A year out of college, I walked into the front door of a presidential campaign and said that I was there to do whatever I could to help.  I admired the candidate and genuinely thought he would make a worthy and wise leader for America.  A year later, my candidate had been defeated and, though my faith in him remained intact, my faith in American political journalism had plummeted.  Every time my candidate’s opponent had lied about my candidate’s record or his own, I had naively expected a yellow flag to fly, thrown by journalists covering the race, acting as impartial referees on behalf of the American public and the integrity of the electoral process.  The flag was never forthcoming.  The problem, as I saw it, was not that the media was not impartial.  The problem was that the media was lazy and feckless.  It practiced “he said, she said” journalism.  The story was always the same.  It was formulaic.  Candidate A said X.  Candidate B said Y.  End of story.  The problem was apparent to me.  If Candidate A constrained himself to saying things that were true and Candidate B did not, the effect was to give Candidate B a competitive advantage and ultimately, to encourage all but the most scrupulous Candidate As to eventually become as dishonest as their Candidate B counterparts, if not more so.

This points to an intermediary function that journalists ought ideally to play in a democracy, notwithstanding Dave Winer’s belief that the news function can be served in the Internet Age by sources, including candidates and their spokespeople, who go direct to the news audience, bypassing journalists.  The average voter watching a candidate debate or just the give and take over time between candidate camps in a campaign is not in a position to know whether the candidates’ are being honest about their records and their opponents’ records.  Perhaps this view that journalists ought to play a referee function in campaigns is, as Eric Alterman would put it, a Lippmann-esque view of the role of journalists in a democracy, but it is hard to deny that there is a need for someone to play this role if all our heralded free political speech is to translate into informed voter preferences.

Thus it is that a central question for me about the effect of digital technology on journalism is whether it is improving matters, making matters worse, or neither making matters better nor worse, when it comes to the extent to which journalists and “the media,” whether traditional or emergent, hold political candidates and elected officials accountable for the veracity of their claims.  My conclusion is that it is improving matters, in a certain respect, but via a dynamic that probably does not lead overall to a better functioning democratic process.

Clay Shirky associates the transformative impact of digital technology with its effect of collapsing certain costs that traditionally have served as barriers to activity.  That is precisely the point of Rupert Murdoch, picked up on by Jeff Jarvis, when he says of the effect of digital technology on journalism, “The point is the ease of entry.  If someone has a good idea on the net, the cost of entry is zero.  We are going to have many, many more voices.”  As Alterman notes, the nature of the traditional media was a function of the “broad audience” to which it sought to appeal.  In an era when there were three big networks and in which newspapers were monopolies or oligopolies within their respective markets (because, as Nicholas Carr points out, the cost of printing presses made for a large barrier to entry), the imperative was not to turn parts of a network’s or newspaper’s broad audience off by seeming to favor one side or another in a political controversy. Studied neutrality, even at the expense of shying away from calling a spade a spade when one side was genuinely wrong or at fault, was the posture that best served this imperative.   The incentives in a media marketplace with the many, many more voices Murdoch refers to are quite different from those in the media marketplace in which the traditional media operated.  In a more competitive marketplace, with low barriers to entry, the incentive is to cater to a niche audience.  In this environment, taking sides is not only allowable; it is desirable.  The result is not so much a media that is less cowardly about pointing out the facts, but simply a media that is more partisan, regardless of the facts.

The reason this improves matters somewhat, when it comes to checking blatant untruthfulness on the part of political candidates and elected officials is because, in today’s media environment, there are at least going to be those media voices – and not just at the trivialized margins of the media landscape – who are going to be screaming bloody murder whenever a political candidate tells a fib.  Political candidates and elected officials must at least consider whether it is worth handing the red meat of a demonstrable falsehood to their frenzied opponents in the blogosphere and on cable news.

This is not the same thing as saying that the overall effect of the transition from the old media ecology to the new media ecology is to make our democracy function more as we would ideally like it to.  A more partisan media is more likely to bring misstatements by candidates and public officials to the public’s attention, rather than simply letting them slide.  On the other hand, today’s more partisan media lacks the credibility with the public, especially the “persuadable” voters who are not already decided supporters of one side or the other and are thus a critical audience in a campaign, that a more neutral press traditionally had.  It was precisely because the media was still seen, back when I had just graduated from college, as more neutral than it is perceived as being today, that the prospect of journalists “throwing a flag” on one candidate or the other seemed to me like it could have been a difference maker in that campaign.  In certain respects, the more partisan media we have today replicates the effects of “he said, she said” journalism.  From the perspective of the persuadable voter, what we have now is “his media says, her media says” journalism.

In this respect, I agree with Alterman that the effect of digital technology on journalism is that “[n]ews will become increasingly ‘red’ or ‘blue.’”  I also agree with him that there is a chance that this will actually increase political engagement and voter turnout.  The danger, though, is that the average voter will increasingly decide that distinguishing fact from fiction in politics is a fool’s errand and that, as a result, all sense that citizens are engaged in a common enterprise of trying to do the right thing together will be lost as everything becomes about mobilizing competing coalitions to defeat one another.  In this respect, this year’s fight over the debt ceiling, carried out to the point of driving the country to the verge of default, could be but a portent of things to come.

In In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Steven Levy tells the epic story of Google, the brainchild of two quirky and brilliant Stanford computer science doctoral candidates that grew within ten years from a dissertation-focused project operating out of one of their dorm rooms into a multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions in annual revenue.  Levy describes Google as a truly unique but increasingly troubled company, shaped by the audacious vision of its founders and made in their impressive image, but affected in predictable ways over time by its transformation from start up to large corporation and fated to struggle recurrently with the social implications of its basic mission to organize and make accessible the world’s information.   In Levy’s telling, the history of Google makes not only for a captivating narrative; it also provides a window into some of the central developments and dilemmas of our time.

As the back cover of the hardcopy edition of Levy’s book advertises, Google cannot be understood, in Levy’s view, without understanding Larry and Sergey – Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders.  Even as a new and as-yet-unprofitable start up, Google’s ambitions were grandiose because it was Brin’s and especially Page’s habit to think big.  Over time, the companies basic mission, to organize and make accessible the world’s information, has been interpreted capaciously.  As the company developed, moreover, both its values and its growing workforce reflected its founders’ imprint.  Just as the Marine Corps celebrates and is built to support its infantry grunts, so Google celebrates and is built to support its engineers. Google’s values are engineering values, first and foremost of which is a commitment to being guided in decision making by data.

A commitment to being guided by data has turned out to be a very profitable virtue for a company in Google’s line of business, since, in organizing and making accessible the world’s information, Google – the name evokes a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros – is in the business of capturing a mindboggling amount of data, not least of which is the data it accumulates in its logs of the search behavior of its users.  Making productive use of this data has been key to many of the innovations that have spurred Google’s explosive growth.  For example, Google has used data on when users click on search results and stay at the sites they are taken to and when users return quickly to Google’s search page to try again to improve the quality of its search engine.   By comparing the search behavior of users exposed to both search results and ads with the search behavior of users exposed only to search results, Google learned that it could make lots of money selling ads to go along with its search results without compromising the utility of its search engine to its users or the extent to which users made use of its search engine.  Indeed, Google eventually made detailed data on the response of its users to specific ads on its site available to advertisers, which enabled the advertisers to see for themselves the value they were getting from the advertising dollars they were sending Google’s way, encouraging them to send more Google’s way.

At the same time, the very fact that Google has a seemingly insatiable appetite for data about both the physical world and the cyber world and is committed to making much of that data accessible to individual users of the Internet places it consistently in conflict with those who wish to cordon off information, whether to preserve the privacy of that information, to protect the proprietary value of that information, or to prevent those subject to their rule from being influenced by that information.  Google has repeatedly, for instance, aroused the ire of privacy advocates.  Indeed, a privacy fiasco sunk one of its original efforts to compete in the social media realm with Facebook.  Google’s access to data about users’ social networks – about who they email with on Gmail and who they chat with on Gchat – seemed to give it a competitive advantage over Facebook: it could conjure up a user’s social network instantaneously from this data instead of waiting for the user to build out that network friend request by friend request.  What Google did not reckon with was the reality that many people would not be thrilled if all their friends, family members, acquaintances, and contacts knew as much as Google did about every last person they emailed and chatted with.

Google has also managed to place itself in the sites of those with financial and political interests in controlling information.  One of its most ambitious projects to organize and make accessible the world’s information – a project to scan and make searchable all books ever printed – made it the target of lawsuits by writers and publishers charging copyright infringement.  Its most public and anguished internal moral struggle concerned whether to cooperate with the censorship efforts of the Chinese authorities in order to do business in that country and bring its search engine – with its powerful, even if compromised, capacity to make the world’s information accessible – to China’s billion-plus population.  The company ultimately decided to pull out of China, but only after a period of willing complicity with China’s censors sullied its public image at home and an act of data espionage on the part of the Chinese government jolted the company’s complacent expectations that it could manage the risks associated with doing business in China and that its very presence would exert a moderating influence on the powers that be in China over time.

Google’s explosive growth has partly been a function of the attributes –traceable, as Levy suggests, to qualities of its founders – that make it unique.  It also clearly has been a function of fortuitous circumstances, which, to the company’s credit, it has successfully capitalized on.  As Vanity Fair’s survey of the history of the Internet makes clear, when Brin and Page arrived as grad students on the Stanford campus, the moment was propitious for the introduction of a technology, such as Page’s PageRank, that would enable users to quickly and effectively separate the wheat from the chaff on the Web.  The introduction of personal computers had broadened access to the Internet beyond a limited community of researchers to a broader public, while the extent of content available on the Internet had grown to the point of becoming unwieldy.  Meanwhile, the revenue potential of advertising tied to search presented Google with an opportunity for unusually rapid growth due to the capacity in cyberspace, described by Chris Anderson, to serve the “long tail” of user and content-creator distributions.  Google’s AdWords helps advertisers reach niche audiences that they could not economically target via traditional broadcast media.  Google’s AdSense helps niche sites and blogs with small audiences to get a piece of the advertising action.  In both cases, Google takes a large cut for itself for, as the Web makes it possible for it to do, making the traditionally impossible possible for others.

As circumstances on the Web have changed, the attributes that make Google unique have become less unambiguously advantageous.    Though Google has succeeded in large part by understanding and being responsive to the desires of its users, it’s model for accomplishing this is essentially a top down one.  Reflecting the brilliance and engineering values of its founders, Google hires the best and brightest to sift through data about its users and design and improve its products accordingly.  The increasingly social nature of Internet use in recent years has presented a new challenge to which this model, as evidenced by Google’s relatively futile attempts to respond to the Facebook phenomenon, has not proven itself to be entirely equal.  If Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are right to suggest in The Groundswell that “relationships are everything” on the Web today, this may go a long way toward explaining why, as Levy suggests, Google seems to be an increasingly troubled company.  Not only has Google become more difficult for users to relate to as it has evolved to become a corporate behemoth and struggled to chart a consistent ethical course, whether in China or on issues like net neutrality; the relationship Google offers – being serviced based on data that it unwittingly extracts from you – is not the ideal relationship that an increasingly number of “Creators,” “Critics,” and even “Joiners” are looking for on the Web.

Clay Shirky argues that the changes associated with social media are revolutionary because social media tools are collapsing the transaction costs involved in group sharing, collaborating, and collective-action taking.  This collapse of transaction costs is calling forth group efforts that simply were not viable when group action could only be achieved through traditional institutions, with their substantial managerial overhead costs.

For one thing, this collapse in transaction costs affects the provision of goods and services that are valued by some group of people, but not valued enough to justify the costs that would be required to justify production by traditional institutions.  For example, when Flickr collapses the costs of presenting in one, accessible place photographs from an obscure festival attended by New York hipsters, that presentation (through spontaneous sharing on the part of those who happened to attend the festival and take pictures) happens.  See http://www.flickr.com/groups/2008mermaidparade/.  This good – this collection of photos of interest to a certain, relatively small group of people with idiosyncratic tastes- simply would not be provided if the means of providing it depended on a traditional institution, i.e. a traditional news outlet either hiring freelancers or sending its own staff photographers, as the modest demand for the pictures would not justify the modest, though not modest enough, costs of procuring them.

For another, the collapse of costs involved in group sharing, collaborating, and collective-action taking makes it possible to draw into participation in group efforts individuals who in the past would have remained uninvolved bystanders.  This can be seen clearly in the case of group efforts to lodge protests against, or demand changes from, traditional institutions.  One of Shirky’s best examples here involves lay Catholics protesting inaction on the part of the Church in the face of repeated instances of abuse of children on the part of a particular priest.  The group, Voices of the Faithful, started in the basement of a church in Wellesley, Massachusetts and subsequently expanded worldwide to the point that its membership reached 30,000 and it was able to force the Church to respond.  See http://www.votf.org/whoweare/who-we-are/100.  The group’s formation in 2002 was motivated by revelations that were strikingly similar to revelations that had surfaced a decade before, before the spread of many of today’s social media tools.  The controversy that had been sparked by the revelations the decade before had been successfully managed by the Church and eventually died out.  New social media tools changed all that a decade later because it made the kind of actions necessary to spur a protest movement large and sustained enough to command the Church’s attention far easier.  Specifically, it made those actions far less demanding on both the leaders of the movement and those the leaders of the movement were seeking to engage.  When sharing outrage-inducing news stories is accomplished by the click of a mouse button rather than through photocopying and mass mailing, the time and energy it takes to keep a large group informed and motivated becomes such that ordinary people, rather than just organized institutions, can readily undertake the effort.  When the dissemination can be global in scope, at the same vanishingly small cost in time and effort, the possibility for shaking even a global institution like the Church is suddenly in the hands of people who traditionally would have been dissuaded by the mismatch between the time available to them in their busy personal lives and the daunting nature of the enterprise.

Indeed, in emphasizing both of these effects – the way in which social media facilitates the production of goods and services of low enough value to small enough groups that they would not previously have been provided and the manner in which social media makes some participation on the part of the marginally committed possible, where their stance would have been non-participation in the past – Shirky’s understanding of the impact of social media dovetails with Chris Anderson’s view in “The Long Tail.”  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail_pr.html.  Traditional physical retailers, Anderson emphasizes, focused on providing goods that appealed to large enough audiences to justify the costs involved in providing those goods in physical space (bookstores and movie theaters used their shelves and screens to provide “hits”).  With the costs of distribution essentially collapsed for online distributors (such as Amazon and Netflix) compared to what they are for physical retailers, the online distributors are able to make a profit selling, not only the “hits,” but also to much smaller niche audiences, in the extreme audiences of one.  When it comes to the effort necessary to sustain group activity, Shirky’s favored explanatory device is the power distribution, which looks a lot like the long tail.  The distribution of contributions on the part of those involved in contributing to a social media collaboration such as Wikipedia is highly unequal, with a few doing much more than the rest (they are the “hit” contributors, if you will), while many do much less and most (in the tail) make the most marginal of contributions.

While there is a temptation to ask whether the revolutionary changes wrought by social media are good or bad, Shirky makes a compelling argument that attempting to answer this question makes little sense.  Social media tools have helped democracy activists protect one another in the face of repressive regimes.  They have also enabled anorexics to abet each other in their self-destructive behavior.  Moreover, it is not as though we could, if we decided that the changes being wrought by social media were bad, simply “stop and pull over.”  We are not in a car that way, Shirky argues.  We are in a kayak, being swept along, with only a limited ability to steer.  As Shirky suggests, to the extent it is desirable to regulate certain group efforts facilitated by social media, we will increasingly have to do so by way of response rather than up-front control.

Shirky touches at the very end of his book on the tendency of collective action of a social or political nature facilitated by social media to be oppositional in nature, galvanizing groups in protest against an institution or policy rather than in favor of a specific, constructive vision or agenda for change.  The insight is very perceptive.  This was certainly true of the protests against Mubarak in Egypt.  One might also say that it was true of the participation engendered through social media by the Dean and Obama campaigns, if one posits that much of the unifying energy in those cases came from opposition to President Bush and his policies, rather than agreement on a unified vision as to what policies should replace those seen as “failed.”

One wishes Shirky would have dwelt on this topic a little longer and probed it a bit deeper.  He offers some intriguing remarks about the possibility that social media will increasingly allow groups to bypass traditional institutions, such as governments, in accomplishing collective ends.  In class we have talked about some examples of this, in parents who used social media to bypass a local government in getting a slide built or local residents who bypassed government authorities in getting a road paved.  But how does this translate to Egypt after the fall of Mubarak or to the United States after a young, inspirational leader defeats a discredited president?  Can the problem of transition from protest to the building of a positive future really be solved by way of Shirky’s bypass option when what is at stake involves more than a single, relatively uncomplicated and uncontroversial public good, such as a slide or road?  One cannot help but feel like there are severe limits here, while also wondering whether there are not strategies and tools that might be developed, as our understanding of social media improves, for bringing the constructive, positive-value-creating model of social-media-facilitated group effort exemplified by Wikipedia and Linux to the realm of social and political change.  Perhaps a subject for Shirky’s sequel.

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