From the Boston Globe today:

Blagojevich a distraction for Democrats
Former governor’s retrial complicates campaigns in Ill.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Alexi Giannoulias had planned to talk jobs. The Democrat in a tight race for President Obama’s former Senate seat wanted to take the opportunity to say his Republican opponent had helped wreck the nation’s economy.

Reporters, though, only wanted to talk about the ousted Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a newly convicted felon who is expected to be retried on some counts.

The unfinished business of the Blagojevich trial poses a major new hurdle for Illinois Democrats, who are already facing a difficult election season. Despite hopes that Blagojevich’s trial would wrap up well before the November vote, a retrial could begin as soon as this fall, in the final weeks of campaigning.

Blagojevich’s saga will keep diverting attention from the pocketbook issues Democrats want to talk about as they try to keep Obama’s old seat…

Hmm. Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Media continues to distract Democrats with Blagojevich
Journalists’ pandering threatens democracy in Ill.

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The National Enquirer, which thinks it’s about time it was given a Pulitzer, this week (July 26) blares from its front page “Whitney’s $6,300 a Week Drug Habit.” The story inside tells us that Whitney’s addicted not only to drugs but to eating. And they’ve got the photo to prove it:

As my brother Andy pointed out when he saw me reading it, the least of Whitney Houston’s problems is that she’s over-eating. She really ought to see someone about that extra hand of hers.

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I didn’t need the viral campaign to convince me I loved the Old Spice Guy ads. I rewound it the first time I saw it on TV so my wife could see it.

Two points:

1. While I of course admire how cleverly they’ve viralized it, credit where credit due: it would have laid there as inert as a hand-caught silverfish if the content weren’t compelling. And what’s essential about the content, besides the charm of the Guy himself, is that it mocks advertisements, men, the product, and the viewers. Pretty much a clean sweep of ironic commentary.

2. In a viral campaign — as in the general movement of ideas and memes around the Net — the audience is also the medium. We are that through which memes move.

BTW, here’s a look at how they churned out the personalized videos.

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I talked with a journalist today about Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows. It’s a good book to which I have complex reactions, which I’ll save for another time. But I found that I kept calling it “The Narrows.” In part this is because my brain focuses on vowel patterns. But it’s also a bit ironic, since part of my reaction is that if the Net is the shallows (a brilliant title, by the way), then the old media that Nicholas romanticizes was the narrows: narrowing the richness of shared experience to a manageable trickle.

If the choice is between the shallows and the narrows — and, it’s important to remember that that is not the choice — it’s not so clear which to prefer.

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I was listening this morning to an NPR Morning Edition story by Allison Aubrey about a study that found that if mice drink lots o’ joe, they’re less likely to suffer from little tiny cases of Alzheimers. It was a fine piece, but to a large degree because it spent most of its time undoing the very reason that the story was on the air. The story’s pitch was: Coffee prevents Alzheimers! The bulk of the story was: In mice! Maybe! Other studies on humans are provocative but inconclusive! There are other factors! We don’t know! Maybe! Mouse study isn’t really all that significant!

On the one hand, it’s admirable that NPR spent so much of its time getting us past the headline. On the other hand, isn’t it a little bit depressing that we need to be told over and over again that scientific studies rarely are conclusive about big points and biological correlations? Are we still that unschooled in the scientific method that 450 years after the birth of Francis Bacon (and a thousand years after Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, if you want to get technical about it) we need a refresher course in science’s nervous stepwise progress every time the media report on a scientific study? Apparently, yes.

Then, as if NPR were thinking exactly the same thoughts, the very next piece (by Alix Spiegel) was about how a tiny study got turned into a cultural meme:

In the spring of 1993 a psychologist named Francis Rauscher played 10 minutes of a Mozart Piano Sonata to 36 college students, and after the excerpt, gave the students a test of spatial reasoning. Rauscher also asked the students to take a spatial reasoning test after listening to 10 minutes of silence, and, after listening to 10 minutes of a person with a monotone speaking voice.

And Rauscher says, the results of this experiment seemed pretty clear. “What we found was that the students who had listened to the Mozart Sonata scored significantly higher on the spatial temporal task.”

The story tracks how this modest research among a tiny, non-random group led to a small industry of Mozart for Babies CD’s, the state of Georgia distributing free Mozart CD’s to every newborn, and even death threats against Rauscher for having the temerity to report that she did not observe the same beneficial results from listening to rock and roll.

Why did this basically insignificant study generate so much interest?

It’s probably a couple of things, Rauscher says. Americans believe in self-improvement, but also are fond of quick fixes. And as Rauscher points out, parents care desperately about their children.

Sure. But that’s missing the primary cause in the sequence of events:

The first call came from Associated Press before Rauscher had even realized that her paper was due to be published. Once the Associated Press printed its story the Mozart Effect was everywhere.

“I mean we were on the nightly news with Tom Brokaw. We had people coming to our house for live television,” Rauscher says. “I had to hire someone to manage all the calls I had coming in.”

The headlines in the papers were less subtle than her findings: “Mozart makes you smart” was the general idea.

Americans may have embraced the Mozart-makes-babies-smart meme because we love our poor dumb babies so much, but we got the idea from the AP and the rest of the media that followed AP’s lead. The media played on American’s love of babies, self-improvement, and quick fixes to serve up exactly what we wanted to hear.

So, I’m willing to acknowledge that we have a stupidity gene that causes strong conclusions to wipe out the reasoning that led to them. But the media are supposed to be helping us to get past our natural tendency toward blunt-edged thinking. Instead, over and over it dangles juicy conclusions in front of us, appealing to our fear of disease and our urgent desire to give our babies the competitive edge they need to crush lesser babies whose parents do not love them as much. The good science reports — like this morning’s on caffeinated mice — dangle exciting conclusions in front of us but then explain why we shouldn’t have gotten so excited by them. The bad ones — most of them — play upon the fact that for some reason, we seem unable to remember how science actually works…and then reinforce that forgetting, over and over.

By the way, I wonder if one other reason we forget how science works is that we are taught about the scientific method by performing experiments in school that establish known results. When the lima beans kept in the dark don’t grow, we’re told that the experiment worked because it proves that lima bean sprouts need light. The teacher doesn’t mention that maybe it was because that side of the jar happened to be in the path of hostile bacteria or that the distribution of the beans was not sufficiently randomized. Only many years later is it broken to us that the scientific method is more about eliminating false hypotheses than proving positive causation.

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Brendan Greeley is moderating a panel on truth and factchecking. He begins by wondering if we need argument-checking as well as fact-checking.

Bill Adair of Michelle Bachman.) They also check pundits. And they have an Obameter that tracks how Obama is delivering on his 500+ campaign promises. They have also begun state sites. “It’s a whole new form of journalism,” he concludes.

Brendan: Couldn’t you have done this before the Net? No, says Bill. You couldn’t do the research. Plus, the corrections would have only run in the one edition of the paper, and if you missed it, you would have missed it forever.

There is a jurisprudence to the Truthometer, Bill says. They’ve had to invent how to distinguish an “untrue” from a “pants on fire.”

Jay Rosen says that 58 yrs ago, Joe McCarthy exploited defects in the media to make a name for himself, at great cost. Charges are news. What happens today is news. Senators are worth reporting on and have some credibility. News can’t be untold. Eventually, the media figured out that they’d been exploited; the press had been put in the service of untruth. So, reporters changed the rules: It suddenly became ok to do “interpretation.” I.e., it was ok for them to point out that a public official might have another motive for what he said. Fifty years later, politicians are exploiting different weaknesses. The best known is “he said she said” journalism. That’s a response to the quest for innocence, i.e., a demonstration that you are neutral in the cultural/political wars. Rather than having an agenda for the left or right, the press has an innocence agenda. He-said-she-said also helps journalists make their deadlines: you don’t have time to interrupt, so you get someone to state the other side.

In December, Jay tweeted that Meet the Press ought to fact check its guests and run the results on Wednesday. ABC has started doing it, for ABC This Week. MtP has refused, possibly because the person who’s been the most frequent guest is John McCain, who Politifact rates as a pants-on-fire liar. But, some college students have put up MeetTheFacts.com to

Marc Ambinder says that he’s getting more comfortable going outside of traditional journalism’s box, and getting angry about being told to stay inside of it. E.g., there’s nothing to the story of the White House offering a job to Sestak, but the press is covering it as if it’s an issue. The solution is for reputable journalists to say that it isn’t a story and then covering something else, but you’re dealing with an entrenched set of habits.

Bill points to TechCrunch as his favorite voice on the Web, which, as he says, is strongly voiced and non-neutral. Jay says that it used to be that you lost credibility if you judged, but that has flipped. This is part of a culture war in which the press is an object of attack, Jay says.

Brendan says that Jay was right 5 yrs ago to say that the war between journalism and blogging is over. Now there’s the same sort of controversy over factchecking. How do we get past the conflict, Brendan asks. Bill says we need to get past the “bucket of quotes” mentality. Factchecking should be a standard part of the journalist’s toolkit. Jay says that the birther phenomenon is interesting. That Obama was born in the US is as verified as a fact can get. But, within politics, the overriding of that fact has given rise to a political movement. There is no journalistic response to this. They can’t treat it as a claim within the spectrum; it’s actually a repudiation of journalism. Marc and Jay agree that the remedy is not within journalism but within the political system: Republicans ought to shame the birthers.

Q: What about factchecking that goes wrong?
A: There’s still room for journalists.
A: (jay) Reputation systems work.
A: (brendan) But email is anonymous.

Q: Reputation systems can be gamed. And we need the Sunday shows to do the factchecking on the same episode so people can see it.
A: Yes. We’re seeing progress, but… ABC deserves credit.

Brendan: There’s selection bias in factchecking. Factcheckers decide what to count as worth checking?
Bill: Is it something that Mabel — our typical reader — would wonder about?
Jay: News orgs used to establish trust by advertising their viewlessness. now they need to say where they’re coming from.

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Roger Ebert has a thoughtful an respectful response to a TED Talk by Kellee Santiago, in which she says that video games already are art.

Besides a general annoyance that there already is a body of thought about what constitutes art and maybe it’d be helpful not to have to start over every time we talk about these things (insert an old man’s sigh here), I feel like we’re in definitional hell: If it looks like art, Ebert will say it’s not a game, and if it looks like a game, Ebert will say it’s not art. What’s the point?

Well, maybe the point is what Ebert asks towards the end: “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” Good question. One answer is that they want to be taken more seriously than they are.What they’re doing aren’t merely games. Some are beautiful. Some are funny. Some are occasionally morally challenging. Some are well-told tales. Some are astonishingly clever. That doesn’t make them art, but, you know, we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona last week, and there are galleries full of art that don’t look a lot like art either.

And, unlike Ebert, I leave the door fully open for games to be art. Mass Effect 2 may not be great art, but it’s better than a lot of pretty good TV shows I’ve watched. The Path has a numinous quality. Bioshock had a narrative twist that Hitchcock would have liked. Why can’t they be art? Unless, of course, you say that games always have to be won or lost (they don’t — Wittgenstein covered this pretty well) and that art can only happen when you’re pursuing artistic experience in itself (it doesn’t).

In fact, I’d pass Ebert’s question back at him: Why is he, a film critic, so intensely concerned that games not be defined as art? The answer is, I’d guess, that he sees that games are becoming aesthetically competitive with movies.

Art happens in any form of human sematic construction that is developed long enough. Of course art can happen in video games. It’s not the medium or the rhetorical form that holds them back, but the commercial constraints.

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Christian Sandvig is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “The Television Cannot Be Revolutionized.” [NOTE: I am live-blogging, making mistakes, getting things wrong, leaving things out, not spellpchecking. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK and do not assume this is an accurate reflection of Christian's talk.]

He begins by crediting Gil Scott Heron for the title. He says he’s looking for a research agenda for studying TV, especially three bottlenecks: distribution, search, and genre.

He talks about a 1995 effort to create a cable channel (The Puppy Channel, then Channemals) that was all cute animals all the time. The creator’s market research showed it would capture a respectable 0.1% of the US TV market. So, he went to Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, but they thought it was “too weird” an idea for cable. He found it’d cost $17M to distribute it himself.

So, says Christian, the creator launched ThePuppyChannel.com. no one is watching it, but people are watching cute animals on YouTube, etc. The bottleneck has been broken, but it still looks like 1995. E.g., YouTube has a Rentals beta and puts ads everywhere. “YouTube is behaving like a television network and not like a tube for you.” The person behind the recent redesign (Margaret Stewart) of YouTube said “We want you to go into passive mode, sit back, and watch.” We used to think that the Net and Net TV were about interactivity.

TV is important, Christian says. A Ball State U study in 2009 looked at what Americans spend their time doing with media. 100% of people use the phone every day. People use video about 6 hours a day in the US. (This includes video on any device.) About 2/3 of views were on YouTube last year. Analysts say YouTube loses money, but Hulu is profitable. One possible conclusion: Dump amateur content.

In an essay, Christian and a colleague compared Life Magazine and You Tube. Life launched as pioneering photo-journalism. Is YouTube becoming like Life magazine?

Christian shows the power law distribution. What would be the ideal distribution, he asks. We don’t want a single producer of media. We don’t want only a long tail because then none of us share any single media content; that would be complete fragmentation. We don’t want only the head, because that’s media concentration, although it would at least give us enough shared experience to have a culture. In fact, says Christian, we shouldn’t be thinking simply about the shape of the curve. If we were talking about monetary income curves, we’d want to do a mobility analysis: How hard is it to move up the curve? It’s not so much the shape as whether you can move up it, he says.

“We seem to be in the process of building two Internets, Christian says, “which is worrying.” Getting your baby video up on YouTube is easy, and you don’t even need YouTube to do it. But, if you want to show the Olympics, NBC has to do a deal with a Net intermediary; if you tried to do it from the server under your desk, it wouldn’t work. History break: Adorno was exercised by the making industrial of culture via things like expensive, complex broadcast studios; the same is happening with the Net because we need expensive, complex hosting/edge-caching services.

A difference between broadcast and Net media: The head of the curve was purposefully built for TV, but emerged for the Net. TV started out with only local audiences because there were no national networks. After a lot of investment and lobbying, after 1962 we have a national TV system, built to satisfy advertisers.

The Net is supposed to be a cheaper form of distribution than TV. Is this true? If you use Amazon Web Services to distribute a video to a million people, is it cheaper than TV? It’s a hard comparison because TV bundles in the costs of building a market. So compare putting on a late-night one-minute infomercial. The costs are surprisingly similar.

Christian asks why more people aren’t doing research on this and on mobility. In part, he thinks, this is because of the way university departments are structured; they don’t always have people combine expertise in media and Net infrastructure.

Second bottleneck: Search. Videos become popular through being featured on distribution home pages, and on recommender systems. Chris Anderson says recommender systems help you find unpopular results. But there’s no reason for a system to design their algorithms that way, instead of promoting more popular systems. These systems look at things like featured videos (which can be paid placements). Steven Wittens in 2009 found that the algorithm tends to match view counts: If you look at a video, it will recommend other videos with the same or greater number of views.

Finally, the third bottleneck: Genre. How do unpopular things become popular? So much on YouTube apes the conventions of broadcast genres. Parodies of television sitcoms. Parodies of newscasts. Does mobility depend on adopting broadcast genres? Is YouTube just the A&R of the tv industry, externalizing the development of new talent?

Christian says he’s surprised that television seems to be going backwards. Distribution: He’s looking for ways to study this. And, he says, policy issues depend on this as well. E.g., Princeton has a distributed, p2p edge-caching system, sans Akamai. Search: See Frank Pasquale, Christian says. Search: Maybe vlogging, video game commentary, or animal videos are the new genre.

Q: Google says it puts user experience first. Are they betraying that at YouTube?Are they serving users by driving them to popular videos?
A: It’s hard, because people’s wants can be trained. Their search algorithms may reinforce popularity.

Q: You set up a dichotomy. TV is still transforming. There are more channels than content. TV is heading to the Net. Why not see this as a convergence?
A: I admit that in the framing I’ve emphasized a question of Internet exceptionalism. But, this, the Berkman Center, is Ground Zero for Internet exceptionalism.
Q: Maybe the conclusion is that people want mass hits and a long tail.
A: We don’t have good tools for arguing about what we want the shape of the curve to be, but we could about mobility.

Q: What about marketing? That makes a big diff about where you are in the curve. Networks are the biggest advertisers of themselves.
A: Yes, marketing is crucial. We’ve also unintentionally made capital requirements for distribution. I’d like a way to host a video that isn’t hugely expensive.,br>
Q: Why not be in the tail?
A: Chris Anderson says it’s finding your niche, but you could also call it total irrelevance. You want everyone to be able to construct culture.

Q: Isn’t BitTorrent the tool you’re looking for?
A: Any p2p performance tracks to page rank. The ones that will perform best are the ones that are popular.
Q: We want more bandwidth for the popular, and less for not popular.
A: We want a route to move from unpopular to popular. If I put it on my host, I’ll get hit if popular zooms.

Q: Could we be going back to the CompuServ model where we paid but the content was good?
A: Normatively, if we paid for it, there’d be a lot of advantages. Right now we have a sender-mostly-pays system, which is why we have edge-caching.

Q: How much does the culture of the users matter, vs. the culture of the distributors? What happens when users start to game the system?
A: One of the best way to find out about the algorithms is look to people who use these services a lot. E.g., the search engine optimizers. And the new users of new media tend to bring forward assumptions and behaviors from the old culture. Cf. Claude Fischer. Amanda Lotts in The Television Will Be Revolutionized focuses on the old industry. It’d be interesting to see how the old TV folks think about the new one.

Q: Content will flow uphill to money. TV has moved toward the Net. We watch when we want. We’ll see a merge of the two technologies. Understanding why some videos go viral would be valuable, because that will attract money.
A: It’s such a challenging research challenge. There are so many factors involved. But, I do want to say that my talk does recognize the influence of money.

Q: [yochai] You are proposing three distinct kinds of research projects: 1. Look at video creators and musicians. Mimi Ito on anime movie videos: they’re not primarily on YouTube. Look at how hard it is for a producer community to reach the relevant audience. And how important is that, normatively. 2. How much does a user see, read, or hear that is not news and that does not come through capital-intensive media? What is the flow of streams that people watch? We don’t know the answer to that. 3. What is the ability to set the agenda for what is broadly viewed as culture? MediaCloud looks at agenda-setting over time. Start with case studies. E.g., find 50 of the 895,000 viewers of the autistic kids YouTube.
A: This talk is a reaction against looking at how artists reach their desired communities. Lots of research is being done on this. How virtuous communities arise is not the most pressing question. More important: Are there new cultural gatekeepers arising?
A: Imagine that the answer of #2 is the 40% spend 50% of their time on content that doesn’t reach more than 100 people…

Q: Anita Elbersee [sp] says that the Web is magnifying the impact of blockbuster media. This gives the mainstream little incentive to be revolutionized. What’s the impetus to change?
A: Chris Anderson’s book doesn’t hold together because what drives things down the tail you could argue the other way, e.g., the recommender algorithms I talked about. So, what’s the incentive? There’s no “charlie bit my finger” lobby. There are beginning discussions about open video standards. I’d like to see more of a counterpoint to the mainstream approaches. The institutional impetus isn’t there. In most user-produced content, you don’t see revolution, nor would you expect to. Maybe I was being naive.
Q: If you kill the edge-caching business, why wouldn’t everyone get what they want?
A: The fact that you have to rely on third party hosting has effects broadly.

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Clay Shirky has given us a surprising number of Internet myths. And by this I mean not falsehoods but the opposite: Broad, illuminating ways of making sense of what’s going on. For example, Clay’s post about the power law distribution of links in the blogosphere (based on research by Cameron Marlow) changed how we view authority, fame, and success in the Web ecosystem, and provided the structure within which Chris Anderson could point to the Long Tail. And Clay’s Ontology Is Overrated made clear that a change in how we categorize our world affects very real power relationships; that essay was highly influential, including on my own Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Clay’s new post — The Collapse of Complex Business Models — gives us a broad way of understanding why those who used to provide us with content will not be the ones who give us content in the future…and why they cannot fathom why not.

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I’m looking forward to Christian Sandvig’s Tuesday talk at the Berkman Center:

THE TELEVISION CANNOT BE REVOLUTIONIZED

Tuesday, April 6, 12:30 pm

Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor

RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)

This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

ABSTRACT

Video on the Internet briefly promised us a cultural future of decentralized production and daring changes in form–even beyond dancing kittens and laughing babies. Yet recent developments on sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Fancast as well as research about how audiences watch online video both suggest a retrenchment of structures from the old “mass media” system rather than anything daring. In this talk I’ll argue that choices about the distribution infrastructure for video will determine whether all our future screens will be the same.

ABOUT CHRISTIAN

Christian Sandvig is a Fellow of the Berkman Center and Associate Professor in Communication, Media, and at Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds the Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University. In 2006 he received the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in the area of Human-Centered Computing.

All part of what one might see as the Berkman Center’s recent (past couple of years) theme that the Internet isn’t working out the way some of us hoped. (Note that the Berkman Center doesn’t really have a theme. I’m just pointing to a trend that may be more of a result of selective perception on my part, reflecting changes in my own thinking.)

Note the info about RSVPing if you want to attend, and the fact that it will be webcast live…

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Pew Internet has released its contribution to Pew’s annual report on the state of the news media.

My take on the results: Online users generally want news, but we don’t much care where it comes from. 71% of us get our news online, but only 35% of us have a favorite site. Of those 35%, only 65% check it every day. And only 18% of us are willing to pay for online news (a percentage that includes those of us who already do pay). Most of us which would switch sites if they began charging.

The report casually describes our activity as “grazing,” which I’d push back on. My guess is that often we’re going to news sites because someone we know or someone we read has linked to the site. We’re more like bees than like sheep, darting out of the hive when one of our co-bees does an interesting enough little dance.

Anyway, it’s the usual great work by Pew. Thanks, and thanks for posting it for free.

Here’s a podcast interview with me about Internet fame. It’s part of Open Thread Radio. Also on the episode: Thomas De Zengotita from Harper’s Magazine.

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Pew Internet has published the results of an important survey on how we’re getting our news today.

I haven’t read the whole thing but one little point leaps out already:

Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means.

Note that this breaks the usual rule that 1% of the online population does the work that the other 99% “consume,” which applies (extremely roughly) to Wikipedia edits, tagging, etc.

[LATER that day:] In fact, it’s fun watching tidbits from the report surfacing on Twitter.E.g. Jay Rosen @(jayrosen_nyu) points to Micah Sifry‘s writeup (@Mlsif). Scott Rosenberg (@scottros) reminds the Pew folks that “participatory news consumer” is an oxymoron. Meanwhile, Steve Rubel (@steverubel) points to Mike Melanson’s post at ReadWriteWeb about a report that says that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast media websites than Google News does.

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Tarleton Gillespie of Cornell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on the politics of online media. He’s been interested in how we are shaping cultural discourse through the confluence of tech, policy, economics, etc. Today he wants to look at how social platforms are shaping social discourse.

He begins with YouTube’s announcement in Dec. 2008 that they’re going to become more conservative in blocking offensive videos: removing some, moving some behind an age firewall, and algorithmically demoting some so they won’t appear on the most popular lists. This combines traditional tactics with newfangled technical management of where things appear. We don’t really have a language for how these sorts of innovations work.

He asks: How do we take the tradition of asking questions about how commercial providers shape the public discourse … with the basis that these providers, especially the most prominent ones, are playing a role in determining what ends up online, viewed and possible? How do we apply this to new media? Three differences in how online media work: 1. Emphasis on user-generated content. 2. Gatekeeping or comprehensiveness? E.g., Google wants comprehensiveness for Google Books. That changes why they would include or exclude. 3. They cater “to active niche communities, trying to produce a coherent site, consistent brand, and commodifiable audience.”

“How do these sites promise to be everything and not everything at the same time?” How have they cultivated the notion that they provide everything in a neutral manner? How do they intervene in what they provide? “What obligations are we willing to impose, to protect free speech and ensure a healthy public discourse?”

What about the promises they make that makes them appear neutral? How do they articulate their services and sell themselves to the various stakeholders, setting the terms for how they’re judged? Part of the answer: They use the term “platform.” “The role this term plays is indicative of the type of positioning a youtube, facebook or flickr would like to establish.” These terms are carefully chosen and are carefully massaged. Why has this term fit so comfortable in these sites’ characterizations and why have we accepted it? E.g., before being bought by Google, Youtube referred to itself as a service and a community. Afterward, it became a “platform.” The term draws on the computational meme: an infrastructure on which tools can be built. Marc Andreesen disagrees because you can’t build tools for it. [This is the original geeky meaning, but its meaning has shifted, IMO - dw] It also has a political meaning. And architectural. All these meanings help the term resonate. There are a series of connotations that are powerful in this tool: An open space, egalitarian, wide, limitless, facilitating something of value.

The term “platform” manages the conflicts among stakeholders for youtube. For users, it’s a platform from which to be heard. For advertisers, it’s a platform of opportunity. For media partners, it’s a distribution platform. For lawmakers, it’s a fragile, valuable platform that enables free speech. When they are talking about liability, they are merely a platform. Structurally, “platform” is not unlike “conduit.” [Hmm. I think that for advertisers, YT is a platform in that it's an open space where millions of users come together. - dw]

So, how do you begin to find a language for the technique and justifications online media make about what belongs on their site and what doesn’t. Facebook, youtube, and flickr adopt different strategies. Youtube maintains that it doesn’t look at content proactively but only when their users flag it. But they do look for spam and are obliged to look for child porn [actually, I think they are not required to proactively search out child porn — dw]. Youtube has a figure 8 model of community governance: Users flag content. Users can comment on the guidelines. Users can game the system, but Youtube can decide which flags to ignore. Users can complain about being flagged. So, while Youtube positions itself as non-interventionist, it actually isn’t. It says it’s defending the community according to the community’s norms, but those norms have been crafted by YT in accordance with its legal and economic interests.

YT’s algorithmic demotion of videos manages their front page. They don’t want it to look like a soft core porn site; those videos are there, but it’s not their image. Flickr does this carefully as well. Their front page tells you that this is a site for landscape photos, and birds, and arty shots. Amazon’s best seller list excludes “adult” literature. Not to mention (he says) Amazon’s removing from the Kindle a copy of 1984 that was posted in violation of copyright; what seems like ours isn’t really.

[I'm doing a terrible job capturing the questions. Basically, I just couldn't hear the first couple. Sorry!]

Q: [wendy] Platforms vs. intermediaries. “The lawyers tend to talk about intermediary liability or immunity, whereas economists talk more about platforms.”
A: Intermediaries such as ISPs have a different set of protections. YouTube wants the protections but doesn’t fit neatly into that definition. Viacom calls YTY a “distributor.”

Q: Couldn’t these platforms get out of the dilemma by providing curated and uncurated versions?
A: Flickr comes closer to that. It tries to have it all but not be visible about having it all. They have a “Porn is in the back” approach.

[me] We’re in a confusing time. We’ve invented new things that don’t fit the old vocabulary perfectly. What should we do about the lack of a vocab. Invent a new one? Be vigilant about understand how people use terms?
A: All vocabularies are strategic. We should unpack the terms and recognize that they’re doing work, and that the connotations matter. E.g., issues of liability depends on whether we see them as intermediaries or distributors. Is it about imposing a new vocab? Or maintaining vigilance? I’m torn about the impulses in those directions.

Q: We had a system that had user ratings. We a “text jockey” looking at msgs 24/7. We call them global ratings vs. contextual ratings. It’s gotten very very complex. E.g., cleavage photos have to have a head included.

Q: [jodi] How has the near real time feedback influenced accountability/exposure of algorithms and decisions? The Twitter/#amazonfail incident, for instance. Amazon was faced with a decision to respond or not, and then further faced with a decision of what to do about the allegation.
A: The Amazon FAIL revealed what was going on all along. Now the reaction can be faster, is more public.

[Missed some more questions because my hearing is getting worse.]

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BoingBoing reports boingnantly on the miserable enthusiasm of the (unelected, heavily-lobbied) European Commission for making it illegal to provide families with an Internet connection if any member is accused of having violated copyright three times.

Take a look at your hard drive and tell me for sure that a judge reviewing the charges in a 1-2 minute traffic-court style proceeding would not find you unworthy of a European Internet connection. Three Flickr photos you passed around because they were amusing? Three newspaper articles you downloaded and attached to emails you sent to friends? Three recipes you enjoyed and shared with your family? Three attachments friends sent you that you didn’t ask for but didn’t bother deleting because you didn’t even realize they were copyrighted? Three extended quotes from medical information sites sent to an ailing relative?

And, by the way, downloading copyrighted material is not necessarily a violation of copyright. Fair use creates exemptions that are based on factors other than mere possession.

This rule has nothing to do with advancing our arts, sciences, education, government, or economy. So, if the EC passes two more stupid/insane/corrupt (your choice) laws, can we disconnect them from governance? Please?

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Herkko Hietanen, a Berkman Fellow, is giving a talk about TV. “Television is really broken.” It’s not providing what consumers want: programs when we want them, where we want them. It lacks interaction with other viewers and with broadcasters. It has ads. It’s geographically limited. If you had to pitch TV to a venture capitalist, it would have a hard time getting funding.

Herkko gives a brief history of the highlights. VCRs were an early attempt to fix tv. This frightened the broadcasters, who took it to court, where — in Sony vs. Betamax — they lost. The court said the manufacturers were not responsible for infringing uses because the devices had non-infringing uses, and personal use was declared a fair use. Satellites extend over-the-air (OTA) broadcast. Community antennas were first set up by stores selling TV sets. Now cable is dominant. But contracts limit core innovation. “If you’re afraid you’ll piss off your content provider, you’re not going to do something that’s good for the consumer.”

There has been some innovation in the core. On-demand video. Time-Warner “LookBack” lets you view any show on the day it’s broadcast at any time during that day. Cable also provides a whole lot of channels. But, “Intelligence in the middle stops innovation at the edge.” The industry has litigated against just about everything innovative. E.g., Cablevision want to launch a service that would centralize storage rather than putting it in the set-top boxes. Just about everyone sued Cablevision for copyright infringement. The court saw that every user would have their own copy of a saved show. The court decided it doesn’t matter where the copies are stored. Herkko says it’s too bad it didn’t go to the Supreme Court so we’d have a definitive decision.

The problem with mythtv, Herkko says, is that it’s not user-friendly. [I spent 1.5 yrs trying to get MythTV to work, and failed :( Wendy Seltzer, seated across the table, has been using MythTV for years.] Tivo is easy but not all that easily hackable. You can’t share TiVo’ed shows, you can modify the code in the box. ReplayTV got sued for having a skip commercials feature, and went bankrupt.

Herkko points to living room clutter as another problem with TV today.

Herkko looks forward to PVRs getting connected to the Internet, because connected users create social networks, and they start to innovate. “We want stupid networked records and intelligent open client-players.” We want connected and tagged shows. We’ll have interactive TV for real, including gambling. Social groups could recommend what to watch.

This all creates privacy problems. E.g., an MIT study discovered they could identify gays by analyzing their social networks, with a high degree of accuracy.

At some point, users will probably start sharing their resources, cluster their recorders. Why should everyone record the same show over and over? Why get it from a central recorder when your neighbors have a copy? Of course, this is what got Replay TV into trouble, Herkko notes. He thinks that the social interaction around shows will happen before and after the show, because people won’t sit with a keyboard in their laps. [Since I'm on the backchannel as I listen to him, I guess I disagree.]

What about ads? Adding social networks would mean that people could watch ads they actually want to watch.

Overall: TV can be fixed. Social networks. Socially-oriented recorders.

Q: This is a compelling vision of the opposite of the Net. The Net is smart at the edges and dumb in the middle. TV has been the opposite. You seem to hope that the future will invert so consumers can get what they want. But consumers have never gotten what they wanted. What will change it?
A: We need brave entrepreneurs to test it in the courts. Having network recorders isn’t that different from having a VCR.

Q: When you were talking about the keyboard in your lap, I think that’s wrong generationally.
A: Voice works while watching tv. But typing and sharing the screen doesn’t.

Q: You’re talking about what the cable companies will do. But then there’s the stuff in the IP world: mythTV, Boxee, etc. That’s where the exciting stuff is.
A: Innovation at the core is very slow, while innovation at the edge is happens very fast.

Q: If the Internet arises to bypass the core, will the quality decline? Will it be more like YouTube style?
A: That’s a real concern. If everyone skips the ads, then there won’t be profit in producing high quality shows. Although there are also premium channels. And in Finland we pay an annual fee and get 4 channels.

Q: There are a lot of forces driving the centralization of TV. With that comes control against innovation at the edges. Is TV going to change or be changed by people sharing content from the edges?
A: If we force a change on TV, the broadcast flag will be re-introduced. Big audiences still demand the lay-back experience.
Q: The sitting back phenomenon has persisted for 50 yrs. Why will it continue?

Q: What is your main research question?
A: When recorders get connected, what sort of innovation are we going to get?

Q: Don’t we need non-Net neutrality to ensure that the video experience over the Net is good enough to inspire innovation in that space?
A: It can be done in other ways. You don’t need immediate delivery of all packets if you’re downloading for viewing late. E.g., in Finland I have a box that records 2 weeks of all 10 channels.

Q: The picture you’re painting is not very TV-like. It’s not broadcast, not one-directional, the business model doesn’t work, we’ll be using our computers…So, it seems like you’re dissolving what TV is. Rather talking about the “social enrichment of TV” [the title of Herkko's talk], we should be talking about the visual enrichment of the Internet. E.g., how do you see Hulu, which has some community features.
A: I defined TV at the outset: It’s geographically bounded, it’s broadcast, it’s scheduled, etc. And Hulu takes some of the edge approach, but it’s very much a core app. We’re going to see a big shift of control from the rights owners to consumers.

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