Why aren’t the newspapers in Europe going under? It’s not that newspapers in Europe are having an easy time – again, we’re in an economic recession that’s worldwide, but why aren’t they going under? The American newspapers, oh they say ‘It’s the Internet. Papers are getting killed by the Internet.’ Last I’ve heard they’ve got the Internet in Europe. And they’ve got the Internet in Japan. So why aren’t their papers folding like ours are going under? European, Japanese, other countries many, most, of their newspapers, the primary source of their funding is circulation. Advertising is second. In our country, advertising is the primary source of funding, circulation is second.

Anything[Anytime] you say that the people who read your newspaper are secondary to the business community you’ve lost, eventually you’re not going to survive at that point when you’re primary concern is the advertiser. In Europe, they know in order to keep circulation up they better put out a damn good newspaper. They better put out something that people read, and they better not cut too many reporters because if certain beats aren’t being covered, people aren’t going to read the paper.

edit (2009.10.21): fixed suspected typo in transcript, “Anything” => “[Anytime]“

It would be a shame if this opportunity for reframing were overlooked, leaving us to remember journalism’s last moments of fragile unity. As it stands, the journalistic community is fracturing along fault lines of whim, trend, and financial viability. Journalism is not making a choice to diversify and split up. Its hand is forced by circumstance and the failure of a narrowly conceived advertising and subscription model.¹ Uncontrolled failure is always failure. Controlled failure can become success.

professional reformation and diversification: a mixed bag

As the field of journalism flounders, it is beginning to hemorrhage talent. Sue Schmidt and Glenn Simpson–both widely respected by their peers, having decades of well-regarded work behind them and a Pulitzer between them–recently left the Wall Street Journal to start an independent, investigative journalism firm: an exciting prospect.²

But, the journalistic profession’s uncontrolled transformation has its risks. What if Schmidt and Simpson’s departure heralds a slow exodus of traditional journalistic talent to virgin markets and models? What if that exodus cost journalism its professional identity?

Most discussion about the state and fate of journalism fails to recognize the community’s most valuable asset: its professional code and mission. Rather than competing with bloggers and newswires, traditional media might find guidance in looking to uniquely distinguish themselves. That involves capitalizing on the best aspects of their guild-hood, whether in a blog or magazine or newspaper or book. There’s no reason that “blogging” should mean anything more than “online publishing”–journalists have been caught up with form, when they are missing a coherent mission for their content.

Traditional media’s leverage has eroded with the democratization of media’s means of production, because their security was founded upon how hard it was to print a newspaper. Now, that difficulty is irrelevant. New media makes available an infrastructure better than newspapers’: breaking stories and publishing commentary are no longer easy marks to dominate. Instead of focusing on its old advantages, journalism needs find niche(s) the profession can dominate.

Journalism should be asking what the introduction of new media has not equalized. The democratization of media’s means of production has largely left hard things hard and made tedious things easier. In particular, creating carefully crafted, cross-cutting journalism is still remarkably difficult, even if it is now much easier to disseminate your solidly investigated expose. If anything, the focus on new media has distracted journalism from its core competency.³

The coverage of journalism’s dire straits has been so ubiquitous as to go meta. Yet for almost a decade, people have been talking about the misalignment between social trends and the structure of the profession of journalism.⁴ We need new models. And they’re emerging: ranging from the Huffington Post’s new fund to the ecosystem of models hinted at by entrants to competitions like the Knight News Challenge to new metaphors like the investigative strike teams” recently described by Aaron Swartz. But a model isn’t enough. A model says how, and sometimes what. But a model can’t tell you why.

peddling understanding instead of breaking news

In early March, a handful of editorials clobbered the Obama administration’s handling of the bailout’s public relations. The widespread reaction to Larry Summer’s interview on CBS–judged “tone deaf” by many–characterizes that brief turn of public opinion, now reversed.

But you know what? It’s hard not to come off as “evasive” when trying to describe something enormously complex and subtle (and probably not fully understood by any one person–a reality inadmissible on television) in a fifteen minute segment. Asking a digestible, accurate explanation of government policy and finance to fit between primetime commercials is ridiculous. Worse, setting that expectation does an active disservice to journalism’s unfulfilled role in our civic education.⁵

We’re confronted with a daily deluge of information that leaves little room for thoughtful consideration of most anything, much less an issue of the bailout’s complexity and nuance. But there are hopeful signs that a market for deep understanding is emerging.

a promising example: covering the bailout

Dozens of explanations emerged to address the burgeoning financial crisis. These explanations did not aim just to report on the crisis and bailout. They focused on creating the offering the clearest, most comprehensive understanding, distinguishing themselves in formand depth,⁶ not just content.

Two pieces particularly captured my attention: “The Credit Crisis Visualized” and an episode of This American Life, Ira Glass’s now-famed “The Giant Pool of Money”. Both aimed to provide authoritative, edifying coverage, recognizing the need to pay due respect to the complexity of the credit crisis.

An intersection of the information visualization subculture and mainstream coverage of the credit crisis? An hour long radio hit examining the financial instrument of collateralized mortgages? This is coverage people like Jon Stewart have been begging for.⁷

When was the last time gears of the media machine turned to teaching in difficult times? Iraq? 9/11? Clinton’s impeachment? The Gulf War? I haven’t thought of any.⁸ This isn’t to say that the media were monolithically irresponsible until the bailout. But mainstream media has rarely seemed to concern itself with its audience’s education.⁹ Why the shift? Maybe more excitingly, how?

the conditions of deep coverage

“The Giant Pool of Money” exemplifies engaging, nuanced coverage of a [typically] dry, complicated topic. And it was an instant classic. The Credit Crisis Visualized is a ten minute culmination of a master’s thesis aiming “[to use] new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world.”¹⁰ Both were compelling for straightforward reasons:

• everyone cares about the financial crisis: Or at the very least, everyone feels they should. The unity evoked by crisis with clear perpetrators is powerful. The collectively felt gravity of the financial crisis translates into comparatively patient and demanding readers.

• the financial crisis alienates no one: This may say more about my social circle than anything, but: it seems hard to manufacture a more compellingly stark but conveniently digestible drama than the financial crisis.

  The crisis doesn’t polarize. Everyone is comfortable criticizing fiscal irresponsibility. Everyday people are pitted against wealthy financiers, but the financier’s role is systemic and personally deniable. Between critical economists like Peter Schiff and Nassim Taleb and villains like Bernie Madoff, Bear Stearns, and AIG, the stage is set for a widely engaging tale.¹¹

• mastery of the medium: This American Life carved out in its listeners the expectation of an hour long show. Ira Glass is a fantastic storyteller. The story was contextualized as a natural outgrowth of the show’s positioning as rooted in the American experience. What is more evocatively American than the homestead and the suffering born of a threat to the homestead?

  “The Credit Crisis Visualized” is gorgeous, ten minutes long, and embedded in a comfortable form: a Flash player where ten minute interactions are the norm.

These conditions highlight the power of marketing: a clear customer, a need, a positioning with accessible entry points, and a professionally mastered medium are all that were needed.

creating a market requires flexibility

When I first read Manufacturing Consent and later saw the documentary, I was dumbfounded by media leaders’ ignorance of the far-reaching repercussions of the constraints of their market, medium, and business model. Take a look at 01:51:18 in the documentary for an interview between Jeff Hansen¹² (H) and Jeff Greenfield (G):

H: What about just in the selection of guests, let’s analyze things: Why isn’t Noam Chomsky ever on Nightline?

G: I couldn’t–I couldn’t begin to tell you.

H: He’s one of the leading intellectuals in the entire world.

G: I have no idea, I mean I can make some guesses. Uhh–he may be one of the leading intellectuals, who, uhh, can’t talk on television. You know, that’s a standard that’s very important to us. If you’ve got a 22 minute show, and a guy takes five minutes to warm up–now, I don’t know whether Chomsky does or not–he’s out. When you book a show [you have to] know that the person can make the point within the framework of television. And if people don’t like that, they should know that it is about as sensible to book somebody who will take eight minutes to give an answer as it is to book somebody who doesn’t speak English. We need concision.

Chomsky goes on to point out that, “The beauty of concision is [that] you can only repeat conventional thoughts.”

These constraints haven’t let up. Our bandwidth has only become scarcer. But, the rapid diversification of media outlets and usage habits might mean that nuance isn’t a lost cause. There is symbiosis between production on democratized platforms (like software, and now media) and the “long tail” of demand. The costs of production drop off much more quickly than the distribution of demand. That is to say, whether you are writing for one million people or one hundred, Wordpress makes it just as easy to blog.

Lowering the cost of software development to nil to made the richness of the free and open source software (F/OSS) ecosystem possible. And now, lowering the costs of media production to nil gives us a chance to nurture a similar ecosystem.¹³

The comparison between journalism and F/OSS is often strained–their stakeholders, domains, and cultures differ deeply. Nonetheless, both offer insight into how a field’s transaction costs and barrier to entry can fundamentally determine the mechanics of cooperation and production. It is now free to put your media on “the market,” giving us an opportunity to reprogram traditional “market forces.”

In fact, reprogramming is too active a verb. It is no more reprogramming than Apple’s “reprogramming” of people’s design aesthetic. Markets are a constant feedback cycle between what’s available and what’s desirable. As the line between producer and consumer blurs, the classical economics of supply and demand need to morph to accommodate.

the back-and-forth of supply and demand

The feedback cycle between supply and demand becomes more interesting with the addition of open means of production, causing the range of attempts to satisfy demand to blossom. Because the very act of attempting to satisfy demand can create demand, new markets and customers are made.¹⁴ Historically, media choices have been limited by a small selection of media producers, meaning the single paradigm of traditional media created an enormous bottleneck in the evolution of people’s individual tastes.

We need a broader, more stimulating environment. Traditional media could take advantage of those who are willing to give media creation a try, using their efforts as an engine to churn out information about what people could want, where new markets might be. The less diverse an industry, the harder it is to learn about your customer, whose habits are by and large purely environmental:

Education & availability of choice play an enormous role in determining the objects of our pleasure [...] we enjoy what we are trained and conditioned to, and what our options allow us to.

– Richard Shusterman

We have the chance to use media to discover and nurture demand for deep, contextualized coverage, where there once was neither demand or coverage. Newsweek might not be able to afford to fail in guesstimating what’s stimulating.¹⁵ New media can. That means that there will be more opportunities to deconstruct the assumptions traditional media have made–and are forced to continue making–about the nature of their audience.¹⁶

Thanks to Will Bosworth, Shaunalynn Duffy, and Michael Nagle for reading drafts of this post and offering feedback on style and content.

1. We know that the current attitude toward advertising won’t cut it. And if we didn’t, the New York Times is proving it. The Times Co. just lost $74.5 million this quarter after taking a $250 million loan earlier this year from Mexican telecom patriarch Carlos Slim Helu and mortgaging its controlling interest in the Times Building for $225 million to New York City real estate developer W.P. Carey.

   People talk about the failure of advertising as though it were a failure of a model as opposed to a failed campaign. The model hasn’t been fully explored. People should be saying, at most, “Undifferentiated advertising and walled-garden subscription models have proved untenable.”

2. and one Aaron Swartz just explored from a different angle

3. And others are beginning to ask for a similar refocusing. FAIR recently covered an interview on Democracy Now! with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive wherein Matt reaches a similar conclusion:

   [Magazines], to the extent that they’re going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can’t find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

4. to use Gardner et al’s language from the Good Work project

5. I would say nascent, if it weren’t for the outdated claim that journalism is a civic organ of society: it’s a purpose that’s been long forgotten by too many. Excitingly, the theme is regaining currency–Phil Shapiro recently suggested MAKE magazine should supplant Newsweek in our public libraries on the grounds that:

   When I read MAKE magazine, I not only learn new things, I become more creative. [...] It gets me thinking about constructing creative solutions to a host of different [problems in my life. ...]

   The main reason MAKE magazine deserves a place in our local public libraries is that it brings real value to our communities. We want our children to be reading that magazine. We want our adults to be reading that magazine. We want everyone to be reading that magazine.

   Shapiro goes on to suggest that not only should libraries stock MAKE, they should have hackerspaces on-premises. Given the positioning of MAKE as “The first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages,” that’s an inspiring confluence of the aims of public media and education.

6. What I’m letting slide for “deep understanding” here is a little scandalous. In my wildest dreams, acknowledging the need to deeply understand the bailout leads to a thoughtful, pluralistic consideration of economic theory and practice. No such luck, yet.

7. The very fact that Jon Stewart’s interview/showdown with Jim Cramer garnered such wide attention is an indicator of professional integrity’s growing cultural currency.

8. I’d be excited
   to hear about other opportunities for media-driven civic edification which were not overlooked. Although, with the creation of sites like Tracking Swine Flu by “old media” like the Austin-American Statesman, it looks like that track record is quickly improving, complemented by the trend toward fantastic visualizations like those produced by the New York Times and more recently, NPR

9. What if journalism is becoming more about talking to your constituency than at it? To take an analogy from education: maybe the audience is no longer a vessel to be filled, but a citizen to be kindled

10. Jonathan Jarvis’s work highlights a trend I only recently noticed in the world of academic design and media studies: people are creating real, immediate value which is deployed outside of academia. Media and design studies do more and more work in real marketplaces as more than just an experiment. DestroyTwitter is the product of a thesis. The LilyPad Arduino provides real value to the DIY community, and it started out as part of Leah Buechley’s academic research. It’s an exciting trend.

11. Bitter irony: the simplicity of this morality play is in direct tension with what I’ve been calling a shift to “deep” understanding and nuance. Hopefully, these are the first, tentative, baby steps.

12. I haven’t confirmed that this is the same Jeff Hansen as the excerpt from Manufacturing Consent, yet. I’m waiting for a response from KUOW and will update as soon as I know.

13. Free and open source software is one of the best developed and most richly studied examples of the effects of democratizing a field’s means of production. But, F/OSS’s history is unique. It is a rich analogy that is often overused and overextended in discussion of the “network society,” and I don’t mean to contribute to that overuse.

    In an upcoming post, I’ll explore some of the most common failures in people’s usage of the F/OSS analogy. Looking at F/OSS’s lessons and understanding how its position differs from journalism’s has a lot to offer.

14. Where we mean specifically Drucker’s sense of creating a customer

15. Worse still: the shallow engagement promoted by ad-based models creates a tight coupling to users’ conception of their tastes, leaving little room to explore subtler, unrecognized hungers. If you are constantly fighting to increase readership, you have scant room to deepen readership.

16. That rigidity is a cost that has not been limited to traditional media. There’s a lot more to say here about the chance for democratized platforms to change industries into market-making commons. But more on that in a later post.

• An Introduction to Python – Packages
• The Open Planning Project | Areas of Expertise
• Specto
• Python List, Python Tuple, Python Dictionary
• Public Sphere Project
• GNU Emacs FAQ: Key bindings
• ColorPicker.com : Quick Online Color Picker Tool
• dcramer’s django-debug-toolbar at master — GitHub
• Intense Debate Import Hack – Socialist Software
• django-openid – Google Code
• django-google-analytics – Google Code
• django-logging – Google Code
• django-oembed – Google Code
• django-pressroom – Google Code
• django-rest-interface – Google Code
• django-rsvp – Google Code
• django-syncr – Google Code
• django-template-utils – Google Code
• django-tagging – Google Code
• django-undo – Google Code
• django-voting – Google Code
• gelman – Google Code
• i18ndynamic – Google Code
• typogrify – Google Code
• Django | Built-in template tags and filters | Django Documentation

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• python-twitter – Google Code
• WordPress › GitHub Projects « WordPress Plugins
• stimuli.ca » Lightbox 2.8.0 plugin for Wordpress
• eightface.com — flickrRSS for WordPress
• stimuli.ca » Slickr Gallery (AJAX Flickr plugin for Wordpress)
• the webopticon | flickr tag plugin
• Django snippets: Using reverse() to do redirects
• What’s all this about “open”, anyway? (long) – DIYbio | Google Groups
• Debian User Forums :: View topic – Setting terminal folder/file colors
• Understanding IMAP and POP | ITS
• EmacsWiki: Icicles
• Edsger Dijkstra — Discipline in Thought (visit www.catonmat.net for notes)
• Guide to Semantic Use of HTML Elements | Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
• Work with Git from Emacs
• Configuring exim4 in Ubuntu to use GMail for SMTP
• A step by step guide to installing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on your Eee PC – Simple Help
• Clay Shirky – Gin and the Social Surplus |
• NOOP.NL: Managing Software Development: 5 Easy Questions for Karl Fogel
• Installing WordPress « WordPress Codex
• Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management « Geeks Guide To Productivity
• Code Snippets – Snipplr Social Snippet Repository
• Stack Overflow
• TuneBlocks
• A List Apart: Articles: In Search of the Holy Grail
• How to USE HEADPHONES to listen to audio
• Teachers College Record: The Mind Behind the Musical Ear: How Children Develop Musical Intelligence
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – a practical guide to web typography
• WordPress › Support » No input file specified.
• WordPress MU › wordpress rewrites on nginx « WordPress MU Forums
• animeBSD › nginx and WordPress MU

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• rEFIt – Documentation – Installing rEFIt
• BradBergeron.com » HOWTO: Install and Boot OS X On a Flash Drive
• Beverage Art Meetup #1 – Beverage Art – The Untapped Medium (Cambridge, MA) – Meetup.com
• MacBook – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• Data Recovery and File Undelete freeware for Linux files
• Atom (standard) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• GS BS » Getting Real – A new book from 37signals
• Getting Real: The Book by 37signals
• How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
• Virtual Private Network (VPN) at MIT
• FFFFOUND! | Crummy Church Signs
• 2D3D
• YouTube – Keepon dancing to Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On”
• rlazo’s blog Insert a path into the current buffer
• CAMBIA Homepage
• Capistrano: Basics
• FeatureHighlights/TeamBranches – Launchpad Help
• Evidence Based Scheduling – Joel on Software
• Using Nginx as reverse proxy — intranation.com
• Neil’s Blog
• GNU Screen – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation
• Bzr – Ubuntu Wiki
• PEP 8 — Style Guide for Python Code
• Chapter 4: The Django Template System
• VirtualHost Examples
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• Lightweight Approach to AOP in Python
• SeeqPod – Playable Search – Find. Discover. Watch. Listen. Share.

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• Put a dent in the universe – (37signals)
• MAKE: Blog: Waterfigures
• Skill Surfers :: Tour 08
• George Church
• 2008: September – December Political Notes – Richard Stallman
• The Other Half of “Artists Ship”
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• Songbird – Open Source Music Player
• wicd – download
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• Gmail Full Width 2 for Greasemonkey
• Google Reader Unread Count for Greasemonkey
• Google Reader Prefetch More for Greasemonkey
• Delicious for Google Reader for Greasemonkey
• Google Reader – Mark Until Current As Read v 1.2 for Greasemonkey
• Jasper’s Google Reader subscribe for Greasemonkey
• Search Add-ons :: Firefox Add-ons
• Textarea Backup for Greasemonkey
• Mac GNU Privacy Guard
• Ubuntu Unleashed: Beginners Guide for GnuPG in Ubuntu
• Disable or Enable Backspace as ‘Go Back’ Page Browsing Function in Firefox » My Digital Life
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• Lynch Consulting Blog: OS X Leopard and Ubuntu Screen sharing – HOWTO
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• Yet another snippet mode for Emacs | sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek
• copying and pasting from emacs to firefox [Archive] – Ubuntu Forums
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• YouTube – Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management
• RescueTime | Free Time Management Software
• History of U.S. Gov’t Bailouts – ProPublica
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• Watch “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” Movie – Watch Movies Online For Free Full Movie Downloads
• EmacsWiki: twit.el

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The illusion of a neat set of bins¹ into which you can place all knowledge and experience is reinforced and rehashed in school, where the entirety of your school experience is defined in terms of concrete units of time given names like “Math” and “English.” As the underlying structure behind the defining, dominant activity for most youth (i.e., school), this classification exacerbates the confusion between activity (what you do) and identity (who you are). People grow up being “good at math” or “a talented athlete.” For a decade, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and simultaneously told that we are “students,” further reinforcing the coupling between an artificial organization of knowledge and our identity. Then we head off to college, where that relationship deepens, giving us the language to discuss our intellectual curiosity and muddling that with what we do and who we are.

A lot of collateral psychological damage is incurred in this long narrative of assumptions about the nature of expertise. Unfortunately, simply being aware of these problems and articulating them is not enough to insulate you from their effects.² People have talked about the need for cross-disciplinary thinking in science for years. And with the arrival of “design thinking” on the education scene, more people are beginning to use that type of language. Nonetheless, the disempowering role of the idea of expertise is still well-entrenched across every domain in which an institution dominates that domain’s definition. Plenty of people identify as parents and can incorporate that into their identity. But for most, calling yourself an artist because you draw and paint is a much harder jump. In part, this is because people differentiate between activities defined by doing and activities defined by being. That difference does not exist. It is a myth entirely perpetuated by the very idea of expertise being something intrinsic to a person, and therefore inaccessible to some people.

I can work eight hours a day as a waiter and go home to play music with my friends and call myself a musician, or paint portraits in my spare time and call myself an artist. This is possible only because there exist infrastructures and narratives which I can comfortably integrate myself into that permit me to do this. The musician-trying-to-make-it-big is an archetype: they play gigs and long to become part of the mainstream media so that thier identity as a musician can be validated by an external definition of success. The “starving artist” has a bit easier of a time permitting themselves their identity, because the starving artist narrative has some amount of counterculture built in at the ground floor (i.e. that is, to some extent, some people feel like rejection and marginalization are a necessary part of being an artist. Not that they’d turn down a gallery showing.)

But what if I just paint? Or fiddle with a guitar every now and then? Why can’t wielding a paintbrush every now and then be enough to call myself a painter? Or even better, why do I need to call myself a painter? Why can’t I just be painting?

I’m ignoring plenty of complicating issues, not the least of which is the fact that activity is strongly correlated to identity, particularly when a community grows around an activity.³ The group of people who associate themselves with classical concert performance share not only an activity, but an entire culture and mindset. Unfortunately, people usually lack the language to differentiate between an activity as an indicator (something which is correlated to membership in a certain culture) and an activity as an identifier (something which is part of that culture’s definition).

How do we change this? The end goal is to empower a person to approach an activity without comparing themselves against some sort of stifling, mental standard, requiring the activity to be common or otherwise unmysterious, diversely peopled, and open to engagement at many levels.

The typical pop song involves an enormous amount of work to create. The fact that all that work is hidden from people means it is difficult to feel empowered to create music, because an entire industry is devoted to making it seem easy, effortless. The conflation of the artist and their art only exacerbates this problem. Even in a pop song, because it is seen as “accessible” [for listening, if not writing] suggests that classical music is even further removed.

Within a field, this raises an issue for everyone who’s not at the top of the artificially defined hierarchy of expertise. Musicians who haven’t “made it” wonder about the workflows of musicians who have ["made it"]. Even if they understand that it isn’t an issue of talent but of work, the mystery surrounding the workflow is disempowering.

Turning to science, we find the same problem: for motives different than the music industry’s, producing papers which hide all your mistakes and mis-steps is [mis-]incentivized.⁴ so strongly that we have given a name to scientists’ particular insecurities.

The situation is the same everywhere you turn: doctors, artists, athletes—everywhere an expertise is defined, the fact that “experts” in that field feel the need to maintain and extend the importance of their identifying skill means that there is a feedback loop encouraging the increasing commodification and obfuscation of indicators for that particular skill. The art industry is infamous for the disconnect between quality and credentials—when people are in a museum complaining that, “my toddler could paint that,” what they are revealing is a deep ignorance, disempowerment, and resultant bitterness about the artistic process. Experts cannot exist without defining amateurs, and that will always set up a disempowering dynamic if it is seen as a component of identity.

These problems are generalizations of the process of artificially defining poverty. In Deschooling Society, Illich wrote (emphasis mine),

Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Ten years ago in Mexico it was the normal thing to be born and to die in one’s own home and to be buried by one’s friends. Only the soul’s needs were taken care of by the institutional church. Now to begin and end life at home become signs either of poverty or of special privilege. Dying and death have come under the institutional management of doctors and undertakers. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect. In Mexico the poor are those who lack three years of schooling, and in New York they are those who lack twelve.

Instead of technologies separating the rich from the poor, it is more abstract commodities like access to credentials or studio labels or museum galleries. And I think that this generalization highlights the first, concrete step in addressing these issues.

During the 2008 election, a plethora of musical and visual works were created by “everyday” citizens to support Barack Obama. From the polish of Yes, We Can to the parody of No, You Can’t to the antics of Obama Girl, dozens of music videos of all levels of skill were created to communicate a message and define a community. Graphic designers and artists and “simply” excited people with Adobe Illustrator came together in parallel and created hundreds of powerful designs advertising for Obama. At this point, despite the fact that there are thousands of academic, professional blogs and videobloggers, blogs and YouTube are generally regarded as fundamentally vulgar⁵. This access has meant that thousands of people feel empowered and secure enough to dip their toes into an activity and medium that was otherwise off-limits.

Taking this as a blueprint would suggest that for a given domain there are a few components to empowering people broadly:

• Recontextualize the activity :: Blogging doesn’t have to be about Writing, it’s about writing-about-what-I-ate-for-lunch-today. A video with music in it doesn’t have to be about Music, it can be about how much I like Barack Obama. Drawing doesn’t have to be about Art, it can be about my enthusiasm for anime.
• Expose the process :: When people realize that the distance between high quality video productions and films and your daily dose of YouTube is more about hard work and small details than anything else, it’s a big deal. People realize that trade secrets are powerful, but knowable.
• Take back—or relinquish—linguistic real estate :: Just because Tradition has already homesteaded words like “scientist” and “artist” and “philosopher” doesn’t mean that needs to matter. You can either attack that problem directly—makers and hackers have been calling themselves engineers for years—or you can make the question irrelevant. Even if I’m a Writer because I blog, I don’t need to care about that identification, rendering the distinction powerless to make me insecure.

I still need to concretize what this means for individual domains in which I am interested (in particular, science and education—what’s the difference between a good teacher and a good communicator? Between a scientist and someone who explores their world in a rational, curious way?).

Comments and critiques welcome. Poke holes in these claims!

1. That is, a taxonomy
2. Or at least, it hasn’t been, for me
3. Consider the entire idea of a community of practice.
4. Think about the implications of plagiarism’s precedence in music and science. Setting aside the debatable issues of intellectual property, plagiarism’s ethical prominence highlights how starkly money and credit oppose the enhancement and refinement of fields they dominate.
5. In the sense of the the original Latin, vulgaris, meaning the “common folk”, not in the sense of obscenity or crudeness

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G: I love the money! I love looking at it!

***** is thinking about a PhD in economics. SAIS has made her terrified of applying for a job.

Note that more advanced education has made someone more wary of the job market.

The perceived need for an advanced degree to remain competitive is a growing problem. The fact that a diploma is a commodity means that the spiral of credentials’ devaluation will only increase until the feedback loop between skills acquired and jobs available is closed by something more useful than a piece of paper.

More later on the long history of people’s attempts to wrangle the “PhD glut” (since 1982!).

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Big science is like religion, you just gotta do what the people before you did.

I have seen [a resistance to "debugging"] in many children’s first sessions in a LOGO environment. The child plans to make the Turtle draw a certain figure, such as a house or stick man. A program is quickly written and tried. It doesn’t work. Instead of being debugged, it is erased. Sometimes the whole project is abandoned. Sometimes the child tries again and again and again with admirable persistence but always starting from scratch in an apparent attempt to do the thing “correctly” in one shot. The child might fail or might succeed in making the computer draw the picture. But this child has not yet succeeded in acquiring the strate-gy of debugging.

It is easy to empathize. The ethic of school has rubbed off too well. What we see as a good program with a small bug, the child sees as “wrong,” “bad,” “a mistake.” School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is to pore over them, dwell on them, or think about them. The child is glad to take advantage of the computer’s ability to erase it all without any trace for anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it. Experience with computer programming leads children more effectively than any other activity to “believe in” debugging.

The distinction between convergent² and divergent³ thinking and learning is an old one. Nonetheless, I think that the distinction has a lot of mileage left on it. In particular, I have seen little attention paid the epistemological significance of the convergent/divergent choice. While it would be misleading to suggest that an activity or environment cannot have both divergent and convergent characteristics, it is important to understand the nature of the learning that goes on in each type of activity.

While much has been written about the process of deconstructing misconceptions in pedagogy, the issue seems to have been passed over in designing and structuring environments for learning and doing. Papert uses the debugging analogy to computer programming to point out that for most people, education is the process of fearful, controlled guessing. Rarely is there an opportunity to revise a guess based on feedback before being graded/punished/rewarded. Unfortunately, this not only means that we condition children against their natural instincts of perseverance and patience in the face of uncertainty, we actively hinder the development of metacognitive language and thought, in turn making it harder to disabuse learners of their misconceptions.

why not? instead of why?

I am often frustrated by the absence of documentation of why things are not the way they are not. For instance, authors of physics texts create a carefully crafted argument about why things are the way they are, given that we accept some axioms or experimental evidence. No matter how elegant or natural this line of reasoning, there is a chance I will misunderstand. When I work through a physics problem incorrectly, I have either misunderstood, misdeduced, or miscalculated. Creating a watertight argument that allows no misconceptions is difficult, and therefore rare. This is dearth is felt keenly in introductory texts: exactly where an allowance for misconceptions does the most damage as the basic misconceptions propagate forward, unchecked. I would find the answer to the question, “Why doesn’t it work the way I thought it did?” far more valuable than an explanation for why it does work the way I didn’t think it did. Which is to say, I’m looking for the raw materials to create a debugger for my own thought process.

what does this have to do with {conv-, div-}ergent activities?

My teaching experience has capitalized⁴ on the naturally tinkerable character of entry-level activities in the domains of physics, building things, and electronics. By tinkerable, I mean that materials and activities reward incremental exploration. While it is easy to take some electrical components, a toy, and explore circuit bending, it is much less reasonable to expect mixing together arbitrary chemicals from a chemistry set to yield much except [potentially dangerous, but probably boring] sludge. In this sense, electronics supports exploration more naturally than chemistry. The important parameter here is the relative cost of the most accessible iteration. In electronics, the most accessible iterations are the cheapest⁵ , whereas in chemistry, the most accessible exploration is comparatively expensive⁶ . This has made my attempts to teach chemistry, for instance, much less successful than the rest of my teaching experiences, and it’s a problem basic to a lot of fields which are not naturally approachable.

While this is a “natural” cost in the case of teaching chemistry, we repeatedly incur a similar cost for essentially every other domain in our schools. Convergent problem solving artificially increases the cost of iteration by making exploration psychologically expensive. Ridiculously, this inhibits the very instincts which would hone a learner’s skill, lengthening—often indefinitely—the time to mastery.

What would a resource that is aimed explicitly at helping you avoid pitfalls—not necessarily finding “the right path”—in a field look like? Are there any precedents or analogues?

1. !!!
2. Meaning that an activity converges on the same endpoint for everyone—workbook problems are a textbook example.
3. Meaning that an activity has many possible endpoints—the goal is engagement with the process, not the product.
4. That’s a euphemism for “copped out.”
5. e.g. What happens when I disconnect this component?
6. Limited (no pun intended) reagents, time, sensitivity to initial conditions, etc.

G: Well I mean, it wasn’t like I was at all productive during my summer. I should have been here [at MIT] you know, doing shit.

• YouTube – DjangoCon 2008: ReviewBoard
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There is a significant opportunity for hackers and makers to capitalize on their community’s relative agility and flexibility to make a series of tools and platforms that scientists don’t even know they need. Rather than playing the credibility and credential game on the terms of standing institutions, there is a lot of ground to be gained by making and using tools that the mainstream community wants [and needs].

For instance, scientific equipment (particularly in the life sciences) is tremendously overpriced. The primary institutional customers are universities and corporations with research and development departments. The fact that time is more of a concern to these institutions than one-time equipment costs means that equipment costs are inflated.

Scientific equipment is rife with proprietary interfaces and software that create friction in the data collection and processing workflow. As science relies on ever larger datasets and ever more computationally intensive analysis, it will become increasingly necessary to streamline the connections between equipment, between labs, and across experiments.

Scientists don’t realize that they need a platform, and the DIY skills that are blossoming first (electronics, software) are exactly those needed. Science is not considered an open, cultural activity. I can work as a waiter during the day, jam with friends at night, and call myself a musician. I can paint in my spare time and call myself an artist. I can’t¹ do science in my spare time and call myself a scientist, not only because the equipment isn’t available, but because there is no infrastructure to support a community like that. What if the process of making science available as a cultural activity entailed engineering tools the scientific community at large wants a part of? Can tools be the bridge between two communities? Are there any precedents in other domains?

The prospect of having scientific labs as analogues to hacker spaces is a pretty exciting vision. Soon to be concrete via NUBlabs!²

1. Well, people don’t.
2. More on this, later

Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization – information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like.

There’s too much media – it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter?

So, the question for this week:¹ to what extent is affecting the flow of information relevant to changing people’s minds? What about changing their information diet: what type and quality of information people expect to consume? When it comes to the filters that govern people’s information access, where do they come from? How many are implicit?

My interest in these questions comes down to the following: in the context of education, where should I push to make information available? What media are most useful for changing the right people’s minds?

Original email

Hi all,

I took some sketchy notes during the Civic Media Bull Session last night. It would be overly charitable to describe them as “minutes”, but perhaps they can help trigger further discussion of some of the issues we raised.

Here goes:

—-

Civic media bull 2008-06-27

Youtube: what’s it for? Is it for diversion, or subtle discussion?

“I’m Voting Republican”, “It’s Raining McCain”, “McCunt” vs. rational discussion of issues
straw man, comedy, maybe not real (but maybe?)

youtube [sic] is for publishing. People don’t go to the front page to find videos, they get links from friends/family.

But is this good for engaging real discussion?

Hubert Chang: “I helped invent google [sic]“. True, interesting, but not viral. Video production not so good.

Should there be instructions, tutorials for making a good YouTube video? Templates for proper video format to get big and viral?

Is it a good goal to have radical decentralization?

No band should sell more than 10,000 records; no band should sell just 1. Decentralized communities forming around local interests.

Lots of porn stars are very local. “Cam girl” phenomenon. Each has a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers, working in dorm rooms, etc. The big budget porn movie is basically gone. The same thing is happening with bands on MySpace, where the relationship is personal. People talk directly to the bands.

On the other hand, there are news and images that are so important that as many people as possible should see them.

Expert systems, reflexive democracy — Jurgen Habermas, U. Beck. Consider the different types of risks, and experts, who do you listen to? Do you listen to the people warning about global warming, or the people talking about economic danger? U. Beck talks about going for hyper-local, reflexive democracy which allows a local community to create power structures locally. You have to at the same time pay attention to the global voices and the local voices, pay attention to the majority and the minority.

Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization – information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like.

There’s too much media – it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter?

How do you create discourse, dialog, critical thought? The mississippi [sic] right now, some communities build large levees which flood other communities, and there is no communication. Lots of quiltwork. Would like to generate dialog that engenders understanding rather than derision. Is “I’m Voting Republican” the wrong way?

A balance between talking to your communities, and not watering down the upset, emotion, reactionary things. You need to be able to express that stuff.

Are republicans/democrats a community? Is voting for a president enough for a community? A shared space, What defines community? A set of people affected by a common thing? Communities seem to cut at many levels, on macro and micro scales. The Boston Public Transportation system is a community; you should talk to it on that level.

An email from a women’s technology group in Sweden, “she-geeks”, which has an awful connotation among CS students in Switzerland. Since “geek” has a positive connotation everywhere else, should they change their name? Noone has a problem with the name except for a small community of local, backwards CS students. Should they cater to those interests by changing their name? The OLPC has an app called “hippy” which can be offensive in some spanish dialects, and they had to change the Application name. There are times to stand up for a particular word, and other times when the word isn’t that important.

A catalyst in engaging a dialog may be humor. Sarcasm (such as “I’m a Republican”), presenting the facts (such as the Daily Show)…

Paul Otlet — the web, 1934. Tried to catalog all the books in the world, but “invented the internet”, but conceiving of a network of telephones/monitors that allow you to call up any book. “The Treatise on Documentation”. Emmanual Goldberg, an engineer/scientist, worked for Zeiss Icon in Dresden, Germany, and invented the first system to use electronics to access documentation. Used microfilm, with a pattern of opaque dots and lights, like punch cards, to access microfilm. Vannebar [sic] Bush — 1945, “memex”. What matters about this?

Why have we never heard about this guy? What’s important? Is it that this guy was the “first”, or far before the others? But why is it that Wikipedia one [sic], and not the others — or Edison, instead of the others? There are certain social moments…

American journalism is very different from journalism elsewhere in the world. America seems to make news items out of what is really advertising or marketing.

Conspiracy: Bohemian Grove. Onion News Network: Deibold releases presidential election results early.

Enka: a Japanese middle-aged musical style, done by a guy from Pittsburgh (Jero). Lame for young people, but done by a stereotypically urban young guy. Two very local communities communicating.

How do you navigate popularity to create community dialog? PORN!!!
If you want to engender discussions that bridge conservative/local dialogs, you have to use humor, or other apolitical ways to generate interest.

1. As some people have pointed out, I flaked on keeping my thinking about last week’s question open. But, I think I’ve arrived at answer, nonetheless (about which I will write, shortly)