Welcome to the New (Networked) News

There's some fine writing coming out of the current newspaper crisis. Here's some more, from one of the my favourite thinkers, Yochai Benkler. He's replying here to an earlier article in The New Republic; two paragraphs in particular caught my attention:

Critics of online media raise concerns about the ease with which gossip and unsubstantiated claims can be propagated on the Net. However, on the Net we have all learned to read with a grain of salt between our teeth, like Russians drinking tea through a sugar cube. The traditional media, to the contrary, commanded respect and imposed authority. It was precisely this respect and authority that made The New York Times' reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so instrumental in legitimating the lies that the Bush administration used to lead this country to war. Two weeks ago and then last Friday, The Washington Post was still allowing George Will to make false claims about the analysis of a scientific study of global sea ice levels without batting an eyelid, reflecting the long-standing obfuscation of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change by newspapers that, in the name of balanced reporting, reported the controversy rather than the actual scientific consensus. On some of these, the greatest challenges of our time, newspapers have failed us. The question then, on the background of this mixed record is whether the system that will replace the mass mediated public sphere can do at least as well.

Absolutely: newspaper have their virtues, but as Benkler says, they certainly have their vices too. So criticising potential weakness in nascent news forms is perilously close to pots calling the kettle black.

This other point also struck a chord (well, it would do, wouldn't it?):

Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model--be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica--to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided in the networked public sphere.

In other words, welcome to the new news: it's the future.

Thus Spake Yochai

I am still optimistic. It does seem that people have been opting for open systems when they have been available, and that has provided a strong market push against the efforts to close down the 'Net. Social practices, more prominently the widespread adoption of participation in peer production, social sites, and DIY media, are the strongest source of pushback. As people practice these freedoms, one hopes that they will continue to support them, politically, but most powerfully perhaps, with their buying power and the power to divert their attention to open platforms rather than closed. This, the fact that decentralized action innovates more quickly, and that people seem to crave the freedom and creativity that it gives them, is the most important force working in favor of our capturing and extending the value of an open network.

Sigh; my hero.

Banking on Benkler

Trust Yochai to give us a way forward - and some hope:

In the mass media environment, there was a general culture of "I saw it in print, therefore it must be true." This culture led to a relative atrophy of critical faculties, and made the public sphere highly manipulable, or simply prone to error. It is not, for example, that well-trained media critics could not point out the dozens of ways in which any given news report or television program were biased or incomplete. They could. But the readers, viewers, and listeners by and large adopted a trusting relationship to their media. We long spoke about the need to teach critical television watching. But that never happened, really. I think as a new generation grows up reading things that never have a clear voice of authority, that have only provisional status as inputs, we will begin to see a more critical, investigative form of reading, as well as listening and viewing. The act of reading will be more like an act of investigation, as one picks up pieces of evidence with variable levels of credibility, triangulates them, and arrives at a conclusion that continues, nonetheless, to be revisable and falsifiable. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is high time that people adopt it more broadly. I embrace this uncertainty, for with it comes critical reading. This trend is then strengthened by the widespread practices of cultural production, what I have characterized as the re-emergence of a new folk culture in the digital environment. People who create know how to be more critical users.

ODF La La!

France really seems to have something about ODF. I wrote before about one initiative to bring in ODF, and now here's another that's even more promising.

That's because the report is to the French prime minister - no messing on this one. Moreover, its recommendations are very broad in their sweep. So, not content with proposing

Introduire, par voie réglementaire, l'usage obligatoire de ce format par l'administration française pour la création et la diffusion de tout document administratif.

the obligatory use of the ODF format for the creation and distribution of all administrative documents of the French Government, it also suggests

Proposer à nos partenaires européens de favoriser systématiquement les standards ouverts et, comme premier exemple, d'imposer le format international ISO «odf» pour la création et la diffusion de tout document officiel échangé dans le cadre européen.

proposing to European partners to do the same for all official documents of the European Union.

It's well-worth reading the whole document, which ranges widely - the GNU GPL and Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks are both discussed - and offers a uniquely French perspective on the modern world. It reminds us yet again that if France did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

The Cost of Freedom - Not

"The cost of freedom in the digital age" is a sadly misguided article on openDemocracy that questions whether Creative Commons, open source and open access are "a just reward for creative endeavour", and concludes:

Free dissemination systems such as open access and creative commons are good and should be supported. The most excluded in society will benefit from not having to pay. But creative commons is not the right alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators. We are still only at the dawn of the digital revolution. It is likely that by the time we get to sunrise, more equitable alternatives will have been found. Until that happens, whoever ends up picking up the bill for content creation, there is little justice in charging the credit cards of scientists or short-changing authors of books and composers of music.

Well, no, actually: scientists do not pay with their credit cards for open access: the cost may be author-side, rather than reader-side, but it is picked up by one of the scientist's sponsors - be it the grant-giver (like the Wellcome Trust) or academic institution.

Similarly, it is incorrect to say that authors of books and composers of music are "short-changed" just because they adopt a creative commons licence, or to call creative commons an "alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators". There are well-attested cases of sales being boosted when a book is released under a CC licence (just ask Cory Doctorow or Yochai Benkler): in other words, more reward, not less. And even when sales aren't boosted, there are numerous other ways of making money from the reputation that CC publication can bestow (public appearances, consultancy, etc.).

Looking at new-style content distribution with the blinkers of old-style publishing inevitably misses these facets. Not so much the cost of freedom, then, as the cost of fettered thinking.

Open Access Books Are Like Buses...

...you wait for ages, and then three turn up at once.

Well, two at least: I wrote recently about Willinsky's The Access Principle, and now here, hard on its heels, comes Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks.

If the name Benkler is unfamiliar, you might want to glance at the suggestively-titled Coase's Penguin (yes, that penguin), which is effectively a sketch of the present book. Both, then, are about how the network changes everything, and how all the opens and the various kinds of commons that are central concerns of this blog lie at the heart of one of the most profound economic, social and political transformations seen in recent years.

But don't take my word for it, listen to what Larry Lessig has to say, with typical generosity:

This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.

Then buy/download the thing (CC licence, of course) and read it. I know I will. The fact that I haven't yet finished its 500+ pages is not just another reason not to listen to me: it's also a further hint of why eventually all books will be freely available as digital downloads online. Basically, reading on a screen and reading text placed on a physical object are two quite different experiences, and warrant two quite different business models.