Participatory Politics in an Age of Crisis: Stuart Cunningham, Eric Gordon, and David Craig (Part II)
/
ERIC
As you describe, social media entertainment changes the power structure of media organizations and the ways in which civic conversations are forming in public life. The proliferation of voices from a heterogeneous group of people is bursting with potentiality. But to what extent is this massing of voices creating an accessible, equitable, and generative public? Or is it a proliferation of cloud-cukoo lands, each of which we can pay attention to, but collectively don’t add up to a legible public space? As dialogue is fragmented across technical market-based platforms, whose infrastructure is optimized for profit, what becomes of the social infrastructure on which all of our politics rely? Arendt's notion of action is decidedly non-instrumental. It suggests new beginnings, where the actor sets something in motion without mind to objectives or conclusions. This only works if the civic infrastructure is in place to support such a thing.
STUART
What is the public space that SME occupies? It's an increasingly contested space because at the very time that it is becoming recognized as an emergent phenomenon, it is also been severely threatened by issues that constrain its potentiality. So much of this activity occurs on major commercial platforms which have become the object very rapidly of societal and governmental suspicion and severe critique. Compare the bonhomie with which the Obama administration and the platforms got on and compare that to now. We have a dramatically shifted situation where the potentiality of new voices, voices from the grassroots, people who by and large have never had a voice before across a range of multicultural touchpoints as well as geographical touchpoints are under direct assault. The potential is for this to be threatened by the baby being thrown out with the bath water as regulatory concern grows around the world. It's an existential threat to this creator culture. People may ask why do these creators for good have to work on these noxious platforms? Why can't it take place on some alternative space? This is one of the key questions that comes back to your discussion of "inefficiency" and of different potential realities. Alternative infrastructures is a really key question. We're very open to that. But the reality is that many of those alternative infrastructures carry far fewer network effects. In other words, the globality, the sheer pervasiveness of the big platforms also creates the potential for the kinds of peer to peer potentiality that we have tried to map. There is of course always the possibility of new means of communication. The platforms stand in a roiling, competitive landscape where the ones that are here today may not be here tomorrow, but we're still dealing with the infrastructural realities of network effects based on pervasiveness and we map their use by these creators for progressive potential.
ERIC
Where is platform governance at the moment and to what extent is this relying on a public to come into being through market logics?
STUART
Governance is very important and the terrible lapses of internal governance within the platforms quite rightly have given rise to all the concerns that are now being articulated through the political system, within the scholarly community as well as in the industry and the policy community. Platforms have let a massive genie out of the bottle by creating huge scale and light touch self-governance mechanisms which have clearly failed. So it’s up to the state to intervene. To be concrete, the GDPR was seen initially as outrageously interventionist in the US. It's now being seen as the way forward. With major questions of democratic deficit, Facebook is now on notice to manage foreign influence in every election cycle. To be clear, we don't take a pollyannaish attitude to these things. What we are concerned about that creators don't become collateral damage in these absolutely justified concerns raised at the citizenship level. There is a serious question here about the relation between citizenship concerns and these particular concerns around the creative potential of this new communication industry. You've quoted Arendt on "cloud cuckoo land". Let's be Arendtian about this. It's the most self-indulgent gesture to say public institutions are corrupt. This is the voice of right wing populism. But where is the emerging potential of infrastructure to seed journalism?
ERIC
Institutions provide infrastructure. Distinct from organizations, institutions are comprised of any codified moral framework that organizes social interaction. This often takes organizational form, but not always. To your question about journalism, I think we need to look at organizations and their role in providing the infrastructure necessary to build trust and legitimacy. As small, local newspapers continue to fold because of a crisis of business models, larger national or global news outlets are being challenged because of a crisis in value models. Consumers of news are questioning the ability of large organizations to filter and editorialize content because the values behind the editorial scrim are opaque, non-existent or counter to existing, strongly held beliefs. Anchor institutions like the New York Times or the BBC, even as their audiences have surged in the last few years, are having to contend with their resilience amidst a range of new social and political shocks. They are at once doubling down on discourses of truth and objectivity and creating new mechanisms to interface with publics. For the latter, they are creating engagement desks, and actively seeking conversations with communities as a form of what we call “relational journalism.” This is an investment in infrastructure -- not a speech act, but the cultivation of the context in which speech happens. On a practical level, anchor institutions are seeking ways to build trust and relatability, as a means of maintaining legitimacy and relevance. Sometimes this looks cheap, like a social media marketing campaign. And other times, it can mean entire positions or even offices devoted to questioning and understanding how news impacts people’s lives and then being responsive to those conditions. This, like all relational work, can be highly inefficient. Large organizations tend to be bad at prioritizing these meaningful inefficiencies as they run counter to established values and business models. Popular YouTubers, on the other hand, are already doing this work, as they tend to understand their role as community organizers as much as content creators. The flow of influence is clear. Legacy organizations are starting to transform, and new institutions are growing up around those transformations.
STUART
This is an important point that connects us. Platforms' understanding of governance is all about hyper efficiency. The problems arise because of hyper efficiency. The ability to scale is one of the absolutely core beliefs in Silicon Valley. There will be the continuing search for AI, for tech solutions to this. But the reality so far has been the need to hire tens of thousands of humans to deal with the very subtle questions of hate speech. These points correlate with your questions about hyper efficiency and the problems of the transactional versus the relational. One of the fundamental reasons we identify in our book for the growth of creator culture is the search for authenticity and relatability amongst young people in a digitally-saturated world. To take another German philosopher from the period, Adorno railed against authenticity, against bogus claims to authenticity in Heideggerian German philosophy. Adorno claimed it was one of the root causes of the rise of Nazism. We've got to be very careful about what he called the jargon of authenticity. But it doesn't change the fact that there is a deep search in this hyper-mediated world for what is now cliched as relatability. This is what differentiates at a level of fundamental discourse social media entertainment from mainstream media.
ERIC
Turning one’s back on the possibility of authenticity is what Arendt would call dark times. Donald Trump can speak through Twitter directly to his constituents and cultivate his appearance of authenticity. If we reject the very notion of authenticity because of its corrupt and increasingly cheap manufacturing, then we reject the public all together. It is more important now than ever to support existing civic institutions or build new ones that embrace authenticity as the result of values forward practice. In the emerging practice of engagement journalism, for example, a hybrid form between community organizing and journalism, newsrooms are seeking to understand the communities on which they report in a way that can both factor into the stories that they tell, but also into the ways in which those stories get told. This is happening in public radio stations throughout the United States. The BBC has an engagement desk. Now the New York Times has an engagement desk. Large and small media organizations are opening up in this way. Certainly, in some cases, it is a cheap simulacrum of authenticity. In other cases, it's good-intentioned actors trying to understand what relationships look like and then trying to educate and transform the organization to maintain those relationships.
STUART
This raises the question of how much do we put energy into supporting the persistence of mainstream journalism as well as alternative forms of journalism. I'm thinking of Deuze and Witschger on start up journalism. I think that you would find a lot in common with that, but what about mainstream journalism? What about the fact that most people who call themselves professional journalists are employed by Murdoch? In Australia, the shadow of Rupert Murdoch looms very large. He's the biggest employer of journalists in the country. He's the biggest single employer of journalists in the world.
ERIC
There's no necessary progressive quality to civic action, right?
STUART
David and I have focused attention on the progressive side, but there's no question that the alt-right has weaponized social media affordances. Our most immediate concern is that we introduce some balance into what has now become a tsunami of focus on the downsides of the weaponization of social media affordances. I'm thinking of all the excellent work that's done by Alice Marwick in the Data and Society Institute tracking the sophisticated right wing weaponization of social media. Being steadfast in identifying progressive potentiality and advocating for it is to our mind just as important as analysing the potential for so many social and political harms. If you think about Arendt in this context, you can't help but be buoyed by her ability to call forward in the darkest of times the potential for something good to come out of it. We name it, lock it down and map it. We instantiate it, we enumerate it, we analyze it. But that doesn't mean that we're not also very aware of future contingency: where is SME going to be in 10 years time? The future of creator governance is what we are working on now.
ERIC
I agree that it is important to highlight and celebrate emerging practices that bolster progressive goals. This is precisely what we do in our upcoming book. But it is equally important to highlight those that have “weaponized” those practices for political harms. Using words like weaponization drops us squarely into a claim on authenticity. Progressive practices are authentic, and right wing practices are weapons. While I might personally agree with this, I’m advocating for a deeper look, for an understanding of how authenticity is produced across ideological divides. Even in its weaponized form, the fundamentals are the same - Breitbart, for example, has successfully cultivated its followers by building relationships with audiences and seemingly responding to interests and needs. Its foundational narrative is that you can't trust mainstream news. “But you can trust us. We're going to respond to you and respect you. We're going to make you feel important.” This approach is present in all civic institutions - from government to media. Authenticity is not a perspective, it is the sociability of perspective. It is the space between people.
STUART
Where do we go with that? Go back to Arendt for a moment. At the time she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was inconceivable that she could have adopted the position she did. The position that everyone expected was that these people were monsters. Her insistence on the banality of evil was so unacceptable. Where do we go with the idea of creating a planar similarity between Breitbart and the Vlogbrothers? We would need an Arendt to work that one out.
ERIC
I don't think it's an accident that Arendt is gaining in popularity at the moment. We do need Arendt and that’s why she’s resonating so deeply at the moment. She was attacked from all sides of the political spectrum after writing Eichmann in Jerusalem. But she was right -- evil is in the everyday turning away from the world, not in any particular act. She was interested in the underlying infrastructure that motivated people to do what they did. But even in dark times, she retained a resounding hope in the possibilities of public life.
I have really enjoyed this conversation. It has pushed my thinking about institutionalization, about how social media entertainers are influencing and influenced by legacy civic organizations. It has made me think about the relationship between the frontend - the individual social media celebrities and the discourse they produce, and the backend, the institutions (both in the form of organizations and social norms that structure that discourse). My work is focused on these backend shifts, and yours primarily on the frontend. But where we come together in middleware is a really important line of inquiry.
STUART
I think one of the biggest things that's come out of this for me is your point about efficiency and a way of thinking about the backend. In other words, for us, platform infrastructures that are more civic-minded have had to take account these questions about what they've put in motion - extraordinarily high levels of connectivity but not high enough levels of societal normativity that can keep us together. How do you do that in a silicon valley culture that is predicated on efficiency and scale? It's only been 10 or 12 years, but what's it going to be like 10 years from now?
Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. In addition to Social Media Entertainment, which he co-authored with David Craig, Cunningham has authored over a dozen academic titles including Media Economics (Terry Flew, Adam Swift), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Jon Silver), Hidden innovation: Policy, industry and the creative sector.
Eric Gordon is professor of civic media and the director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture. He has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that encourage play, delight, and deliberation. He is the author of two books about media and cities and, most recently, is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016). His book Meaningful Inefficiencies: How Designers are Transforming Civic Life by Creating Opportunities to Care is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
David Craig is a Clinical Associate Professor at USC Annenberg and a Fellow in the Peabody Media Center. Along with Stuart Cunningham, Craig co-authored Social Media Entertainment along with over a dozen journal articles and book chapters. Craig is a veteran Hollywood producer responsible for over 30 projects that garnered over 75 Emmy, Peabody, and Golden Globe nominations and awards.
