What I have noticed is that unless you have specific technical skills, it’s very difficult to create new technologies. However depending on the learning curve, you can use many different kinds of technologies. Technological inclusivity has many layers to it.

• You can use a technology even if you didn’t design the technology. For many people with a certain level of digital exposure, you can utilize a lot of technologies.
• If you have limited or no access to the internet or to digital tools, you can’t participate or create.
• Even if you can participate, it doesn’t mean you can create.

Should inclusively mean simply being able to use a technology or should it also mean being able to transform that technology and/or create a new technology? There is not only a digital divide but also a divide between producers and consumers. The labor force doesn’t have enough people with the skills to be producers/creators which causes systematic problems that have ripple effects.

Broadcast Media

Today I took a tour of the Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN) on Washington Street in Roxbury. On their website they state that:

“Boston Neighborhood Network is a nationally recognized, award-winning community media center and 501(c)(3) nonprofit that acts as a public forum for all Boston residents, nonprofit and community-based organizations, and governmental and educational institutions, providing them with affordable training and access to emerging media technologies.”

BNN has been around for 30 years however I stumbled upon them last week while researching local television channels. When Cablevision became the cable provider for the city of Boston, part of the deal was that a portion of their revenue (around 5%) would support the common good. BNN is a platform where Boston residents can learn studio production and produce their own television shows. BNN offers membership, as well as volunteer and internship opportunities for any resident of Boston. The goal is to create a public forum for Boston residents from all neighborhoods to come together and talk about what is happening in their neighborhood and lives. As well as learn transferable media skills.

BNN has a program called the People’s Platform where residents of Boston can come to the studio, untrained, and voice their opinions and concerns about daily life in the city.

It is a space designed for inclusivity. However mimicking the macro problem of neighborhood segregation in a city, even so small as Boston, the residents who live closest to the studio end up utilizing the services more. The fact that it is in Roxbury, scares some people from coming in. When I talked to Janice, the manager of memberships, she said they are thinking of having satellite studios but that takes money and resources that they don’t really have.

Another problem of inclusivity for BNN is the medium, which is broadcast television. Given the switch to streaming content online instead of watching cable, BNN like other organizations are losing revenue. Which means they rely more heavily on grants, fundraising, and donations. And with less resources, there is less opportunity to invest in new technologies and media which is important when you are place for emerging media technologies.

One example is their drupal website. Janice is having a hard time fining someone to work part time with drupal skills to develop their website. Drupal developers are expensive as the supply is low and the demand is high. They need citizens who have these skills to help. Can BNN and NGO’s keep up with the pace of technological advancement given their resources?

There are organizations out there like Code for Boston who support public projects. But there are too many projects and a limited amount of people with the skills to help. The city of Boston has held a few hackathons to get coders in the community to help the city. Again the producers are a limited group of people. The concept of BNN is great, and as I toured the studio I was really impressed by the organization. There were independent producers who were local residents who were spending their time producing shows for the public. It is a real attempt to bring neighborhoods together and residents together. However as technology becomes increasingly important in society, and it differentiates the people who have and who have not, there needs to be a greater effort in ensuring that more people have the access and skills to not only participate but create. Imagine a model like BNN for emerging media instead of broadcast media? You need to train residents in the new skills of media. You need more people in the labor force participating rather than the same limited amount of people. And since technology changes so quickly, it requires investment and resources.

Here is a thought that is not original at all. There needs to be more people in the pool to make sure that technologies are inclusive.

 

As an anxious person with a thrill for hypochondria, I sometimes use the internet as a way of diagnosing myself with various ailments. But I’m not alone. According to the latest Pew Research Center Health Fact Sheet, 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year (this was in 2012) and 35% of U.S. adults say that at one time or another they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have.

Within the 35% of people who use the internet to diagnose themselves, this group tends to use it more:

• women
• younger people
• white adults
• those who live in a household incomes earning $75,000 or more
• college degree or advanced degree

I fit the demographic almost perfectly. I usually start diagnosing myself by searching google.

But then this happens. As you see, 86,800,000 results pop up in .48 seconds (side note, as I’m writing this, all of a sudden my head seems to hurt). More than 87 million explanations. So how do you decide which sites to trust? I’m probably not alone in clicking the first few websites. But not so much because I trust them as much as it’s convenient. One website that always pops up in the first few searches is WebMD, a website specializing in health information.

According to the WebMD website, the organization “fulfills the promise of health information on the Internet. We provide credible information, supportive communities, and in-depth reference material about health subjects that matter to you. We are a source for original and timely health information as well as material from well known content providers.” Which include:

WebMD provides a lot of information but I’m going to focus on diagnosing symptoms by exploring WebMD’s Symptom Checker. But first, a disclosure. I don’t really use WebMD to check symptoms. It’s more a habit of irrational anxiety. However, more than half of the people who use the internet to look up health information talk to their doctor about what they find.

Symptom Checker:

 

I start by entering my gender and age. What’s important to note is that age and gender do play a part in the likelihood of certain diseases. It’s also a great way for WebMD to gain valuable analytics about the people who are using their website. What I  immediately notice on this page is the advertisement for Tufts Medical Center. I’m pretty sure I see Tufts because WebMD somehow knows my location. It’s a good strategy for both WebMD and Tufts. First for WebMD, Tufts provides some credibility and trust to the site. If Tufts is advertising, the site must be legit! And for Tufts, it’s about as targeted an advertisement strategy as you can have. People who are looking for medical symptoms are seeing your advertismenet. This bridges both the public sphere of internet knowledge with the private sphere of hospitals.

In the symptom checker you must chose a part of the body that is bothering you. I clicked the scalp region. In the drop down menu of symptoms, I clicked on anxiety.

 

Quite a few possible conditions populated. If you click on the question mark you can see that WebMD provides a caveat that the symptom checker should not replace a medical professional. However the question mark is a small button. How many people are they hoping click on it?

The possible conditions for a headache relating to anxiety are ranked based on probability The most common conditions show up on top. This is very important. The list would have a different effect if there was no ranking or order.  Organizing information is power.

The most common list is:

Least common

The problem with anxiety is that you are not usually being rational. Thyroid storm sounds a lot more scary and therefore attractive than excessive caffeine use. Mad cow disease doesn’t sound plausible unless you had a hamburger the night before. The fact is, that WebMD may not solve the issue of hypochondriac anxiety, but it can make it better by providing ranking systems, more explanation, and encourage talking to a health care provider.

Before the internet, most people relied on their doctor or social network like friends and family for health related information and support. And to this day, even with the internet, for major medical issues, people still rely on their doctor and social networks. This means that the private health sphere is still dominant. However, the medical profession is not the same. Doctors don’t have as much control over their patients. And patients are informing themselves.

A place like WebMD is where the public and private sphere coexist. The public look for answers, and some medical professionals participate with their expertise. At this point, the symptom checker can’t replace doctors, but what impact tools like this will have in the future, still needs to be seen.

From class discussions, and the readings so far, the idea of representation has struck me as being fundamental to a civic society. In this entry, I will talk specifically about political representation in the United States. Although a seemingly never ending crisis historically and globally (I haven’t read enough critical political theory to know if there have been any real examples of “pure representation”) I find that in the United States today there is an interesting phenomena where there is an increasing concentration of powerful special interests– bound legally–with increasing citizen participation online, outside of traditional political organizations to raise awareness, increase transparency, start movements, and write petitions. Which raises two questions. Who is the government really representing and do citizens need to be represented by the government to have influence?

I remember when I was in 8th grade, I was obsessed with the 2000 presidential election. It was the first election I had ever paid attention to. It was exciting to witness American democracy at work even if I was too young to vote. And then everything I learned in social studies up to that point, made me totally unprepared for what happened next. Election day came and there was no winner. The weeks that followed were full of anxiety trying to understand the difference between the electoral college and the popular vote, as well as the Florida recount. And then eventually the Supreme Court made the decision for us. In a 5-4 vote, they ultimately decided that Bush won the election. My confusion led to distrust, and I ended up grabbing a marker and wrote on a plain white t-shirt, “the Supreme Court shouldn’t decide the election, the People should” and I wore it to school the next day.

Fast forward to the 2012 federal election and the most recent 2014 state elections. Although the Supreme Court didn’t decide elections like in 2000, they made an important ruling that may have implications for elections to come. In 2010, The Supreme Court ruled in “Citizens United vs the FEC that “the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation.” Basically it gave Super Pacs, 501 C4 charitable organizations, the ability to spend an unlimited amount of money as independent expenditures on elections without having to disclose their contributors. A loophole in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that “prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund “electioneering communications” (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election.

The reason this is important is because when a politician is funded by a specific organization, they tend to have to make sure they represent the interests of the organization, perhaps over their own constituents’ interests. To put it more simply, money talks. However at the same time, there are examples of citizens using their own initiative to make those financial contributions and interests more transparent to the general public. Take the example of a browser plugin created by 16 year old Nicholas Rubin, a “designer, developer, and photographer” from Seattle. Rubin’s plugin called Greenhouse, works for safari, firefox, and chrome.

 

After downloading Greenhouse, whenever you are on a web page where a Senator and Representative’s name is mentioned, the name is highlighted and you can hover over it to see what industries have financially backed them and how much money they received.

 

Take this article: Mass. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey call for release of additional $34 million in low-income heating assistance funds.

 

Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey are both Democrats from Massachusetts but have different financial contributions.

 

There is even a list that ranks politicians in terms of the % of small contributions that make up their total contributions. Small contributions make up 44.8% of Elizabeth Warren’s total contributions and only 1.3% of Ed Markey’s.

Rubin, although just a high school student, has more tools at his disposal than a marker and a white t-shirt. He can turn frustration into activism on the internet. He is also a board member of an online community/campaign called represent.us which is attempting to mobilize support for the American Anti Corruption Act:

 

Model legislation that sets a standard for city, state and federal laws that prevent money from corrupting American government. It fundamentally reshapes the rules of American politics and restores The People as the most important stakeholders in our political  system. An Anti-Corruption Act has three primary outcomes:

 

• Stop political bribery by overhauling lobbying and ethics laws

• End secret money by dramatically increasing transparency

• Give every voter a voice by creating citizen-funded elections.

 

 

Maybe the better question is, is there such a thing as a common good? Can the government truly represent the interests of everyone? It’s certainly not new that some interests are more powerful than others, but I’m not sure if there has ever been a time where there has been such concentrated power in special interests, along with, as Nancy Fraser would call it, multiple participatory public spheres. What is not yet known, is if these multiple participatory public spheres can compete against the more powerful interests.

 

[Disclaimer: Global Voices intrigued me before I realized Ethan Zuckerman was a co-founder. I tried very hard to find another example to explain my definition of citizen journalism but I wasn’t able to].

Citizen journalism is a form of journalism where the public is the reporter, editor, publisher, and reader that has the intention of being a public good. To quote Robert Putnam, “frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity. Civic engagement and social capital entail mutual obligation and responsibility for action.” Citizen journalism, when done right, should evoke action.

Global Voices is one such example of citizen journalism. They describe themselves as “a borderless, largely volunteer community of more than 1200 writers, analysts, online media experts and translators. Global Voices has been leading the conversation on citizen media reporting since 2005. We curate, verify and translate trending news and stories you might be missing on the Internet, from blogs, independent press and social media in 167 countries. Many of the world’s most interesting and important stories aren’t in just one place. Sometimes they’re scattered in bits and pieces across the Internet, in blog posts and tweets, and in multiple languages. These are the stories we accurately report on Global Voices—and translate into up to 30 languages, including Malagasy, Bangla and Aymara.”

Appropriately named, Global Voices is a collection of voices from citizens all over the world, including citizens from marginalized and misrepresented communities. By translating articles in over thirty languages, more readers can be contributors and more contributors can be readers; strengthening the community.

Curation is at the heart of successful citizen journalism because it separates citizen journalism from simply an aggregation of large amounts of unfiltered content. Emily Bell writes about the consequence of bad journalism, “the problems the press creates when it works badly, errors of fact and interpretation, opacity, carelessness- are amplified by new technology and new capabilities.” As new technologies like smart phones allow people to take photos, capture video, record audio, and instantly share content to their friends, family, and to the greater public, there is room for both beneficial and harmful effects. At Global Voices, the curation process requires the collaboration of leaders, advisors, contributors, and volunteers to make sure the stories are poignant and worthwhile.

I believe that in the future, there will be no separation between journalism and citizen journalism. All jouralism will be citizen journalism. Journalism will look more like Global Voices than the New York Times. Martin Shubik, a professor of Yale asked in the 1960’s: “How much time can the man on the street devote to politics? As population grows and the world becomes more complex, how can society keep the individual supplied with the right information for making political decisions and preserving his dream? The problem is not the speed of generation of transmutations of bits of raw data per second. It lies at the far more fundamental level of interpretation and understanding.” In order to get to the level of intepretation and understanding needed to inform citizens, citizen journalism will require collaboration, connection and participation from all sectors of society.

Sonya