July 1st, 2006
One voice or many?
Dave Winer is a really smart guy and technological leader who has reshaped media. That’s a given. But he lets his personal agenda get in the way of his reasoning, unleashing massive doses of hypocrisy for folks to swallow.
Winer said to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in response to a suggestion I made during Gnomedex, that it would make no difference to politics if a campaign like that of John Edwards if a blogger were on the campaign bus.
"Who cares if he puts a blogger on the bus?" Winer said, according to the article. At various times in recent memory, Mr. Winer has been a forceful advocate for the idea of citizen journalism, such as in this July 3, 2003 Guardian article:
Winer proclaims no party political agenda. He simply wants rid of the opinion pollled "slicing and dicing" that has candidates saying whatever they think the particular demographic listening wants to hear.
With an army of webloggers presenting reports and transcripts of the candidates’ every public move, he sees as inevitable a new atmosphere of plain talking. "The 2000 election in the US was a tie, and the candidates never told us about themselves," says Winer.
"They lied, they struggled to make themselves stand for absolutely nothing, and the voters were powerless to do anything about it. In 2004, they won’t be powerless. The question is, will they use the power?"….
It is not just the politicians who should be afraid. Weblogging, says Winer, is coming after journalism, too. "In 2004, the opportunity is to have the citizens cover the candidates and root (sic—the writer’s fault, as it should be "route") around the journalists who do an absolutely terrible job.
Yet, now, when the suggestion is made that candidates live their livesLet’s look beyond personal feelings to democratic principles. largely on the record, Winer doesn’t like the idea. Why? Since it conflicts with all his public pronouncements, the only explanation that makes sense is that it is because I made the suggestion. Dave doesn’t like me, or hasn’t, since I took a public position that contests his views about podcasting, so he contradicted himself on principles that we agree about. See, Dave seems to think I am trying to kill him with The Stress of disagreement, because we have differences of opinion about podcasting business models. Disagreements, however, are the very essence of democracy and markets.
To be completely fair, I didn’t say "put a blogger on the bus." I said "The bloggers and the vloggers who are using personal media and social media to live their lives at least partly on the record are setting a completely different agenda for conversation in the United States and I’d like to urge you as a candidate to do the same." When Senator Edwards asked for a specific suggestion, I said he should provide a seat on his bus—the idea being that he should bring himself into close contact with someone who records what is going on with no filtering—to someone outside his campaign. Text, video, audio and photographic records should be used, not just blogging.
You can see the video here, to check the facts:
Had I had the opportunity to continue this discussion in detail, I would have told Senator Edwards not to give this access to just one person for the whole campaign. The public recordkeeper should change frequently so that the candidate, any candidate, would not be able to seduce the recordkeeper. One blogger wouldn’t necessarily make a difference, but a process that ensured the candidate actually lived on the record would.
Going back to Dave Winer’s criticism of me last fall, we’ll see the essentially screwed up element in his thinking: He assumes that any interlocutor is suspect, except himself:
There used to be a time when you could get the reporter - like Ratcliffe used to be a reporter - to cover it from your point of view, then people who disagreed with you, if you gave them any voice at all they would be relegated, they would run the quotes from them you would want to run. You could make them look the way you wanted them to look, but now they’ve got their own blogs and they’ve got their own podcasts. You can communicate directly, you don’t need to go through those filters. Nobody can really control what you say.
Reporters, especially good reporters, don’t fall for the seduction Winer believes is endemic in the press. Alas, he now seems to think that everyone is suspect, that there is no authentic voice other than his own. Consider how Dave says that unless he experiences something directly there is no basis for trust.
He tells the Seattle P-I that placing him on Edwards bus would be "courageous," but anyone else would make no difference.
The unfortunate thing is that Winer is right about the power of the press being distributed, but he apparently fails to see that the democratic power of that press lies with the people, not his individual skepticism and prejudices. This is the antithesis of democracy, it’s a form of unrealized authoritarianism. Democracy demands that we sacrifice some of that personal and exclusive control of events in order to share the rights and responsibilities that become possible in the commons of opportunity created by those individually ceded exclusivities.
Dave Winer was right to argue that the distributed power of blogs and vlogs is a potential corrective force in a mass-media dominated politics. He was wrong in his comments to the Seattle P-I. My comment is not personal attack on Dave, but exactly the kind of critical questioning everyone should engage in whenever they meet a leader, and Dave Winer is a leader.
On another, related topic: There was a good deal of criticism of Senator Edwards for coming to Gnomedex, speaking and leaving. It would be nice of politicians could spend dozens of hours with small communities, but national pols simply can’t do that. His technology advisor, Ryan Montoya, did hang around (see Dan Farber’s interview with him at the Gnomedex party last evening).
A group that demands attention from a national politician by suggesting they forego meeting others to spend time with them either doesn’t understand that many people want to—and have a comparable right to—spend time with the politician or doesn’t care that other constituencies exist. I think the criticism were naive, not self-centered. Of course Senator Edwards flew in and flew out, because getting to and from Gnomedex took a full day. I’ll give Senator Edwards all the credit in the world for coming to Gnomedex. I don’t think we gave him as much as he wanted, because, as Chris Pirillo, the host of the event pointed out, the audience focused on political discussion rather than technology and social media.
If, however, the public had a person covering Edwards all the time, we’d know what he had to say about the event before he got time to script his statement. The dialog would have continued, even as the Senator flew home. His comments could have been blogged or vlogged and Gnomedexers could have continued the discussion with him and through his community, as well.
Finally: I stayed home from Gnomedex today, which may be perceived as being critical from afar. I welcome a continuing and constructive debate in writing, where a record will exist. For my part, there were two great World Cup quarter-final games to see and an afternoon swimming with the kids that took priority. I’d rather be on the record here than having unrecorded arguments in a hallway in Seattle on a glorious day like this.
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 07/03/06
