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I just donated $25 to Barack Obama. Much like many other geeks before me. Obama is clearly the choice of the country’s programmers, researchers, and other eggheads. Why?

Despite the explosion of baby name voting posts, I usually write about more technical topics on this blog. I’m very interested in the intersection of technology and society, and use of the internet in social interaction. So I think it’s fair to talk about that other vote that’s going on right now, the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

As I said before, Obama is clearly the choice of the geek constituency. Don’t believe me? Here’s a graph of individual campaign contributions by employees at five large, notoriously geeky tech companies, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon:

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This week was slow until someone posted wondering where everyone was.  Someone mentioned the automatic news gathering systems like Google News, and mentioned that Microsoft was working on one:  “When I first checked the french version, http://fr.newsbot.msn.com, its lead story was a link to a two-paragraph story on a french business site about “Playboy et les femmes de WalMart deshabille” — illustrated with a head shot of Donald Rumsfeld.  For all the early glitches that people reported on Google News, I never saw anything any way near that bad.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

I went ahead and looked up some info on RSS.  It seems pretty interesting-details can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a common format for content you want others to be able to pick up through their news sites, blogs, and web applications.  It’s a flavor of XML, which allows you to set up different channels and different items within the channel, with some other standard tags like creator and description.  It’s nice because it’s an open format, and it seems to be getting pretty big.  Like so many other things, there’s a set of dueling specifications for it, though some are backwards compatible with each other which is nice.  If more sites keep using it, I’m sure Microsoft will ad their own proprietary version to Office any day now.

One thing that’s interesting about this list is that people use it to announce papers, books, and projects.  For example, there’s “The current status and potential development of online news consumption: A structural approach” by An Nguyen at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/nguyen/index.html, which makes the bland assertion that more news web sites are going up and more people are getting their news from the web.  That one was mentioned by someone who had read it; other times the writers themselves make announcements like Robert Berkman, who co-wrote Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals.  This book likes kind of interesting, just because I’ve read a few journalism ethics books and they usually don’t have much on online journalism.  There are some important issues which are particularly pressing online as opposed to print–like reader privacy.

In other threads, some people have been discussing a poster called “JOE BIALEK” who seems to have appeared out of nowhere to write huge diatribes.  The name looked familiar to me and some of the other posters confirmed my suspicion-he’s a troll from Usenet and other forums who tries to start fights.  There was an interesting meta-thread about how these sorts of things happen.  Another thread was about the use of mobile phone cameras by reporters.  The first poster talked about how great it could be, but others quickly added there could be ethical concerns.  It might not be a great idea to let your reporter (who’s not a trained news photographer) take insensitive pictures of victims and post them without going through an editor first.

A response to Taking Sides - Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society - Issue 8

In the affirmative argument, Kathleen Jamieson argues that the First Amendment has protected the media and allowed it to cover many sides of issues, even sides the government might want to suppress.  In the negative response, Thomas Patterson says the mainstream press hasn’t fought for its own freedom, routinely excludes unpopular opinions, and is more concerned with dollars than debate.

Jamieson thinks the press has the freedom and contains the robust debate the framers intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights.  She cites the case law progressively strengthening this right and also the development of broadcast law, which has as its heart a notion of opening discussion for the public good.  Watergate and the Pentagon Papers provide two good examples of the press using this power to defend citizens against the government.  Political speech that offends and may even seem irrational today is protected as vigorously as the political speech of the part in power.  And voters today are exposed to many different sides-everyone from Marxists to Buddhists to Bill Clinton in the 1992 primaries, for example.  The development of technologies has broadened communication and debate as well.

Patterson says Watergate and the Pentagon Papers are an oasis in a desert of mundane mainstream press practices.  The mainstream press has not been the driving party in many First Amendment cases, and has been played like a fiddle by people like McCarthy.  The press control the government orchestrated in the Persian Gulf War is a good example of the media’s willingness to be controlled; only the alternative press protested.  Patterson argues that individual publications and broadcasters have displayed little interest in public debate and more in being able to exclude opinions they don’t like.  And finally, he says the press is more interested in making money than anything else.  Television and competition for customers have dumbed down news more than opened debate.

What interests me about these articles is how both look at the same case law and come to different conclusions.  Jamieson sees Miami Herald v. Tornillo as the court defending the press’ right to refuse to publish even if it’s in the state’s interest.  Patterson sees the same case as strike against hearing all sides in a political debate.  Jamieson sees the series of cases defining the First Amendment as the government’s (or at least, the court’s) struggle to guarantee free expression; Patterson says the mainstream press are rarely the ones fighting for the freedoms they enjoy.  Patterson’s point is interesting and I wish someone had thought of it while I was in media law class.  Why is it that the mainstream press has not been on the front lines of its own freedom?

I think Patterson’s final point, about commercialism over communication, deserves its own chapter.  Giant corporations and profit-minded individual ownership of mass media helps narrow the marketplace of ideas in key ways.  I’m going to make this point in my paper, too, because I think Internet news may be even more apt for this-most people get news on the internet from companies that have never had anything to do with news (Microsoft, AOL, Netscape).  Though they outsource to more traditional providers (AP, Reuters, etc) they’ll happily go with the lowest bidder and have no sense of journalistic mission whatsoever.

A response to Taking Sides - Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society - Issue 14

In the first article presented, The Media Monopoly and Other Myths, Noam and Freeman argue that concentration of ownership in the mass media is, when looked at statistically, actually decreasing and not a large problem.  The real concerns they see include local media ownership concentration and possibly Microsoft.  In The Realities of Media Concentration and Control, Bagdikian disagrees with their statistical methods, saying they have disregarded the context of the numbers-does it matter if GE or Rupert Murdoch have smaller pieces of the pie if they are now better able to get what they want?

Noam and Freeman cite a number of statistics in their argument.  For example, the total share of the top 10 U.S. companies in the information industry was 59 percent in 1987 but only 39 percent in 1997.  They also examined the top four firms in a number of individual industries and found the telecom, computer hardware and software, TV networks, and cable industries to be losing concentration.  Also, the information industry and mass media are below the concentration danger zone according to Justice Department measures.

Bagdikian, however, questions both their methods and their approach.  For one thing, he doesn’t believe computer hardware should be included in the study any more than print press manufacturers, because the dilemma lies in controlling content, not production methods.  He disagrees with the statistical approach because it does not include the real conditions companies operate with; GE owns NBC among other media outlets, and may choose to use either it’s manufacturing-based economic power to get what it wants or its mass media power or both.  Bagdikian also disagrees that new technologies like the Internet will necessarily mean more competition and feels their view of market forces are naïve.

I tend to agree more with Bagdikian than Noam and Freeman.  I do think that large media groups and media-and-industrial conglomerates have a lot more power to control what gets out to the public in what form than Noam and Freeman think possible.  Bagdikian is right about most companies not selling important properties to competitors and using their clout in one industry to get what they want in another or get laws made or bent in their favor.  Bagdikian also was correct about the Internet not solving the problem.  Although there is still a large amount of competition on the edges, the large players in the net (like Microsoft and AOL) have already emerged and dominate.

On the other hand, I can’t totally dismiss the use of statistical methods as Bagdikian does.  Noam and Freeman’s statistics were not precise enough to prove their position, but if a more detailed and narrowed analysis were made they could derive important points which could then be put into context.