Benefits and Risks (from Phil)

I remember typing term papers in the 1960s and 70s on typewriters like some of those you see in the glass cases on the ground floor of the GSPM building. Back then, we used "WhiteOut" to correct mistakes and carbon paper to make extra copies. Today, I write with the assistance of word processors and laserjet printers.

When I first started writing newspaper stories in the 1970s, I had to go to the library to look up background material and to find the latest issues of current magazines and newspapers. After I finished writing my stories, I had to call them in to my editor and read them so that she could re-type them. If we were on a tight deadline, I would run the story over to her house or, in a later development, use a fax machine to send over a copy. Today, I do almost all of my research online, and send my articles in with the touch of a button on my computer.

New technologies obviously have had a big impact on my life, and they probably will have a comparably big impact on your future endeavors, whether in politics or in any other field.

The best way to stay current with these new technologies is to do what each of you has been doing for the last ten weeks: stretch a bit to get yourself up to the cutting edge, and then remain there by creating a network of colleagues who can share the task of constantly reinventing yourself in the context of technological change.

While we have been emphasizing the positive aspects of these technological changes, we would be remiss if we did not also remind you that the great power of technological innovation also carries some risks. The loss of privacy that we have discussed does not have to come at the hands of an over-intrusive government or data-mining corporate empire. It also can happen through something as simple as leaving a memory stick, laptop, or Blackberry in the cab as you race for your flight at Dulles.

According to surveys discussed in the Washington Post, "160,000 portable devices are left in [Chicago] taxicabs every year," and "37 percent of smart-phone users store confidential business data on their phones" while "only 40 percent of those surveyed worked at companies that have corporate policies about wireless security."

Password protection is important, and the ability to remotely destroy the data on your cell phone if it is lost sounds like a good idea. These safeguards, however, are just physical reminders of the bigger issue we all should be confronting as we embark on our careers as political technologists: How will technology be used? By whom? For what cause? And with what safeguards?

Is Prof. Lessig right when he predicts that "Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to 'tame' the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed?"

Have a good summer, and thanks for a great semester!

This cost me over $80,000

I tried telling you in class. I wrote you emails individually. I posted it in the requirements. But no luck.

I can't believe I am sitting here grading end-of-term work that has not been spellchecked. In the future, when you are professionals responsible for producing online communications, you will lose credibility if your work contains typos that a simple spellcheck could correct.

How can I get you to run spellcheck? I've almost run out of ideas. I finally decided to fork out big bucks for a celebrity endorsement. I sincerely hope this investment pays off.

We are running out of time. Please run spellcheck on your work ASAP if you have not already done so. I WILL dock for spelling errors that an online spellchecker would catch.

The final lap

I've done an initial survey of all blog work to identify students who have not yet posted the minimum number of required blogs (41 blogs minus 5 passes = 36 total). Most of you are in great shape.

There are 6 of you, however, who still need to post one or two more blogs ASAP to meet the requirement. In addition, there are a few of you who are missing more than one or two blogs. For those of you who are behind, Phil will be sending you emails individually tonight (Saturday July 23) to let you know your status re: missing assignments.

My plan is to finish grading your work this weekend and email you on Monday with the results. That will give you time to do any final corrections before I submit the grade.

Keep in mind that if you have exactly 36 blogs, you need to get 3 points on all of them to get an A on your blog work. If you have a few additional on-topic blogs (beyond the 36 minimum), those points will be added to your total blog points, which is then divided by 36. However, if all 36 of your blogs are excellent, you won't need any extra points.

A Lesson From History (from Phil)

In The Movies are Born a Child of the Phonograph, movie historian Mark Ulano noted that:

The 1870's and 1880's experienced dramatic development of technologies that were converging to make film sound possible. Conceptually, sound recording and the ability to photograph and reproduce motion pictures began intersecting at the very beginning. Since recording technology was born approximately 14 years before motion pictures, it naturally lead the way.

He quotes Edward W. Kellog, who wrote the following in the June 1955 volume of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers:

Edison invented the motion pictures as a supplement to his phonograph, in the belief that sound plus a moving picture would provide better entertainment than sound alone. But in a short time the movies proved to be good enough entertainment without sound. It has been said that although the motion picture and the phonograph were intended to be partners, they grew up separately. And it might be added that the motion picture held the phonograph in such low esteem that for years it would not speak. Throughout the long history of efforts to add sound, the success of the silent movie was the great obstacle to commercialization of talking pictures.

As this course draws to a close, I hope you will take away a few concepts and apply them to your lives as political technologists. Technological change is happening at a rapid pace. Not all changes are for the better. And we who value democracy must make sure that we harness the best of this new technology to empower and educate people while limiting the use of technology that can abridge freedoms or undermine democracy.

I mention the evolution of radio and moving pictures a century ago as an example of how we cannot foresee the consequences of every new technological development as it comes onto the market. We have discussed websites, blogs, email, micropayments, online video, podcasts, and many other innovations, but who can predict how these will be applied and what new ones are going to be developed? Sometimes the best you can do is to keep up with the broad trends, and dig into the specifics as your job requires it.

Today's Washington Post discusses the good and bad aspects of podcasts, and ends with an important reminder:

The most promising part about the podcast business is that, unlike radio, it has infinite room for anybody; there isn't a fixed set of channels that can be bought up by the big media conglomerates. Podcasting may be a mess, but at least it's a mess that everybody has the same access to.

Yes, the class is drawing to a close, but your education in applying technology to politics is a lifelong endeavor. Keep on blogging, keep on learning, and keep on keeping democracy and the Internet available to everyone!

Class photo from last week

Thought you'd enjoy this. Phil and I hope your final week is going well.

Click on the thumbnail below. When the image loads, use the horizontal scrollbar to see the rest of the photo.

Back by Popular Demand

Here are two extra passes for exam week.
You can use each pass only once:

To use this pass, create an empty blog entry, give it a title, and paste this code into it.

 

For this pass,
use this code.

Good luck on your exams!

 

FBI Monitored Protester Websites (from Phil)

In two recent posts I explored the implications of China restricting web access to its citizens and a private company restricting access to emails.

The Washington Post now is reporting another troubling development: the FBI conducting political surveillance on the websites of the ACLU and Greenpeace — domestic civil rights and civil liberties groups lawfully exercising their Constitutional rights to assemble and speak.

"It's increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks."

A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention.

"It's one thing to monitor protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing to refer them to your counterterrorism unit," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.

Pulling together some of the threads of the class, we have seen that there exist digital divides based on race, gender, class, geography, disability status, and age. Based on these latest revelations about the FBI, we can add political affiliation to this list. While the FBI denies that they are monitoring law-abiding citizens based on politics, how do we know? How can anyone know? And if we find they are subjecting us to political surveillance, what is the remedy?

Because the FBI is a public entity, certain oversight laws do apply to them. Comcast is a private sector actor, however, and so unless new regulations are enacted, there is little we can do if they arbitrarily decide to not deliver certain customer emails based on political content.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Micropayments are a growing trend in online commerce. Until recently, the most ardent proponents of micropayment systems were web prognosticators (such as Jakob Neilsen) and struggling online artists (such as Scott McCloud). For years, they were soundly rebuked for their supposedly naive and impractical assumptions about the nature of online commerce (1998, 2003).

Meanwhile, as lesser carnivores argued about feasibility, it appears that the Tyrannosaurs finally caught a whiff of fresh meat, and are already claiming it for themselves.

Micropayment systems are fascinating, because they are an economic model that could make it easy and convenient for virtually anyone to sell services online, comparable to the way blogs allow virtually anyone to publish online. Such systems could evolve to cut out middlemen and take advantage of lowered production and distribution costs. This would allow drastic price reduction — perhaps the return of the dime novel is now impossible.

But will the established content production and distribution moguls — in publishing, media, and entertainment — simply allow the little guys to push them to the margins? How will this transformation play out, and how will it impact political fundraising?

Blogging is All-American (from Phil)

David Von Drehle of the Washington Post has written an entertaining and enlightening piece on blogs in today's Washington Post.

His hook is to bring together two women with blogs, one on the left and one on the right, and follow them around as they visit the sites in Washington. Not surprisingly, they are very opinionated and have different viewpoints on almost every issue.

Embedded in this story, however, are historical insights such as these:

Blogging is an old craft recently made new by technology. Which is only fair, because it was technology that quieted the bloggers of old. Mass "mainstream" media arose thanks to the original wireless — the radio. Before that, cities supported a wide variety of newspapers, each with a distinctive niche and bias. Then television came along on a broadcast band so narrow that only a handful of stations were licensed in each city.

These stations were quickly tied together into networks by the already dominant figures of radio — David Sarnoff of NBC (which spawned ABC) and William Paley of CBS. These networks immediately felt pressure to serve huge national audiences, so they moved to eliminate sources of controversy and signs of personality from their reports. As the evening broadcasts killed off afternoon newspapers from coast to coast, a.m. papers adopted the same goal of impersonal, unbiased, reporting for their ever-broader readership. Thus, an idea that would have struck Zenger, or Greeley or the young Hearst as madness — the notion of "objective" journalism — became the paramount goal of America's editors.

A generation after these changes were completed, the whole thing is shaky. Paley's edifice, CBS, can be discombobulated by a blog called Little Green Footballs. That's the site that smelled something fishy about purported National Guard memos deployed by anchorman Dan Rather. Technology no longer favors the big guys; the limits of the broadcast band are irrelevant in the age of cable and the Internet. And the once fat and happy morning papers are being forced to relearn the virtues of speed and verve.

In Von Drehle's view, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Bill of Rights, Free Soil newspapers, and thousands of other political tracts were paleo-bloggers. For example:

John Peter Zenger, the original hero of American journalism, was essentially a blogger. In the 1730s, he used his New York Weekly Journal to criticize the governor. Arrested and charged with libel, Zenger gloated over his acquittal in the distinctively personal voice of the blogo-sphere: "The jury returned in Ten Minutes," he wrote on the Journal's front page, "and found me Not Guilty."

This historical perspective is important, because some in the mainstream media want us to believe that their "objective" enterprise is the norm, and we swarms of blog-assisted opinionated individuals are an aberration. Well, it just ain't so.

As Von Drehle notes in his conclusion:

So, when we note that it's pretty ugly sometimes in the blogosphere, and when we observe that this country always seems to be arguing about something, it's worth adding that even the sharpest divisions tend to smooth out under the steady current of time. The culture of argument may not be ideal, but it's ours, and it beats certain alternatives. The roisterous, partisan, often mean-spirited world of the political blogs is not threatening America; for better and for worse, this is America.

[Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas, also examines new technology in the light of our cultural history. In the next class, we will discuss his notion of "free culture" and how our shared culture is threatened as copyright restrictions expand beyond all historical precedent.]