Tweet: The new divide in media is walled v. open. Here’s why I think walls are bad for the builders and us all.
In the discussion about news, there’s always a divide – because news loves divides. The splits have been old v. new, MSM v. blogs, professional v. amateur, institutional v. entrepreneurial, and lately paid v. free.
But I fear another divide we’re beginning to see develop is walled v. open. The legacy players – in what I believe is their last-ditch effort to save their old ways, models, and empires — are threatening to put up walls. News Corp. is forever rumored to be putting up both pay walls and more walls to keep Google’s hordes of Huns (aka us useless asshats) out.
Some say: Fine, digital suicide couldn’t happen to a better mogul. But I say we should fear the precedent, the balkanization of the web into isolated worlds. It’s true that all the data on the web is not today available via search — content trapped in data bases, in Flash, in comments, in video — though I see continuing efforts to bring that content into the tent. The momentum is toward including ever more data. But now come Murdoch and Microsoft, threatening to take their balls and go home. It’s their right to do so; as Google always points out, it’s also easy to do so.
But I would hate to see walls go up just as we are tearing them down. That’s how Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger began his road show on the mutualization of news for my students a week ago: showing the wall between the press and the people coming down. But then, Rusbridger recognizes that the future of news – any industry, really – is about handing over control. That is what Murdoch et al fear most.
I fear balkanization. I fear stupidity, too – that others will follow Rupert the Pied Piper over the cliff. And I fear the impact on democracy.
At some events lately, I’ve heard it argued that information needs to be free to be democratic. I don’t agree. But I do say that when information is free, it becomes more democratic. Or put it a better way: the cheaper news and information is, the more people can be informed and the better that is for democracy.
Rusbridger reminds us that advertising freed newspapers from ownership and control by political parties and special interests who exercised that control via patronage. Advertising gave journalism independence. Advertising also subsidized news and reduced its cost so more people could get it. Surely the mission of news is to serve as many people as possible and so things that serve that end serve the mission; things that don’t, don’t.
I’m accused by those who don’t listen to what I say of arguing that – in the too-often paraphrased half quote – news (information, content) wants to be free, as if that is my cause, my religion. No, I say that I want to support news in the most sustainable and profitable way possible — and I believe today, that’s still advertising, which will work better in the open. I want to make news more efficient and less expensive so it can, again, be more sustainable — which will also work better in the open as networks, collaboration, and links serve that efficiency. And I want news to be as open as possible so as many people as possible can use it — that’s as close as I get to a cause: not that information wants to be or must be free but that it is better to be open.
Murdoch thinks Google is doing evil — kleptomania — because he doesn’t understand the new realities of media. Microsoft knows better. Its alleged attempt to woo old-man Murdoch is an act of deepest cynicism. It’s evil.
I believe that the next wave of virtue in society will flow from openness: from government transparency, from corporate transparency, from personal publicness and an ethic of openness that will bring greater accountability, deeper connections, and meaningful sharing.
Walls used to contain value; that’s why it’s the reflex of the legacy powerful to want to build them. They don’t see that today, in an open society and economy, walls no longer preserve value, they diminish it.
So I’m not rooting for Murdoch to build his walls as good sport. I really wish he wouldn’t, for his sake and ours.
My prostate cancer was caught with multiple PSA tests that weren’t out of the normal range but that were rising fast. That led to a biopsy, which found cancer in 1 of 12 samples, meaning it apparently was caught early. That led to surgery, which confirmed my malignancy but also that it was contained to the prostate.
I say, thank god science for screening. Those tests gave me information I needed to make a choice. Without the information, I wouldn’t have had the choice.
But there is a growing rumble about curtailing screening, especially for the erogenous-zone cancers of the breast and the prostate. See today’s New York Times report on the debate about the efficacy of screening to save lives.
Note that plural: lives, not a life. This isn’t about me and my cancer. This is about statistics and money. The question they’re asking: Is it worth it to find these cancers and cut them out at considerable cost if we’re not sure those cancers would have killed all those people who had surgery? But who’s to say what’s worth it?
What if I’m the one in a hundred who would die without the screening and surgery? Only one way to find out: keep the cancer in me and wait. Indeed, I had that choice — “watchful waiting,” it’s called. But without the screening, I wouldn’t have had the information to know that was cancer was in me until it spread — until it was too late. I wouldn’t have known I had a choice.
As The Times points out, part of the problem here is that researchers don’t know whether some prostate tumors are more certainly deadly than others and I’ll agree that more research is inevitably a good thing.
But this discussion is really about playing the odds with my life – and who gets to roll those dice. I want to be the one who makes this bet. I want to have the information to make it. But implicit in this debate is the idea that insurance companies want to make the bet and they want to do it for everyone at once: “Let’s curtail the screening and see what happens. OK, so one more person in a hundred dies, but we also saved huge money.” Worth it? Not if you’re that one in a hundred. Not if that one is me.
I am 55 years old and in good health with a wife and two children. Faced with the choice of not knowing whether I had cancer, I chose screening. Then faced with the choice of leaving cancer inside me because it might not kill me (that is, something else could kill me sooner than this slow-growing tumor), I chose – my wife and I chose – to get it out. In my grandfather’s case, no other disease or accident got him first; his prostate cancer killed him.
My insurance company will probably pay $25k for my surgery to take out my cancer. I am now facing some inconveniences. Worth it? I’d say it is. Will the insurance company think it’s worth it? Don’t know. Don’t care. I don’t want them making that decision. I will make it. That is the point of having control of information about my health: my information about my life. That is the point of screening.
If this were a purely economic decision, then some would die. Imagine you’re Frank Purdue and you can spend $100,000 to save a few chickens worth $100 on the market; you won’t do it. But we’re not chickens. At some level, it’s always an economic decision, I know. That is why I support government involvement in health care. Yes, I’m a free marketeer when it comes to other industries, especially the press (because I’m also a First Amendment adherent). And yes, even when government is involved, it can decide not to spend money for expensive treatments or old people (the stories we keep hearing about the U.K.) – but at least then we hold political pressure over the government. Chickens don’t vote. Patients do.
As a matter of statistics and odds, I know screening results in treatment that adds to costs. But it also saves lives – no matter whether we know precisely how many. I believe screening saved my life and I chose not to have been proven right by waiting.
So get your screenings, folks, get ‘em while they last. I’m due for another damned colonoscopy (which I’ll get after my rump feels repaired from the damage of my last surgery) and I’ll get it because they found a polyp in me (benign) last time; I won’t take the risk. You should get your PSA tested, men, and your mammograms, women. And then you can make informed decisions – informed by data and your doctors. It’s the information that gives you the choice. That information is yours.
: MORE: This discussion also leads to the work Doc Searls has been doing with vendor relationship management and personal health records. We not only need the information, we need it in a form that is usable, and we need control of it — because it is, again, our information about our lives.
: Later: Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report (and a friend and fellow prostate guy) reports on TV’s reports on the story.
It has been a week and a half since my prostate surgery and I’m doing great. I’m walking a couple miles a day (can’t run for a few weeks but even when I do run it’s not running), eating normally, sleeping well, now able to sit and stand and cough and burp without feeling as if I was hit in the belly with a Volkswagen.
I just returned from my hosectomy: the last dread. After everything else one goes through, this is the least of it. But I am damned glad I didn’t know just how long a Foley catheter is; I’m surprised I didn’t choke on it. The nurse fills the bladder with saline, then deflates a balloon also filled with saline (which is what keeps it in), then pulls, and then it’s my job to catch what comes out in a jug. “Just don’t get my shoes wet,” she says, “they’re expensive.” Mission successful. An hour later, I just went to the bathroom for real. Mission successful. Life is good.
But it turns out my pharmacist was wrong: I will be wearing man diapers for a few weeks along with a man pad inside – the belt and suspenders of the urologic trade. I feel as if I’m walking around with a padded codpiece – which is ironic, considering what’s still not going to be happening for awhile in that department.
They tell me it’s going to be a difficult few weeks and then it will start getting better over the next few months. That’s why I’ve canceled trips – that and I am still recuperating. The one thing I heard from people who’ve had my same robotic surgery is that you feel too good and then push it and then regret it. Today’s a case in point: I was determined to go into Manhattan for my class but my wife and my substitute, Steven Johnson, convinced me I was wrong.
Bottom line: The new normal is looking more like the old normal every day. I remain very lucky.
As I prepare to go under the robot on Monday, I’ve found that the process includes drugstore embarrassments. They’ve only just begun.
It starts with Viagra. As I’ve explained, a man’s plumbing doesn’t do the two things it’s supposed to do for at least some time after the prostate is taken out. In the hope of fixing one of those functions, doctors now prescribe low-dose Viagra even before the operation.
So I had to go to the drugstore and buy the little blue pills. But I don’t need them, I wanted to announce. Medical reasons. Really.
The doctor had prescribed 10 of the little blues but the pharmacy gave me only six. That’s evidently as much whoopee as my insurance company will pay for. But this isn’t for whoopee, I told the pharmacist; it’s for cancer. No matter. I could buy the extra pills for almost $20 each. Jeesh. In my day, erections were free. No more.
A few days ago, I sucked it up and dealt with the other missing function. I went to the drugstore’s incontinence aisle – yes, it’s a market niche – and took a pack of pads and another of full-size, pull-up, absorbent underwear to find out what I’ll need. Thank goodness at least that the guy behind the counter was a guy, I thought. So I asked him. He turned around to the two women pharmacists behind the counter and said to the cuter one, in front of everyone: “Does he need the underwear?” He might as well have gotten on the mic and asked for a price check for pull-ups for the guy who’s peeing in his pants. Jeesh.
But the pharmacist was nice. “You won’t need the diapers,” she said. Good news. Except why did she have to call them diapers?
The Guardian asked me to write a column about the transparent life and my writing about my prostate cancer. Here it is:
* * *
In the company of nudists, no one is naked and there is nowhere to hide. In this space and on my blog, I have been arguing that with the internet, we are entering an age of publicness when we need to live, do business and govern in the open. So I was left with little choice when I learned I had prostate cancer. I had to blog it.
So far, no regrets. Oh, one troll tweeted that in my blog post, I had merely used my cancer to plug my book (which, by the way, is entitled What Would Google Do?). But my Twitter friends beat him up on my behalf. I got emails pushing nutty cures on me – yes, there is cancer spam – but Gmail’s filters killed them for me. And I have had to be mindful not to bring my family into my glass house; my transparency shouldn’t necessarily be theirs.
But it has all been good. On my blog, on others’, in Twitter, and in email, I received an instant and lasting shower of good wishes and some good advice about my choice of surgery. My brothers in malignancy have shared their experiences with generous candour. I even inspired a few of them to blog their own stories. They joined me in urging men to have the PSA blood test that revealed my cancer.
After my blog post sharing the diagnosis was republished last week in the Guardian, I heard from Emma Halls, chairman of the UK Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, who said the disease affects almost as many men as breast cancer does women, but it gets less funding and little attention.
That stands to reason. We men don’t like talking about penises – certainly not when they malfunction. Discussing one’s incontinence and impotence post-surgery – both temporary, we hope – well, it doesn’t get much more transparent than that. It’s one matter for me to disclose my business relationships, politics, religion, and stock ownership on my blog’s “about” page; it’s another to do this.
So I think I’ve become about as transparent as a man can. I am living the public life. There are dangers here. I risk becoming merely a medical and emotional exhibitionist. And I know I have violated my own privacy to an extreme.
But I think we need to shift the discussion in this era of openness from the dangers to privacy to the benefits of publicness. It’s not privacy that concerns me, but control. I must have the right and means to keep my disease secret if I choose.
By revealing my cancer, I realise benefits, and so can society: if one man’s story motivates just one more who has the disease to get tested and discover it, then it is worth the price of embarrassment. If many people who have a condition can now share information about their lifestyles and experience, then perhaps the sum of their data can add up to new medical knowledge. I predict a day when to keep such information private will be seen by society as being selfish.
Collectively, we will use the internet’s ability to gather, share and analyse what we know to build greater value than we could on our own. That is the principle of transparency that I want companies and governments to heed: that openness in their information and actions must become their default, that holding secrets only breeds mistrust and robs them and us of the value that comes from sharing.
I believe this openness at the source will become a critical element in a new, linked ecosystem of news, as institutions and individuals will be expected to provide maximal information on the web. Such open intelligence also allows an unlimited number of watchdogs on those in power, helping to bring about a new, collaborative – and ultimately, I hope, more effective and efficient – system of journalism.
So for me, transparency is a necessary ethic of the age. That is why I used my medium, my blog, to share my prostate cancer. If I believe in the value of publicness, how could I not?
In a few countries around the world, we’ve seen a backlash against Google’s Streetview as somehow an invasion of privacy, even though what Google captures is the very definition of public: what can be seen in the open.
I wish that journalists would defend Google and its definition of public, for it matters to journalism.
See Peter Cashmore’s report on Streetview’s capturing of a crack in a building that collapsed today in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. Google captured what it thought was merely data but data turns out to be news.
When I was in Amsterdam for the Next09 conference, the Streetview controversy was in full bloom because Google’s oggling cars had just toured its streets (and canals?). Now I’d been told by German friends that Holland is different from the more closed societies in Europe, as folks leave their front windows and doors open, ashamed of and hiding nothing. Nonetheless the Dutch were hinky about Streetview, even journalists I met.
I argued with those Dutch journalists that if a city official were caught red-handed in the red-light district by a journalist’s camera – or a witness’ – there’s no difference if Google’s camera captures it. It’s public. It’s news. But if that politician is given the ability to quash Google’s photo, then it’s a short step to setting a precedent so a journalist’s photo could be quashed, on the basis that the private can occur in public.
No, public is public. We need that to be the case, for journalism and for society. We must protect the idea of public.
What is happening in Iran this week is public, no matter how much the despots try to make it private. See, too, this Guardian report in which a witness captured images of police allegedly roughing up and arresting citizens for demanding officers’ badge numbers and photographing them – for enforcing the doctrine of publicness with public officials.
Indeed, I’d say this doctrine should stretch to saying that everything a public official does is public – everything except matters of security. Thus Britain’s MPs would not be allowed to black out their spending of taxpayers’ money. Thus the default in American government would be transparency, making any official’s actions and information open and searchable. Thus anyone in Ft. Greene could scour Streetview to look for unsafe buildings.
What happens in public is the public’s – it’s ours.
Craig Newmark said that rating and reviewing online is tantamount to civic service. I agree and said in my book:
The ethics and expectations of privacy have changed radically in Generation G. People my age and older fret at all the information young people make public about themselves. I try to explain that this sharing of personal information is a social act. It forms the basis of the connections Google makes possible. When we reveal something of ourselves publicly, we have tagged ourselves in such a way that we can be searched and found under that description. As I said in the chapter on health, I now can be found in a search for my heart condition, afib. That is how others came to me and how we shared information. Publicness brings me personal benefits that outweigh the risks.
Publicness also brings us collective benefits, as should be made clear by now from the aggregated wisdom Google gathers and shares back with us thanks to our public actions: our searches, clicks, links, and creations. Publicness is a community asset. The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge—a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice—may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior.
Here’s a piece I wrote for BusinessWeek’s social report on publicness. Snippet:
In the company of nudists, no one is naked. We are entering an age of publicness when more and more we will live, do business, and govern in the open. Some see danger there. I see opportunity. . . .
An accompanying video:
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Sunday magazine this week devotes its entire issue to the future of newspapers and journalism. I have a lengthy interview in it – in Germany, I’m afraid.
If you want to hear how bad my German is, listen to the start of this video, my keynote at Next09 in Hamburg this week. (Sadly, no one told me that the camera was set to record stage left and I pace a lot.)
This interview in Spiegel Online is in German and in English.
And a nice illustration accompanies this interview in the Hamburger Abendblatt.
Finally, I was interviewed by Robin Wauters for TechCrunch at Next09 and I sucked up to Michael Arrington.
: LATER: A Zeit Online interview, subtitled in German.
Gannett and Wisconsin high-school sports bodies are in a fight over streaming games. As more and more people can broadcast even from their mobile phones, I think there’s an important principle at work here and it should be: Tax-supported content is taxpayers’ content. That means that anyone should be able to broadcast public events paid for by the public. This also should include government meetings (which are usually covered by local open-meetings laws). Otherwise, we are going to find governments, bureaucrats, and private bodies trying to stop us from sharing what we see because of commercial interests (or using those interests as a means of control). The problem with my doctrine is that companies that invest in broadcasting events will say they will not be motivated to do so when they don’t hold exclusive rights. It gets very complicated – and expensive – at a university level, I know. But as a matter of principle, I am uncomfortable with government selling control to information we paid for, from research to maps to field hockey.
I was invited to speak to a media trade organization today – I’ll spare them the specifics – with the assignment of provoking discussion about new models, which I’m happy to do, even if I do often hear the same old lines and take the same old arrows. I also hear new challenges and learn from that. I was also looking forward to spending the rest of the day with the group to hear about their ideas and opportunities and needs were and, at their invitation, to share a drink at the end of it. I was going to get a chance to catch up with people I’ve worked with over many years and meet some new people I was looking forward to getting to know and I would learn a lot. It was an off-the-record session, which may not be ideal – for them – but is pretty standard; I’m used to that and abide by the desire.
But after I finished talking and sat down to hear the next panel, I was ejected from the meeting. It wasn’t anything I said, I don’t think. It was that they now wanted a closed meeting. As I was rather unceremoniously rushed out, still noshing on my cookie, grabbing my coat and hat and trying not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out, I turned to the room and said, “One last thing: Think open-source, people.” It got a laugh and even a hand.
I was angry – insulted and embarrassed. But the problem is worse for this trade group and its industry. Talk about an echo chamber. What these people need is hear more new voices – newer than old me. What they really need to do is share their challenges and ideas openly and hear new perspectives and new answers from unexpected sources. Hearing the same old stuff from the same old group will get them nowhere. Witness the last 15 years.
If I were such a group, I’d be bringing in people from many different backgrounds and perspectives – from bloggers to technology executives to inventors to investors to customers to kids – and share quite openly my business with them (it’s not as if media’s problems are a secret!) to get new ideas and solutions. But then, that is the reflex I have learned here, online. That, sadly, is still not how media people think. As a group – not to a man – they’re still closed. Too bad. That will hurt them. It already has.
: LATER: A rather lengthy addendum, in response to a Jay Rosen comment, here.
Fred Wilson – bless his heart – blogs on my book, saying nice things (“It’s a good read, perfect for a flight. It’s not too dense, full of great quotes and insights. I’m enjoying it.”) and he pulls out one of the ideas that fascinates me most, one I’m thinking about writing on again: publicness.
It starts with Catarina Fake telling how she and Stewart Butterfield made a fateful and wise decision when they started Flickr and “defaulted to public.” Then Fred retells the story I have in the book of Mark Zuckerberg and his Tom Sawyer moment in an art class: how public interaction helped an entire class. Next, Fred quotes a commenter who had a similar story about a class working through problems in front of the entire class (though the school stupidly requiring killing the product of this work).
Here’s the lovely irony: Because Fred discusses this publicly and because he has wonderful discussions o his blog, there are more good ideas and viewpoints: a debate about whether Facebook is really public because we can control and restrict our publics here; discussion about competition and secrets; opinions about the foolishness of erasing knowledge; more talk about the value of secrecy vs. execution; a neat thought about the positive pressure of publicness; how publicness – being first to an idea shared in public – can lead to thought leadership.
The double irony for me is that the book itself isn’t public yet. Fred shared a bit of it in public and that is what lead to this discussion. I can’t wait for it to be public – though, of course, books are only so public since they are sold. We’ll be putting some of the book online – I need to talk with the publisher this week about what exactly that will be – and I hope we’ll test the limits of the benefits of publicness.
On the Dallas Morning News opinion blog today, the paper brags about what sets its letters apart from online discussion: identity. They quote a frequent letter writer named Chris (irony: no last name given) who says:
There was a statement in this guide whose importance is understood by far too few. Maybe it should have been entered in bigger and bolder lettering. The statement went as follows:
“There is no shortage of online forums where people can make up facts and throw bombs. But in our published letters to the editor, people sign their names and publicly stand behind their opinions.”
In a free society, opinions without sources reflect poorly on both writers and readers. This fact, along with the feedback that hard copy journalism has concerning government at all levels, constitute a valuable rationale for the necessity, existence and continuation of such journalism.
I’m not sure I can parse that last sentence into anything approaching clarity. But the point of the rest is clear: identity is good.
But then there’s a comment left by one PaulC (no last name, either), who argues:
Really?
“In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the
Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects
anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission,
decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required
the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. . . .
Justice Steven’s opinion for the Court note that arguments favoring
the ratification of the Constitution advanced in the Federalist Papers
were published under fictitious names. Justice Stevens said “quite
apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her
ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her
identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be
personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her
message simply because they do not like its proponent.” Stevens
concluded “Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a
pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of
advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of
the majority. “
Each is right. I have long said here that I give more credence and value to the opinions of those who stand by those opinions with their names, as I do here. But there is a place for anonymity in political discourse (and in whistleblowing and under repressive regimes).
