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> | A New Journalism
- Moving Beyond Institutionalism
- Lessons from Free Software
- Blunting the Tools of Surveillance Capitalism _ * Moving beyond the social media platforms
- Enabling secure news capture_
- Conclusion
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< | The day our internet best friend betrayed us |
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< | Introduction |
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> | A New Journalism |
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< | The rise of the internet best friend |
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< | The apple, or the loss of innocence |
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> | It is time to free journalism. I refer not to journalism the institution, that venerable fourth estate whose wreckage lies all around us. Rather I speak of journalism as an endeavor, an iterative process of collective knowledge gathering, synthesis, and distribution. |
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< | The tumor |
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> | The Net has both necessitated and facilitated this reconception of what “journalism” means. Every day, an amalgam of professionals, ordinary citizens, and activists collectively creates the news. They do so via disparate methods and platforms. The results can be powerful—as evidenced by ongoing protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder—but also dizzying, chaotic, and fractured. Journalism’s future as an instrument in service of human learning depends on our ability harness a new, networked press that is simultaneously egalitarian, prodigious, and distracted. |
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> | The first step is to identify the restraints. They exist in propertarian views of news rooted an obsolete, ad-based business model. But the ends of journalism are also thwarted, ironically, by the very tools that enable the networked press. Smartphones that document police brutality catalogue their user’s every move. News updates are fed through Facebook and Twitter, where they are either drowned out or reduced to a lure for the Parasite, dangling in news feeds only so long as they snap up human attention. |
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< | The day our internet best friend betrayed us |
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> | We must forge a networked press that resists the Parasite, rather than mooring us to it. But we also need to reimagine the concept of what journalism means in the age of the Net. |
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< | Introduction |
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> | Moving Beyond Institutionalism |
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< | Fear, suspicion and aversion to pain are the evolutionary senses that have driven our survival as a species. In today’s world, where technological advances including the internet have fundamentally changed the way we live, these senses are no longer adequate to ensure the survival of the human race as we know it. Changes in our minds are occurring without our knowledge or detection because things that should inspire fear are now pleasurable, and things that do violence to our bodies are now painless. This essay seeks to reveal but one such instance of this painless violence in the form of the internet best friend and hopefully, offer a moment of clarity. |
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> | I have been part of journalism the institution. I saw the crumbling up close. The old model of for-profit journalism required ad revenue, which required eyeballs. So we chased them—we spent hours pushing stories on social media and perfecting our headline SEO. We still tried to do good work reporting the news. But the stakes were crystal clear. At one reporting job, my salary was tied directly to how many page views my stories got. |
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> | I do not mean to say that professional journalists are obsolete. There will always be a need for those trained in the art of storytelling and investigative reporting. Organizations like ProPublica? show that new models of non-profit journalism can produce superior content. We must go farther, however, to move beyond institutionalism to a more dynamic view of what journalism can be. The journalistic creation of knowledge no longer ends once the nightly news clicks off or the newspaper goes to print. Journalism is constantly becoming, and all of us on the Net can have a role in making it so. |
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< | The rise of the internet best friend |
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< | The internet best friend, like the internet, began innocently. With the launch of YouTube? in late 2005 under the banner ‘Broadcast Yourself’, a ground-up, egalitarian community was formed where tech-savvy youngsters could make videos about almost anything. This inclusive, fertile, womblike interface lent itself to much experimentation by users and became birthplace of the video blog or ‘vlog’ as we now know it, which effectively transformed the wildly popular early 2000’s blog into video form. These videos, usually of a longer nature, documented the everyday life of the vlogger and could contain anything from exciting adventures to what they were eating for breakfast. |
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> | Lessons from Free Software |
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< | The vlog was thus born a splice of public and private. On one hand it was a raw, confessional, intimate and incredibly detailed record of everyday life through the sheer detail that could be captured with a single swoop of the camera. And yet it was also performative and entertaining, designed to capture attention. In the abstract, the prospect of watching someone go about their everyday business could not seem more boring - and yet, the vlog form flourished. From a human need perspective, the vlog satisfied viewers’ voyeuristic desires as well as viewers’ innate yearning for human connection. For perhaps the first time, ordinary users of the internet could peer into a stranger’s life and observe not only their trials and tribulations, but also the intimate details of their homes. Indeed, to follow a vlogger was to go through a process of metamorphosis whereby the viewer transforms from momentary voyeur to consistent voyeur to developing a one way, but very real, human connection with the vlogger as they experience the minutia of everyday life, growing up, falling in love, breaking up, getting married and so on ‘together’. In teenage girl parlance, this relationship could only be described as that of a best friend and thus the internet best friend (IBF) was born. |
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> | Free software offers an analogue for what journalism can become. Free software produces a better product because subsequent users are empowered to tinker with and improve a program’s source code. Likewise, “free journalism”—enabled through creative commons licensing and collaborative platforms like wikis—can generate more dynamic reportage. News outlets and bloggers are empowered to borrow, organize, and add to information produced on the Net. The results can be powerful. Consider the Tunisian blogger collective Nawaat, which in 2010 curated hundreds of otherwise censored videos during that country’s uprising. Or Global Voices, whose volunteers translate citizen-sourced articles from around the world into more than 50 languages. |
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> | Free journalism invites readers into the process of news creation. Imagine new, hybrid journalism platforms that house professional investigative and accountability journalism, while also offering dynamic spaces for citizens to engage in collaborative news creation by posting their own content, or that of others on the Net. Paid or volunteer editors could help sort and verify crowdsourced content to ensure it serves journalistic goals. Most importantly, these sites can be run cheaply, potentially allowing them to be sustained through user contributions rather than through advertising or paywalls. |
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< | The apple, or the loss of innocence |
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> | Blunting the Tools of Surveillance Capitalism |
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< | The loss of innocence occurs when the vlogger becomes a tool for the amplification and normalisation of the panopticon through which the State subjugates its citizens. The act of surveillance on the vlogger is obvious. The vlogger’s work is the work of being watched. Although the vlogger believes that they are not subject to constant, comprehensive surveillance because they choose what content they publish, surveillance becomes total through the vlogger’s continuous need to produce new content that reveals more and more about their existence. |
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> | Moving beyond the social media platforms
It is premature to advocate that the networked press immediately disassociate from the tech platforms. Facebook and Twitter remain useful newsgathering tools. We should, however, cease to treat social media platforms as a locus for journalism. The process of knowledge creation requires continuity—the ability to locate, link together, and preserve information culled from disparate sources. From a technical standpoint, Facebook and Twitter are ill-equipped for this. Nor is their attention imperative aligned with the mandate of journalism to serve the public. We must instead build new, collaborative spaces where communities can gather to engage in collaborative journalism. This can include creative commons repositories where citizens can upload media for anybody to use. |
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< | The act of surveillance on the viewer manifests in two different ways. The first is through advertising, a product of the viewer watching while being watched. Indeed, the IBF is now considered to be one of the most versatile and effective advertisements ever made. Having taken on the role of the trusted ‘best friend’, the IBF is able to leverage this relationship of loyalty and trust to be an ultimate source of word-of-mouth advice. Each second of the IBF’s video is either an advertisement for a product that can be found and bought or of the IBF’s general lifestyle which seems within reach if you just purchase X items. Data on an IBF’s viewer engagement is powerful in that it tracks viewers’ purchases through discount codes and has the potential to predict what is happening or will happen in viewers’ lives through analysing the IBFs that the viewer engages with. This phenomenon feeds into the damaging effects of surveillance capitalism and instrumentarian power (Shoshanna Zuboff). The second act of surveillance occurs when viewers normalise the existence of surveillance itself. The process begins with the viewer observing the IBF sharing intimate details of their life, which bears a key behavioural message: that it is now permissible and normal for people at large to know the everyday details of our lives. This act of normalisation then amplifies surveillance, as the viewers emulate this behaviour and become the producers, so too engaging in the production of overly revealing, everyday content. As Foucault wrote, “the panopticon… has a role of amplification… its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.” All at once there is more production of content, more surveillance of that content, amplification of surveillance on existing content, and thus multiplying surveillance throughout society. The final stage is when the sheer prevalence of surveillance leads to the viewer’s adoption of the notion that surveillance is merely a side effect of modern life and needs not be challenged or removed. |
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> | The law may also help equal the playing field between journalistic gathering spaces and the tech giants. Despite their precise curation of user news feeds, social media platforms (unlike news outlets) are not considered publishers for the purposes of tort liability. Nonetheless, any Section 230 reform should be approached carefully, since imposing liability for crowdsourced content may hinder the hybrid journalistic models described above. |
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> | Enabling secure news capture
Likewise, an immediate retreat from smartphones as a tool for newsgathering is perhaps unlikely. However, law and technology can help prevent those in power from using smartphones to surveil or incriminate newsgatherers who seek to expose corruption or abuse. Open source encryption apps like Signal already exist to enable newsgatherers to securely capture and transmit media. These apps can only do so much, however. Politically, we must continue to push for legislation that safeguards encryption technology and limits how technology firms can track, store, and use mobile data. |
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< | The tumor |
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> | Conclusion |
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< | The IBF is thus a collection of paradoxes. It is an advertisement, but not; a reality, but also a fantasy; a voyeuristic experience, but also an exercise in surveillance. Viewers are so distracted by what the IBF purports to be and the sheer pleasure of consumption that the silent changes within us go undetected. By the time we realise, the tumor has already formed. Our apathy towards surveillance will be so deeply engrained in our tissues that it will be impossible to remove. All that remains is for mankind to be subjugated by the state, divided into little cells flooded with light. |
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> | I propose an idealized vision for the future of journalism. I am not naïve; this is neither the journalism we have, nor one that we can create overnight. Law and technology can create the conditions in which news content can be securely captured and widely shared. We can equip individuals from a young age with the technical skills to contribute to our networked press. But we must also undertake a more fundamental reconception of journalism as a collectively owned and pursued public good—a process of knowledge sharing that every human can both benefit from and contribute to. |