Information, Politics, Policy and Values

Following up on our conversation on Thursday, I’d like to point out what I see are some interesting parallels between Sunstein’s thoughts in Republic 2.0 and in–of all things–Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In particular, I’d like to explore how Sunstein’s characterization of the perils of internet filtering/balkanization and the “Daily Me” phenomenon reflect some of the features that Tocqueville noted about American democracy (and democratic societies in general) in his book, which after all came out a full 150 years before the advent of the World Wide Web.

Tocqueville, despite being a French aristocrat whose family was on the wrong side of the French Revolution, was a great lover of democracy. However, much of Democracy in America is focused on the dangers of democracy, or more accurately the dangerous effects that the principles that underly democracy (freedom and equality) could have on individuals and on societies. In particular Tocqueville feared two related phenomena: the rise of Individualism among democratic peoples and the subsequent opportuntiy for the rise of a particular kind of oppressive government called Mild (or ‘Sweet’, depending on your translation) Despotism. I won’t talk about Mild Despotism, but you can read a basic description of it here: http://revision-notes.co.uk/Detailed/2001.html

The term Individualism meant more as Tocqueville uses it than simply self-reliance or placing a high value on individual freedom. Simply put, Individualism is the tendency of democratic citizens to ignore their obligations and retreat into a restricted circle of private  interests and limited social interaction. The Tocquevillian Individualist becomes disenchanted with broader society and withdraws “to one side with his family and friends, so that having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.”  (Democracy in America, II, 7.4, p.672)

This sounds similar, in consequence anyway, to the Daily Me phenomenon that Sunstein describes. At the highest level, both Individualism and the Daily Me describe mechanisms by which individuals selectively wall themselves off from experiences that aren’t immediately relevant to their personal needs and interests. And both authors contend that in order for a democracy to stay healthy, this tendency must be actively combatted. For example, compare this quote by Sunstein with Tocqueville’s warnings about Individualism: “…I do contend that in a democracy deserving of the name, lives should be structured so that people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected.” (Republic 2.0, Ch. 1, p. 6)

There are other interesting comparisons. Tocqueville lauds newspapers for the same reason that Sunstein does, for their function as intermediaries to expose citizens to a variety of perspectives and ideas, and to each other. Tocqueville also makes a point that jury duty, of all things, educates citizens in democratic “habits of mind” and forces to consider issues that may be beyond the scope of their daily activities and personal interests. Ultimately, both Tocqueville and Sunstein rely heavily on civic institutions (voluntary and involuntary) to maintain healthy democracy. This is reassuring to some extent, since after all our American democracy has not yet sunk to the worst excesses that Tocqueville warned of–although some of his ‘predictions,’ including arguably both the civil war and the cold war, have come to pass in the years since he toured the young United States.

So hopefully our digital future isn’t as bleak as Sunstein’s worst-case scenario, either.

The “Daily Me”, chapter one of Cass Sunstein’s Republic 2.0 was a compelling read. Much like other readings assigned this quarter, there were points where things made perfect sense to me. However most of my time is usually spent scratching my head, trying to ingest various ideas and trying to make sense of everything (in case you’re wondering, I’ve enjoyed every grueling moment of what at times is an intimidating task).

Written in 2007, Sustein starts by providing several seemingly innocent examples of how individuals would one day be able to, with the help of technology, “’filter’ what they want to read, see and hear” (p. 1). Less than three years later, his dream is well into fruition. Personalization is lauded as the best thing since sliced bread. Anyone who is interested solely in sports can avoid everything else. If you want to see everything but “news” that that is possible too. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Although, in many ways this sort of self-selection has been occurring for ages, it has and will continue to be enhanced through the use of technology.

Sustein identified examples of filtering that require conscious efforts (e.g. setting the time TiVo should record). Since then, there have been several technological advancements. Now websites can serve you content based on geospatial location. I can see an enhanced type of TiVo technology in the near future. Through data mining your TV recognizes that you’re an avid fan of a TV show (let’s say “House”).  In your absence, it records an episode for you. Not because you instructed it, but because it “knows” its your favorite show.

As mentioned by Sustein, yes these advancements come with many benefits—“increased fun, convenience and entertainment” (p. 5)—but what implications does this have on democracy?  In an attempt to explore this further, Sustein poses three compelling questions, first, how will the increasing power of private control affect democracy? Next, how will the Internet and the explosion of communications options alter the capacity of citizens to govern themselves?  And lastly, what are the social preconditions for a well-functioning system of democratic deliberation, or for individual freedom itself? I would like to add one item to his list, how will the Internet and related technologies effect how government governs society. Now it is possible that he is addressing this within one of the other questions, however I think it would be a useful exercise to look at this explicitly.

Sustein goes on to introduce indicators of “a well functioning system of free expression” (p. 5). Among them are involuntary encounters with information you may have never selected on your own and a “common experience.”  At this point I was reminded of discussions that took place in Professor Malcolm Parks’ seminar course looking at different manifestation of community, both online and offline. One thing that often came up was the importance of a shared experience.  As highlighted by Sustein it is sort of the social glue that can help avoid fragmentation.  Questions then arise about how personalization works for or against this. Where is the balance between personalization and shared experience? How do you encourage people against operating in silos?

I loved Sustein’s “street corner” analogy as a potential solution. The mind-bending question is how do you create it? A space where people encounter things involuntarily. Nine out of ten times, you’re pressed for time (among other things), and so voluntarily encountering things you haven’t predefined as interesting is unlikely. Can advertisements effectively replicate the “street corner”? Nope. Public Service Announcements? Nope, smh … I have no other idea. Do you?

Resources:

Sunstein Cass, 2007, Republic.com 2.0, Princeton University Press, ch. 1, pp.1-18

This was my favorite of today’s readings by far, and one of my favorite of the quarter. Not only do Benkler and Shaw lay out a persuasive case for what they term “high resolution research” in internet studies, they also demonstrate that a well-thought out and executed qualitative content analysis of internet features and behaviors can yield generalizable results.

Benkler and Shaw’s demonstration of the variety of mechanisms for engagement that different political blogs employ  problematizes over-general assertions about both a) the uniformity of blogging patterns across the political spectrum, and b) the oft mentioned notion that citizen engagement in our weak-tie culture is always and everywhere “thinning” (to use Philip Howard’s words from Lassana’s post below). For instance, how can we say that political engagement is ‘thin’ in a thriving political weblog that features a variety of active user-generated content channels? As we Freelon alludes in his article, an overly specific focus on deliberative discourse as the sole identifying criterion for an “engaged” public willfully ignores a variety of ways in which a public/citizenry/user community can be involved in reflective political discussion.

Like any good article, this one raises more questions than it answers: why do conservative blogs, in general, feature fewer content producers, fewer opportunities for user-generated content production, and tighter gatekeeping practices? To what extent do the differences between the features and practices of liberal-leaning blog sites and conservative ones reflect specific temporal sociocultural circumstances versus differences between how the two political ideologies affect the behaviors of the people who follow them? There are a lot of fascinating avenues for research here on how different user groups view the ‘role’ of bloggers, blogging platforms and blog communities in their personal lives and in the greater political sphere. How do people come to trust the information they find online? What sources are seen as authoritative? Under what circumstances do people who are generally consumers of blog content feel the need (permission? entitlement?) to contribute?

Sounds like a mighty intriguing (if wicked) problem to me!

A theme in recent readings has been that deliberative discussion and other forms of political participation have been on the decline, particularly since the 1980s [1],[2]. I can’t help but think about this from an economics perspective. It might be easy to assume that improvements in technology would reduce the cost (in time and effort) to engage in political discourse, but I think that misses some important observations. To discuss this I am going to bring in a few authors not covered in our class: Elihu Katz, Anthony Downs, and Thorstein Veblen.

In The two-step flow of communication: An up-to-date report on an hypothesis, Elihu Katz discusses how in a variety of contexts people are influenced by other people like themselves, often in their own peer group, and that these influencers tend to be influential in a given area, but not necessarily others [3]. So, for example, you might not be up on the current fashion trends, but you know your friend Emily is – she dresses well, reads all the right magazines, and can name this season’s in colors and designers. You might ask her to go shopping with you because you respect her opinion. Likewise, you might not follow the candidates and issues for a mid-term election, but since you know your Uncle George avidly reads the paper and watches the nightly news, you know he knows what’s going on. In this example, you probably wouldn’t ask George which sweater to buy and you probably wouldn’t ask Emily about a local ballot proposition. Thus, according to Katz, a lot of the information we receive and act on is mediated by opinion leaders. George and Emily follow the important information sources to stay informed on their topic of interest.

In 1957, Anthony Downs introduced the concept of rational ignorance [4]. According to Downs, citizens find the cost of being truly informed to be sufficiently high compared to the value of being informed that it makes sense for them to instead rely on information proxies. For politics this shows up when folks, by and large, tend to agree with a party platform and vote along party lines rather than develop an in depth knowledge about the candidates running in any given election. In our example above, George and Emily might be considered information proxies.

But let’s return to abundant, cheap, easy information. If technologies make information so easy to get, why aren’t we all exceptionally well informed? I offer three reasons. First, certainly we have more information, but now, instead of a finding problem, we have a filtering problem. With so much information competing for our attention we must become more selective to avoid being overwhelmed. Indeed, we can only attend to some limited amount of information regardless of how good technology is at serving it up. This leads to the second issue: specialization. In economics the concept of specialization refers to the idea that we can become more efficient by breaking down large tasks into small parts that we each become a specialist in. In today’s information environment, since we can get so much information we can more easily become specialists in areas that interest us. And since technology has progressed in many many areas, like medicine, transportation, materials science as well as computers, there are far more areas to become a specialist than ever before.

This means that the political discourse is an activity that competes with a far larger number of activities than it did 20 or 30 years ago. Now, instead of having, say 100, choices of things to allocate some of our attention too – political deliberation being just one – now we choose between, say 1,000. And political deliberation is still just one out of that set of choices.

The third reason people may be less politically engaged, and more likely to count on information mediators has to do with what Thorstein Veblen called emulation [5]. Katz briefly notes that not only do we respect opinion leaders, we hope to gain their respect and one way we do this is by agreeing with them. We want to be like them. And for Veblen this can be traced to social hierarchy and the idea that as humans we are always comparing ourselves to those around us. Some people, those of higher status, we place above us and try to emulate in an effort to gain social status ourselves. Those below us we attempt to distance ourselves from.

Thus, since participating in deliberation is just one choice among many, and since other people in our personal network may be more politically specialized, and we may want to emulate them anyway, reduced participation in political deliberation just makes sense.

[1] W.L. Bennett, “Changing citizenship in the digital age,” The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, 2007, pp. 1-24.
[2] J. Brundidge and R. Rice, “Political Engagement Online: Do the Information Rich Get Richer and the Like-minded more Similar,” Handbook of internet politics, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. Ch. 11, 144-156.
[3] E. Katz, “The two-step flow of communication: An up-to-date report on an hypothesis,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 21, 1957, pp. 61-78.
[4] A. Downs, An economic theory of democracy, New York,: Harper, 1957.
[5] T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

I became interested in learning more about the public sphere after reading Jurgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action and attempting to make sense of it through the eyes of Information Science.  I found Communicative Action to be useful in IS for several reasons, but that’s another blog post. After reading boyd, Freidland et. al., Dahlgren, and Papacharissi my head was spinning.  I hoped these readings would help me better conceptualize the public sphere in today’s digital society, but it turns out they left me with many more questions than I had in the beginning.

The public sphere as Habermas describes it, is a space where people can come together to have critical and rational debates and more importantly everyone is on an equal playing field; there are no power struggles in play.  Critics of this conception argue that it most modern society, this very rarely happens.  And even the place where Habermas conceived this idea did not allow women or men of certain races, classes, or religions. I like Dahlgren’s conception of the public sphere as a communicative spaces made up of structures, representations, and interactions.

For Dahlgren, the structures are institutions  such as media organizations.  Representations refer to the small medias, small town papers, neighborhood pamphlets, etc.  In today’s society, these would be blogs, Facebook pages.   Interaction has to do with the way citizens make sense of information from the media organizations and how they communicate that information amongst themselves.  This definition of the public sphere, made me question what is public and what is a public space.

When I enjoyed reading danah boyd’s article and most mostly intrigued by the three dynamics of a networked public: invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of the public and private.  So in true librarian fashion, I ordered about twenty books from the library and am still stumbling through them trying to make sense of all this.  On the bright side, at least I have a paper topic.

boyd danah, 2011, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications”, in:Zizi Papacharissi, A Networked Self, Routledge, ch. 2, pp. 39-58.

Dahlgren, P. (2005). The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political Communication, 22(2), pp. 147-162.

Papacharissi Zizi, 2009, “The Virtual Sphere 2.0: the Internet, the Public SPhere, and Byond”, in: Andrew Chadwick & Philip N. Howard (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, Routledge. Ch. 17, pp. 230-246

Friedland Lewis, Hover Thoma and Rojas Hernard, 2006, “The Networked Public Sphere“, Javnost – The Public, Vol 13(4), pp. 5-26.

After reading Political Engagement Online written by Jennifer Brundidge and Ronald E. Rice I felt like it was a story I had read before. Then it hit me! It was a strain of the digital divide being manifested in the political arena. The author’s open the article by noting the increased connection between democracies and technology. Specifically there have been many questions about the ability of the internet to expose and “invigorate” political participation among marginalized groups, increase accessibility to policy-makers and more. There are two points of view on this issue. One that believes technology can increase the number and types of people engaged in the political process and a second that argues that the internet will [make stronger established patterns of political communication] increase the divide between elites and non-elites.

As expressed by the author’s I agree that it would be overly optimistic to believe that the internet would significantly increase political engagement among those who have historically been disengaged. Yes, the cost of political participation in the digital age has significantly decreased, but other barriers (extensive civic skills, good vocabulary, personal efficacy, etc) still remain. So it is not a surprise that the people engaged in political discussions on the web are the same ones that were engaged prior to the internet.

The next significant thing alluded to is the role of media in helping citizens decide if they want to participate in political discourse. As expected, the internet affects this as well. It transforms what was once a two-way system into what is referred to as a multiaxial one where the proliferation of increased news sources and “the blurring of the boundaries between entertainment and news” (p. 148), make it even more difficult for individuals to make sense of already enigmatic messages.

Next the author’s discuss how digital technologies are used to shape what individuals see, know, and think about. The go on refer to a statement made by Philip Howard which reads “while democracy is becoming deeper…citizenship is thinning…that is, increased political expression with less substantive engagement, and less shared text in the public sphere” (p. 148). He has something going on here. The statement whose effect has yet to be fully understood is a powerful one. Does less “meaningful” engagement mean those traditionally excluded will continue to remain disengaged or will only engage at a very superficial level?

To end this post I’d like to go back to the “knowledge gap hypothesis” a concept that I was not familiar with prior to reading this work. The theory (developed in the 1970′s) “suggests that each new medium increases the gap between the information rich and information poor, because of differences in access to the medium, and control over its use, among other factors.”

After reading the original journal article (published in 1970) I wonder if efforts to add to the ways which engagement can occur will EVER be enough to significantly increase levels of engagement among those traditionally excluded. Based on the knowledge gap hypothesis article, it appears that formal education plays an important role in ensuring individuals have the skills to use tools available to them to engage politically. In light of recent article highlighting the decline in the quality of education, I can’t help to wonder if patterns of political engagement will remain steady, decrease, increase or be represented in new ways.

Resources:

Brundidge Jennifer and Ronald Rice, 2009, “Political Engagement Online: Do the Information Rich Get Richer and the Like-minded more Similar”, in: Andrew Chadwick & Philip N. Howard (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, Routledge. Ch. 11, 144-156.

I’m going to argue that while our new networked world posses new problems and risks, in some ways they aren’t that much different than what humans have faced before. But first, I’m going to tell you about Cindy. I was waiting for the bus next to Cindy. She was late for class, again, but it was her birthday after-all, and her date with Ted last night had gone places she hadn’t planned on, but it was cool since Joe had dumped her the day before, probably for that **** in chemistry, and she needed to, well, get over him, even though Ted really wasn’t her type.

I’d never met Cindy before. And when her bus came and took her away, I still hadn’t. I’m shocked at what a total stranger will say around me these days. At how much I can learn, whether or not I want to, just by being within ear shot of a cell phone user who would almost certainly not disclose these things to me, personally. But people do disclose things in public, physically or on the net, all the time. Perhaps it is the case that, whether in a crowd or online, we count on our anonymity. We are just one more face, or one more blog, or Facebook profile in a sea of similar faces/profiles. If so, we are counting on the fact that attention is a scarce resource and as such, no one will be paying undue attention to us. We feel safe in our obscurity.

But how safe are we? In “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” danah boyd discusses how networks and the bits that fly around in them have three dynamics that shape networked publics. These are invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private. My experience with Cindy was certainly an example of a blurring of public and private, but if it had happened on-line, say I arbitrarily ran across a similar textual version of her conversation, then I would have been a member of an invisible audience, and I could have lifted the text out of context, reproduced it, and spread it around the net. Such an action could have unwanted consequences for Cindy.

So is Cindy being irrational? By writing about her personal life on line, or even using a search engine to find information on line, is she just ignoring the risks? I think not. I think she is managing risk and satisficing. I think that while it’s true that we don’t know what a company does with our data, much less how unintended audiences might perceive or use the information, we humans are responding to the networked world in a way that is similar to what we have always done. Yes, now that we live in a world of networked communication we do risk having our information appropriated and miss-used. Or used against us. I expect that it is impossible to accurately calculate the probability of that some unit of our information will be miss-used. But we do gain immediate benefits from participating in the system the way we do: information is plentiful, we can keep in near constant communication with those we care about, and we can manage our network of personal contacts like never before.

Certainly there are risks. But there have always been risks. Consider your car. Think about all the bolts in your car. You don’t know the quality of bolts that were used to secure the differential to the frame of the car. If one of them were aluminum, and if it gave way while you were on the freeway, the results could be catastrophic. But, just like we tend to trust Google, we also tend to trust Honda. Likewise, I bet you don’t know the speed that your tires are rated at. But tires are rated for certain speeds and temperatures. Since we don’t hear about tires blowing out very often, we tend to assume the risk of speeding is very low compared to the convenience of getting where we are going quickly.

So we humans are used to managing unknown risks and, while the current information environment is new and different, in some ways we already have the tools needed to navigate our new networked environment.

This week’s readings were quite a handful. The articles explored Jurgen Habermas’s term, “Public Sphere”. Some of the readings expanded upon it, while others exposed flaws that have become visible as a result of technology and the rise of a networked public sphere.

Very interested in social networking, I thought that for the purpose of this posting I will focus on chapter two (Social Network Sites as Networked Publics) of “A Networked Self”. As indicated in the article networked publics serve the same purposes as other types of publics. What makes them distinct though is that technology structures them in a way that that determines how people engage in networked environments. What’s important to note is that although these settings may effect how one engages, “networked publics’ affordances do not dictate participants’ behavior…”

The article goes on to note significant features of social networking sites. Fundamentally speaking, the fact that networked technologies are the driving force behind social networking sites which have the potential to connect large amounts of people and have a a “virtual” space that allows for all sorts of interactions to occur, qualifies it as networked publics.

Specifically, Danah identified profiles, friends lists, and tools for public communication as the key elements that allow social networking sites to be perceived as networked publics. What I found most intriguing in this section was the importance of profiles. Profiles are essentially the crux, of social networking sites. This is because profiles are basically the first point of contact. As such individuals must carefully consider how they decided to represent themselves. In addition to being a place to represent yourself, profiles also survey as a location where people “congregate” to talk, share information, etc. Things get a little murky when you consider this in relation to the purpose and positioning of profiles within social networks. Why? Because although you may have some level of control, at the end of the day it is the networks structure, which you have much less control over, which impacts who contributes to your digital representation. Consequently, you are constantly at risk of being misrepresented.

Next the author discusses structural benefits of the networked publics. These benefits include:

• Its ability to automatically capture and archive online expressions
• The ability to easily duplicate content created within the structure
• Its ability to make content visible to large amounts of people
• Its ability to be accessed via search tools

Not surprisingly each of these seemingly beneficial qualities have a downside including, but not limited to:

• Content that is automatically archived may lose its relevance when encountered outside of the context in which is was created,
• The ease associated with duplicating content makes it nearly impossible to set apart an original creation from its duplicated counterpart
• The fact that more people “can be” reached doesn’t imply the “will be” reached

The article goes on to explore many ideas introduced in earlier readings. One that is probably important to all people is the idea that privacy no longer exists. The author believes that privacy is in a state of “transition.” What the heck does that mean, I really don’t know. However, I believe that privacy, as articulate by others is losing its importance in a networked publics. Its not that privacy is not important to individuals. Rather that the network structures do not handle privacy well. I mean what good is it to provide users with tools that allow them to determine how they represent themselves if those managing the networks are give your information up freely to entities (governmental and non-governmental) who request it.

An active participant in the world of social networking sites, the pieces I’ve read over the last few weeks point out issues that everyone should occupy themselves with.  Why? Because the popularity of these sites are growing among all people–young and old. I don’t expect this trend to change anytime soon. As such, we should be helping shape the structures that make up these sites.

Boyd Danah, 2011, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications”, in:Zizi Papacharissi, A Networked Self, Routledge, ch. 2, pp. 39-58.

The three-model framework outlined by Freelon (2010) is intended to facilitate comparative evaluation of political discussion fora. He does not claim it as a general method for analyzing communication on and through social media platforms more generally. Similarly, danah boyd’s (2011) networked publics framework is intended to model some of the sociotechnical mechanisms by which participants in social networking sites interact. She does not claim that it describes other types of social media equally well. However, I think that although these two frameworks describe different genres of online communication spaces, they are complementary and to some extent cross-applicable.

Although Freelon and boyd are concentrating on different phenomena and looking at different genres of online communication, their work shares a common theme: how do the affordances of the architecture and the composition of the community (or audience, or networked publics) shape how people interact in these online spaces? To show how each author’s analysis might benefit from the others’ framework, I’ll share two examples where I think that a concept from one framework would enrich the other.

Persistence and Deliberative Quality

One of the goals of Freelon’s framework is to outline a set of factors that can be used to evaluate deliberative quality. Freelon seems to be talking about ‘quality’ in both the generic sense of a quality as an attribute, and also the valuated sense of ‘quality’ as a criterion for saying something is good or bad. Utterance persistence (boyd, p. 46) in online spaces can become an issue that affects the deliberative quality (in both senses). For instance, take an example scenario from an asynchronous political comment board.

Rosa is a new participant on a political comment board discussion that is already in progress. Because the whole discussion is archived, Rosa can see everything that has been said so far in that discussion. Political discussions are often heated affairs, even the civil ones, (Papacharissi 2004) and this one is no exception: a perusal of the discussion archive shows that this discussion has hosted many tense exchanges between several of the current participants at various points.

Now, these exchanges may have been long since resolved to the satisfaction of everyone involved, and the discussion may recently have become much more productive and deliberative. However Rosa, after reading the whole discussion history all at once rather than experiencing it unfold over time might come away with strong but misleading impression that the current state of the discussion is polarized and hostile, which may in turn affect how, whether and with whom she choses to engage.

In this example, it’s the attention to the temporal aspects of online communication that boyd contributes to Freelon’s framework, which does not in and of itself present mechanisms for understanding how the nature of a discussion changes over time.

Imagined Audiences and Identity Markers

One of the points that boyd brings up as an illustration of the difficulties that participants face when negotiating with strangers on social networking sites is collapsed context. Collapsed context can easily lead to misinterpretations of social acts (like comments), because “while starting every statement with ‘as a person with X identity and Y beliefs and Z history’ can provide context, most people do not speak this way, let alone account for all the background for any stranger to understand any utterance.” (boyd, p.51)

While collapsed contexts and misconstrued meanings are certainly problems endemic to computer-mediated communication, micro-level frameworks for conversation analysis like Freelon’s three-model framework can reveal the mechanisms through which individuals in fact do embed contextual cues into their utterances–sometimes to a surprising degree. For example, communicative strategies such as disclosures of “personal narratives” (Freelon, p.8) and linguistic markers of community identification such as the use of inclusive terms like ‘us’ and ‘we’ (ibid, p.9) are frequently employed by participants in online spaces to situate their utterances. These strategies not only fill in context cues about the speaker, they also provide hints of the characteristics that the speaker ascribes to their imagined audience.

Although these two frameworks work on different levels they can be productively used in tandem todescribe a wide variety of mediated communication spaces online, not just political deliberation forums or social networking sites. Wikipedia, where I’ve done most of my work so far, is neither a political deliberation forum or a social network site (or, arguably, it’s both). However, I’ve seen phenomena that could be well-described by both of these frameworks at work in the talk pages I’ve analyzed.

In Victor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, the bulk of the discussion revolves around a pair of very compelling ideas:

1) that while throughout most human history remembering has been easy and forgetting has been hard (p. 92), and

2) those who control access to information have power (p. 98)

To these ideas I would add a third, which was I think in the background of these chapters but was not specifically articulated at any point:

3) even in a society where remembering is the default option and access to personal information is widespread, only those who have the power to interpret that information have true power.

To give an example of this, let’s turn to my favorite social studies petrie dish, Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia, every action you take is captured for posterity. Every edit, comment, revision, page lock, ban and file upload is indelibly associated with your user ID and can be reviewed by anyone. However in reality it very seldom happens that your entire contribution history gets pored over by anyone other than the occasional curious passerby.

Two occasions when your entire history IS likely to be examined in detail is if you are up for promotion (to Administrator status) or are in danger of being banned from the site forever. Wikipedia has formal mechanisms for dealing with these special cases, which usually come down to a sort of group deliberation process where various interested parties (friends, enemies, current admins, and anyone else who cares to join in) argue back and forth over your relative merits as a Wikipedian.

In such cases, everyone has access to the same huge body of information–your entire edit history. Whether or not you end up being promoted or banned is, therefore, not really a matter of control over information access, but rather of control of interpretation. The individual, or ‘side’ who can make the most persuasive case about the significance of your past activities (whether your history of edits means you are a tireless worker or  just have a bad case of editcountitis; whether your frequent deletion of unsourced material is a demonstration of your commitment to quality content or tendentious editing) is the one who wins the day.

This same point can be made about the case of Andrew Feldmar the academic that Meyer-Schonberger (p. 4) describes, who was banned from entering the US after a border guard discovered that he had done LSD in the 60’s. What got him banned was not that the border guard was able to control access to that information (it was available freely to anyone), it’s that he by virtue of his power in that specific context* he was able to make the information significant, and chose to do so: he decided (and was able to convince others) that the fact that professor Feldmar had done LSD made him a credible threat to US interests.

Same goes for Stacy Snyder: it was not inevitable that posting a picture of herself drinking on MySpace would have led to her being denied her teaching certificate: someone had to find that picture and be able to convince the university administrators that the picture meant something–in this case, that Snyder was unfit to teach minor students.

We should never underestimate the power of interpretation. Information is not the same thing as meaning: the same information can lead to different inferences, motivate different actions, and be used by different parties to different ends. The fact that information about us is ‘out there’ does NOT mean that some unknown other automatically has power over us.

*context is important. If that border guard had been working at another post and discovered the same information, or had discovered the information later than night after he’d already let Feldmar through, he would not have had the same power over Feldmar. Again, mere access to information does not imply control over information.