Why accountability now?
Tomorrow, I’m on a panel at an Accountability conference in London. Also on the panel: John Lloyd (editor, Financial Times Mag) and Richard Sambrook (dir., Global News, BBC). (I am a huge admirer of Sambrook. (I don’t know Lloyd.)) Topic: “Democratization of Communications: Technology and Accountability.” The question the panel is addressing: “Transparency…has been lost in translation and the Net is becoming increasingly unaccountable in sourcing misleading information to the general public and even to the media. What accountability approach may preserve this global virtual space for democracy?” Each panelist gets 7 minutes to speechify at the beginning. Here’s something like what I’m thinking of saying:
That this way of formulating the question seems reasonable terrifies me.
Let me put it like this. Suppose we were to listen in on conversations in bars and around dinner tables around the world. We would hear the most appalling ideas. Misinformation. Gossip. Outright lies. It’s a global epidemic! Would we then ask what accountability approach may preserve this global conversation space? Shall we inspect every conversation? Punish people for saying false things? Require them to publicly retract what they said because of the harm they’ve done? That would, IMO, do more harm than good.
I think we have to ask why the word “accountability” is showing up. Why is it now becoming so hot that it’s even paired against transparency, as if they were opposites, which they most decidely are not. Why accountability now?
After all, we have other words that serve well. For example, guilt. If someone does something wrong, they are guilty and some consequences should follow: Retribution, restitution, the cold shoulder, loss of respect…depending. What does “accountability” add to this? It implies a system that tracks each act, which digitally means each bit, in order to catch the few who are guilty. In the real world, such a system would be easily identifiable as totalitarianism, the infrastructure of a police state. So why does it seem plausible and even desirable on the Internet?
First, because on the Internet, we can track every bit. Or we could if we just altered the Internet enough. Say, like in China. If you want to see an accountable internet, that’s where you should look. After all, China simply wants to prevent false ideas from spreading and doing harm to the Chinese people. [Note for the irony-impaired: I am using this as a negative example.]
Second, we’re being seduced by a false vision of fairness perpetrated by traditional content producers and traditional political authorities. The fairness argument goes like this: Fairness consists of an equal exchange of value. If you buy shoes, you get the shoes and the shoe store gets your money. That’s fair. If, however, you pay leather prices for plastic shoes, the exchange was unfair. So, the argument goes, we want a system that maximizes the equal exchange of value.
Sounds right, but what would happen if this fairness were strictly enforceable in the real world? As it stands, if you buy a book, you can read it twice without paying the author again. You can lend it to a friend. She can sell it to a used book store. You and others just keep getting more and more value from the book, but the original bookstore, the author and the publisher don’t see a penny of that. It’s so unfair! [See above note for the irony impaired]
And according to the idea that fairness is the equal exchange idea of value, it is indeed unfair. But that only means that fairness — at least, this type of fairness — is not the highest societal value. Culture works by having ideas, tunes, images appropriated by the members of society. We make them our own. We quote and misquote the phrases, we whistle and mis-whistle the tunes, we combine them into messes and forget where we got the initial ideas. We build on them. We mutate them. We make them ours. A niggling idea of fairness would kill culture. Ideas succeed by becoming unaccounted-for.
We’ve allowed the trampling of this idea of fairness because we had no choice. But in the digital world, we can track every turn of the page. Culture is rapidly moving online. n the name of fairness, we are going to kill culture.
This ability to track every bit makes accountability possible, to protect “content” and to prevent the spread of ideas that are wrong…or that we just can’t tolerate. Accountability is now more attractive than ever because we are afraid of what will happen if everyone is allowed to speak, to explore, to get things right and wrong. But it’s more important to democracy, culture, the advancement of thought and the healing of the world to permit open, free, anonymous, playful talk than it is to tag every bit so it can be held against you.
So, yes, we need ways to counter the bad and sometimes fatally wrong ideas on the Internet. Let me suggest three. What would you do if you found out that human conversation was frequently way off track? First, engage in the conversation. Second, let’s work on educational systems that face the fact that the walls are down. Third, where more transparency and accountability are required, then let the people who are engaged in the discussion work on ways to improve the discussion; the Net has a remarkable history of enabling solutions to emerge that are far better than what outsiders would have imposed.
In short, keep your hands of our Internet.
[Disclosure: Edelman PR, to whom I consult, put the panel together and is paying my expenses.] [Tags: accoutnability DigitalRights anonymity]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Hi David,
Regarding your example of books. They don’t like that too much either!
The Growing Market
For Slightly Used Books
In Latest Threat to Publishers,
Readers Flock to Web to Buy
Best-Sellers at Big Discounts
By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 29, 2005; Page D1
Not sure if this article is sub only or not, so I’ve pasted a bit:
“Readers seeking E.L. Doctorow’s new novel “The March,” one of the best-reviewed books of the fall season, can buy the new novel at their neighborhood bookstore for $25.95 or on the Web for a few dollars less.
Or they can seek out an even better bargain, like the $13.99 (plus shipping) deal offered earlier this week for a “read once gently” copy on Amazon.com Inc.’s Web site.
The Internet is creating a new and fast-growing category in the book-selling market — the barely-used book. An increasing number of consumers are snapping up used volumes online at invitingly cheap prices. These aren’t yellowing copies of out-of-print titles but often unblemished copies of newly published books — sometimes available just a few days after a book’s official publication date.”
…
“The issue is so contentious that several literary agents are calling for authors and publishers to find some way to share in the revenue created by the used-book market. “The online transaction providers should pay a fee,” says Richard Pine, a partner in New York literary agency InkWell Management LLC. “The commission should be paid directly to the publisher, who should pass through 100% of that income to the author.”
Adds Ann Rittenberg, president of Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency Inc.: “I’d like to see the author getting 10% of a used book sale. I wouldn’t have asked for this years ago, but it’s so organized now that there should be a payment.” A spokeswoman for Amazon says the company doesn’t offer a commission and won’t comment on what it may or may not do in the future.”
—
ANOTHER POINT:
Another point you might want to make is that on blogs posters are almost always asked for links to back up their statements. I only frequent a couple blogs, but you rarely can just say something and not provide a source, unless it is your own opinion. Fellow bloggers keep you honest and ask for the link to a news article or other source. We’re a skeptical bunch, and I don’t think too much slides by.
Compare this to radio and cable “news” shows where we know without a doubt guests and hosts blatantly lie and no one calls them on it. Every day the lies go across the airwaves to unsuspecting viewers who believe it because Bob Dole, Tim Russert, Imus, or Rush, for example, said it.
Now, if it’s a site like Drudge, for example, you have to be careful because there is no conversation. But, on sites where readers can comment, the lies, rumors, and honest mistakes get caught pretty quickly.
Also, on television, even if it is an honest mistake it won’t be corrected because the show is over. On a blog, the conversation keeps going; someone will catch it and argue the point, and it will be corrected.
The Internet is generally more accurate than news shows on tv, but I suppose you do need to be discriminating and intelligent in what sites you choose to frequent. I don’t know what all is out there that the panel may be referring to.
As you said, “In short, keep your hands of our Internet.” And, I would add And, fix your own dang medium.
Sorry speakers only have 7 minutes! Looking forward to hearing from you after.
Gee, seriously, I hate to point this out, but I know you want to know. In your tag, accountability has a typo. Maybe tags will start being like keywords in meta tags; we always put keywords spelled wrong for our hurried searchers. ;)
Elegant. Excellent.
Dave, u have a double posting/entry. For a second, I thought I was having one too many !!! :)-
But nonetheless, its seems to hecka fun forum !!
1) You’re on a roll at the moment. Great stuff.
2) Like OLinda, I was struck by your use of the tag ‘accoutnability’. Obviously a devious attempt to remain unaccoutnable…
3) Lloyd is, I think, an ex-Communist (from way back). What this generally means, in the context of the British Left, is near-obsessive moderation and realism & bitter, contemptuous hostility towards those crazy utopian radicals. Old CPers also tend to be quite big on management’s right to manage, businesses’ right to do business & so forth. It’s quite a consistent pattern; Charlie Leadbeater, also an FT alumnus and a major cheerleader for globalisation, actually joined the Communist Party in 1980, i.e. after the crackdown on Solidarnosc.
(I’ve corrected the typo in the tag. And removed the first of the double posts. Aargghh.)
In recent times, I have come to think of accountability as related to providing an account (an aspect of transparency and its narration). So when I am accountable for something, or being held to account, it is for providing an account.
Although one can load it with words like responsibility and so on, and take it as something that is done to someone, I find that there is less angst for me if I just stick with providing an account, and holding *myself* to account.
Of course, the conference is misguided if it thinks there is anything different here than anything they (i.e., people engaged in professional journalism and media delivery) should be attending to with how they are holding themselves to account, or not.
What strikes me about this conference, without giving it very close attention, is that people don’t trust their fellows to learn how to sift the crap from the gems. Don’t they get how they’ve been training us to detect crap all this time? And to discount most of anything authorities have to say?
If this is just one more paternalistic group hell-bent on protecting me, I want to know first what they are doing to clean up their act and leave me empowered to choose who I will listen to with the best judgment I know how to apply.
[Ahh … all that pent-up longing to post here released. I cratered my Tablet PC and am now getting my favorite blogs resubscribed on its emergency replacement. What a relief … – dennis.]
[Note from David Weinberger: I double posted this blog post, and orcmid replied to the first one. I’ve deleted the first one and have re-posted his comment here. Sorry for the confusion.]
Although one can load it with words like responsibility and so on, and take it as something that is done to someone, I find that there is less angst for me if I just stick with providing an account, and holding *myself* to account.
Of course, one can unburden accountability from words like “authority” and “responsibility,” and it becomes all so much clearer. A lynch mob is merely a group of empowered citizens (“smart mob”?) holding a fellow citizen “accountable.”
Rigor is so lame. Things should mean what we want them to mean, or what’s the internet for?