Posts about Internet

Trafficking in traffic

May 1, 2023 by Jeff Jarvis
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Ben Smith picked just the right title for his saga of BuzzFeed, Gawker, and The Huffington Post: Traffic (though in the end, he credits the able sensationalist Michael Wolff with the choice). For what Ben chronicles is both the apotheosis and the end of the age of mass media and its obsessive quest for audience attention, for scale, for circulation, ratings, page views, unique users, eyeballs and engagement. 

Most everything I write these days — my upcoming books The Gutenberg Parenthesis in June and a next book, an elegy to the magazine in November, and another that I’m working on about the internet — is in the end about the death of the mass, a passing I celebrate. I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: 

The mass is the child and creation of media, a descendant of Gutenberg, the ultimate extension of treating the public as object — as audience rather than participant. It was the mechanization and industrialization of print with the steam-powered press and Linotype — exploding the circulation of daily newspapers from an average of 4,000 in the late nineteenth century to hundreds of thousands and millions in the next — that brought scale to media. With broadcast, the mass became all-encompassing. Mass is the defining business model of pre-internet capitalism: making as many identical widgets to sell to as many identical people as possible. Content becomes a commodity to attract the attention of the audience, who themselves are sold as a commodity. In the mass, everything and everyone is commodified.

Ben and the anti-heroes of his tale — BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington, investor Kenny Lerer, and a complete dramatis personae of the early players in pure-play digital media — were really no different from the Hearsts, Pulitzers, Newhouses, Luces, Greeleys, Bennetts, Sarnoffs, Paleys, and, yes, Murdochs, the moguls of mass media’s mechanized, industrialized, and corporate age who built their empires on traffic. The only difference, really, was that the digital moguls had new ways to hunt their prey: social, SEO, clickbait, data, listicles, and snark.

Ben tells the story so very well; he is an admirable writer and reporter. His narrative whizzes by like a local train on the express tracks. And it rings true. I had a seat myself on this ride. I was a friend of Nick Denton’s and a member of the board of his company before Gawker, Moreover; president of the online division of Advance (Condé Nast + Newhouse Newspapers); a board member for another pure-play, Plastic (a mashup of Suck et al); a proto-blogger; a writer for HuffPost; and a media critic who occasionally got invited to Nick’s parties and argued alongside Elizabeth Spiers at his kitchen table that he needed to open up to comments (maybe it’s all our fault). So I quite enjoyed Traffic. Because memories.

Traffic is worthwhile as a historical document of an as-it-turns-out-brief chapter in media history and as Ben’s own memoir of his rise from Politico blogger to BuzzFeed News editor to New York Times media critic to co-founder of Semafor. I find it interesting that Ben does not try to separate out the work of his newsroom from the click-factory next door. Passing reference is made to the prestige he and Jonah wanted news to bring to the brand, but Ben does not shy away from association with the viral side of the house. 

I saw a much greater separation between the two divisions of BuzzFeed — not just reputationally but also in business models. It took me years to understand the foundation of BuzzFeed’s business. My fellow media blatherers would often scold me: “You don’t understand, Jeff,” one said, “BuzzFeed is the first data-driven newsroom.” So what? Every newsroom and every news organization since the 1850s measured itself by its traffic, whether they called it circulation or reach or MAUs. 

No, what separated BuzzFeed’s business from the rest was that it did not sell space or time or even audience. It sold a skill: We know how to make our stuff viral, they said to advertisers. We can make your stuff viral. As a business, it (like Vice) was an ad agency with a giant proof-of-concept attached.

There were two problems. The first was that BuzzFeed depended for four-fifths of its distribution on other platforms: BuzzFeed’s own audience took its content to the larger audience where they were, mostly on Facebook, also YouTube and Twitter. That worked fine until it didn’t — until other, less talented copykittens ruined it for them. The same thing happened years earlier to About.com, where The New York Times Company brought me in to consult after its purchase. About.com had answers to questions people asked in Google search, so Google sent them to About.com, where Google sold the ads. It was a beautiful thing, until crappy content farms like Demand Media came and ruined it for them. In a first major ranking overhaul, Google had to downgrade everything that looked like a content farm, including About. Oh, well. (After learning the skills of SEO and waiting too long, The Times Company finally sold About.com; its remnants labor on in Barry Diller’s content farm, DotDash, where the last survivors of Time Inc. and Meredith toil, mostly post-print.)

The same phenomenon struck BuzzFeed, as social networks became overwhelmed with viral crap because, to use Silicon Valley argot, there was no barrier to entry to making clickbait. In Traffic, Ben reviews the history of Eli Pariser’s well-intentioned but ultimately corrupting startup Upworthy, which ruined the internet and all of media with its invention, the you-won’t-believe-what-happened-next headline. The experience of being bombarded with manipulative ploys for attention was bad for users and the social networks had to downgrade it. Also, as Ben reports, they discovered that many people were more apt to share screeds filled with hate and lies than cute kittens. Enter Breitbart. 

BuzzFeed’s second problem was that BuzzFeed News had no sustainable business model other than the unsustainable business model of the rest of news. News isn’t, despite the best efforts of headline writers, terribly clickable. In the early days, BuzzFeed didn’t sell banner ads on its own content and even if it had, advertisers don’t much want to be around news because it is not “brand safe.” Therein lies a terrible commentary on marketing and media, but I’ll leave that for another day. 

Ben’s book comes out just as BuzzFeed killed News. In the announcement, Jonah confessed to “overinvesting” in it, which is an admirably candid admission that news didn’t have a business model. Sooner or later, the company’s real bosses — owners of its equity — would demand its death. Ben writes: “I’ve come to regret encouraging Jonah to see our news division as a worthy enterprise that shouldn’t be evaluated solely as a business.” Ain’t that the problem with every newsroom? The truth is that BuzzFeed News was a philanthropic gift to the information ecosystem from Jonah and Ben.

Just as Jonah and company believed that Facebook et al had turned on them, they turned on Facebook and Google and Twitter, joining old, incumbent media in arguing that Silicon Valley somehow owed the news industry. For what? For sending them traffic all these years? Ben tells of meeting with the gray eminence of the true evil empire, News Corp., to discuss strategies to squeeze “protection money” (Ben’s words) from technology companies. That, too, is no business model. 

Thus the death of BuzzFeed news says much about the fate of journalism today. In Traffic, Ben tells the tale of the greatest single traffic driver in BuzzFeed’s history: The Dress. You know, this one: 

At every journalism conference where I took the stage after that, I would ask the journalists in attendance how many of their news organizations wrote a story about The Dress. Every single hand would go up. And what does that say about the state of journalism today? As we whine and wail about losing reporters and editors at the hands of greedy capitalists, we nonetheless waste tremendous journalistic resource rewriting each other for traffic: everyone had to have their own story to get their own Googlejuice and likes and links and ad impressions and pennies from them. No one added anything of value to BuzzFeed’s own story. The story, certainly BuzzFeed would acknowledge, had no particular social value; it did nothing to inform public discourse. It was fun. It got people talking. It took their attention. It generated traffic. 

The virus Ben writes about is one that BuzzFeed — and the every news organization on the internet and the internet as a whole — caught from old, coughing mass media: the insatiable hunger for traffic for its own sake. In the book, Nick Denton plays the role of inscrutable (oh, I can attest to that) philosopher. According to Ben, Nick believed that traffic was the key expression of value: “Traffic, to Nick … was something pure. It was an art, not a science. Traffic meant that what you were doing was working.” Yet Nick also knew where traffic could lead. Ben quotes him telling a journalist in 2014: “It’s not jonah himself I hate, but this stage of internet media for which he is so perfectly optimized. I see an image of his cynical smirk — made you click! — every time a stupid buzzfeed listicle pops on Facebook.”

Nick also believed that transparency was the only ethic that really mattered, for the sake of democracy. Add these two premises, traffic and transparency, together and the sex tape that was the McGuffin that brought down Gawker and Nick at the hands of Peter Thiel was perhaps an inevitability. Ben also credits (or blames?) Nick for his own decision to release the Trump dossier to the public on BuzzFeed. (I still think Ben has a credible argument for doing so: It was being talked about in government and in media and we, the public, had the right to judge for ourselves. Or rather, it’s not our right to decide; it’s a responsibility, which will fall on all of us more and more as our old institutions of trust and authority — editing and publishing — falter in the face of the abundance of talk the net enables.)

The problem in the end is that traffic is a commodity; commodities have no unique value; and commodities in abundance will always decrease in price, toward zero. “Even as the traffic to BuzzFeed, Gawker Media, and other adept digital publishers grew,” Ben writes, “their operators began to feel that they were running on an accelerating treadmill, needing ever more traffic to keep the same dollars flowing in.” Precisely

Traffic is not where the value of the internet lies. No, as I write in The Gutenberg Parenthesis (/plug), the real value of the internet is that it begins to reverse the impact print and mass media have had on public discourse. The internet devalues the notions of content, audience, and traffic in favor of speech. Only it is going to take a long time for society to relearn the conversational skills it has lost and — as with Gutenberg and the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years’ War that followed — things will be messy in between. 

BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, etc. were not new media at all. They were the last gasp of old media, trying to keep the old ways alive with new tricks. What comes next — what is actually new — has yet to be invented. That is what I care about. That is why I teach. 

Writing as exclusion

December 22, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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DALL-E image of quill, ink pot, and paper with writing on it.
DALL-E

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis (my upcoming book), I ask whether, “in bringing his inner debates to print, Montaigne raised the stakes for joining the public conversation, requiring that one be a writer to be heard. That is, to share one’s thoughts, even about oneself, necessitated the talent of writing as qualification. How many people today say they are intimidated setting fingers to keys for any written form — letter, email, memo, blog, social-media post, school assignment, story, book, anything — because they claim not to be writers, while all the internet asks them to be is a speaker? What voices were left out of the conversation because they did not believe they were qualified to write? … The greatest means of control of speech might not have been censorship or copyright or publishing but instead the intimidation of writing.”

Thus I am struck by the opportunity presented by generative AI — lately and specifically ChatGPT— to provide people with an opportunity to better express themselves, to help them write, to act as Cyrano at their ear. Fellow educators everywhere are freaking out, wondering how they can ever teach writing and assign essays without wondering whether they are grading student or machine. I, on the other hand, look for opportunity — to open up the public conversation to more people in more ways, which I will explore here.

Let me first be clear that I do not advocate an end to writing or teaching it — especially as I work in a journalism school. It is said by some that a journalism degree is the new English degree, for we teach the value of research and the skill of clear expression. In our Engagement Journalism program, we teach that rather than always extracting and exploiting others’ stories, we should help people tell their own. Perhaps now we have more tools to aid in the effort.

I have for some time argued that we must expand the boundaries of literacy to include more people and to value more means of expression. Audio in the form of podcasts, video on YouTube or TikTok, visual expression in photography and memes, and the new alphabets of emoji enable people to speak and be understood as they wish, without writing. I have contended to faculty in communications schools (besides just my own) that we must value the languages (by that I mean especially dialects) and skills (including in social media) that our students bring.

Having said all that, let us examine the opportunities presented by generative AI. When some professors were freaking out on Mastodon about ChatGPT, one prof — sorry I can’t recall who — suggested creating different assignments with it: Provide students with the product of AI and ask them to critique it for accuracy, logic, expression — that is, make the students teachers of the machines.

This is also an opportunity to teach students the limitations and biases of AI and large language models, as laid out by Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major in their Stochastic Parrots paper. Users must understand when they are listening to a machine that is trained merely to predict the next most sensible word, not to deliver and verify facts; the machine does not understand meaning. They also must realize when the data used to train a language model reflects the biases and exclusions of the web as source — when it reflects society’s existing inequities — or when it has been trained with curated content and rules to present a different worldview. The creators of these models need to be transparent about their makings and users must be made aware of their limitations.

It occurs to me that we will probably soon be teaching the skill of prompt writing: how to get what you want out of a machine. We started exercising this new muscle with DALL-E and other generative image AI — and we learned it’s not easy to guide the machine to draw exactly what we have in mind. At the same time, lots of folks are already using ChatGPT to write code. That is profound, for it means that we can tell the machine how to tell itself how to do what we want it to do. Coders should be more immediately worried about their career prospects than writers. Illustrators should also sweat more than scribblers.

In the end, writing a prompt for the machine — being able to exactly and clearly communicate one’s desires for the text, image, or code to be produced — is itself a new way to teach self-expression.

Generative AI also brings the reverse potential: helping to prompt the writer. This morning on Mastodon, I empathized with a writer who lamented that he was in the “I’m at the ‘(BETTER WORDS TK)’ stage” and I suggested that he try ChatGPT just to inspire a break in the logjam. It could act like a super-powered thesaurus. Even now, of course, Google often anticipates where I’m headed with a sentence and offers a suggested next word. That still feels like cheating — I usually try to prove Google wrong by avoiding what I now sense as a cliché — but is it so bad to have a friend who can finish your sentences for you?

For years, AI has been able to take simple, structured data — sports scores, financial results — and turn that into stories for wire services and news organizations. Text, after all, is just another form of data visualization. Long ago, I sat in a small newsroom for an advisory board meeting and when the topic of using such AI came up, I asked the eavesdropping, young sports writer a few desks over whether this worried him. Not at all, he said: He would have the machine write all the damned high-school game stories the paper wanted so he could concentrate on more interesting tales. ChatGPT is also proving to be good at churning out dull but necessary manuals and documentation. One might argue, then, that if the machine takes over the most drudgerous forms of writing, we humans would be left with brainpower to write more creative, thoughtful, interesting work. Maybe the machine could help improve writing overall.

A decade ago, I met a professor from INSEAD, Philip Parker, who insisted that contrary to popular belief, there is not too much content in the world; there is too little. After our conversation, I blogged: “Parker’s system has written tens of thousands of books and is even creating fully automated radio shows in many languages…. He used his software to create a directory of tropical plants that didn’t exist. And he has radio beaming out to farmers in poor third-world nations.”

By turning text into radio, Parker’s project, too, redefines literacy, making listening, rather than reading or writing, the necessary skill to become informed. As it happens, in that post from 2011, I starting musing about the theory Tom Pettitt had brought to the U.S. from the University of Southern Denmark: the Gutenberg Parenthesis. In my book, which that theory inspired, I explore the idea that we might be returning to an age of orality — and aurality — past the age of text. Could we be leaving the era of the writer?

And that is perhaps the real challenge presented by ChatGPT: Writers are no longer so special. Writing is no longer a privilege. Content is a commodity. Everyone will have more means to express themselves, bringing more voices to public discourse — further threatening those who once held a monopoly on it. What “content creators” — as erstwhile writers and illustrators are now known — must come to realize is that value will reside not only in creation but also in conversation, in the experiences people bring and the conversations they join.

Montaigne’s time, too, was marked by a new abundance of speech, of writing, of content. “Montaigne was acutely aware that printing, far from simplifying knowledge, had multiplied it, creating a flood of increasingly specialized information without furnishing uniform procedures for organizing it,” wrote Barry Lydgate. “Montaigne laments the chaotic proliferation of books in his time and singles out in his jeremiad a new race of ‘escrivains ineptes et inutiles’ ‘inept and useless writers’ on whose indiscriminate scribbling he diagnoses a society in decay…. ‘Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age.’”

Today, the machine, too, scribbles.

https://link.medium.com/35wnOIMyYvb

Hope for a post-Musk net

November 5, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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Maybe we’ll look back and see that Elon Musk did us, the civilized citizens of the net, a favor by forcing us off our cozy if centralized, corporatized, and corrupted internet to find and build an alternative future grounded in the founding principles and dreams of this networked age. How’s that for looking on the bright side? 

Well, optimist to a fault that I am, I see a better future. Come along…

Twitter will fail — for all the reasons Nilay Patel’s mic-drop foretells — ending up in the sewer where journalists claim it has been all along, in bankruptcy, in the hands of Saudi princes, or — who knows — in Yahoo!, where all good things have gone to die. I’m not leaving Twitter, I’m still on Facebook, and I’m enjoying TikTok’s honeymoon. But I am packing my go-bag to travel to an internet built on protocols over platforms. Here, I’ll explore some of the opportunities afforded by the likes of Bluesky, Scuttlebutt, the Fediverse, and Indieweb — not to mention good, old, reliable RSS. Nowhere better to start getting one’s head around this distributed vision than with Mike Masnick’s epic explainer, Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech.

To start with the present, I am on Mastodon and already enjoying it. Come on in; the water’s fine. For me, it is already reaching critical mass — not mass media, mind you; let us leave scale and its debasements behind — with folks I know from Twitter and new and interesting conversants, particularly academics and journalists. Don’t let unhelpful reporters dissuade you with their arm-waving about complexity; you are smarter than they think you are. 

It’s really quite simple: Join any server, set up your profile (say who you are, please), and start looking for folks to follow: search for friends and follow whom they follow, or click on the local (your server) or federated (every server) timeline to see who’s strolling by the front porch, then follow hashtags to interesting conversations and people. A few tips from my vast experience of days: Go to the settings and switch to light mode (really, it makes a difference; it’s not just my dark-mode phobia) and enable the advanced web interface (it’s like Tweetdeck). Boost posts you like (no quote tweets here). Use the verb “to toot” at your option. If it slows down for a bit, just remember Twitter’s Fail Whale of yore, know that your server is run by volunteers (led by the amazing Eugen Rochko), and chill; it’ll speed up speedily.  

There are more than 3,000 Mastodon servers, all built on and connected via the ActivityPub protocol. There are also related services you can connect to (e.g., Pixelfed, an Instagram that doesn’t Zuck). You may follow folks from any server, so where you start isn’t all that important. Later, if you want, you can move yourself to another server (you’ll keep your followers but lose your posts).

Here’s the most important thing about this open architecture: No one owns it. Musk can’t buy it (not that he can afford to buy a bagel anymore). I predict this will give censorious and authoritarian governments fits when they realize that a federated, distributed conversation is impossible to control (just as the printing press was; I have a book about that coming out soon). That immunity from control is a reason to love it — and also to be concerned, for there is no central authority to verify identity or kill bad accounts. 

Which leads us to the next most important thing about this Fediverse: It’s adaptable. Look how already academics are gathering to create groups and lists of folks you can import and follow all at once. I’d like to see journalists and COVID experts and my beloved book-history wonks do likewise. See also Dan Hon’s excellent suggestion for news organizations— or universities, companies, or any organization or institution — to set up their own Mastodon servers to verify and control their users. Say The Guardian set up a server and created accounts for all its journalists, then when you see someone coming from that server, you know for certain who she is. That is a new blue check of verification (now that Twitter’s blue check becomes the mark of the $8 shmuck). Again, if someone leaves the paper, she can take her identity and social graph with her elsewhere. Because it’s open and federated. 

I want news organizations to not only set up their own servers but also to start adding share-on-Mastodon buttons to story pages. That will send a message to Elon et al, endorsing an alternative. 

With me so far? Now is where it gets exciting. In an open, federated, distributed, and/or peer-to-peer ecosystem, folks can come and build services atop it. As both Masnick and Daphne Keller explain — see also Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Zittrain — this might allow you to pick the level of algorithmic and human curation and moderation you want as companies or organizations offer such services. Say you want the Disneyfied social feed, cleansed of all nastiness and filled with unicorns; Disney could provide that and charge for it. Ditto a Guardian liberal feel; you could donate to help them. Or, yes, you could get your crazy Uncle Al’s feed of nothing but conspiracies from Q’s Pizza Parlor. That’d be up to you.

In this distributed future, other services can be offered. Institutions, entrepreneurs, or individuals could provide services including curation and recommendation (of users and content), verification (of users), and authentication (of content). See also our founding webmaster, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for data vaults that would allow you to hold and control your information; he’s building a service called Inrupt based on the protocol he proposes, Solid. We will see new means to help pay for and support the services and creativity we want. I anticipate new kinds of clubhouses where folks of like interest, need, or circumstance can gather to connect or collaborate.

Then no longer are we caught in an endless, hopeless game of Whac-a-Mole against the bad shit on the net. Now, at last, we can concentrate instead on finding the good shit — and get help doing so. This is precisely what happened when print emerged. See the story of Nicolo Perotti asking the Pope to censor the press in 1470, when what he really wished for was the establishment of the new institutions of editing and publishing: to find, improve, support, recommend, verify, and authenticate the good shit. 

What institutions need we create now, in this new reality? Note that I did not say what new technologies. We have lots of technologies; more than enough, thank you. What we need are human standards, norms, and means to discover and support quality and credibility, talent and utility.

This is not to say that there is not more technological work to be done. It is underway. I have long been enthusiastic about the prospects for Bluesky, a protocol for an open, distributed social ecosystem proposed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and now run by Jay Graber. Bluesky is funded independently of Twitter and Musk (thank God and Jack). They just released the first version of their protocol and an app will follow soon. Here are Bluesky’s principles:

Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.

Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.

Interoperation. The world needs a diverse market of connected services to ensure healthy competition. Interoperation needs to feel like second nature to the Web. The AT Protocol includes a schema-based interoperation framework called Lexicon to help solve coordination challenges.

Performance. A lot of novel protocols throw performance out of the window, resulting in long loading times before you can see your timeline. We don’t see performance as optional, so we’ve made it a priority to build for fast loading at large scales.

My fondest hope is that @jack, who still owns his chunk of Twitter — thus saving Musk $1 billion! — might convince Elon to open Twitter to Bluesky. Imagine if we could control our identities and social graphs and take them wherever we want, choosing the curation we desire, and interacting with folks on many other services. That might just save Twitter and Musk’s own hide, for then his users would not feel so trapped there. 

I’m also excited by the work of rabble, an early employee at Twitter, on the Scuttlebutt protocol. Leo Laporte and I had an enlightening conversation with him about the app he is building, Planetary, and about his fascinating collaboration with the Maori of New Zealand, learning from their social structures and enabling peer-to-peer communication off the grid. I’ll let him explain (the conversation begins with Twitter tales, then gets to the meet of Scuttlebutt, and Rabble returns at the end for more):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJieSncsZjA&t=21s

And lest we make the mistake of once again being dazzled by only the new, shiny things, also follow the ongoing work of pioneers including Dave Winer ☮, a creator of RSS (and podcasting atop it) and a pioneering blogger. Blogging is a model for the conversation we want and we can still have it there. See also Kevin Marks, a champion of the Indieweb. See also our This Week in Google conversation with Matt Mullenweg about the virtues of open source. The things that work online, that give you choice and some measure of control, are the things built on open protocols: the net itself (TCP/IP), the web, email, and next those explored here. 

Mind you, this is not a net without corporations and capitalism; they can use the protocols, too, and I’m glad Google gives us usable email and spam protection. But it need no longer be a net corrupted by the business model of mass media imported online: the attention economy. And it need no longer be a net under sole corporate control — and thus, potentially, the influence of malign actors, whether Musk or his pals Putin or Trump. 

If we gain this promising future, if we return to the net’s founding principles, keep one thing clearly in mind: It won’t be so easy to blame the bad shit on the corporations and nasty nerd boys anymore. The net will be ours along with the responsibility to build and enforce the expectations and standards we wish for. The net is us, or it can be at last.

*Image from https://twitter.com/sheonhan/status/1588029253496414208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

<a rel=”me” href=”https://your.server/@your_username”>Mastodon</a>

 

Habermas online

October 10, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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In 2006, Jürgen Habermas, the preeminent theorist of the public sphere, spoke of the internet for the first time, only in a footnote, all but dismissing the net as “millions of fragmented chat rooms.” Many have waited for more. Now, in a paper recently published and translated, Habermas finally reflects on the internet and its impact on public discourse.

Habermas now calls the internet “a caesura in the development of media in human history comparable to the introduction of printing,” an “equally momentous innovation” to the invention of movable type, and a “third revolution in communications technologies” whose result is “the global dissolution of boundaries” as “the communication flows of our garrulous species have spread, accelerated and become networked with unprecedented speed across the entire globe and, retrospectively, across all epochs of world history.”

As someone who has a book positing just that coming out in June — The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (preorder now) — I am gratified, indeed relieved not to be alone. In my book and now here, I will dispute Habermas. Agree or disagree with his provocations, though, they have a way of helping to clarify one’s own thinking. (Sadly, Habermas’ paper is behind high academic paywalls festooned with barbed wire — $351.83 to get inside the special issue — so linking to it does little good, and I am not up to the task of summarizing all he has to say. Instead, I will offer a few reactions and debates of my own about publics, media, and speech.)

Habermas has long sought the substantiation of the public sphere. Many say that ultimately eluded him in his seminal work, in which he asserted that a bourgeois public sphere mediating between populace and state emerged in critical, rational and inclusive discourse in the coffeehouses and salons of England and Europe. Problem is, that debate was far from inclusive, as it was open only to the privileged patrons of the establishments, excluding women and people of lower classes. Neither was the discussion necessarily rational, as coffeehouse historians Aytoun Ellis, Brian Cowan, Markman Ellis, and Lawrence Klein amply document. Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas’ theory is convincing: “We can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule…. In short, is the idea of the public sphere an instrument of domination or a utopian ideal?”

Today Habermas seeks his public sphere on the internet, suggesting that “at first, the new media seemed to herald at last the fulfillment of the egalitarian-universalist claim of the bourgeois public sphere to include all citizens equally.” He has a habit of proposing the emergence of a public sphere and then simultaneously mourning its passing. As for the seventeenth- and eighteenth- public sphere, he lamented its denigration via mass media and the welfare state. As for the networked public sphere of present day, he complains of echo chambers, the dissolution of boundaries, the blurring of private and public, and social media fragmenting this new institution as soon as it appears.

But there never has been and never will be a singular public sphere; that is the fundamental fallacy of the theory. Instead, there are multiple, overlapping imagined communities, publics, institutions, and markets that vie for power and attention through debate, privilege, and protest. Michael Warner proposed counterpublics: the idea that some publics “are defined by their tension with a larger public.” Fraser wrote that alongside Habermas’ bourgeois public “there arose a host of competing counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working-class publics. Thus there were competing publics from the start, not just in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Habermas implies.”

Habermas repeats the mistake much of mainline media make when he interprets January 6 as “the emotive response of voters who for decades have lacked a sense that their ignored interests are taken seriously by the political system in concrete, discernible ways.” He blames political elites, saying they had “for decades disappointed the legitimate, constitutionally guaranteed expectations of a significant portion of citizens.” No. It’s not that the insurrectionists — white men — had been neglected by the power structure; they were that power structure. It’s that white men see their power slipping away at the hands of so many counterpublics — read: people of color and women — who had been neglected and now may finally be heard via the internet. As a European, Habermas fails to account for race in the public Reformation (#blacklivesmatter) and Counter-reformation (MAGA) occurring now in America.

In Habermas’ worldview, there is today a public sphere online that decomposes into “competing public spheres” and “shielded echo chambers.” (Note well that the echo chamber is a trope with little empirical data and research to support it. See Axel Bruns’ Are Filter Bubbles Real? and its answer: No.) Fraser suggests the opposite, a public not decomposing but growing out of “a multiplicity of publics” as “an advance toward democracy” to “promote the ideal of participatory parity.” She warns: “Where societal inequality persists, deliberative processes in public spheres will tend to operate to the advantage of dominant groups and to the disadvantage of subordinates. Now I want to add that these effects will be exacerbated where there is only a single, comprehensive public sphere.” That is, the vision of a single public sphere brings with it the presumption of norms and standards set on high, from those with the power to impose their vision upon all. (See, for example, journalistic objectivity — and Wesley Lowery’s critical op-ed exposing that institution’s roots in white power.)

Fraser says that with a single public sphere, “members of subordinated groups would have no arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, and strategies.” Fraser labels such groups “subaltern counterpublics.” In André Brock Jr.’s book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, which I quote and teach often, he calls Black Twitter a “satellite counterpublic sphere.” All this is to say that rather than imprinting Habermas’ worldview on the internet, it would be more productive to understand the net for what it is becoming and adjust one’s worldview accordingly, not to pursue a single, decaying public but instead to study an interlocking ecology of many publics.

One need also adjust one’s view of media. In his foundational 1962 book, Habermas lamented the damage wrought by mass media on his first public sphere of the coffeehouse. In his current paper, he laments the supersession of mass media by social media and its effect on his new public sphere of the internet. He still imbues in mass media the power — the responsibility, in fact — to shape public opinion. “The function of the professional media is to rationally process the input that is fed into the public sphere via the information channels of the political parties, of the interest groups and PR agencies, and of the societal subsystems, among others, as well as by the organisations and intellectuals of civil society.” He goes farther: “[T]he public communication steered by mass media is the only domain in which the noise of voices can condense into relevant and effective public opinions.” He longs for “a professionalized staff that plays the gatekeeper role.” Habermas says that mass-media journalism “directs the throughput and … forms the infrastructure of the public sphere.”** Extending his electronic imagery, he argues that institutions provide the input, the public receives the output, media throughput. But I say he needs to reverse his wires.

Actually, Habermas made me understand that I have reversed my wires. I now see that the role of media is not to shape public opinion but instead to listen to public opinions now that the internet makes that possible. The goal is not to direct the views of the powerful in institutions toward the public but instead to direct the needs, desires, and goals of citizens to those in power. What has to be shaped is not public opinion about public policy but instead policy to the needs of the public. Whether media have a role in that process — that reversed throughput— is yet to be seen.

Today, media use polls as a proxy for a discerning and disseminating public opinion. Polls are fatally flawed, carrying the biases of the pollster, reducing citizens’ nuanced opinions to preconceived binaries, and warping identities into to prepackaged demographics. As James Carey — whom I also often quote — teaches us, polling preempts the public conversation it is intended to measure. In fairness, it’s all media had: one-size-fits-all publications carrying all-fit-in-one-size polls to represent vox pop.

But the internet changes that, as Habermas acknowledges, “by empowering all potential users in principle to become independent and equally entitled authors.” Now, instead of measuring people in binary buckets, we may listen to them as individuals. Habermas and countless others might consider that the ruin of democracy. He regrets speech occurring “without responsibility” or regulation: “Today, this great emancipatory promise is being drowned out by the desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers.” No, in that cacophony, which media cannot manage, is the opportunity of democracy to hear citizens on and in their own terms, in their own communities of many definitions, as their own publics. That will require a new institution, a media of reversed pipes, to build means to listen well. That does not yet exist.

What shape would that new institution take? On the one hand, I am overjoyed that Habermas acknowledges — as I often argue — that “the new media are not ‘media’ in the established sense.” Yet he then turns around to reveal his expectation that people talking online should meet the standards of media and journalism. He is nostalgic and he is worried. He heralds “post-truth democracy” and regrets the passing of print and even of daily newspapers taking on “the ‘colourful’ format of entertaining Sunday newspapers.” German newspapers are particularly gray. “[T]he dramatic loss of relevance of the print media compared to the dominant auto-visual media seems to point to a declining level of aspiration of the offerings, and hence also for the fact that the citizens’ receptiveness and intellectual processing of politically relevant news and problems are on the decline.” When radio emerged as print’s first competitor, newspapers denigrated the receptivity of ear versus eye and called for the new technology to be regulated, just as Habermas demands that “platforms cannot evade all duties of journalistic care” and “should be liable for news that they neither produce nor edit.” Let us hope the Supreme Court does not read this in its deliberations over Section 230.

At least Habermas acknowledges that this process, whatever its shape and purpose, will take time. “Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitisation is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?” He expects speakers online to aspire to the roles of journalist and author, to “satisfy the entry requirements to the editorial public sphere…. The author role has to be learned; and as long as this has not been realized in the political exchange in social media, the quality of uninhibited discourse shielded from dissonant opinions and criticism will continue to suffer.” No. I say we must learn to accept online speech for what it is — conversation — and value it for what it reveals of people’s opinions and for the opportunity to engage in dialog. Habermas is rather befuddled by public spaces that carry the kind of content that used to be reserved for handwritten letters: “they can be understood neither as public nor private, but rather as a sphere of communication that had previously been reserved for private correspondence but is not inflated into a new and intimate kind of public sphere.” Is he not describing Montaigne’s place in the development of print culture?

In the end, I wish for what Habermas desires: democracy underpinned by inclusion and by public discourse as “the competition for better reasons,” as he said a half-century ago. Or as he says now: “I do not see deliberative politics as a far-fetched ideal against which sordid reality must be measured, but as an existential precondition in pluralistic societies of any democracy worthy of the name.” He is an idealist. “The point of deliberative politics is, after all, that it enables us to improve our beliefs through political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems. In the cacophony of conflicting opinions unleashed in the public sphere only one thing is presupposed — the consensus on the shared constitutional principles that legitimises all other disputes.” Unless, of course, one is a MAGA Republican, an AfD populist, or the leader of Hungary or Turkey, for whom the goal is not Habermas’ wished-for rational consensus but instead the visceral attractions of hate, fear, power, and insurrection.

Media have failed to get us to Habermas’ promised land. So far, so have so-called social media. Perhaps we have expected too much of either. Perhaps we have expected too much from the mere serving of information. Perhaps media must take on a new role, as educator, for education is the only cure for the ignorance reigning in the land. Or instead, should education take on the role of informing the public after school? (See this recent thread about academics leaving the academy to pursue public scholarship.) Or will we need to create new institutions to serve public enlightenment and discourse, just as we had to await the creation of the institutions of editing and publishing and journalism after the invention of print?

The shape of public discourse is changing radically and trying to pour new wine in an old Weltanschauung will not work. I can hardly blame Habermas for trying to do that, for he has spent a brilliant life crafting his theories of democracy and discourse. I find his effort to understand this new world useful not because I agree but because it focuses my perspective through a different lens. The worldwide network does not corrupt some ideal that was never achieved but instead allows us to imagine new ideals and new paths toward it.

* Not Jürgen Habermas but Dreamstudio’s AI image of him online

** Habermas is oddly italics-happy in his essay; his itals are his. In my book Public Parts, I got in trouble with Habermas adherents for likening his prose to wurst. I cannot pass up the temptation to quote one footnoted and much-italicized sentence of his here: “The lack of ‘saturation’ concerns the temporal dimension of the exhaustion — still to be achieved in the political community and still to be specified as regards its content — of the indeterminately context-transcending substance of established fundamental rights, as well as the spatial dimension of a still outstanding world-wide implementation of human rights.”

20 Post-it provocations on media

October 9, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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Post-it notes: Super Sticky and Super Adhesive!

Recently, I was asked to open an unconference with students and grads from our News Innovation and Leadership program at Newmark. I was also preparing for a Newsgeist unconference (which I unfortunately had to miss). Thus my mind has been its own unconference; I sneeze Post-its. So, for our event, I decided to present 20 provocations for discussion about news and media as virtual Post-its (that is to say, tweets):

  1. I’m thinking about the half-life of media forms. Magazines are going out of print. Studying the form, I’ve come to see how evanescent any publication can be and perhaps so is the genre. Television is in shambles as the institutions of prime-time, networks, linear television, broadcast, and even cable fade. Recently, The Times had a story about the unsustainable resource and risk it takes to make a best-seller. And the death of the print newspaper has been oft foretold but might finally be upon us, for it is fast becoming unsustainable. Nothing is forever. So what might follow?
  2. Journalism is unprepared to cover institutional insurrection. News organizations still seek balance, fairness, sanity, tradition, and the establishment and enforcement of norms, while much of the country seeks to tear down the institutions of society — journalism, science, education, free and fair elections, democracy itself. As Jay Rosen points out, we have no strategy for how to cover this coup.
  3. Should journalists be educators? Educators deal in outcomes, telling students what they will learn, teaching them that, and asking whether they learned it. What if journalism aimed for outcomes — such as reporting why people should get vaccinations or vote or believe election outcomes — and judged its value and success accordingly? Then do we become advocates? Activists? Propagandists? At a gathering of internet researchers we convened a few weeks ago, one of the academics asked whether all propaganda is bad. If the bad guys use it, should the good?
  4. Internet leadership. I’m turning my attention from news leadership to internet leadership. For I think we in journalism need to broaden the canvas upon which we work past stories, content, and publications to the connected society and its data. What should we then we teaching in journalism schools? What of the humanities and of ethics and historical context should technologists and policymakers be taught?
  5. The story as a form is an expression of power. It empowers the storyteller. It extracts and exploits others’ stories. It can tempt journalists into fabulism — witness the scandals over time at Der Spiegel, the NY Times, and Washington Post. It carries with it the expectation of neat arcs and endings. The story is an excellent tool, no doubt. But do we concentrate on it too much? Do we sufficiently warn students of its temptations and perils? Do we imaginatively teach many possible alternatives in journalism?
  6. Death to the mass! In two books I’ve just completed (plug: The Gutenberg Parenthesis, out in June, and another on the magazine as object, both from Bloomsbury), I write about the arc of the mass: its birth with the mechanization and industrialization of print, its fall at the hands of the net. What the net kills is the mass media business model, with it mass media, and with it the idea of the mass, an insult to the public, a way not to know them as individuals and communities. Said John Carey: “The ‘mass’ is, of course, a fiction. Its function, as a linguistic device, is to eliminate the human status of the majority of people.” How do we recenter journalism around individuals and their identities in communities?
  7. Our definition of “local” is too narrow. Communities are not just geographic. I am closer to the people on my Twitter List of Book History Wonks and all the media wonks here online than I am to my frequently Trumpian neighbors. How do we expand our definition of local to communities writ large, to people’s own definitions of themselves and their affinities, circumstances, needs, and interests? Yes, save local journalism — but redefine “local.”
  8. We have much to learn about communities making spaces for themselves from Black Twitter. I recommend Charlton Mcilwain’s Black Software and André Brock Jr.’s Distributed Blackness and I await Meredith D. Clark, PhD’s upcoming book. They chronicle efforts by communities to establish their own spaces, not under mass or white gaze. Communities do not need us. We in journalism need them.
  9. Jack Dorsey regrets making Twitter a company. He wishes it were a protocol so one could speak anywhere and anyone could build enterprises atop that speech layer, adding value — curating, verifying, editing, supporting. Especially now, I eagerly await what happens with his Bluesky. How might journalism fit into such an ecosystem?
  10. Censorship is futile. At the birth of every medium, incumbents fret about bad outcomes — fake news from print (witchcraft) or radio (War of the Worlds) or television (the “vast wasteland” where we “amuse ourselves to death”). How much better it is for us to turn our attention to finding, nurturing, supporting, and improving the good.
  11. Paywalls damage democracy. When disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it? What is our moral obligation to democracy, to society as a whole?
  12. Fuck hot takes. The answer to abundance in media is not to pile on more abundance.
  13. Journalism is terribly, fatally inefficient. Every outlet copying every other outlet’s stories to make their own content on their own pages to get their own clicks and ads. Enough. We must concentrate on unique value.
  14. We desperately need more self-criticism in journalism. Especially after the departures of David Carr, Margaret Sullivan, and Brian Stelter. Media are actors in the story of democracy but they go uncovered.
  15. We desperately need more research on public discourse and media today. We must consider the entire media ecosystem, not just Facebook and not just The Times and not relying on such baseless tropes as the filter bubble. Doubt me? See Axel Bruns’ book, Are Filter Bubbles Real? His answer: No. We need to work with researchers to examine what we do, what works, and what does not.
  16. We need to reinvent advertising. The attention economy — invented by media and imported into the internet, is obsolete and damaging. Advertising must shift to value, permission, relevance, and utility. We will still need advertisers. Advertisers won’t reinvent themselves. So we have to.
  17. Media are engaged in a moral panic about the internet. See Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s book, The Techlash, in which she marks the pivot from utopian to dystopian coverage with the election of Donald Trump: Media wanted someone else to blame. News industry organizations have become lobbyists, cashing in journalism’s political capital for the sake of protectionism and baksheesh. At a time when freedom of expression is imperiled, we must do better and fight to protect the speech of all.
  18. Facebook is not forever. Even Google is not forever. And Twitter? Who knows what the next day brings? What new functions might we build?
  19. We have time. It is 1480 in Gutenberg years. I do not advocate longtermism. Our obligation to tomorrow begins today. In print, great innovation — the essay, the novel, the newspaper — did not come until 150 years after movable type. How long must we wait for such bold innovation online? Will you be such innovators?
  20. When will the first editor in chief or publisher of a major news operation come from the ranks of the people now known as “audience” or “product?” These are the new disciplines — new to news — that base their work and value on the relationship they have with, to borrow Rosen’s term, the people formerly known as the audience. I hope someone hearing this now will be that person.