Posts about Internet

Publishers’ political blackmail

September 15, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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Senator Amy Klobuchar’s oxymoronically titled Journalism Competition and Preservation Act — it might better be named the Journalism Lobby Blackmail Bill — was just dealt a kick to the kidneys by a confused Ted Cruz amendment. It is delayed but not dead. It is still wrong-headed and dangerous and here I’ll examine how.

As ever, Mike Masnick does stellar work picking apart the bill’s idiocy and impact in detail. In summary, the JCPA would require big internet companies — Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, though perhaps not the incredibly shrinking Facebook — to negotiate with midsize newspaper publishers. Freed from antitrust, the publishers may band together and demand payment for linking to their news. Yes, linking to their news. The value platforms bring in terms of promotion, distribution, and audience is not a factor in these negotiations. If agreement cannot be reached, talks go to a co-called arbitration process and the platforms can be forced to carry and pay for publishers’ content.

Stop right there. That government would force anyone to carry anyone else’s speech is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Compelled speech is not free speech. Keep in mind that the extremist right in Congress is dying to concoct ways to force platforms to carry their noxious speech; Klobuchar et al are paving a way for them. That government would force anyone to pay to link to others is a fundamental violation of the principles of the internet. Links are free. Links are speech. That government would insert itself in any way into journalism and speech is simply unconstitutional.

Let us now consider the wider context of this legislation and where it goes wrong.

Newspaper publishers do not deserve payment

God did not grant newspaper publishers the revenue they had. They chose not adapt to the internet; I spent decades watching them at close range. Competitors offered better, more efficient and effective vehicles for advertisers, who fled overpriced, inefficient, monopolistic newspapers at first opportunity. Readers, whose trust in news has been falling since the ’70s, also fled. Welcome to capitalism, boys.

Today, most newspaper chains in America are controlled by hedge funds. I briefly served on digital advisory boards for one American and one Canadian company controlled by the hedgies and witnessed what they did: selling every possible asset, cutting costs to the marrow, and stopping all investment in innovation. The JCPA offers no real means of accountability to assure that platform money would go to journalism serving communities’ needs, not straight into the pockets of the hedgies. (The JCPA shares that problem with Rupert Murdoch’s similar blackmail bill in Australia.)

Journalists should not be lobbyists

I am appalled that legacy journalistic trade organizations — led by the News Media Alliance (née Newspaper Association of America, recently merged with the former Magazine Publishers Association)— have turned into lobbyists, cashing in news’ political capital and engaging in conflict of interest in the name of protectionism. Newspapers exist to stand independent of power in government, not beggars at its trough. Journalists themselves should rise up to protest what their publishers have ganged together to do: to sell their souls.

Newspapers have a long history of antitrust

This shameful behavior of publishers is not new. When radio emerged as print’s first competitor, papers did everything possible to prevent it from competing in news. Here are a few paragraphs recounting that episode from my upcoming book with Bloomsbury, The Gutenberg Parenthesis.*

In Media at War, Gwynth Jackaway chronicled American newspapers’ opposition to broadcast in a tale of defensiveness and protectionism that would be reprised with the arrivals of television and the internet. “Having been presented with a new technology, contemporary actors voice their concerns about how the new medium will change their lives, and in so doing they reveal their vulnerabilities,” she wrote…. Newspaper publishers tried to disadvantage their new competitors, strong-arming radio executives to agree to abandon news gathering, to buy and use only reports supplied by three wire services, to limit news bulletins to five minutes, and to sell no sponsorship of news. Their agreement also prohibited commentators from even discussing news less than twelve hours old (a so-called “hot news” doctrine the Associated Press would try to establish against internet sites as late as 2009). The pact fell away as wire services and station-owning newspapers bristled under its restrictions.

Print publishers tried other tactics. They threatened to stop printing radio schedules in their newspapers, but readers protested and radio won again. They lobbied to have radio regulated by the federal government and then unironically maintained that radio companies under government control would be unreliable covering government. The newspaper press tried to have radio reporters barred from the Congressional press galleries. They called radio a “monopolistic monster” and lobbied for a European model of government control of the airwaves. They blamed radio for siphoning off advertising revenue, though the Great Depression was more likely to blame for newspapers folding or consolidating in the era. They also lobbied for the government to limit or ban advertising on radio.

All their protectionism was cloaked in self-important, sacred rhetoric, with publishers accusing radio of manifold sins. Radio, they said, spread loose statements and false rumors: fake news. Radio “filched” and “lifted” news from newspapers. Radio seduced the public with the human voice to exploit emotions, to “catch and hold attention,” and to excite listeners. Will Irwin, a muckraking print journalist, wrote in his book Propaganda and the News: “The radio, through the magic inherent in the human voice, has means of appealing to the lower nerve centers and of creating emotions which the hearer mistakes for thoughts.” Radio was “a species of show business, with overtones of peddling and soap-boxing.” Editor and Publisher maintained that “the sense of hearing does not satisfy the same intellectual craving as does the sense of reading” and the editor of American Press claimed that “most folks are eye-minded. They get only impressions through their ears; they get facts through their eyes.”

“Using the doomsday approach that so often accompanies the invocation of ‘sacred’ values,” wrote Jackaway, “they warned that the values of democracy and the survival of our political system would be endangered” if radio took on the roles of informing the electorate and serving a marketplace of ideas….

“Never,” said Jackaway, “is there the admission that public opinion might be manipulated by the printed word as well as the spoken word, or any recognition that by attempting to control radio news the press was actually infringing upon the broadcasters’ freedom of expression.”

Sound familiar? This is the same industry that today wants to be excused from antitrust law and Klobuchar et al are doing its bidding.

Government must not license and limit journalism

The JCPA sets a definition for news organizations eligible for its benefits and thus defines and de facto licenses journalists. Beware: What government giveth government may take away.

To avoid accusation that the bill would transfer money from big tech to big media, the JCPA sets a limit of 1,500 employees. It also sets a floor of $100,000 revenue. Thus, many are excluded. In our entrepreneurial program at CUNY’s Newmark Journalism School, we train independent journalists to serve communities and markets; they are too small. Our Center for Community Media and its Black, Latino, and Asian Media Initiatives work with a wide array of news organizations serving communities; many of them are too small. LION, the wonderful association serving local news organizations, says 44 percent of its members are too small.

These newcomers and publishers of color are the real innovators in journalism, not the old, tired, failing, incumbent newspapers. They are left out of the JCPA. The JCPA is aimed at companies whose papers are, in the immortal words of Goldilocks, just right — that is, the ones controlled by the hedge funds who pay the lobbyists.

The help platforms should give

I am all for technology companies helping the cause of news. In full disclosure, my school receives funds from various of the technology companies to fight disinformation, to independently study the internet, to train journalists in the new skills of product, to train community news organizations in business innovation. For years, I’ve attended Newsgeist, an event started by the Knight Foundation and Google, and there I began what is now the tradition of running a session asking, “What should Google do for news?”

Forcing payments from technology companies as this bill and others elsewhere would do is no business model. It’s blackmail. What we need instead is help to develop new models. Google does that with subscriptions and YouTube players offering monetization. Facebook used to do that in various programs but has thrown up its hands and given up on news (I frankly do not blame them). Apple and Microsoft send audience to news. Jeff Bezos saved The Post. We need more of this kind of help. JCPA does nothing to make news sustainable.

Should news even be copyrighted?

The legislation in the U.S., Australia, and Canada, as well as Germany’s Leistungsschutzrecht, Spain’s link tax, and the EU’s resulting Article 15 are all attempts to extend copyright.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I also write about the origins of copyright. Note well that at the start, in the Statute of Anne of 1710 and in the first American copyright laws, news was explicitly not included. Not until 1909 in the United States did copyright law include newspapers, but even still, according to Will Slauter in Who Owns the News?, some still debated whether news articles, as opposed to literary features, were protected, for they were the product of business more than authorship.

The first, best government subsidy newspapers received was a franking privilege from the Post Office, starting in 1792, which allowed publishers to exchange editions with each other for the express purpose of copying each others’ news. This, too, from my book: “Newspapers employed ‘scissors editors’ to compile columns of reports from other papers. Editors would not complain about being copied because they copied in turn — but they would protest and loudly about not being credited…. It is ironic that newspapers — which since their founding in Strasbourg in 1605 have been compiled from news created by others — today complain that Google, Facebook, et al steal their property and value by quoting headlines and snippets from articles in the process of sending them readers via links. The publishers receive free marketing.”

I came to learn that copyright was created not to protect creators. Instead, copyright turned creation into a tradable asset, benefitting the publishers and producers who acquired rights from writers.

Just as a thought experiment, instead of extending copyright as so many legacy publishers in league with legislators wish to do, let us imagine what journalism might be today without copyright.

Without copyright, news organizations might not concentrate, as they do now, on the notion of journalism as a product to be restricted and sold to the privileged who can afford it. They are returning news to what it was before the printing press, when it was contained in expensive, exclusive newsletters called avvisi. Meanwhile, disinformation, lies, and propaganda will always fly free.

Without copyright, journalists might see news as a service that individuals and communities could choose to support — as they do public radio, The Guardian, and countless newsletters — because it is useful to them.

Without copyright, journalists might then concentrate on creating service of original value rather than employing digital scissors editors to rewrite each others’ stories into trending clickbait to make their own content to fill their own pages to attract their own SEO and social links to feed ever-decreasing programmatic CPMs.

Without copyright, they might turn all that wasted journalistic labor and talent loose on watching, reporting on, and holding accountable the politicians they are instead now lobbying.

Without copyright and the Gutenberg-era notions of content, property, and product, journalists might also feel freer to collaborate with the public, rather than speaking and selling to the public. Journalists might come to center journalism in the community rather in themselves, as we teach in our Engagement Journalism program at Newmark.

Without copyright, journalism might no longer be seen as a widget to be used as a wedge but instead a contributor to the quality of public discourse.

Do I want to get rid of copyright for news? Actually, yes, I do. I know that is not going to happen. But I can at least beg my legislators — I am looking at you, Cory Booker — not to extend and mangle copyright in the service of hedge funds and failed newspaper monopolists. Instead, let us find ways and means to support collaboration and innovation to improve news.

* The Gutenberg Parenthesis is scheduled to be published by Bloomsbury in June. You can be assured I would be sending you to a preorder link now if it existed, but it won’t until November. Watch this space.

How harmful is it?

June 27, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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As the UK gets ready to regulate harmful (including legal but harmful) speech online, the appointed regulator, Ofcom, released its annual survey of users. It’s informative to see just how concerned UK citizens seem to be about the internet. Not terribly.

First, a list of potential “harms” encountered.

Let’s look at these. Scams (27%). Yes, We get those through every possible medium: phone, mail, and net. Misinformation (22%). Well, that requires definition. “Generally offensive or ‘bad’ language” (21%). Oh, that is so broad; it is in the ear of the beholder; and — even without a First Amendment — does government want to be in the position of policing “bad” language? Unwelcome friend requests (20%). Sounds like a bad cocktail party; one may easily walk away. Content encouraging gambling (16%). Gambling is legal in the UK and promoted by many newspapers, which profit from it.

The sixth and seventh complaints are ones worthy of attention and are mostly native to online: trolling (15%) and discriminatory content (11%). Other categories worthy of attention include objectification of women, bullying, unwanted sexual messages, and content about body image (each 8%).

Now how concerned are these users about their complaints? 15% are “really bothered.”

What did the complainers do about it? 30% scrolled past, 20% reported it, 20% unfollowed whoever posted the offending content, 18% did nothing, 11% closed the app or site…

That’s the complaint side of the report. It does not alarm me about the extent of online harm users are reporting to their regulator.

To its credit, Ofcom also asked about the benefits of the net for its citizens. These results are striking.

“Being online has an overall positive effect on my mental health.” Only 14% disagreed; two and a half times more users agreed that the net is good for their mental health.

Oh, but isn’t the net addictive and taking over our lives? To this statement — “I feel I have a good balance between my online and offline life — a solid majority of 74% agree; only 9% do not.

“I can share my opinions and have a voice.” I consider this a critical difference between the net and mass media. 44% agree; only 17% disagree; a third don’t share an opinion about sharing their opinions.

“I feel more free to be myself online.” A third agree; almost a fifth disagree; half, being British, shrug.

Many people see the net less as a means of self-expression and more as a useful helpmate. “Accessing goods and services online is more convenient for me.” A whopping 83% agree; a mere 3% disagree.

Rather than being imprisoned by the desires of algorithms, it seems people see themselves as individuals following their own desires. “It gives me space to pursue my hobbies and interests.” Almost two-thirds — 63% agree — while 11% do not.

So far, as I read the survey, people feel predominantly positive about their use of the net and they do not seem terribly concerned about their complaints. The reason for a regulator to step in would be if users thought themselves incapable of handling problems there. Ah, but UK internet users do not paint themselves as desperate. To the contrary, they are confident: 79% call themselves very or fairly confident as internet users; not so much, 8%.

Well, what about attempts to pull the wool over their eyes by unscrupulous marketers? How confident are they that they can recognize online advertising? 78% are; 7% are not.

But data is/are a problem, everyone agrees, yes? Sure people feel they have lost the ability to manage their personal data online? Not so. A majority — 58% — are confident managing their data; 18% not.

OK, then fake news must be terrorizing citizens. News media say so. How many feel confident judging the truthfulness of online information? 69%; 9% feel otherwise.

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But young people are the most vulnerable to online disinformation — that’s why there are so many interventions to teach them news literacy, right? How do young people compare with their elders? 29% of users aged 16–34 are very confident, and it goes downhill from there.

Most people feel pretty strongly about their own abilities online. But when asked about others, well, they need help. Two thirds of users agree with the statement, “Internet users must be protected from seeing inappropriate or offensive content.”

There we see the third-person effect at work. Coined by sociologist W. Phillips Davison in 1983, the third-person effect “predicts that people will tend to overestimate the influence that mass communications have on the attitudes and behavior of others…. Its greatest impact will not be on ‘me’ or ‘you,’ but on ‘them’ — the third persons.” The third-person effect, I argue in my upcoming book, is the basis of so much regulation and censorship of media since Gutenberg. Ofcom and fellow citizens want to protect them from the internet whether they think they need it or not.

All of this would seem to me to auger against the urgent need for Ofcom and the UK government to guard its citizens from the net.

But perhaps, as we hear in a constant media drumbeat, internet companies are negligent of doing anything to address the problems — problems that humans cause — on their platforms. Ofcom reports the moderation activity of the three big companies:

Facebook took down 153 million pieces of content in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 96% found by its algorithms. Is Facebook censoring too much, as America’s right-wing would claim? Only 2% of its decisions are challenged.

I know I’m being sassy here. I am not arguing against all regulation. The net is already regulated. Neither am I defending its current proprietors. I wish for a more distributed web (a la Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky). But keep in mind that a more distributed web will be much harder for regulators to regulate. And a more distributed web will make it more difficult for moral-panicking media to find folk-devil moguls to blame for all our ills.

Interventions in the internet and our newfound freedom of speech online need to be based on empirical evidence of actual harm, clearly defined. This, it would appear, is not that.

Concede defeat to bad speech

April 27, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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What if we concede that the battle against “bad speech” is lost? Disinformation and lies will exist no matter what we do. Those who want such speech will always be able to say it and find it. Murdoch and Musk win. That is just realism. 

Then what? Then we turn our attention to finding, amplifying, and supporting quality speech.

A big problem with concentrating so much attention and resource on “bad speech,” especially these last five years, is that it allows — no, encourages — the bad speakers to set the public agenda, which is precisely what they want. They feed on attention. They win. Even when they lose — when they get moderated, or in their terms “censored” and “canceled,” allowing them to play victim — they win. Haven’t we yet learned that?

Another problem is that all speech becomes tarred with the bad speakers’ brush. The internet and its freedoms for all are being tainted, regulated, and rejected in a grandly futile game of Whac-A-Mole against the few, the loud, the stupid. Media’s moral panic against its new competitor, the net, is blaming all our ills on technology (so media accept none of the responsibility for where we are). I hear journalists, regulators, and even academics begin to ask whether there is “too much speech.” What an abhorrent question in an enlightened society. 

But the real problem with concentrating on “bad speech” is that no resource is going to good speech: supporting speech that is informed, authoritative, expert, constructive, relevant, useful, creative, artful. Good speech is being ignored, even starved. Then the bad speakers win once more.

What does it mean to concentrate on good speech? At the dawn of print and its new abundance of speech, new institutions were needed to nurture it. In my upcoming book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis (out early next year from Bloomsbury Academic), I tell the story of the first recorded attempt to impose censorship on print, coming only 15 years after Gutenberg’s Bible.

In 1470, Latin grammarian Niccolò Perotti begged Pope Paul II to impose Vatican control on the printing of books. It was a new translation of Pliny that set him off. In his litany of complaint to the pope, he pointed to 22 grammatical errors, which much offended him. Mind you, Perotti had been an optimist about printing. He “hoped that there would soon be such an abundance of books that everyone, however poor and wretched, would have whatever was desired,” wrote John Monfasani. But the first tech backlash was not long in coming, for Perotti’s “hopes have been thoroughly dashed. The printers are turning out so much dross.” 

Perotti had a solution. He called upon Pope Paul to appoint a censor. “The easiest arrangement is to have someone or other charged by papal authority to oversee the work, who would both prescribe to the printers regulations governing the printing of books and would appoint some moderately learned man to examine and emend individual formes before printing,” Perotti wrote. “The task calls for intelligence, singular erudition, incredible zeal, and the highest vigilance.”

Note well that what Perotti was asking for was not a censor at all. Instead, he was envisioning the roles of the editor and the publishing house as means to assure and support quality in print. Indeed, the institutions of editor, publisher, critic, and journal were born to do just that. It worked pretty well for a half a millennium. 

Come the mechanization and industrialization of print with steam-powered pressed and typesetting machines — the subject of future books I’m working on — the problem arose again. There was plenty of proper complaint about the penny press and yellow press and just crappy press. But at that same time, early in this transformation in 1850, a new institution was born: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. See its mission in the first page of its first issue:

Rather than trying to eradicate all the new and bad speech suddenly appearing, Harper’s saw the need to support the good, “to place within the reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.”

Magazines — which Ben Franklin and Noah Webster had tried and failed to publish — flourished with new technology, new audiences, and new economics as good speech begat more good speech. 

I am not suggesting for a second that we stop moderating content on platforms. Platforms have the right and responsibility to create positive, safe, pleasing, productive — and, yes, profitable — environments for their users. 

But it is futile to stay up at night because — in the example of the legendary XKCD cartoon — someone is wrong, stupid, or mean on the internet. People who want to say stupid shit will find their place to do it. Acknowledge that. Stop paying heed to them. Attention is their feed, their fuel, their currency. Starve them of it.

I also am not suggesting that supporting good speech means supporting the incumbent institutions that have failed us. Most are simply not built to purpose for the new abundance of speech; there aren’t enough editors, publishers, and printing presses to cope. 

Some of these legacy institutions are outright abrogating their responsibility: See The New York Times believing that the defense of democracy is partisan advocacy. Says the new editor of The Times: “I honestly think that if we become a partisan organization exclusively focused on threats to democracy, and we give up our coverage of the issues, the social, political, and cultural divides that are animating participation in politics in America, we will lose the battle to be independent.” No one is suggesting this as either/or. I give up. 

Instead, supporting good speech means finding the speech that has always been there but unheard and unrepresented in the incumbent institutions of mass media. Until and unless Musk actually buys and ruins Twitter, it is a wealth of communities and creativity, of lived perspectives, of expertise, of deliberative dialogue — you just have to be willing to see it. Read André Brock, Jr.’s Distributed Blackness to see what is possible and worth fighting for. 

Supporting good speech means helping speakers with education, not to aspire to what came before but to use the tools of language, technology, collaboration, and art to express themselves and create in new ways, to invent new forms and genres. 

Supporting good speech means bringing attention to their work. This is why I keep pointing to Jack Dorsey’s Blue Sky as a framework to acknowledge that the speech layer of the net is already commodified and that the opportunity lies in building services to discover and share good speech: a new Harper’s for a new age built to scale and purpose. I hope for editors and entrepreneurs who will build services to find for me the people worth hearing. 

Supporting good speech means investing in it. Millions have been poured into tamping down disinformation and good. I helped redirect some of those funds. We needed to learn. I don’t regret or criticize those efforts. But now we need to shift resources to nurturing quality and invention. As one small example, see how Reddit is going to fund experiments by its users. 

We need to understand “bad speech” as the new spam and treat it with similar disdain, tools, and dismissal. There’ll always be spam and I’m grateful that Google, et al, invest in trying to stay no more than one foot behind them. We need to do likewise with those who would manipulate the public conversation for more than greedy ends: to spread their hate and bile and authoritarian racism and bigotry. Yes, stay vigilant. Yes, moderate their shit. Yes, thwart them at every turn. But also take them off the stage. Turn off the spotlight on them. 

Turn the spotlight onto the countless smart, informed, creative people dying to be seen and heard. Support good speech. 

Web .0000012

January 9, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’ve been thinking about Matt Mullenweg’s response to Brian Armstrong’s response to Moxie Marlinspike’s excellent post about Web 3. I have some responses in return in this post based on a thread. tl;dr: I think Matt + WordPress provide much of the model Moxie seeks at the end of his post. 

First, let me say I don’t give a rat’s rump what is called Web 1, 2, or 3. They are all hubristic labels based on the ego of the present tense. This might be web .000002. As I often say, it’s 1475 in Gutenberg (Johannes, not WordPress) years. 

A key lesson I came to writing my book (still out with a publisher) on the (Johannes) Gutenberg Parenthesis is that it took a century and a half before groundbreaking innovation came *with* print: the newspaper, the modern novel, the essay (Montaigne), a market for printed plays. 

So what interests me about Web N is not what goes *into* it in terms of technological innovation — that will come — but more so what comes from invention *with* the technology, once the tech becomes easy, assumed, boring. 

What strikes me is that WordPress — blogging then — is a *with* not an *into* institution because it allows people to create WTF they want. It makes the technology easy & boring. It allows creators to surprise us with their creations for their own sake, not technology’s. 

Right there is a model for Moxie’s Web 3: ease. Creating NFTs: not easy, not cheap. Creating on WP: easy, cheap, thus fast and open. 

Of course, WordPress *is* a creation tool. There are others. But what sets it apart — what set it apart when it won out over Movable Type — is its open-source architecture decreed by Matt: The underlying code is open; anybody, including Matt, can build services atop it.

I remember when a Polaris VC scratching his head over Matt’s open-source architecture called me to ask whether it was insane to invest. No! I said. I explained why WordPress would win over Movable Type because of it. The software would spread and improve at the same time. 

In this structure, Matt merely has a first-mover advantage in building his services. This is why I am also excited by Jack Dorsey’s proposals for Bluesky, making the speech layer a commodity so innovators can build value-added layers we need (e.g., recommendation, authentication). 

So now (at last) to the point re Moxie: In the end, the post calls for:

 1) “We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure.”

In a sense, doesn’t WordPress at least display a model for meeting criterion #1 through open source: multiple instances create a sort of distributed architecture?

Moxie’s second wish: 

2): “We should try to reduce the burden of building software.” 

Here, too, doesn’t Matt’s WP at least demonstrate a model through its object/block-oriented creation tools (not of software, but of creation *with* software)? 

All this is to say that we’re not making a clean progression from Web 1–2–3 but instead trying to clean up what was done in Web .0000012. We return to Web 1 to deplatform it through a worldview that is already well proven: open source. I *know* that’s simplistic. 

My point is that it’s just as dangerous to think that Web 3 is an advance on Web 1 & 2 as it is to think that Medieval years were Dark Ages and that the Renaissance was progress and that we are modern. That’s the greatest hubris of all. Perspective matters. 

In writing about the Gutenberg Parenthesis, I learned the dangers of periodization, for in dismissing what came before, we lose the opportunity to build upon it. This is why I despise journalism’s conceit of the “first draft of history,” thus ignoring history. (By the way, from the MS:) 

The reason I’m thinking so much about this is that I’m teaching a course in Designing the Internet next month with Douglas Rushkoff. I’d love to assign Moxie’s post that launched a thousand threads, though I fear the technology might be intimidating to students.

Then I see that’s Moxie’s point: People don’t want to run servers. They don’t want to become fluent in something called Web 3. They want to build *atop* not *in* (that is, not in a walled platform). Making tech complex as a prereq is the equivalent of having to run servers. 

So I might well assign the post but also assign Matt’s thread because it brings historical perspective on the building of the web and demonstrates the whole point of the course: that students have the agency & responsibility to build the future of the net. 

Of course, Matt sums it all up better than I can: 

Continua: Lessons from two books on books

December 21, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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All culture is conversation. — Neil Postman

Culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.
— Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about the end of the Gutenberg Age and the lessons we can learn from our entry into it. (It awaits a publisher.) In my reading, I very quickly saw that I would not be demarking eras—in fact, I warn of the perils of periodization, the hubris of the “modern,” the noxious journalistic conceit of writing “the first draft of history.” Instead, I sought continua across eras, for that is where the lessons lie.

I came to see that from the dawn of movable type, books were in conversation with each other: Luther conversed with the Pope in their books (and bonfires of them); Erasmus and his friend More held an ongoing conversation through theirs. With its mechanization and industrialization — with the birth of mass media — print lost the art of conversation. Now, in a connected world, we are attempting in fits and failures to relearn how to hold a conversation with ourselves. There is a continuum.

Among the delights of my research are the moments when I find books that I fancy are, whether they intend it or not, in a conversation with each other. Sometime ago, I found connections about cognition in Alex Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories and David Weinberger’s Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility. In another example, I constantly recommend to students that they read Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software with André Brock Jr.’s Distributed Blackness, for the first offers an oral history of the early attempts to create Black spaces online and the second is a sequel in time, analyzing the successful gathering of Black Twitter as a space for — in Brock’s delightful word choice — “jouissance.”

I just finished reading two new books by book historians I hold in the highest esteem and found connections between them.

Andrew Pettegree is the dean of book-history scholars. I have devoured many of his books — among them The Book in the Renaissance, The Invention of News, Brand Luther — and countless of his papers in the Brill series he edits and elsewhere. He and his colleague at the University of St. Andrews, Arthur der Weduwen, collaborated (for the third time) on a captivating new book, The Library: A Fragile History.

Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, another book historian, focuses on more contemporary topics. Aging nerd that I am, I loved his last book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He has just written a new book, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage.

I read these two books together. One could say that The Library is about the past and Bitstreams about the future. But no. Rather, between them they present a compelling continuum in their examinations of the processes of creating, editing, publishing (or today we might say sharing), curating, protecting, and losing what is written, said, or made.

The Library begins, of course, at the library of Alexandria. When Richard Nixon went to Alexandria, he asked to see the library, which is a punchline for a few reasons, one of which is that no one knows exactly where the library was. I was struck learning that scale was the Alexandrian library’s mission but also its curse, for the hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls collected there would have had to have been copied before crumbling every century or two. The more the library collected, the more impossible that would have become. “The sheer size of the Alexandrian library militated against its survival,” said Pettegree and der Weduwen. I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately, about how mass became the mission of media with industrialization, about the benefit scale brings online (enabling more people to speak), and about the curse scale brings (curating and moderating — or, as some would wish, censoring — is an impossibility at scale). The pursuit of scale — and its perils — is not new; it is a continuum.

As The Library makes clear, the reflex to save books was not immediate, and when it began it was a pastime of the privileged. One of the earliest and greatest collectors was Columbus’ son, Hernando Colón. (See Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.) Subscription libraries were a business model that would support much of publishing. When Benjamin Franklin and friends started their shared collection in 1727 it saved them money on their reading and established the Library Co. of Philadelphia. Public libraries followed and flourished, thanks in great measure to the support of Andrew Carnegie.

With mechanization — of presses, paper, and typesetting—books became so inexpensive that more could write them and anyone could buy them. That, though, frightened the elites — just as movable type had in its day and the internet does today: a continuum. For the masses could now read and, God forbid, learn and even speak. Pettegree and der Weduwen explore the moral panic brought on by the rise of fiction, the fear that it would corrupt the souls of especially women and children. Even to open the stacks to browsing was worrisome as surely readers without watchful librarians would gravitate toward dangerous tales. “Circulating libraries were denounced as purveyors of pornography and books of brain-rotting triviality.” Sound familiar?

The Library ends recounting wars against books: wars of banning and burning and wars that destroyed libraries, demonstrating just how fragile they have been. (On this topic, I also recommend last year’s Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Oxford Bodleian Librarian Richard Ovenden.)

As a bibliographer, Matthew Kirschenbaum seeks to discover, preserve, and study not just the product but the act of creation: the process. In Bitstreams, he begins by exploring the physical and digital archives of manuscripts of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The paper version was singed and almost destroyed in a fire in her home and so Kirschenbaum was permitted to view the remains on a screen. Also on screens, he delved into the contents of her outmoded plastic diskettes. That is how he reconstructs revealing moments of conversation between Morrison and her editor over critical choices of words. Next Kirschenbaum examines writing that was “born digital,” poetry written in Hypercard, and he finds that while the author’s words may be preserved, the choices and designs he made in fonts — the full experience of display — may be lost as machines and formats become obsolete. Many a bibliographer will argue that each copy of a book should be studied as a unique object rather than a copy for each one carries its own provenance and use and marks in the margins. (See Luther’s copy of Erasmus’ New Testament.) So, too, Kirschenbaum teaches that each bitstream — each representation of creation on different screens in different circumstances using different tools — is “never truly self-identical.”

The ultimate continuum I see in these books is about culture as conversation, to borrow from Neil Postman. For as a disciple of James Carey I see much of our world through the lens (the loudspeaker?) of conversation. Kirschenbaum writes about the processes of creation. Pettegree and der Weduwen write about the processes of selecting, saving, using, discarding, and destroying print in libraries. Together, they present an unbroken string from creator to reader, in the constant conversation of culture.

Libraries, then, can be as much about what is forgotten as what is remembered. In addition to everything else he does — which is awe-inspiring enough — Pettegree heads the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a grandly ambitious effort to create as complete a bibliography as possible of the first two centuries of print with movable type. This means tracking down not just books and artifacts in collections but also those that are lost to history, the ghost of their existence surviving only in references elsewhere or as lines in auction or estate catalogues. This struck me as a terribly depressing endeavor: finding that which cannot be found. But I was mistaken. When Pettegree and his USTC colleague der Weduwen presented their book in a conversation for the New York Public Library, I quoted Jean-Philippe de Tonnac (above) in a question, asking about the lessons they might recommend for the digital bibliographers of the future.

Pettegree answered that he and the USTC pay special attention to the “ugly ducklings” of print, the items that were so well-used in their day that they were worn to bits or that were so everyday that they were not valued enough to be preserved. For that tells us much about the choices that culture makes and the choices that make culture. “[N]o society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations,” Pettegree and der Weduwen write, adding that what they chronicle in their book “is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artifacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows.”

The great and founding book historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (who along with Thomas Pettitt of Gutenberg Parenthesis fame and Pettegree himself inspired me to embark on my book project) was attacked by some critics — some out of sexism and jealousy, I think — for focusing too much on the fixity of print. They accuse her of not recognizing how books, especially in the early days of incunabula, were riddled with error, of unsure provenance, and changed often. They say that she projected latter-day views of print on the past. I say the critics are wrong. Eisenstein frequently addressed print’s malleable nature. In a conversation I had with her, she did boast on Gutenberg’s behalf that his Bible had already lasted longer than any digital format would, and she was right. Yet as Kirschenbaum argues, digital bitstreams can be resurrected: “[T]he immolated edges of a manuscript are gone forever, carbonized and vaporized in a flash; the bitstream, if fixity and integrity are maintained, awaits only the imposition of the appropriate formal regimen to cauterize its internal cascade of relational disarray and rememory its pixels all anew.”

We risk projecting our contemporary expectations of print’s fixity not only on early publishing but on the early internet, expecting that since digits are all but free everything can and should be saved. No. Culture is conversation and some conversation is meant to disappear in the sky like the hot air it is; some is worth remembering and repeating, teaching and learning, copying and remixing. The Library and Bitstreams make clear that observing what society and its institutions choose to remember will tell us much about what they value.

In a recent post, I discussed the case of Niccolò Perotti, who made what is believed to be the first call for censorship of print in 1470, beseeching the Pope to appoint learned censors to judge and fix printers’ formes before they were duplicated. What he was really calling for was not censoring at all but instead editing; he foresaw the need for the institutions of editor, publisher, and librarian to assure quality and authority in print.

The institutions created for the age of print are so far inadequate to the networked world with its abundance of wonderful conversation. We should not expect the net to be edited any more than we should expect a barroom argument to be. We cannot expect — though many do — Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to be cleaned and polished like a slick magazine. We should understand the net for what it is: conversation, process, sometimes a library, sometimes a stream of bits disappearing into the past.

What institutions do we need then? That is what leads me to teach this course alongside Doug Rushkoff, in hopes that students might tackle such questions as Pettegree, der Weduwen, and Kirschenbaum (and Rosenberg and Weinberger, and McIlwain and Brock) inspire. How do we find what’s worth hearing? What editing and moderation of the public conversation should we wish for, demand, or permit? What could digital librarianship accomplish? What will we save so it may be used, studied, and built upon in the future? How do we rethink our models of content, product, and property and our laws of copyright to support collaborative creation? (See my proposal for creditright.)

Kirschenbaum begins Bitstreams asking this lovely question: “What is textual scholarship when the ‘text’ of our everyday speech is a transitive verb as often as it is a noun?” At the end he wisely declares: “[A]ll the data dumps in the world — 365 days of diffs — won’t get us any closer to total recall. The future of digital literary heritage will be as hit and miss, as luck dependent, as fragile, contingent, and (yet) wondrously replete as that of books and manuscripts.”