Out of Print

Try to live without Google for a week, and write down questions that you cannot answer. This would be a great experiment to see how much we depend on internet, and to see how to live without internet. With internet, we seldom go to library, we seldom picked up a copy of paper in the morning, and we seldom call up others.

Also try to live without paper and any print copies for a week and to live only with information online. Is that possible? Do you have a good quality of learning in a pure online environment?

Journalism could be one of the industries that received the most impacts after the advent of internet. Daily newspapers are losing readers, advertisers, and market values. People are talking about online version of paper with interactive communications, incorporation of multimedia clips, and active archives. The physical print papers look outdated and slow. The New York Times has its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004 and an analyst at Deutsche Bank suggested that client sell off their Time stocks.

Yet, pick up a copy of the New York Times. "All The News That's Fit To Print" is the quote on the top of the front page that catches a reader's eye. What does "fit to print" mean? This "fit to print" hints the power relation between the gatekeepers and readers. The gatekeepers, here the editors of the New York Times, have the authorities to decide what the important issues are that their readers need to know, and thus shape people's world view. When the Internet comes in, things suddenly change. The balanced mainstream media writing is questioned. The readers want more opinions, perspectives, and news on demand despite the professional judgment of news values. The Internet tears the banner of the exclusive role of a journalist and claims that everyone can be a journalist. People advocate the freedom of speech, and their ready accesses to voice their own observations.

Rachel Sterne, a young and beautiful woman, the founder of Ground Report, a citizen journalism for-profit website, hopes to, one, promote cyber democracy and two, prove that citizen journalists can make some bucks from their contributions. She has faith that people all over the world can submit their articles to this collective project. However, Ground Report has several essential problems. One, the advertising profits have not yet sustained the site. Second, the contributors were centered in the same area like India, Turkey or Pakistan, which makes Group Report sometimes look like a Turkish publication. Third, the quality of reports is not guaranteed. Nonetheless, it is still important for Ground Report to come in to make the one-dimensional world noisy, to make globalization not Americanization.

Content is king. To produce quality contents with thorough researches and interviews is still the core, whereas technical problems can be solved easily. It is like the ancient quarrel between humanism and science, sense and sensibility. We are glad that online media make news fancy; however, the traditional layouts of print journalism might still be valuable in its designed presentation, and its capacity to show readers information.

If one day, we have materials that deliver the quality of a physical paper, and give readers the equal experience of reading, I am sad but feel ok to attend the funeral of pieces of dead trees. But the substitute is not the Internet today. Online journalism has long way to go.

Internet as Public Sphere?!

Jurgen Habermas said public sphere is a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can he formed. And the access is guaranteed to all citizens. The printing press, television, to Habermas, might carry the capacity of forming a public sphere. However, when the private interest came in, and when the press catered to commerce, people began criticizing the hope for the press to gather public opinions. Internet came in as a new medium which lit people’s hope to form a public forum.

Zizi Papacharissi provided the utopian and anti-utopian view to discuss if Internet supplied a public sphere. The positive view says that internet was a medium that could help democratization, and increase politic participation. Skeptics say that only 6 % of earth population has access to the internet; internet as a public sphere harbors an illusion of openness. Both views are right. I think we do not have to put too much pressure on online media, which is never an answer to promote democracy, which is not responsible for people’s interests in talking politics, and which is not the panacea to the world’s problems. Online media is a new platform for information sharing. It is coincident that it has some capacities to revolutionize people’s ways of communication and networking. But when people have X, it is common that they would want more, they want X, Y, and Z.

It is convenient that we have online archive so that we can retrieve data easily, and so that we do not go to dungeon-like chamber trying to find an article a year ago. It’s great that we can talk instantly and simultaneously with friends on messenger. Internet is surely a powerful carrier of information. However, can internet take over print? How do print and online journalism walk forward hand in hand? Or how does internet kill print? What’s next? What is the value of print?

Foucault’s Panopticism: Discussion On Power And Knowledge

• Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. (Foucault, 1978)
  

I like Foucault’s metaphor of Panopticon when he talked about the issue of social doctrines and surveillance. Each person, no matter he is a student, prisoner, patient, employee, is participate in the

Foucault said in his Discipline and Punishment that power and knowledge attain a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. Power rested in knowledge in forms of standard answers, formulas, etc. people are willing to learn new skills, methods of calculation, or a foreign language, which make people feel that they have power because they are literate, but at the same time make people controlled by even stricter power of social norms. Knowledge advances the exercise of power: increasing people’s abilities to describe or discourse; therefore, we are living under the descriptions fabricated by knowledge—we are watched, gazed and analyzed.

We can prove that in a following example. We see people who have sex with people in his own sex as a kind of unnatural behavior in the middle age, since we have no term to describe the behavior then and they are under lighter discipline of the society. Now we say they are homosexuals, exploring what they think to analyze meticulously about their acts and motivations. They are totally visible, not in the dark corner like before. The process is similar to Panopticon, which reverse two of the functions of the dungeon—to deprive of light and to hide. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness. The progress of knowledge shed the light on many unsure places, while we create a lot of new professional terms to describe a person which make us expose more to the surveillance of disciplinary modern power, the visible but unverifiable one.

Roland Barthes “Mythologies”

According to one of the definitions in Merriam-Webster dictionary, myth is a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone especially: one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society. This was close to what Barthes’ perspective that myth is read as a value system, which is put into the social and conventional contexts. The mythical meaning of an object exists not in itself, but in the interpretations and wrapped package of norms. Barthes said: “Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message.” Why would the king who dressed like a normal man in Blue Blood Cruise be amusing? Why do people think this is abnormal? It is because people’s mythical logic of a king is different from an ordinary man. What people see in the face of superstar Garbo are the humanization of goddness, and the standardization of attraction and enchant. Also, Barthes’ discourse of brain of Einstein serves as another good example of myth, which a signifier signified not only the neutral object but a tale with imbedded analogies of great advance in science.

The danger is the power and the expansion of the myth. Even if when we think of a word: Iraq, China, Bush, Obama, democracy, food, it is never neutral. They are not only a person, an object or a location but they contain abundance of connections to what they are put in the cognition of society.

Marcuse: One-dimensional Man

One dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the maker of politics and their purveyors of mass information. (p.14)

The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split level home, kitchen equipment. (p.9)

Reviews and Questions

When I read for our class, I could not help thinking about current events and how to link the theoretical discourses to what are happening in the world. I am thinking of genocides in Sudan, Burma, and Rwanda when I read Appadurai’s explanation of violence and small numbers. Kosovo’s declaration of independence and Tibet’s demonstrations occurred to me as I read Dewey’s argument of ‘state.’ Lanier’s pioneering warning on the danger of collective wisdom prefaced the debates on whether to delete minor entries on Wikipedia. (Inclusionist v.s. Exclusionist) Stern Review on climate change reminds me of China’s economic development and hunger of resource and the consequences that could bring to the world’s environment.

As Appadurai described, we have entered an era of new war—prevailing internal wars in civilian zones and ideological external wars between the U.S. and Islamic world.

1. a. Globalization, to Appadurai, is not a buzzword of prosperity but could be a nightmare to some countries and groups. What are the dark sides on globalization?

1. b. Why are the minorities often been put as target in elections and genocide, but neglected in politics and in economies?

“At the other limit there are social groups so separated by rivers, seas, and mountains, by strange languages and gods, that what one of them does—save in war—has no appreciable consequences for another,” said Dewey. “The plurality of states is such a universal and notorious phenomenon that it is taken for granted” (p.42)

Dewey went on to discuss state:

Railways, travel and transportation, commerce, the mails, telegraph, and telephone, newspapers, create enough similarity of ideas and sentiments to keep the things going as a whole, for they create interaction and interdependence. The unprecedented thing is that states, as distinguished from military empires, can exist over such a wide area. The notion of maintaining a unified state, even minimally self-governing, over a country as extended as the United States and consisting of a large and racially diversified population would once have seemed the wildest of fancies….Our modern state-unity is due to the consequences of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant and intricate far beyond the limits of face-to face communities. (p.114)


2. In Dewey’s sense, a state to be a state seems not necessarily to have unified codes of languages, gods, and geographies. What makes a state? Why do some minority groups fight to become a state like the Karen group in Burma, Albanians in Serbia, and Tibetans and Mongolians in China? What makes them recognized themselves as different from their original nationalities?

3. Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” tried to tell a different story to criticize that market itself is perfect. Can market regulate itself? If market is perfect, why do we have Federal Reserve to monitor inflation and to set the interest rate? If market is perfect, what kind of story the Bear Spears case will tell? According to Polanyi, how do we see the subprime crisis flame across the United States? How do we see Ben Bernake constantly cut the interest rate?

I like very much about Mill’s explanation of “The Power Elite.”Mills thought that most of the power elites are born as power elites, educated in the similar environment, and shared similar values. Their status as power elites and their source of power came from their assets, their abilities in making decisions, and the reinforcement of mass media. Their power came from the contexts the power elites were in, but not necessarily originated from themselves. Mills said:

If we took one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication that are now focused upon them—then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated. For power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences. (p.10, 11)

4. Professor Moretti proposed a central point to disclose Mill’s text that if communists or peasants are going to penetrate the power elites, they are to become the power elite. What makes power elites control the power to make decisions? What makes power elites have power? What makes power elites to be celebrated, and to be wealthy? What makes Clinton Clinton and Bush Bush?

Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Benjamin wrote the piece because he sensed the transformation in the mode of production, and how the condition of production influenced the conception of art. He wanted to focus on two parts: one, the reproduction of the work of art, and two, the art of the film, and made a contract between the modern form of production and the traditional ones. He thought we entered the age of mechanical production, which brushed aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery. (p.218), and he linked this developmental trends to Fascism, propaganda, and war.

1. Benjamin referred historically to lithography, newspaper, photography, and film. In his words, lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, while photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eyes looking into a lens. A film captures the image at the speed of an actor’s speech. (p.219) A good quote captured Benjamin’s awareness of new technology: Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted work of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public. Work of art has always been reproducible, but not in ways mechanical reproduction represents. According to Benjamin, the Greeks only produced bronzes, terra cottas, and coins in quantity. However, in mechanical reproduction, we can see 100 Nemos, 50 Micky mice, 30 Buzz Lightyears, tons of greeting cards and postcards line up in stores. We cannot tell which one is the original.

2. 3. Benjamin argued that even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be—this includes changes in art’s physical condition over years as well as the various changes in its ownership. (p.220) He said that the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. (p.220) A good quote that Benjamin talked about the authenticity—The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. [He provided two reasons why the manual reproduction can preserve the original’s authenticity while technological reproduction can not.] Benjamin went on to the discussion of aura. He said aura withers in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin explained aura by illustrating the aura in nature—the unique phenomenon of a distance. (p.222) To summarize Benjamin’s notion of aura, aura lived in the uniqueness, the singularity, the permanence, the distance, and the authenticity of the original piece in museums or temples, while the plurality, the closeness, the penetration, and the availability of the work of art in mechanical reproduction killed the aura.

4. 5. Benjamin also thought that art has a crisis with the advent of the revolutionary means of reproduction, in this case, photography, and the rise of socialism.(p.224) Benjamin said the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.(p.223) He further explained that the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult, which I think he refers to religious rituals. Benjamin said the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. The traditional work of art is under protection of a palace, or a cathedral. People have to travel thousands of miles in order to see a real piece of art, like the Mona Lisa in Paris. But now we have Mona Lisa on our notebook, on our tea cups, and on our t-shirts. What matters in traditional arts are its existence, its linkage to God, its magic and spirits, and the awe in itself. According to Benjamin, with the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for exhibition of their products. (p.225) In this sense, a piece of art became a commodity, or a product. It looks like the work of art is walking down the ladder, the work of art descends from the sky, the god’s power, to the museum, and then to every household. To Benjamin, the change of condition of reproduction led a new era while art became humane and down to earth, and became available easily. He said, “For the first time in history, mechanical reproduction releases the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual… Instead of being based on ritual, the work of art begin to based on another practice—politics.” (p.223)