To blog is to desire a certain communion with others – an exchange of ideas. On the other hand, it is a remarkable tool of the free market, the open marketplace of ideas. Communal and individual are tensions explored by Isaac Mao in a Guardian interview “China’s first blogger.” Mao’s analysis is a thoughtful self-examination and an optimistic interpretation of both blogging and China’s future, which he sees blogging as playing a part in advancing. We are from a culture that prizes individualism highly; his analysis comes from a different perspective. As Mao notes
Blogging
Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, “Fairness Doctrine” that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums – nothing.
This was first reported to me by Congressman John Culberson (R-Tx) and I asked for approval to cite him and for any media links to this story. He provided the following link of regulations proposed by the Chair of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (PDF) Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) that was sent to Rep. Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Committee for Administration. The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted. It would be a very considerable error to assume that the House leadership intends to let dissenting Democratic members post any more freely than Republicans.
Set aside the nakedly partisan aspect of this plan for a moment – on the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the Internet coming out of Congress in a long, long time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970s. Except during the 1970s no one would have dared to propose controlling what a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings
It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker – not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.
Nancy Pelosi has finally arrived at a historical pinnacle – as an enemy of free speech and the public’s right to know.
UPDATE:
Given that I was somewhat intemperate in tone in my post and many questions were raised by the other side regarding the document, I’m highlighting my reply to those commenters who felt aggrieved:
Briefly:
1. The old rules were indeed worse than the new proposed changes. They were also not enforced and most members of the House posted as they pleased, much like the rest of us.
2. Putting new, modestly less restrictive rules in place and actively enforcing them results in a de facto large increase in the level of restrictiveness to access social media.
3. What larger public good is served by either the old or the proposed new rules?
4. The complexity of this elaborate gatekeeping system is rife for partisan abuse and selective enforcement that would have a chilling effect on members of Congress using social media. If you think Pelosi is a saint then imagine the system in the hands of Tom DeLay. The pre-publication review is itself a significant barrier to access given the limited time Congressmen have in very busy schedules
5. The rules that seem “reasonable” regarding content and external sites are subjective and are to be interpreted by the majority at the minority’s expense. Again, consider the shoe on the other foot.
6. Changes in the rules of the House of Representatives are done only in close consultation with the Speaker, who appoints the committee chairmen, and the the majority leader and whip. The chance of Nancy Pelosi not being at the table here is about zero. That the issue is being pressed on the Senate side as well indicates that this is a coordinated leadership agenda and not minor tidying up by members themselves.
An Image of Martial Discord
The Battle of Bunker Hill by the fabulous Howard Pyle.
I’ve been tagged by History Guy for something called the “meme of seven”.
Visualcy at Complex Terrain Laboratory
Recently, I agreed to join Complex Terrain Laboratory, a British “think tank 2.0” as a contributor along with Matt Armstrong , Tim Stevens and Michael Tanji. There is a good synthesis there at CTLab between full-time professional academics and horizontal thinking bloggers and, I think, the potential to become an intellectual hub for intersecting fields.
The following represents my first post at CTLab which I am cross-posting here at Chicago Boyz:
“Visualcy and the Human Terrain”
COIN and public diplomacy alike tend to encounter significant barriers to effective communication between the state actor and the intended audience. In part, this is due to gaps in cultural intelligence that will only be remediated by degrees with the careful advice of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and the experience derived from an extended immersion in another society. The other aspect of the problem is that the target audience often has greater complexity and cognitive heterogeneity than the Western society from which the warrior or diplomat hails.
As a result of public education, the rise of mass-media and commercial advertising, Western nations and Japan, some earlier but all by mid-20th century, became relatively homogenized in the processing of information as well as having a dominant vital "consensus" on cultural and political values with postwar Japan probably being the most extreme example. The range between elite and mass opinion naturally narrowed as more citizens shared similar outlooks and the same sources of information, as did the avenues for acceptable dissent. A characteristic of modern society examined at length by thinkers as diverse as Ortega y Gasset, Edward Bernays, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler.
The situation is more complicated in states and regions enduring the legacy of colonialism and failed state-centric (often Marxist) national development policies. Here the educational and technological gap between a very sophisticated, Western educated elite and a rural villager or tribal member may be exceedingly wide. Basic literacy levels may be low enough to leave substantial portions of the dominant population group outside of the literary tradition and reliant upon word of mouth, radio, television and – increasingly – images on the internet via handheld mobile devices.
These are broad generalizations, of course. Western societies contain cultural "holdouts" like the Amish or digitally deprived underclass populations who are relatively disconnected from the mainstream and some developing countries have high, even enviable, levels of educational success and popular literacy. Nor are Western societies as homgenous in terms of information flows as they were two decades ago. But because images have powerful cognitive responses in the brain, the "Visualcy" effect is a factor that cannot be ignored in COIN, IO or public diplomacy. Images will have broad societal effects – at times akin to that of a tsunami.
Interestingly enough, despite complaints by American conservatives regarding the political bias of news outlets like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, these organizations are packaging news in the familiar "Pulitzerian frame" in which mass media have been structuring information for over a century. Effectively, habituating their audience to a Western style (if not content) of thinking and information processing, with all of the advantages and shortcomings in terms of speed and superficiality that we associate with television news broadcasting. This phenomena, along with streaming internet video content like Youtube and – very, very, soon – mass-based Web 2.0 video social networks will overlay the aforementioned complexity in regard to the range of education and literacy.
What to do ?
While acceptance of a global panopticon paradigm is unpleasant, due to decreasing costs for increasingly powerful technology and web-based platforms, this trend is irreversible in the medium term. Concepts and messages to be successfully communicated to the broadest possible audience will have to be thought of strategically by statesmen, diplomats and military officers with images as starting points, followed by words rather than the reverse ( to the extent that images are currently considered at all, except after some PR debacle). In the long term, greater prosperity and rising general education levels in developing countries may blunt the negative political effects of "visualcy".
Or, given that the social media revolution is just getting underway, it may not.
Too Much Fun
LGF is having way too much fun finding crazies in Barack Obama’s blog community. It looks like it was inspired by Daily Kos’s community of like-minded progressives, where everyone gets his own little sublease to part of the real estate. The problem is that Obama’s campaign has attracted all kinds of crazies. The people running and moderating the little bloglets are way out of their depth; they don’t catch some of the real poisonous things until Charles or one of his lizard minions finds it and publicizes it. Shortly after, the offending blog is removed and the archives are deleted.
Maybe it’s unfair to judge a candidate by his supporters. If it were just one or two, I might go along with that. In this case, though, there is a whole ward of drooling loonies who think Obama is their kind of guy, and Obama’s campaign furnishes them with a soapbox and a microphone.
