February 2009

Here is the 5 question interview with Jay Rosen. (Jay’s Wikipedia entry, blog Press Think, video of the last month’s interview with Bill Moyers, twitter stream @jayrosen_nyu).

1. BA: I wrote about the generational rather than cultural gap online: “People who were born before 1960 view the internet with apprehension and various degrees of resentment (even paranoia). People who were born after 1970 take the internet for granted. There is a third group of people in their 40s, its a tossup between the two groups”. Question, do you think that we just have to wait till the pre-internet generation gives up the power? Is dislocation and disruption brought upon by the Internet inevitable?

JR: Dislocation and disruption are inevitable, yes. But generational blindness is not. Factor in education, will you? It works when you are ready for it. It also goes two ways, and often we aren’t ready for that. The fact that the young may need to tutor the old about some things while being educated in others is not a crisis; we can handle it. Songwriters Richard and Linda Thompson sang it well: it’s just the motion. Or look at geek culture: people in their 60s are heroes in it, so are people in their teens. How does that work?

I was born before 1960 and I do not view the Net with apprehension or resentment. Upon discovering the read-write web, around 1996, the primary emotions for me were liberation and gratitude. I’m clumsy around technology, but have learned a lot from people like Asa Dotzler and my pal Lisa Williams.

2. BA: Do you think there is something counter intuitive in our aspirations for a redemptive messianic leader and the decentralizing nature of the internet, niche breaking society into tribal parts and interests?

JR: Counter-intuitive? In other words, if we apprehend the decentralized and niche nature of the Internet, where more power resides at the edges than at HQ, would we not expect weaker demand in the wider society for some of the more messianic forms of leadership?

I’m not sure about that logic. The Internet is a change in the nature of our communication system, but not in human nature.

Think what happens when a huge and sprawling institution faces a protracted and complicated mess. Like our health care disaster. You may have multiple systems faltering at once, but also complete dependence on those failing systems for day-to-day delivery. The number of variables is too large for rational planning. The risk of action and inaction are both unacceptably high. These are sometimes called “wicked problems,” as against the merely huge. Our world abounds in them, no matter how much computing and sharing and publishing power the edglings have.

Sometimes in a situation like that–a wicked problem–the only solution we can think of is to hand the whole impossible puzzle of it to one person. Let that person try to understand it. Ira Magaziner was the guy for the health care mess when Bill Clinton was president– a wizard of expertise (he failed). The belief that such things can work is not necessarily incompatible with a fractured, decentralized environment.

3. BA: Journalism schools, like much of our curriculum, are a very recent phenomenon. In addition to tools and skills the journalists are taught to be proud of the profession and to have an internal identity of a journalist. Do you think what they really teach you is how to be a proud silversmith in the age when everyone eats from a plastic plate?

JR: There’s definitely a risk of preparing people for a situation that does not exist. That would be dumb, but if they don’t learn some agile development the J-schools of America could find themselves doing just that. Most of the better ones are aware of this. There’s some entrepreneurial push, and some forward-thinking partnerships may be emerging. Also the first stirrings of inter-generational collaboration. Good signs. Long way to go.

People have always scoffed at the “requirement” to go to journalism school. This is because there is no such requirement. Which I think is a good thing. It keeps the practice of journalism de-controlled: a very good thing. Between 40 and 60 percent of working journalists never went to J-school. There have always been other ways, and there always will be because we cannot license the press or create a gate without violating the First Amendment. And so “you don’t have to go to journalism school!” is actually an aspect of press freedom and something I support.

I think J-schools should try to become more valuable to the full-time doers of journalism, especially as a source of R & D, and charged-up people with networks of their own and stuff to try. The faculty has to re-train itself and adapt. We also need something on model of the cooperative extension service, like you would see in agricultural schools at land grant colleges. Here too there are signs of movement. And isn’t this J-school, of a kind?

4. BA: Is Marshall McLuhan one of your cultural references? Who are the thinkers that influenced you the most?

JR: Yes, actually. I did my masters thesis on McLuhan in 1981. He was the first writer on media that I really studied, reading all his work and commentary on it. It was one degree of separation. Neil Postman, my thesis adviser, mentor and friend, met McLuhan in the 1950s, before he became famous, and hung out with him a bit. So I heard the stories, as they say.

McLuhan was an english professor who turned to media when he realized what was happening. Postman was an english education professor who turned to McLuhan when he realized that school, as he put it, was the “second curriculum.” Television was the first. They were both fascinated with popular culture, and by emerging media systems. They knew how to talk to people outside their discipline, outside the university. They both wrote huge best sellers (Understanding Media by McLuhan and Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman.)

The program in which I got my PhD at NYU (1986) was the kind of program McLuhan said he wanted to establish. In it, we studied the history of communication systems from speech–the first medium–through writing, printing, telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, looking not at the devices themselves but at, say… the problems of cultural memory in an oral culture, or “craft literacy” where a group controls access to the writing system and thus to priestly authority. The democratizing influence of print in the Protestant reformation. The disruptive influence of photography on realism in painting. The information science of code breaking– where I first met my friends, signal and noise. It was a great subject to study and very good preparation for the Web.

McLuhan and Postman were both creatures of print civilization, masters of literacy, who were able to break the page. They were ready to “unlearn dead concepts,” a phrase from Postman’s books. I was also influenced by the semiotics of Roland Barthes, a French critic who was big when I was in grad school. McLuhan and Barthes were doing something very similar in the 1950s: short essays about advertisements and myth. (Appreciate the simple definition for myth that Barthes had: “many signifiers, one signified.”) I made my first acquaintance with the curmudgeons of the world in studying the reactions McLuhan got from “big literature” around 1964-67.

Alexis DeTocqueville, Walt Whitman and John Dewey on American Democracy. James W. Carey on the press and the public. Hannah Arendt on the evils of mass society, and the recovery of the public world. More recently, Richard Stallman on free software, Eric Raymond in his Cathedral and the Bazaar manifesto, Rebecca Blood on blogs at the beginning, Tim O’Reilly and Dave Winer on pushing the logic of openness. Lessig. And my nephew, Zack Rosen. It was an undergraduate student, Shankar Gupta, who told me about blogging in 2002. Influential.

5. BA: If you had to be born in a different time and place where would that be and why?

JR: Same town, same year as Lucinda Williams:

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Why? Uh…