Danah Boyd at the New School

On Friday, April 13,  I attended a seminar on "Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere" at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics at The New School in Greenwich Village, the purpose of which was to discuss the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation.The roster consisted of Danah Boyd (School of Information, UC Berkeley/Annenberg Center USC), Trebor Scholz (Professor at SUNY Buffalo, founded Institute for Distributed Creative) and Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law/co-founder of globalvoicesonline.org.

Ms. Boyd concentrated on social networking sites influence on youth cultures and her focus was that our culture has destroyed youths' access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?Her most salient point with respect to the internet's ability or inability to transform politics is the difficulty that politicians have negotiating separate audiences as a politician.  She used the example of Stokely Carmichael, the black activist from the 60's.   When the highly articulate Mr. Carmichael appeared on tv he chose to use southern speech patterns akin to a preacher (analogies to the the Clinton's are too obvious to mention) and when he spoke to white audience in person he spoke 'proper' english.She made a good point that "your politics dictates where you surf" and people are basically "navel gazing". Ms. Boyd stated that most bloggers never intended to be journalists but had to make the semantic distinction for professional necessity.Professor Scholz is focused on labor and content control with respect to online contributors, e.g. what does the MySpace generation do about working for free? His discussion concentrated on the following:

1. The paradox of affective immaterial labor - very few get rich from the immaterial labor of very many.

2. There should not be a "factory without walls" and net publics should control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman's discussion was most relevant to Assignment Zero, although his focus is on net freedom and censorship in the developing world, and government and corporate interference with democratizationHe illuminated the fact that Philip de vellis '1984' Hillary Clinton spot as new step in politics - the 'remix' was actually done first by a tunisian named Astrubal to boycott the rigged 2004 Tunisian elections. According to Mr. Zuckerman, Mr. de vellis claims he never saw Astrubal's version. Mr. Zuckerman showed a few maps of internet constraints worldwide and illuminated that in some places like Ghana where there is an open press, there is little blogging because people can call radio stations to complain against the government without fear of retributionAs for his thoughts on citizen journalism, he prefers term "citizen media" and that the people at 'globalvoices' think of themselves of bloggers and not journalists.

The 'assumed identity' issue of bloggers for activists also is an issue for "citizen media" who cannot, or should not act under the cloak of anonymity.

Mr. Zuckerman was familiar with Assignment Zero and was very respectful, but what I took away from the evening from him was an understandable sense of 'good luck to you' - polite acknowledgement without enthusiasm - understandable for someone with a long record of accomplishment in the online world.. 

The assembled audience seemed far more enthused about AZ than the assembled academics.  We'll see if any accept my invitation to join AZ.