serial consign

[detail of relief sculpture on a los angeles times parking structure]

Kate Milberry is a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 1994 Kate co-founded ROOM, a culture and community news monthly magazine based in Windsor, Ontario. The publication was on the verge of becoming a weekly, but the project was terminated and Kate decided to pursue her interest in independent media in the academic realm. I came into contact with Kate last year as my growing interest in citizen journalism began to drive my thesis research. My sister Karen urged me to interview Kate about the intersection of media and politics and the following transcript documents an email exchange that took place last winter.

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What inspired you to research the intersection of technology, activism and participatory media?

My interest in technology and activism arose indirectly out of my experience with ROOM. Covering two major demos - the Organization of American States meeting in Windsor in 2000, and the Free Trade Area of Americas in Quebec City in 2001 – caused a major shift in my conception of journalism, and my own activism. After seeing the extremely repressive measures of the state to quash democratic, largely peaceful (though that is fairly irrelevant) expression of dissent made me realize that things were a lot worse than city council trying to close a community garden ... I decided I was no longer a journalist, but an activist, and that objectivity was nothing more than a ruse to sell newspapers.

I decided to close the business [ROOM], and with no clear direction, began taking some courses in communication at University of Windsor, thinking to apply for graduate school. That’s just what I did, and joined the first cohort of the new Masters of Communication and Social Justice. My supervisor, whom I’d taken classes with, and whom I knew to be a Marxist radical scholar, put me on to Indymedia16, knowing my interest in activist journalism. I wrote my thesis on Indymedia as a social movement within the new global justice activism that had literally swept the globe since the Battle of Seattle in 1999 ... I began to read philosophy of technology (e.g. Andrew Feenberg), and critical theory (e.g. Frankfurt School), and found the conceptual tools I needed to think about technology as a political project, with deep ties to democracy. I shifted from examining the journalistic practices of Indymedia to its use and development of technology in order to achieve movement goals of democracy, equality, social and economic justice etc.

What do you see as key failings of corporate journalism?

The key failing of corporate journalism is that is operates within a strictly capitalist framework. This means that the pursuit of profit is the central objective, with all other components of “the news” being considered through this lens. This precludes consideration of the importance of community values, for example, or indeed, acknowledgement of the democratic function of the newspaper. If the newspaper exists solely to make a profit (with content, or “the news” being simply a means to readers, thus advertisers), corporate journalism can only frame stories in such a way as to promote the generation of profit. This is typically done by eliminating angles and elements of a story that might contest the capitalist values that underwrite the corporate mainstream news-media, and conversely, highlighting aspects that support the dominant understanding. For example, the Globe and Mail editorial board denied that global warming was “real” until fairly recently. This despite ever increasing numbers of the world’s scientists declaring that it was, indeed, real, and a potential threat to the planet. The Globe held on to its seemingly insensible position for so long, because to acknowledge otherwise would necessitate a reexamination of the human practices that contributed to this dangerous phenomenon. In essence, global warming contains an implicit critique of the duel engines of capitalism: industry and over-consumption. Because of this challenge to the socio-economic organization of Western society, the editorial board could not admit it. Further, the Globe cannot provide any objective evaluation of the deficiencies of capitalism (be it in the context of the environment, social programs, public ownership etc.) because it is at once a byproduct of this system, and dependent upon it for survival. Once again, the corporate news media do not bite the hand that feeds. The one-time function of the newspaper of contributing to the development of an informed citizenry capable of participating in a democracy has fallen out of fashion. If it is invoked it is in name only.

In your article Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace, you refer to the tension between democracy and capitalism in “building” the social space of the internet. What do you think the average citizen stands to gain or lose depending on the manner in which the internet evolves?

The average citizen, or user of this technology, stands to lose an important communicative tool if the internet is tiered, parceled, and sold off to the highest bidder. Further, they stand to lose an alternative space for engaging in public life. These spaces have declined drastically in modern life, and are largely the preserve of the elite, like much else in Western society. In this alternative public space, this virtual public sphere, citizens can dissent, organize, and mobilize for action against the dominant social structure. This is what we saw happen in the first few years of the global justice movement. The global nature of this communication and of this gathering place has been previously inconceivable, and the impact has been nothing short of amazing. It has further facilitated the development of community in a way that has been short-circuited in our frenzied, task-oriented, debt-ridden daily lives. By engaging in online community building, people are relearning or reclaiming skills such as trust-building, cooperating and information-sharing, that are essential to the development and preservation of democracy.

In the same article you refer to the corporatespeak labeling of wiki software as a “conversational knowledge management solution.” How would you define wiki culture?

I don’t define it much differently than Ward Cunningham. It is an open community (whether or not it’s technically closed to a particular group, as I think it probably is, big exception being Wikipedia), which means that people are exposed. They cannot participate in the wiki project (whatever that may be) if they don’t engage with a certain amount of honesty and forthrightness. A wiki also requires participation – it simply won’t function otherwise; so members must be actively engaged, not passive observers, as we tend to be in daily life when it comes to politics or political engagement in our communities. As Cunningham states, wikis require trust – he says this is a value he purposely built into the technology. And of course, wikis depend on collaboration; that’s their raison d’etre, in fact: to facilitate collaborative work; to enable interested people to work together on projects of mutual interest, each contributing their particular talents and skills. Further (as with free software development) there is no monetary recompense, no reward other than the satisfaction of having been productive, of having accomplished something or created something. It is a Marxist truism that humans are fulfilled, or completed, through their labour. I think we can see this insight realized in the process and product of a wiki.

[kate milberry's geeks and global justice blog]

What is your reading of the rapid expansion of the blogosphere and blog-journalism exemplified by online publications like The Huffington Post?

I can’t comment on the Huffington Post as I'm not too familiar with it. I just started blogging myself so am fairly new to the whole game, though I have a section on blog history in my MA thesis. I think the expansion of the blogosphere is an unprecedented communication phenomenon – not just for its global, low-cost connectivity, but also for its interactivity, and its production oriented nature. Furthermore, I think it points to the insatiable compulsion humans have to communicate – with friends and loved ones, but also total strangers; with like-minded folk and those who disagree with them; with people of all colours, ages and orientations. People need to connect. And the social software phenomenon of blogging has helped fulfill this need. Of course, it is not a universal phenomenon, and I won’t go into issues like the digital divide, etc. However, for the millions who are visiting and/or participating in the blogosphere, I think this is an important endeavour. For much like the wiki, blogging offers the opportunity (note it is not always or certainly the case) to practice communicative skills that have been lost or neglected in “real life”. It is possible – and I believe it is evidenced on some of the “quality” blogs – to engage in rational, intelligent, tempered debate, which can lead to community development and/or knowledge creation. This, in turn, has implications for how – and even if - we engage in civil society or not.