Generation Gap

Flying to Spain, I bought one of my favorites magazines "Newsweek" and I found a very interesting article by Robert J. Samuelson. I find interesting to take a glimpse in this amazing written.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/234584

Uses and Gratifications Theory: the media power

By Daniel Gomez

Every single day and every word you say

Every game you play

Every night you stay, I'll be watching you

Oh can't you see you belong to me?

- The Police. Every breath you take

Companies use the people flow of knowledge and information as raw materials for the process of creation and commercialization than make the products profitable to these business. But people don’t use media for nothing, as Uses and Gratification theory say, social and psychological characteristics motivate the need for media. My thesis supports that whether the companies and Centers of Power need information of people to reach their economic or political goals and people provide this information because they need to do activities that generate it (Uses and Gratifications theory), people are able to control better the world around them if they have more control of the information they give.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”. This sentence can be read in the book 1984 written by George Orwell. In this story the world is a totalitarian society led by Big Brother, which censors everyone’s behavior, even their though myth of the Big Brother. Since the apparition of the Internet and the new information technologies and devices, many people have the belief that our society has become in something like in Orwell’s book. The network society in the Information Age provides people of being connected and sharing knowledge beyond the geographic and physical boundaries. This knowledge and information can be used in many ways if some organization has access to it. According to Andrejevic in the book iSpy, surveillance and power in the interactive media, this new linked society makes that “companies are able to track our movements, transactions, and communication without permissions, or in many cases, knowledges” (Andrejevic 2007:4). The use of the new technology devices hides “behind the scenes and screens the little access to the form of information collection and circulation” that we really have. The myth of interactivity has being taken as this that will improve our feeling of freedom, but it has not been well examined. This term, interactivity, “is an illdefined and slippery one that has been used to include everything from staying in constant contact with friends, family and relatives to votes for our favorite “american Idol”” (Andrejevic at al. 2007). Otherwise, Uses and Gratification Theory exposes that people interactivity concept is to take an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their ows lives.

However, human being is a social animal, and communication is the best tool to this socialization. According to Mental Research Institute researcher Paul Watzlawick, the first basic axiom in his theory on communication that is necessary to have a functioning communication between two individuals is that “one cannot not communicate”. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate. Therefore, when people is using Internet as Interactive way of socialization, they spread amounts of information about themselves that is impossible to control entirely. It makes that a company only has to harvest the grains these “Hansel and Gretel” that we have become when we are surfing. It is obvious that those grains is a metaphor of the knowledge that we drop in every process of communication- every behavior, according to Watzlawick-.

Network society has changed our way of life. The new linked cities that emerge this century have made changes in the behavior of people and the administration of time, specially in big cities, than concentrates the most of the population of the world. In a mixture of the augmentation of the individualism in all terms and the rise of the leisure time as a new business forms. According to the Media dependency Theory, a theory considered as an extension of Uses and gratifications theory, the audience goals are the origin of the dependence and that the more dependent an individual is on the media for to fulfill needs, such a person choose the more essential media to him or her and it is opposite to Andrejevic thesis where “the deployment of the promise of interactivity in commercial and political context underwrites participation in top-down forms of management and control rather than in democratic self-governance” (Andrejevic 2007: 51). My point of view about this discussion is that in a democratic system where the companies are so worried about the opinion and behavior of the customer rather than to control the way of thinking and the obsession of the politicians to lead the people to vote them, is a political system where citizen have more power than they really know. The Big Brother can hide the manipulation of the information, can have the track of our movements, transactions and tastes as Andrejevic argues. But they will always depend of the actions of the producers of the information. So in my opinion the Big Brother is afraid of changes of users, and people can share the sufficient information to be warned. We can not forget that people get the information that they wants in internet: when you are writing your profile in Facebook and you have to fill the part of “Musical Tastes”. Nobody makes you to write “Nirvana” or “Tchaikovsky”, you give the information you consider necessary.

Anyway, it is obvious that my point of view is not very useful to this kind of information we give in eCommerce, purchasing any product via Internet. The problem is not to give your credit card number but to provide with the information about what do you like or not. I like more fiction books, but when I am working in an article, Amazon database knows perfectly what kind of books I need, specially after the first purchase. It means that the people have the final control of clicking or not on the mouse left button, so we cannot talk about totalitarian system, but we must always remember that all that we do is observed and processed always in a communication act. In the current network society the tools to get people information are multiplied thanks to the interactivity of new media. Interactivity is a term very confused that refers to a feedback between consumers and producer, transmitters and receivers. According to Andrejevic, this interactivity raises the differences between power and the rest and there is not a power sharing, only a widely participation of consumers that are continually observed in commercial and political context. Otherwise, Uses and Gratifications Theory states that these people are just filling a need and the price is the “accidental” donation of information. My opinion is that people can control the information they give while they are filling these needs and this control of information can change the movements of the power, so, people belongs to themselves. Nowadays, with the flow of information, the theory of Big Brother has no sense, because they are not slaves and they are not ignorant. We can share information with many people and to contrast all of it. Democratic nations have free access to share the information, and the same companies while they are hiding people information manipulation sometimes forget that axiom that say “you cannot not communicate”.

References:

• Andrejevic, Mark (2007) iSpy, surveillance and Power in the interactive media. USA: University of Kansas
• Watlzawick, Weakland and Fisch), (1974) Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.

Network Society and the power of people against totalitarian governments

By Daniel Gómez

On 11th March, 2004, a group of terrorist linked to Al-Qaeda, exploded several bombs in the local railway line of Madrid. Few minutes after the terrorist attacks all pro-government media (public television and conservative holdings) tried to manipulate people to believe that the guilty of the attacks were the basque separatist terrorist band ETA.The purpose of this manipulation was that if people believe that islamists terrorist were the authors, as all early evidences indicated, people would be angry with the government. The government of PP leaded by Aznar, was the responsible of the participation of Spain in Irak war despite the most of spanish didn’t support this decision. The people would relate this attacks with a revenge of arab people because a war they never wanted. Three days later were the presidential elections in Spain and, surprisingly, the government of the right center party of Spain (PP) lost the power despite being the favorite in the polls. What happened?

Despite of having the control of the majority of the media in Spain, the government never considered the impact of the new media. While public television were insisting about ETA, blogs, e-mails, mobiles, digital media and the access of people to foreign international broadcast media trough Internet gave all time new evidences about the islamic authorship of attacks. I remember that these days of fear and fury I was at the same time with my mobile and fix line ringing with news, with several windows opened in my computer with digital newspaper websites, with television and radio station on... my room looked like the pentagon: I needed truthful information. It is the best example for me that support my thesis: New Media contribute to increase the freedom for built a more trustful information thanks to sharing it with different people and from very different sources. Therefore if we are more free to build our socialization and information about the world, political decisions, like voting in the elections, will be made by people with more reflexion and logic.

The power cannot control so much as in the past the ways of information. According to Benkler “Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom of act and cooperate with others in ways to improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:9). However in my opinion this sentence cannot be applied to all political systems both democratic and totalitarian.

Regarding to Hallin and Mancini there is three kinds of democratic political systems: Polarized Pluralist (France, Italy, Spain), Democratic Corporatist Model (Sweden, Germany, Belgium) and Liberal Model (USA, Britain, Canada) and each one has a different relationship between government and Information sources (Hallin and Mancini in ed. Curran and Gurevich 2005:220). In case of Spain, that has a Polarized Pluralist politic system, media are divided in conservatives and progressives, and they support the party with these ideologies. Media have a high parallelism with politics, so objectivity is very difficult to be found. So it is necessary the point of view of many people and the different information sharing to increase the freedom of thinking without a huge manipulation. And this is were Network Society has an important role. For democratic countries without a clear separation between government and media (this union has been caused by a long historical process). The important of bloggers and the flow of information about a political decision are making the political sphere more transparent and objective. In a world were the individualism is the spearhead of the consumption, according to Benkler, networking “increases the range and diversity of things that individuals can do for and by themselves” moreover ”the networking information economy provides nonpropietary alternative sources of communications capacity and information” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:135). In case of the Democratic Corporatist Model, the relation between national media and political parties is colder. Despite of having a “historically strong party press”, this countries have a strong “external pluralism” (Hallin and Mancini et al.). And in my opinion, networking society have a lower impact in this kind of societies than in Polarized Pluralistic ones where the media are most manipulated in political terms and the professionalization of journalist and communicators is very low. Thus, in the democratic countries, the degree of influence of the new media and technologies in empowering citizens depends of the democratic system that we study.

On January 12, 2010, Google announced that it is "no longer willing to continue censoring" results on Google.cn, citing a breach on Gmail accounts of Chinese human rightes activists. In a major speech by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, analogies were drawn between the Berlin Wall and the free and unfree Internet. What Clinton mean with the analogy between Berlin Wall and google censorship?

Regarding to the Totalitarian systems, the influence of networking depends of the access to international and free sources rather than the application and use of the new technologies across the country. If the Information Age is based in the information sharing and the public sphere is moving to cyberspace, any kind of censorship over the freedom of sharing information is similar like a physical wall which stops the flow of people and goods. Nowadays, people from China is controlled by one this kind of walls. While international companies are able to win money in chinese territory, chinese people are not able to connect to the global village if they are suspects of working against the regime. According to Benkler, “the belief that it is possible to make something valuable happen in the world, and the practice of actually acting on that belief, represent a qualitative improvement in the condition of individual freedom. They mark the emergence of new practices of self directed agency as a lived experience going beyond mere formal permissibility and theoretical possibility. Our conception of autonomy has not only been forged in the context of the rise of democratic, civil rights-respecting state over its major competitors as a political system” (Benkler, Yochai 2006:137). If people cannot contrast the information with other people with freedom of expression this information has no effective effect.

Concluding and summarizing my arguments, the most important things when we talk about the increase of the power of citizen thanks to the networking society are:

• New Technologies improve the information sharing trough the freedom that gives them the interactivity and the need of people of communicate and being informed.
• This information sharing fosters the improvement of the knowledge of people about the environment where they live.
• This knowledge makes people more critical and improves their defense against manipulation.
• This decreasing of the manipulation leads people to be more participative in political system, but being more participative doesn’t mean that the power of decision is in their hands, anyway, politicians always shall disregard the feelings of the citizen about their decision because of electoral reasons.
• But this participation and increasing of empowering of the citizen depends of the political system. In democratic systems they depends of the relationship between the power and media. In totalitarian system it depends of the degree of censorship and the access of people to the external-to-regime information.

References:

• Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (2005) Mass media and society. 4th Edition London: Hodder Education
• Benkler Yochai (2006) The wealth of networks. New Haven, London: Yale University Press

Spain: New technologies and Politics

By Daniel Gómez

Divide et impera

- Machiavelli

According to Dalhgren and Gurevitch article “Political communication in a Changing world”, Mancini and Hallin establish three differnt models of democracy among actually existing democracies based in a study of 18 different media system: “Polarized Pluralist Model, characteristic of southern Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the Democratic Corporatist Model, characteristic of northern and central Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) and the Liberal Model, Characteristic of what could be called the north Atlantic Region (Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA)” (Mancini and Hallin in Curran and Gurevitch 2005:217).

In regard to Spain, this country would be situated in the Polarized Pluralist Model, where “the press developed as part of the worlds of literature and , above all, of politics, much more than of the market” (Mancini and Hallin et al. 2005:217) and according to the authors “this path of development produced a media system characterized by a lower-circulation, elite oriented press, a lower level of professionalization of journalism, a high degree of political parallelism and strong involvement of the state in the media sector”.

Spain has a dark past in terms of participation of people in government. Despite of the time among 1931 to 1939 this country has had for a long time totalitarian forms of government. Spanish media have been used as a tool for supporting the regime and this kind of education has lead to a very polarized society even in democracy period. The current political behavior in Spain is based more in supporters of a Party rather than a ideological or voted-oriented people. The two main parties in Spain, PP conservative party and PSOE socialist party, have governed at least once in the democracy period and political landscape is defined basically by these big parties and several regional-nationalistic parties from regions as Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Canary Islands. Despite of the high participation in elections and the high interest for political news, the Spanish people´s participation in ex-parliamentarian politics like NGO´s and activists, is very low. People like to be informed, to be critical, but, in general, people in Spain is disengaged about politic actions. They are spectators of a show whose protagonists they elect every four years. One of the causes could be the patrimony of the people under a dictatorial period like the almost forty years in Spain, where the freedom and the participation in politics were practically missing. The culture of “I vote you, so you have to govern me”- with a light smell to feudalism- is very rooted in this country. And obviously this way of power is also very rooted in those that reach to the government. Spanish culture is englobed in the called “High Context” culture. It refers to a culture's tendency to use high context messages over low context messages in routine communication. Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group , while in a lower context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important (Hall, Edward T., 1976). Therefore, Creative discussion is not one of the virtues of this culture, and media are always used by the According to Dahlgren and Gurevitch, But, could the Internet and New Media change this problem?

In regard to Castells “the internet was expected to be an ideal instrument to further democracy-and still is. Political information can be easily accessed, so citizen can be almost as well informed as their leaders...Instead of the government watching people, people could be watching their government” (Castells 2001:155). In a “polychronic” culture as Spanish people tend to solve their problems in social ways so the internet seems to be a very useful tool to expand the public sphere to the “virtual world”. Internet provides, in principle, a horizontal, non controlled, relatively cheap, channel of communication, from one-to-one as well as from one-to-many. There is still only limited use of this channel by politicians. Yet, there is a growing use of the Internet by maverick journalists, political activists, and people of all kinds as a channel to diffuse political information and rumors (Castells et al. 2001:157). Spanish people tend establish a climate of public opinion about all information they gather from media but their capacity of reaction is summarized in critics and comments waiting for the electoral time, so we cannot talk about a growth of participation in democracy thanks to the internet. While in other countries extra-parliamentary activities grow with the new media, in Spain they are creating what I call “passive political citizens”, people that like to discuss about what mass media say about political issues. Andrejevic, with a more pessimistic point of view establishes that “moreover, participation is not always the same thing as power sharing; sweat shop workers certainly participate in the production process, but that doesn’t mean that the sweatshop can stand as a model for democracy” (Andrejevic 2007: 29). Political class enhance this situation where while people only speak their position in politics is insured and this situation foster that always the same faces and the same persons are always around the centers of power.

However, in positive point of view, the networking society improves the flux of information and this generates knowledge. Knowledge is the form of reliable, referential cognizance of the social world is indispensable for the vitality of democracy, even some degree of literacy is essential. New media technologies can promote new modalities of thought and expression, new ways of knowing and forms of communicative competencies (Dalhgren and Gurevitch et al. 2005:388) This knowledge could generate, creative discussions than can be seen “as the continuation of political communication beyond the mass media or alternatively phrased, as a cornerstone of the public sphere”. Therefore this discussion can generates a change in behaviors in people that can evolution in new practices that can “become in traditions...yet the newer media increasingly take on relevance as more people make use of the newer possibilities and incorporate these as part of their political practices.

Beyond the traditional boundaries of a country like Spain were -specially in small towns and cities- where the interaction and political discussion is reduced to the closer neighbors and friends the use of electronic means to communicate with people we already know offline, however much it permeates our lives, is not likely to produce entirely new forms of community. The more revolutionary potential of Internet technology is the possibility of creating connections among people who don’t know each other offline.(Putnam, 2003:227).

Summarizing, we can establish that.

• Spain political system can be situated within Polarized Pluralist System, according to the classification of Hallin and Mancini.
• Spain climate of people’s political participation has to be studied regarding to the totalitarian near past that establish a sort of behaviors very different to a democratic system.
• The high context culture could make networking society a very useful tool to improve the participation of people in democracy.
• Spanish culture of democracy is not yet well developed and the role of most of citizen is seen like to vote for a kind of “magic leader” that will solve the problems.
• People Political discussion doesn’t go beyond of comment the comments of journalists and political experts.
• Internet could impersonalize the public sphere, so all the biases can disappear and the discussion could be reduced to the contents of the information: more productive discussion.

References:

• Putnam, Robert (2003) Better Together, restoring the American Community. Simon & Shuster
• Castells, Manuel (2001) The internet galaxy. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
• Hall, Edward T. (1976) Beyond culture. New York: Anchor Books
• Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael (2005) Mass media and society. 4th Edition London: Hodder Education