James Murdoch leaves the UK - News goes for TV and Rupert Tweets

Whoever said the world is a simple place has been disconnected. Following the continuing unravelling of News International / Corporation in the UK, it is a challenge to get one's head around the entire enterprise of this "family business."

Here is a smattering of news from this date: March 1, 2012. All the news embodies aspects of the digital -

• James Murdoch resigns even as the UK Government inquiry continues into digital phone hacking News of the World (NOW, closed); 
• moving from newspapers to TV, which is converged digital video / applications by any other name; 
• Rupert Murdoch tweeting;
• members of the Inquiry tweeting him!

A non-digital aspect to the story stream is the news that Rebecca Brooks, former NOW editor saved a horse from the glue factory.  https://twitter.com/#!/rupertmurdoch/status/174810157082091520  This was Rupert Murdoch tweeting, so back to the digital. (This is, I'd suggest, a perfect communicative strategy for dedicated conservatives like the Murdochs - talk about animals in distress.)

James Murdoch has resigned as executive chairperson of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation.  At least one commentator - Michael Wolff, author of a recent Rupert Murdoch biography - suggested that James may face time in prison for his role in the hacking business. For such a possibility to play out, there will need to be a significant collapse of elite support for News - that may in fact be occuring.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/29/james-murdoch-exit-news-international?intcmp=239

Such an outcome would be the result of utilizing the Internet in the newspaper domain.

The standards for Internet behaviour in the un-regulated digital domain are or have been, unknown. You could do anything you wanted on the Internet - including hacking people's phones. The default is to rely on Enlightenment legalities about decency and civility - that is, allow people privacy on their telephones. (Frankly, you cannot blame the so-called journalists employed on English tabloids for doing anything but what their bosses instructed them to do or whatever was necessary to get the story. If I am correct, many of these "journalists" are uneducated well connected young people for whom the terms "critical thinking," "reflection" and "academics" are totally unfamiliar terms.  Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of  Evil offers a take on this. A reading of Arendt on Eichmann should let the implications of "I was just following orders" explain itself to this generation of the mindless).

In many ways the Leveson Inquiry is an attempt to claw back the idea of civility in the face of the digital. A similar claw back took place in the US after the commercialization of the Internet and the Telecommunication Act of 1996, with the Copyright Millenium Act, the Digital Decency Laws, Children protection laws and a multitude of other post-factum efforts to regulate the otherwise unreglated. (See Uprising for more on this).

 I want to draw attention to what is possible in the uncivilized twittersphere. I want to repeat here the tweet from the Levenson Inquiry Committee Member Tom Watson after Rupert Murdoch tweeted about the horse.  https://twitter.com/#!/tom_watson/status/174811123030298625

"@rupertmurdoch You comment on her horse but not on her insider knowledge of a criminal investigation into your company. Have you no shame?"

Then again, maybe this is more of the same: is the appeal to "shame" anything more than an appeal to the civility of Enlightened values?

News Corporation is planning to focus on television. This is understandable given that so much quality visual media is around. Given what I have seen in the 3D and games platforms dimensions, it is only going to become more engaging and immersive, perhaps even transformational. The size of the global market for Internet-based communication is vast.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/list2.htm

Rupert Murdoch in his letter about James's resignation said:
"He has demonstrated leadership and continues to create great value at Star TV, Sky Deutschland, Sky Italia, and BSkyB. Now that he has moved to New York, James will continue to assume a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay-TV businesses and broader international operations."

 It may as well say digital video.  Is it really possible for James Murdoch to end up in prison? If so he will have plenty of TV to watch, much of it very, very good! Complex indeed.

Proletarianization meets News Corporation

The end of journalism as an ethical practice continues. At least this could be the conclusion reached by the unravelling of News Corporation in the face of the UK government's Leveson Inquiry into the media. (I have blogged on this previously.) There is not much room to believe in the future of newspapers as established institutions for information, as the story continues to emerge about the way News Corporation journalists in the UK collected news.

They appeared to take two roads: they used whomever they could to hack into mobile phones to illicitly collect private information and secondly, they paid police and UK Ministry of Defence officials for secret information. Both sources were used to create news and sell papers.

According to old school moralists, this is not acceptable. The clear message from the moral gate keepers is that established standards of journalism should prevail even while the Internet makes that ideology obsolete. It's a case of attempting to reproduce nineteenth century reporting standards in the twenty first century of digital feeds. The two do not fit together. They cannot fit together.

Curiously, The Guardian newspapers persists with the idea that News Corporation is the embodiment of immorality. 

The story in The Guardian on 11 February 2012 - apart from its self-serving claims to holier-than-thou status - was instructive because of the sheer joy The Guardian appears to derive from seeing News Corporation in trouble.  With a headline like this, why bother asking readers to read on?

"Murdoch media empire engulfed in scandal as Scotland Yard net spreads."

The more significant comment was this line in the story:
 Following the first set of arrests, a News International source suggested it was intent on "draining the swamp", a comment that provoked fury among the company's journalists.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/11/rupert-murdoch-media-empire-scrutiny

Draining the swamp of what? It would be correct to assume that the higher ups in News Corporation have determined that they can get back to old fashioned journalism if they can just rid themselves of the crooks in the organization.

More strident critics than me would suggest that the entire ediface of News Corporation is a swamp. A more accurate interpretation could be that the organization may be finished as a global newspaper player because the Murdoch model of newspapers cannot be sustained, not because a few toads got into the pond to mess up an obsolete moral universe.

The fact remains that cell phones and new technology make something of a mockery of print media and its journalistic standards, even though print media continues and in some parts of the world is growing. (Latin America and parts of Asia). Draining the swamp would mean some kind of effort to find lilly-white journalists who rely on ethics as it once was. The internet has made that approach impossible.

Proletarianization means that the dirt circulates without the kinds of controls News Corporation wants to put in place. It can drain the swamp all it likes. The circulation of the vicious, the vindictive and the venemous is already here. Pretending that some kind of swamp draining will work is a fools errand.

Interview with Toby Miller - podcast

Title: A conversation with Marcus Breen about the proletarianization of the Internet.

http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/2012/01/16/a-conversation-with-marcus-breen-about-the-proletarianization-of-the-internet/

Killing the thing you love: Predator Drones and the Internet

The title of this post is not intended to be playful. It is intentionally provocative. It is the title of a plenary talk given today at the Technology, Knowledge and Society conference at UCLA.

The point to the paper was the discussion of the relationship between the communcation tool that most everybody loves - the Internet - and its dystopian manifestation, predator drones. My intention  in addressing this particular dystopian manisfestations of the Internet was to provide an opportunity to critique contemporary warfare ideology. This discussion can be set in the context of the Obama presidency, which many people hoped would mark the end of the warfare ideology that emerged during the Bush 2 presidency, the Bush Doctrine.

The hoped-for about face against the use of US military power to enforce liberalism did not diminish with Obama, in fact, it seemed to escalate. Hilary Clinton has made a habit of publicly stating in the nicest possible way that the US / NATO model of liberalism will succeed, by force if necessary. This is the weirdness of the current situation: members of the political elite appear to embody American liberalism, and have no compunction about using US military might to enforce it.

The point driving the paper is that the Internet is used to impose acceptable US standards of liberalism on the world. This is a complicated topic which I will not unpack here - Vincent Mosco has already undertaken much of that thinking. 

The use of the Internet for managing and controlling predator drones that can then launch missiles to kill purported enemies is the end point of US discipline. The French Philosopher Michel Foucault in his lengthy ruminations on human behavior surely would not have imagined that "discipline" could take such an extreme form.  But frankly, that's what drones are used for - to extend US discipline to anywhere in the world.

Predator drones (pilotless) are used by the US Air Force to kill militants, mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They do not get a court case, or a warning, as far as we know. The drones are controlled by Air Force personnel based in New York State and Nevada, who identify the target, then use the Internet and computer game-style devices to kill at will. No "boots on the ground" by US forces. Just the anonymous hum of a plane as it releases a missle over a desert somewhere.

The discussion needs to be around comprehending this shift in warfare ideology in everyday language. These two terms are taken from a 1963 essay by Hannah Arendt, "Symposium on Space," in which she talked about both of these topics as a challenge given the rise of space travel and computerization. Her comments are still applicable to the investigation of the Internet in its relationship with predator drones.

Of special note then is the way the technology of the Internet has moved beyond public interest, beyond jurisprudence and associated ideas of morality.  (These are ideas I explored in Uprising, where proletarianization is the unanticipated consequence of the unregluated Internet.)

This is where Arendt's concerns are helpful. How do we comprehend predator drones? How do we find everyday language witrh which to critique the use of the Internet to run these tools of war?

Perhaps an even better set of questions result from a conversation about warfare ideology.
 

Language and the Internet - new challenges

Today's Technology, Knowledge and Society Conference started at UCLA with a Plenary speech by Henry Jenkins. Formerly of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Henry now teaches and researches  in the Journalism School at the University of Southern California. He has, let's be honest, a mixed reputation and yet wonderful success as a person with a clear connection to what's going on. (To quote Marvin Gaye).

At one level his work is absolutely stellar in documenting trends and concerns about technology while at another level it has been criticised as being almost devoid on theory, knowledge of theory or critique. In fact, anything that would detract from Henry's style of technoboosterism has been seen as his Achilles Heel.

The surprise this morning was to hear Henry discuss the current situation with his forthcoming book - which will be out of date when it appears later this year. He referred to "rotting information:" That is the book versus the immediacy of the digital space: nice.

One of the points he made was that digital tools make information / knowledge "spreadable." He immediatley went ont to say that the word is not very good, and then to say: "We wanted to change the language and put the language in crisis." (by using the inprecision of the world "spreadable.")

I like this. Not only does it acknowledge something we know more clearly than ever as the Internet shifts and grows around us - that language is not helping to describe what is happening -  but that "the best language from cultural studies and critical studies" can help resolve this gap. Furthermore, Jenkins suggetsed that in the Web2.0 era, there is a reapproachment between cultural studies, critical studies and technology-Internet studies.

This is important - especially because in my own self serving way - Henry referred to E. P. Thompson's use of moral economy, in The Making of the English Working Class. Welll, I used this extensively in Uprising to describe the context in which we now live - a new moral economy, where proletarianization occurs. The unregulated space of the internet offers and creates a new moral economy.

It is always nice to see one's work ahead of the pack. We are egos after all... more importantly, it is exciting to see someone of Henry's stature referring to moral economy as a means of generating language that will make sense in our discussion of the Internet.

My plenary speech tomorrow talks about the limits on our language and how that impacts public ability to discuss the use of the Internet to mobilize predator drones to kill people who don't like us.

I'll blog that tomorrow.
 

At UCLA next week - Uprising Launch

Next week - 15 - 18 January 2012, I will be at the Technology and Society Conference in Los Angeles. It is being held at UCLA. Below is the link.

Feel free to attend the book launch / reception to introduce yourself or attend my talk about drones and the end of the internet on Tuesday morning.

http://techandsoc.com/conference-2012/location/

Pepper spray in a digital world - emotionalization again

A few weeks ago (October 19, 2011) I noted the way emotionalization had been informed and generated by  the internet. The new emotional intensity of social life is powerfully constructed around information. It comes to us with few filters: this is the renewed definition of proletarianization. (The images of police in New York City battering Occupy Wall Street protesters was profound because it revealed how emotion - in this case anger - can be captured in the internet era. It looks so utterly pointless).

To all intents and purposes the intensification of emotion is what has been seen again in the pepper spraying of protesters by police at University of California - Davis. Of more interest is that the New York Times reports that chief of police at UC- Davis has been placed on administrative leave. The call has also gone out for the Chancellor of UC-Davis to resign. This as the result of the pepper spraying video going "viral."

This is the media terrain that everyone will increasingly navigate. Watch any of  the Occupy Wall Street protests and what is always present? The video cameras. Almost everyone is recording everyone else. We could call this the video court of digital exposure (VCODE).

The extreme of this is that you will be tried and your execution at the hands of an angry mob will be videoed - as indeed happened to Muammar Gaddafi, the former president of Libya. I strongly suspect that officials of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations felt a little queasy at the sight of one of their number, who was on the podium only a matter of months before at the UN, being unceremoniously murdered. The question is who is next?

"The frenzy of the visual" which Linda Williams used in 1989 to described video pornography - has given way to a new frenzy. As usual, I am not optimistic - but it is nice to see those cops getting some early vacation time.

Will their emotion give way to something else? For the time being probably nothing but the intensification of emotion.