The New Social Circulation: Frontline, Out of Print, and the XO Laptop Photo

You’ve most likely read about—or even sat through the entire four hours of—
Bush’s War, the fantastic Frontline documentary that aired last Monday. If you didn’t catch it, don’t worry, you can still watch the program in its entirety online.

Also, if your friends or family haven’t heard of the documentary or seen it, you should send the program link to them, not only because Frontline does a great job of concisely presenting the events of the last few years, but presents the events which have become/will become/are very unfortunately our generation’s political legacy.

Four years ago, in response the push and nation-wide capitulation for the occupation of Iraq, I began sending weekly emails to my friends and family that contained links to buried or-circulated articles from news sources. Those articles chronicled America’s un failed involvement in Afghanistan, the administration’s early attacks on the Constitution and rejection of international conventions, the legitimizing of rendition and establishment of torture as acceptable practice, the switch to the disastrous occupation in Iraq and the beginnings of the nation’s now emerging financial crisis, and on and on.

They were uplifting emails, as you can imagine. It’s refreshing nonetheless to see that Bush’s War recap to a much wider audience much of what I sent around in those same emails almost four years ago. But there are also a few notable omissions in the program. First, the President (who, for the record, I think is often unfairly demonized) gets a total free pass. Frontline portrays Secretary Rice as out of her league in dealing with the neo-conservative heavy-hitting bureaucrats like Cheney and Rumsfeld, but even more so the two-headed neo-con hydra also out-matched the head of the whole administration. To the world’s detriment, the President put up no resistance to the mutiny of the American foreign policy ship and went along quite willfully.

Next, Frontline needed to further examine the use of “national security” and the Iraq war as an issue by the national Republican party to take over Congress in 2002. From the Republican takeover until the Democratic sweep in 2006, the GOP turned much of Congress into foot soldiers for the White House, and the national party’s ability to channel a simplistic message through local elections played a key role in spinning the public discussions on the war.

Last, after the attack on the World Trade Center towers, much of the media, nationally and locally, folded like a bad poker hand and provided little resistance or disagreement with the administration’s incredibly flawed (and maybe more importantly for journalism, incredibly controversial) policies. I say “much” of the media, since there were still a few solid outlets, particularly online, that grew large and loyal readerships during the early years of the Iraq war by presenting contrary—and what we’ve come to now know as more accurate—information and opinion. And those were the outlets that I turned to for information to email around to friends and family.

Granted, Frontline only had so much time to tell their tale, and they did so masterfully. But those last two omissions—that local politicians parroted the White House’s national message and that online media picks up the ball that the press corps had dropped—came up in two other places this week.

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In the newest New Yorker, Eric Alterman describes the developing relationship between burgeoning online media and the demise of newsprint. He makes the case that without the high cost productivity of news organizations (to me more accurately news institutions, people with logos and semi-celebrity staff members), the predatory and recursive web-o-sphere would be in dire straights. And that’s very true. (Who would save the link blogs!!) He also points out that at the same time, newspapers have done little to improve in the face of new communications technology; quoting Molly Ivins, newspapers’ solution to the crisis was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting”.

Alterman uses The Huffington Post, the online political news and information site that’s now more popular than all but eight newspaper sites, as his web-news example. The Huff Post started out filling the same need as those early emails that I sent and those many other political blogs of both the Left and the Right, the need to provide alternative and ultimately more accurate information. And the more people messaged each other and the more those new media sites caught on, the deteriorating finances of newsprint compounded, and here we are today with the barbarians at the gates.

Unfortunately, Alterman misses one of the same points that Frontline does: that there is an important issue at stake with the relationship of the national and the local media similar to the national and local politics. While national media have been hit hard by online growth, the damage done to local print is even worse. Why? Because the national media, if only in the last year or so, have been able to position themselves as producers in the expanding chain of information sharing. The Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, the WSJ, et al., make their news better and more available with each passing day because they understand that when a good story that gets picked up and circulated, the circulation will improve their brand, and therefore increase traffic on their site, and therefore their online sales rates.

Local media(s), however, have stayed static while the web models grow like vines around the house. How often does a story from a local paper get picked up by national aggregators? About as often as a major bridge falling down. And that lack of change in direction and lack of circulation-worthy material has given rise to more functional localized online alternatives to the once dominant media outlets, much in the same way national political blogs and social networks out-maneuvered the national media four years ago.

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Also this week, Aaron took big-time blog Boing Boing to task for re-publishing a photo that originated on the web his Flickr page without following the Creative Commons usage policy listed on most of his public photos.

The CC license clearly states that the photograph can be “re-published” on someone else’s site, just as long at the photo is attributed to Aaron. And in that way, CC acts as a sort of guideline that understands the intention to spread around the photo with attribution being more central than an exchange of money.

Before Boing Boing posted the photo of Aaron holding his XO laptop, someone else re-posted the picture without indicating the photographer, just linking back to the Flickr page. And once the photo was out there with the label, the chain of backtracking was gone, and the photo was afloat in the internet, seemingly free for Boing Boing to grab and post.

Because there’s really no recourse against CC (other than calling bullshit on a blog or in the comments of a post), CC doesn’t hold much might in terms of successfully enforcing attribution of material. (You can read more on that in the comments of Aaron’s post.) But what CC intends is much more important than its lack of enforcement. Since CC focuses more on attribution than payment for material that readers, writers, emailers, producers, users in general, can send around the internet, the policy works very well with the copy machine aspect of new technology and it works very well the viral circulation of information around the web.

Instead of something starting from person A, moving on to persons B and C through sales, most things on the web move from person A to persons B, C, D and Ed, and then on to even more people at exponential rates. And the value (although often not monetized, of course) comes from being identified, through the transparency, as the originator of the cool content. Or as previously stated, a brand begins to be built. In many ways, it’s a battle to continually be the best and first, similar to the Associated Press syndicating their reporting without the paid-for avenues of distribution. And since the little guys—almost all of us on the web—don’t have legal counsel to enact copyrights, but do have the desire for recognition and collective contribution, CC works as a great starting place.

The CC approach clearly contrasts both the opportunity cost of local media in Alterman (failing to improve the usefulness of the local news and streamline its dissemination) and the message by the national political parties to the local politicians as missed by Frontline (at this very moment, Norman “in the mornin” Coleman is backing away from his party line on the Iraq that received heavy play four years ago).

If you get through the documentary and the articles, I’m sure you’ll see additional ways in which they relate to you and to each other, and when you do, feel free to email them to me.