Jeff Jarvis to address internet complaints once and for all

In a post called "Sigh," Jeff Jarvis complains about the whiners:

I’m thinking of writing my Guardian column this week responding to some because I’m tired of having to answer the same complaints over and over. I sometimes despair at being able to advance the discussion about the opportunities of the connected age, as someone in the room will inevitably say: “Yes, but there are inaccuracies on the internet.” Or: “Most people watch junk.” Or: “There are no standards.”

[...]

And then I got email for a panel discussion at NYU on Oct. 21 called Crossing the Line, which asks these questions: “Are there any ethics on the web?” “Should bloggers be held to journalistic standards?” “Who makes the rules — the media, the courts or YOU?”

Sigh.

The implied answers, of course: The web has no ethics… Bloggers have no standards…. The wrong people are making the rules (if there are any).

To hash over these weightless questions they have nothing but the products of big, old media: David Carr of the NY Times, Liz Smith of the NY Post, Jim Kelley of Time, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, and Sherrese Smith, counsel for WPNI.

Mind you, just across campus, NYU has at least two of the country’s greatest thinkers on the internet and its implications for society, Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. But they’re not on that panel. New York is thick with great practitioners of new ways on the internet, but they’re not there.

Same old questions/objections/complaints/fears. Where is the talk of new opportunities in our new reality?

Link: Sigh.

Here is the comment I posted over there.  I confess my mood was a little cranky, but I still stand by this...

Sighing over the questions and calling them “weightless” doesn’t answer them. Maybe they keep getting asked because the pat answers people give (on either side) aren’t good enough and some people are hungering for deeper analysis.

For example, asking the question “Are there any ethics on the web?” does not imply the questioner is assuming “the web has no ethics,” just as I assume your response is not simply “the web has ethics.” (And the other common response, which I’ve heard Shirky give — that the web has the best and the worst — doesn’t cut it either.)

I get your point in the first part of the post and agree with you — it’s a disservice to you as a speaker when people don’t hear you because they can’t think past simple/closed-minded objections. My problem is with you dismissing the NYU panel for the same reasons. I don’t know anything about those speakers’ qualifications, but on the face of it the panel sounds worthwhile.

Jarvis's sigh reminds me of danah boyd's similar post a while back called feeding quasi-"legitimate" trolls in an attention economy, which I wrote about in a previous post: The Tender Ears of the Blogosphere.

By the way, I finally read The Dumbest Generation (one of those troll books) and I think Boyd is wrong -- it's a serious critique that deserves attention, though I certainly don't agree 100% with Bauerlein, and I think the book's title is ridiculous.

One of the points that Bauerlein makes is that there's no funding to study really fundamental questions about technology in education like "does it work?"  Danah boyd, Clay Shirky and the Berkman Center are all doing fine and important work but a lot of it presupposes that the internet and technology are beneficial, wherever they're applied.  It bypasses fundamentals and goes straight to studying what kids are doing with the technologies, how it's empowering them, and what else technology could do for them. (For example, see this talk abstract danah boyd posted Thursday.)  It's no surprise that a lot of funding for these researchers comes from industry.  Again, I'm not saying this isn't important work, but it's not the whole story.

Update: Jarvis's promised Guardian column is now up (and is mostly straw-man silliness): Once and for all.

Comments

[zephoria]

Just for clarity... my main argument is not that technology is inherently empowering, but that, in practice, it tends to mirror and magnify the good, bad, and ugly. I don't presuppose that the Internet is beneficial. My presupposition is that the Internet is a cultural artifact that is shaped by and shapes society. My frustration with effects literature is that it is rarely rooted in solid social science research.

Bauerlein, for example, blames technology as the cause of a decline in certain measures of intelligence, noting temporal correlation. This is interesting given that he also provides a reasonable critique of the decline in other structural conditions in children's lives. He is not a social scientist and is piecing together random studies, failing to recognize the most basic tenet of social science: correlation is not the same as causality.

I believe that research is critical to understanding what's going on and that's why I've been doing fieldwork for years. My findings suggest that social media has dramatically improved the lives of the most marginalized teens, become a new channel for most teens to enact what they've always done in a new space, and radically widened the cultural divide between rich and poor through a notable participation gap. The structural forces of these spaces inflect social practices in new ways, but at the core, not that much has changed.

I'm very critical about the blanket application of technology. I don't think that it's a panacea and I think it often gets in the way. I also think that we implement technology because it's technology rather than thinking through the implications. For example, I was very critical of introducing social network sites into education. I think that's just plain dumb (except for a few case examples where it's well applied).

In general, I see my stance as extremely moderate. That said, since I spend a lot of time publicly pushing back against fear-mongering, I end up looking like a techno-lover. Truth of the matter is that I would like to see teens spend less time online and more time interacting in physical environments. Yet, through research, I realized that we have the cause and effect backwards. Teens are choosing the Internet over friends; they are choosing the Internet because they want to be with friends and structural forces get in the way of F2F encounters.

Anyhow, I just want to clarify my stance because I am quite critical of techno-utopianism. That said, the fact that you see my stance as techno-worship makes me think that I'm not being clear enough.

[Kevin Arthur]

danah -- thanks very much for the clarification. My characterization of your work is based only on your most public stuff (your blog and from mention of you at other sites like BoingBoing). I haven't taken the time to read any of your papers or watch your talks, which I really should do. So I apologize if I'm being unfair.

I agree with you that where Bauerlein falls down is on his use of survey research (and some on the opposing side, like Steven Johnson, make the same mistakes). On the other hand, I think some of his other arguments in the book are stronger. Even if you question the particulars of the surveys, there's not much doubt that the trends in learning are all down. That really puts into question any claims that technology improves learning. At the least, research needs to be supported that asks those questions.

Fear-mongering is irritating and it seems to be growing. I try to stay away from it here and point people to more thoughtful critiques, but it's a difficult balance. I tend to err towards the negative side here just because critical voices about technology don't seem to get a fair hearing on the net (or at least they didn't a few years ago when I started this).

[zephoria]

Definitely take a look at the articles and tell me what you think: http://www.danah.org/papers/ You might want to start with "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites."

As for fear-mongering, yes, it is growing and very unsubstantiated. For example, I am working on a literature review of all research known about child safety and the Internet. What's super salient is that there are indeed risks but they are completely different than what the perceived risks are. For example, adult-minor sexual encounters rarely involve deception and almost never take the form of the imagined predator. That said, statutory rape is huge as teens meet up with older men knowing that it's about sex and doing so repeatedly. Very different crime.

Gaming is another practice that everyone fears which is why Pew's report is so interesting.

Trying to strike a balance is uber tricky. I think we're more inclined towards fear so I tend to veer to the positive side of things. I also do so because fear is leveraged as a tool for restrictions and I don't think that restrictions are productive at all. I'm interested in root causes to problems, not obsessing over the places where they're most visible.