“I am sitting here, six in the morning, I am staring at two people bascially naked in the shower together with 30 people watching and its like uh okay, but that’s the future.”-Josh Harris, We Live in Public

Perhaps the most haunting film I have watched on publicity and the digital network is Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public. On the surface the documentary is about the Josh Harris and his various internet ventures. But on a more significant level the film raises questions about what it means to “live” once that living is done almost exclusively in public. The movie covers several of Harris’s projects including “Quiet: We Live in Public” a bunker hotel in NYC where one hundred people agreed to have every aspect of their lives exposed to every other member of the community. Everything that happened was filmed, 24-7, and broadcast to the TVs around the hotel. Participants were filmed, eating, sleeping, showering, and having sex, nothing in the bunker was private (think of it as reality TV on steroids). For me the most disturbing scene comes at the end of the “experiment,” just before the cops break up the hotel. What exactly happens is a bit unclear, but a woman is taking shower as the community watches, when a men walks in and forces her to have sex with him. The level of violence isn’t entirely transparent in the film, but it is pretty clear that what is happening is not okay. But what is perhaps most disturbing though is that the onlookers, the rest of the “public” do nothing, take this incident as just the usual fair.

About ten pages into the introduction of Jeff Jarvis’s new book Public Parts I started wondering if he had seen TImoner’s film. By the time I had reached the third chapter I thought if I were to teach this book Timoner’s film would make the perfect counterpoint. At that point I couldn’t resist scanning ahead in the book to see if Jarvis was aware of We Live in Public. I was, I must admit, rather surprised to find that the film was included in the book (157). Reading Jarvis’s account of We Live in Public I began to think we had perhaps not even watched the same film. What I took to be a rather serious investigation into the concerns of living in public Jarvis takes as testimony to how far one can be public, adopting an entirely uncritical stance. And this is the problem with Jarvis’s book, although the introduction claims that the book will be an investigation into the value and importance of being “public.” What Jarvis actually delivers is less a nuanced understanding of the important debate between the ideas of publicness and privateness, and more a full throated defense of “being public.” As a result Jarvis either reads past examples (like We Live in Public) that would complicate his defense, ignores the nuance and complexity in the issues, or poorly represents the positions of the critics with which he engages. This is all really unfortunate, as there are things Jarvis and I agree on: that the internet enables sharing in a new way, that this sharing can have significant benefit. More important though than any intellectual agreement or disagreement I might have with Jarvis is the importance of this debate. I think that the issue of “Public and Private” is one of the most important discussions we ought to be having about the digital network. So, in one sense I am glad that we are starting to have this discussion, but in another I think Jarvis’s book is so poorly argued that it turns out to be a rather dangerous contribution to this debate and a poor place from which to begin.

Jarvis in Brief

Before I attempt to explain all of my concerns/problems with this book, I want to start by laying out Jarvis’s argument. The base of his argument is rather straightforward. Jarvis argues that being public has a great deal of value, and that any discussion of media and culture needs to recognize the centrality of this value to our culture. According to Jarvis recent debates about the internet have too heavily focused on privacy, and that we are currently running the risk of over valuing privacy, and thus running the risk of losing the value of publicness. There is a danger that we will become, “too obsessed with privacy,” and “lose the opportunities to make connections in this age of links” (5). Early on Jarvis recognizes that privacy and publicity are actually values for which we must “seek a balance,” but clearly Jarvis believes that we are over reacting to privacy, and need to learn to embrace are new publicness. Privacy advocates pose a greater threat to our future than publicness advocates. At one point Jarvis even quotes Philip Kaplan one of the founders of Blippy (a company that lets you share your credit card purchases) as saying, “[Privacy] is one of those things that is completely manufactured” (156). Although he is quoting another here, Jarvis clearly agrees: We are over-reacting to privacy concerns, this is an “engineered” frenzy.

In this regard Jarvis tells a history, a brief one, of how technological transformations have historically produced discussions about values and culture. The history presented here should feel like a familiar one to those who are familiar with the history of technology, or any of the recent discussions about the transformative roll of the net. New technological epochs arrive disturbing cultural assumptions and values, resulting in a need to realign culture: “Then technologies come along and ruin our dear, old assumptions and order” (10). Straight forward enough. Indeed as Jarvis presents this there is a long history of new technologies producing cultural angst, doom and gloom scenarios. In this case, Jarvis focuses on how technological transformation has a history of upsetting privacy values: “Again and again in history, technology has caused change and that change has sparked worries that privacy is being threatened” (9).

So, Jarvis contends that one way we need to understand the current technological transformation is in terms of publicness, “publicness is at the heart of a reordering of society and the economy that I believe will prove to be as profound as the one brought on by Johanees Gutenberg and his press” (9). Rather than worrying about preserving privacy, we should turn the argument around and worry about how to maximize publicness, over focusing on privacy means missing the advantages conferred by publicness, and as Jarvis argues these advantages are legion.

In this regard Jarvis says that when you pull back and take the long view of privacy you learn two things. First that privacy is culturally relative. In different cultures individuals chose to keep different parts of their lives private. In Germany people hang out naked in spas, but don’t like Google street view. In Norway and Finland citizens publicly list taxes and income, whereas in Switzerland and the US we (mostly) keep this information private. Second is that privacy as a value is historically relative. It is here that Jarvis shares some amusing stories of what has occurred in other moments of technological transformation, pointing out how people were concerned about the “Kodakers” violating privacy by taking too many photographs (63). Things at other moments that people would have kept private, we now share without any concern. And perhaps more importantly, and more problematically, Jarvis claims that privacy as a cultural value is a rather modern invention. The main idea here is that privacy really isn’t a value until the turn of the last century, or if it was a value, in past moments it was a negative value, “privacy was not an enviable state,” and “privacy was not assumed to be a good” (70). The idea behind both of these claims is to suggest that we need to keep privacy in perspective, not overvalue it, at the expense of harming the other value of publicness.

For Jarvis there are three levels on which we should value publicness: individual, corporations, government. That is that the individual, corporations, and governments could all be improved by being more public. And accordingly throughout the book Jarvis gives examples about how all three are improved by being more public. From Jarvis’s own personal stories about sharing his bout with Prostate Cancer, to businesses that have crowdsourced development, to governments who open up data to allow citizens to self organize, he piles on the examples of how being public can improve our lives. And since the internet allows us to be more public, we ought to leverage this.

The meat of the argument though is contained in Chps 2-5, where Jarvis wrestles with defining and explaining privacy and publicness. Most of the above is discussed in these chapters, the value of publicness (Chapter 2), the historical invention of the public and the private (Chapter 3), media history (Chapter 4), and defining privacy (Chapter 5).

But for understanding what Jarvis outlines here the fifth chapter is perhaps the most important, where he defines what he means by the terms public and private. The chapter starts by cataloging a range of privacy definitions, demonstrating how each fails to adequately cover our concerns, or how privacy concerns are often related to other issues (theft). At the end of this section Jarvis concludes (and it is worth quoting at length here):

“Do you feel any closer to definition of privacy? I don’t. I see a confused web of worries, changing norms, varying cultural mores, complicated relationships, conflicting motives, vague feelings of danger with sporadic specific evidence of harm, and unclear laws and regulations made all the more complex by context.” (101)

Rhetorically this is a deft move, privacy is too hard to concretely define, we often define it out of fear, and ineffectively so. As a result Jarvis argues privacy is not a value to be defined, but rather an ethic to be practiced. His conclusion: “Privacy is an ethic governing the choices made by the recipient of someone else’s information. Publicness is an ethic governing the choices made by the creator of one’s own information. Or put more simply: Privacy is ethic of knowing. Publicness is an ethic of sharing” (110). What Jarvis is doing here is realigning the debate to the axis of sharing and knowing, sharing is good and valuable, and privacy is not a matter of not disclosing information about yourself, but rather a matter of an ethic of how to treat information that others give you. In the end what he is suggesting is that privacy is about not using others data in nefarious ways, and publicness is about sharing all possible information about yourself. “If you have information that could in any way be valuable to other you must ask yourself: Why not share it?” (112). Got that? Privacy isn’t about you and your rights as an individual but rather about respecting others information when you have access to it, and publicness is about the value of sharing. Although at different times Jarvis strays from these definitions, this is the core of his argument.

In brief: Concerns about privacy are overstated. If we look at the matter historically and culturally we learn that privacy is a relative value whose worth is often overstated. The internet is a giant sharing machine enabling us to be more public. Sharing is good. Being public is good. We should make sure the public aspects of the internet aren’t harmed in our quest for privacy.

Or at least that’s what Jarvis wants his book to argue . . .

Public ≠ Sharing ≠  Openess ≠  Transparency ≠  Public Sphere ≠ The Public

Perhaps the first thing that one notices in reading public parts is that while Jarvis will say that he is seeking a balance between publicness and privacy, and he recognizes that privacy is important, he clearly sees publicness as the privileged term. While being public is directly responsible for human civilization and progress, “our publicness and our connections bring progress,” (69) the advantages of privacy are less easily defined. Indeed one might read the entirety of Jarvis’s book and wonder why one would be private all, given the advantages he assigns to publicness and the serious dearth of value assigned to the private. But this indeed is Jarvis’s aim, to show that privacy is an over rated value, while demonstrating that publicness is underrated.

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of having this debate is not only the slippery definition of the concept of privacy, but the myriad ways the word public is used throughout the book all with different resonances and applications. And while Jarvis is quick to limit the definition of privacy he is equally quick to expand the definition of public. Although he defines public as sharing, he often uses other terms as synonyms for being public. So while being public is a matter of sharing, at other moments he argues that being transparent is being public, being open is public, that being in the public is public, and that the public sphere is public. It is true that these words are certainly related, but there is a need to not only be precise about which term we are talking about, but to also treat them separately. The public is not public, is not being public, is not publics, is not sharing, is not openess, is not transparency and is not the public sphere. Sure these terms inform each other, and often share a familial relation but treating them as conterminous, as Jarvis often does is seriously problematic.

To see why this is lets break down some aspects of this book:

1. Net Neutrality. In the closing sections of the book, Jarvis argues that we need to preserve the open net, coming out strongly in favor of net neutrality. I am not at all sure what this has to do with being public, unless you are willing to substitute the word open for public. Don’t get me wrong, this is an issue which Jarvis and I clearly would agree (at least on the level of policy), I think net neutrality is one of the most important issues when it comes to preserving the digital network. But, I would argue this is just as much a matter of privacy as it is publicness. Individuals have the right to access web pages and not have their traffic monitored by ISPs (one aspect of net neutrality), I don’t want ISPs intervening in individual consumption on the net, whether they are throttling bandwidth, or directing traffic. Individuals ought to be able to control their net access, and do so with a sense that browsing history will not be monitored or compromised by ISPs. Sure we could phrase this as a debate about keeping the net open, but that is open as in open for all to access and broadcast equally, not open as in public. And I certainly would support government intervention here as a way to protect the net and people’s privacy.

2. Throughout the book Jarvis works hard to equate publicness with sharing. Most blatantly he claims that publicness is an ethic of sharing. But this is not the way we tend to use the term. There is a strong overlap at times, but the words are by no means coterminous. Consider how we often share things with certain individuals but expect them to nevertheless remain private. Indeed the law recognizes these cases, protecting this type of sharing from public disclosure. Information one shares with a doctor is required by law to be kept private. The court cannot force individuals to disclose things revealed by a spouse in private, although sharing took place, it was not a public sharing. In fact sharing something with another in private, that is non-public sharing, is a crucial aspect of building relationships.

3. Why is this book for sale? I ask this rhetorically but also with a purpose. By placing the content of this book under copyright Jarvis has essentially made the book “private” property. Rather than “sharing” the book with the widest possible audience he chose to make it public only to those who purchase it. He could have easily posted this book to his own website and allowed anyone to download it free of charge, making it an open book available to anyone in the public. Indeed if Jarvis believes that public is the way to go and that we should have an ethic of sharing knowledge in order to foster the public good, not making the book public is an ethical failure (by his own standards). The book as Jarvis readily recognizes was in part the product of conversations he had on his blog with others (although he argues he would do it more for the next book). The book is a result of a public process. If this is the case what gives Jarvis the ethical right to then make the product private and sell it on the market. The answer is simple? Because he wants to. Jarvis recognizes this is a “sin” (181) that Simon & Schuster paid him to write the book, and that he garnered sufficient advantage from leveraging the private here. Or slightly later Jarvis confesses that he writes books as a means to “build public reputation, which lead to other business” (181). In short Jarvis argues that one should be public when it leads to individual gain, private when it leads to individual gain. Clearly not the ethic of share, be open, be public all the time.

4. Or, let’s take Jarvis’s central example. His private-public parts. Jarvis recounts his decision to be very public with information about his prostate cancer. He uses this as the ultimate example of something people are inclined to keep private (personal medical information about their very private parts) that he chose to make public and how the resulting public conversation yielded social good. Discussing his treatment, wearing diapers, his use of Viagra and Cialis, along with a penis pump, lead others to disclose, building a community of individuals who could support each other and share experiences. Jarvis shares several people who email him thanking him for being public, and recounts how his publicness led to an appearance on the Howard Stern show, further yielding revenue for prostate cancer research. But that’s not the whole story. In his account he admits that he wasn’t fully public about what happened. “When I received my cancer diagnosis, my reflex was to go to the blog and talk about it. I had to wait. Our son was away that summer, and I certainly didn’t want him to learn about my cancer in a tweet. Once he returned, I told him and and our daughter, Julia, and the rest of our family. And then I blogged” (35). Again in other words what Jarvis is saying is that he carefully controls and balances the public and private deciding when to be public (when it serves his own interest) and when to be private (when it serves his own interests). But in the world he describes we would lose control of this balance. Indeed he notes how he himself almost lost control of this balance when a friend noticed his delicious bookmarks before he had gone public. Imagine a world where individuals would lose this control. Any purchase you make in a store is made public (Blippy). After a cancer diagnosis you purchase a book about recovery on Amazon and everyone knows what you have purchased? Or because others might benefit from sharing your medical data as soon as a diagnosis occurs it is posted to a public health site? Clearly this is not the future Jarvis wants, but it is the one the book seems to be arguing for, share everything. Or at least share everything that might help others. And if this is the case I somewhat rhetorically ask why did Jarvis not post videos of his sex “struggles” after prostate cancer. Telling us that he was taking Cialis or using a Penis Pump is one thing, wouldn’t the community be helped more by having the full disclosure? Again, the point is that Jarvis controls what data is public and what is private. He shares more than most and gains advantage from this (reputation, financial status, etc.). But for all his claims that we should be public, he is not public or rather only public when he wants to be.

The issue isn’t about publicness or sharing or transparency or any of those things, the issue is about controlling one’s own information.

It’s About Control

So this brings us to the central issue/problem with Jarvis’s book. For whatever reason he doesn’t seem to recognize that this is about power and control. The axis of public/private or even the more mundane one he often champions of sharing/not-sharing isn’t the issue, the issue is the degree to which individuals do or do not have the ability to determine this themselves.

As I mentioned in the summary of this book, one of the central claims is that we are being overly concerned about privacy, running the risk of ruining the value of publicness with all of our concern. I am not sure what history or critics Jarvis is analyzing, but it strikes me as a patently absurd claim to suggest that we are becoming more private. I think by nearly every measure imaginable we are now more public than ever. (Indeed at other points Jarvis agrees, arguing that the internet makes us more public than ever.) The internet, as a giant data sharing engine certainly renders more information than ever public. Jarvis seems to be arguing that the internet increases the volume on sharing, but rather than be happy with setting the dial at 8 or 9 we should crank it all the way to 11.

The army of privacy advocates screaming that we should be scared about our over-sharing are really more of a strawman argument, or at least an argument that is about 5 years old. True at the inception of social networks I read a great many articles expressing angst about “kids these days oversharing” posting too much of their lives on Facebook. But we are sort of past that point now, instead much of the discussion is about how to insure that people maintain control of privacy and publicity.

The largest mistake in this respect in the book is the way that Jarvis treats people, corporations, and governments as equal players here. Corporations would be better off he argues if they were more public (kept fewer secrets) and governments likewise would be better off is they were more public (kept fewer secrets). Ostensibly the reason for this is that if corporations are more public they garner benefit (increased profits) and more importantly here, transfer power to individuals. That is if corporations were required to be more public they would be held more accountable to the public (individual citizens). The same argument holds true for government. By being public governments can become more efficient (perform services better) and more importantly here be held more accountable to the public (individual citizens). Now lets try and apply that reasoning to individuals, by being more public individuals can gain more advantage (why Jarvis is public with his life) and more importantly be held more accountable to governments and corporations? That’s an odd formulation, but that’s partly what Jarvis is arguing for. If individuals are more public more power is than transferred to the government or to the corporations. And make no mistake about it, power is often what is at stake here. Jarvis never recognizes the asymmetry in place here.

If you doubt me on this consider all the myriad ways governments are infringing on individuals privacy (forcing them to be public) all of which seem to be absent from Jarvis’s book. Governments representing a wide range of political models, not just ones labeled despotic, are using technology in general, and the internet specifically to monitor and surveil their respective populaces. Should the government be allowed to monitor internet traffic? Should internet services be required to supply the government with user data without a subpoena? Should the government be able to use GPS or cell phone data to track a suspect 24-7? Should corporations be forced to give governments back door access to encrypted files? All of these are serious questions, questions about balancing the public with the private and matters of power. The simple answer to these questions is make everything public, there is much benefit to be had, and only those who have things to hide would need to be concerned. (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it” (127)). This seems to be the answer that Jarvis supports. We have built an internet of Ubiquitous Surveillance, this troubles me, but doesn’t seem to bother Jarvis.

Or one last example here and then we can turn to the corporations. Last month a police officer at California State University wrote a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that universities should data mine/monitor all traffic on their networks in order to surveil students and have the power to intervene in case one of them is mentally troubled. For so many reasons this is a remarkably bad idea. But Jarvis would argue not only that there is benefit to be had from doing this monitoring, but more troubling that students should just offer this data up, agree to be public, for in the first case they have nothing to hide, and in the second the police only have public interest at heart and the community could benefit from this monitoring.

And then consider the corporations here. Increasingly corporations are attempting to harvest data from users, both with and without their consent. Jarvis adopts one of two approaches to this question, either don’t worry be happy users are likely to benefit from this scenario, or corporations have a right to use individuals data. Again lets take a look at two of Jarvis’s examples.

The first example Jarvis leverages to convince the user that he is correct in this regard is Google Street View. He questions why is it that Germany restricts what Google can do with street view, really poking fun at the Germans who seem to be so focused on privacy that they don’t want their houses on the internet, yet go to the spas naked. Jarvis says that any law restricting Google from using photos publicly taken from the street could interfere with other uses of data. For example by what means would you restrict Google from taking a picture and posting it to street view but not also restrict any individual from taking a picture on a public street and posting it on the web? A couple of things are particularly telling about this example. First that Jarvis sees the interest of a corporation designed for profit as the same of an individual. Clearly we can and probably ought to, distinguish between privileges and rights we grant to companies and those we grant to individuals. Indeed often the tension is located precisely here, not between public and private, but whether or not individuals have the right to not have corporations decide for them whether or not the information is public or private (the issue is control not public or private). Or imagine Google has a car with infrared cameras and other imaging devices that would drive down the street and not only take pictures of your house from the street, but take pictures of inside your house from the street. If you think I am being ridiculous, I point you to the ways that police are already doing this. And couldn’t Google argue that there is public value here? (Measuring population density? Which houses are using the most electricity?) Sure this is a limit scenario, but it is a scenario we ought to consider and make decisions about, not just default to saying, “no worries. Being public is good.”

Or in one of Jarvis’s later examples he argues that companies have a right to track users on websites. His reasoning is that without tracking they cannot serve up ads, thus killing their revenue stream (not tracking is equivalent to stealing?). According to Jarvis you can no sooner order up a newspaper with all the ads removed than you should be able to access webpages without being tracked. Notice what a bizarre equivalence this is. (There are problems with how Do Not Track is being implemented, but Jarvis is arguing beyond this, that corporations have a right to track people.) This is a bad analogy. Rather the correct one is imagine if every time you wanted to walk into a store, read a newspaper, access a piece of literature you had to submit a 50 page questionnaire detailing demographic information about you, all past services you used, products you bought, and things you have read. I think clearly we would say the companies are asking too much, tipping the balance in their favor. No one is talking about eliminating ads from the internet, what people are talking about (an important conversation) is the degree to which we ought to let corporations track users, and what they can do with this data once they have it. We might decide that a certain amount of tracking is acceptable but that certain levels are too much (try ordering a pizza in a world in which everything is public). This is to say nothing of the issue of corporate responsiblity to protect data and not reveal it, or the degree to which we can trust them to protect data once they have it, and whether or not they should be held responsible for privacy breeches. Setting the balance to all public, with occasional exceptions for private (the Jarvis model) seems to me the irresponsible, less nuanced approach.

To be sure I am raising some fairly nefarious examples here, but contrary to Jarvis’s claim that there is “no point in dwelling on dark potentialities” (91), it is only by dwelling on both the dark and light potentialities that we can correctly address these concerns, ignoring the “dark” side here is liable to lead us to a future where individuals have decreasing control of their own lives. It is irresponsible to only highlight the utopic vision.

Technology isn’t Good or Bad . . .

Throughout the book Jarvis is found of saying that Technology is not good or bad it’s neutral. Or in other terms technology is a tool which we can use for good or ill, and it is how we use it that counts. (“It is also true that the tools are neutral-they can be used by bad actors as well as good (209).”) It is odd then that consistently Jarvis assigns the bad consequences to the social space, but the positive consequences to technology. Technology lets us share = good. But the consequences of sharing (persecution for beliefs or sexual orientation for example) are societies’ fault.

The problem is that Jarvis either doesn’t know the philosophy of technology, or chooses to just ignore it. While it is true that at moments of technological change we often see declination narratives (“The internet is evil because it allows us all to share to much. We are all going to hell in a hand basket now that we are sharing so much.”) we are equally as likely to see utopic narratives as well. (“Now that we can share so much, we can all share and learn to get along, be better humans, resolve our differences and do away with social strife. A claim Jarvis seems to be making about the net, but that was also made of the telegraph. See the Victorian Internet Chapter 6.)

The real lesson is that technology isn’t good or bad, but it isn’t neutral either. That is, that while a given technology will not necessarily produce positive or negative changes in a society, once that technology enters said society it will be transformed. Technology is not merely a tool but fundamentally alters how we structure our social space and even understand what it means to be human.

It is too bad that Jarvis is not a better reader, or at least not a more genuine reader, as the sources from which he so often quotes contain precisely this message.

Take for example the Warren and Brandies legal article. Jarvis uses this article to show that privacy wasn’t even a right that was legally recognized until the early 1900s, “there had been no established legal right to privacy” (65) (somehow, the fact that there was not also a legal right to publicness at the time doesn’t matter for Jarvis). Near the turn of the century there was an increasing concern about how technology was altering individuals lives (some of this was about photographs but the context is much larger, even though Jarvis would have you believe it is all about Kodakers). The history that Jarvis tells is that Warren and Brandeis responding to people’s concerns write this essay suggesting courts ought to recognize a right to privacy. Oddly Jarvis wants to assign this essay to personal motives on the part of Warren and Brandeis (press coverage of a daughter’s wedding?), saying that, “it’s not known precisely what raised Warren and Brandeis’ hackles” (65). This is an entirely disingenuous reading of Warren and Brandeis, as if it is some outlier essay that has to be explained by a personal vendetta against the media.

What Warren and Brandeis actually argue in that essay is a idea that Jarvis should probably consider. Warren and Brandeis are not arguing that technological transformation has yielded a threat to privacy and that we must respond by passing new laws (that’s the secondary concern of the piece). Rather what Warren and Brandeis argue is that technological transformation has yielded a new question of what it means to be public and private. That is technological transformation should force us to rethink, consider a new, answer lingering questions about privacy. What technology does is change the definition of what it means to be public and private. What Brandeis and Warren argue is that the founding fathers understood the importance of being private, that being private was an essential part of the “right to live.” So the constitution protects a range of legal rights that preserve this “right to life.” Given the technology of the late 1700s the framers protected people against certain kinds of invasions into their persona, for example unlawful search and seizure. Warren and Brandeis were concerned that technologies now enabled privacy to be breached in new ways. Technological transition requires the court to “define anew the exact nature and extent” of the protection the government provides to the rights of the citizens. Their central point is that technological transitions require a rethinking of legal values and frameworks, rendering past ones useless. Technological changes produce changes in what it means to be public and private and thus requires legal intervention.

To see how this is the case we only have to turn to another one of the sources Jarvis seems to very selectively read, danah boyd. Jarvis raises boyd’s research to point out that teenagers do preserve privacy online and value it (it is difficult to tell if Jarvis thinks this is good or bad or just is). But boyd’s research isn’t just about how teenagers maintain privacy online, but more importantly how socialization is fundamentally different now that we have online social spaces. Having socialization be informed by these online spaces Facebook and Myspace means that there are, according to boyd, four aspects of socialization that make it different from prior moments in history: persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences. Indeed boyd’s very point is that now that socialization is in part augmented by these digital devices we need to rethink what it means to be public and private, from both a social standpoint and a legal one. The idea isn’t to throw your hands in the air and say “concerns about privacy are over-rated, we have always had those kinds of fears, lets just all be public and get over it.”

In some sense it is probably not fair to hold Jarvis to the standard of you should read ‘x’ philosopher or critic on the history of technology. He is not an academic who studies such things, he is an academic whose focus is journalism, not the long complex debate about the intersection of technology and its effects on society. But in the same respect I don’t think it is setting the bar to high to ask him to accurately portray the work he is dealing with. (His reading of Habermas is phenomenally bad, he actually portrays him as arguing the exact opposite of his position, and misses several of the main points. Since this has become a much talked about point maybe I’ll address it later, but snark aside Morozov’s critique here is pretty much accurate.)

But if I could prescribe one critic for Jarvis it would be Walter Benjamin. I won’t attempt to recount all of Benjamin’s work here, or even try and sum up the entire essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rather I will try and point out one major thesis that pretty much unwinds all of Jarvis’s book.

Written at the moment where the photograph is becoming popular, Benjamin addresses the question of whether or not the photograph is art. But rather than argue whether or not the photograph is art, he makes the rather deft move of realizing that this is a bad question. Instead of asking is the photograph art, Benjamin realizes the better question is to ask, “what does the existence of the photograph do to our concept of art.” In other words when new technology comes about we need to ask larger questions, not is this or that art, is it good to be public or private, but rather what does the internet do to the very concept of publicness and privateness.

Back to Watching Naked People in the Shower

“At first everyone will like it, but then there will be a fundamental change in the human condition.” -Josh Harris

And so back to where I started with Josh Harris. I could probably write several articles on how poorly Jarvis reads his sources and the degree to which he abuses and misrepresents those he quotes, but I am sure Jarvis would respond with the excuse that he is not an expert on these scholars and he is still working thru them. Fair enough. But although he says he has watched We Live in Public, I can’t help but wonder if we have seen the same movie. For Jarvis the movie serves as an example of taking being public to the extreme, mostly with benefit, and more importantly as a glimpse into the future. The section closes with a quote from Harris: “The audience are going to demand self-surveillance,” to which Jarvis adds, “It has already begun” (160). Jarvis is so unreflective and nonchalant about this observance that it is hard to know whether he realizes the full impact of this conclusion.

Harris’s point, and one the movie makes over and over again, even explicitly in the form of a narrative voice over at the end of the film, is that an increase in the scale and pace of our sharing will fundamentally alter what it means to have relationships, to be social, to be human. (Harris is at least as much a prophet of publicness as is Zuckerberg even if Jarvis doesn’t want to listen to his warnings.) Publicity will certainly have its advantages (people will order pizzas to have delivered to your house, the public can help you find your keys when they are missing–both events happen in We Live in Public), but it will have rather serious effects as well, primarily on individuals ability to build relationships.

There are two particularly telling moments in this regard, one in each of the two “experiments” Josh runs. In ”Quiet: We Live In Public,” one of the participants observes that it is mentally draining to live in “Quiet” because of the lack of privacy. It is difficult to get to “know” anyone because you know everyone. The participant rather astutely observes that intimacy is a matter of revealing to people secrets which others do not know. In other words one of the ways we express trust, build intimacy is share with others our private lives, but if we have no private lives building that intimacy becomes all but impossible.

But Jarvis knows this, even if he is not willing to say it in the pages of the book. He cops to this. He will consistently note that while he is public the one thing he does is shield his family from the publicity he chooses to accept for himself. Why? If he really believes being public aides society why not open his private life to more public scrutiny, there is clearly information there that could in some way be valuable to others (112). The answer is not simply that he is respecting the privacy of his family (why respect privacy if publicity is the value? why let his family succumb to the engineered overhyped message of being private?), rather Jarvis knows that to keep that relationship healthy it requires a certain amount of privacy, not things that are not  shared, but rather things that are only shared between a small select subset of people (family). Quiet “developed into a perhaps predictable bacchanal of discord and decadence” (116) not because of the people Josh picked, or the rules he set (these certainly might have helped but the lesson is only that these sped up the process) but rather because of the “heat of the spotlight” a spotlight which Jarvis suggests that we now all uncritically and unreflectively bring on ourselves.

The other particularly telling, and difficult to watch moment, in the film comes during Harris’s second experiment, called just “We Live in Public.” He and his girlfriend Tanya have a fight, part of which involves violence on his part, ultimately leading to a break up. But that particular scene is just part of a larger problem in their lives, as Tanya observes in the film (and Jarvis mentions in the book), that the two were unable to have constructive conversations with each other. When they had a disagreement each would retreat to the net to rally supporters, get feedback from the crowd, in other words fight in public. The result is that each became more interested in winning an argument than resolving a conflict, not a productive situation in which to find oneself. Indeed, it is pretty easy to find examples of what Tanya and Josh experienced now in our daily lives. Individuals now frequently fight and break up with each other “in public” on Facebook, spurring vicious arguments, which quickly degrade due to the contributions of the crowd. One thing the speed of the internet is good at providing for is the dividing up of teams. I am on this persons side. Team #kanya. Team #Taylor. Indeed Jarvis himself is now a victim of this dynamic as he and Morozov have a very public argument about the merits of this book, that really isn’t at this point at all about the content of the book but rather about scoring snark points. While I doubt that Morozov and Jarvis would ultimately agree, I think it is pretty clear that the publicness of the controversy has increased the vitriol. For Jarvis and Morozov this is probably not a concern as I don’t see them trying to build an intimate relationship anytime soon, but when this dynamic starts to inform all of our social relationships the consequences are fairly significant.

And this is where I will turn to one last critic that Jarvis enlists in his book, but whom he seems to totally miss the point of (sorry I couldn’t resist and this one is important). Throughout the book he frequently cites Daniel Solove who is easily one of the most important critical voices on the question of privacy. Solove’s writing is rich, diverse, and nuanced in its consideration of the question of privacy. And this is what makes Jarvis’s use of Solove so abysmal. Let’s just take one point. Jarvis quotes Solove as saying “Privacy seems to encompass everything, and therefore it appears to be nothing in itself” (93). So Jarvis is leveraging the Solove quote here to back up his point that privacy is a slippery, almost impossible to define value, that is overrated. But let’s look at the Solove quote in full context. It is true that in Understanding Privacy Solove critiques “many existing theories of privacy” (8), arguing against the “abstract incarnations” which are “not nuanced enough to capture the problems involved” (8). But, he is in no way arguing that privacy is “protean” or undefinable, rather he is responding to critics like Judith Jarvis Thomson who say that “nobody seems to have a clear idea what it is.” (7) Indeed the very point of Understanding Privacy is to build a clear and precise definition of privacy and express why it ought to be valued. It is almost as if Jarvis stopped reading on page 8. I won’t try to summarize all of Solove’s argument here (maybe at a later time), but what he argues, borrowing from Wittgenstein, is that privacy is best understood as a family of concerns, best “conceptualized from the bottom up rather than the top down” (9).

But even if Jarvis had missed all of this argument maybe we could give him a pass, he says the Dewey arguments (from which Solove draws) are not really his concern, and maybe he is not a Wittgenstein scholar. Still the larger error comes when he either intentionally reads past or fails to recognize Solove’s central point:

Privacy is a public good.

This is in one sentence Solove’s central argument. Somehow Jarvis misses this. Solove is arguing that contrary to the idea that privacy is an individual good that must be balanced against the social good, privacy and publicness are both public goods that must be balanced against each other. To strip a society of privacy, whether thru legislation and government surveillance, corporate data mining and surveillance, or engineered individual choice is to significantly alter that society. And in Solove’s terms, and I would agree, alter for the worse. Privacy is a necessary part of social living. We all act differently in private then we do in public, and maintaining that difference is crucial to developing productive citizens. A public world with an always on panopticon carries serious social consequences.

So here’s the deal.

Jarvis writes this book because he believes that publicness is threatened and we must learn to appreciate it, or lose its advantages. But this is a spurious claim at best. We are (and I think this is beyond arguing) more public than we have ever been. We are not faced with a scenario whereby we are going to slide into a world where people are completely private, or the law steps in to outlaw being public, or corporations prevent us from being public. What is happening though is a technological change which is calling into question the lines upon which we draw privacy and publicness. And the real issue is making sure that we have serious thoughtful conversations about what this new balance is going to be. The real threat here is that we lose control over our ability to decide what should be public and what should be private. Corporations and governments are increasingly making decisions sans individual input about what is public, determining for us where the line about publicness and privateness should be drawn. This is a question that is fundamentally about power and control and Jarvis just wants to give up on it, “lets just all become public.”

And this is why I think this book is dangerous. It’s clear to me that this book is written to affect policy and convince people that change is coming, we should just get on the bus or be run over. But that is not at all the case, technology is not a run away bus (as if we are stuck in the movie Speed) that we either chose to board or get run over by. And Jarvis is certainly making the rounds, promoting this book, suggesting this idea. “Don’t worry. Be happy. All this publicness is actually a good thing. Let’s all just be public and the world will be a better place.”

We are not becoming less public, or losing control over our ability to be public, that’s a ridiculous argument. What is happening though is that we are losing control over our ability to decide what we want to be public, and what we want to be private, losing control over this to corporations and governments who are making this decision for us. This is a bus we don’t have to get on, a bus we don’t have to be resolved to ride on or get run over by. We can choose to intervene and figure out legal, social, and technical solutions to make sure we maintain a balance, but more importantly give individuals the ability to find a balance in the digital media ecology.



Shirky’s claim is still that digital technologies fundamentally alter a society which uses them, a claim I agree with (indeed I agree with Deen Freelon’s grouping and characterization of positions). Social media allow people to synchronize beliefs and coordinate actions in a way and on a scale not previously possible. What interests me about this article though is not necessarily its central claim that social media pose a unique set of problems for abusive hierarchical power structures, and that increasingly it will be harder to both censor these technologies in an effort to resist change and participate in the global economy, but rather a question that arises out of this proposition. As part of its coverage of the MENA uprisings, the Wall Street Journal conducted a short conversation with Shirky asking him to elaborate on this article and his thinking about the ongoing revolutions. This interview is particularly informative because the interviewer, Alan Murray, is skeptical of Shirky’s claims and presses him on a few central propositions and ideas.

The most interesting moment though comes at 14 minutes and 30 seconds into the video and lasts for about six minutes. At this point Murray accepts that social media can empower revolutions and instead shifts his questioning to whether or not social media can produce stability. That is, while social media might be good at yielding uprisings, is it good at producing a stable democratic power structure? At the first take, Shirky sidesteps the question responding that the real question is whether of not democracies are stable, but eventually they get back to this point. So, if we accept that social media (even if just for the sake of argument) empowers revolutionary or resistance movements, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they enable the installation of stable power structures. It could be the case that a social movement which empowered by the use of social media actually hinders the formation of stable power structures. It isn’t really a matter of does democracy produce stability, rather a question of whether or not social media enables the construction of a democracy, or slightly different even if revolutions which utilize social media perhaps yield a different form of governance and power distribution. It is entirely possible that one could get an unstable democracy.

In the Egyptian case this is often framed around the terms of the Muslim Brotherhood. While it is clear that the protests were not led by the brotherhood there is a significant concern that the Egypt revolution would yield a power vacuum allowing another autocratic regime to take power. While these technologies might be very effective at altering power dynamics or accelerating social unrest, long lasting social stability is by no means a given. One can see how this fear is warranted when we look at the characterization of the Egypt revolution as leaderless, or people led. As Shirky points out during the early days of the Egyptian revolution ElBaredi returns to Egypt and tries unsuccessfully to instill himself as the leader of the movement. This is not to suggest that there were not leaders of the revolution (this is a debate that I think will need more analysis) but rather there were not leaders in place as we typically recognize them. This became even more clear when the regime wanted to try and negotiate with the protestors-there was no leader with whom to negotiate.

This is also one of the central concerns surrounding the debate about the timing of the elections. Many Egyptians feared that a quick election would favor The Muslim Brotherhood or civic institutions which already possessed at least a small amount of organization and ability to mobilize, while harming the more fractioned less developed groups. Without established political parties it is perhaps difficult to have a democracy operate as we currently understand it.

Indeed this was a question that came up during the Theorizing the Web panel I was on last April. Both Henry Farell and Marc Lynch mentioned something about this concern, the lack of preexisting political or civic groups which could help to shape the public sphere/discussion in a way that it is important for a functioning democracy and election. I opined at the time that while some groups (like the Muslim Brotherhood) might have wanted a short term horizon for the election, believing it favored them, and others might have wanted a longer horizon in order to organize, that there might have been another response from the loosely organized groups (the ones that relied on social media) and that would be to push for an even shorter term election, where the ability to organize on Facebook and via other social media might serve as a serious advantage. (I’m not sure this is at all the case, but I definitely think it is worth considering.)

While generally I am a cautious optimist when it comes to the question of does social media enable people to resist and coordinate against oppressive regimes (more on the side of Shirky on this, less on the side of Morozov), I am far more skeptical on the question of whether or not social media powered revolutions yield stability. They might be really good in the short term, but the attributes which make social media powerful in the short term, might also be a hindrance in the long term, not so good at long lasting stability.

One way to frame this problem is to think of it in terms of counter-power versus anti-power (not my frame I have borrowed this from several authors I have been reading lately). Counter-power is a way of resisting and overcoming a current power structure by opposing it with another sort of power. These power relations might be symmetrical or asymmetrical but what is at stake in this type of conflict is replacing one power structure with another. I think in the majority of revolutionary conflicts we can see this type of resistance, where another group, not the one currently holding power attempts to replace or unseat the current one. This type of power alignment doesn’t even necessarily constitute itself through violent resistance, one can thing of the Democrats versus Republicans, legal battles, or revolutionary conflicts. The notion of anti-power though is slightly different, where the effort is to resist the current power structure not through some sort of affirmative replacement, destroy this with that, replace this with that, but rather an effort to just undo the current system. Anti-power is a little easier to build a coalition around, the framing issue is resistance to the current structure as opposed to counter power whereby a group not only shares the idea that the current power ought to be replaced but a shared agenda of what ought to replace it.

As Joss Hands points out in @ is for Activism the oft cited example of the “People Power Protest II” in the Philippines, the one coordinated and fostered by text message, was actually an example of counter power as it was supported by, enabled by, and encouraged by anti-Estrada members of government. In this case the movement had a clear organizational structure, not only to remove Estrada but to replace him with Arroyo. (I realize the history and story here is more complicated, but I am more interested in the framing that Hands provides.) The point here is that one power structure was replaced by another which had a clear sense of how to fill the power vacuum.

In the case of Egypt the movement seems to me more constituted by anti-power, get rid of the current regime, and less around any other institution replacing the existing one. In other words there was no part of the movement ready to take power once Mubarak was ousted. In the late stages of the protest this struck me as one of the issues, no one person or group or even diverse group of people had the ability to negotiate with the government. The protestors were clearly saying no to Mubarak but what kind of power they were saying yes to was less than clear. Now this kind of frame for thinking about protests is not particular to social media, indeed you could have counter power or anti power via a range of media. But I do think that the speed and organizational structure of social media probably lends itself to being easily used as a force for anti-power, an easy way to organize a massive “no,” but deciding on the next step might be the more tricky part. And again I think this next part, what power comes next, isn’t a unique problem to this media landscape, but I do think it is worth considering the possibility that while social media might be particularly useful for organizing and coordinating people to resist power, acting as a destabilizing force, the very factors that make it so useful in this regard might make it less useful, indeed counter productive to (or at least it might require conscious reworking/re-engineering, for example how to resist the accelerating forces which are good for resistance but an anathema to slow deliberative democracy) democratic organization.

Clearly there are a lot of forces in play now in Egypt, and reducing the current power vacuum and political power struggle to an effect of social media would be ridiculous. But, I do think it is worth considering the ways in which an anti-power resistance movement struggles to reconstitute itself as power. And in the case of Egypt I think we are seeing how this plays out. At the Theorizing the Web panel Mark Lynch made the counter point to this, suggesting that because the younger generation had practice in organizing and utilizing social media tools that in the long term it might actually lead to greater participation and a healthier public sphere. That the young individuals who compromised a significant piece of the revolutionary anti-power might in the first election prove less than organized, without a leader, in the second election cycle they would clearly use the tools, techniques, civic institutions and political awareness to shape that election.

The answers to these questions will only come after the power struggles have played out, and what is happening in Egypt is different from Tunisia. From listening to protestors and the citizens of Egypt there is evidence to suggest that the people are moving away from anti-power and towards forming a stable government, resisting attempts of other autocrats to consolidate power, maintaining the strong political engagement of Tahrir Square.

I do however think it is important to separate these two parts of the question, social media as power resisting platform and social media as power consolidating platform. My suspicion is that social media itself is heterogenous to the way that governments and bureaucratic institutions organize power, thus making it difficult for social media enabled revolutions to fill a power vacuum that they are so good at creating.

This past April I was fortunate enough to attend the Theorizing the Web Conference at the University of Maryland (as a side note easily one of the better conferences I have ever attended). Following lunch, George Ritzer gave one of the keynote addresses in which he argued that sociology, specifically sociology research which focuses on the internet, could benefit from relying more on, or incorporating more, postmodern theory in its respective analysis. (In the “Title your talk with your thesis” vein his address was called “Why The Web Needs Post-Modern Theory.”)  It is difficult for me to comment on the merits of this talk with respect to sociology, not being as familiar with the discipline as I am that of literary studies, however I will say that I find his central thesis, if not the individual claims, persuasive (or perhaps more accurately, I agreed with Ritzer before his talk and was further persuaded after his talk). Theory, and particularly post-modern theory has a lot to offer our understanding of the web. (Which is not to suggest that those operating out of a post-modern theory background have the only or even primary approach, just a useful one. Indeed, I think disciplines such as legal studies, media history, network analysis, etc. all play important roles.)

What interests me about Ritzer’s talk though was the theorist who was held up as the privileged example, the theorist whose work he argues might be most useful for understanding the internet: Baudrillard. This is not an entirely unusual claim, even if not often framed in this matter. That is, that when engaging in understanding the net we ought to think about theorists who have spent time theorizing the virtual, understanding the virtual, talking about simulations etc. To paint very broad brush strokes here, which are not entirely true, but I think are mostly correct, and illustrative of the trajectory of thinking about the web, theorizing about the web has often happened along the lines of theorizing about the virtual. And so while Baudrillard might not play a central role in the way that many critics have approached the web, certainly the “virtual” or a certain thinking about simulations and the virtual which is loosely influenced by the works of those like Baudrillard has informed our approach.

This is not to discount Ritzer’s thesis, again I am not familiar with sociology or the degree to which American sociology has embraced or rejected theory, certainly if one wants to think about the web as a virtual space of simulations and virtual worlds, then Baudrillard is a good place to start. And, a more nuanced engagement with his work would probably yield some fruitful insights. The problem is that I think this is already a wrong way to frame the analysis of the web. That is, while theory might be useful for illuminating the complex set of influences the existence of the digital network yields Baudrillard is the wrong place to look, even if the recent history of web theory would seem to point to the primacy of his work.

As a way of looking at this problem consider Bolter and Grusin’s canonical text Remediation. Originally published in 2000, it is characteristic of much of the early thinking about the public internet and the related digital technologies. Two technologies, one fictional and one real, serve as the primary examples which drive the argument. Fictionally, Bolter and Grusin frame their case by using the 1996 film Strange Days and the SQUID technology. In the film humans are able to wear a skull cap, and jack into another narrative world, experiencing another narrative as if it were real, the ultimate virtual reality experience. Indeed virtual reality, the real technology, serves as the other important example throughout the book, the “ultimate” artistic experience which is both immersive and interactive.

I don’t mean here to practice some sort of reductivism, reducing this book to these two examples, or to argue against Bolter and Grusin. Indeed this text is one of the ones I am most likely to teach in my “Theory of Digital Media” classes, as I find the dual logics of immediacy and hypermediacy particularly useful as a frame for thinking about the aesthetic logic and discourse informing digital media. Rather I want to suggest that this texts focus on the virtual is representative of a certain line of thinking in digital media or theorizing the web that, until recently has been particularly dominating. And in this respect Ritzer’s comments seem helpful: If we are going to theorize about these virtual technologies, we ought to try and leverage theorists of the virtual. The problem though is that these technologies are anything but virtual.

The virtual angle though, again to paint broad brush strokes which are only mostly true, seems to me to have informed both the early imaginations of the widely used public internet (film and fiction) and the early discourse about its cultural effects (both within the academy and the more public discourse). Consider the internet narratives of the 90s and early 2000s. Films like Strange Days were not an aberration, indeed Strange Days was more an early harbinger of a range of films that addressed the idea of what would happen as we all start to lead virtual lives via avatars, jacked into the the net. The Matrix probably serves as the most ubiquitous example here, reflecting a sense that the virtual worlds will be so intense, reducing physical bodies to a mere battery, while simultaneously representing a sense of unease about this type of future.

One can notice the same pattern in the almost fetishistic obsession that academics had about Second Life. It seemed that every conference I went to after its launch in 2003 contained numerous panels discussing the importance of virtual worlds, from creative, critical, and pedagogical standpoints. And this focus on virtual worlds extended past the academy. Numerous academic institutions as well as corporate ones purchased space in Second Life, believing virtual worlds to be the future and preparing to stake their claim there. Indeed, popular discourse and media coverage focused on Second Life as the digital future, the virtual future we were all about to live in. One could say that the early internet of Neuromancer had been replaced by Snow Crash, rich 3D worlds inhabited by avatars represented our future. The key piece of this vision though is the sense that online lives will be different from real ones, the virtual being the key component.

That is not, however, the internet we ended up with. Second Life is clearly past its prime, most of the virtual stores opened there long since abandoned, and now when I attend conferences I hear only the occasional paper about it. Some might disagree, and maybe there will be a revival, but in my estimation Second Life is dead, has been for some time. While marginal interest may remain, it clearly is no longer the focus of our digital futures.

What we have instead is Minority Report. Tellingly this is also the conclusion Grusin reaches in his newest book Premediation, in which he argues that while Strange Days was the ur film of the late 90s, the film which turned out to be more descriptive of our digital future was Minority Report. For the most part Grusin leverages the film to suggest that it is important because of the figure of the pre-cogs, the ability to predict, control, and prepare for the future (hence the title of the book pre-mediation. But I want to extend this even further, pointing out how the vision that the film offers us, seems to be pretty close to the one we ended up with.

One could point out how many of the technologies present in the film come pretty close to ones that we now have, everything from self driving cars (admittedly a popular sci-fi vision), to robot drones, and billboards which customize themselves based on the viewer. Even the idea of the pre-crime unit seems more and more plausible each day. It isn’t however the fact that the film got these individual instances of future technology more or less correct, but rather that the film portrayed no vision of an online versus offline self. Rather than imagine networked technology as a separate space, in Minority Report it is portrayed as something pervasive and all encompassing.

This it seems to me is one of the principle points to understand about the digital network. The digital network isn’t a separate realm. It isn’t that we are leading virtual and real lives. Rather the digital network is pervasive in the real world, has substantially altered the way that the real world is structured. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the net to treat the space as virtual, it is very real and very present. I think this is a point that some critics (again both in popular accounts and more academic ones) frequently miss—for example when parents ask how can teenagers socialize virtually online via Facebook. Faceboook isn’t a virtual socialization it is part of (a significant part of) socialization in general. The online isn’t a separate self, it isn’t even an extension of the self, it is part of the self.

And so here is the problem, while many people spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the internet envisioning virtual worlds and virtual selves, we missed thinking about the internet that developed, one of ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, personalization, prediction, and persistent surveillance. To be sure there were many books written during the late 90s early 2000s, during both the growth of “cyberspace” and the rise of Web 2.0, which chose to focus not on our virtual futures, but a future of ubiquitous computing networks. But, these narratives and critiques were far less prominent and usually didn’t constitute the focus on analysis. Perhaps one of the more interesting exceptions to this would be the work of Howard Rheingold who in 1992 wrote a book about Virtual Reality, but by 2001, in Smart Mobs had already made the shift to focusing on ubiquitous computational technologies, pointing to them as the key to understanding the contemporary shift. In each case Rheingold seems to be at least 5 years ahead of the critical curve.

The central tenant I want to push here is the idea that the first step to theorizing about the web is to recognize that the web is not a separate realm, not an online space which needs theorizing, but rather a significant part of our current cultural landscape. There is no online versus offline and continuing to think of it as such hinders our ability to ask the important questions. I think that this was a problem (self included) in the way the internet was theorized during the late 90s early 2000s. By treating these two spaces as separate (cyberspace vs. meatspace) we ended up focusing on the wrong things and a host of critical concerns ended up being pushed to the margins. Everyone was busy talking about Second Life and The Matrix, but what we built was more like Minority Report.

Which brings me back to Ritzer. At the end of his talk I said something to the effect of you make a strong case for theorizing the web, but you seem to be theorizing a web that doesn’t exist, that is you are talking about the web of Second Life when what we got is Minority Report. (Zeynep starts this critique at 35:00 minutes in, and my question comes right after that.) I think this was probably the wrong way to ask the question, or a poor phrasing, for it counted on Ritzer being familiar with both Second LIfe (which he seemed to be) and Minority Report (which based on his answer he didn’t really recall). I should have probably explained my thinking a bit better, how I got to the question rather than just asking about my conclusion. Which is to say, that I think we do need to theorize about the web much more than we do (although the first move I might want to make would be to claim that there is no web, or at least not singular web of which we could speak, but I’ll save that for another post), but when doing this theory I think it is important to get beyond thinking about the possibilities and limits of the “virtual” or “cyberspace.” In short don’t think about Second LIfe think about Minority Report.



Forum on the Middle East and Africa

Apr 5th, Conference Center, 2-3:30pm.

Kacem Ayachi, 2009 Political Science Ph.D. Graduate A new era of mass politics in the Middle East

David Parry, Assistant Professor, Emerging Media and Communications The role of social media in the protests and the lessons that can be learned

Robert Lowry, Professor, Political Science Large-scale institutional change and conditions for stable democracies

After the presenters each make brief comments, the floor will be open for questions from the audience.

“[T]he internet is more like a social space than a thing; its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effect of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effect of hammers is not to make people hammers . . . but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany.” -Mark Poster, “CyberDemocracy,” 1995

It seems to me that the speech in 2010 was organized around the tension between using the internet to promote freedom, the internet as the samizdat of our day, and the dangers that the internet posses to cyber security (how to maximize the first, while recognizing the threats of the second). Indeed the remarks on one level were structured around the idea that on the one hand the internet is a wonderful tool for promoting freedom of expression which if let lose upon the despotic regimes will yield democratic change, and the threat that these new technologies create in terms of dangers from hackers, threats to business, piracy, etc. Most of the speech though, was focused on promoting the notion that the Internet if used correctly is a great (primary) tool of 21st Century Statecraft.

Flash forward to yesterday’s speech and the rhetoric has shifted, now the organizing logic is around two examples: Egypt/Tunisia and Wikileaks. The question has congealed around these two case studies, how to enable the internet as a tool for promoting democracy in foreign countries, while ensuring that is doesn’t threaten US national interests. While their is still a recognition that the internet can be used for good or ill, the examples of good and ill have become far more focused. Indeed in the most recent speech protecting the internet as a space of commerce is almost entirely absent. Commerce only gets a mention in so much as it relates to the dictator’s dilemma, the idea that these new technologies are necessary for economic advancement (thus countries must accept them) but also usher in the means for removal of any authoritarian regime. In short the question Clinton poses is how can the internet not be a threat to US sovereignty while simultaneously be used as a tool to undermine despotic regimes (the sovereignty of other countries). This is an impossible position to try and uphold, the contradiction is readily apparent (but, for what it is worth, Clinton’s more recent speech marks a far better understanding of this contradiction and the role that the internet plays).

I think the first thing that is worth noting is that the cyber-utopic rhetoric has been vastly scaled back. Gone is the sense that one gets from the first speech that the internet is a force, a primary cause of social change. Indeed at several points Clinton remarked that we should recognize that “the internet did not do any of those things; people did. . . . Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future.” While in her first remarks one got the sense that internet freedom was becoming the battleground for 21st Century statecraft, in this second speech it is clear the focus is on a much more complicated picture of which the internet is merely one part. Free speech is a necessary but not sufficient cause for change, and the internet is just one factor in free speech, not the only one (even if it is a really, really, really, large one). And in the closing section of the speech Clinton recognizes that circumvention is not the only solution, and that solutions are likely to be multiple and not singular (read Haytack).

There is considerably more focus in the second speech on the way that the internet can be used for ill not by nefarious economic actors (pirates, hackers, identity thefts, the examples from the first speech) but rather by political actors (The Revolutionary Guard using the internet to arrest members of the Green Movement).

But what is striking about the speech is that its not organized around this tension, that the internet can be used by despotic regimes and those seeking social justice, but rather that her remarks then turn to the question of how to use the network to simultaneously foster liberty and security. That is her remarks aren’t about how to threaten the security of foreign dictators by enabling the liberty of citizens around the world, but rather about how to promote liberty around the world, while simultaneously protecting our security.

This I would like to suggest is an untenable position.

To be sure Clinton tries to separate out cases, and weave a path that argues our security can be protected while we foster the liberty of others, but ultimately the example she uses proves the impossibility of such a path. On the one hand citizens need access to information and the ability to freely exchange ideas with each other in order to form a civil society but on the other governments need the ability to decide what should be made private and public.

Nowhere is this tension more clear than through the case of Twitter. So, while Clinton is praising Twitter as a tool for spreading free speech and enabling conversation, the US government is simulatenously engaged in a court battle against Twitter to gain information about its users as part of its pursuit of Wikileaks. While Clinton argues that Wikileaks exposed US activists to greater risk (I actually haven’t seen evidence that this is true), human rights activists could also point out that Wikileaks exposed the way that governments and corporations undermined human rights. One could insist that the problem is theft and display of private information, but it is theft and display of private information that the US wants to foster, just theft and display of despotic regimes private information. If Wikileaks was only “stealing and displaying” info from governments that the US felt were anti-democratic I doubt it would serve as one of the organizing examples.

But Clinton gets this (or at least her speech writers do) when she says that the internet isn’t the real issue here, values are, that we need to decide what values will govern and determine this public space (lets leave aside the rather large issue that the internet really isn’t public space at all but rather a corporately controlled space). The problem here is nothing about the internet guarantees that US values will come to be the ones that determine the principles of its governance (sure there are historical reasons like influence over ICANN that mean the US has a greater say, but this influence is neither determinate nor guaranteed).

And here is where we get the most important line in the speech: “In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.” The subtext: nothing about the future of the internet guarantees US sovereignty or exceptionalism, because those 5 billion, they aren’t US citizens. And, let’s just add that it isn’t at all clear that those 5 billion people are going to be able to agree on what those “values” are.

And this is where I think the important debate is: Is the internet as a technology subject to the same analysis as other technological developments? Can it largely be understood within the history and philosophy of technology, itself being shaped by the milieus into which it enters, determined by other forces, economics, politics, or human nature? or Is the internet a heterogenous technology? Is the internet so transformative a technology as to render prior means of understanding the philosophy of technology, if not useless at least making them outmoded? Does the internet act as a force transforming economics, politics, and human nature?

For me this is the place in need of more discussion and deeper analysis. I think there are arguments which suggest that we ought to consider the digital network as a transformative technology, and positions which (although I am not personally persuaded by them) argue that the digital network ought to be understood in a continuum of technological transformation. If you read Deen Freelon’s excellent post sketching out a rough typology of where different people position themselves on the relation of democratic culture to the digital network  (no really take a minute go read, it is a good starting point for mapping out the terrain . . . seriously at least go look at the chart). Notice that the three of us grouped together under the rubric of “net as public sphere platform” would all (I think it is safe to speak for all three in this case) argue that the digital network is a heterogenous technology, radically transformative. Having said that I think there are probably differences within this position that are important to articulate and discuss. I want to start to get at those differences, not by discussing other people in that grouping, but rather articulating why it is I think the digital network is heterogenous (profoundly so) in relation to prior technological moments.

The Digital Network is Radically Transformative

Let me begin by saying to effectively make this argument I think requires more than a moderately lengthy blog post, indeed would take several books, so this will necessarily be brief and generalize. But, I think that can still be useful in helping develop the kind of typology that Freelon lays out, articulating a this is where I am coming from to begin to put our positions into conversation with each other. So for what it is worth:

1. The Digital Network Transforms Printing Press Culture: For roughly 400-500 years we have been in the Gutenberg Parenthesis, a culture of communication in large part determined by the printing press. Indeed as Clay Shirky often argues one of the only ways we can understand how radically transformative the digital network is, is to look to the historical precedence provided by the printing press. The list is long and again we would need books to discuss this matter (many already have been written), but it is hard to overstate the transformation brought about by the invention of the printing press and its adoption across Europe: Protestantism, Bureaucracy, Scientific Method, Liberalism, Capitalism, Nationalism, Intellectual Property, Language Standardization, Salon Culture . . .

Now there are generally two schools of thought about this, one represented by Eisenstein in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in which Eisenstein argues (in a more techno-determinist position) that the technology of mechanical type transformed European culture (massive number of books equals social change). The second, represented by Adrian Johns in The Nature of the Book, argues that the technology was by no means determinate that the changes were at the level of cultural institutions developed around the rise of the printing press (think here of how intellectual property and copyright had to be hashed out by various parties). While this debate is important, and I think not surprisingly that both Johns and Eisenstein have useful analytic perspectives, the key is to realize that once you get this mechanical invention there is no going back, as Shirky frequently points out, for the first time in history you can copy a book faster than you can read it. We could argue about the details here but it seems pretty clear that this was a hyperbolic change in the rate of information production and sharing.

The digital network by analogy is another one of these moments, indeed the change is even faster and more substantial than the one brought about by the invention of moveable type. Changing the means by which information and knowledge are produced and shared significantly alters the culture. While inventions such as film and television also mark changes they did little to alter the broadcast structures, even radio I would argue is not nearly as transformative as the printing press or the internet.

As an example here place all the arguments about how the internet transforms journalism, most of these debates take place around how the new means of communication (the internet) transform the practice of journalism, or also consider all the arguments about the death of the book.

2. The Digital Network Represents a Different Mode of Cognition. This one is a bit harder to see, or argue about, but in the same way the invention of writing transformed consciousness, I think the digital network also transforms consciousness. The theoretical precedence for this argument is found in the likes of McLuhan and Ong. Ong famously, and I think persuasively argues that oral cultures are markedly different than cultures with access to writing. For Ong the invention of writing transforms the cultural not only on the level of how people interact with each other but at the level of individual cognition. One of the chapters in Ong’s seminal work is titled “Writing Restructures Consciousness.” One (small) example here that Ong uses is think about how knowledge moves from lasting only a short time (spoken, oral) to having substantial staying power (write it down). Suddenly you don’t need to consult the one person who is the store house of expertise, you consult a written text. For Ong the move from orality to written literacy is one of the most significant moments in culture, and importantly, although he doesn’t really fully develop this point, due to electronic communications we are moving to a secondary orality.

Again lots to discuss here and there is much more nuance to this argument than this post can represent but I think the general arc here is correct. Whereas, Eisenstein and Johns locate the transformative moment in the mechanical means of knowledge and information transmission, Ong argues that the transformative moment happens at the invention of writing because it transforms how we think about the world, not just the rate of communication.

In this bin, as an example place the arguments about how privacy and publicness change on the internet, or how attention changes now that we have the digital network. Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous gets at this as well in the way that the internet allows us to move away from taxonomic classification. Information has for sometime been treated as analog, now that we can treat it as bits, that changes many things.

So here is the thing, the digital network is transformative on both of these levels–It is as if you had the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press at the same time. I think once we understand this we start to understand how transformative this moment is.

We cannot change our technological prosthetics without subsequently also changing ourselves. This is not to make a technological determinist argument, our tools determine who we are (indeed I think this kind of “toolism” is a really dangerous line of thinking), nor to argue that it is simply a matter of how we use the tools (technology is neither good nor bad, but it’s not neutral either). The point I would argue is that technology and our definition of “the human” are co-determinate, they develop together. So, as our technology changes we also alter our definition of the human, what it means to be human. (Want the long and persuasive form of this argument? Read Prosthesis.)

What This Means for Democracy

I would argue that most of our ways of thinking about democracy arise from very specific and historically contingent views about individuals (humans) and how they relate to each other (the social) and subsequently the government. The idea of liberal democracy comes about (it is no coincidence) during the rise of print culture. And, here is I think one of the most crucial points: our notion of the public sphere is based on a very specific idea of rational political individuals which developed at the same time as print culture.

One doesn’t have to go very far to see how this works. Habermas’s arguments about the development of the public sphere are intimately connected with the rise of the printing press and a reading public who would come together to rationally debate matters with each other and reach a consensus. As Habermas points out during this moment there was a transformation of the concept of public and private predicated in part on the existence of a reading public. Again we can quibble over the details (and the details are important) but I think the central point is key here: The notion of public and private that we tend to rely upon for discussing political interaction (liberal democracy) develops at this moment in part because of the techno-socio landscape of the time.

Now many people have argued that Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere is misinformed, and proposed alternate models to explain how the public sphere forms and expresses itself to the government. But, I think the internet necessitates that we take a further step. What if our very notions of public and private are transformed? What if our very notions of individual subjectivity are transformed? What if our notions of what it means to be human are transformed?

This is why I think older models of the public sphere are not adequate to the task, they simply cannot account for the changes brought about by the digital network, which both transforms our speed and ease of connection, and the way we think about the world (cognition). It is not that we need a new model of the public sphere, but rather because our notions of public and private are being irrevocably altered that we need entirely different models for thinking through how publics (not even sure this term works) form, operate, and govern.

None of this suggests that the digital network yields democracy. Indeed those who argue that having the internet brings about democracy might as well be arguing that the internet brings about magical unicorns galloping on rainbows bringing lollipops to everyone. But those that argue it isn’t transformative I think are equally deluded. And to be sure the existence of the digital network does nothing to guarantee that the next moment will be a more socially just one. Indeed there are substantial reasons to be concerned about the digital network (as well as reasons to be hopeful). This is why I would argue it is important to study, investigate, critique discuss these matters, in order to at least try to help insure that the changes brought about by this transformation are ones that yield a more just society.



Last night Gladwell published this short piece for the New Yorker. Gladwell revisits his earlier essay which argued that the ties produced by social media (weak ties) are not as important as social ties produced by face to face iteration (strong ties), and thus social media is not a particularly advantageous platform for fermenting social change. While I disagree with much of that essay, it seems worth investigating/considering, the degree to which social ties produced by social media are substantially different from those which develop from relationships not mediated thru social media. Bizarrely though, his most recent post actually suggests something quite different. Rather than argue that social media has effects on social organization (replacing strong ties with weak ones), Gladwell argues that social media is of little to no-consequence:

“But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

The point for Gladwell is that asking how the revolution happens is the “least interesting” question one can ask. Again bizarrely this seems to contradict his earlier piece which argued that “how” a revolution happened was of crucial importance for understanding the nature of the ties people develop. It would seem that the only consistency between these pieces is an attempt to downplay the significance social media plays in social movements, indeed arguing that it either doesn’t help, or is of no relevance. The first Gladwell is worth considering, the second less so.

But where Gladwell misses in this second article is realizing that the discourse has shifted, moved beyond does social media cause a revolution, to how does the existence of social media change the warp and the woof of a social movement. This question is far more interesting, and far more important. The “Twitter Caused the Revolution” headlines have been more or less replaced by more nuanced accounts of “what role did social media play in these protests.” Few have been willing to argue that social media is not part of the equation here, or that social media’s role is not worth investigating. This strikes me as a fairly substantial shift from the “Iran = Twitter Revolution” headlines of a year and a half ago. Indeed, I have even detected a subtle shift from the Tunisia analysis, whereby understanding of social media’s role has become more nuanced and refined. I have spent the better part of two days now reading thoughts and blog posts from various places around the web attempting to learn what others have to say about these events and I see little evidence from academics and leading thinkers in the field that Twitter = democracy arguments are still alive. (Even CNET argued that there is no such thing as a social

To be sure “cyber-utopism” as a discourse is still a dangerous and prevalent myth. Indeed all one has to to is see recent comments by Iranian activist and noble prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who said, “So, I can tell you that thanks to technology dictators can’t get a good nights sleep,” to realize that the belief that social media = social justice is alive and well. Clinton’s 21st century statecraft ideology is alive and well.

I think it is also important to distinguish here between the analysis of social media and the Egypt uprising, I and you, are likely reading, and the one that still circulates amongst people who are not particularly and specifically invested in the matter. That is I think if you asked people who do not spend hours a day on Twitter, or reading articles on the web written by experts on the subject, the impression might be distinctly different. I have had numerous conversations (four in the airport alone on Sunday) with people who all articulated the belief that social media was largely responsible for the uprising, and that do to social media we are likely to see all of Africa revolt, and demand democracy, a cascade effect produced by the internet. Which is to say, that although the debate has for the large part moved past cyber-utopism, the effects of that debate still linger. And in this respect it is not the internet that matters so much as how we talk about the internet (see Thesis One of Morozov’s book).

But that doesn’t account for the most recent article by Gladwell, indeed it makes said article even more academically irresponsible by recasting and repeating a debate that most (all) experts have moved past. Gladwell misses an opportunity to help develop questions about the role of social media in pursuit of social justice, instead choosing to play the “nothing new here, move along” card. One doesn’t correct for the cyber-utopic discourse that still exists by utterly dismissing the effects of the medium under discussion. This just creates the “yes it is,” “no it isn’t” debate which has proved not only inadequate, but at least partly responsible for the less than effective social media foreign policy. We need better.

The Medium Matters

It strikes me as ignorant to argue that social media (or any communication tool for that matter) produces a revolution, causes are multiple, no singular cause produces a revolution, the least of which being something like Twitter. But it also strikes me as arrogant to assume that the tools we use doesn’t also alter the way in which we communicate. This is a rather simple and often lost point in McLuhan’s thesis that “the medium is the message.” McLuhan wasn’t arguing that content is entirely irrelevant to a specific communication, the bastard simplified interpretation of that quote, instead his thesis is that the medium is the social message. This is crucial: The point is that the existence of a specific technology and its widespread adoption fundamentally alters the society which adopts said technology. (This is alters not determines.) Now we could argue the extent to which McLuhan was being a technological determinist (I read him as being more nuanced than other critics have), but will save that debate for later (a much longer essay). For now the important point is to understand that the medium matters. As McLuhan says you can focus on what the train is carrying, cornflakes or Cadillacs, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that the existence of a network of rails and trains alters the social structure of a society. If you believe the medium doesn’t matter, that content is the real key, you are ignoring the degree to which a tool changes its user, you are taking “the numb stance of a technological idiot” (“Medium is the Message”).

Even the Greensboro protest, Gladwell’s example from the original article, demonstrates this point. As many have argued, and Mark Anthony Neal reminds us, that television was central to how the civil rights demonstrations played out. This is not to suggest that TV is responsible, or even that civil rights legislation wouldn’t have passed without television. Rather, what McLuhan’s analysis shows, and critics have long recognized, is that the how of something getting accomplished certainly shapes the what is accomplished, to try and separate the two is to be a “technological idiot.”

One Lesson From Egypt

I think it is pretty clear, and maybe I’ll build this case later, that what happened in Egypt and Tunisia would have looked much different, played out differently if the how of the revolution had been different, if social media had not been one of the tools used as a means of communication. And to see why this is the case one needs to look not at the particular uses of Twitter or Facebook (whether people were Tweeting or updating about cornflakes or Cadillacs) but rather at the existence of the publicly used internet.

From an internet studies standpoint (not the protest as a whole, just what I study) the most interesting moment was the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down the internet. On January 28th, amidst increased activity, the Egyptian government shut down citizen access to the internet. Only one internet service provider, the Noor Group (which is largely responsible for corporate connections, the stock market Coca-Cola, etc) remained connected. As the Noor Group only provides roughly 8% of the internet traffic in Egypt, and with the other big four service providers following government orders and cutting access, most Egyptians were mostly cut-off from the internet. (The mostly is key here, as we discovered Egyptians started to find ways around the blackout.) It is worth noting that the government also cut mobile phone service, so more than cutting off the internet, the government cut off hyperconnectivity, reducing protestors to more traditional means of communication. (Mubarak seemed to be trying to have both sides of the dictator’s dilemna, enabling economic communication while restricting all others.)

As many have observed this was an “unprecedented move” by a nation-state. While other countries have “pulled the plug” on the internet, namely Burma in 2007 and Nepal in 2005, this is the first time that a country with such a large internet penetration had entirely shut off access. While Iran heavily filtered the internet, and drastically slowed connection speeds, they stopped short of using the “kill switch.” Also important to note is that in prior cases it was the government acting to kill centralized routing, rather than intervening as Egypt here did at the level of the ISPs. Through leveraging influence on the ISPs Egypt managed to shut off the public internet.

But here is the deal, while the Egyptian government could mostly shut off access to the public internet, they couldn’t shut off the internet public.

That is, while the government could shut down the hardware of the internet, it could not shut down the social effects of the digital network. In the same way a public is fundamentally changed by the existence of print technology, a public is fundamentally altered by access to the digital network. This is what makes the Egypt case different from Burma and Nepal. In these other two cases the internet was not widely used, and certainly was not accessible by a substantial sector of the public who relied on it, and used it to maintain and foster social ties. Keep in mind that when Nepal shut down the internet in 2005 there was no Facebook or Twitter which they were shutting off, same goes for Burma (mostly). So while in other cases the government was shutting down access to information from the outside and controlling the flow of news, in this case Egypt was shutting down the way that a substantial portion of their populace was communicating.

Compare this situation to China where the government can shut off access to particular Western services (Facebook or Google even) but the general populaces would remain largely unaffected because the public uses Chinese based services and we can begin to understand how the public which was shaped by internet use in Egypt is substantially different than the ones in other cases. Tellingly the Egyptian case is far more similar to the Tunisian one.

And so, when the government in Egypt chose to shut down the internet, they could shut down the trafficking of information along those channels, but they couldn’t shut down the public that was already created by having already communicated and interacted along those channels. One of the most important things to understand about the internet, is there is no separation between online and offline. What happens when one is connected and actively using the digital network substantially effects what happens even when one is not actively connected and using said digital network. Cutting the wires cuts the hardware, it doesn’t cut the already changed public. Indeed cutting the hardware at the point the Egyptian government did might actually exacerbate the problem, depriving people of what they see to be a substantial public good (imagine who upset the average American gets when Time Warner interupts service).

Government oppression works in part through creating a lack of trust between members of the public–you never know if you can trust your neighbor. Key to the formation of a public which can resist the government is a space in which individuals can form ties with each other. In this sense it matters little whether those ties are formed during the making of LOL Cats or through posting to a political website, what matters is that it changes people’s social ties. The weak ties Gladwell mentions in the original article are indeed weak, but weak ties are the stuff on which publics begin to form. As Tufekci argues, the internet creates a latent public sphere, ready to be called into being given other contributing factors. A public built on LOL Cats is much different than a public which has never had access to digital networked media.

This means that we have a new level of complexity to add to the dictators dilemma. The issue isn’t just one of economic interest (let the internet into your country) versus information control interest (restrict the internet so as to control the flow of information) rather there is another level here, once the internet has been turned on (or at least the social internet enabled) turning it off proves to be a dicey proposition, for the same channels that people use to trade political information are the same channels they use to trade social information. It is as if rather than shutting off broadcast TV the only choice available would be to shut off the electricity. Sure you can kill all the electrical power, but that has far greater effects than merely ending broadcast communication. Throwing the kill switch even when you have one, is not necessarily the best of options.

Lest you think I am being utopic here let me be say that it is not at all clear to me that these changes are progressive or that a digitally networked public naturally yields to a democracy. As numerous examples show a digitally networked public can just as easily be used for social ill as for social justice, nothing guarantees that civic engagement yields civic progress. And once more as governments recognize that publics form online there is much they are likely to do to control these spaces (see China). What it does mean though is that a public with the internet has a substantially different relation to their government than a public without the internet.

Update: Tufekci argues something similar, while outlining some important ways that we can understand how this protest was different.



In my reading Morozov has three separate but intertwined theses in The Net Delusion, and it is important to distinguish between them in order to both engage the book on its own terms and understand its limits/shortcomings. And more importantly I want to make the claim that it is only by understanding how each thesis builds on the prior that one is able to understand both the ground Morozov is trying to stake out, and why his position does or does not resonate with other readers.

First Thesis:

The first, and in my estimation the most important, and certainly most effective of theses in The Net Delusion centers not around the internet itself, but the way that we talk about the internet. This is a crucial point to understand, at least on this level, Morozov is not talking about the internet, but talking about how we talk about the internet. Our discursive production about the internet and democracy is far more important here than many of the actual practices (that comes later). Morozov’s claim here, and I think he is pretty persuasive on this point, is that cultures, especially Western liberal democratic cultures, essentialize technology, treating it as the primary (sometimes only) ingredient necessary for success. Large sections of the book are dedicated to examining and exposing the history of this techno-determinism. As he aptly points out the list of technologies thought to bring democracy and peace to the world is long, and history is filled with their broken promises, and even worse at times anti-democratic effects. The telegraph, the railroad, phones, fax machines, airplanes, all technologies which at their inception were surrounded by rhetoric which promised to radically alter geopolitical structures, all failed to deliver on the democratic utopia promised. (The quotes Morozov pulls from the history of the airplane are particularly humorous on this account.) Although he only mentions Fukuyama in passing, the idea that technology is about to bring an “end to history,” encapsulates this line of thinking (6).

More importantly though Morozov connects this line of thinking to Western diplomacy and a history of engaging with non-democratic countries. This argumentation is Morozov at his strongest, not when he is actually talking about the nuances and direct effects of a particular technological invention, but rather demonstrating how said particular advancement gets incorporated into public discourse and subsequently affects public policy and diplomacy. There is a kind of toolism (my word) which is especially “rooted in the history of the Cold War” (6). Vocabulary and metaphors inherited from the Cold War, according to Morozov, still influence our policy making decisions, a serious mistake: “Cold War vocabulary so profoundly affects how western policy makers conceptualize the internet” (42). This is a problem because these metaphors, inadequate to the Cold War landscape certainly don’t apply now, “all metaphors come with costs, for the only way in which they can help us grasp a complex issue is by downplaying some other, seemingly less important, aspect of that issue” (43). So the critical error here is politicians responding to rhetoric instead of history (48).

This conclusion is fairly persuasive, and Morozov pulls up example after example to bolster his case. The fact that he can so seamlessly weave comments from Ronald Reagan, Cold War era diplomatic practices, and neo-cons with “Internet Freedom” diplomacy should certainly give us pause. Indeed Obama’s state of the union address last night would be just another case of how this rhetoric and cyber-utopism plays out. Obama so easily called on Sputnik as the metaphor to drive our nation forward, while arguing that cyberspace offers us great promise, just like “outer-space.” Key in this lineage is Hilary Clinton’s 21st Century Statecraft speech given at the newseum, cited throughout The Net Delusion. Her speech works only on condition that you associate Internet free speech with the idea of samizdat, when it is not at all clear that samizdat played the significant role she assigns it, or that the internet can by analogy be called the “samizdat of our time.” While it might be comforting, to think that supplying people with Xerox copiers gets you a democracy, this kind of rhetoric relies on a monocausal, or billiard ball causality, that simply doesn’t apply.

In this sense Doctorow’s critique that Morozov relies on “quotes from CNN and other news agencies who are putatively summing up some notional cyber-utopian consensus” is misplaced. It isn’t that cyber-utopism can be assigned to any one individual, again as Doctorow points out many of the thought leaders in the field are anything but utopic, but rather careful thinkers who see both sides of the issue and the complex layer of problems, but rather that cyber-utopism is something which circulates at the level of national discourse. Cyber-utopism isn’t a “straw man argument,” it isn’t something associated with a particular individual (although one can point to individuals which hold this position) but rather that it is something which circulates in the national press, in public discourse, and subsequently and most dangerously in public policy. I am all for Ashton Kutcher using Twitter to compete against CNN and punk Ted Turner, but when because of his Twitter influence he gets named to a State Department delegation, one has to admit that something strange, and not all together good is afoot.

And so while I think Cory Doctorow is right to point out flaws and missteps in The Net Delusion, I think he misses that he is not the audience, or not the primary audience. Doctorow clearly understands the nuances of internet architecture, policy, legislation, and activism, he probably doesn’t need persuading that Iran was not a Twitter revolution (although they would probably disagree about its role, neither would assign Twitter primary causality). But there are many out there who do need persuading, or need showing, that this kind of technological determinism where Western diplomats assume a particular technology automatically produces freedom is not only a fictional version of history but more importantly a bad basis for current foreign policy.

If you still need convincing that Morozov is right on this account, all you have to do is turn to the book’s two strongest examples: Iran as Twitter Revolution & Haystack. To this day I think the American public associates the events that happened in Iran as a Twitter revolution, and while the media is a large part of the reason why this perception exists, those that champion the importance of social media in spreading democracy also bear some of the responsibility, or at least Morozov wants them to. And again with Haystack the proof is in the pudding so to speak. It isn’t as Doctorow points out that the problem was that Haystack wasn’t transparent (indeed this was a problem), but rather that Haystack was so easily backed by, gained the attention of the US State department, without any sort of rigorous analysis. Certainly journalists are partly to blame here (championing Austin Heap, adding him to most influential lists etc.), and journalists that made this mistake are one of the targets of this book, but that journalists are not critical of technology like Haystack, and that the state department is so quick to jump on the promise of a particular technology for liberating people insures that mistakes get made, mistakes which are not reversible. In this regard though Morozov’s book already feels a bit dated, as journalism surrounding Tunisia was far more fair in its understanding of the role of social media, although I won’t hold my breath for the state department to give up on its cyber-utopia-techno-determinism, especially at the level of public rhetoric. (Although I do wonder how much this book would change if you swapped Iran and Haystack for Tunisia and Wikileaks.)

This is what we would call one of the warnings Morozov offers: cyber-utopism is bad government policy. It is not that those working on making the internet a more just place, the EFF, the Berkman Center, etc. are cyber-utopians, but rather that cyber-utopism still prevails as a discourse at the level of the public, journalism, and public policy, and that this type of techno-determinism-utopism has a long history we ought to try and avoid repeating; people’s lives are after all at stake here.

There is one other cautionary tale in here, that Morozov doesn’t spell out as much as I would like, but is worth noting before I move onto the second thesis in the book. The cyber-utopic-techno-determinist rhetoric which informs public policy, especially foreign policy has one more danger: a military-industrial-surviellance-cyber complex. There is a lot of money to be made here and we should expect companies against our own interest to leverage the “quick fix” of a particular technological tool to make money at our expense and engineer a social world against our own best interests. (I think this is a point that Morozov, Doctorow, and Shirky would all agree on.)

It is for this first thesis alone that the book should be read.

Thesis Two:

The second thesis, is not as strong as the first, at least in my estimation. That is while at least mostly true, I think it isn’t as nuanced as it needs to be, or as persuasive as Morozov perhaps wants it. But a good portion of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that the internet can just as easily be used by authoritarian regimes to oppress, surveil, and deprive its citizens of liberties as it can be used for social justice or advancing democratic aims.

Morozov tries to persuade his readers that this is true through a long series of examples. And it isn’t that these examples aren’t true, or shouldn’t give us reason for pause, but rather that I felt at times that Morozov was pilling on, example after example, giving his readers 20, 30, 40 (I lost count) ways in which authoritarian regimes can use these technologies for nefarious purposes, without really providing the necessary intricate analysis. In contrast to the first thesis where he demonstrates a consistent problem through a historical reading, painting a clear picture of how technological advancement is misunderstood, these sections of the book feel more like Morozov is just pointing and saying “look over there, see how easily (insert evil regime) uses this new fangled tech for dastardly deeds.” It is as if Morozov wants to convince us by the shear volume of examples, rather than connecting and weaving the examples together. Ironically, when I teach, this is actually one of the things I point out limits Shirky’s books. Morozov only gives us examples of social media technology used to bolster authoritarian regimes, never both sides of the example. Which means when he argues against someone like Shirky, Shirky can just say, “but I have all these examples where it does,” wherein each side just keeps hoisting up examples as if an example in and of itself is convincing. Sure Hugo Chavez has a Twitter account, but I’m not sure that means anything, or it certainly doesn’t mean the internet strengthens Chavez’s power, it might, but it might also mean that Chavez is now using communication means beyond his control, and has less power. As Doctorow rightly points out in his critique the footing is now a lot more equal, sure Chavez has more followers, but dissidents can also use Twitter. It is a lot more complicated than pointing out examples and say, look here.

Not surprisingly some of Morozov’s strangest analysis happens here. In the list of things to worry about Morozov cites the dangers of police audio surveillance, or the ubiquitous presence of cameras, but why are those examples here? All technology is not the internet, and while the growth in ubiquitous surveillance has occurred at the same time as the rise of the digital network those things are by no means coterminous. If anything the internet helps to level the playing field in that regard by giving surveillance powers to citizens, or at least helping to make citizens aware of the surveillance powers of the government.

This is unfortunate, for Morozov has some fairly strong examples worth pursuing here, and by focusing on those we can get a more complicated picture of activism in the age of the internet. The strongest point raised here is that those who champion the internet as a tool for democracy or social justice often assume that allowing people to connect with each other more frictionlessly will yield a more just society, when indeed there is little evidence to suggest this is the case. Again as Morozov points out civic engagement does not necessarily yield social justice or democracy; groups can organize, i.e. civic engagement, for unjust/undemocratic purposes as well. Groups bent on oppressing others can just as easily use Facebook to organize, mobs get more powerful in the networked age, that doesn’t mean they get more just. The examples here are many and when Morozov cites them and explains them they are particularly powerful. Want to know what justice looks like on the internet? Sure you can point to a group of school kids organizing a walk out, but Morozov can point to 4chan justice. How do you encourage one without encouraging both? (And again in fairness Shirky does the same thing just in reverse, notice all of his examples in Here Comes Everybody are positive, except the one of anorexia, which he manages to place a positive spin on.)

The historical and theoretical literature on this subject is pretty vast, and I think worth considering more in depth than Morozov does. To be sure he cites one of the better books on the subject, Amory’s The Dubious Link, which demonstrates civic engagement doesn’t yield social justice, that other factors are more important. But I just wanted more here, more than the argument by example, which is so easily refuted by argument by example from the other side.

Third Thesis:

This is where I get off the bus, or at least start to significantly disagree with Morozov. Morozov in my estimation seems to be arguing that there is nothing particularly new about the internet. That is that we can understand this moment as homogenous to the prior, the net is just the next step in technological change (I don’t think he would call it evolution), and nothing about this technology fundamentally re-orders power or the way that power operates, or if it does it only enhances these power dynamics (often for the worse not the better) not revolutionizes them. To be sure this is a subtle thesis throughout the book, not one as directly argued as the other two. But to see how this operates I point, not to the book itself but to a column Morozov did for The Browser outlining what he thought were the five most important books on the philosophy and history of technology. Now I am not going to break down the list, you can go read it yourself, but it is pretty clear to me that given the books he selects, and his take on them he is 1. firmly against techno-determinism. 2. Against any philosophical or historical take which argues technology is revolutionary, instead treating technology as transformative but transformative with a continuous narrative, influenced by other stronger forces such as politics and economics.

The last sentence in that article is particularly telling, “It boils down essentially to whether the internet is so unique as a technology that it even defies the conventions of philosophy of technology as a field, and whether it requires its own set of principles and assumptions.” It seems to me that while Morozov wants on the one hand to argue that the internet is a big subject, but also wants to argue also that it is not a radically new technology. Indeed the other half of cyber-utopism that The Net Delusion spends a good deal of time discussing is internet-centricism, a focus on the internet almost to the exclusion of understanding other forces. In fact this was Morozov’s response to the Doctorow piece when he tweeted, “Ironically, Cory’s review has convinced me that Internet-centrism – not cyber-uoptianism – is the real problem with Internet discourse.”

It seems to me that Morozov has a particular, not very optimistic, view of human nature, which leads him to the conclusion that any technology, while perhaps altering human relations, cannot be finally determinate, other [largely negative] forces will always over determine the technology. A particularly telling joke/aside in this regard is when Morozov suggests that cyber-utopians and internet policy makers clearly haven’t read their Hobbes (xiv). While surely policy makers could benefit from reading political philosophy I am not sure I would start them out with, or even encourage Hobbes. Morozov’s bend towards the negative ends up being on display throughout the book where he will quickly point out that a particular technology can be used for ill, but only reluctantly, often with caveats, concede that these technologies can also be used to promote social justice. At one particularly telling point he says, “Will some of that influence be positive and conducive to democratization? Perhaps, but there will also surely be those who will try to stir things up or promote outdated norms and practices.” (252, emphasis added) Why perhaps and surely? Why is the good only a perhaps and the ill a surety?

And this is where I think the important debate is: Is the internet as a technology subject to the same analysis as other technological developments? Can it largely be understood within the history and philosophy of technology, itself being shaped by the milieus into which it enters, determined by other forces, economics, politics, or human nature? or Is the internet a heterogenous technology? Is the internet so transformative a technology as to render prior means of understanding the philosophy of technology, if not useless at least making them outmoded? Does the internet act as a force transforming economics, politics, and human nature?

To be sure I don’t think this debate is by any means settled, I have my own opinion (here is a hint this project is called profound heterogeneity), and I think we should be clear about this debate and what is at stake. I think one of the weaknesses of The Net Delusion is that it isn’t as clear about these stakes as it could be, arguing by example (see above thesis two) to make this point, which unfortunately can lend the book to be read as an “old guard–cynical” approach surrendering to the “status-quo” before the battle is even over (as Tufekci argues). I am not sure if this is Morozov’s purpose, but the sense that one gets from the book that we need more hierarchy, more policy wonks, more of the old-guard, old structures, certainly lends to the reading that it is (at times I actually wondered if I was reading Richard Clark’s Cyberwar). And maybe we do? I wouldn’t want to make that argument, but there are certainly reasoned arguments to be made in this regard, and at its best The Net Delusion hints towards what those would be, and where those who want to make that case ought to be looking.

One last closing thought I think this gives us insight into the Shirky (and now Doctorow) versus Morozov debate. Shirky and Doctorow argue from the perspective that the digital network is radically transformative, not understandable according to prior models, and find examples to bolster their claims. While Morozov seems to argue its not and finds examples to prove his point. Unfortunately these debates often end up being about examples rather than digging further in to the details here of does sociality, publicness, and governance change. Sure, I can say look isn’t it cool that this guy got his cellphone back when the police couldn’t help him, and you can say yeah but look people use the net to make LOLCats how does that help, or more seriously,  Doctorow can say, but the internet makes it easier to organize I don’t have to run around posting flyers, and Morozov can respond yes but now the government has a record of every flyer you ever posted, but neither approach gets us as far as we need to go.

And despite moments where The Net Delusion channels the base form of the argument, “you are going to amuse yourself to death online,” for the most part it advances the argument that we need to be more careful about how we understand the internet to affect politics.

Again, this time in the case of Tunisia, we have the rise of the “(insert Internet technology) Revolution” meme. And already it seems that I have read at least 10,000 words penned (typed) in defense of thesis that a specific internet technology (Wikileaks, Twitter, Facebook) caused the Tunisian uprising and as least as many words arguing the negative, that these internet services had nothing to do with the events in Tunisia. At least when compared though to prior “social media revolutions” narratives (“Iran Twitter Revolution” or “Moldova Twitter Revolution”) critics seemed far more aware that reducing a revolution to one particular piece of social software simplifies a complex story. Indeed on balance, as I suggested, I think I saw equal analysis on both sides of the “social media as revolution enhancer” argument. Journalists reporting on the situation seemed less likely to immediately embrace the notion that Twitter or Facebook had caused the uprising.

The notion of causality here is the important one, and as Zeynep Tufekci argues what one means by causality in this case goes a long way to explaining how one approaches the problem. Tufekci invokes Aristotle here to argue that social media was a material cause, that is, it was a medium in which the revolution played out. This does not mean it was a final cause, but simply part of the equation.

I think this is correct, and a useful way to look at the problem, although I have my reasons to doubt Aristotle’s framework (see “The Question Concerning Technology”) this at least points us in the right direction. That is, many people are asking did Twitter etc. cause the uprising in Tunisia, when any analysis adequate to the task would not ask this question, but rather more fine grained ones. The fact that we ask this question illustrates several problems with our current technological analysis/critique.

First, it demonstrates a consistent bias towards technological fetishism. That is, when an event occurs we look to place causality on a technological explanation, look for the tool which enabled the event rather than place causality in some other realm. As Evgeny Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, there is a history, particularly beginning with the Cold War of associating social change with technological linear causality. Political uprisings are caused by samizdat, Xerox machines, or faxes, when the actuality of those events is far more nuanced. And this fetishism seems always to me related to a certain focus on the “new” as if only new technology is a contributing factor. No one speaks now of a “money revolution” despite the fact that Iranians passed currency inscribed with revolutionary messages. Or, perhaps in the case of Tunisia no one seemed to argue that it was a “fire” revolution, despite fire being a key piece of technology in the narrative (one of the events which sparked the uprising was Mohamed Bouazizi’s self immolation). And finally, it seems to me pretty clear that this kind of technologically based linear causality betrays a certain cultural bias, if not outright racism, whereby one group claims a certain measured superiority over another: the idea that without a technology developed here in the west Iranians or Tunisians were incapable of having a revolution.

Second, this type of technology based criticism/analysis ends up conflating the various and different technologies associated with the internet, asking if social media caused a revolution, without demonstrating any specific engagement with those technologies. Asking, “Did Twitter contribute to the revolution?” is an entirely different question, than, “Did Facebook contribute to the revolution or was this a Wikileaks revolution?” It is entirely plausible that one of these technologies had no effect, while another was important. As subsequent analysis has shown, Tweets about the revolution spiked only during the final hours leading up to Ben Ali’s flight and following the announcement that he had left Tunisia. The story with Facebook though seems far more complex. And indeed any final analysis might show that certain technologies inhibited the uprising, while others fostered the protesters aims.

Finally, and most importantly searching for singular causes is a misinformed approach. Again as compared to writings on prior “Twitter Revolutions” it seems that critics and journalists have come around to this position, at least in the case of social media. The question is not, did social media technology cause the Tunisian revolution, but rather how did a specific social media technology contribute or inhibit the revolution. Ultimately these are going to be impossible questions to definitively answer, but I think we can at least try to answer this question from an arrange of disciplinary approaches. Asking did a specific technology cause an event is to reproduce what I referred to earlier as “billiard ball causality,” (borrowed from Proveti) the idea that events are linear, and causes and effects are singularly understandable. But if the net teaches us anything it is that events are networked together, and that causes and effects are always multiple nuanced and complex in their interactions. (Asking if Twitter caused a revolution is a bit again like asking if the political rhetoric caused the Giffords shooting, the real question is in what way did it contribute/not contribute.) Searching for linear causality might be comforting, but it is always wrong and reductive.

There is a larger problem here with seeking explanations in linear causality, connected to the first issue of techno fetishism, for in asking about the linear causality of a particular technology we end up falling into the trap of either being techno-determinists, or the reverse mistake of assuming that we are unaffected by our tools, wholly in control of the technology, unaffected by its uptake. As techno-determinists would have it, humans are determined by the technology that they use, social problems can be engineered away by technological design. For a techno-determinist it is all to easy to find the explanation to an event in a technological cause, history being determined by technology. But the opposite side is equally as reductive choosing to believe that humans are fully in control of the technology itself, that it is merely a tool to be used for good or ill, and what matters is the using of the tool. Neither position is adequate to the task of analysis, although unfortunately one of these two positions seems to underly most critique of social media. The truth is that humans and technology are codeterminte, or day I say networked together. It is impossible to talk about what it means to be human without also talking about technology, trying to analyze one side of the equation without the other is reductive. (Call this a chicken, egg problem. Neither came first, you have to have both to know that the other means.)

Humans are technological creatures, and the technological milieu in which we operate clearly changes the way we act. Having a printing press changes the sociality of the groups with access to this technology, having an internet connection also changes the sociality of a group. (And even changes how legacy media produce/re-produce sociality.) Would the Tunisian uprising have occurred without Facebook? I think again this is an impossible question to answer, and also perhaps a less than nuanced one. The better question is in what ways did Facebook affect the events in Tunisia? And I think when we start to ask that question, it starts to become pretty clear that certainly Facebook played a role, as this article points out, the number of people in Tunisia on Facebook rose dramatically during the revolution, but more broadly, and more importantly the very existence of social media changed the social relations of the people in Tunisia. That is prior to any uprising, the fact that people had access to social media (particularly Facebook) means that the type of “public sphere” they had was drastically different than it was before the citizens had access to the digital network.

Social media change (dramatically) our social structure, to then assume that this would also not change how revolutions (which are after all large scale social affairs) play out, is to ignore the change wrought by the digital network. This is not to argue that social media have a universal positive effect, I remain skeptical on this front, as it is just as likely that in some social uprisings social media might have a decidedly negative effect (either from the standpoint of enhancing state oppression or breeding complacency on the side of the disgruntled-clicktivism). We need to begin by realizing that these causalities are always multiple, that indeed social media have changed our social structure, and that while we can effect some of these changes, the outcomes are not fully up to us.