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description= The media pundit s pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.;
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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 habermas internet journalism media comments 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 sh...
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