So I'm on an Ethan Zuckerman kick lately, and here's Zuckerman responding to a report in the Guardian that Joe Lieberman was able to pressure Amazon into kicking Wikileaks off their servers in the wake of Wikileak's recent State Department cable dump.
In the video I posted below, Zuckerman talks for a bit about Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital, and most specifically about Negroponte's idea that it is hard to build connections in the world of atoms, in the world of tangible things. But, Negroponte predicted way back in 1995, in the emerging future, in the digital world, it would be much easier to build connections because information would move very easily as tiny bits at the speed of light across the globe.
But of course as Zuckerman goes on to point out, things haven't quite turned out that way (not entirely surprising when you remember that we didn't all of a sudden become a new species devoid of clannish tendencies). Information does move very quickly indeed in the digital world, but that information tends to stay within rather closed loops; basically, we talk to people who are like us.
And so, Zuckerman argues, even though we have an amazing physical infrastructure that allows us to transport both goods as well as information all across the globe, if we only focus on that infrastructure, we won't have a very good idea of what is really going on, we won't know what kinds of connections people are building and what they are doing with those connections. And he's quite right, it isn't very useful to look just at the infrastructure, but of course as his quote above makes clear, the infrastructure is still pretty important.
People are certainly aware of the change, but I sometimes wonder whether they appreciate the magnitude of the shift toward private control of our primary places of public discourse. With facebook and twitter you have incredibly important spaces for both public discourse and the private discourse that sustains it being policed by private entities. That simply wasn't the case 20 years ago. Even with the early advent of the internet, information was not as easily policed or controlled or circumscribed as it is today. It is more difficult to limit the content of a phone call, or an email message, or a short wave radio broadcast, or a snail-mail letter without reducing the desirability of the communication in a free and open society. But a post on facebook, or twitter, or this blog post for instance, it's much easier to limit the bounds of that content without materially reducing the desire to communicate through that interface because you can filter out or block just certain messages, or certain audiences from seeing certain messages.
Now, I'm not saying that facebook or twitter or amazon or google are doing anything terribly nefarious (yet), but they and the political-economic power-structure that controls the U.S. are acting in a formative period in our new media environment. Our republic has succeeded in large part thanks to the fact that our government has protected and subsidized the free press throughout our history. As communication moves increasingly through private networks instead of through public or publicly-regulated networks, will we still be able to have the free and open discourse that is so necessary to the success of a governance structure that takes its driving force from the will of the people?
One of my favorite parts of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is when he describes traveling out to the hinterlands of Tennessee or some such frontier place and coming upon a cabin deep in the woods and being dumbfounded that the resident there could speak intelligently on all the major subjects of the day because he received a newspaper. Such a thing would have been unheard of in monarchical France among the "peasants." But newspaper's in the early republic's period were subsidized by the postal service, and that allowed information to flow freely.
Will we be able to say the same about our information 20 years from now? To answer that question we will have to pay close attention to both changes in our communication patterns and in our communication infrastructure.
It’s going to be very interesting to hear how Amazon justifies this decision. If the company was required by a court order to remove the content, that’s one thing. If they simply responded to pressure from a US Senator, or to boycott threats, it sends a very disturbing message: that Amazon will remove content under political pressure. Yes, Amazon is within its legal rights to refuse service to a customer… but as I’ve argued previously, they’re a private company responsible for a public space. That’s the nature of the internet – we use it as a space for public discourse, though the sites we use for much of our discussion are owned by private corporations and controlled by terms of service that are significantly more stringent than restrictions on public speech.
In the video I posted below, Zuckerman talks for a bit about Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital, and most specifically about Negroponte's idea that it is hard to build connections in the world of atoms, in the world of tangible things. But, Negroponte predicted way back in 1995, in the emerging future, in the digital world, it would be much easier to build connections because information would move very easily as tiny bits at the speed of light across the globe.
But of course as Zuckerman goes on to point out, things haven't quite turned out that way (not entirely surprising when you remember that we didn't all of a sudden become a new species devoid of clannish tendencies). Information does move very quickly indeed in the digital world, but that information tends to stay within rather closed loops; basically, we talk to people who are like us.
And so, Zuckerman argues, even though we have an amazing physical infrastructure that allows us to transport both goods as well as information all across the globe, if we only focus on that infrastructure, we won't have a very good idea of what is really going on, we won't know what kinds of connections people are building and what they are doing with those connections. And he's quite right, it isn't very useful to look just at the infrastructure, but of course as his quote above makes clear, the infrastructure is still pretty important.
People are certainly aware of the change, but I sometimes wonder whether they appreciate the magnitude of the shift toward private control of our primary places of public discourse. With facebook and twitter you have incredibly important spaces for both public discourse and the private discourse that sustains it being policed by private entities. That simply wasn't the case 20 years ago. Even with the early advent of the internet, information was not as easily policed or controlled or circumscribed as it is today. It is more difficult to limit the content of a phone call, or an email message, or a short wave radio broadcast, or a snail-mail letter without reducing the desirability of the communication in a free and open society. But a post on facebook, or twitter, or this blog post for instance, it's much easier to limit the bounds of that content without materially reducing the desire to communicate through that interface because you can filter out or block just certain messages, or certain audiences from seeing certain messages.
Now, I'm not saying that facebook or twitter or amazon or google are doing anything terribly nefarious (yet), but they and the political-economic power-structure that controls the U.S. are acting in a formative period in our new media environment. Our republic has succeeded in large part thanks to the fact that our government has protected and subsidized the free press throughout our history. As communication moves increasingly through private networks instead of through public or publicly-regulated networks, will we still be able to have the free and open discourse that is so necessary to the success of a governance structure that takes its driving force from the will of the people?
One of my favorite parts of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is when he describes traveling out to the hinterlands of Tennessee or some such frontier place and coming upon a cabin deep in the woods and being dumbfounded that the resident there could speak intelligently on all the major subjects of the day because he received a newspaper. Such a thing would have been unheard of in monarchical France among the "peasants." But newspaper's in the early republic's period were subsidized by the postal service, and that allowed information to flow freely.
Will we be able to say the same about our information 20 years from now? To answer that question we will have to pay close attention to both changes in our communication patterns and in our communication infrastructure.
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