Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

"Becoming Gannon" is a very good piece of work - I'd have to say that it exemplifies the best that citizen journalism can be : fully as well researched, and also - crucially - stylistically crafted to be an enjoyable read, as the best of what what traditional print media has to offer. So, kudos. Not that kudos substitutes for fame or financial reward, but kudos nonetheless.

Even though I've worked heavily with ePluribus Media over the last few months ( less so recently ) I'm unaware of the details of this dispute, and so I'm completely agnostic on assigning culpability ( is blaming ever a productive activity ? ) for the dispute that led to the banning from Propagannon that you mention. But - rising above the fray - I'd have to say that it's a shame that ePluribus Media wasn't able to resolve this dispute internally. It seems to me - knowing nothing of the actual details - that citizen journalism must learn to do better, so that efforts such as ePluribus Media - at best a great and noble notion - do not shatter into a myriad of bickering factions.

What can be done ? I've been wondering myself as to whether this, and related sorts of inter-organizational tensions and factionalism, do not point to a sort of limit horizon ? Can a group of strangers, thrown together by fate and happenstance but who have never met in person nor, in some cases, even talked on the telephone actually be organized to work productively towards a common goal or be united under a common vision ? Is that even possible ?

The phenomenal success of the Wikipedia has - I suspect - led us astray : citizen journalism cannot, and for very good reasons, proceed as a public Wiki process. Is citizen journalism possible as a distributed process at all ? I actually believe that it is possible, but only insofar as it recognizes and addresses several interrelated imperatives :

1) Boundaries must be clearly defined at the outset, so that all participants know the ground rules : above all, the challenge - in distributed projects - is to work to ensure that participants have a clear, shared understandings - of their roles and responsibilities within the organization. Under what ground rules do participants agree to operate within the overall effort and what, if any, will be the rewards for their participation ? That last point is perhaps the key flashpoint of conflict : idealism is a powerful force, yes, but we all must live and so we all must eat. Can the organization offer participants any compensation, whether monetary or in terms of recognition - even fame ? And - if so - how are those rewards to be distributed ? In a completely egalitarian manner ? In a meritocratic fashion ?

What are the rights and responsibilities of the participants within the organization ? What do they owe the organization, and what does the organization owe them ? And, how will disputes - which will occur - be resolved ?

And, overall, how will the organizational culture, and its prevailing philosophy, be defined ? That culture - to the extent that it can be defined and brought into being - will bind the participants together in a shared enterprise... or not.

2) The issue of governance is an inherently perilous one : decisions must be made, yes, and so a bottom-up decision making process is unworkable. But, conversely, a top down, hierarchical decision making structure may be unworkable due to ambiguity inherent to text-based communication, at least, but also for the need to make participants feel invested in the project. Over all these imperatives lies this, as a cloud and as a challenge, which must be cut through and surmounted : the fog of Net. That fog exists as a basic challenge to distributed projects, one which cannot be avoided and demands to be addressed.

Centralized leadership, further, cannot penetrate that fog. Hierarchical authority has it's uses, yes, but the chains of command, lines of authority, and rules - or protocols - which arise in hierarchical organizational systems must be counterbalanced by social feedback processes - the company water cooler, lunch room or coffee spot, yes, but also as formal processes - by which members can communicate with leadership - to give feedback, offer suggestions and potentially invaluable concepts and, critically, to air grievances. Lacking those feedback loops, the paths by which members can inform leadership, all will spin - amplified by the fog of Net - into confusion and incoherence

In the absence of shared meaning, things fall apart : and, lacking shared meanings and understanding - and that lack must be assumed as inherent, to a degree, in all distributed processes - conflicts will erupt. Such is a given, and so the succesful resolution of those inevitable conflicts, as they arise or better still while they are nascent, is imperative. This is crucial - if bad feelings that arise among capable and heavily invested members, ones who have contributed much time and emotional energy to the collective project, are not addressed, and if those feelings are not recognized and successfully mediated, such negative energies can ricochet through the group and among members, with considerable destructive impact. Those high stakes - of potential fragmentation - must be acknowledged and addressed so that mediation and resolution processes are built into the very organizational model.

Such potential conflicts are inherent to all human endeavor - on the Net and off of it - and organizations and political associations which arise as distributed processes and which persist and succeed must address, as best as possible under difficult circumstances, such issues. Citizen journalism may seem a new and radical affair, magical even : the Internet makes possible novel social arrangements and enables much that was previously inconceivable. Agreed. But citizen journalism - and distributed, collaborative media and journalism which is truly of the people and by the people - can only flourish as a not-for-profit process - driven, in part at least, by talented volunteers - to the extent to which those volunteers feel truly invested in that "We" of a collective media, and to the extent that the collective, the "We", acknowledges that it compromises many "I's" who have a right to expect certain things back from the group process, in a natural given and take that characterizes all human social enterprise.

There is a danger - amidst all of the buzz and hullabaloo surrounding the envisioned potential of citizen journalism - to fall prey to the fantasy that, as during the Internet boom of the 1990's, everything is now somehow different and that we stand on the cusp of, or a moving into, some radical break with the continuity of known human history, that we are transcending history and entering some media and journalistic extropian age in which news will somehow self assemble into coherent, timely, professional, and even enjoyable reads. Maybe. But, much of "news" is inherently political as - for better or worse - are humans themselves.

Citizen journalism that seeks to challange, address, and reform power can only do so if it acknowledges the lessons of power - in an overt acknowledgement of politics - and so builds those into its fabric : and - yet - it must do so in such a way that it preserves its inclusive nature. Sun Tsu meets the Wikipedia - can it be done ?

Because humans are just that - humans - designers of "Social Software" which is envisioned to enable the construction, via distributed processes, of news that addresses major political issues and conflicts must acknowledge this basic limitation - that, as long ago acknowledged by the spooks at Langley, software can indeed be made that is absolutely secure and immune from espionage attempts, yes. But only if humans are completely removed from the equation. For that, the social software which would enable citizen journalism cannot resolve those issues of trust and secrecy which must be mediated to make possible true deep investigative journalism. Those challenges can only be resolved via "social software" of a different sort - as human social process unmediated, at least in part, by code. Otherwise, we will only see the emergence of the Sy Hershes, Greg Palasts, , Bob Parrys, or Jeff Cohens of investigative journalism ( my deepest apologies to those greats I have omitted there. I am not a journalist, nor do I claim to be one under the aegis of citizen journalism. ) with the emergence of true artificial intelligence : We the robots ?

3) Humans are very different, at present, from putative AI's - but it is very easy to imagine them, in distributed citizen journalism projects enabled by the Internet, as somehow like artificial intelligences, as hyper-rational beings somehow devoid of the normal range of the human behavioral repertoire. Well, although the Internet may in fact invite an overrepresentation of individuals with a range of social dysfunction ( a friend of mine has commented on the apparently high concentration of individuals with Asperger's Syndrome on Net forums and as the early adopters of emerging net-enabled social technologies ) even the socially challenged are not robots. They are very much human.

Much of human communication happens through body language, in the nuances of spoken language ( by emotional tone, emphasis, inflection, facial expression ), and even through more subtle channels - by trace chemical signals that our bodies emit all the time, intrinsic to our biological nature as social animals. All of these "rich media" channels are integral to that palette by which Homo Sapiens communicates, but those channels drop out altogether in text and exist only in shadow form in telephone conversations. Hence : the fog of Net.

If citizen journalism is to succeed and be truly effective. It must pay heed to and somehow address the limitations, the dangers, and the fog of Net inherent to Net based distributed processes based on textual communication which are only occasionally enriched by phone conversation.

Here is the crux of the problem : as individuals, we choose our human associations - our work associations, our romantic ties, our allegiances in general, those with whom we see fit to join with in common enterprise - based above all on one simple calculus : sanity. Now, that is a vastly complex calculus but also one which reduces to a simple measure : we want to associate and work with those with whom we can get things done, and all measures of sanity are only contextual. If citizen journalism - as a project - can be likened to a barn-raising ( this analogy occurred to me independently and then, later, reading Dan Gillmor's excellent book, I encountered Dan's "barn raising" analogy. It's an apt comparison to make. ) well then....

We would want to work - in building that barn - with those who bring carpenters' tools to the work site, rather than with those who come with ukuleles or crayons or those who show up and begin staging emotional dramas by encouraging the carpenters to fight among themselves rather than swing hammers at nails.

Now, some will also show up at the barn raising and immediately begin sawing or chopping away at the barn frame or at the effort's social infrastructure - shaky at best - which underlies the communal project. Issues of trust are crucial ones that must somehow - roughly - be addressed. In matters of trust, it is generally best to have a good, long look into the eyes of one's compadres. That cannot happen via the internet - not now and, and maybe never. But issues of trust, and of attempted sabotage, are not the only danger inherent to such projects : some participants who are quite earnest will nonetheless be unsuitable to the task and may even, through their own best efforts, create havoc.

Those are the sorts of considerations - the ones which are appropriate for me to publicly air anyway - which I think citizen journalism and related distributed efforts would do well to address.

Perhaps I'll write this up as some sort of "manifesto", give it a zippy name, and forward to the digerati and doyens of Blogodemia* Perhaps. But, for now, I'm going to take the dog for a walk, in the beautiful Spring morning air.

*Credit for coinage of that word rightly goes to Frederick Clarkson

Posted by: Bruce Wilson | May  2, 2005 12:30 PM