matter.  It’s clear to me that this key tension between monopoly and public goods is being hidden. All that comes out in the public discourse is about the need to incent the heroic builder of the networks – the people rolling out fiber.  This is a powerful image, and governments (including our government) are going along.  The distributional, environmental, and innovation-related effects of this trend will be profound.

There’s of course very little empirical evidence either way on the monopoly/public goods issue.  It’s also not clear to me which way the public imagination is going.  Do most people feel that Comcast should/does get the right naturally to constrain their online experience?  Or is what they want access to the public internet, which is owned by no one?

It does seem to me as if the public internet, the space just beyond whatever default home screen you’ve neglected to change, is a public sphere.  It seems like sphere-crossing to commodify it entirely – to make it into a private sphere.  There are certainly areas that are commodified, but there is plenty of competition that seems to be interesting people more.

Indeed, there’s something special about a public communications network, a traditionally public network, that is different from a cable system.  This isn’t, perhaps, a rational view.  But this nonrational association between information networks and the public sphere – a place of debate and discussion and entrepreneurial creation – makes it easier to talk about access that is structured by equality and fairness.  Our intuitive sense about all this matters and shouldn’t be discounted.

I haven’t really worked out yet what’s public and what’s private about use of the internet.  It’s not clear whether commodification of the internet can be viewed as an unjust impediment to a better online future OR as essential to the future existence of the network at all.  We have different ways of reifying the internet, of understanding it as a picture.  Is it an intrusive, dangerous presence?  Is it the lifeblood of debate?  Must it be commodified?  Is it impossible to commodify? 

The network providers are getting very skilled at conflating access and interaction.  A DSL lobbyist takes two logical steps:  first, conflate these public and private realms, and then bring in the romantic, heroic builder, rolling fiber across the land.  That seems to do the intellectual trick, and successfully ignores the notion of user-created content in an almost invisible, incremental way.  (“For service purposes, we can’t allow you to use X port or Y application.  We’re sure you’ll understand.  You can use OUR application if you pay us for our premium services.”)  We’re at risk of being in thrall to an idea of romantic network ownership that should be questioned as dogma. 

For the users, these two things are wholly separate.  Access can be private – that’s fine –  but interaction is public.

A parallel with the IP issues that Boyle was focused on in 1996 is that developed nations are always saying how much better everything will be for developing countries if they adopt maximalist IP standards.  Companies will invest, so the reasoning goes, and the developing nation will be brought into the magic circle of riches and respect.  Same argument here:  the internet will be a backwater until it’s secure and commodified.  But, in fact, it may be that securing and commodifying the internet will mostly result in stifling innovation and missing out on enormous economic growth. 

Indeed, the IP analogy can continue:  the sources of user-created content, like the sources of indigenous cultural content, won’t be rewarded by the commodifying network providers.  In the meantime, all the riches will be taken out, and we’ll have no one to protect the network itself.

At any rate, it would be too bad if we decided to regulate the most important technologies of this century by relying on their formal similarities to the technologies of the last century – like telephones.  What’s better for society?  Wouldn’t it be better to think about that directly rather than merely bringing regulation through this filter of analogy?  The internet lets us reexamine fundamental legal principles, and it’s time to do this here.

I’ve been working on three puzzles:  E911, CALEA, and Universal Service.  All are steps towards controlling the public internet.  All are part of a much larger move, already well under way, to deregulate broadband access and remove any obligation not to discriminate against applications and devices.  That larger move is in turn part of a global move on the part of broadband providers to turn their networks into something much more like the what mobile phone carriers have – completely monetized services, allowing for packet inspection, and making it possible to block services they don’t want to have competing with them.

So that's why I'm paying attention to communications law these days.

A friend of mine sends an IM:  “There's so much going on in the [Bay Area] that I hate to leave, even for a few days.”  She burbles (electronically) about three separate really great digital/business/social events that all happened last night. 

Here's one take on this burst of energy and enthusiasm: 

[T]he high-tech industry appears to be entering a vibrant new phase of both growth and upheaval. It is the Web's sober second act, characterized not by soaring stock prices but by forces that are challenging traditional industries – from publishing to telecommunications – to adopt new business plans. Consumers seem to be the only sure winners. The maturing of the Internet as an engine of the global economy is being driven by a handful of important forces: 1) shrinking sizes and prices, 2) “digital convergence” — the fusion of computing with other traditional industries foreseen in the 1990s — is happening in earnest, challenging traditional communications industries, and 3) wireless services are making the Web portable, not just a desk-bound tool.

Everyone is getting skilled at thinking up the next metainformational thingie (blog of blog of blogs!), but we're still so clearly at the beginning.  Someone told me last night that speed of access to hard drives hasn't changed in years, even though both storage and bandwidth are soaring.  We're still having problems getting at the mountains of data we have, even as we're creating more.  I wish I could see around the corner and understand where we're going.

At the moment, though, the best I can do is go to the Bay Area myself for a few days.  I'm going to be hanging around talking about OneWebDay (link coming before Thursday).  I'll post my coffeehouse whereabouts here.