Last Friday I took the day off from work to go to the Personal Democracy Forum at Pace University.
Thanks to Tim Bonnemann for giving me his ticket and Alan Rosenblatt for putting in touch with Tim. Part of the deal was that I “blog extensively” which I’ll attempt to do here. I’m not much of a live blogger, so hat’s off to people like Alison Fine who managed to coherently summarize presentations seemingly before they were even finished!
Since there are lots of sources for information about the PDF, I’ll focus on things that relate to WITNESS and the Hub.
Larry Lessig
Creative Commons Founder, Lawrence Lessig started things off with an entertaining slide show which included a bunch of remixes of videos and images used for political commentary and satire, including the “endless love” Bush/Blair mashup, and the 1984 Apple commercial with Hillary Clinton. The point is that media, especially when it comes to political debate, is part of the global lingua franca, and in order for free and open discourse to occur, people need to be able to have access to the source materials to have conversations. Just to be clear Lessig is not an anarchist and does believe in copyright, but only when it makes sense. Copyright should not be used to squelch political debate, which is what happened with Robert Greenwald when making “Outfoxed.”
Additional analysis from Groundswell here.
Eric Schmidt and Thomas Friedman
The next plenary session was a conversation, Actor’s Studio-Style between Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman. Friedman’s questions were a little light weight, and most of the interview had Schmidt talking about new initiative such as iGoogle, a personalized search engine that will know way too much about you, “You Choose” on YouTube, and how Google Earth was used in Bahrain during the elections to show disparity between the ruling class the general population.
Not too much came out of the discussion that hadn’t already been said, but it was good to hear about Google’s hiring strategy (Friedman actually asked for a job at one point) as well as a reminder that services like Google will have an increasingly important role as a sort of searchable public record. In the past, there was much greater level of mediation between an individual and the rest of the world, one’s resume used to serve as a proxy for the individual, there was much more individual control of one’s public information. What this means is that smaller groups of people now have a potentially larger amount of power to do all sorts of things both good and bad. It’s also created a culture of criticism, where things aren’t just accepted at face value.
There was also a discussion (not enough if you ask me) about Google’s activities in China relative to the “Great Firewall” and media laws. At least they tell people in China that their searches are being filtered, and going back to the Bahraini example letting people know they’re missing out on something is a sure fire way to get them interested in finding out what it is.
Two Fast Talkers: Lee Rainie and Yochai Benkler
Lee Rainie from Pew and Yochai Benkler are two fast talkers… literally. Given the tight schedule and the amount of information each had to cover, I think they both felt the pressure and each powered through a million facts and slides.
Some highlights from Rainie’s presentation:
• There’s been a demographic change in internet users in last 10 years, it’s more representative of county demo.
• Broadband access in spreading (in the US.)
• The Internet is as important a news source for people under 35 as traditional news channels and for politics, the Internet is more important.
• Alternative sources like blogs, satirical sources like the onion and the daily show, have expanded concept of the news site and ultimately what is news.
• will hyper local news supplant mainstream
• political videos. 15% of all internet uses have accessed political videos.
• Web 2.0 has met politics and this trend will increase
• Wireless apps for politics will matter because they encourage people to be more active.
• Teenagers don’t think of internet as separate realm, they are comfortable switching between both real and virtual, and to paraphrase Stephen Stills “when they’re not with the device they love, they love the device they’re with.”
Anyway there a ton of interesting reports on the Pew site.
Yochai Benkler talked about the “Networked Public Sphere” citing an example from the New York Herald’s coverage of Lincoln’s assassination as the emergence of media’s importance in politics, as well as a demonstration of the high economic barriers to entry for anyone wanting to start a mass media channel. Flash forward to the present, Benkler shows a chart comparing various super computers, and reveals that the SETI@home project is much more powerful than any one supercomputer.
Distributed computing has moved activities that were once peripheral, social motivations, cooperation – to the core of this new economy – an economy that is based on social rather than financial motivations.
How does this work? He uses the example of “Stolen Honor” to show how blogosphere, self-organized networked public sphere changed policy of partisan controlled media channels.