Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Social Media Shorthand

This is a theme I’ve certainly written about before; it is in fact, the theme that started this blog — the idea that the expansion of stuff through communications technology can lead to a reduction in the very benefits meant to be yielded by the expansion in the first place.  CNN’s insistence upon providing round-the-clock speculation about the missing Malaysian airliner is just the latest absurd example demonstrating how 24hr news can yield less actual reporting than the years when TV news was limited to just a few hours a day.  This, perhaps counterintuitive, more-is-less phenomenon is not only replicated in the realm of social media, it appears to be exacerbated by the tools themselves, which promise deeper immersion into stuff, but wind up fostering exactly the opposite behavior.  And according to this New York Times editorial about online slang by novelist Teddy Wayne, the shorthand we often use online doesn’t necessarily help.  From the article:

“It takes far more time and energy to express a nuanced reaction to a personal essay than simply writing “Heart” or “Oh, please.” Likewise, when a celebrity does something we disagree with, it is easier to condemn him with a one-word takedown than to empathize with his humanity and communicate a more complex reflection. If you physically handed an article to a friend, or even emailed it, it’s doubtful you would sum it up with one reductive word. But when disseminating it to the masses, we often dumb down our own interpretations.”

I don’t think Wayne means to suggest these monosyllabic habits are a purposeful dumbing down the way a TV executive might want to make a script less literate in order to retain marketshare.  Instead, these slangy fragments, even used by highly educated adults, are just an inevitable by-product of the technologies and interfaces themselves.  The volume and rate at which things go by while we’re probably meant to be doing something else combined with the fact that we may be typing with a single thumb on smart phone is all going to produce concision just this side of a grunt.  What interests me, though, is whether or not these fragmentary exchanges are more than a byproduct and are instead something akin to a force, like the dark matter of the universe causing both expansion and acceleration toward a greater “emptiness.”  A friend or colleague’s endorsement (i.e. share) is a powerful validation; so, if a friend shares a story along with  the note “Terrible” or “Amazing!” or some other context-free comment, does this further increase the probability of one taking a headline and a picture at face value and passing it along with one’s own cursory remark?

Just last week, a well-educated, well-meaning friend on Facebook posted an article about a new, admittedly concerning, bill in Tennessee.  The article was hosted on a website that deals with LGBT issues.  It featured a stock photo of two young men grappling and one of them clearly about to get his face pounded.  The headline stated that the new bill would effectively permit bullying of gay students in public schools as a form of religious expression.  Is it outside the scope of some people’s beliefs?  Not at all.  Is it the kind of thing we might expect to come from certain regions of this country?  Sure.  Do the headline and and photo accurately reflect the language in the bill?  Not quite.  The bill itself certainly should be of concern to those of us who believe the separation of church and state is unambiguous, but there’s nothing I can read in its text that can justifiably be called state-sanctioned bullying of anyone in particular.

Not to get bogged down in that bill per se, the point is that I suspect we all propagate shorthand engagement with social issues from time to time, pushing semi-accurate stories along with a verbal pat on the back or slap on the wrist.  What’s interesting, though, about this Tennessee bill example is that the lead is one of those that can immediately send one into a rage about a matter entirely different from the more subtle and insidious concern that the story actually raises.  On first encounter with the keyhole view of this story on Facebook, a whole movie narrative unfolds in the mind with hicks beating up gay kids while school officials quietly thank God in the background. Meanwhile, as we share, vent a moment of outrage, and move on, we risk missing the subtle story in which the Tennessee state legislature is moving the needle between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause toward favoring more religious influence in public schools. As Wayne writes, “Indeed, fragments are indicative of how quickly we pass judgment while on the Internet without investigating an issue too deeply. We share articles and videos that conform to our prejudices but rarely seek out opposing views, and hardly ever link to them unless it’s to mock them.”

My photographer friend calls all this “gisting.”  My journalist friend calls the internet the greatest tool for “epistemic closure,” describing its efficacy in providing endless support of one’s pre-existing biases.  Whatever we want to call these superficial interactions with information, with news, even with one another, it seems as though the solution is a conscious choice to force behaviors contrary to the instincts fostered by the technologies.   Or…whatevs.

LA Times editorial addresses outdated DMCA

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is obsolete, and everybody knows it.  The DMCA was the topic in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on copyright review about two weeks ago, and much has been written about its flaws both from pro and anti-copyright perspectives.  A recent editorial in The Los Angeles Times leads with a headline “Congress should bring copyright law into the 21st century.”  Unfortunately, for far too long, this particular theme has been distorted by technology interests to convey the message that copyright law as a principle is obsolete in a market that has been transformed by the capacity of the internet to enable mass, cheap distribution of media.  In reality, though, the story that is finally being told is that certain aspects of copyright law, like the DMCA, are inadequate protections for rights holders in the digital age.  Quite simply, the technologies of 2014 enable and reward piracy on a scale that no entity of any size can combat with a 1998 mechanism.

The Times article does a good job of summarizing the flaws with the DMCA, both for rights holders and legitimate internet companies; and it makes the radical suggestion that companies like Google might want to collaborate with media interests to simultaneously strengthen protections for creators and craft a legal framework that would be more efficient for entities like YouTube, which receives a tremendous volume of takedown requests under the DMCA.  It was just a couple months ago that YouTube passed the milestone of receiving its 100 millionth takedown request from the recording industry alone.

See the full LA Times editorial here.

For some perspective on just how useless DMCA is for an independent content owner, watch this video from Fast Girl Films and VoxIndie:

 

Coup du Jour – Eric Schmidt as CEO of America?

Image by RienkPost

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s just another Twitter attention junkie, nobody is taking her too seriously if the comment section below the article in The Guardian is any indication.  In fact, this is one of those side-show moments that I questioned commenting on at all except for the unfortunate fact that so much of what now passes for discourse in the world  comprises so many side shows that mutate into headlines and round-table discussions on once-respectable news programs.  Even more relevant, though, is that even if Tunney herself is dismissible, her appeal might actually touch a few very real nerves running though the body of the American electorate.

For starters, the suggestion that any business leader ought to be president, that the presidency itself is like being a CEO, is a well-entrenched conservative idea also popular with many right-leaning libertarians.  Given that one of the universal complaints about government is that the elected are terrible stewards of “our money,” it’s a natural, albeit narrow-minded, instinct to want to elevate a successful business operator to the presidency so that he or she can “get our house in order.” On purely theoretical grounds, I have always quarreled with this premise because a corporation is not a democracy — I don’t care how flat you say your org chart is — so much as it is a benign dictatorship, usually designed to excel in a limited number of core competencies in the service of profitability.  Democracy isn’t efficient, giving everyone a voice isn’t efficient, balancing competing interests within a nation isn’t efficient; but inefficiency is one of the prices we pay for free speech, the right to redress the government, the right to assemble and organize, and so on.

Conversely, CEOs are conditioned toward efficiency and toward meeting quarterly goals for their shareholders.  As such, CEOs are not necessarily the best collaborators; they’re often not multi-dimensional thinkers; they frequently have egos way too big for Washington (which is saying something); and they’re not particularly oriented toward balancing the needs of the diverse and quarrelsome many. There are and have been CEOs who meet these criteria, but my point is that a strong P&L statement alone does not make a good resume for Leader of the Free World.  Interestingly though, while Tunney is standing on this weatherbeaten plank of the GOP, I think she’s simultaneously echoing sentiments among the left and libertarian left, who have come to think of technologies like social media as the antidote to corporate/government corruption and incompetence.  And this is where the bizarre confluence of Occupy zeal and the idea of appointing a less-than-one-percenter like Eric Schmidt as national leader might actually make some twisted sense in certain minds.

Occupy, after all, was a YouTube protest that was unfortunately almost as fleeting as that damn “What Does the Fox Say” video, and just about as likely to effect any tangible change in the world. At its core, I thought OWS began as a legitimate response to a genuine problem — wealth consolidation and the many systemic ways in which this economic cancer, eating away the middle class, is protected and perpetuated in the U.S.   But Occupy rather quickly manifest as the proverbial rebel without a clue — yet another social media side show in which the lead stories became a handful of viral videos depicting excessive force by certain police officers instead of a narrative relating any kind of clear, advancing agenda.  Thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of social media and its tendency to provoke an increase in conspiracy theory, the story of Occupy became the story of who was trying to shut it down rather than what it was meant to accomplish. Think OWS today, let alone years from now, and what probably remains are a few images of cops misusing pepper spray.  Imagine if all you could say about the civil rights movement is that some cops sprayed people with fire hoses.

Like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Tea Party made Occupiers look like a bunch of fair-weather activists who seemed to think it was enough to conjure the illusion of a movement with all the trappings and also seemed to confuse mouse clicks with votes.  OWS generated images and buzz and “Likes” and a moment of fleeting outrage while the Tea Party got seats in the House of Representatives.  So, while Justine Tunney may be mockable for her hypocrisy, trying to trade on OWS bona fides from the rarefied heights of Googletopia and anointing the most corporate of corporate guys, the irony is that an event like OWS unwittingly does feed the pseudo-progressive trend toward a technocracy.  OWS was a functionally impotent movement with regard to addressing any serious issues, but one that simultaneously elevated the apparent relevance of citizens using smartphones and social media. By extension, this elevates the importance of the individuals who build those technologies.

In this sense occupy takes on an unintended second meaning.  While it was meant to express a contemporary sit-in whereby people occupy physical space as a form of protest, the millions of people passively engaged online were occupied in the sense that their attention was drawn particularly toward the aforementioned images of police misconduct.  While this is happening, the unseen irony is that the one percent of the one percent who own social media sites are saying “Ka-ching!” while many users are thinking, “Thank goodness for YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, or we would never know about these extraordinary (soon to be forgotten) events.”  Thus, I would argue that on at least a subconscious level, people come to think of a guy like Schmidt as a national leader of sorts.  It reminds me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the 19th Century man with his technological prowess is to be given a title that doesn’t quite acknowledge that he’s the most powerful person in the realm.  Arthur remains The King, Merlin remains The Wizard, and the technologically skilled Yankee is given the title The Boss.