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  From: Sophie Guite <seg79@columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 20:46:36 -0400

paper 2 (second try)

Hi everyone,
I am officially very confused by this mailing list, having just
received my third paper in my inbox four hours after I sent it, and
never having gotten similar assurance that anyone got the second
one
which was sent yesterday.  In any case, here is my second paper
again, I hope this works.


Sophie Guite									 May 15, 2005
Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution					  Eben Moglen

Modern-Day Storysellers: An Argument Against the Commodification of
News

“The decay or instability of our cultural resources, the loss of
confidence in extrasomatic sources of information, orientation, and
moral regulation, is the thing we fear at the deepest level of our
beings…To grasp hold of our popular arts with terms like story,
narrative, chronicle…is to see in a miraculously discontinuous
world persistent practices by which that world is sedimented and
held together.”

Over the past ten years, advances in technology such as increased
bandwidth capacity on peer to peer computer networks and a decline
in the price of the physical hardware required for large-scale
dissemination of information have revolutionized the way we think
about journalism.  Websites and blogs are cheap and increasingly
ubiquitous, seeming to have the potential virtually to eliminate
the economic barrier to entry for someone who wishes to reach a
large number of people with a message.  Furthermore, the rising
importance of blogs on the national media scene is often cited as
proof that we are moving away from hierarchical models of cultural
production and toward more democratic forms of peer-produced news. 
As the New York Times subscription numbers dwindle to 850,000 , and
blogs such as Instapundit average over 130,000 visits per day,  one
is inclined to wonder if the line we have drawn between freedom of
speech and of the press has become arbitrary.  However, one should
not overlook the fact that the social importance of news is less
about communicating an aggregation facts and more about
constructing meaning and narrative from incomplete or infinite
information.  We need storytellers not only to tell us things, but
also to separate the trivial from the important, to “create order
out of disorder…[to offer] reassurance and familiarity in shared
community experiences”.   Journalists have an important role as our
official cultural interpreters, and having privileged stories and
storytellers in a society is just as important as having news—no
matter how complete.
New technology allows average people to reach an enormous audience
at virtually zero marginal cost, and therefore to gain public trust
organically.  While Glenn Reynolds, the voice of Instapundit, is not
exactly an everyman—he is a law professor at the University of
Tennessee—he gained credibility by producing consistently good
quality and trustworthy opinion writing, not by affiliation with or
artificial validation from mainstream media institutions.  By
circumventing the traditional structure and process of media
accreditation and proving themselves every bit as good as, if not
better than, paid journalists, it seems that bloggers demonstrate a
need for a functional rather than a class-based definition of
journalism.   The recent Think Secret case in which Nick Ciarelli,
an eighteen-year old Harvard Undergraduate running an Apple
enthusiast website, scooped every major news outlet with the early
announcement of Apple’s new hard and software is an example of
this.  At the same time, public trust in previously ‘reliable’
mechanisms for identifying dependable news sources has eroded with
the recent Jeff Gannon and Armstrong Williams public relations
scandals.
The First Amendment’s eighteenth century language differentiates
between the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but
twenty-first century computer networks grant almost everyone access
to a large (albeit privileged) swath of the population, and the name
and act of journalism no longer match up.  The Think Secret and
Valerie Plame cases increasingly expose the weaknesses inherent in
our state shield laws, which protect journalists from revealing
anonymous sources, and which are based on what is obviously an
antiquated definition of journalism that does not reflect reality.
With the scandal surrounding the lead-up to the Iraq war fresh in
our national media consciousness—where questionable anonymous
sources convinced even the most trusted journalists that Saddam
Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—many academics and
reporters alike are declaring that we have reached an era of
unprecedented media crisis.  Calls for a complete redefinition of
journalism based on more participatory or inclusive models such as
wikipedia or Kuro5hin, while having some of the romance and of
revolutionary rhetoric, have all of its reductivism, and fail to
recognize that the fundamental act of creating and consuming news
is less about transmitting information and more about telling
stories that reinforce social norms and address the central
tensions in a social system.
What is needed is a better system of identifying and maintaining
journalistic credibility.  Reporters function as storytellers, and
companies like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal
function as trademarks by identifying consistency and quality.  In
the same way that the trademark Coca-Cola indicates that, whether
you find it in a Piggly Wiggly gas station in Wisconsin or an
upscale restaurant in New Delhi, your soda will taste a certain
way, the New York Times trademark is supposed to indicate that you
can expect the same quality of news from a story by one reporter as
the next.  Trademarks, however, are merely one way of identifying
quality, and blogs are an example of the potential of the Internet
to provide a forum for more democratic means of identifying
quality.
While the Slashdot news service is composed largely of recycled news
filtered by Open Source Development Network employees, the website’s
system of moderating the ‘comments’ portion of the website is highly
democratic and could serve as a useful model for an alternative
system of news source accreditation by ex-post peer review.  
Moderator “karma” is granted on the basis of user participation,
whereby your level of contribution—a signal of your own
credibility—allows you to in turn bestow credibility on other users
and their comments.  Although it sounds (and is) complicated, this
is merely a means of digitally replicating real world social
networks, based on the same fundamental concept as Google’s Page
Rank or accreditation in the Blogosphere, where your relevance is
based on how many people link to your site, and your resulting
trustworthiness predicated upon an age-old system of friendly
recommendation.
The real value of peer-to-peer networks is not in their ability to
make everyone a journalist—although they do have the potential to
facilitate equal opportunity access for meritorious journalism
passed over by the mainstream media—it is in their ability to
democratize the process of accreditation.  We will still have
storytellers, but the process of determining who gets to tell what
kind of stories will increasingly be in the hands of the readers,
not editors.



StorysellingasaCommodity.doc

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