• Montana Journalism Review: Ethical Issues Between Blogging and Journalism

• Chronicle of Higher Education: Digital Dissertation Dust-Up: Film clips and hyperlinks in graduate theses raise tough copyright and open-source issues

• New York Times Week in Review WK1: Ideas & Trends: Not-So-Brave New World: Sci-Fi TV Runs Aground

Here’s the full bib citation:

Boese, C. (2006) “Challenging the Power Structure.” Montana Journalism Review. Summer 2006, Number 35. pp. 8-10.

Challenging the Power Structure

 

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American “town square,” the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true “commons,” spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the “commons.” But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare’s time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a “global village.” While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online “blogosphere,” people are gathering. They’re writing and editing their own customized interactive “newspapers” with headline readers and research they’ve done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term “blog” was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it’s often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The “blog movement” is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what’s being put online using blog software has very little to do with the “blog movement” per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person’s content management system. It’s like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The “blog movement” is another thing altogether, and it’s having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

What the blog movement really does is reclaim the public commons for something that could approximate participatory democracy. Bloggers are having an impact on politics in the United States, most prominently at the national level. Increasingly, with grassroots political organizing, a tool called “Meetups,”6 and citizen journalism, their impact is also beginning to be felt at state and local levels.

Why would journalists be leery of the blog movement? Perhaps its massive size 7 and cacophony of voices are off-putting. Unlike with the public square, interactive online spaces place no limits on the number of soapboxes, and interfaces make rude “interruptions” impossible. Headline feed readers assist in the sorting and editing process, and other evolving features online let readers know where the crowds are gathering in the commons, and what ideas are being discussed there.8 In that respect, the movement of crowds online resembles a political caucus, where participants vote with their feet.

A journalist wouldn’t expect every participant at a public hearing to be credible and quotable, but most often I hear journalists dismissing blogs because all bloggers aren’t credible or reliable sources. Why should they be? Would a journalist give prominence to and quote any person on the street, even the drunk that comes stumbling out of a bar?

This electronic commons is also a hybrid, because it’s a publishing space as well as a social space, and that gives a different kind of dialogic voice to the movement. While one person at a public hearing may have a nutty reason for opposing a particular change in the city law, that person didn’t used to have the power to publish that opinion and distribute it widely.

And that brings us to the most crucial issue between journalists and bloggers: power.

The folks who asked me to write this article probably expected me to discuss blogging codes of ethics like the excellent one found at cyberjournalist.net,9 or the “pledge” citizen journalists had to take at Dan Gillmor’s now failed “Bayosphere” project.10

Or perhaps they wanted me to discuss the common complaint made by bloggers against mainstream media, that traditional media methods are too cloaked in a black box and could be ethically suspect, so members of the blogging community often advocate for holding themselves to higher standards of ethical transparency than the mainstream press currently follows.

Those are all important issues because they deal with accountability and corruption, but the reason they are concerned with accountability and corruption is power. Power corrupts. If social and political power were not in play in the day-to-day workings of the mainstream press AND the blogosphere, none of this would be an issue. Until now, mainstream media has been a fairly exclusive gatekeeper to those who hold power.

Journalists approach power brokers in exclusive places on behalf of their readers/listeners/viewers. They must work with their feet in two worlds: the world of the power brokers, and the world of the ordinary people they serve. Corruption and serious ethical lapses in journalism usually happen when a power broker convinces a journalist to use the power of communication in service of the broker instead of the people. Journalists can be targets of such seductions just as surely as politicians can, because they sit at choke points of power, the power of the filter that says, “This gets published this way,” and “this doesn’t get published at all.” There are people who would like to influence that filter for their own benefit. A journalist may even see a way to personally benefit by influencing the filter.

And so long as the world determined and defined by that set of filters is the only game in town, that world rules.

But then along come the bloggers. The blog movement has risen up in open rebellion against the common practices of mainstream media in a self-appointed role as a check and balance against a non-elected, non-governmental entity that nonetheless wields great power. One major sector of the blogosphere devotes itself entirely to media criticism.

Why should bloggers have any power over huge media entities? Why should words disseminated over cyberspace, the words of millions of bloggers, amount to anything except a rising chorus of babble? If ethics are about how one uses power responsibly according to a set of values based on something other than personal gain, would bloggers need ethics if they had no real power?

A peculiar thing is happening to ordinary people in the United States. They may be participating in the public commons in cyberspace on their own time, but their employers are becoming interested in monitoring what they have to say. Unlike when you speak words into the air, words uttered in cyberspace live forever in the ethers, in Google’s long memory. And some people who have signed their names to their words online are losing their jobs over what they have written.

Generally, one would assume the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom to assemble would cover a person in such instances. However, employers who would restrict or monitor employee speech acts in cyberspace could seemingly respond, “Why of course you have freedom of speech. You are free to speak all you want, just as you also are free to not work here.”

Bloggers, dissenting radio stations with significant audiences but few advertisers, and divergent voices can be seen as a threat by powerful people who are willing to use their power to restrict such voices. Perhaps that’s because, as the writers of the U.S. Constitution understood, speech itself is powerful, simply the power of a voice speaking its truth. The kings and lords of our world amass power and wealth at levels that are hard to imagine, yet it appears some of them tremble in the face of free and dissenting speech.

What, then, is the most ethical act a person can engage in right now? What would that radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine have done? Many journalists decry the fact that a number of bloggers are not using their real names and instead adopt pseudonyms on their sites. This, they say, is a lapse in ethics and it undermines the credibility of these sites.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have to find a way to keep a steady paycheck while speaking their truths to power. Free speech uttered while warming one’s hands over a barrel fire under a bridge has very little communicative reach. Anonymity may breed irresponsibility and possibly risk libel, but which ethical value is higher, getting the story out, or putting it away to never see the light of day because the price of putting your name on it is too high?

Think of what our world would be like if the words of many pseudonymous writers in our past had never reached us, including that war correspondent and socialist Eric Blair, an advocate for clear and concrete writing and against the political use of language to deliberately lie and obfuscate. He did that all the while lying about his own identity and hiding behind the fake name of George Orwell.

Endnotes

1 “‘Blog’ Is Runaway Word Of Year.” Associated Press story at CBS News Dec.1 2004. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/01/print/main658433.shtml.

2 “Uthink: Blogs at the University Libraries.” University of Minnesota Libraries. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/.

3 “Weblogs at Harvard Law.” Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/.

4 Boese, C. Ed. (2006) “Headpiece Filled with Straw.” Retrieved 3/12/06 at http://www.serendipit-e.com/hollow.

5 I recommend starting at Bloglines.com or FeedDemon.com to try out some of the most user-friendly headline feed readers.

6 Meetup: World’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs, and groups!” Retrieved 3/14/06 at http://www.meetup.com.

7 At last count, Technorati.com says it is monitoring 30.5 million blogs (3/14/06).

8 Technorati.com is one of the most popular tools for finding out where the action is in the blogosphere on any given day. Other suitable sites are the Daypop Top 40 at Daypop.com and Blogpulse.com.

9 “A Blogger’s Code of Ethics.” Cyberjournalist.net. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php.

10 “Bayosphere Citizen Journalist Pledge.” Bayosphere. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://bayosphere.com/cjregister.

Film clips and hyperlinks in graduate theses raise tough copyright and open-source issues

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i34/34a04101.htm

http://chronicle.com/article/Digital-Dissertation-Dust-Up/20201

By PETER MONAGHAN

Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble.

Nothing unusual about that.

But it wasn’t that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it.

Her thesis is not a printed document. It was born digital, in a multimedia format full of film clips, hyperlinks to other parts of the work, and other uses of electronic media.

There was no way to measure the margins to make sure they met the university’s specifications, which are notoriously strict at many institutions. But that was a minor concern. The biggest issue was copyright. Citing a snippet of text in a printed thesis is standard procedure, but including a piece of video or a still picture, which Ms. Kuhn says is critical to explain her points, can raise the ire of copyright holders, and sound the alarm among university attorneys.

Although Ms. Kuhn lists detailed citations for all multimedia works in her thesis, she refused to ask permission to include them, because she insists that she should be able to cite them in the same way that print sources have long been cited. She says: “If you ask for permission, you’re screwed because you imply that you legally need it.”

Instead, she says, “I’m doing all that’s incumbent on me legally to establish fair use.”

The topic of the work, as it happens, is the challenges of adopting new technologies in teaching and learning.

Even though university officials first approved her dissertation and tentatively granted her a doctorate in December, they quickly reconsidered and put a hold on her transcript while they deliberated on whether they could accept the thesis. Only in late March did the university grant her degree, after a nerve-racking delay. Ms. Kuhn, now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, is among a very few students to compose a dissertation completely in multimedia format. Many dissertations now include some film, sound, or other media files. Few, however, appear to have been conceived as multimedia projects from the start.

Why not just stick to the traditional format?

“As I did my research,” says Ms. Kuhn, “I became convinced that I had to put it in this digital format, because the subject is what happens to writing, now, in this digital age. I couldn’t make the argument without the digital format.”

An Enhanced Book

The form of Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation is based on that of a regular book, but with many nonstandard features. Its online pages are heavy with text, like a printed book, but when a user moves the cursor over the pages, hyperlinks pop up, leading to embedded information. And images, when clicked on, open windows containing more-detailed captions, or a film clip, or citations. An electronic “sticky note” feature lets users record comments and reactions for their own later reference.

“I made it look traditional so it wouldn’t be completely alienating for a university user,” says Ms. Kuhn.

To produce the electronic work, she used TK3, a software platform designed by Robert Stein, research director at USC’s Institute for the Future of the Book. An acclaimed figure in new-media circles, Mr. Stein is the founder of Night Kitchen, a seven-year-old company that develops writing tools for electronic publishing.

Ms. Kuhn first secured the approval of her dissertation committee, whose members became enthusiastic after initially hesitating. When her doctorate was put on hold, committee members went to bat for her.

She assured University of Wisconsin officials she was willing to convert the document from the TK3 platform to an open-source program that Mr. Stein and colleagues have developed, called Sophie, which Mr. Stein says is specifically designed to “be alive for a long time.” The Sophie project is part of his work with the Institute for the Future of the Book, a collaboration between USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication and Columbia University. The software allows writers and readers to have conversations within books — both live “chats” and exchanges through comments and annotations.

The software does not answer the thorny copyright questions, though.

In her dissertation Ms. Kuhn discusses such subjects as what it means in the era of digitized media to reproduce images. That and, as she puts it, “why should you pay copyright fees to cite an image but not a word?”

She argues that citing works, the way one cites texts, should be enough. Copyright laws, as currently enforced, she says, “limit what can be put out there,” and discriminate against people without a lot of money. “The rich can afford to pay Hollywood for those clips.”

In fact, she does not know how much copyright clearances would cost her were she to request them. But she is certain that it would be more than a beginning academic could afford.

While the status of Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation remained in limbo, some graduate-school officials said they were not interested in helping her break down copyright barriers, even though current copyright laws have never contemplated cases like hers.

Saving a Copy

Storing the dissertation could also cause problems, says Ewa E. Barczyk, interim director of the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

The University of Wisconsin System is setting up a repository for a variety of digital documents from the system’s campuses. But the library requires that materials that are placed in the archive be “open-access compliant,” she says, so that anyone can get to them. And, she says, if Ms. Kuhn’s work is included in such a repository, that may create legal problems because copyright holders may consider the document’s accessibility a breach of their copyrights.

The university’s legal department, however, has washed its hands of the dissertation. “After reviewing the matter, we concluded that the copyright issues were the concern of the student and publisher, not UWM,” says Robin L. Van Harpen, the campus’s senior university legal counsel, in an e-mail message.

For members of Ms. Kuhn’s doctoral committee, the delay in approval of her work became frustrating. “I don’t see what Virginia did as anything less than a solid, original dissertation,” says one of them, Charles I. Schuster, associate dean of humanities. “It met all the requirements: good argument, exploratory, full references and sources, innovative.”

Even the copyright concerns struck him as misplaced. The concept of “fair use” should apply, he said, because “this is a dissertation, not a commercial property.”

Legal experts agree. “It seems to be classic fair use,” says Kenneth D. Salomon, a Washington lawyer who often represents colleges in intellectual-property cases.

Courts determine fair use by considering several questions, says Peter Jaszi, a professor of law at American University. Is the use educational? Is it for commercial ends? Does it do measurable harm to a copyright holder’s prospects in the marketplace? Are the clips unnecessarily long or numerous?

He agrees with Ms. Kuhn that images should be evaluated just as text is. “Case law makes that absolutely clear,” he says.

Of course, he says, universities’ lawyers are paid to avoid risk, but they should beware of doing so at the cost of legitimate educational and research goals.

He recommends that representatives of various academic groups, including developers of multimedia works, do what members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies have done over the last decade: formulate a document of best practices relating to fair use, and stake a claim to it.

But even court rulings, say the two lawyers, do not prevent organizations such as University Microfilms Inc., the publisher and repository of 98 percent of doctoral dissertations completed in the United States, from imposing their own rules. And, in fact, Milwaukee officials did meet opposition when they tried to submit Ms. Kuhn’s work to that archive.

The company, which is now part of ProQuest Information and Learning, has been accepting dissertations in CD-ROM format since 1996. Sound, video, and other nontext files can be uploaded to the company using an online submissions process. But those files must be in “standard” formats — and the TK3 software platform does not qualify.

Nor does Ms. Kuhn’s dissertation meet the company’s copyright-compliance requirements. Tina Orozco, a spokesperson for ProQuest, said in an e-mail message: “While we are seeing many challenges to copyright ‘standard practice’ and the scope of ‘fair use’ is being debated across academia and the global media, we are obligated to protect our authors to the extent possible and to comply with the standards set by our agreement with the Library of Congress.”

According to company policy, authors must obtain “written permission to reproduce copyrighted images, video, graphics, animation, data, and images of individuals.” When copyright questions remain, “publication will be delayed until those concerns are resolved.”

Delayed Resolution

Last month the dean of the university’s graduate school, Abbas Ourmazd, said in an e-mail message that the institution would award Ms. Kuhn’s doctoral degree on the basis of having formulated a “‘first pass’ solution to the issues raised” by it. She had “clearly earned” the degree, he said, so the university would “not wait until all issues are finally resolved.”

In addition to problems of readability and dissemination, he said, there is the obvious one of copyright. He said Ms. Kuhn’s work posed challenges because, for example, it “includes video clips nested inside other multimedia ‘quotes’ from other ‘authors.’” In such cases, attempts at clear referencing of material are “not always so simple,” he said. The university is not permitted to help a student resolve such legal issues, but officials are sympathetic to the difficulty students face when they try to, he said. Students, he said, are “ill resourced to clarify such complex legal and commercial issues.”

Multimedia dissertations are not new, though they have been few and far between. One of the first was Christine Boese’s 1998 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute dissertation about the “Xenaverse,” the cyberworld of fandom for the television show, Xena: Warrior Princess (the work is stored at http://www.nutball .com/dissertation).

Authors of multimedia dissertations have found various ways to deal with the issues that officials at Milwaukee have been confronting. Way back in 1997, for her dissertation at the University of Virginia, Constanze M. Witt, now a lecturer in classics at the University of Texas at Austin, used a multimedia format to support her arguments about the nature of early Celtic art.

“I actually didn’t have many problems with acceptance, as the time was ripe,” she says. The “nonlinearity” of hypertext suited her subject, she says. Celtic art, she explains, is “curvilinear; it’s very hard to follow what is background and what is foreground. Many images don’t have a beginning and an end; they twist and turn on themselves.”

With all that, she says, to use a linear medium would be to impose a “post-Renaissance, four-square way of thinking,” inherited from Roman and Greek conceptions of art, onto her Celtic material.

Her nonstandard format did pass muster — although, she says, “the margins lady was upset because she couldn’t wield her ruler.”

But permissions did pose problems. Some museums refused to allow Ms. Witt to reproduce images she wished to include, or allowed her to include only low-resolution versions. But she skirted those issues and used some images without permission, she says, by not making the dissertation publicly available, “although I do have an innocuous Web-site version.” On the Web, she includes low-resolution versions, with permission, of the images she had wished to run in high-resolution mode.

She has not sought to register her work with University Microfilms.

At her current institution, doctoral candidates are required to submit their dissertations electronically. But “the dissertations aren’t hypertextual, at all,” she says, noting that they must be designed to print out like book pages and submitted as files converted to Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF.

Mr. Stein, of USC, suspects that the full-fledged advent of the digital dissertation is still a ways off. “Everybody is looking at everybody else, and saying, ‘You go first,’” he says. “You’re going to see a lot of that for a while.”

http://chronicle.com

Section: Information Technology
Volume 52, Issue 34, Page A41

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/06/weekinreview/ideas-trends-not-so-brave-new-world-sci-fi-tv-runs-aground.html

(Author’s Note: the following article is archived here for fair use and historical documentation purposes only, to protect key records that are disappearing from their original locations on the web, as many print media properties are cavalier about maintaining archives and permalinks in times of cutbacks and publications going out of business.)

IDEAS & TRENDS

Not-So-Brave New World: Sci-Fi TV Runs Aground

By J. D. BIERSDORFER