Visualisation Project

Essay Task 3

When publishing changes, so does society. Investigate and compare the impact of two publication technologies, one pre-1900 and one post-2000, on a specific aspect of society

When publishing changes, so does society. I strongly believe in this quote as I believe the media has a tremendous amount of subconscious control over the way we interact. However there is a third party missing from this statement: the Internet. In the words of Sachin Kamdar, “Publishers have been running a marathon in a pair of shoes that are four sizes too small.” Publishing has changed because of the Internet, therefore, society is changing is changing because of the Internet. In this essay I will be exploring the impact that the printing press and Twitter have had on journalism.

Firstly it is vital to have an understanding of what the word ‘publishing’ means. The process of publishing can be broadly defined as the distribution of information to any particular public. Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers, and includes the various stages of development such as graphic design, editing, and production.

The publics grasp together to form society, and each public can make up any specific form of publishing such as aggregating or archiving. We are, in a sense, an assemblage. An example I use of archiving is the act of publishing your own thoughts on paper, and directing them, or saving them, to a ‘relevant’ place.

The emergence of the printing press by German, Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, is regarded as one the most significant events in media history, and in my opinion, life as we know it. Publishing became archived and organised through books and newspapers, and was a huge step for education everywhere. Information was now accessible to a wider reach of people.

Remaining the standard until the 20^th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press is also accredited with printing the world's first book using movable type: the 42-line Gutenberg Bible. There only 200 copies were made, in 1452; an interesting statistic considering “Fifty Shades of Grey” has sold over 70 million copies worldwide.

The Gutenberg Bible’s were printed on Vellum, an expensive material made from mammal skins, thus allowing only the ‘rich’ to acquire the book.

The Gutenberg printing press developed from the technology of the screw-type wine presses of the Rhine Valley, Germany. It was there in 1440 that Johannes Gutenberg created his printing press, a hand press, in which “ink was rolled over the raised surfaces of moveable handset block letters held within a wooden form and the form was then pressed against a sheet of paper” (Bellis, unknown).

Mass production did not really exist before this. Publishing on paper and being able to mass-produce, brought on some of the most important cultural revolutions such as the Renaissance and the formation of capitalism.

How you may ask, could a publishing technology be what formed the basis of our society today? Books shared knowledge, ideas, and experiences; they became a catalyst for cultural change. In the 18th century, sovereigns or families had no public sphere. There was no debate about whether the sovereign was right or wrong. As things started to change, such as the formation of coffee houses and printed press, a new space inserted itself in between the sovereign and the family: the public space.

People and society started to be able to ask questions about their space, such as, is this leader truly right? Should they be representing my needs?

According to McLuhan (1962), it was the Gutenberg evolution of printing that instilled the notion of the public in society. The printing press was indeed a milestone for observing how mass-publishing and direct messages to the public, affected the organisation of society. According to Eisenstein (2001), the impact caused major social, economic and political transformations. She also argues that it facilitated the reformation of liberalism and the development of the scientific method (Geiselhart, 2001).

Technology of the printing press went on to be further improved in the Industrial Revolution. By 1470 in France, 1489 in England, and by 1533 in ‘The Americas”, printing presses had made their way around the world.

A fun fact to keep you interested: King Ptolemy I Soter in Alexandria created the first library in -295. He asked the former governor of Athens, Demetrios Phalereus, to collect all the books in the inhabited world. This included works by poets, prose-writers, rhetoricians, doctors, and historians. Foreign vessels that docked in Alexandria were constantly rummaged through for scrolls and manuscripts.

The emergence of coffee shops and the age of gossip in the 18^th century as discussed before, can similarly be seen in a new and improved replicated form: Twitter.

A publishing technology in it’s own right, it is an online social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".

Created in March 2006, it has over 500 million users generating 340 million tweets a day. It has been described as the SMS of the Internet. Twitter usage spikes during prominent events, the current record for usage was on January 1^st 2013 in the Japanese time zone as the New Year begun, reaching 33,388 tweets per second.

Twitter has been known to organise protests, referred to as ‘Twitter Revolutions’, such as the 2009-2010 Iranian election protests. In retaliation, the Iranian government blocked the service. Some have described Twitter as a strategic weapon, with the ability to re-align social order in real time.

  

Now to the fun part of the essay: comparing the impacts of these publication technologies on journalism.

The printing press was the birth of journalism. The mass production of literature across the world allowed discussion and debate; and there was now a space to publish it. This is where “imagined communities” occurred, journalism allowed communication across physical boundaries (Anderson 1991). It could be said this is where ‘gossip’ was formed, and by gossip I mean the actual discussion of what was happening in government or higher power, not what your best friend wore last night. It is interesting to compare coffee houses in the 18^th century to Twitter today, as they act as the same platform.

The printing press set journalism up as a profession, well, at least up until a few years ago. If you were a journalist, your article was to be read by everyone, as there were not multiple publications.

The newspaper was a primary, and often only, source of news and entertainment for people. The newspaper may have been printed daily or weekly, and it was a direct connection to the people, for the people. This allowed the set up of a business model for newspapers where they could make profit from advertising revenue (and in that, pay their journalists good money).

Today, social media and the Internet have taken that away. Twitter, for example, has a 24-hour news cycle, which is quite literally, impossible for a printing press to compete with. As a result, advertisers have started withdrawing from print media and moved to digital platforms such as Twitter where advertising space is much cheaper and will have a greater reach. Not only is this putting print media out of business, it is also seeing a decline in the amount of trained investigative journalists. In Sydney in 1992, the average free-lance journalist would be paid $1.50 a word for an article in the newspaper. Today, it is 50cents a word (Simmons, 2010)

It is widely accepted that there are less ‘professional’ journalists and that it is somewhat of a dead industry. However depending on perception, there are actually more journalists in a thriving industry.

Pre 1900, journalism was used strictly as the 4^th estate, a watchdog for society against corruption. Today, that description is would only apply to ‘investigative journalism’, which there is very little of. Recently, everyone is a ‘journalist’. Twitter users can break news via their status in 140 characters or less and upload a photo if they were at the scene. It’s all about mobility and urgency. Consequently, the authenticity and legitimacy of the media and journalists is often questioned.

Twitter has made journalism, or what we are calling journalism, about speed and frequency. People are beginning to favour news that is quick and accessible, not a 2 page article that they have to sit down and take time to read.

There is a ‘pseudo-evolution’ of the mind whereby attention spans are dropping whilst our ability to absorb quick snippets of information increases (Cooke 2005). The newly created iPhone app ‘Summly’ created by Nick D’Aloisio is a development of this idea as it summarises the content of a webpage in to a few words. The implication of absorbing small amounts of information quickly has further been developed in televisions, which can display news headlines via voice recognition. It could be said these implications of media convergence are making our life increasingly fast pace (Cooke 2005).

Back the question of perception of journalism, there is a huge rise in the amount of Internet bloggers on what is known as the ‘blogosphere’. These bloggers, or journalists to some, write about areas that interest them. They have become specialised in an area, and usually their followers will be too. For example there has recently been a huge increase in the amount of nutrition bloggers, who follow other nutrition bloggers etc. The data friction present actually helps to make the information credible, thus the bloggers are thriving as they are attracting advertisers to use their blog. In some ways this could be seen as better journalism than that of pre 1900, as there are endless options for the reader in a specialised area. 

This is reflected in a general sense that Twitter and other social media sites are making journalism more personal and tailor-made for each individual. In the article ‘Digital Publishing’ by Paul Mercieca; Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos stated that,  “if you have 20 million customers, you should have 20 million stores” (Mercieca, P 2001,p 77). The printing press was never able to do this. Journalism pre 1900 was a very ‘one size fits all’ audience.

In an article, published on the American Public Broadcasting Service website, called “Why Publishers Are About to Go Data Crazy”, Sachin Kamdar predicts it will become common practice for newsrooms and editors to “interview the data” before selecting it for a feature (the data being that from Twitter, and social media). The question is then raised, why should we even bother writing articles in the first place, why not just look at the data?

  

In a lecture by Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, he gives 15 advantages of using Twitter. One of them, which also applies to journalism today, is that it is interactive. He says everyone likes to create and write things, why should journalists be the only ones that get to?

“Reporters use open media as a way of finding sources, communities and audiences. The notion of a story – with a finite starting and finishing point – is changing. Live-blogging can bring audiences of millions around specific events. Linking allows you to place your journalism at the heart of issues, news and information.” (Rusbridger 2010)

“Much of what we call communication is, necessarily, no more in itself, than transmission; that is to say, a one-way sending” (Williams 1958).

Said over 50-years-ago I think Raymond Williams have summed it up perfectly. Today, journalism is moving towards communication. Pre 1900, it was transmission.

References:

Anderson, B 1991, Imagined Communities, Verso, London.

Cooke Lynne (2005): A visual convergence of print, television, and the internet: charting 40 years of design change in news presentation, New Media and Society, 7:1, 27-46

Kamdar, Sachin (2012) ‘Why Publishers are about to go Data Crazy’, Mediashift: Your Guide to the Digital Revolution, January 17,  http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/why-publishers-are-about-to-go-data-crazy017.html

Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979) ‘Defining the initial shift: some features of print culture’ in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43-163

McLuhan, Marshall (1962) The Gutenberg galaxy:the making of typographic man, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

McLuhan, M 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 1^st ed, University of Toronto Press.

Rusbridger, A 2010, ‘The Splintering of the Fourth Estate’, The Guardian, 19 November, accessed 4 June 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/19/open-collaborative-future-journalism/print

Simmons, M 2010, What Are Freelancers Paid? The Complete Data So Far, Crikey, 28 Februrary, accessed 14^th June 2013,

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2010/02/08/what-are-freelancers-paid-the-complete-data-so-far/

FRICTION

“So you dig into the history of data. You fight metadata friction, the difficulty of recovering contextual knowledge about old records.” – Without historical data there would be no data today.

To begin: Aggregation is the constituting or amounting to a whole; total- bringing things together

Distribution is the opposite of aggregation but put in words: the act of dispersing

The reading entitled A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming is about how Edwards is trying to aggregate the arguments and models of climate change into one source.

The reading offered more or less a timeline of how scientists learnt to understand the environment- and from this then- how different models for data analysis of climate change have progressed and changed and importantly what these changes mean in developing our understanding of information.

Edwards says the Infrastructural Globalism needs socio technical systems that produce knowledge about the whole world. However Global Data needs multiple images to replicate change as one image is not useful in demonstrating a theory as big as Global Warming.

Aggregation is used to analyse information efficiently. Scientific models are the best way, (Edward) to predict the future impacts of changes. Without models, would the data really exist?

Statistics are thus used in models. It is here that frictional data can be observed.

It is data friction because it is close to impossible to term something a ‘fact’ when talking about global warming. There are so many representations of data and models that they over-lap and contradict each other.

Within climate change, there are two sides to the story. Some say it’s happening, some say it’s not. If we were to go back to the original data they used to make these suggestions, there would probably be a debate then about what a certain statistic means – because your views will be based on data you have seen before that, and before that, and before that….etc.

In my own personal views of aggregation, I find it interesting to think how the creation of a hash tag is formed. When I hash tag something on instagram, it’s been done a million times before. To some people, the hash tag has different meanings. For example I hash tagged ‘billgates’ the other day. When I view the global hash tags for Bill Gates, it’s anything from a computer to a dog wearing glasses.

I guess after reading the Edwards article it made me realize that you own interpretation of data is always going to be what you base your future interpretations of data on.

Visual

This week’s topic of ‘making the invisible visible’ was truly incredible, even the title gets you thinking. I had never thought about how many visual signs I ‘take for granted’ or I just know/recognise daily.

One of the examples Andrew used which struck me was ‘the dashed line’. I studied Industrial Design for one year and had to do copious amounts of technical drawings. These drawings aren’t easy; they take hours and are incredibly detailed. They end up looking something like an architectural drawing, but for a product not a building. As the drawings are done in black and white with a pen, you have to show many different kinds of details with line thickness and dashed lines. When I was learning how to do these drawings, I just took those rules for what they were and got on with it. I never thought how people just somehow knew what each line represented. It’s kind of like speaking another language.

If we look at the art of VJ-ing, we see another way in which something intangible can be physically seen. “VJs,” as they are called, employ the use of images and visuals, which are synchronized with and/or respond to their music. It’s like you can see music. But isn’t the performing arts way ahead of VJing? In my opinion ballet was way ahead of its time.

Visualisation can never replace firm facts or extensive data, they should only exist to complement the data and make it more manageable. I don’t think visualisation should replace the text, are we so lazy we have to have everything drawn out for us?

A quote from the reading ‘The Virtual Window Interactive” saying “how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame,” I thought was brilliant. Very abstract but here it is anyway – everything is about perception. 

The Commons

The idea of ‘The Commons’ is a tricky concept to grasp. My understanding is that is about common information; who should have access to what. As I briefly touched on last week, I believe it is extremely hypocritical for any information on the Internet to be privatized and not available to everyone.

This view is shared among many, and can be seen in the growing number of Hacker activist groups such as ‘Annonymous’. This is a group of anonymous Hackers from anywhere in the world that hack well-known organisations for the benefit of public interest. I guess they see that the ends justify the means. Some of the organisations they have hacked include; government agencies of the US, Israel, Tunisia, Uganda, and others; child pornography sites; copyright protection agencies; the Westboro Baptist Church; and corporations such as PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Sony.

Although this idea is more related to free speech and free press, it is all interconnected when talking about accessible and classified information.

Another example of common information is 'The Stolen Scream'. Noam Galai posted four pictures of himself on his Twitter account, one of them he was screaming. Unknown to Noam, his image was used as a symbol of civil unrest appearing on posters and graffiti in many countries such as Iran, Spain, Argentina, Egypt and Honduras. Companies also misappropriated the use of his face for financial gain, selling t-shirts, books, magazines, and other paraphernalia. He never gave permission for his face to be used as 'common' information. Watch his story below. 

The saying Knowledge Equals Power becomes a centre point of discussion. Why do people want to conceal some information? Why should some people be able to conceal information?

This brings me to my next question; does publishing your thoughts make them common to everyone?

I am publishing my thoughts now via this blog, and then it be uploaded to the Internet. If I didn’t want anyone to see the blog I would have set it to private, however I accept that this is a part of today’s sharing society. Who’s ideas are what? How do we come up with ideas in the first place? Where do they come from?

“A Common arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability." - David Bollier

The Internet is one big community and it does not have the power to manage who sees what information. I think Hackers are marking the first step into a more democratic space in society.