The Potential Paper - unrevised

I/Encode: Manipulating Media Biases on the Internet


How do we codify information, thoughts? For millions of years, the most common way of codifying information and transmitting thoughts was through speech, through oral tradition. With the advent of written traditions, there was a perceptual revolution with a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of language processing (Postman 12) Plato recognized this, that the transition from an oral transmission of knowledge to a written one created an entirely new way of conceptualizing, of codifying information, and this new medium then began to create a hierarchy of knowledge acquisition. As Meyrowitz states, “the skill and learning required to encode and decode messages in a message determines, to a large degree, who in society can use the medium to send messages and who has access to the information the medium carries.” (Meyrowitz 74) Reading proficiency takes years longer to acquire than does speaking proficiency in a given language and written works can then further be separated by the complexity and specificity of terms that only persons with specialized knowledge can easily decipher. Meyrowitz, McLuhan, and Postman wrote major treatises addressing the change in media accessibility with the advent of television and electronic media, most admittedly simplifying the contrasts to those between books and television. We have now passed the television and entered an entirely new realm of communication media, with the internet providing new means of communication seemingly every day with new programs and ways of codifying information and communication.

The internet itself is written with a base code that restricts what is possible to create on the code’s platform, however the possibilities for the communication structures that can be built on that platform are myriad. Within the last five years, communication media and information sources have proliferated with alacrity over the internet. “Older” media such as instant messengers, email, Wikipedia, blogs, and message boards have either been absorbed into new structures or have evolved into something barely recognizable from their nascent forms in terms of both respectability and ease of use. “The skill and learning” required to encode and decode messages on these electronic media have become radically easier to acquire and thus the media more accessible to a much larger population. New media such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, mySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and even permutations such as RSS feeds have made more information and more communication media incredibly more accessible. It is no longer truly necessary to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them.” (Meyrowitz 79) With an internet connection and minimal literacy, ideas, pictures, videos, and texts can be shared with literally millions of people with limited knowledge of how the actual inner workings of the media function.

However, with these new media ecologies on the internet, new methods of manipulating information are coming to light. Linguistic anthropologists have written about the media biases of oral communication media in Sherzer, Bauman, Ben-Amos, and Hymes, looking at performance and discourse. Analyses proliferate on the biases of the written and the typed word, as well on the effects of the telephone and the internet. Now we must look at these new electronic media on the internet are manipulated and how the very code is used and manipulated to publicize very specific ideas and appeal to select sensory biases. The collective known as Anonymous has effectively exploited the both the sensory biases presented by online text and media, but also the loopholes written into the media’s code. One could argue that groups like Anonymous flash mob the internet to get their ideas publicized through view-counts, but that is unlikely. The internet has often been likened as a place, a physical location that one must navigate. As Lessig points out in his book Code, a loose analogy can be drawn between internet collectives like Anonymous and the revolutionaries of the French Revolution, the ones who took advantage of the infrastructure of Paris to revolt (Lessig 91). The revolutionaries in the 18th century had an extreme disadvantage when compared to the governmental forces; the government had the absolute power with far more man and gun power. However, the students recognized the fact that Paris was a warren of small roads and alleyways with no real central boulevards; the small routes were extremely easy to blockade and hold with minimal personnel and firepower. The French revolutionaries recognized the bias in the city's infrastructure and took advantage of it (which is why Paris’ infrastructure was restructured in 1853 to include wide boulevards and multiple passageways to make it impossible for insurgents to take control of the city). The same can be said of Anonymous and their manipulation of the architecture of the internet media’s code.

Anonymous does not write the code of the media it uses; most of its members are NOT hackers or elegant code writers. They have critically looked at the current infrastructure of the internet and, recognizing the areas open to manipulation on Digg, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us, and others, have been able to effectively publicize their causes and mobilize masses. As Steve Cross put it, they are using the digital code to rewrite social code and to get action. They manipulated the vagaries of the internet code to get Oprah Winfrey to host a television special based on a comment about "9000 penises" posted on her website’s messageboard. They have also supplied the information that directly led to the legal investigation of Kenny Glenn and his brother after Glenn posted a video of himself abusing a cat. A website has been created, http://www.kenny-glenn.net/, that details the cat abuse and serves as a nexus for not only information on the case, but also as a launching point for people to take action against the cat abuser and to share their own creations. Anonymous also got the cat-abuse video mass media coverage via instigating an internet movement that exposed the abuse video and the personal information of Kenny Glenn.

The architecture of the internet can be envisioned as perhaps an imaginary warren of interconnected information streets, roads, back alleys, tunnels and byways. There is no one huge highway connecting it all; Google and other search engines might be considered the highway connecting the smaller routes, but they function more as a map or as a teleporter. To continue the analogy, manipulating groups like Anonymous are not building new streets or connecting the roads; they are, instead, like graffiti artists on steroids (not “Hackers on Steroids” – FOX News). They are the ones who would plaster the sides of buildings and alleys in major cities with posters advertising what they found important, or perhaps spray-painting their messages.

This analogy for what Anonymous does also fits in with Meyrowitz' argument on cultural lag, published in his 1986 book "No Sense of Place" wherein he talks about the change in society that occurred with the advent of television. Meyrowitz argues that a subset of a population will embrace a new technology much quicker than the rest of the population, necessarily causing some conflict between the two groups. He was referring to the 1950s arguments with the TV as the "devil" and a subversive influence on the day's youths. Similarly, the internet media have most fully been embraced by the younger generation and, as Lessig and others point out, the people most likely to generate and influence internet content are the teens-to-thirty-somethings that use the internet (especially the high school and college students with relatively more "free" time on their hands). Anonymous seems to be made up primarily of members from this age subset and their manipulation of media seem to be the new evolution of that age subsets rebellion in previous years; from the French Revolution's university students, the 1960s and 70s political protesters, graffiti artists and visual protesters all tend to fall in this age bracket.
Already, the biases, the ins-outs-twists of these information alleys, and some of the more overt form of manipulation are becoming public knowledge. Robots, spiders, offline readers, and automatically reloading pages to boost ratings and views on YouTube videos have gotten much coverage from news media already. Anonymous has been linked to the micro-celebrity rise of figures such as Boxxy and Tay Zonday. Beyond YouTube, Digg has also been the subject of much controversy. Some estimate that 56% of the frontpage content on Digg is generated by less than 100 power users and as much as 25% of that content is generated by only 20 users (randfish); this from a site that has stressed user-generated rankings and sold itself as a democracy. Another bias that Digg has is the "bury" option; it is anonymous, unaccountable, and burying a story is much more powerful than voting against it. With the anonymity of the “bury” option it is difficult to track, but there have been rumors of people forming "bury brigades" to effectively jettison stories on subjects of which the brigadiers do not approve.

The code, the groundwork, of these media ecologies have been susceptible to manipulation by the people who use but do not write it. Can users take control of the online code to rewrite social code? Will the codewriters rebel? Is there a threshold at which the creators of the structure, of the code, lose control to the users OR the code evolves to serve some function other than the one originally intended by the writers? The codewriters have already rewritten code when users began to use it for "unwanted" purposes; Digg deliberately deleted/buried an article on how to rip files (making users angry by their bowing to the "man" and foregoing what users considered to be Digg's mandate) (BBC News). YouTube limited video lengths in 2006 to 10 minutes after too many copyright violations were occurring with posts of full TV show episodes and movies. More recently, YouTube has begun to remove videos that loosely violate copyright law. Videos of people and bands performing covers of copyrighted songs are being taken down, as well as videos with a copyrighted song playing in the background (for example, a radio playing a copyrighted song playing in the background of a home video) (Arango).

Copyright issues necessarily become part of the argument when speaking of internet media such as YouTube, but the code itself is slowly but surely being rewritten. The internet media are incredibly fluid in terms of code; new media are being developed and modifications to the base code of many platforms occur more and more frequently. User generated content is becoming more and more the norm, rather than the exception, and internet users are learning how to find the shortcuts and back-alleys written into the code almost before the code is modified. The new electronic media have changed the way in which we must conceptualize the codification of information. Information is fluid; we no longer need to “distinguish between the inherent complexity of specific ideas and processes and the superimposed complexity of the means through which we encode and describe them”(Meyrowitz 79). The new media are not restricted to the limitations of spoken, written, or televised media. The internet media can combine all of them or none of them and anyone can be a generator, an encoder, of a message. The encoding of information on the internet is constantly evolving to be more accessible to both readers and writers of the code and the exploitation of the media comes from the speed at which the new media are learned and mastered.



Sources
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BBC News. “DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion: Attempts to gag the blogosphere
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http://www.kenny-glenn.net/

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