Forever Young

A quick comment inspired by yesterday's (8/26) New York Times:

I read two fascinating articles. One was the column by Maureen Dowd about on-line celebrity gossip  and about a case involving a set of lawsuits that materialised after horrendous and initially anonymous  blog-bullying.  The other one discussed Twitter's popularity and who are driving it. 

The former text documented a vile fight between a 28-year old blogger and a 37-year fashion old model; the latter noted that both Facebook and Twitter are really forums of the middle class, middle-aged (and regarding Twitter, those doing business / marketing, too). Teenagers may send hundreds of texts a day but tend to consider Twitter and FB platforms that are too public for them.

Slightly scary: 40 is the new 14? It is as if certain forms of social media allow the kind of virtual yet public teenager / student socialising; as if to show off  that while we middle-aged can still lead somewhat adult lives off-line, the inner youth has not died. And as a consequence, it is as if -- as perhaps in the case of the beauty and the blogger -- the conventional limits / ethics / adult behaviour patterns can get totally mixed up virtually and in real life.

Public Sphere and Web 2.0

Right now I'm working on a paper with a dear friend Ingrid Erickson (Social Science Research Council). Surrounded by terms like 'virtual public sphere', 'networked information economy', ' the communicative space', ' networked publics' we started to wonder how the idea and thematics of the public sphere (Habermas 1962/1989) has translated to the web 2.0 era. We know, after all, several recent and major cases of social media and user-generated content in general playing a crucial role in the US, Pakistan, Iran (see the previous blog on participation).

After searching numerous databases we noticed some broad trends:

• Conventional (especially non-US) communication studies us the PS framework to analyse old media. There are also quite a few of historical studies about television, radio and  news papers published in the past 5 years.
  
• The idea of a European PS has been very fashionable within comm studies. More broadly, the idea of transnational or global PS facilitated by the internet and other digital media is widely discussed.
• However, within comm studies, sociology or pol sci there is (yet) very little theoretical or empirical research to be found on web 2.0. Partly this may be due to the time-lag of the academic publishing process, partly perhaps because the development is rapid and the concepts and tools to study it are not up-to-date...

The main challenge, in a nutshell is this -- as Jostein Gripsrud has noted in the March 2009 special issue of the Javnost:

The discussion on how democracy is affected by the introduction and functioning of digital media and the Internet has been going on for at least two decades. (...) While there is no doubt digitisation of the public sphere adds new dimensions and new forms of discourse, the implications of these for the overall quality or health of democracy are still quite differently understood by scholars working in these issues. Consequently, further theoretical work is required, but, perhaps even more important, a variety of empirical studies.

I'm a believer in empirical work. I'm also a firm believer that the access to studies (databases) and forums addressing these issues should be even more interdisciplinary. A case in point: Ingrid, with a background in Science and Technology Studies, and vast knowledge of web 2.0 research noted how different the connotation of the term ' virtual public sphere' would be in that field -- virtual literally meaning virtual worlds. Our review of the term in the studies within 'conventional' comm studies and sociology indicated that it simply referred to the (potential) PS formed by other means than old forms of mass communication.

And I'm a firm believer that when any form of communication, involving some significant number of people, is popular, a formation of a public sphere is possible. We researchers need to show examples and options, to map good practices. 

Murdoch's Tune and its Finnish Remix

By this entry I end the short (cross-Atlantic) silence and join the chain of bloggers pondering about the pay-to-read plan of the Mogul Murdoch.

The recent Economist (the paper version, dated 8/8), summarises the matter in its fabulously concise manner:

[RM] said he expected that all of his websites would charge users for access within a year, despite his previous commitment (...) News Corporation's boss was speaking as the company revealed a quarterly loss, caused in part by its struggling MySpace social-networking site. The media mogul has sparked an intense debate about ending free access to online news content; many observers remain sceptical that such plan will work.

The Guardian's (UK) superb media blogger Roy Greenslade has posted a comment with a compilation of international reactions to the news. Somewhat ironically (given his affiliation) he remains amongst the sceptics. He summarises the discussions : "publishers across the world are dancing to Murdoch's tune" .

The tune in Finland is upbeat and celebratory. In the related story by the business paper Taloussanomat, the commercial media houses are noted to "greet the decision with joy". It will be a rocky road, but solutions for commercially viable net-based news operations will surely be found, is the main drift.

The issue here is that Murdoch's tune allows these Finnish companies, once more, to gather the complaints choir about the role of public service media company YLE.  Representatives of the two big media houses Alma Media and Sanoma are joined in unison, in stating that YLE's free news services hinder free competition. They demand that not all of the public service news services should be free; and even that YLE would become sort of pay-tv / pay-media content provider through licence fee.

The worry that lurks behind the complaint tune is more than understandable. Look at BBC's success online. Also, the UK and German debates and experiences on restricting public service media indicate that this line of argumentation is taken seriously. And a recent study about newspaper readership in Finland indicates that young people increasingly go to online only for the news. For instance, the State of the News Media study by PEW shows that the trend is exactly the same in the U.S..

Let's get to the bottom line with another quote from the Economist in its recent lead on the future of the news (and let's remember its generally conservative market- and  business-oriented drift...):

[O]nly certainty about the future of news is that it will be different from the past. It will no longer be dominated by a few big titles whose front pages determine the story of the day. Public opinion will, rather, be shaped by thousands of different voices, with as many different focuses and points of view. As a result, people will have less in common to chat about around the water-cooler. Those who are not interested in political or economic news will be less likely to come across it; but those who are will be better equipped to hold their rulers to account. Which is, after all, what society needs news for.

To echo Greenslade, would Murdoch, Alma & Sanoma be happy serving these smaller, kind of elite news audiences that pay services might create?  Those who prefer to check out news online only are most likely not the core target segments that would want to pay for online services. Greenslade suspects, in fact, that if Murdoch's plan is not only a trick to stir up the market, he will look into combining on and offline subscription.

A broader question of public service, media and democracy: I seem to remember that a key part of the very mandate of public service is to inform. Public and scholarly memory tends to be short in these days of constant change in the media landscape, but remember: in the 1990s and early 2000s the Finnish commercial television channels have complained about the entertainment content produced by public service. As so much research in Europe indicates (re: Finland, Aslama, Hellman, Sauri 2004), in past public service has very much taken the role of filling in the gap in the expanding media markets. And, yet, a part of public service mission has traditionally been full service and universal access. A tough call. 

I suppose the commercial operators are arguing that given the fee / public funding public service is not free. Needless to say, their tune is based on the idea of media content being as any product, and media policy being about industrial policy. They surely want to guarantee diverse news supply, but ultimately save their business.

Well, another option would be to take an opposite approach, a model of online quality or 'accountability' journalism as emerging in the U.S.: newspapers / news services as non-profits (see, e.g., the article by the Christian Science Monitor summarising the trend, and Leonard Downie's analysis in British Journalism Review). Finland has a tradition of press subsidies, anyhow, so some sort of model could be set up... 

Utopian thinking aside, my point is, really: Murdoch's tune and other complaint choirs do not necessarily further and broaden the core content discussion about what news will and should be and who participate in the production and distribution. It's a little scary, since, as the Economist noted, the ultimate role of news is to inform, connect people, and enable political participation in democratic societies. 

NOTE: there is such a thing as a complaints choir: it's a Finnish invention but now an international avant garde phenomenon that was featured, for example, in the PS1/MoMA contemporary art exhibition in New York... Here's an example of academic complaints, sung by the choir of the University of Tampere, Finland.