Television and Virginia Tech

hp4-18-07ee.jpg

I’m just back from the US, having arrived the night NBC began to broadcast the videotaped messages of Seung-Hui Cho, who had just shot 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech. I stayed up watching CNN’s coverage. It was unbelievable viewing, but not as CNN intended.

In its rolling coverage, CNN broadcast large chunks of the video, in which Cho claimed to have been bullied, compared himself to Christ, and attacked what he deemed the hedonistic, pampered lifestyles of his fellow students. Parts of the video are still available from a link on the story’s slideshow on NBC’s website. Next, CNN would show a small segment and allow ‘experts’ to analyse Cho’s words and gestures. Then another segment would be shown, and more speculation. CNN also tantalised the viewer with promises of ‘more footage tomorrow’.

At some point in the next 24 hours, the story changed. Families of those killed by Cho demanded the videos be taken off air. News broadcasters, it seemed, were fulfilling Cho’s wish by spreading THE KILLER’S WORDS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (in the words of many news sources that day). Suddenly CNN’s breaking story was: MEDIA MISTAKE. Commentators and experts now began speculating about how NBC, CNN and others could be so callous. And these debates happened on NBC and CNN, creating the spectacle of journalists reporting on themselves.

A collision had happened between news values – the compulsion to broadcast anything live, immediate, and shocking – and the values of American society. The network TV studio became the crucible for a public debate about taste, decency, and responsibility. This media event, in which the expected media coverage was incorporated into the protagonist’s actions, enabled US society to have a family gathering. Here, through television, American values could be re-asserted, 'evil' could be given a name and face, and public mourning could proceed. Network TV was both problem and solution, but how will such a story play out next time? And how far will the genre of suicide martyrdom video spread?

Blogs: the British backlash

Over the last few weeks, a number of articles have appeared in the mainstream media commenting on the attempt by Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly to create a civility code of practice for bloggers. In the UK, this debate was sparked off late last year by Matthew Taylor, outgoing adviser to Number 10. Wales' and O'Reilly's well-meaning article has given it a new lease of life.

One of the things that surprises me about the framing of these articles is how so many of them begin from the assumption that the blog format is 'now a decade old', or how it's somehow 'ten years on' and we need to 'take stock' because blogging hasn't 'taken off'. Victor Keegan writes in The Guardian that Technorati finds that there are 'only' 70 million blogs. I find this incredible. First, Radio Userland was invented in 1997 but had a miniscule user base for the first five years. Blogger.com was founded in 1999 and it too did not take off until 2002-2003. The RSS standard, arguably one of the only things that really defines what a blog actually is, was not even settled on until late 1999. The most successful all-round blogging applications were founded well after the turn of the century: Moveable Type (2001), Wordpress and Typepad (2003). Second, that there are 70 million more people (or groups of people) publishing their thoughts in a globally accessible medium than there were ten years ago strikes me as quite a significant change.

I was presenting at the UK Political Studies Association last Friday in Bath, and Dr Scott Wright made the excellent point that this framing is occurring all over the place now. He brought up the example of the finding that 17 per cent of the british public have visited the Conservative Party's website. This, too, is usually framed as 'only 17 per cent'. But if you turn it around the other way, the very fact that 17 per cent of the British public have bothered to 'lean forward' and use this purposive medium to visit the site is pretty significant, don't you think?

Politicopia

Politicopia is a new e-democracy initiative founded by Steve Urquhart and Utah citizens. It is a simple wiki based setup which enables debate on real and potential state legislature bills and other issues. As the site says, "Users create summaries of bills, pro and con arguments, comments, links, and more." My first impression is that the rigid formula for presenting the items might work against it, but it seems to working well so far. The idea of presenting contextual links is a good one.

YouTube user removes clip mocking Thai king

The anonymous creator of a 44-second video clip mocking Thailand's revered king removed it from the YouTube video-sharing Web site on Thursday after torrents of abuse from outraged Thai viewers.

The relevant page on YouTube said simply the video had "been removed by the user".

However, Communications Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom said Bangkok's army-backed administration would continue to block YouTube (www.youtube.com) as two images deemed offensive remained.

"We want those photos off the site too," he told Reuters.

Earlier, Sitthichai accused YouTube, owned by Internet search engine Google, of being heartless and culturally insensitive for refusing to remove the file.

"We have told them how deeply offended Thais were by the clip, but they said there was much worse ridicule of President Bush on the site and they kept that there," he said.

"I don't think they really care how we feel. Thailand is only a tiny market for them."

The video showed grainy pictures of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest-reigning monarch whom many of Thailand's 63 million people regard as a semi-divine "father of the nation", with crude graphics superimposed on his face.

The most offensive image to Thais was the imposition of a pair of woman's feet, the lowest part of the body, on his head.

YouTube, which has dominated the user-generated online video market since it was founded in February last year, said it was disappointed by Bangkok's move and was "looking into the matter".

"YouTube reaches a wide global audience and strives to provide a community where people from around the world can express themselves by sharing videos in a safe and lawful manner," the company said in an e-mail response to Reuters.

Criticising or offending royalty is a serious crime in Thailand. Those found guilty of lese majeste can be jailed for up to 15 years.

Last week, a 57-year-old Swiss man was sentenced to 10 years in jail for spraying graffiti on pictures of the king on his birthday in December, a rare prison term for a foreigner.

However, the generals who ousted elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a coup last September have also used the lese majeste laws to stifle criticism of themselves or their actions.

Several Web sites calling into question the southeast Asian nation's 18th coup in 75 years of on-off democracy have been shut down by the army-installed government.

When reports of the offending royal YouTube clip emerged in Thailand, the number of views rocketed by 50,000 in less than 24 hours, according to the site's own data.

It generated a lively debate about freedom of expression although the main reaction from Thais was shock and outrage -- and torrents of abuse at the clip's creator, "paddidda", who is based in the United States.

Source: reuters.com

International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking

I'm currently at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for the opening conference of the new, NSF-funded International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking led by Peter Shane of Ohio State and Stephen Coleman of Leeds. The group consists of 17 members from around the world; a great mix of senior and junior colleagues with a diverse range of interests and concerns. The meeting has been extremely interesting and fruitful so far, with an excellent programme of future events and concrete outputs, including a special issue of the journal I/S and a jointly-authored book to follow. A list of the participants:

Professor Peter M. Shane, The Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law
Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds
Steven J. Balla, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Patrizia Bertini, independent practitioner and Researcher, European Internet Accessibilità Observatory, Manerbio, Italy
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway College, University of London
Sungsoo Hwang, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Pittsburgh
David Lazer, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Jeffrey Lubbers, Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C.
Laurence Monnoyer-Smith, University of Technology at Compiègne, France
Beth Noveck, New York Law School
Kerrie Oakes, Ph.D. Candidate, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Oren Perez, Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Vincent Price, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Alicia Schatteman, Ph.D. candidate, The State University of New Jersey at Newark, NJ
Polona Picman Štefancic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor of Law, Columbia University
Scott Wright, De Montfort University, Leicester, England.

See also David Lazer's blog entry at the Kennedy School Program on Networked Governance

Open Source Policy Making

An interesting experiment being organised by Demos, the left of centre think tank, as explained on their blog.  They have produced the skeletal structure of a document and then posted it onto a wiki. Anyone can register on their website, and then edit the wiki, and so contribute to the creation of policy ideas. It will be really interesting to follow the project and see how it works out. The idea of open source policy making follows on from the release of a Demos publication last Friday, The Collaborative State.

Incidentally, for a theoretical take on how such processes work, this post on my own blog may be of interest.   

Challenges to GooTube

News Corp and NBC are banding together to create an online video presence that they, rather than Google, control. As I blogged when the GooTube deal was first struck, they were always in danger of intellectual property related weakness. The Los Angeles Times says:

"Hollywood has long been the king of entertainment. It believes that viewers will eventually get tired of the amateur videos that populate YouTube and other video-sharing sites, and that professionally produced material will win out."

They might be onto something.

Hansard Society's Digital Dialogues Project

header.jpgJust before last Christmas I was lucky enough to be at a conference at the OII which involved some discussion of the new interim report of the Hansard Society's and UK Department for Constitutional Affairs' excellent new e-democracy initiative, Digital Dialogues. The report is now publicly available and the project continues. One of the main themes that emerges is the lack of marketing in several of the initiatives, but there are some good examples of small-scale successes. The other thing I like about the approach is that it doesn't rely on just forums, but encompasses blogs and chats. Phase Two is now underway.