Monthly archives: October 2009

A question of transparency

David Herrera,

Lawrence Lessig’s recent article Against Transparency and several subsequent responses [1] have stimulated my thinking quite a bit recently. I don’t feel qualified to say anything too significant or original about transparency because I’m new to the debates within the field. However, I have one immediate question.

First, let me briefly recap what attracts me to both Lessig’s argument and some of the responses to it.

Lessig worries about “naked transparency,” a term that is less than clear to me, but seems to represent those groups who advocate for releasing as much data to the public domain as possible, but who don’t have a plan for how the data can be most meaningfully used.

We know that most of us will not take the time to study the data and what they are capable of revealing to us. We will instead be myopic. We will allow the data to prove our conclusions and will not consider the ways in which we may be wrong. According to Lessig, the “naked transparency” movement ignores this reality. The data released in its name will be an trough for hyperbolic, irrational argument.

As several respondents noted, “naked transparency” as used in the article is basically a straw man. But perhaps more importantly, it’s not as if the level of hyperbolic, irrational argument is currently on the decline. Poor reasoning was here last year and it will be here next year. So, why should the constant misuse of data be relevant to whether more data are released? One instead hopes more data will increase, if only slightly, those times when someone presents a really strong argument to us.

Now, my question: Is there any empirical way to talk about the relationship between transparency and argument? As I understand the debate, one could assume there was a time before more transparency (BMT) and after more transparency (AMT). It would be nice if, in judging whether Lessig or his critics are correct, we could take the arguments BMT and compare them with the volume, or salience, or effect, or whatever, of arguments AMT. But how? And if we don’t have these empirical data available, does the transparency question thereby become philosophical — part of the debate about, say, the responsibilities of government?

As I said, this field is new for me. I would really appreciate your sharing of any good resources, books, or articles to help me understand the debate.

PS: Lessig responds to some of his critics in part by saying his argument is different from what I understood it to be: That some data are literally meaningless, or so complex as to be extremely difficult to understand, and these are the data that will be misused and that the “naked transparency” movement needs a plan to handle. For my part, I don’t really see the original article making this point, but I will assume he at least meant it. Regardless, is this question not also an empirical one? Which data are these uber-complex ones? How do we draw that distinction?

1. The articles I read in response to Lessig:

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Ideas of journalism: Facing an uncertain media future

David Herrera,

A series of occasional links pointing to essays I think seriously examine the way we get our knowledge about how the world is, was, will be, might be, or should be — commonly understood as journalism. I’ll sometimes include some questions of my own underneath the summary. Have a suggestion? Let me know.

Much of what Mark Scott, the Managing Director of the Australian Broadcast Company, says in a recent lecture is less of an argument than a recapitulation of the past: The story of media barons who once ruled and the swift destruction of their empires.

What now? Scott is more existentialist than determinist, who believes that “the fate of our organisations lies with us.” Under this assumption, he lists what he sees as those realities news media need to recognize to survive.

One such reality is that the news media must provide quality content and free their users from restrictions on how they can experience it. The goal is no longer to solely drive viewers to a Web site. Instead, the data must be equally enjoyable on Facebook or a mobile phone.

A second reality is that users need more power and trust invested in them. Scott is actually brief on this point, but he believes it enough to say, “If we are to survive as anything more than a shell … this is what we must do.

There are other similar points, such as giving innovators space to work rather than buying them or attempting to crush them, and the importance of diversification on the part of media owners (a lá The Washington Post).

But perhaps the significance of the speech, as Jay Rosen noted on Twitter, comes from the source: A media executive, albeit for a public broadcaster, embracing both uncertainty and the general public’s developing role in journalism.

Read: Mark Scott, “The Fall of Rome: Media After Empire,” available (with additional commentary) as a PDF from Crikey.

NB: Mark Scott is @abcmarkscott on Twitter.

Ideas of journalism: The necessity of organizations

David Herrera,

A series of occasional links pointing to essays I think seriously examine the way we get our knowledge about how the world is, was, will be, might be, or should be — commonly understood as journalism. I’ll include some questions of my own underneath the summary. Have a suggestion? Let me know.

Paul Steiger addresses the future of investigative reporting “in the Web era” in an essay on the Huffington Post.

Newspapers once provided the bulk of the nation’s investigative reporting into “[abuses] of power and failure to uphold the public interest.” Today, newspapers and the depth of their coverage, are thinning, dying, or already dead.

Who will pick up the slack?

Steiger wants to counter “the extreme Web advocates” who argue that individual bloggers or crowdsourcing a lá Wikipedia will “gradually get us to truth.” He argues that only organizations will be able to muster the technical, financial, and legal resources necessary for sustained investigations.

Steiger, who edits ProPublica, the non-profit reporting outfit, says his is one of many organizations in the developing news ecosystem that may be able to sustain the journalism that newspapers are leaving behind.

Read: Paul Steiger, “Investigative Reporting in the Web Era,” on The Huffington Post.

Dave’s food for thought

• Steiger never mentions money beyond that it’s necessary for investigative reporting. Where’s it gonna come from for him and the new kinds of organizations he mentions?

• Is there a point to attacking “the extreme” Web advocates? Who takes them seriously? Not to mention he attacks a straw man – no sources or links are cited to demonstrate who holds this “extreme” position.

FTC’s new rules and bloggers: Not quite worried yet

David Herrera,

I read critiques of the FTC’s new guidelines on bloggers’ disclosure of material interests online by Jeff Jarvis, Reason Magazine, and Dan Gillmor. All three tried to convince me that the new regulations are dangerous, but I’m not entirely persuaded.

I’ll go through the arguments of Jarvis and Gillmor below. Reason’s post makes mostly similar arguments, except in one spot where they clearly misread the rules — the first commenter on their post points out the error.

Why Jarvis and Gillmor? Only because I happen to follow them on Twitter. They’re arbitrary, not exemplary. Have you found stronger arguments? Share in the comments.

Jarvis

First, Pay Per Post et al, as I realized late to the game, are not aimed at fooling consumers. Who would read the boring, sycophantic drivel its people write? No, they are aimed at fooling Google and its algorithms. It’s human spam. And it’s Google’s job to regulate that.

Pay Per Post may not be aiming to fool consumers, but what if it does? I don’t know who would read “sycophantic drivel” apparently any more than Jarvis does but I’m more sure that not everybody knows their way around Pay Per Post and its ilk as well as he might. Are those people deserving of more protection?

Surely it’s not Google’s job to regulate whether a reader has an adequate understanding of the Web, nor is it their job to highlight those parts of the Web which can harm individuals. It would be nice for them to do so, but it’s not a requirement, so far as I know.

Second, the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

I confess to having thought of the Internet as a medium until I read this paragraph. I’m now reconsidering that assumption. But even if we assume the Internet is not a medium, I don’t think it follows that the FTC’s “going after” bloggers is equivalent to the government goon listening in at Denny’s.

In Denny’s, the only people privy to my conversation about Uncle Vinnie are the people I’m talking to, and maybe someone who happens to walk by at the right time, or the people in the table next to me. Regardless, in a face-to-face conversation, there is likely to be a relationship between the speakers, where Person A already knows that Person B’s uncle owns the pizzeria that Person B hawks.

There’s no need for disclosure here – in the context of the conversation, there is less chance that Person B is trying to harm Person A, or that Person A can’t ask enough questions of Person B to figure out B’s relationship with Vinnie.

Contrast the Denny’s conversation with a blog post I make about my uncle’s pizzeria (if my uncle had one, that is). While regular readers or friends might know who my uncle is, someone searching “Columbia MO pizza” does not. Isn’t that person deserving of a warning?

The time element is also important. My conversation at Denny’s exists only for as long as the sound emits.My blog post about pizza is, or at least could be, around for a long time. There’s no guarantee I’ll keep checking back on the post, or that I’ll keep blogging. Two years from now, isn’t someone who stumbles on an isolated post deserving of the proper context?

How much do I have disclose?…And what about automated ads, such as those from Google?

I share these concerns. I suggest reading those paragraphs in Jarvis’ post to understand fully the situations that may come up.

And there is the greatest myth embedded within the FTC’s rules: that the government can and should sanitize the internet for our protection. The internet is the world and the world is messy and I don’t want anyone – not the government, not a newspaper editor – to clean it up for me, for I fear what will go out in the garbage: namely, my rights.

Your right to…? And what about the rights of others? Which rights are promoted and which are muted?

Gillmor

The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same.

Sadly, this theme is not picked up again in the rest of the post, so I don’t know what to make of it. In itself, the sentence doesn’t really mean anything. Perhaps he’s trying to make a similar point to what Jarvis did above.

I’ve posted a number of Twitter tweets about Android, including my preference for that environment than Apple’s restricted system. Where, exactly — in a post with a total length of 140 characters — should the disclosure go?

If the FTC were to regulate that disclosure should fall in the same tweet as the original message, then I agree, we have a problem. It’s not clear whether that’s the case. Edward Champion suggests (in update 2) that the FTC may be OK with disclosure in a separate tweet, which is an annoyance, but I think palatable. One would hope, though, that simply listing disclosures on an “about me” page somewhere, linked to from your Twitter profile, would be sufficient.

[W]hat about the extremely common practices of traditional media? Every news organization covering technology gets freebies by the container-load. Book reviewers’ offices overflow with volumes sent by publishers. Subsidized or even complimentary travel, food and other things of this sort are common but too-rarely disclosed.

Fair enough. This point alludes to one part of the new regulations I found confusing: How the FTC determined who a “reasonable” consumer is. From my interpretation, one reason traditional media were excluded from the new rules is that a reasonable reader would know that the newspaper received the product from the company. Oh? I can’t think of a reason why that may or may not be the case.

Regardless, the point Gillmor makes (Jarvis made it too) doesn’t really address whether the new rules are right. In fact, it almost seems by his argument that, were newspapers included under the regulations, then the regulations would thereby become more legitimate, which I don’t think he wants to argue.

We already have laws against fraud. Let’s enforce those — first against the serious fraudsters, who keep getting away with it — before we even consider harsh regulations on speech.

I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not that he’s wrong, but I need to know something about the rules against fraud and how they’re applicable to the current situation before understanding this reason.

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After I finished typing the above, I found Robert Quigley’s arguments on important ambiguities in the regulations. With a dash of humor, to boot. I think most of what he says has merit.

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Covering the economy

David Herrera,

I spent a good part of today working up an argument for why The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s recent study on “Covering the Great Recession” wasn’t as useful as it could have been.

The argument isn’t important at this point, because I talked myself out of my position.

But because I’m selfish and want something to show for my drafts and rewrites, I’m posting the link to the report anyway to say: It’s worth noting that most media did not cover economic indicators reflecting the recession’s impact on the majority of Americans.