I Thank Whatever Gods May Be

Before you write me off as “a vain, coarse defender of outmoded and rapidly dying institutions,” here me out.

You see, I’m not defending the rote processes and technologies of the past. In fact, the potential for greater access and innovation in the news field thanks to developments in media over the last twenty years is truly mind-boggling, and these developments are only briefly addressed by authors like Clay Shirky, Steve Berlin Johnson, Dave Winer and many others. New platforms for consumption and discussion of daily events such as Facebook offer a 21st-century “public commons” where all citizens are empowered to participate given the low cost of participation. Pro-am journalism and “the blog” can provide more specialized – and, one hopes, more accurate – information and analysis. Twitter and video streams connect users around the world to one another in real time. The headlines of tomorrow, thus, are the Tweets of this moment; and that reality could enable record levels of transparency and accountability in government and elsewhere.

But nevertheless I feel a nagging sense of concern and caution in dealing with rapid changes in the news ecosystem. I am reminded of an important work by the late social critic Neil Postman. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman addresses, among other things, what he perceives to be the “broken defenses” against “information glut” in society:

“Technopoly increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with new information….When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.”

Postman’s discussion highlights well-known institutions like the school and the family, yet here I add another familiar and almost equally important institution: the newspaper. Processes and technologies are rapidly evolving, yes, but news is not, and the need for an intelligent filtering and analysis of the news will always exist in a truly democratic society. As Clay Shirky writes, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Indeed, the changing economics of the news “industry” shouldn’t matter to a society which values the freedom of information; maintaining the “control mechanisms” described above should be a cultural imperative.

And so it is that newspapers and journalism have a future in this very role, as public trusts tasked with organizing and analyzing news as it happens for a citizenry that can only handle so much information in so much time. Let’s think of newspapers in the vein of Hugh MacLeod, namely, as “point[s] on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things.” Let’s utilize the groundbreaking “pro-am” journalism of The Huffington Post‘s OffTheBus project and the financial structure of ProPublica. Let’s blog and Tweet, email and Tumble. Let’s do it all, because by embracing such a flexible and open mindset, the news industry and society at large will be prepared to welcome new technologies and sustain its future while championing a sense of social responsibility and democratic obligation.

Ultimately, we should be looking to preserve (or restore?) our vision of the “common good” and of “common spaces” where democracy can flourish. Whether it’s on paper or online is, therefore, a largely irrelevant question.

So, I’m admittedly very new to the Wikipedia editing world (view my preliminary “laughingoften” profile here) but I’ve been on the consumption side of the process for years. Generally speaking, I find Wikipedia articles to be of poor to fair quality, yet always a fertile ground for initial research or exploration of a new topic.

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to evaluate the article entitled “Small claims court” detailing the concept and implementation of the small claims court system throughout the world. Since the fall of my freshman year here at Harvard, I have been an active member of the Small Claims Advisory Service (SCAS), a service and advocacy organization based out of the Philips Brooks House Association (PBHA). Since my training that fall, I went on to serve as the assistant training director in 2010 and a training group leader for three of the last four semesters since my election to the full group. As a result of this involvement, I’ve had a rather intensive experience reading and applying the Massachusetts small claims legal system, and I feel confident that I am a strong position to provide a preliminary evaluation of its Wikipedia article.

My evaluation follows the following outline provided for #mppdigital students at HKS, an outline which overlaps to a significant degree with Wikipedia’s content criteria.

Comprehensiveness: The article does a fair job of outlining the basics of the small claims court system and how it functions. Regardless of circumstance, small claims court is fundamentally about “small private disputes in which large amounts of money are not at stake”. However, the main body of the article (“Purpose and operation”) spends a concerning amount of space discussing minute variances in the court system from state to state (e.g. trial by jury, family courts) that are not particularly informative. On that note, the article neglects vast stores of information about the filing process, the collection process, and the various types of law that frequently come before the court (e.g. landlord/tenant law, consumer law) even if differences in the details may exist between states and countries. The article is also terribly unbalanced – the most obvious example is the one-sentence description of Australian courts compared to all other sections, but there is also an odd discrepancy between the information provided for the US and Canada.

Sourcing: Unfortunately, the poor quality of the article is only negatively surpassed by the even worse quality of its sources. To be sure, five of the ten sources are from official government websites (e.g. Arkansas, Canada) though the spread of sources, especially in the United States, is very limited. Of the remaining five sources, three are other Wikipedia articles. One source (the first, on trial by jury) is an unsubstantiated private website, ConsumerAffairs.com, which explicitly says in fine print, “[We do] not evaluate or endorse the products and services advertised.” Another source (“How to make a claim”) is no longer published online. Plus, these limited sources are not successful in supporting the core of the article; they are focused more on the specific circumstances of an individual country than on fundamental points about the small claims court system itself.

Neutrality: There doesn’t seem to be much to say here; given the relatively uncontroversial nature of this subject, there is little in the way of opinion or argumentation. (The only possibly neutrality violation is one in favor of uneducated and confusing encyclopedia articles.)

Readability: Mixed opinions here. In grammar and spelling, the article is nearly flawless; there is appropriate usage of various punctuation marks and sentence structures. The language itself is, as stated above, neutral and matter-of-fact, reading much like the law it describes. However, the main section (“Purpose and operation”) could benefit from further topic subdivision, to clarify the central and peripheral points of information – an important distinction for readers looking for a quick launching pad into further study. The individual examples (e.g. US, Canada, etc.) could also be recategorized and reordered for smoother consumption, including revisions for consistent text structure.

Formatting: Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much of an argument here. Most of my beef rests with the content and sourcing of this article, which has obvious implications for formatting and layout. Given the information provided, however, the formatting seems to comply with the Wikipedia Manual of Style. The article is complete with main headings, subheadings, and a table of contents; it even includes a “Types of courts” section at the bottom of the article leading readers to other related articles. Footnotes lead correctly to the “References” section; headings adhere to sentence case and the text adheres to rules of punctuation — all in all, an inoffensive success.

Illustrations: Again, not much of an argument here. The article could benefit minimally, perhaps, from a picture or diagram of a small claims court somewhere in the United States or abroad, so that readers might have a sense of how the court is laid out in preparation for trial. A map highlighting commonalities and differences among different types of small claims courts could help readers get a broad sense of the varieties in small claims courts. Otherwise, I see little need for action.

My overall grade for this article? (C) It’s barely acceptable, and needs a LOT of work.

If great technology, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, is truly “indistinguishable from magic,” then the engineers and programmers flooding Silicon Valley are young wizards – most likely recent graduates from Hogwarts or some other “superior” wizarding institution – brimming with confidence and ambition.

Indeed, it is the attitude of these young visionaries that author Steven Levy attributes to the rise and success of Google, Inc., in his recent book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, And Shapes Our Lives. It is an attitude epitomized in the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whom Levy is careful to label as “Montessori kids” who do what they want, when they want, consumed by grand visions of the impossible and irreverent toward traditional institutions and processes.

The founders built Google from the ground up in such a way that encouraged this culture in almost all facets of its work. The company mantra “Don’t be evil” inspires spiritual purpose, missionary fervor, using language usually not heard in corporate America. The “20% percent rule” (Googlers are allowed to use one day a week for personal projects) emphasizes individual freedom and creativity, bucking managerial control. Even when Google acted like a more traditional corporation (choosing a CEO, making an IPO) the company defended data as the ultimate corporate authority and carefully preserved its values. The company was young, and it embraced (indeed, personified) a worship of youth and a faith in their values — speed, openness, experimentation, risk.

Christopher Beam of The New Yorker highlights the power of young engineers in “Bubble Boys” (9/11/11):

Right this minute, Silicon Valley is America’s opposite: House prices are soaring and demand for young talent far outstrips supply. The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedom—and power—than ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent.

Competition for cyber-talent has led to an incredibly pampered work environment:

It’s a cliché by now that every big tech company’s campus is a mini-resort. Apple’s proposed new site looks like the set of Close ­Encounters of the Third Kind. Facebook boasts Ping-Pong tables and Xbox 360s. Employees at the “Googleplex” in Mountain View can take after-work dance classes and then get massages before hopping a free shuttle home. Zynga, the gaming company in San Francisco, lets employees bring their pets to work. And, of course, free food every­where—food for your dog can’t be far off. Even AOL, that nineties relic, has a fancy new Palo Alto building, complete with a pinball machine, a Razor-scooter dock, and a room with a drum set.

Levy also describes this environment in great detail. One passage is particularly telling:

Seen another way, Google was simply a continuation of the campus life that many Googlers had only recently left. “A lot of Google is organized around the fact that people still think they’re in college when they work here,” says Eric Schmidt. … “The American university system is the greatest innovation engine ever invented,” he says.

Schmidt may be somewhat accurate in judging the enormous benefits of American universities, but he is foolish to overlook the drawbacks. Innovation coexists with stagnancy; openness lives with secrecy; risk neighbors safety. Students may bring fresh ideas, renewable passion, and hope in the future, but they are just what they are: students, warts and all. They can be foolish, arrogant, occasionally naive…and most importantly, they are untested by real-world experience. Pampered environments like the Googleplex may encourage technological innovations but they don’t encourage social consciousness and responsibility.

What’s particularly frustrating (and in some sense, frightening) is Google’s obsession with data and data-driven results. Their neglect of social technology has certainly led to a chase after Facebook, as Levy points out; but perhaps more significantly, it is but only part of a larger disdain for accountability. In the world of Clay Shirky, a world where group formation, communication and mobilization is easier than ever, why has Google not embraced this potential in a more concrete way? Why not leverage its own technologies and those of others to understand what society wants and, more importantly, what society needs? Google executives like to write off criticism from Congress and other authorities as the natural by-products of Google’s phenomenal growth and success; they don’t acknowledge the possibility that their vision for the future may not be ideal for the United States and for the world.

The “bubble boys” of Google, of Facebook and Apple and innumerable start-ups around the world, should tread carefully in the years ahead. Because their bubble of success will burst, and when it does, no amount of code will protect them from real-world consequences. Not even magic.

Human behavior and the very fabric of society is fundamentally redesigned by innovations in media and technology, asserts Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody. It’s not that social activity is a new concept — “Human beings are social creatures,” writes Shirky, “not occasionally or by accident but always” — but rather that electronic tools enable new types and higher degrees of social interaction. In fact, the ripples of change reach the foundation of our public and private institutions, reshaping the way we engage both the marketplace and the Hill. Faster and more widespread than ever before, groups of all sizes and causes are forming rapidly and moving members to concrete action. To borrow an economic phrase, “barriers to entry” vanish, leaving in their place new centers of knowledge and power.

A useful framework for viewing the dramatic changes — and enormous potential — of new social tools (mobile phones, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) might be found in the unofficial discipline of science and technology studies (STS), which attempts to identify and analyze the mutually affecting relationship between science and technology, on the one hand, and society, on the other. Perhaps more relevantly to Shirky’s work, we may call this field “social tool studies” — how are these new tools changing the traditional framework of human society? One compelling dilemma is found in the new “publish-then-filter” dynamic of online information sharing. In a world where anyone with an Internet connection can play “journalist,” what, in fact, is a “journalist”? For that matter, who or what is a “photographer”? A “publisher”? A “newscaster”? The boundaries of professions long cherished are blurred and perhaps making nearly obsolete (or at least highly elitist) those very professions. These and other questions run through Shirky’s book.

Above all, the speed of [social, political, cultural] life has been rapidly altered. The development of digital (vs. analog) technology makes sharing and organizing that much easier and faster for the average citizen, and Moore’s law only points to an increasingly subtle yet powerful role for such technology. After all, “[i]t’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible,” writes Shirky, “that the really profound changes happen…”