Excerpted from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_10/reviews/index.html
Richard Rogers.
Information Politics on the Web.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
cloth, 200 p., ISBN 0–262–18242–4, US$35.00.
MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.eduThe problem: In the U.S., media consolidation has been swift and certain until very recently (when the U.S. Congress blocked proposed Federal Communication Commission rules changes, backed by the former FCC chair, Michael Powell that would have allowed further consolidation). Through horizontal integration, vertical integration, and cross–promotional synergies, a handful of deregulated media behemoths (Disney, General Electric, AOL Time Warner, Viacom and Vivendi) absorbed with enhancing their efficiency and profitability, have arguably subverted historical practices of democracy in the pursuit of maximal profit and power. "Their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values," says Ben Bagdikian, "raises troubling [and durable] questions about the [viability of] the individual’s role in ... [a] democracy" (Solomon, citing Bagdikian, www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/3039/view/print).
In Amsterdam, Richard Rogers implicitly embraces the critiques of Bagdikian and others. In a November 2003 online prologue to "All American Issues: Seven Stories from the Homeland," Rogers lays out "Six Arguments Against News." Beginning (implicitly) with Altheide’s notion of news formats, Rogers notes that journalists no longer exclusively "routinize the non–routine." (The term refers to fitting the "news," the non–routine, into the daily routines of news production). For Rogers, these days, the task of narrative news formatting is not even primarily that of the journalist:
"Reality increasingly delivers the formats to the news. Delivered are press releases, sound–bites, story and video cams, and scripted events ... . The scandal is how media accepts [these formatted products, such as talking points] unproblematically as [reality–based] news" (Rogers, p. 2, http://www.issuenetwork.org/reports/news_networks/pdf/news_networks.pdf).Rogers then catalogs the many problems created by these commercial news practices. Such problems include prominent and repetitive factual gaps, temporal mismatches, and the nearly daily creation of pre–mediation formatting. Pre–mediation formatting is produced by "media seeders" who "sell" scripts of "what will happen." The propagandist’s or public relations operative has a single goal. It is to turn a preferred "definition of a situation," a "spin," however contingent or improbable, into the appearance of the real and inevitable, either for political gain and/or corporate profit. Claims of imminent threats in the form of WMDs, as part of the "selling" of the Iraqi war, are a recent and prominent example.
Addressing NGOs committed to social change, the purpose of the November 2003 conference, and an ongoing idée fixe for Rogers, was "to examine in some depth the conditions under which [commercial] news may be marginalized ... [with] the idea that [information] networks [on the Web] may serve as a new means to [effectively] do without [commercial] news [exposure]" (Rogers, 2003, p. 4). Assessing the present media system as "in tatters," and unable to represent reality or rational democratic discourse, Govcom.org and Rogers turns the attention of NGOs toward the promises and perils of emerging informational networks. Dedicated to reflexively mapping and theorizing about the actual and potential characteristics of Web–based information networks, Rogers’ new book, Information Politics on the Web, is part of Govcom.org’s ongoing epistemo–technological project of "defin[ing] reality more adequately" than the "myths and lies and crack–brained notions" that have so much contemporary currency, particularly in the U.S. (Rogers, citing Mills, 2004, p. 105).
The Web has never been a neutral location, uninhabited either by creative resistance or pliant purveyors of formally–mediated informational politics.
Mapping and Theorizing About Emerging Alternatives: The Web has never been a neutral location, uninhabited either by creative resistance or pliant purveyors of formally–mediated informational politics. Informational politics is what Castells calls the purveying of "official" reality, as opposed to the circulation of alternative [and potentially more credible] networked, Web–based accounts, which Rogers calls "information politics."
Rogers splits information politics into two components: "Back end" and "front end" issues. By "back end politics," Rogers refers to how algorithmic search technologies either privilege or marginalize the information to select and index (or fail to select or index). By "front end politics," Rogers refers to assessments about how diverse, inclusive and prominent are the array of available sites on the Web. To test these notions, Rogers and Govcom.org developed four pieces of software for mapping the activity of information networks in cyberspace. As "political instruments" for the Web, one program displays dynamic linking practices ("Issue Crawler"), while others plot oscillations of interest in "stable" issues ("Issue Barometer" and the "Web Issue Index"). Still another registers shifting political loyalties ("Election Tracker"), in left activist subpopulations that Rogers axiomatically (and problematically) identifies as the entirety of "civil society."
Chapter Two, "The Viagra Files," is accessible and entertaining. Conducted with two sets of students (Austrians, in 2000, and the Dutch, in 2001), Rogers describes how "surfer–experts" solicited, and then mapped, answers to these questions: "What is Viagra, and who is it for?" Via various search engines, surfers found that the drug’s connotations and alternative uses overwhelmed Pfizer’s "official" meaning. On the Web, Viagra was the following: A "Californian drug"; an underground money–maker; a substitute for herbal aphrodisiacs; "a smile"; a party drug; a female aphrodisiac; and, finally, an unrecognized quandary for ER doctors (the conventional intervention for stroke patients, nitrates, kills a Viagra user).
Consider the process of "Cool Hunting," where fashionista market researchers explore and catalog the marginal in adolescent culture. Capital commodifies, exploits, and exhausts what fashionistas find (thereby rendering it "uncool").
Yet Rogers’ assertions about the meaning of what he found are questionable. For example, Rogers describes the "official" and "unofficial" Viagra narratives as "in collision." However, the crude concept of a collision is inadequate as a theorization or description. Bahktin’s semiotic notion of a profusion of significations and practices, the carnivalesque, is a better fit than Rogers’ indiscriminate notion of a collision. (Applying Barthes’ ideas, in S/Z, about the inversion between the denotative and connotative also would have been a better fit). Additionally, while Rogers’ "heart [is] gladdened" because "Viagra leads a richer, more youthful and experimental life [on the Web]," what Rogers does not recognize, in the play between marginal cultures and the commercial center, is the potential that underground uses may well be co–opted by transnational capital. For example, consider the process of "Cool Hunting," where fashionista market researchers explore and catalog the marginal in adolescent culture. Capital commodifies, exploits, and exhausts what fashionistas find (thereby rendering it "uncool"). In the midst of the process, "Cool Hunters" return to the margins, cataloging emerging marginalities, as the parasitic cycle repeats. Is Pfizer surreptitiously co–opting and commodifying alternative uses? We don’t know, but it’s possible.
In Chapter Four, "After Genoa: Remedying Informational Politics," Rogers details the construction and uses of "The Web Issue Index." It is
"a prototypical tracking [device] providing regular indications of leading (global and national) social issues [on] the Web. [It] strives to harness the value of ‘word on the net,’ and distill trends for ... analytical work" (Rogers, 2004, p. 95.In the form of an "Issue Ticker," the Index tracks (among other functions) biases in corporate media coverage of recent dissent events (such as anti–globalization or anti–war protests). The Index allows for evidence–based interpretations of how and where corporatist media frames ascribe discredited identities and motives (such as "enemies of the poor," or "enemies of freedom") to activists. (The "Election Issue Tracker" does much the same, in monitoring the oscillation of electoral politics and issues). Not surprisingly, Rogers finds that Web–based "issue networks" facilitate the distribution of alternative narratives, although he’s careful to note that a Pew Center study shows that, over time, Web surfers narrow and routinize access to a small group of preferred site.
The applied nature of Rogers’ work on networks is fascinating, and undoubtedly deserves continued energy and close attention. However, whether his work means what he says it means (in service of all of civil society), well, that’s another question. There are several unstated "black box" axioms at the core of Rogers’ exposition that deserve investigation. For example, Rogers splits the social world into unproblematic halves: The private sphere consists of transnational corporate interests and the governments that have become increasingly pliant tools of those interests. The public sphere consists solely of progressive left–wing NGOs, who are identified as representing the core of civil society. Framing his objects of analysis this way creates several problems. They are as follows:
The ghost of Habermas hovers over Rogers’ project.
First, the ghost of Habermas hovers over Rogers’ project. Rogers’ project subsumes Habermas’ definition of the public sphere as a place where
"Something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed. A portion of the public sphere [emerges] in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body ... conferring in an unrestricted fashion — [with] the freedom to express and publish opinions — about matters of general interest ... . This ... requires specific [technological] means ... ." (Habermas, in Kellner and Kay, 1989, pp. 136–144).Whether rational–critical discursive practices ever constituted any human society remains a hotly debated factual and normative question, which involves issues of literacy and class privilege. These remain unaddressed. Then, Rogers identifies the entirety of civil society with left–leaning NGO agendas. Rogers de facto jettisons "non–members " (presumably conservative, neo–liberal or religious groups, for example) who do not embrace such agendas. Given Govcom.org’s claim that its key project is to augment and disseminate reality–based narrative mappings, such an excision is an extremely curious move. The resulting validity problem means that the global scope of Rogers’ claims has to be ratcheted back, from cataloging Web–based information politics across the entirety of civil society to mapping the claims of an elite, anti–corporatist fraction.
Secondly, Rogers avoids the rather troubling issue that comes with such public information network mapping — the problem of surveillance effects. For example, the U.S government has a history (Conintelpro, CISPES) of surveilling, mapping, infiltrating and attempting to subvert the activities and relationships of lawful dissenting groups. In the post–9/11 environment, characterized by DARPA’s infamous TIA (Total Informational Awareness program) and the pre–mediation logic of threat preemption, it must be tempting to use left–NGO’s network mappings, based on or inspired by Govcom.org’s work, to identify potential "persons of interest." The transparency of these network maps extends from Govcom.org’s NGOs to the FBI, the CIA and neo–con and right–wing theocratic groups, such as the Family Research Council, or as exhibited by David Horowitz’s Manichean taxonomy of progressive evildoers at www.discoverthenetwork.org. Rogers would be well–advised to consider these unintended consequences.
In the end, what Rogers and Govcom.org are actually doing, by way of specific software development and network information heuristics, is intriguing. But just as they revel in the fact that their study shows that Viagra means something other than Pfizer’s official definition, so too, Rogers’ work also means something more complex and mixed than Govcom.org’s official and somewhat self–congratulatory self–definition. — Dion Dennis
Copyright ©2005, First Monday
