The Next Best Thing To Being There
(Note: This was written before I had thought seriously about the impact of blogs and their relation to journalism. Obviously there are important connections to be made, but I think the piece still stands)
What do you know about Malta? Suppose you watched a documentary about Malta on the Discovery Channel. What would you know about Malta then? Would you perhaps know that it occupies an area of 117,000 square kilometers on the coast of northern Africa? Would you know that it was settled predominantly by Turkish traders in the 12th century? Would you know that the main export of Malta is patterned cotton cloth? Would you know that the Maltese people consider yellow to be a holy colour and therefore offensive to wear outside of religious situations? Probably you would not, because I just made up all of these facts on the spot.
And yet, in the absence of other data, we might believe all of these things if we’d seen them on television. This illustrates a central feature of modern civilization: if we wish to understand any more of the world than perhaps our own neigborhood, we have no choice but to rely on secondhand information of one form or another. This is the essence of the so-called mediated experience, from the word “mediate” meaning “to act as an intermediary.” Such experiences include traditional news media of course, but also all other forms of indirect communication: books, films, personal reports, photographs, music, even things like theme parks and exported goods. Such secondhand modes of communication may exist for many purposes, but whatever their intrinsic possibilities, they are absolutely fundamental to our current lifestyle and culture.
This has become obvious to me, away from my home culture for almost a year. I see little reminders — movies, headlines, emails from home — and I realize that I am beginning to lose touch. It is the ineffable that I miss most, the perception of what it’s like to “be there” in a particular time and place, the kind of deep knowledge which can only come from thousands of small everyday experiences. San Francsico, California, from late 2003 through summer 2004, was like what? What was on people’s minds? What were considered the important issues of the day? How did the people of that era react to world events? I cannot say for sure and will probably never know. All I had at the time were dim reflections of the actual events, courtesy of the international news media. And yet, this is the only way most of us have ever known the world at all, beyond our daily routines.
Even when it actually is possible to experience something firsthand, interpretation is often still a necessity. At the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia, there are dozens of major and minor temples and ruins spread over 70 square kilometers, including thousands of linear metres of reliefs. Even had I been well versed in the Hindu and Buddhist epics, which I am not, I would have found it difficult to interpret these carvings on my own. Thus, a guidebook: 200 pages of suggested itineraries and explanatory text. Also, trained human guides, who are available to lead one through each major site. Even so, what I now know is miniscule compared to the acrhaeologists who study the ancient Khmer civiliation. One way or another, I need some sort of mediator to interpret Angkor for me.
This is the price we pay for living in an extraordinarily large, diverse and rapidly changing world. The role of an intermediary, then, is to choose, digest, abstract, in a word simplify a complex body of information for easy consumption. We cannot do without this.
But there are dangers in this power, for ideas are our reality. They define how we see the world, and how we describe it to ourselves and others, and they have to come from somewhere. Viewed in the best light, this is what the often ridiculous squabbles of mid-90s “political correctness” were actually about. For those of us without black or gay or disabled friends, we only knew what these words meant by watching television. On a larger scale, the citizens of the developing world are mostly too poor to leave their home countries, but satelite TV and pirated DVDs are unbelieveably widespead. I’d be willing to bet that more homes have TV than running water in Southeast Asia, easily. I’ve even seen dishes nailed to trees in the middle of the jungle. Hence, the world knows the West almost entirely through our media and our consumer goods. I saw this effect firsthand in downtown Kuala Lumpur, where the young and stylish seemed to want to dress like Western rock stars, all sheer fabric and exposed flesh — a bit of a paradox in this moderate Muslim country. Similarly, I have not yet visited the Middle East, but the notion that our own media might be obliviously promulgating an inaccurate and offensive sum-total impression of the West suddenly seems a lot more plausible. Conversely, people living in the rich countries, myself included, will discuss television specials on exotic cultures as truth. This may be the best we can do, but it’s still faintly ridiculous.
The point is not that we should be ashamed of our ignorance, but rather that our heavy reliance on second-hand reports has potential consequences. Accurate representation is, to be sure, a noble pursuit for its own sake, but there are much worse things than sterotypes and slander. Information, and especially incomplete or false information, is a major social and political tool. It can be used to extract all sorts of things from someone: money, allegiance, obedience, fear. I note here that every major totalitarian regime has maintained close control over information; there has to be a reason for this. Yet the greatest dangers may be unintentional: it is all too easy to perpetuate falsehoods or misconceptions, whatever their origins. Most of the time, we think we are telling the truth when we repeat a story; most of the time we just don’t know any better. No one can spend their entire life fact-checking, and even if we could, few people have the experience and wisdom to comprehensively interpret the events of our complex and subtle world.
Hence the choice of mediator of our experiences is critical. This is a selection we have the ability to make, to some degree. For example we can choose to read the books of a certain author, or to watch a particular TV channel or read a particular newspaper. We can learn about Egypt by going to the library or by visiting Disneyland’s “Countries of the World” exhibit. All are mediated experiences, and I actually do believe there is a role for each one. Sometimes we don’t need or don’t want to think deeply, sometimes we do want the candy coated version of reality. I believe that society needs cartoons every bit as much as serious journalism, because it’s just not reasonable to expect all of us to be conscious of all the world’s problems, all the time. And art has always been playful with the truth.
But the plethora of available choices does mean that we are confronted daily with potentially complex decisions about who to listen to. It seems clear that differences exist; somehow, the Angkor guidebook and the Disneyland exhibit seem to fall into very different categories. Ditto The National Enquirer and the New York Times. Among other things, we might say that these experiences differ in accuracy, depth, and purpose. While it is impossible to know the entire world, with enough effort one person may gain a deep understanding of an intensely specific sub-speciality, and naturally we would like to choose such a source as our mediator for that topic. This is accuracy and depth. Without these we get authoritative “experts” who don’t actually know anything, we get reporters who haven’t done their research, we get Hollywood screenplays that reiterate stereotypes rather than showing us new truths. However the most important characteristic of any information source may well be the motivation for its provision. There is an adage to the effect that the true purpose of a television station is to sell soap, and this couldn’t be more relevant in the modern era where most of the world’s media is controlled by a handful of large for-profit companies (Viacom, Disney, ClearChannel, Time/Warner, etc.) So again, we have the question of who to choose as a mediator. Who gets to tell us how to see the world?
I would like to suggest that the correct answer is “no one,” or rather, “no single one.” In fact I think the question itself betrays certain deep-seated assumptions. We currently seem to be living in an era of media “brands.” Rather than seeking out the most authoritative, comprehensive, or honest source for each topic we might wish to study or experience, we’re in the habit of tuning to a particular channel. Loyal viewers are of course good for business, and so we’re heavilty encouraged to think this way. But it doesn’t make any sense, because there’s no good reason to expect any single source to be omnisicent. Regardless, in the end we are more or less forced to deal with only a small number of presumably trusted interpreters of experience (channels, newspapers, authors, magazines, etc.) because it is completely impractical to search out the most appropriate source for every single subject. Imagine having to choose between all of the world’s newspapers for every single story, let alone all other possible information sources.
So-called “independent” or “alternative” media is a good beginning, as arguably such smaller and therefore less conflicted sources are able to provide more objective representations, but they are still no guarantee that we will be able to find an accurate and accurately represented information source. In an ideal world, we should not be forced to trust this important issue to any centralized entity, no matter how benign. That centralized power may be problematic is hardly a new notion, being well studied in political science, and modern democracies have numerous so-called “checks and balances” which attempt to prevent such dangerous concentrations of power. The challenge is to figure out how to apply these lessons to our increasingly sophisticated communication channels.
The rise of electronic communication technology during the previous century enabled this centralization, but technology may also provide a way out. What I propose is that we start thinking seriously about the possibility of decentralized media. This is an emerging concept along with decentralized information systems in general. The internet is of course the prime example and the underlying enabling technology. Certainly email and private web pages, in their nascent history, have already been used to bypass traditional political power (e.g. email was the only link out of Moscow during the 1991 attempted coup, young Iranians have apparently begun going to internet cafes to read foreign news, and in February 2003 the largest anitwar protests in human history were ogranized primarily electronically.) But with a little ingenuity, we can formalize the notion of the decentrally mediated experience.
There are a few good examples already online. Wikipedia.org is a free encylopedia based on such a simple concept that it’s hard to believe that it could actually work: any member of the public is allowed to create or edit any entry however they like. Rather than anarchy, the result is a surprisingly consistent, detailed, and impartial encyclopedia. This may seem counter-intuitive, but there are good theoretical reasons why such a system should work. For example, an entry with which most people are happy with tends to be edited little, thus articulate summaries of consensus views persist while poorly written or obviously biased articles tend to be replaced. Similarly, controversial entries — say, “Israel”, “gay marriage”, or “globalization” — seem naturally to develop sub-sections representing the major points of view. More generally, this success can be ascribed to the amazing human capacity to live in any sort of organized society at all. We clearly have an instinct for large-scale mutally beneficial social cooperation. The result may not be Truth in the grand sense, but it’s certainly democratic and difficult to subvert to vested interests.
Another example is the now not-so-humble internet search engine. Google, the most effective and popular of these, works by exploiting a unique and powerful form of collective judgement. When one types in a query, say “spanish cooking”, potentially thousands or even millions of web pages which discuss Spanish cuisine in some fashion are returned. Yet we seldom need to scroll through more than a few dozen citations to find an authoratative gazpacho recipe. This is due to the sophisticated page ranking mechanisms employed. The details have been kept confidential to prevent lucrative manipulation of the results, but it is publicly known that Google’s page rank is closely related to the number of other web pages which link to any given site. Thus Google relies on the collective judgement of the online community as a whole. No one person — that is, no single mediator, no matter how powerful — gets to decide what we see. The modern search engine is therefore a great leveler.
Note that both Wikipedia and Google are automated systems, in the sense of being a set of algorithms that run autonomously once started, yet they do not in any way require machines to judge or “understand” the information they handle. Rather, they rely on the participation and authorship of a large number of individual human beings. They represent a very new kind of large-scale leaderless collaboration between thousands or milliions of people, no one of which is irreplacable or in a position of broad authority. Can we design a news source which also takes this approach? There are some existing attempts at distributed news systems, but they mostly just involve automatic selection of stories from a predefined set of existing media outlets. For the reasons described above, and especially as corporate consolidation continues, this is not enough. We need some way for the people themselves to generate the news. To coin a phrase, what we want is a “democratic newspaper.” Traditional news sources would of course be free to submit their own interpretations along with everyone else — and obviously there are examples of fantastic mediators currently working within the existing power structures — but for the first time, our media giants would be forced to compete directly with the unwashed masses.
There is a lot to explore in this stunningly new form of nearly instantaneous global human interaction. In particular there are several obvious possibilities regarding the construction of a decentralized news source. For a start, it seems essential to the whole enterprise that we allow anyone at all to submit an article. (Actually, submitted information could be of any type, including video pieces, films, books, images, etc, but I will use the term “article” to refer generically to any sort of digital experience.) The massed millions would be invited to try their hand at journalism, including, hopefully, the one or two people who actually knew what they were talking about regarding any particular topic. We know from previous online experience that such calls for mass participation work surprisngly well — indeed, if this were not the case, private web pages would not exist at all. The only problem is sorting through the resulting flood of information. Hence, a truly useful, impartial, and most importantly automated scoring system is needed. There are many possibilities. Articles could be ranked and sorted according to user votes, cross references or citations by other articles, amount of commentary and discussion generated, the opinions of automatically elected judges (there is already research on this topic), a “consensus factor” based on the number of submitted stories with materially the same contents (which has also been studied) , etc. Each of these has potential pitfalls: voting can turn journalism into a popularity contest, citations and links are not generated fast enough to handle rapidly changing information such as breaking news, volume of discussion may measure controversy just as easily as importance, any system of elected moderators is potentially subject to clique problems, and consensus is certainly not the same as truth. But there is at the present time very little research into the large scale application of these techniques. We don’t even know for sure that they won’t work! In fact, any of these might turn out to be preferable to receiving all of our information through corporate and political filters, as we do now.
Such filtering would be only the first stage, designed to identify objectively “good” articles, in the sense of being articulate and thorough — or funny and moving, or whatever other criterion we might design the system to select, depending on whether we wish the result to be more like the BBC World Service or The Onion. The next step is to start categorizing this content by type of mediator. Could a machine infer someone’s political biases on the basis of textual analysis, or better yet, publically available information about the author? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a report on the efficacy of a new drug could be automatically marked with a disclaimer noting that the author sits on the board of directors of numerous pharmaceutical companies? How about links to all previous articles by the same author? It may even be possible to automatically categorize articles based on their basic viewpoint with regards to their subject (”is this essentially a liberal or conservative opinon piece?”) or better yet, infer from cross-article analysis what those viewpoints might be (”there are three main responses to this issue.”) and include an example of each. The information needed to generate these kind of sophisticated inferences is mostly already available online, but there is no system for integrating it. Why not? In general, we seem to regard the authors of our information as essentially anonymous entitites — what does the average citizen really know or care about the story editing process at NBC? Yet we require a list of ingredients on our packaged food, so why should we not expect a similar disclosure for our packaged experiences? We should know what our mediators represent before we let them interpret the world for us.
It is by now an old idea that the internet has the potential for a complete end-run around traditional issues of information access and control. And to a certain extent, it has fufilled this potential. Indeed the Web itself is a uniquely decentralized, more or less democratic medium. Yet due to the very real issues of informaition overload, online journalism is still pretty much the same as its analog counterpart, including being dominated by the same few centralized conglomerates. There is no reason this needs to be so. Instead, we might attempt to decentralize the mediation process, to put the power of information in the hands of the people, as it were. This may sound like a political slogan, and indeed this idea has serious political implications — that’s part of what makes it interesting to think about, and this essay just scratches the surface of both the promises and the potential problems, which are myriad. But really, I am just trying to suggest a very simple premise: we should each be free to experience any aspect of our endlessly rich world through any sort of mediator we desire, regardless of their wealth, visibility, or power, and we should be able to locate and identify such a mediator in a transparent and essentially instantaneous fashion. Technologically we’re probably no more than a few years away from a prototype distributed news system. This would be an important step to take, because ultimately the mediators we choose will make us who we are; what we learn will define us.
