Andy Famiglietti’s Entirely Modest Web-Presence

A recent article from TechDirt provides an interesting data point in the discussion of how streaming services like spotify compensate artists. According to the article, a recent study by a French record-industry trade group finds that a large percentage of the revenue generated by these services is paid to record labels, rather than artists. To be precise the study finds that about 45% of the revenue goes to labels, and 6.8% goes to recording artists and 10% goes to songwriters and publishers. About 20% of revenue goes to the services themselves. (Click through to the tech dirt article for charts, and more discussion of the results).

I've been wondering about what Spotify's reportedly meager pay-out for artists means for the future of digital music for awhile. Does the low revenue from streaming services mean that the “music as service” model is, in an of itself, not a sustainable way to pay artists? Or does it mean that artists need to re-negotiate their relationships with labels to capture more of the revenue from streams?

This study seems to provide evidence in favor of the second conclusion, but I'm not sure it's the whole story. For one thing, the article mentions that the streaming services are not yet “anywhere close to profitable.” One wonders then, what the path to profitability for these platforms look like. Do they need to charge more for subscriptions? Will they want to pay less for content? I'm sure they are telling their investors that they will be able to spin user data in gold, but I'm increasingly dubious about the value of consumer data in an economy where consumer purchasing power is, at best, barely growing.

I'm also not sure we can dismiss all label income as rent-extraction. Yes, production expenses aren't what they once were, and distribution expenses must be lower than they were when fleets of trucks brought plastic discs to physical stores, but the “publication is a button now” rhetoric doesn't tell the whole story about the work and expense that might be involved in digital publication. I need to dig into record company financial data to try to round out the story here.

What follows is a badly belated, fairly incomplete response to the Charlie Hebdo affair, leading to a slightly less belated but much more incomplete response to the Wikipedia Gamergate scandal.

I know that #jesuischarlie is now roughly 4 or 5 centuries out of date in Internet-years, but I got to thinking about it after an interesting panel on the topic here, which my colleague Mike Lyons (@jmikelyons) participated in. The discussion focused, in part, on the contradictions raised by the Charlie Hebdo case in the classic western legal and political formulation of “free speech.” What does it mean, for example, when the French government imprisons a comic for expressing opinions that could be read as sympathetic with those who killed the Charlie Hebdo staff?

I was struck by how this discussion of the contradictions inherent in our juridical notions of “free speech” pointed to the way the discussion of #jesuischarlie often revolved around an instability in a much less formal, but still important concept. Namely, the popular notion that rude or offensive humor is justified only if it is “punching up” against the powerful, rather than “punching down” against the powerless. As in many other cases, it was not immediately clear to all which way Charlie Hebdo was “punching.” Were they punching down against immigrants and outsiders, or up against powerful state and religious institutions?

This confusion about “punching up” versus “punching down” seems endemic to our discussions about offensive speech. The theory suggests this we should expect this to be the case, after all intersectionality means power is never really distributed along neat vertical lines. It can be much fuzzier, with different subjects simultaneously holding positions of vulnerability and privilege.

I wonder if, perhaps, this suggests we ought to ask less about the direction of punches, and instead try to think carefully and critically about why so many punches are being thrown.

More specifically, I can't help but wonder if, just maybe, the throwing of punches has less to do with an effort to achieve a particular political agenda, and more to do with a performance of a certain sort of masculinity. This is only reinforced by the fact that, of the 21 editors, journalists and cartoonists listed as Charlie Hebdo staff on Wikipedia only 3 are women.

What would it mean for us to acknowledge the possibility that we throw punches either because we identify as men and were taught that this is what that identity means, or because we exist in a culture that privileges male violence and we wish to draw on that power? How would that change our debate about offensive speech? Might it be time to consider punching less?

This predilection for verbal violence might also play a role in the recent conflict surrounding the Wikipedia article documenting the Gamergate phenomenon, which recently made news when the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee moved to ban several anti-Gamergate editors. This decision has been widely, and justly, criticized for removing activists from the project in the name of “neutrality.” I'm still digesting what happened in that case, and I want to write up something more complete about it soon. For now, however, let me just note one of the banned editors comments in defense of himself:

“As Chris Kyle (or the movie version thereof) said, “I'm willing to meet my Creator and answer for every shot that I took.” I entered a contentious topic area to protect living people from abuse at the hands of the identified “pro-Gamergate” editors named in this Arbitration, as well as the hordes of SPAs on the periphery.”

The quote seems to show this editor, at least, understanding his action as distinctly “macho.” He is engaging in righteous combat against bad people. I am very sympathetic to him, as the Gamergate crowd was indeed a nasty bunch with a vile agenda. The Arbitration Committee, for their part, relied on Wikipedia rules that attempt to discourage verbal combat in favor of constructive content building. Wikipedia, they say, is not a battleground.

It is not unfair, I think, to point out that this call for “peace” may tend to favor the status quo. What might it mean, however, for us to consider that calls to combat may, in part, be driven by a desire to project and maintain a certain sort of masculine identity? I'm honestly not sure, but it seems like a question we might need to consider.

I saw it in the program, thought, “that looks really important, I should go to that.”

But then I noticed it was scheduled near dinner, and we were supposed to go to that Mexican place everyone was talking about, with the hot chocolate.

And I thought, “well someone else will go.”

“I'm not very important, I won't be missed.”

“Someone will tweet it and there will be a storify and I can catch up.”

So I didn't go.

This is just a note to express my regret.

And to try to shame myself into learning for next time.

I've really enjoyed messing with our new makerbot here at Bucknell ITEC. Here's what I've printed to date!

[satellite gallery=1 auto=off caption=off thumbs=on]

Having fun, droning on…

I am happy to announce that I'll be starting a new position as Bucknell's Digital Scholarship Coordinator in June!

The life of the contemporary academic is a migratory one, I haven't lived in the same city for more than a few years since I completed my Master's degree. However, this move is a migration in more ways than one. For the first time in my adult life I'll be leaving the college classroom, taking on a role as an organizer and developer for Bucknell's growing involvement in Digital Scholarship. This has been a difficult decision to make, as teaching has been a rewarding job. Ultimately, however, I decided it was time to flex some new muscles, and work on refining and building another set of skills.

So, I'm excited to have the opportunity to work with Bucknell to build and shape their new Digital Scholarship Center, which promises to emerge as a fascinating new hub for digital work in the humanities and social sciences. That said, I'm also of course a bit sad to be leaving Dallas. For one thing, Central Pennsylvania lacks in options for high quality tacos. More seriously, the students of UT Dallas are some of the most creative and engaged I've ever worked with. Even as I look forward to my new opportunity, I'm sad to be leaving them behind.

Still, onward and upward! I expect there will be many opportunities for new collaborations and projects in the coming weeks and months! Stay tuned!

So I was reviewing this Elinor Ostrom, trying to figure out how to fit my ideas into the larger conversation about the commons, when I had this kind of epiphany about information, embodiment, articulation, and authority. It's a half-formed idea, but it feels powerful and I want to share it here right away as a way to make a note for myself, and to see if others immediately recognize it as something well established (or perhaps refuted) elsewhere.

There is a tendency, when dealing with digital information, to treat it as sort of fungible. An arbitrarily embodied mass of ones and zeroes that is, by virtue of its near-infinite replicability, both non-scarce and non-rival. Digital information “wants to be free” in the sense that it wants to spread, it wants everyone to have their own copy.

This tends to lead to a discussion of digital information as a unique realm of abundance. Authority, which is seen as a sort of arbitrary move to limit the abundance of information, is seen as critically weakened in this environment.

The above has already been criticized, as I'm sure we're all well aware. Authorities, especially institutions like search engines, do in fact exist in the contemporary digital information environment. This is well established. Wikipedia, too, serves as a sort of authority. Wikipedians are well aware of this, sometimes even discussing the need for Wikipedia to do right by “posterity” or record information accurately for “history.”

And yet, the formation of these authorities has not been without significant resistance. Where ever centralized authorities have emerged, de-centralized schemes to combat them have also. Take, for example, the many attempts to decentralize Wikipedia, “federating” it across multiple platforms/wikis. Or the attempt to escape the singular Facebook via the decentralized Diaspora.

The conundrum, for me, is this: the attempts always seem well-grounded in the theory of digital information, and the experience of the skilled coders who propose them. After all, copying and transferring data really is fairly easy and cheap. And yet, they almost always fail. Why?

Maybe part of the answer has to do with how we treat information differently depending on what we intend to articulate it with and our embodied experience with the topic at hand.

Imagine a coder writing a project solely for his or her own personal use. Coders, of course, have a great deal of experience with code. Thus, when they encounter new code-type information, they are able to readily evaluate it for themselves, with very little need for authority. In the case of personal use, only the non-human actor of the machine will be articulated with the code, so authority is also not needed to establish trust with other human actors.

Another example of the same basic scenario would be a skilled cook making a meal for him or herself. Who cares what the source is, evaluation is easy.

Since coders are the ones who propose new digital systems, the decentralized, anti-authoritarian approach that works for code seems like it might just work for everything else. Set the information free, let everyone get it from everywhere and let them evaluate it for themselves. Why not?

However, this overlooks cases in which either embodied experience is lacking, or information must be articulated with human as well as non-human actors.

Imagine the case of the novice chef (or coder!), how can they evaluate information they encounter for themselves? In the absence of embodied experience, we may well want to rely on authority (or at least reputation) on the part of information sources.

Imagine the case of the bar bet (which, I posit, is the most frequent use for Wikipedia 🙂 ), in this case, we must articulate information with another human actor who also lacks embodied experience with the question at hand. The only answer with any value in this case is one that comes from a source that both parties trust. A source with authority.

And in this case especially, authority is rivalrous not everyone can have it at the same time. A trusted source builds an audience, a shared reputation, at the expense of others attempted to become trusted sources as well. (This is perhaps not perfectly true, there can be communities of shared trust and reliability, but these would seem to grow at the expense of other possible networks).

Thus, the need for scarce, rivalrous authority hems in the possibilities of non-scarce, non-rivalrous information. But perhaps this tendency is overlooked by those closest to the heart of our new digital systems, the coder elite, because the form of information they are most familiar with (code) is one they both have deep embodied experience with, and one that powerfully articulates with non-human actors that don't care if the source is trusted, so long as the code works (hence the IETF slogan reference to “rough consensus and running code” and the old adage about the ultimate test of code in an open source community being “whether it compiles.”)

So, over the course of the last few days a dispute over live-tweeting conference presentations has boiled over on, of all places, twitter.

Just a few hastily composed thoughts here. Setting the default state for conference presentations to “do not share on twitter” is both absurd (given that the whole goal of academic knowledge production is, you know, sharing and discussing knowledge) and impractical (given the rather limited affordances twitter has built in for users to censor one another).

That said, I think it might make sense to take a step back and ask ourselves: what on earth would motivate someone to make the ridiculous and seemingly self-limiting attempt to stop others from discussing their work? Framing this as another confrontation between those who do and do not “get the internet” seems to be a limited frame, in my opinion.

Instead, I can't help but wonder if this desperate attempt to lay claim to knowledge as property is driven by fear. The act of an increasingly precarious academic population desperate to hang on to any asset, however intangible, that might give them a leg up in the dog-eat-dog academic job market. Of course people resent what looks like the “theft” of their reputation. They experience reputation as a scarce asset. One to be guarded jealously.

This attempt to hoard reputation, to hoard the fruits of our intellectual labors, makes us all poorer. In a sense, this could even be seen as analogous to the “paradox of thrift” familiar to Keynesian economists. If everyone fears for their future, and everyone over saves, the economy collapses.

But Keynes did not suggest we simply shame savers into spending. Instead he emphasized the need for collective action to drive investment. I am a strong supporter for openness, and I think it must be first among the values of our profession. If we truly want to create an academic culture of open ideas and shared information, we must take steps to secure the material conditions where people feel secure being open! I think this interpretation of openness is somewhat in contradiction to the sometimes crypto-libertarian language that often infiltrates our discussions of free information. It is not enough to “set ideas free.” We must build safety nets (with all the slogging bureaucracy that will entail) if we want people to feel genuinely free to share and to fail.

In a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education's “Chronicle Review” section, Timothy Messer-Kruse criticizes the editing practices of the Wikipedia community. He describes his attempt to correct what he understood to be a factual error in Wikipedia's article on the Haymarket affair, and argues that his experience demonstrates that Wikipedia limits the ability of expert editors, such as himself, to correct factual errors on the site. While Dr. Messer-Kruse believes his experience demonstrates Wikipedia's lack of respect for scholars, I believe it actually demonstrates that Wikipedia holds a deep respect for a collaborative scholarly process that is collectively more capable of producing “truth” than any individual scholar. 

Wikipedia's privileging of the collaborative scholarly process has practical implications for how scholars should, and should not, interact with Wikipedia. Academic Wikipedia editors might have more satisfying Wikipedia editing experiences in the future if they respect this fact.

To understand how and why Wikipedia functions the way it does, we must first understand the day-to-day realities of Wikipedia's editing process. Because they have the responsibility of securing the free encyclopedia against vandals and other bad actors, editors are always on the lookout for certain patterns that, for them, indicate likely vandalism or mischief. For academics, the best analogy might be the way that we scan student papers for patterns that indicate likely plagiarism. This sort of rough pattern recognition is deeply imperfect, and in the case of Messer-Kruse's edits, Wikipedians suffer from a false positive. Nevertheless, just as teachers use rough patterns when scanning giant stacks of student assignments, so too Wikipedia editors have a clear need to be able to quickly detect likely bad actors.

If we look at Messer-Kruse's first interaction with the Wikipedia community, we can see some of the patterns that likely flagged him (incorrectly) as what Wikipedian's sometimes call a “POV pusher.” That is to say, a person with an ax to grind, looking to utilize Wikipedia as a free publishing platform for their own particular pet theories. He starts his engagement with a post to the article's talk page (a special Wikipedia page that permits editors to discuss the process of creating and revising a particular article), writing:

The line in the entry that reads: “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing…” is inaccurate. The prosecution introduced much evidence linking several of the defendants to the manufacture of the bomb, the distribution of the bombs, and an alleged plot to attack the police on the evening of Tuesday, May 4. An eye-witness was put on the stand who claimed to have seen Spies light the fuse of the bomb. Police officers testified that Fielden returned their fire with his revolver. Now these witnesses and this evidence may be disputed, but it is historically wrong to claim it was not introduced. For more specific information, see http://blogs.bgsu.edu/haymarket/myth-2-no-evidence/ (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265725190)

By starting with a post to the talk page, Messer-Kruse follows good Wikipedia etiquette, which encourages new editors to discuss substantial changes they wish to make to pages before making them. (Those who wish to review the full record of Dr. Messer-Kruse's Wikipedia activity may do so, here.)

However, in crafting this talk message, Messer-Kruse has unintentionally engaged in rhetorical patterns that flag him as a potential bad actor in the eyes of experienced Wikipedians. His most significant error is citing a self-published source, his Bowling Green State University blog, in support of his desired changes to the article. This is, as several Wikipedia editors quickly point out, in violation of Wikipedia's reliable source guidelines.

In Messer-Kruse's defense, the tone taken by some editors in these early exchanges represents a serious misstep on their part. They tended to engage in what is known as “wiki-lawyering,” simply spitting the Wiki-shorthand code for the policy he has violated (WP:RS) at him, with little attempt to explain why he has made an error, and no attempt to offer constructive ways in which a compromise solution might be reached. These editors have since been called on the carpet for being unnecessarily hostile to newcomers, or “Biting the Newbies” in Wikipedia-speak, on the article's talk page.

Messer-Kruse, for his part, does not seem to absorb the reason why his blog is unacceptable as a source. After being directed to the reliable source policy by one editor, he retorts, “I have provided reliable sources. See my discussion of the McCormick's strike above in which I cite the primary sources for this information. By what standard are you claiming that http://blogs.bgsu.edu/haymarket/myth-2-no-evidence/ is not a 'reliable source.' It clearly cites primary sources in its rebutal of this myth. Perhaps its [sic] not 'reliable' sources you want but ideologically comfortable ones” (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265740457).

What Messer-Kruse is missing is how the reliable source policy allows Wikipedia to use the larger scholarly process of peer review for its own benefit. By preventing the use of self-published sources, and preferring secondary sources to primary sources, Wikipedia attempts to ensure that information has been subjected to the most vigorous review possible by scholars before being included in the encyclopedia. Does Messer-Kruse really believe that we should abandon this process, and simply allow any individual scholar to make novel claims about truth, regardless of their ability to convince scholarly peers? It is not some faceless herd of editors that Wikipedia defers to when evaluating truth-claims, it is the scholarly process itself. Even now, discussion is unfolding on the Haymarket affair article talk page concerning the larger scholarly response to Messer-Kruse's book. At issue is whether or not, in the eyes of the experts, this very recent book has indeed significantly revised our understanding of the Haymarket affair.

Wikipedia's policies here seem to have frustrated an attempt to add well-researched points to the encyclopedia, which is unfortunate. However, it is important to understand that Wikipedia editors are, every day, confronted by vast numbers of self-styled experts, many claiming academic credentials, referring to a blog or other self-published source that purports to upend this field or that based on a novel review of primary evidence. Climate science, evolutionary biology, and “western medicine,” are all particularly common targets, though I have also witnessed claims to such unlikely discoveries as a grand unified field theory. While Messer-Kruse's claims are not outrageous, his use of a self-published source, and claims to a unique interpretation of historical events flag him in the eyes of Wikipedia editors as a potentially disruptive editor. They thus use the reliable source policy to defer the responsibility for deciding whether or not his claims are true to the larger process of scholarly peer review.

This deference may indeed, as Messer-Kruse points out, render Wikipedia resistant to change. It can also, as I have argued in my previous case study of Wikipedia's coverage of the Gaza conflict (see chapter 6 here for more detail), privilege points of view with greater access to the means of producing “reliable sources.” This is an important potential problem for Wikipedia. It is an even more critical problem for a web-using public that too often allows Wikipedia to serve as their primary, or only, source of information on a given topic. More must be done to ensure the greater visibility of minority opinions on the web, and to prevent so-called “filter bubble” effects that may prevent web users from consuming a diverse set of information sources.

However, I don't think that Messer-Kruse's critique of the “undue weight” policy of Wikipedia, which holds that Wikipedia should base its coverage on academic consensus on a given topic, is the best way of correcting for this potential problem. It is interesting to note that Messer-Kruse himself, in discussing a related edit to the Haymarket affair article, makes a sort of “undue weight” argument of his own. He argues that the article's casualty count for the McCormick riot (an event that would help set the stage for the later events at the Haymarket) should be changed because, “The claim that six men were killed at the McCormick riot is inaccurate. This claim comes from the report written for the anarchist newspaper by August Spies. Chicago cornorer's records and all the other daily newspapers finally settled on two deaths as the correct number” (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265729292). Here, Messer-Kruse is effectively arguing for the exclusion of a fringe opinion, in deference to the weight of consensus found in other sources.

Consensus, then, is an important mechanism by which we judge the validity of certain truth-claims. I believe that one reason academics, like Messer-Kruse, and Wikipedia editors may not see eye to eye is that they have been trained to evaluate consensus in very different ways. Academic training, especially in fields that stress the production of mongraphs like history, tends to privilege the scholar's own individual judgement of the consensus of evidence. Wikipedians, by necessity of the situation Wikipedia finds itself in, understands consensus to be an ongoing process involving a vast number of both scholarly and non-scholarly actors. Rather than asking Wikipedia to hew closer to any one academic's evaluation of “truth,” I would posit that we can more readily improve Wikipedia's accuracy and respect for evidence by engaging with and respecting this ongoing process. By offering our scholarly findings to the Wikipedia community as peers in a larger process of negotiating the truth, we have the best chance of helping to build a Wikipedia that truly reflects the fullest and best picture possible of the always fraught and diverse process of establishing what we know.

So, a few weeks ago, as the Occupy Wall Street movement started picking up steam and spreading beyond the initial occupation site at Zuccotti park, I noticed that news about the various occupations, which was predominantly being spread via social media channels, often seemed fragmentary and hard to get a hold of in any sort of holistic way. This, it occurred to me, was basically an aggregation and meta-data problem to be solved, so I suggested as much to a group of fellow academics with an interest in the digital humanities. Sadly, we're all busy teachers and academic professionals, and only one of us was an experienced coder, so we didn't produce the grand aggregation of public data on OWS I had imagined. We did, however, start to collect a database of tweets that will hopefully become a fruitful source for future research.

In the meantime, however, others have done what I suggested. This is the Web 2.0 version of the “procrastination principle,” if you have a good idea, just wait. Someone else will implement it. In this blog post, I attempt make my own (very) small contribution to this process by providing an annotated list of the available aggregation projects: a sort of meta-aggregation, if you will.

OWS Aggregation Sites:

• OccupationAlist is an attempt to be a single page portal to the entirety of the media coming out of the occupy movements. It includes recent updates from the “We Are The 99 Percent” tumblr  arranged by date in a horizontal format that seems to have been inspired by something like iTunes' coverflow. They use foursquare check-ins to provide a visual representation of activity at occupation sites, and a map of occupation related meetups. Recent video posts are on the right hand side and recent results of twitter searches of relevant hashtags sprawl across the bottom of the page. The attempt to be everything to everyone is ambitious, and I'm curious to see how they refine the site.
• Occupy Together, an early hub site for online organization of the movement, provides a hand-edited daily news blog of events they believe to be significant to the movement, as well as organizing information and a directory of actions including action websites.
• OccupyStream provides a handy way to access dozens of occupation LiveStream channels, which have often been the source of important citizen-documentation of events as they unfold. Sadly, the site does not currently give the user any way of knowing if a given channels is broadcasting, or even active, without clicking through to the channel. I'm not sure if the LiveStream site provides any way of doing this, but being able to see who was broadcasting live at a glance would be great.
• Researchers may be interested in participating in occupyresearch, an interdisciplinary hub wiki for research projects investigating the movement.