From: <ji2016@columbia.edu>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 15:15:17 -0400

Paper 2: Blog, Spectacle, Capability

Blog, Spectacle, Capability

By Junichi IKEDA

As already lived in the Internet Society, we expect lots of legal
challenges within coming 20 years. To conquer those challenges, we
need to resort to the most fundamental principle: the US
Constitution. This strategy is acceptable because the decisions on
current, urgent issues are so decisive for the future regime. At
the same time, however, I strongly feel that there needs an
analytical framework beyond the US Constitution because,
eventually, those US decisions should procure other countries’
political supports for execution due to the universality of the
Internet. Here I like to introduce two concepts – “Spectacle
Society” and “Capability” - for this aim.

We are now in the era of emerging Blogosphere. Blog is getting
social reality to the extent that BusinessWeek reports the
possibility of blog replacing traditional mass media. [FN1]
Conventional institutional journalism, by contrast, is now losing
their grounds not only by the growing visibility of blog but also
by betraying people’s trust through several scandals. [FN2] Hence,
putting aside the ideological debate on “Blog v. Journalism,” it is
fair to say that the social positivity arises where people’s
interests tend to rely on more diversified, fragmented information
sources.

Then, what is going on to ordinary people, who have no strong
interest in the future of journalism? In my observation, the US is
rapidly transforming itself into “Spectacle Society.” [FN3] Every
daily event can be sliced into spectacles. A typical symptom is
Ashlee Simpson’s lip-syncing Net replay, which gave a boom to ABC
News Now site. [FN4]  Spectacle Society is brought about by the
“Late Capitalism” in which larger companies occupy major part of
national economy to the extent that people and social systems, more
or less, are organized by the dynamism of capitalism. [FN5]  In
Spectacle Society, whatever cultural representation (such as
symbol, design, discourse, etc.) can be exchanged in markets and
will become sources of economic values. Spectacle Society emerges
based on: 1) the emergence of affluent society (where consumption
dominates economy), 2) prevailing “reproduction systems” for
symbols (i.e., computer and network), and 3) social systems
facilitating the liquidity of symbol exchanges.

Indeed, the concept of Spectacle Society was introduced in 1960’s
and allegedly affected low-growth, industrialized countries after
the Oil Shock. But the US seemingly avoided this phenomenon by the
economic resilience in 1990’s as a macro factor, and, as a micro
factor, by the US legal system, which as a whole has resisted this
“free symbol exchange” under the stronger legal execution system
than other countries. [FN6]

Apple’s Think Secret case is a grotesque resistance by the old
regime against emerging Spectacle Society where people just like to
consume gossips and rumors for distraction in daily life. Those
“city legend” discourses have long been accepted as a way of
binding people within a certain community. In fact, Apple
capitalized on this “community binding” for its sales expansion in
its early days. [FN7] Nevertheless, in Think Secret case, guys with
strong community commitments are accused by their Pope, Mr. Jobs.
Ironically, though it still publicly bets on “think different,”
Apple sticks to the old way of publicity: controlling the source of
information with bargaining power to media. Typically, these are
done through the symbiosis between a company and industrial
newspapers/magazines. After all, we can think different only
“within the hands of Mr. Jobs.”

This, however, is the 20th century publicity dogma. In recent
communication theories, the interpretation of a certain message
cannot be so controlled as we supposed, because the interpretation
solely depends on receivers. [FN8] In Spectacle Society, this
essence of communication – contingency solely on receivers - will
be publicly supported because people are involved with that
seamless communication system which provides the same resources to
both ordinary people and traditional media. Considering the decline
of traditional publicity symbiosis, websites like Think Secret
should be protected because 1) normally they just facilitates the
exchange of several opinions just as we do in real communities, and
2) it might happen to reveal the clue for some corporate scandal,
which might induce professional investigation as we have seen in
Enron. So technically, they should be protected by press clause for
the time being.

We should step forward to obtain more abstract concept for making it
universal justice. The free exchange of representation is hindered
by typically a set of Intellectual Property laws. Within the
dichotomy of public v. private, the usage of information is ordered
like a zoning in city planning: Public domain and mandate disclosure
are defined as exceptions. Those distinctions are based on the
assumption that information is treated as physical object
(therefore, we call it property.) But if we pay attention to the
very instance when new information emerges, information would be
counted as a relationship-based concept. Without exchange of ideas,
i.e., communications, we do not obtain anything in future. This
understanding does not mean to repeat a “creation(Hollywood) v.
innovation(Silicon Valley)” debate over P2P cases, considering the
fact that both stances just represent industrial interests, not
users’ or citizens’ welfares.

Since we cannot live without communication with others,
communication should be regarded as a basic right. But here, I
prefer using word of “capability” as Amartya Sen defined, because
capability is open concept keeping flexibility to accept subjective
horizon for what is required for an individual as freedom. [FN9] In
international settings, capability concept allows a certain
spectrum of freedom of communication in response to their
developing stages. Even in the US, it can produce a way of
protecting people with Internet-driven “different” thinking from
being accused within the scope of current, but old, legal regime. 
This change of recognition may not directly solve current, urgent
legal challenges, but, as we have seen in environmental or human
rights movements, the more universal concept for multi-cultural
settings is necessary for penetrating the new regime concept.
Japan, my country, has less flexibility for fine-tuning legal
system. In this respect, I highly appreciate the US
judicial/legislative dynamism to ameliorate appropriate systems in
the Internet era, so much so that universal frameworks are required
to inspire other nations’ internal discussions for coordinated
actions.

**************************************************
Footnotes

[FN1] Baker, Stephen, and Green, Heather, “Blogs will change your
business,” BusinessWeek, May 2, 2005

[FN2] Mnookin, Seth, “Hard News,” Random House, 2004. Seth described
the New York Times’ recent turn to commercialism which caused
several scandals such as constructing fake articles to obtain
readership.

[FN3] Debord, Guy, “The Society of the Spectacle,” Zone Book, 1995.
Debord originally use the “spectacle” to describe the situation
where capitalism ultimately prevails everywhere to nullify the
external of the economy, so much so that spectacle or speculation
will be posted as an internal externality. While Debord used this
concept for his political aim during 1960’s in France, here I pick
up “spectacle” to simply describe the symbol-driven economy. In
this respect, “spectacle” is the similar concept of “simulacra” by
Baudrillard. (Baudrillard, Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation - The
Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism,” University of
Michigan Press, 1995)

[FN4] “A Second Chance for ABC News,” BusinessWeek, May 2, 2005.
This article was included in the same volume treating blog (in
[FN1]). This coincidence seems to tell us about the emerging
positivity of the Spectacle Society.

[FN5] Jameson, Frederic, “Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism,” Duke University Press, 1992

[FN6] Lessig, Lawrence, “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity,” Penguin
Press, 2004. Lessig pays attention to the phenomenon of illegal
derivative comic market expansion in Japan. Though the copyright
law regime is similar between Japan and the US, substantially less
legal practitioners implicitly allowed their growth due to the
limit of legal execution. Ironically, Japan now enjoys the
abundance in comics to the extent that they are the resources of
multi-media goods such as games, dramas, even Hollywood’s films. On
the other hand, American fans of Japanese comic and animation had to
get through the legal challenges in the early, pirate era. They had
to go underground to exchange comics and video cartoons. See
Leonard, Sean, “Progress Against the Law: Fan Distribution,
Copyright, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation,”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 12, 2004, Columnar
Version (http://web.mit.edu/seantek/www/papers/progress-columns.pdf)

[FN7] McKenna, Regis, “Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies
for the Age of the Customer,” Addison Wesley Publishing Company,
1993

[FN8] In this respect, a transparent, symmetric communication model,
such as Shannon-Weaver model in information theory, is an illusion.
For instance, Jacque Derrida, a French philosopher, introduced the
“defera(e)nce.” Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, insisted on
the retrospective identification of the meaning in communication.
Even an American analytical philosopher, Donald Davidson discusses
the miracle of our communication. Further, in linguistics, Sperber
and Wilson clarified the difficulty of the identification of the
meaning and intent of a message.

[FN9] Sen, Amartya, “Equality of What?” in McMurrin, S., ed., The
Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Vol.1, Salt Lake City: University
of Utah Press, 1980. It seems to me that Sen’s approach is in the
middle way “between utilities and rights” which H.L.A. Hart once
described as potential direction to a solution of the ideological
debate over the fundamental criteria for public decision. Sen, in
using “capability” concept, seems to try to mitigate those two
values by introducing economic, engineering procedure to moral
philosophy as well as introducing subjective, moral value into
economics. In this respect, his approach could affect the debates
over the P2P Network which heavily focuses on the economic values,
whether creation or innovation. It would be an appropriate segue
from economic value for the public to moral value (in this case,
“communication”) for each citizen.




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