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| Monday, December 29, 2003 |
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Appreciating interest 
Compare and contrast
| | I'm thinking about standards. |
| | Something Tim Bray said last Spring still ricochets around my brain: Standards have nothing to do with innovation; a good standard is what happens when an industry has basically shaken the bugs out of a technology and then, after the fact, writes it down. This is true of all the really successful standards: grams and meters, voltage, the calendar, octane ratings, TCP/IP, XML. |
| | By "we" I mean everybody who is still free to participate any way they like in building out the suite of standards that comprise the Net's growing infrastructure. It's wild and wooly, but it feels like a new frontier, rather than like another industrial project. |
| | This isn't to say (although I'm saying it to Eric Norlin here, to get him riled up for the new year) that what's happening in Identity is bad. Just that it seems highly attached to big corporations doing what big corporations do. Which is, on the one hand, civilizing the world. And is, on the other hand, making important stuff seem very dull. Which serves as a fine camouflage for all kinds of other stuff, good and bad. |
The new journalism story
| | The first story about Sander, Jay suggests, is Journalist as Citizen of the World: |
| | On the day he was killed, Sander Thoenes was a Dutchman, educated in the United States, employed In England, published in America, the UK and Holland, stationed in Jakarta, reporting from East Timor. He was fluent in Dutch, English, Russian, and Bahasa, the main language of Indonesia. He also spoke spotty French. He had lived in Moscow and Kazakhstan. He had friends all over the world; and there have been memorial services for him in Australia, Holland, Indonesia, England and now the U.S. The White House, the Secretary General of the U.N., the Dutch Foreign Minister, officials of the World Bank-- all made statements condemning his death. |
| | That is part of what I mean by a citizen of the world. But it goes deeper. As a matter of law, there is no such thing as world citizenship. Legally speaking, you're a citizen of a particular country, perhaps two, never the globe. But Sander knew how to live anywhere. He could talk to people, anywhere. He could have fun wherever he was. If he found a way to hook up his computer, play his piano, phone his friends, he was home. As a traveler, the opposite of a tourist. He had no fear of the foreign, and no felt need for protection against it. Maybe it's true that he had a gift for learning languages. As likely, he saw other languages as a gift to him. |
| | Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: "parachuting in." That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes. |
| | Here we come to the moral beauty behind Sander's global citizenship. I am speculating, but I believe he thought it wrong to report on a population when you do not in some way live among them as people. When you operate by this code, you learn their language. You hang out with them. You invite them over. When you walk the streets you begin to see through their eyes. If later, people take to those streets for a revolution, as they did in Moscow and Jakarta (or recently Belgrade), you can understand the event from below as well as from above. |
| | Sander did a lot the typical lot of reporting from above-- news stories about governments, military leaders, central banks, and currency panics. He was, after all, a correspondent for the Financial Times of London, a journal read by the business classes. He believed, according to friends, that a business reporter could write truthfully about politics and freedom, because the rule of law and the transparency of politics in a given country, the freedom people have there, amount to important facts a smart trader wants to know. |
| | Behind his simple belief there was a kind of faith-- faith in editors and readers, but more than that, faith in what the philosopher Karl Popper called "the open society." Which means, in general, a society willing to hear the truth about itself, rather than stifling free expression, suppressing the facts, keeping problems secret, letting crimes go unexposed. |
| | An open society, which is of universal value, and a market society, which is a universal fact, are, in Sander's thinking, compatible with one another. The market breeds openness, transparency, maybe even reform. Now Sander was not an apostle of global capitalism. I doubt he had many illusions about it. But he was willing to entertain one illusion, which I have also called his faith: while truth might be the first casualty of war, it is also the first condition of smart business-- to know what's going on. That's one reason he found himself reporting on East Timor for the Financial Times. |
| | I find myself thinking that journalists writing on the Web are, in fact, citizens of a world. In some ways this is the same world we call Earth, but in some ways it's a second world, with a set of conditions that duplicate or exaggerate those of the first. David Weinberger and I wrote about some of this in World of Ends. I've spoken and written a bit more about it when I've pointed to the observations of Craig Burton, who suggests that the Net may be best conceived as a hollow sphere, expanding with every member added to it, and its center a vast three-dimensional zero, so all of us are in fact zero distance apart. |
| | That zero distance, I suggest, a primary condition of Net citizenship, and also increasingly, of world citizenship as well. |
| | This conceptualization begins to get to what I was starting to talk about yesterday, when I said journals (and journalists) were, at least to some degree, outside the media circle. Which jumps us ahead to Jay's fourth story about Sander, "Journalism vs. The Media." |
| | My final tale is about the media, as something vastly different from journalism. Sander's life and death matter for many reasons. A large one for me is that he perished doing what the media no longer privilege-- and that is serious journalism, especially on-the-ground reporting from distant and troubled lands. We need to tell that story, too, or we fail to appreciate the meaning of his unintended and unwelcome sacrifice, if I may call it that. |
| | For years I have been struggling with how to put this distinction, between the media, on one hand, and journalism, on another. I think of media as the attention production business, a global project of immense reach and cultural power. It comprehends everything-- newspapers, magazines, television, movies, advertising, publishing, the selling of images, the trade in information and of course the Interent. Attention is the media's true product: your attention, my attention, the attention of our fellow citizens. Once gotten, it can be rented out and that is what advertising is. |
| | The point of having journalists around, and the point of sending them to Jakarta, is not to produce the commodity of attention, but to make our attention more productive. The "product" of sound journalism is actual public understanding-- not just an audience of sufficient size and purchasing power. |
| | But these are the words of an academic, struggling in his own language games. Now I see something simpler. One of the strange things about journalism is that people are willing to die doing it. That is not true of the media. No one would, as a matter of principle, give his life for the media-- other than a lunatic like John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in order to get the attention of movie star Jody Foster. That is insanity. Sander didn't want to die, and he did not take foolish risks. But he knew danger, and what he was doing when he got on that motorbike. |
| | We don't all write about life-threatening truths here on the Net. But we do write about stuff The Media does not, including The Media itself, and allied organizations that are clearly hostile to the Web's journalistic environment. |
| | What we cover here is much larger, more varied, and (in many cases) more important than the attention-grabbing stuff that bigfoot journals and journalists in The Media are paid to care about. |
| | At some point the size of that difference becomes apparent, even to the attention machine operators. Then what? |
So that's how it's done
| | Craig points to Dave Pollard's The Blogging Process, an "attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day." I'd like to say what I do is as thorough and formal as Dave's diagram suggests, but it's not. At least not consciously. But what Dave shows clearly is that there are journalistic processes — and opportunities — at work here that could not happen in any more "medialike" journalistic environment. |
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