Author Archives: Peter Levine

concluding thoughts about public media

Today is the last day of a great meeting on public media, a rich discussion enlivened by presentations of excellent projects (for instance, the National Black Programming Consortium, OneWorld, Global Voices Online, Location One, Public Radio Exchange, and PRI’s Open Source.)

“Public media” comprises all forms of communication that help a democratic public to do its work. The public’s work includes deliberating and debating issues of common concern, mobilizing people to participate in formal politics, and creating cultural products that represent and preserve a people’s heterogeneous values.

Three sectors can serve these roles; each has advantages and disavantages:

1. Corporations (broadcast networks, cable-TV providers, big software companies, newspapers, and publishers) can help the public to do its work. They sometimes meet public demand for news, debate, and information. They apply expertise, talent, and discipline; and they have access to mass markets. However, they generally make more money by providing and advertising commercial goods, rather than encouraging civic and political participation. They can attract the largest audiences by presenting politics in ways that amuse or arouse viewers but make them less likely to participate themselves. Corporate consolidation and market fragmentation make these problems worse.

2. “Citizen media” means material created and disseminated by individuals or small, voluntary groups: blogs, personal websites, photo galleries on Flickr, podcasts. These “many-to-many” media are far more diverse, open, and innovative than corporate programming. However, there are questions about the citizen media: Can unfunded individuals and networks create products that are more ambitious than short snippets of text, snapshots, and video–for instance, lengthy narrative movies and original news reporting? Even if a few very talented people can create these ambitious products, how can we help those with average skills to participate and find audiences for their work, which will not look professional? And how can we prevent all these individual producers from forming small, insular groups–how can we create a public dialogue?

3. The traditional “public media” are broadcast stations and producers funded (at least in part) by tax dollars. They have a strong tradition of commitment to the public’s interests, although they can certainly be criticized for attracting and serving a narrow slice of the population. In the United States, the organizations in the orbit of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have some strengths: reputation and public trust, a national network of local institutions, archives of excellent programming, talented employees, and some broadcast spectrum. They have the power to put individuals “on the air,” which attracts participation. However, their advantages are diminishing as more competitors arise (including citizen media producers), and as viewers shift from radio and TV to the Internet, where they have far more choice. People are increasingly alienated by the traditional model of station membership, in which you pay dues, receive some goodies, but have no direct impact on programming–and the fundraising drive just drones on. Public broadcasting stations must learn to use their spectrum and other assets to enhance public discussions and cultural collaborations. Their job is to help form publics that demand genuinely public media from all three sectors.

[Rebecca MacKinnon’s summary is on her blog.]

Alito and strict constructionism

GRAHAM: Are you a strict constructionist?

ALITO: I think it depends on what you mean by that phrase. And if you…

GRAHAM: Well, let’s forget that. We’ll never get to the end of that.(LAUGHTER) Have you heard the term used?

ALITO: I have heard the term used.

GRAHAM: Is it fair to say that, when it’s used by politicians, people like me, that we’re trying to tell the public we want a judge who looks at things very narrowly, that doesn’t make a bunch of stuff up?

Is that a fair understanding of what a strict constructionist may be in the political world?

ALITO: Well, if a strict constructionist is a judge who doesn’t make things up, than I’m a strict constructionist. (LAUGHTER) …

ALITO: I think that a strict constructionist as you understand it would engage in a certain process in evaluating that question. And a strict constructionist, a person who interprets the law — that’s how I would put it — a person who interprets the law would look at the language of the authorization for the use of military force and legislative history that was informative, maybe past practices. Were there prior enactments that are analogous to that? What was the understanding of those? And a host of other considerations that might go into the interpretive process.

If a “strict constructionist” looks at precedent, legislative intent, “past practices,” and a “host of other considerations,” then strict constructionism means nothing at all. Judge Alito clearly doesn’t like the phrase–perhaps because it’s too controversial, or perhaps because it’s vacuous. But could it be a meaningful theory? I suppose it could mean:

1. A judge should deliberately refuse to consider all the matters that Alito listed above, except the text of the relevant statute or constitutional provision. It is improbable that anyone can understand a text without some recourse to context, but trying to do so would be the judge’s intent.

2. A judge should apply the law regardless of its consequences. In moral philosophy, “consequentialists” are those who would assess actions or policies by their results. “Deontologists” instead apply principles or rules, without directly considering consequences. It was a consequentialist Supreme Court that ruled that public schools could not be segregated by race because segregation had bad effects on minority children. A deontological court might have said that barring any child from any public school on the basis of color, even if it has benign effects, always violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Strict constructionism would be a form of deontology in which existing laws (not morality) provide the principles to guide a court’s decisions.

Judge Alito sounds like something of a legal deontologist some of the time. For instance, in defending his decisions regarding searches, he says that these police actions were harmful but allowed by the law. Note, however, that a legal-deontological approach would not always push in conservative directions. A strict constructionist (in this sense) could not argue that courts ought to enhance economic efficiency, nor could he defer to the president in order to promote national security. That would be paying attention to predicted consequences. The motto of the strict constructionist would rather be “Fiat justitia et pereat mundus”: let justice be done even if the world should perish. (This is not a smart thing to say in confirmation hearings, however.)

promise of public media

At a meeting tomorrow, I’m supposed to reflect briefly on this question:

Citizen Media: Enthusiasts claim that new media, with their anti-top-down structure, tend to more democratic. Critics claim that they just make for finer niches of communication and more opportunities for marketing and consumerism. Not enough attention has been paid to how these new ventures can create more public space and invigorate public media. In what ways can these media be used to create a more robust public?

Since four others are also slated to speak and will probably cover the main points, I think I will focus on kids. I’ll say:

Continue reading →

entropy and dialectic

The world grows more alike. Global culture is more uniform today than at any time in the past. Ecosystems are more similar, thanks to human interventions and the mixing of species. Although there are countervailing trends toward diversity, the pressure for similarity is palpable and powerful.

two explanations

I think two theories help to explain this pressure. The first is entropy. In nature, when unlike things come into contact, they become more alike. Likewise, when cultures interact through trade or conquest, they come to share features.

A natural system loses dynamism as entropy grows, to the point that a perfectly entropic universe would be a smooth and inert field of matter. If there were no differences, then time itself would end. Some of the anxiety about globalization derives from fear that cultural differences will disappear, and with them, human dynamism. Some of the impetus for environmentalism arises from fear that all ecosystems will become alike. (This is why biodiversity seems so precious and “invasive species” are such a concern.)

Entropy is fundamentally mindless. It is “noise,” the opposite of a meaningful “signal.” In nature, only intelligence can reduce entropy. For example, by sorting objects into separate piles, a person can make a heap less entropic. In the domain of culture, human beings can use their intelligence to wall themselves off from contact with outsiders, but such barriers always ultimately weaken. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies: the entropy of a closed system tends to increase. However, intelligent beings can also deliberately create new cultural forms in opposition to global averages. Even by the simple act of remembering the diversity of the past, we can make our own minds more complex.

The second explanation is Hegelian. Contrary to popular belief, Hegel never said anything about a thesis meeting its opposite (the antithesis) and generating a synthesis. His model is much more plausible. It starts with consciousness: naive thinking and doing. In a world of diverse people and cultures, a conscious person or group will sooner or later encounter and recognize alternative values and ways of being. At that point self-consciousness arises. This is an uncomfortable feeling, full of tension and doubt; but it is also generative and dynamic, and it can lead to what Hegel calls reason. Hegelian reason is the deliberate and informed creation of values and beliefs, based on the available alternatives. Reason will again become self-consciousness whenever, having built a satisfactory solution, a person or a group realizes that there are other available solutions. That new stage of self-consciousness can again become reason. The whole cycle is “dialectic.”

Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Hegelian dialectic leads ultimately to universal sameness, but it is a sameness deliberately constructed by human beings through the application of intelligence and will. Barring a catastrophe, world culture should become more uniform but also more sophisticated, because it will encompass more history and more awareness of alternatives. It will not be a static state of sameness, but a dramatic narrative leading toward consensus, recorded in the minds of the human actors.

Perhaps the most profound issue of our era is whether we will grow more alike through dialectic or through entropy. Since I am unable to think of any other way to explore this tension, I have made it the theme of a long narrative poem (only part of which is online so far).

consumerism and creativity

I suspect that entropy is connected to the problem of consumerism. Raw materials have been globally traded for a long time. However, the salient feature of “globalization” is the exchange of finished, consumer products. The volume of such trade has surely increased with deregulation and with new communications technology. As a result, people can choose from rapidly growing menus of cultural products. This choice increases as a result of market exchanges, but it is also something that we fight for–for instance, when people who favor “diversity” in education demand more choices in the curriculum, or when civil libertarians assert a right to purchase information from abroad.

Everyone who can choose from a global list of finished cultural products becomes more like everyone else: a phenomenon that Russell Arben Fox insightfully describes. This is a passive, detached, inert sameness. The only way to prevent it is to block people from exercising consumer choice, which restricts their freedom–and never works for long.

In contrast, when we make things, we put our own stamp on them. We thereby exercise Hegelian “reason.” Unlike restrictions on trade and communication, policies that support the local creation of cultural products expand freedom. And even if everyone’s creations turn out to be increasingly similar as history proceeds, at least the resulting sameness will be something that we human beings have made. Likewise, an environmentalism devoted to creativity (rather than preservation) would make the world less entropic even as we put a human stamp on nature.

[This post is being discussed on the Philosophy New Service “community” page]

this blog turns three

I first posted on January 8, 2003. The congressional office that I described that day belonged to Bob Ney–“Representative no. 1” in the Abramoff court papers.

I’ve since posted 766 times more: once every work day, except when we’re on family vacations. I enjoy the rhythm of a daily activity; it’s my hobby now. For better or worse, it has replaced playing the clavichord.

I’ve discovered that if you stick with blogging for long enough, your archive of posts becomes more popular than your daily contribution. People reach an archive by searching the whole web, which means that they don’t read my old posts about extremely common terms, like “George Bush” or “philosophy.” But quite a few people find themselves on this site because of a search for Miles Horton, the great American political educator and civil rights leader, about whom I once made an offhand remark. (There is a great need for a good Miles Horton website.) Some come to find out about Lia Lee, the tragic victim of cultural miscommunication in Anne Fadiman’s great book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. (Sometimes people email me to find out whether Lia is still alive. It’s possible, but I don’t have any way of knowing.) And some arive from Google’s image search page to see a photo of a Persian lion that I took one summer in Burgundy. These most common search terms are pretty miscellaneous and random–but then so have been my experiences over the past three years.