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‘Just zeroes and ones’: Nine Inch Nails and the move to online music publishing

Anon

Digital music publishing and distribution is an area that has presented considerable challenges to the prevailing operating methods of artists and record companies. With much music now freely available online, musicians and the corporations that support and promote them have had to reconsider their business models in this digital age. The opportunities that the internet presents have led to some musicians questioning the value of being signed to a traditional record company. This article looks at a case study of one such band that has rejected the process of releasing music under a mainstream record label. Nine Inch Nails has deviated from the standard music industry practice and become an unsigned independent act, one that embraces the internet as a useful medium for releasing music. This paper aims to explore the reasons behind their move to an online system by undertaking a textual analysis of the scholarship regarding digital music publishing as well as exploring comments by the band’s founder and frontman Trent Reznor. It argues that their new business model is one that has the potential to be adapted more frequently in the future by other musicians.

Keywords: digital music, record company, online distribution, music industry, Nine Inch Nails

In late 2007 Trent Reznor announced that his band, the American industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails (NIN), had been released from their contractual obligations to Interscope Records, part of Universal Music Group, itself a subsidiary of Vivendi SA (Cohen 2007). Only a few weeks before, at a September concert in Sydney, he had told his fans to steal his music, give it to all their friends and keep on stealing (Moses 2007). This approach to obtaining music considerably differed from the traditional ideals of the record company regarding intellectual property and not long after Reznor found himself without a record label for the first time in his 18 years of making music as NIN. Freed from this arrangement, Reznor set about making and releasing music on his own terms. What events led to this situation occurring? Why did NIN abandon the traditional processes of

2 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications music publishing and distribution and move to an online model? This article seeks to explore the factors that have influenced Reznor and NIN in their attempt to find a new business model. It looks at significant events that may have caused Reznor to question the value of being signed to a record label and examines the latest album releases from the band that were published and distributed via the internet. Reznor and his efforts with NIN have been recognised by people in the music business (see for example Lefsetz 2009) as well as the technology industry (see for example Murphy 2009). Much blog space and even presentations at music conferences such as MidemNet (see Masnick 2009) have been devoted to following his attempts to find a profitable business model for the music industry. Yet there is little academic analysis of NIN. The scholarship in the area of the digital music market usually only looks at the underpinning economic theory such as the virtual value chain (see for example Bockstedt, Kauffman & Riggins 2006) which neglects to take into account other influential factors. This article seeks to fill that gap and contribute to knowledge about a fast-changing area in the world of digital publishing.

Reznor has a history of disputes with record companies and management. In 1992 he secretly recorded Broken, a studio EP which was NIN’s second major release. At the time he was fighting with his record company TVT, as they wanted creative control over his work because his first release, Pretty Hate Machine, wasn’t as radio-friendly as the label would have liked (Gourley 2009). Then in 2004 he sued his former manager, citing mismanagement and fraud, and was awarded almost US$3million (BBC News 2005). During NIN’s February 2007 tour, USB sticks containing songs from their as-yet-unreleased album Year Zero were placed in bathrooms at concert venues (Paoletta 2007). Fans who found these USB sticks and discovered the new tracks uploaded them to torrent sites. In March the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent cease and desist letters to these fans, forcing Reznor to announce that his record company Interscope had approved the leak (Burns 2008). In May 2007 during a tour of Australia he noticed the price discrepancy between his CDs and those of other music acts and was told by a record company executive that because Reznor had a true fan base, a core audience that was going to buy whatever he put out, the label could price his releases more expensively than the pop music they needed to discount so people would actually purchase it (Johnson 2007). Reznor reported this on nin.com and thanks to the internet the news was picked up and spread worldwide. He could see that the labels were not acting in the interests of the fans or the artists as they only saw them as sources of revenue (Reznor 2009). As Currah notes, record labels that are part of a media oligopoly (such as Interscope) have historically ‘been oriented around the maximisation of revenues, the preservation of industry structure and the extension over the sale and post-purchase use of its commodities’ (2006, p. 450). The entanglements with various record companies over the years left Reznor feeling as though he had no agency, unable to act and under the control of an organisation that was not interested in him as an artist. He was angry about the RIAA trying to intimidate his fans, putting a dampener on the Year Zero experience. All that Reznor was able to do was to keep talking about the situation. On stage in Sydney on September 16 2007, he said that his record company now hated him for complaining about the ‘ridiculous’ price of CDs in Australia because he ‘called them out for being greedy fucking assholes’ and that the only way for the labels to realise that ‘they’re ripping people off and that that’s not right’ is for fans to steal his music (Reznor, quoted in maths 2007). A few weeks later he was released from his contract with Interscope. Faced with freedom from a record contract for the first time in his musical career, Reznor began working on new ways to make, publish and distribute his music. He sought to accomplish disintermediation by removing the record company from the music infrastructure, replacing the top-heavy hierarchical structure with a decentralised musician-to-listener system and hopefully in the process reclaiming creative control and power (Frost 2007). Following Deuze (2009, p. 68) this could be termed distantiation, ‘a manipulation of the dominant way of doing or understanding things in order to juxtapose, challenge, or even subvert the mainstream’.

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Reznor’s music and lyrics have always challenged the mainstream and contained an anti- authoritarian streak. The first track on his first album contains the line ‘I’d rather die than give you control’ (Head Like a Hole, Pretty Hate Machine). Other NIN songs also lash out at other symbols of authority such as the police (Piggy, The Downward Spiral), the government (Capital G, Year Zero) and even God (Terrible Lie, Pretty Hate Machine). The Downward Spiral, NIN’s second album, contains themes of dehumanisation, disease, drugs, violence and suicide – a far cry from the subjects usually heard in commercial music. Reznor has also had a longstanding interest in technology. He liked the 1993 computer game Doom so much that he contacted the makers, which led to him composing the sound effects and music for Quake, a game released in 1996 by the same software company (Reznor 2009). He has admitted that if he had not been a musician he might have become a computer programmer, as he thinks ‘it’s just as much of an artform as music is – to make a machine do something like that is incredibly impressive to me’ (Reznor 2009). The combination of previous unhappy experiences when dealing with record companies, especially with regard to having a lack of creative control, mixed with a tendency of wanting do things his own way and a love of technology resulted in Reznor being a likely candidate to reject the traditional method of music publishing and switch to an online distribution model for his music.

Masnick (2009) has identified a formula for success in the music industry that he believes Reznor is employing:

Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$)

Masnick believes that Reznor began doing this during the Year Zero release, connecting with fans by leaking tunes and making an internet scavenger hunt using clues found on the back of merchandise sold at concerts. This, combined with a physical CD that was unusual in that it changed colour when heated, gave them a reason to buy the album. Reznor continued this model when he released his next studio album, his first as an independent musician. In March 2008, NIN released their sixth studio album, Ghosts I-IV. Without any prior announcement, it was initially available as a digital download from their official website and fans from all around the world were able to access this music release simultaneously. A four CD-length instrumental offering, it was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (Leeds 2008). According to Creative Commons ‘this license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms’ (Creative Commons 2009a). Creative Commons is a non- profit organisation that seeks to increase the amount of material available in the public domain for people to use by offering a variety of copyright licences which are an alternative to the current prevailing permission schemes (Creative Commons 2009b). This different way of thinking about copyright, one that challenges the mainstream ideas of the traditional record company, suited Reznor’s aim of bringing about a new way of publishing and distributing music. Ghosts I-IV is the type of album that might not have been possible to make if the band were still under contract to a traditional record label, as it probably would have been deemed not commercially viable. However, so many people were interested in downloading it in the first couple of days of its release that the website servers crashed under the volume of requests (Silverman 2008). In its first week, there were 781,917 downloads of Ghosts I-IV from the band’s official site – both paid for and free, making US$1.6million for the band (Van Buskirk 2008a). Reznor experimented with creating a scarce resource at different price points in order to see how the market/fan base would react (Reznor 2009). Providing these choices was a way to connect with fans. The cheapest option was to pay nothing and receive the first 9 tracks for free. The most expensive option at US$300, called the ultra-deluxe edition, sold out almost immediately. This physical product, numbered and personally signed by Reznor, went far beyond the traditional CD release by a record company, offering 4 LPs, 2 CDs, a DVD with all the multi-track session files

4 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications ready for remixing, a Blu-ray disc featuring an exclusive slideshow that played along with the album in very high quality audio, a book containing 48 photographs and two art prints (Nine Inch Nails 2008a). These additional features gave fans a compelling reason to buy. After the tallying was completed at the beginning of 2009, Ghosts I-IV was ranked as the best selling mp3 album for 2008 on Amazon.com’s mp3 download website (Benenson 2009). This is noteworthy as the music could be downloaded from nin.com or for free from any torrent site legally due to its licensing status, yet many people went to Amazon and paid for it, providing income for the band even when the option existed for fans to obtain the album at no cost. In addition, the files on Amazon were of a lower quality than the ones on nin.com (Silverman 2008). It was suggested that Reznor paid only $38 to Amazon for them to host the download while NIN collected all the profit (Van Buskirk 2008b). This is a considerably different outcome to the one if NIN were still on a traditional record label which would see them only receive a very small percentage of the profits and it shows that their attempts to find a better business model were working. A similar approach was taken for NIN’s next release, The Slip, which appeared online only two months after the previous album. This time around Reznor offered the entire album for free, writing on his website ‘this one’s on me’ (Pareles 2008). The method of free digital distribution was applauded by fans and the wider internet community. Commentators termed it an example of Web 2.0 innovation, a good implementation of Anderson’s theory of Freeconomics and located it within Disruptive Innovation Theory (Burns 2008). By using online distribution channels, the band managed to spread their product through the market at a low cost, connecting with and amassing goodwill from fans. The album was downloaded over 1.6 million times by the middle of July 2007 when the physical version was put out by the band (Nine Inch Nails 2008b). Even though the complete album was available free of charge online, all 250,000 copies of the US$10 limited- edition physical CD of The Slip sold out (Rose 2009). Reznor (2009) has stated that he believes it is their most successful release:

We knew how much [money] we needed to make and it worked out. We didn’t get rich off of it but we covered our costs and we made some profit … and we got that message out to a lot of people. There wasn’t any hurdle to get you to get that record: here it is, it’s easy to give to everybody. And as an artist there’s a part of me that wants as many people to hear what I do as possible, without the hurdle of having to pay for it.

Reznor has stated that he doesn’t believe music should be free, but has accepted that it is in this digital age, so has decided to work with the situation with regards to releasing music, as opposed to the traditional record companies who are still fighting against it (Parales 2008). By releasing his music under Creative Commons licenses he acknowledges that the idea of intellectual property and copyright as the proper way to ensure revenue is no longer applicable and that by connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, whether that be albums or concert tickets, he can still make money as a musician. However, some newer artists believe that Reznor would not have been able to give music away for free and still make a profit if he did not already have an established fan base built over his twenty years in the industry (Boucher 2008). Yet studies have found that the theory of the ‘superstar phenomenon’, which states that the past reputation of an entertainer has a larger role to play in fuelling future sales than any artistic merit, is actually being eroded by the prevalence of online music technologies (Godal, Bhattacharjee & Sanders 2006). With more choice available through the ease of internet access, consumers are able to sample tunes from a wider variety of artists than was previously possible.

The two latest albums from NIN were published and delivered online. This was done by the band in order to regain control over their musical output, pricing levels and promotional methods, aspects that had been areas of contention for them under the conditions of their old record contract. With these releases, NIN succeeded in attracting a listening audience and obtaining considerable publicity for their new approach. But where to from here? NIN has recently used torrents to distribute HD footage of concerts and produced a free iPhone application for fans (Rose 2009).

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Further studies could be undertaken that look at such examples of other non-album releases and question their necessity in an overall business model that relies on a continual connection with fans. Other possible lines of investigation include seeing if the model that Reznor is following can be adapted for other industries such as online journalism (Richmond 2009). The next digital moves of Nine Inch Nails will surely be watched by many people from different industries and especially those in the business of making, publishing and distributing music.

Notes ‘Just zeroes and ones’ – lyric from Zero-Sum, Year Zero

References

BBC News 2005, ‘Nine Inch Nails win manager fight’, BBC News Entertainment, 1 June, viewed 22 May 2009, < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4598571.stm>

Benenson, F 2009, ‘NIN’s CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album’, Creative Commons blog, 5 January, viewed 24 April 2009, < http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11947>

Bockstedt, J, Kauffman, R & Riggins, F 2006, ‘The Move to Artist-Led On-Line Music Distribution: A Theory-Based Assessment and Prospects for Structural Changes in the Digital Music Market’, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 10 (3), pp. 7-38, viewed 15 March 2009, from Business Source Premier database.

Boucher, G 2008, ‘Trent Reznor: Back from the abyss’, Los Angeles Times, 31 August, viewed 22 May 2009, < http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/31/entertainment/ca-nin31>

Burkart, P & McCourt, T 2006, Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox, Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland.

Burns, A 2008, ‘Event modelling for policymakers & valuation analysts in disruptive innovation markets: digital download strategies for Radiohead’s In Rainbows & Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip’, Alex Burns: the personal site of Australian research analyst & strategist Alex Burns, viewed 24 March 2009, < http://www.alexburns.net/Files/DisruptiveRadioheadNIN%20-%20Alex%20Burns.pdf>

Cohen, J 2007, ‘Nine Inch Nails Celebrates Free Agent Status’, Billboard Music Magazine, 8 October, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jspvnu_content_ id=1003655498>

Creative Commons 2009a, ‘Licenses’, Creative Commons – About, viewed 22 May 2009, < http:// creativecommons.org/about/licenses>

Creative Commons 2009b, ‘What is CC?’, Creative Commons – About, viewed 22 May 2009, < http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc>

Currah, A 2006, ‘Hollywood versus the Internet: the media and entertainment industries in a digital and networked economy’, Journal of Economic Geography, 6 (4), pp. 439-468.

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Deuze, M 2006, ‘Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture’, The Information Society, 22 (2), pp. 63-75.

Frost, RL 2007, ‘Rearchitecting the music business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies’, First Monday, 12 (8), August 2007, viewed 22 May 2009, < http://firstmonday. org/issues/issue12_8/frost/index.html>

Godal, RD, Bhattacharjee, S & Sanders, GL 2006, ‘Do Artists Benefit from Online Music Sharing?’, The Journal of Business, 79 (3), pp. 1503-1533, viewed 25 May 2009, < http://www.journals. uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/500683>

Gourley, B 2009, ‘Nine Inch Nails Interview’, Chaos Control Digizine, viewed 24 May 2009, < http:// www.chaoscontrol.com/?article=nin>

Johnson, N 2007, ‘Q & A with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails’, Herald Sun, 17 May, viewed 23 April 2009,

Krasilovsky, MW & Shemel, S 2008, this business of MUSIC: the definitive guide to the music industry, 8th edition, Billboard Books, New York.

Leeds, J 2008, ‘Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan’, The New York Times, 4 March, viewed 16 March 2009, < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/arts/music/04nine. html?scp=8&sq=&st=nyt>

Lefsetz, B 2009, The Lefsetz Letter, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/>

Masnick, M 2009, ‘My MidemNet Presentation: Trent Reznor And The Formula For Future Music Business Models’, Techdirt, 5 February, viewed 24 May 2009, < http://www.techdirt.com/ articles/20090201/1408273588.shtml> maths, 2007, ‘Trent Reznor to Australia - Steal My Music’, Music 2.0 – Exploring Chaos in Digital Music, 18 September, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://www.music2dot0.com/archives/42>

Moses, A 2007, ‘Nails frontman urges fans to steal music’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/steal-away-steal-steal- and-steal-some-more/2007/09/18/1189881482912.html>

Murphy, D 2009, ‘Nine Inch Nails: The First Open-Source Band?’, Geek Tech - PC World, 7 January, viewed 24 May 2009, < http://www.pcworld.com/article/156602/nine_inch_nails_the_first_ opensource_band.html>

Nine Inch Nails 2008a, ‘Ghosts: Order Options’, Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://ghosts.nin.com/main/order_options>

Nine Inch Nails 2008b, email, 23 July,

Paoletta, M 2007, ‘Reznor adopts unusual Web campaign for new album’, Reuters, 2 April, viewed 24 May 2009,

Parales, J 2008, ‘Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.’, The New York Times, 8 June, viewed 16 March 2009, < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/arts/music/08pare.html>

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Reznor, T 2009, Digg Dialogg: Trent Reznor, online video, 7 April, viewed 23 April 2009, < http:// digg.com/dialogg/Trent_Reznor>

Richmond, S 2009, ‘If Trent Reznor can save the music business, how about journalism?’, Telegraph Blogs, 10 February, viewed 26 May 2009,< http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/ blog/2009/02/10/if_trent_reznor_can_save_the_music_business_how_about_journalism>

Rose, F 2009, ‘Nine Inch Nails iPhone App Extends Reznor’s Innovative Run’, Underwire blog : Wired.com, 6 April, viewed 7 April 2009, < http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/04/trent- reznor-wa>

Silverman, D 2008, ‘Nine Inch Nails, 36 songs for $5 and a good problem to have’, Techblog: Chron. com, 4 March, viewed 26 April 2009, < http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2008/03/nine_ inch_nails_36_songs_for_5_and_a_good_pro.html>

St Clare, M 2009, ‘Transcript of Digg Dialogg with Trent Reznor’ | 7 April’, Meowhousemedia.com, 18 April, viewed 24 April 2009, < http://www.meowhousemedia.com/digg-dialogg-trent-reznor- transcript/>

Van Buskirk, E 2008a, ‘Nine Inch Nails Album Generated $1.6 Million in First Week (Updated)’, Listening Post blog: Wired.com, 13 March, viewed 23 April 2009, < http://www.wired.com/ listening_post/2008/03/nine-inch-nai-2>

Van Buskirk, E 2008b, ‘Trent Reznor Paid about $38 to Distribute ‘Ghosts I-IV’ to Amazon (Updated)’, Listening Post blog: Wired.com, 4 March, viewed 23 April 2009,

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The evolution of Public Relations in the rhetorical public sphere of Web 2.0 Case study: Edelman PR representing Wal-Mart

Anita Sulentic

Deuze (2006) contends that in digital culture, we will no longer rely on professional storytellers. Journalists, Public Relations (PR) practitioners and communicators will no longer make sense of this world. Yet, these creative industries are rapidly growing as they have the skill-set, knowledge and versatility to communicate appropriately in new mediums. By focusing on Wal-Mart’s ill-fated PR attempt using a model of Habermas’ universal pragmatics within Hauser’s rhetorical public sphere; it will become evident that whilst mistakes occur, PR practitioners are vital to make sense of this world, especially on behalf of those who do not have the skills or capacity to communicate within this space. Their role as professional storytellers and meaning-creators will continue to exist and thrive in Web 2.0, but only if there is an understanding of the nuance between changing its epistemology, not ontology.

Keywords: Transparency, trust, social media, Web 2.0, Public Relations, digital culture, rhetorical public sphere, universal pragmatics

Introduction The Public Relations (PR) industry has been successful in its role as agenda-setters; producers of meaning; cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu, 1984) or creative workers in charge of the service and knowledge economy (Pratt and Gill, 2008). Previously, PR practitioners have utilised strategies, tactics and other proven methods in order to influence their audiences. This has involved influencing the “influencers” in society – i.e. disseminating information through print, radio, TV journalists and opinion makers, thereby creating meaning and knowledge of this world. In other words, “public” relations has previously been more aptly defined as “media” relations.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media such as user-generated Internet applications including blogs, wikis, podcasting and social networks (Lai and Turban, 2008), there has been a dramatic change in the way society communicates and the PR industry has had to change its methods, speaking directly to consumers, rather than through the media (Kelleher, 2007).

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In his work regarding the online space, Deuze (2006) argues that whilst digital culture is difficult to define, it can be understood through three key concepts: participation, remediation and bricolage, which are fostered through the active engagement and autonomous realignment of reality by individual users. Those who participate in digital culture will therefore no longer rely on “journalists, public relations officers, marketing communications professionals and other professional storytellers to make sense of our world.” (Deuze, 2006 p66)

This is the one limiting notion with Deuze’s argument. PR as an integral component of the creative industry has been on the rise (CCI, 2007), as the skill-set, knowledge and fluid process of its communications and professional storytelling is vital to create meaning of this world for those who cannot express themselves in appropriate ways. The Australian government alone is injecting $17 million to boost creative industries (ABC News, 2009), as the cultural and economic value given to these knowledge and service industries is quite high. In order to create knowledge, there always needs to be a starting point. PR practitioners are this starting point, communicating stories, creating meaning and making sense of this world in new ways within the rhetorical public sphere.

The challenge for PR in Web 2.0 There are many definitions of PR, but a comprehensive outline is: “A communicative process; that is, it involves some form of communication, whether it be written, verbal or neither, as a purposeful choice, and it is a process. As such, it isn’t static, fixed or immutable; rather, public relations is largely about creating and recreating ideas and generating meaning.” (Curtin & Gaither, 2007 p6)

Web 2.0 will not do away with professional storytellers. There are still many stories to tell on behalf of those unwilling or unable to participate in this medium. Effective communication and meaning creation is a skill developed by those in particular industries – academia, government, communications, advertising and more. They are the innovators, entrepreneurs and risk-takers in new domains, with a specific and valuable skill-set (O’Conner, 2009) to commence or foster the knowledge process.

A 2008 survey conducted by Burson-Mustellar found that only 15% of Fortune 500 companies participate in social media, (Brito, 2008) despite the fact that studies have shown that 55% of social media consumers want ongoing dialogue with companies, and 89% feel they would be more loyal to a company if they participated in social media (Cone, 2008).

PR practitioners are enhancing their knowledge systems and participating in this new environment, representing clients, and directly engaging audiences by using blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more. PR is changing its epistemology by no longer relying on the limitations of the media relations schema. When media experts, Solis and Breankenridge advise how to “put the public back into public relations”, they are detailing how Web 2.0 is reinventing this ageing business (Solis, Breakenridge 2009), changing the “know-how” to “know-that” for both the PR industry and publics.

This means that within Web 2.0, there is little room for deception or the “blurring of lines”. The old PR methods, where identity was blurred within media relations are no longer valid. PR, as a communicative process is now evolving, but only in its epistemology – as methods of knowledge creation, not its ontology – identity as PR practitioners and existence as an industry.

Yet, participating in social media does not simply equate to effectiveness or campaign success. In Web 2.0, trust, transparency and honesty are the moral framework for the creation of meaning.

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To simply view Web 2.0 through the Habermasian ideal of the “public sphere” is to relegate PR to its static, previous time and method, and therefore limiting its ability to operate effectively as a fluid, communicative process.

Truth, trust and norms In his work on the public sphere, Habermas (1962) contends that a new civic society emerged in the eighteenth century, the “bourgeois public sphere” that furthered the Enlightenment Project. This group of middle-class intellectuals would meet in coffeehouses and salons to rationally and critically discuss the concepts of liberating humanity and creating a just moral order.

The bourgeois public sphere challenged the authority and bureaucratic principles of an absolutist state, and allowed for the collaboration and emergence of ideas and practices based on the greater good for all. The public sphere was therefore based on notions of inclusivity, the common good and the disregard of traditional status, privileged by the state and economy.

Whilst a prime starting theory, Habermas’ utopian vision has received its fair share of criticism, including the fact that his distinction between public and private was exclusionary and inaccessible to everyone (Fraser, 1992), that this sphere has an inherent trait that excludes dissent (Phillips, 1996) and that he disallows for other types of public spheres.

Hauser (1999) remediates the public sphere into the “rhetorical public sphere”, which he argues is a discursive space fundamental to democracy. Hauser’s public focuses on the dialogue surrounding issues, rather than the identity or social class of those in discussion (1999). This sphere is therefore characterised by certain norms which guarantee its effectiveness: permeable boundaries – people outside the group can participate; active rather than passive publics; adherence to a norm of contextualised language to ensure their experiences remain intelligible to others; believable appearance; and tolerance of others opinions (Hauser, 1999).

To prescribe to Habermas’ public sphere, PR practitioners run the risk of a simplistic understanding of who the public is, and how this public participates in public discourse. In effect, this is the old “media” relations schema.

Hauser’s rhetorical public sphere on the other hand considers publics to be far more complex, diverse and reticulate which are “joined together by a myriad of formal and informal ties and arising less from demographic categories than from shared rhetorical ends.” (Hauser, 1999 p71). Within this space the public has more agency, vernacular and discussion, rather than just being considered a “dead public”.

In the rhetorical public sphere of Web 2.0, it is not enough to simply participate in the medium, but to understand the process and publics, commit to ethical practices and deal with conflicting opinions that will inevitably arise.

However, another of Habermas’ theories is useful to discuss PR within the rhetorical public sphere of Web 2.0 – his concept of universal pragmatics. Habermas contents that those who participate in communications assume certain norms based on valid claims inherent in the speech acts they exchange, truthfulness of the content, and mutual understanding that they can be held accountable for the validity of their claims. (Cooke, 1998)

Habermas’ communicative rationality within Hauser’s public sphere is an effective mechanism to discuss social media and how PR interacts within it.

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Norms in Web 2.0 Lai and Turban (2008) argue that social media thrives on our need for community and social connection. Social media or Web 2.0 is built on a desire for trust in order to foster a dependable social network (Lai & Turban, 2008), where self-regulation and norms become consequential of the process of the medium (Lewis, Kaufman, Christakis, 2008).

This is not just a convenient theory of social media, but is a practical reality of the process. Digital communicator, Anthony Mayfield provides a useful example: “Hiring actors to talk about a product on the bus, for instance, much like a fake blog, is unethical. Brands and their agencies must be transparent, otherwise consumers will trust them even less…..WoM (word of mouth) fails when it is engineered...... You must be honest.... It is wrong to attempt to highjack social media or offline communities and it will ultimately backfire. You need to generate a genuine advocacy among the biggest influencers; people who are trusted.” (Marketing eek,W 2007).

This view is supported by Richard Edelman, President and CEO of Edelman PR: “I hate the term “spin”.... it links PR to political affairs and makes it seem that everything we do is not about the reality but about the presentation….The best PR is [to] lay out the facts, put your best foot forward, and have it based on truth.” (Edelman, 2007)

Those who prescribe to Habermas’ norms of truthfulness and honesty in a “believable appearance” within Hauser’s rhetorical public sphere will ultimately garner the most success. A prime example would be the PR team of the Pheonix Suns Basketball team who used their own identities on Twitter to engage fans, alert them to certain events, raise awareness, and begin dialogue with audiences. As reported: “it [turned] virtual connections into real ones… the PR staff rolled out the red carpet for a bunch of fans… [who are now] getting to know [the PR staff] personally as the people behind the brand.” (Zuk, 2009)

PR is changing its epistemology in order to effectively make sense of this world and communicate stories in a medium that may be foreign to their clients. However, it is when these professional storytellers change their ontology and identity, rather than their epistemology, that they suffer in the rhetorical public sphere.

Case study: Edelman PR on behalf of Wal-Mart In 2006, award-winning global PR firm and self-proclaimed champions of social media, Edelman PR, attempted to become storytellers in a new way in Web 2.0 for their major American client, Wal-Mart.

As part of the communications strategy, Edelman PR created two fake blogs. One blog was created under the Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM) website, a grass-roots advocacy group formed by Edelman in 2005 to overcome the union leadership funded attacks on the company (PR Newswire, 2006). WFWM was “committed to fostering open and honest dialogue...that conveys the positive contributions of Wal-Mart to working families.” (Siebert, 2006). The blog, “Wal-Marting around America” detailed the travels of a man and woman in an RV across America, staying in Wal-Mart parking lots.

The second blog, “Paid Critics” was devoted to “exposing” links between unions and other vested interests that are “smearing Wal-Mart” through the media. (Siebert, 2006)

Giving rise to the term “flogs” - fake blogs (Wikipedia, 2007), the highly publicised affair revealed shortly after the blogs were posted, that Edelman employees were in fact the authors of the blogs.

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The media spotlight on Edelman lasted from the discovery of the “flogs” to the apology of the CEO, Richard Edelman, three days later. (Gunther, 2006; CNN Money.com, 2006)

“[It was] our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s..... Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.” (Edelman, 2006)

Interestingly, the blogosphere not only expressed disdain towards those responsible for another PR blunder, but also focused heavily on the disappointment felt towards Edelman, an agency with a credible and trustworthy industry reputation, and as leaders in social media communication.

“While fake blogs (and other fake social media) are nothing new, it’s dismaying to see it emerge from Edelman…and which touts itself as the PR firm that truly gets social media… This opacity is the complete antithesis of what social media is about and what Edelman have been championing for the past two years. Because they are widely regarded in the profession as the PR champions for social media, this comes as a bitter pill to swallow.” (Nevillehobson.com)

Edelman prides itself not only on adherance to the code of ethics of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WoMMA) but, in fact, is a contributor to the Code’s guidelines on transparency (Edelman, 2006). In a bizarrely ostentatious move, these two blogs were actually created for grass-roots advocacy groups that were focused on honest dialogue and exposing media flaws. These conflicting movements highlight why so many felt disappointed in and confused bythe agency’s strategy.

Blogger Neville Hobson “The key issue here is what people are saying - in essence, the PR counsellors at Edelman have acted with extremely poor judgment in dressing up something for what it’s not.”

Blogger David Jones “I have to believe they have an online PR policy…. or at least some sort of understanding that transparency is important in everything we do. But who keeps authorizing these less than appropriate uses of social media that get them in trouble?”

Blogger Dennis Howlett “PR bloggers have done a fantastic job raising awareness and none more so than Rubel-Edelman. The problem is they’ve been caught in classic PR command and control thinking. Which begs the question: Is the PR industry (as represented by Edelman) serious about this medium or are they engaged in a cynical ploy?” (NevilleHobson.com, 2006)

Blogger and author Sean Carton “This was a brilliant idea, in its way, but it was evil and they got caught. It was old media thinking in the new media world, and you can’t get away with that [stuff] anymore.” (Siebert, 2006)

In this situation, Edelman used old media relations practices of command and control thinking, exercised change in its ontology and identity and viewed Web 2.0 as a Habermasian public sphere, where dissent or backlash by the publics was not envisioned. Luckily for the agency, CEO and President, Richard Edelman rectified the situation when the speech act was challenged. He held the agency accountable for failing to participate in a transparent, ethical manner, therefore maintaining the universal pragmatics of communication. The dissatisfaction and rhetoric created in the blogosphere made Edelman realise that the public was far more complex, diverse and reticulate – a rhetorical public sphere.

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This is all fair and well, but to return to Deuze’s argument on professional storytellers, are Edelman still making sense of this world and creating meaning?

After working quite hard to regain its reputation in both the online and offline worlds, Edelman created a strict Code of Ethics outlining their commitment to the highest standards of truth and accuracy, refusal to intentionally disseminate false, misleading or inaccurate information or to act in a way that may appear to be an attempt to deceive public opinion (Edelman, 2008).

Most recently, Edelman PR have won the title of PRWeek 2009 PR Agency of the Year, for the third time in four years; their annual Trust Barometer was recently launched with the Financial Times in London, the company boasted global revenue of $337 million in 2007 (PRWeek, 2007), and the agency is expecting worldwide growth of more than 12 percent without losing any of its top 40 clients in 2008 (Advertising Age, January 19, 2009).

Richard Edelman was named the Most Powerful PR Executive by PRWeek in October 2008, for the second year in a row, and Agency Executive of the Year by AdAge in January 2008. His influence extends to his service on several boards including: the Board of Directors of the Ad Council, the Atlantic Council, the International Business Leaders Forum, the Gettysburg National Battlefield Foundation and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum, the Arthur Page Society and PR Seminar (Edelman, 2008).

“Whilst [Richard] Edelman has run into controversies – primarily as a result of his firm’s work with high- profile client, Wal-Mart – his reaction to these episodes … did meet the mark for openness not always employed by PR executives.” (PRWeek, October 15, 2007)

Edelman’s quick realisation that Web 2.0 is not a public sphere but a rhetorical public sphere, built on Habermas’ universal pragmatics, where if challenged by the public, it is the ethical norm to justify your communication, has led him to be one of the most powerful storytellers globally on behalf of many international companies (PRWeek 2009). Without losing 40 major clients in 2008, trust has been reinstated in the agency and credibility in its status as leaders in social communication has been reinstated. Edelman PR, as professional storytellers have continued in the fluid communicative process of PR, refusing to remain static in the rhetorical public sphere. This has led to many company’s entrusting Edelman to communicate stories and meanings for those unwilling or unable to participate in social media.

Conclusion Ultimately, the proliferation of PR agencies, social media experts, corporate bloggers and digital communicators (O’Conner, 2009), shows that within digital culture, the role of PR practitioners will still be there to make sense of this world, but only once they have changed their ways of knowing – recognising and using the norms of Habermas’ universal pragmatics within Hauser’s rhetorical public sphere.

This is not to reconstitute these industries as powerhouses of meaning and knowledge, but to understand that stories, meanings and knowledges always need a starting point, and this point usually begins with those who understand how to communicate. Professional storytelling has lasted since the beginning of time. Storytellers have the capacity to process knowledge, remediate it, and deliver it in a way that is appropriate to their audience. Social media now allows us to ask questions and engage in the debate, but the story is still there – it is not a matter of the chicken or the egg: the story must come first in order to create meaning, understand our world, and then be used as point of discussion or remediation within the rhetorical public sphere.

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http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/17/technology/pluggedin_gunther_blog.fortune/index.htm

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O’Conner, J. (2009) Creative Labour: Emancipation or Honey-trap? ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology Retrieve May 26, 2009 from http://cci.edu.au/publications/creative-labour-emancipation-or-honey-trap

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Zuk, R. (2009) Tweeting up with @ THE_REAL_SHAQ: Pheonix Suns PR pros embrace Twitter Public Relations Tactics, Public Relations Society of America

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Google Book Search: Digitisation of books as a positive invention

Remi Otani

Since the 1980s, the digitisation of books has been a well discussed topic among the publishing industry on how it would have a considerable impact on the industry (Thompson, 2005). This article intends to discuss how books are represented when changed into digital formats such as e-books, in order to understand the value of digitisation and how it may benefit the publishing industry. This discussion is based on research and interpretation through relevant literature, websites, and online academic journal articles. The first part of this article discusses the definition of books where Sherman Young (2007) argues that a book consists of the idea, the object and the publishing. The second part discusses the way which Google Book Search realises these three key components. Google Book Search strengthens the publishing aspect of books through its characteristics of intertextuality, scale and searchability, therefore, increasing the connectivity between the books and their readers. This intensified connection may lead the readers to purchase more books of their interests and thereby help the publishing industry keep their existing revenue source. As a result, Google Book Search as a type of digitisation of books can be seen as a positive invention for the publishing industry.

Keywords: Google Book Search, digitisation of books, e-books, publishing industry, definition of books, representation of books

Introduction Since the 1980s, the digitisation of books has been a well discussed topic among the publishing industry on how it would have a considerable impact on the industry (Thompson, 2005). There have also been views that the digitisation of books would lead to the death of printed books (Thompson, 2005). This paper intends to discuss the way various elements of books are realised

18 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications when they are transformed into digital formats, thereby attempting to understand the value of digitisation and how it has the potential to benefit the publishing industry. Among various e-book services such as Amazon’s Kindle, an e-book reading device with the capability of connecting to digitised book contents, Google Book Search (GBS) has been chosen as the case of investigation. GBS is worth investigating as a unique type of digitisation of books, as the invention of search engines has taken over the traditional way of seeking information; reading books (Bidgoli, 2004). GBS as a form of digitisation can be interpreted as a positive innovation that would facilitate the flourishing of the publishing industry. In order to verify this hypothesis, the definition of books will be first explored, which refers to Sherman Young’s (2007) literature, ‘the book is dead - long live the book’ that clarifies the framework that will be applied to the system of GBS. Secondly, by using the framework of the definition of books, there will be an analysis on how books are represented in GBS, and what implication it would have on the field of publishing. Digitisation of Books and Publishing Firms In the late 1990s, some studies predicted that electronic books would take up around 10 percent of the market by 2005 which led to many publishers investing heavily in developing books in electronic formats (Thompson, 2005). However, in fact, the popularity of e-books has not taken off as much as predicted (Thompson, 2005). Publishers are now cautious about investing in electronic formats of books, as the cost and maintenance of digitised books appear higher than expected (Thompson, 2005). Therefore, based on the assumption that the major source of publishers’ revenue is still produced from the sales of printed books, the challenges the industry faces today are; 1) maintaining revenue from the sale of printed books, 2) how digital technologies can be utilised to strengthen the existing revenue streams (Thompson, 2005). Definition of Books While the market of e-books seems to be emerging in recent years (Lee, 2008), printed books are still being published and play a large part of our daily lives (Young, 2007). According to Young (2007: 22), a book is defined as ‘a technology’. In other words, the technology of the book is a system which includes the assemblage, the process of creation, and the ideas of the object. Such technology of the book consists of three components which are the contents, the object and the publishing (Young, 2007). The contents refer to the idea that writer intends to portray through the books. Young (2007) distinguishes ‘texts’ as different from the idea, as now there are different methods of communicating texts, such as Audiobooks.

The second element that constitutes a book is the physicality of it, the object itself. Young (2007: 27) explains that books have ‘heft, texture, touch and even smell that has cultural value in itself’. Books as objects can be attractive in themselves, since some are charmed simply by the aesthetics of books, such as designs and colours, as well as the way the collection of books can be expressions of identities (Young, 2007). Just as reading medieval manuscript pages stimulates five senses of sight, touch, sound, taste and smell operated in collaboration of text within the page is to create meaning (Camille, 1998), the material aspect of books is important because it evokes sensations, affecting the way readers experience the book, though the intensity of sensations may not match those from the medieval times. Furthermore, the physical book embodies the foundation for the text in terms of ‘offering a stable object of reference’ and therefore grounding its cultural authority (Flanders, 1997: 127). Cultural authority in this context is based on the notion that books are culturally vital and symbolic objects that have significance for the reader (Flanders, 1997). Moreover, McGann (cited in Hayles, 2005: 90) asserts that ‘bibliographic codes’ such as ‘page size, font, gutters, leading,…’ which can be interpreted as physical characteristics of texts, are influential in creating meanings. Therefore, physicality is an essential component that constructs a book.

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Lastly, publishing is another element that defines books. There are three important functionalities of publishing: the production of the text; the design; marketing, and distribution of the book (Young, 2007). Google Book Search Books that were perceived as significant were the target of Google to digitise, based on its mission ‘…to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (Spink & Zimmer, 2008: 77)’. The launch of Google Books Library Project was announced in December 2004, in partnership with the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Oxford University and Stanford University, which accumulated the total number of approximately 15 million books (Google, 2009-a). The digitised contents of these collections were made available for users to search in Google Book Search (Connaway & Wicht, 2007). GBS allows the users to (Google, 2009-b):

1.Search the contents of books and find contents that match search terms. 2.Browse pages inside books with a preview section (if allowed by the publisher or out of copyright). 3.Provide relevant information such as references of the books and contents. 4.Show different ways to access the book, either by purchasing or borrowing.

GBS search result pages consist of two sections; ‘About this Book’ and ‘Preview this Book’ (Google, 2009-c). In the first section, links to the following information is included; where to buyor borrow the books, bibliographic information, table of contents, popular passages that has been cited in other books, book reviews, web pages, scholarly works and books that have been used as references to other related books as well as a global map that shows places which have been mentioned in the book (Google, 2009-c). In the second section, images of scanned pages can be browsed and texts can be searched within the entire book. Most of the time, the entire text of books are not available unless the publisher has given permission, therefore previews lack certain pages. Still, it would show the information on what page the search term would appear within the book, without the scanned images. Representation of books on Google Book Search The Idea Having explained the main features of GBS, the argument will proceed to the analysis of the way books are represented within its functionalities. First of all, a book should be conveying ideas and make a compelling case to convince the readers about the idea (Young, 2007). Since what GBS provides is scanned pages of books, it does not fundamentally change the idea of what the author is trying to communicate. In a sense, GBS reflects what is originally expressed as an idea in the book, as it is. With the display of Table of Contents, GBS helps navigate the reader to grasp the overview of the idea without having to actually physically have the book in their hands. However, since most of the time the previews are lacking pages and does not allow the readers to access and read the entire text, it can be said that this component of the idea of a book is not realised through GBS, but it is rather fragmented. The readers could speculate the idea of the book although page access may be limited, however the restricted preview pages of GBS does not actively help the communication of the idea.

The physicality Secondly, the physical aspect of a book is hardly present in GBS, and therefore, it does not contribute to realisation of what constitutes a book in this sense. Since GBS contains scanned images of pages of books that are made available online, it can be said that books represented in GBS belong to the virtual world. One of the most radical changes that new digital information

20 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications technologies bring about is ‘the shift from the physical to the virtual (Landow, 1996)’. The lack of physicality of books may be seen as a defection of GBS, since the materiality of a book is culturally valuable in itself (Young, 2007) and GBS fails to embody that aspect. To a certain extent, GBS articulates the visual aesthetics of a book, since it still communicates the tone of colours and designs. However, the screens of computers reduce the characteristics of a book as an object to only appealing to optical sensations, one of five senses (Camille, 1998). Therefore, GBS seems to be far from embodying the materiality of a book.

The publishing Lastly, GBS can be seen as strengthening the aspect of publishing, specifically the element of marketing and distribution. As ‘once the book has been created, it has to be sold (Young, 2007: 27)’, the marketing activities of a book includes buzz creation and Public Relations activities. GBS facilitates this element through linking published books to critic reviews that may be a summary and evaluation of the book, which therefore can be interpreted as a type of publicity buzz generated, be it good or bad. Since word of mouth recommendation is an essential influence on the purchase decisions of consumers (Mitchell, 2008), the availability of book reviews on GBS is important in the marketing of the book. Moreover, information on quoted popular passages of the book and how many other books had quoted it highlight the characteristics of the book within specific markets of discipline or genre, and thereby promote the book, differentiating it from many other books. Similarly, links to other books, web pages and scholarly works that were referenced in the book may contribute to the marketing aspect of a book, adding more value through displaying the way it may have influenced many other books. These features resonate with what Thompson (2005: 320) describes as ‘intertextuality’, which is defined as one of the characteristics that adds value to the contents of electronic publishing. What was described as ‘references, footnotes (or endnotes) and bibliographies’ in printed books, have become more dynamic in the online environment by the use of links that enables ‘end users to access referred- to texts quickly and easily, without having to locate the text physically (Thompson, 2005: 320)’. Therefore, it can be said that this intertextuality which GBS provides, adds value to the contents (the searched book in this context) and thereby supports the element of marketing of books.

As for the factor of distribution, GBS plays a significant role in terms of not only realising the functionality of publishing but also boosting its intensity. Depending on the scale of the publisher, whether it is a renowned one with connections to the mass market, or an independent press, there are differences in availability for the coverage and distribution of books (Young, 2007). However, GBS has the potential to provide all books equally with a form of distribution on the internet, regardless of the publishers’ size and capabilities. In other words, books that may not have had the opportunity to be vastly distributed in the book market, and thus was only able to reach limited audiences, may be empowered because of the global reach that GBS enables. This strength of GBS holds true to Thompson’s (2005: 319) perspective of ‘scale’, which is also one of the characteristics that add value to the content of electronic publishing.

‘Scale’ refers to the ability to supply connections to a number of materials, variety of options in both width and depth (Thompson, 2005: 319), which, in the context of GBS, can be seen as providing the book with a wider distribution channel through the internet. Naturally, GBS does not physically distribute or ship the books, rather, promotes the aspect of distribution of books by proposing different modes and methods of accessing books to the readers, such as online bookstores and directories to local libraries, as well as the utilisation of its feature of scale.

The electronic text Another perspective that supports the argument of GBS accentuating the publishing aspect of a book will be explained through further analysis of applying the notion of electronic text. According to Browner and Sears (2000: 169), electronic text on the Internet is different from texts on printed

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materials in terms of the following characteristics;

1. It is searchable. ‘Hypertext on the Internet is much more searchable than the print texts in a physical library, within individual documents and web sites, and across the whole Internet’. 2. It ‘(l)inks within documents and between documents…’. 3. It differs in its degree of accessibility for both writers and readers. For writers, the Internet provides methods of self-publication. For readers, it provides reasonable and convenient access to relevant and new types of material.

The first point describes what GBS offers for the readers. At the ‘Preview This Book’ section, the texts on scanned pages serve as electronic texts that can be searched through GBS, which allows the readers to determine whether the contents of that book match their interests. The texts inside a book were previously inaccessible unless the reader had the physical book in their hand. However, with searchable texts, GBS makes the contents of the book open and accessible to readers who are searching for it. This can be interpreted that the marketing aspect of the publishing component is emphasized since the searchability helps the book reach the right audience. As for the second point, the texts on scanned pages on GBS does not link to other texts within the same book, except for the table of contents section, where clicking on the headings would lead the users to the page preview accordingly. As a result of point one and two, GBS boosts the accessibility between the books and the readers by providing the contents of the book in searchable electronic text and navigating them smoothly within the book by links on the table of contents. In Thompson’s (2005: 319) view, this searchability of a digitised material is valuable because it is ‘infinitely quicker and more powerful than the traditional search mechanisms employed in printed texts,…’. Furthermore, the search capacity acts as a powerful tool for the end users in order to reach the contents that they are looking for (Thompson, 2005). Conclusions As discussed, the publishing aspect of books are emphasised when digitised through the system of GBS. The digitisation of books is valuable because of the characteristics of intertexuality, scale and searchability that may promote intensified accessibility between books and readers through a more easy, convenient and precise way. Due to the easy and precise connectivitiy, one could argue that this may cause more awareness by readers to purchase printed books that are relevant to their interests. Therefore, GBS may contribute to the publishers maintaing their revenues from printed books. Since digitised books do not have the physicality, they may not contribute to the enriching experience of reading. Similarly, the limited availability of contents on GBS prevents readers from completely immersing oneself in reading the texts. However, it is the way GBS connects the readers and the books through its emphasis on the publishing element as well as the functionality of electronice texts that plays a significant role in flourishing the publishing industry by supporting its existing revenue streams of printed books. Thus, GBS can be seen as a positive invention for the publishing industry. Lastly, since this analysis has limited its focus on GBS, it is not approapriate to generalise the positive aspects of digitisation discuessed above as applying to all kinds of digitised books. Nonetheless, this article has hopefully surfaced valuable points which is worth arguing regarding the digitisation of books.

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The Digital Business Ecosys- tem and the Corporate Wiki: toward knowledge creation and innovation

Beth Powell

This paper looks at a digital business ecosystem model in the context of complex adaptive systems theory and network theory. It discusses the possibilities a digital business ecosystem model offers for knowledge creation and innovation within organisations and, analysing a study on the adoption of a corporate wiki, identifies critical success factors.

Keywords: network theory, complex adaptive systems, knowledge creation, innovation, wiki, self-organising, digital business ecosystem, heterarchy

1. Introduction The business organisations of previous generations share few characteristics with business organisations of today (Baungaard Rasmussen, L., & Wangle, A. (2007). Responding to external stimuli, and triggering broad changes themselves, SMEs and corporations have morphed into flat structures and groups of flat structures and networks. Enabled through communication technologies, contemporary business organisations are now loose hubs of connectivity that are constantly changing, adapting to change and causing change.

Making use of complex adaptive systems theory, a theoretical framework emerging from the social and natural sciences, including mathematics, information science, sociology, chemistry and biology

24 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications among others (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly, 2005), this paper describes the digital business ecosystem as an organising system for SMEs. The digital business ecosystem is explained as a heterarchial structure whereby self-organising agents engage in activities for local benefit, which can result in global effect. The heterarchial structure of organising, briefly defined as a network of agents in which, at any given time, one agent has no more or less power and authority over another, is discussed in relation to Castells’ ‘network enterprises’. The analysis of the digital business ecosystem as heterarchy identifies opportunities for knowledge creation and innovation. A study on the adoption of a corporate wiki, offers insight into the ideal conditions for the heterarchial structure to emerge and allow for innovation while at the same time identifying critical success factors for the adoption of a wiki as a knowledge creation system.

2. Describing the Digital Business Ecosystem Many fields of study use an ecological systems model as a tool for analysis (Rosenhead, 1999) (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly, 2005). Applied here as a conceptual metaphor and drawing on the theory of complexity and complex adaptive systems, the concepts of co-evolution, self-organising, interconnectedness, and feed-back mechanisms give meaning to agents’ participation in the digital environment that is non-hierarchical and non-linear and where agents are both human, or ‘engineered’ ( software, hardware, network interaction, and so on.)

The ecosystem in relation to the digital ecosystem, defined by Chang and Boley (2007, p. 398), is “a loosely coupled, domain clustered environment inhabited by species, each proactive and responsive regarding its own benefit while conserving the environment. A digital ecosystem can be definedas an open, loosely coupled, domain clustered, demand-driven, self-organising agent environment, where each agent of each species is proactive and responsive regarding its own benefit/profit.”

The digital business ecosystem model has been adopted by business organisations as an approach to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), globalisation and innovation for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) (Chituc, Toscano, & Azevedo, 2007) (Blomberg, 2007). In the context of SMEs, the ecosystem is the knowledge, the processes and the economic activities working in cooperation and competition, amid a networking paradigm and within a system designed to evolve with changing economic circumstances and adapt to local conditions (Blomberg, 2007). Although Blomberg does not define “the system”, it is taken to mean here that a characteristic is scalability in relation to local conditions and economic circumstances.

The conditions of the ecosystem, as described by Chang and Boley (2007, p. 399) are that it supports loosely-coupled relationships, meaning interdependence is relatively low and “there is functional semi–autonomy between subsystems” (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly, 2005). As a demand- driven and domain-clustered environment, the agents gather through choice because of similar interests or culture or, for business, economic need. Within the cluster, the agents self-organise for the purpose of individual benefit and “profit for the domain” (Chang & Boley, 2007, p. 399). This is further expressed by Iannacci and Mitleton-Kelly (2005), that the self-organising nature of the system is related to a process of evolution labeled emergence that can be described as “the transition from local rules or principles of interaction between individual components or agents to global principles encompassing the entire collection of agents.”

Cisco Systems as described by (Yan-Ru, 2009), although not in the category of an SME, provides a useful illustration of the semi-autonomous functionality of the subsystems outlined by Iannacci and Mitleton-Kelly and the scalable nature of the system in response to economic circumstances.

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“Cisco Systems has developed a scalable business model that enables the company to meet the challenges posed by continued explosive business growth. It has created a form of enterprise–termed an “ecosystem”–which seamlessly links together customers, employees, contract manufacturers, and other supply chain partners into a multisite, multilocation electronic network based on practices and technology of the Internet.” (p. 380)

Reasons identified for SMEs in particular to adopt this model relate to increase in efficiency, productivity and cost reduction; response to globalisation of markets; enhanced customer service and responsiveness; and faster time to market in relation to the supply chain. (Chituc, Toscano, & Azevedo, 2007). From a logistics and technological point of view, these can be achieved by shared physical infrastructure, decrease in transportation and storage costs, and so on but of greater interest is how the effect of the digital business ecosystem as a self organising network provides the opportunity for knowledge creation, learning and innovation.

3. Heterarchy, a structure for knowledge creation and innovation Castells’ describes contemporary business organisations operating in the global economy as a “network enterprise, whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals.” (2000) The development of the iPod, as described by Yan-Ru (2009), is an example of the network enterprise as conceptualised by Castells and is a useful example in the context of the network enterprise and complex adaptive systems, particularly in regard to innovation. “For the successful product iPod as an example, none of its parts and accessories is produced by Apple— the hard drive is produced by Toshiba, the CPU by PortalPlayer, and RAM by Samsung (Linden et al., 2007). However, entertainment companies license content through iTune and iPod, which connect to music downloading sites, as well as the consumers who purchase and enjoy the music (Moore, 2006). Therefore, a new business ecosystem has evolved around the music player. (Adner, 2006) clearly indicates that business ecosystems allow firms to create value that no single firm could create alone. With a vision that extends beyond their current business operations or technical specifications of one product, the synergic cooperational value of an industry ecosystem is greater than the sum of the part.” (2009, p. 381).

Business organisations as network enterprises are co-evolutionary, operating as a system, adapting and influencing the socio-economic system and hence the network in which it operates and, within the organisational system, subsystems or networks within the network, operate in a similar way of mutual influence (Dooley, 1997) (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly, 2005) (Moore, 1996). Described this way, the structure of the subsystems of the organisation is a heterarchy, a loosely coupled system where the interdependence of the actors can vary. Iannacci and Mitleton-Kelly (2005) suggest an “ensemble” of loosely coupled systems, illustrated by the example of the development of the iPod as described above.

The agents organised in Castells’ network do so around the ‘autonomous system of goals’, in the heterarchy however, the agents organise, act, react and take responsibility in relation to local influences and triggers so as to realise benefits or in the expectation that benefit will be realised. The emergent order from the adaptations to local influences may have global consequences in line with the ‘autonomous system of goals’. Moreover, subsystems within complex adaptive systems organised as heterarchies may form and dissolve to exploit a chance (Baungaard Rasmussen & Wangle, 2007). Both of which can occur in an explorative space within the subsystem, creating a new order, knowledge or innovation.

The EU-supported digital business ecosystem initiative described by Blomberg has its focus geographically on the regional level for SMEs, “valorising their local culture and vocations and enabling the creation of value networks at the global level” (2007) . However, most importantly it

26 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications sees itself as a ‘body of knowledge on innovation constantly innovating itself with new ideas and new points of view” (Blomberg, 2007). But while the actors in the heterarchy are responding to local triggers and effecting change, how does such a system ‘constantly innovate itself’? Iannacci and Mitleton-Kelly (2005) suggest, because of its moderate level of connectedness within its own network (rather than the lesser connectivity between subsystems or to the system as a whole), the heterarchy is able to ‘search the space of possibilities’ in relation to a change trigger, in a local context. Such endeavour relates to an individual’s own interests, expression of a skill area, or motivation to learn and in response or adaptation to known, understood, and trusted parameters with little or no reflection of the impact on the system as a whole. For the heterarchies within the business digital ecosystem, a localised response occurs within a trusted network arriving at a new subsystem order, creating the possibility for business innovation across subsystems within the hierarchy.

For the complex adaptive system theorists, innovation arises when systems operate at the boundary between two zones – the stable where, in disturbed conditions, the system will return to its natural state and the unstable where disturbance causes “further divergence”. The “bounded instability” is a desired state for innovation where “unpredictability of specific behaviour within a predictable general structure of behaviour” may occur (Rosenhead, 1999). The digital business ecosystem, organised as an ensemble of heterarchial network structures, within a broader market hierarchy, offers opportunity for bounded instability leading to innovation and knowledge creation, as types of knowledge become part of the network’s parametric understanding.

4. The study on the adoption of the corporate wiki and critical success factors. The Wiki is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “a type of website that is developed collaboratively by a group of users, and can be easily added to or edited by anyone (known as ‘open editing’)”. Some may argue that the wiki cannot be a part of a digital ecosystem because it is governed by an administrator that has access to the code. However, open administration systems are commonplace and the code, a simple mark-up language, is transparent. It is likely that the wiki will operate in a business environment within a hierarchy of information management systems, but that does not prevent users and developers of the wiki organising as a heterarchy. A good example here is the most famous wiki, Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia created by a group, built and maintained by volunteer contributors, with resource support from a small group of staff. Wikipedia is an example of successful heterarchy, based on its growth and complexity, with collaborators enjoying benefits of knowledge sharing among networks and communities.

For the success of the wiki as an innovation and knowledge creation tool within a digital business ecosystem, it must have the characteristics of a complex adaptive system; it will be loosely coupled with a leadership that may emerge and dissolve according to the requirements of the group (Baungaard Rasmussen & Wangle, 2007, p. 185), in addition to being self organising and demand driven. Chang and Boley (2007, p. 399) state that failure occurs in corporate wikis because participants are forced or required to participate in order to meet an externally enforced goal and there is no consideration about what benefit the collaboration will provide to the collaborators.

The wiki can also be viewed as a component tool in Castells’ network enterprise. Drawing on Castells’ consistency and connectedness criteria for the network enterprise, where connectedness refers to the degree to which there is a sharing of identity, trust and knowledge amongst the agents (Baungaard Rasmussen & Wangle, 2007, p. 187) , the wiki enables identity sharing through feedback mechanisms, such as response to and development of a particular thread within the subsystem. The development of trust and knowledge creation occurs by way of a process of

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parametric adaptations (Iannacci & Mitleton-Kelly, 2005), where agents respond and adapt to understood parameters of the local subsystem.

As a component of a network enterprise, which requires the creation of knowledge in order to maintain a competitive edge (Castells M., 2000), the wiki’s possibilities for innovation and knowledge creation are far greater than traditional knowledge management. In arguing for a broader consideration of the corporate wiki, Hasan and Pfaff (2006, p. 378) draw on constructivist learning theorists (Vygotsky, 1978; Leidner & Jarvenpaa, 1995) assertion that the process of expressing knowledge aids its creation and that ‘conversational knowledge management’ such as questions and answers become the source of relevant knowledge. Put simply the creation of knowledge requires interaction.

Hassan and Pfaff studied four cases where the wiki was being used in corporate environments or adoption was being considered. The authors found that in none of the cases was the use or adoption of the wiki a “complete success story” (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006). In summary, the lack of success was due to resistance from management, issues related to power and control emerged, as well as disinterest on the part of participants. In the cases described, the fundamental principles of the complex adaptive system were lacking.

A systems approach to organisation requires a challenge to management thinking (Rosenhead, 1999) and the adoption of a wiki in business organisations is less likely to be successful if management does not recognise a systems model as a competitive advantage. Critical success factors suggested by Rosenhead (1999) are for “extraordinary management require(ing) the activation of the tacit knowledge and creativity available within the organisation”. The use of informal structures, spontaneity, conflict, paradoxes are on the menu within structures that are “self-organising, capable of redefining or extending their remit rather than being bound by fixed terms of reference.”

“Rather than trying to consolidate stable equilibrium...the organisation should welcome disorder as a partner, use instability positively. In this way new possible futures for the organisation will emerge, arising out of the (controlled) ferment of ideas which it should try to provoke. Instead of a perfectly planned corporate death, the released creativity leads to an organisation which continuously re-invents itself.” (Rosenhead, 1999)

5. Conclusion Digital business ecosystems can be examined as complex adaptive systems with heterarchial structured subsystems. As an initiative of the EU to increase the economic benefit provided by the SME domain, success of the digital business ecosystem model may be dependent on the preconditions identified in complex adaptive systems theory. The self organising system is shown to be a model for localised innovation with potential global effect. However, either technological or social constraints, often to do with issues of power and control, may affect the innovation and knowledge creation outcomes of the digital business ecosystem model. As illustrated here with the example of the corporate wiki, success requires an acceptance of uncertainty, unpredictability and self organising within conditions of non-linear and domain cluster structures.

Bibliography Aaltonen, M (Ed). (2008). The Digibusiness Cluster and the emergence of the Digital Future. Helsinki: The Digibusiness Cluster Programme. Baungaard Rasmussen, L., & Wangle, A. (2007). Work in the virtual enterprise—creating identities, building trust,. AI & Soc, 21 , 184-199.

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Blomberg, E. (2007). Digital Business Ecosystems, European Commission 2007. Retrieved April 10th, 2009, from Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/Brno53/bc-digital-business- ecosystems-20081012-980753. Castells, M. (1998). Information Age: Economy, Society & Culture, The (Book). New Political Economy; Vol. 3 Issue 3 , p473-484, 11p. Castells, M. (2000). Toward a sociology of the network society, vol 29, Iss 5. Contemporary Sociology. Chang, E., & Boley, H. (2007). Digital Ecosystems: Principles and Semantics. 2007 Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2007) (pp. 398 - 403). IEEExplore. Chituc, C., Toscano, C., & Azevedo, A. (2007). Toward the creation of a digital business ecosystem for the Shoe Manufacturing Domain. 2007 Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (pp. 88-93). IEEExplore. Dooley, K. J. (1997). A Complex Adaptive Systems Model of Organization Change. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1 , 69-97. Hasan, H., & Pfaff, C. C. (2006). Emergent Conversational Technologies that are Democratising Information Systems in Oganisations: the case of the corporate Wiki. Information Systems Foundations:Theory, Representation and reality Conference. Canberra: ANU. Hasan, H., & Pfaff, C. C. (2006). The Wiki:an environment to revolutionise empoyees’ interaction with corporate knowledge. OZCHI (pp. 377-380). Sydney: CHISIG. Iannacci, F., & Mitleton-Kelly, E. (2005). Beyond Markets and Firms: the emergence of Open Source Networks. First Monday, Vol 10, Number 5 . Lessig, L. (2002). Building Blocks: “Commons” and “Layers”. In L. Lessig, The Future of Ideas. Moore, J. (1996). The Death of Competition: leadership and strategy in the age of the business ecosystem. NY: Harper Business . Qureshi, S. (2001). Adaptiveness in virtual teams. Group Decision and Negotiation Vol 10 , 27–46. Rosenhead, J. (1999). Complexity theory and management practice. London. Yan-Ru, L. (2009). The technological roadmap of Cisco’s business ecosystem. Technovation, Vol 29, Iss 5 , 379-386 .

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Web 2.0 Activism and the battle for online space

Harry Mills

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Introduction

During the nineteen-nineties the Internet was discovered as a medium in which it was possible to establish and maintain political campaigns which could potentially have a significant impact on real-world politics. One of the first campaigns to give an indication of the potential of the internet for political use was that of the Mexican Zapatista movement of nineteen-ninety four. In this instance, the Internet was a large part of a broader media campaign that was successful in aiding the rebel movement in its confrontation with the Mexican government. The success of the Zapatista movement led to further utilisation of the internet as a tool for organising and disseminating information relating to real world campaigns by anti-capitalist groups. In recent years, however, a number of writers have noted that the optimistic view of the potential of the Internet as an open and neutral platform for ideas that was prevalent at the end of the

30 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications last century has been replaced by a more pessimistic view. This view sees the Internet as being under threat from increased corporate dominance, potentially crowding out and silencing anti- corporate or merely unprofitable viewpoints. In the face of these developments, online activism has in some cases shifted from merely being an auxiliary tool for the furtherance of real-world political campaigns, but has become a battleground in itself, as differing voices fight for space online. This article attempts to show how the left-wing online activists of the Web 2.0 era are aware of the colonial threat posed by corporations and commercial concerns and have to a certain extent consciously shifted the focus of their activism. This can be seen in the attempts by Egyptian bloggers to consolidate a community of like-minded bloggers from around the world , and their attempts to spread knowledge about the effective use of Web 2.0 technology, as well as the battle between left and right in the virtual world of Second Life

Internet Activism in the 1990s

One of the first activist movements to take advantage of the radical potential of the internet was the Mexican Zapatista movement. In the mid 1990s, this movement of indigenous and impoverished Mexicans from the southern Chiapas region of the country staged an insurrection against the government, in protest against the latter’s economic policies and lack of recognition for indigenous rights.(Castells, 1998) A major part of their strategy was based on utilising the media so as to gain support in Mexico and around the world, as well as to ensure scrutiny of the government’s response and ensure that excessively violent repression was for the most part eschewed in favour of peaceful negotiation. While this strategy utilised various mediums, Castells writes that it was the internet in particular that

allowed the Zapatistas to diffuse information and their call throughout the world instantly, and to create a network of support groups which helped to produce an internet public opinion movement that made it literally impossible for the Mexican government to use repression on a large scale.(Castells, 1998)p. 90

Some writers have argued that the role of the internet in the Zapatistas’ success has been over-stated and romanticised. However, it is clear that they constituted a grass-roots political movement that was able to overcome their marginalisation with regard to the mainstream media in Mexico and abroad that was sable to use the internet to spread information about their situation. This was to have wide ranging effects for global political movements. Chadwick states that “By demonstrating the potential of Internet technologies, the Zapatistas arguably created a long term shift in global social movement politics.” (Chadwick, 2006)Their example was to be carried forward to the end of the decade to the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ in nineteen-ninety nine, a world-wide movement that borrowed a number of strategies from the earlier Zapatista movement.(Chadwick, 2006)

Castells writes also of another political movement that successfully exploited the internet in the 1990s, one drastically different in political ideology from the Zapatistas, the Militia movement of the United States. This movement is described by Castells as being so diverse as to be “almost chaotic” comprising as it did of a multitude of small state or local based groups from all over the country, representing between them a diverse range of views, from extreme libertarianism to more traditionally conservative outlooks.(Castells, 1998) For Castells, despite this, the homogeneity of the core vision of the entire movement is remarkable, a fact he attributes to the thick web of linkages between the smaller groups made possible by the internet. Castells quotes another observer of the movement who had observed that “the computer is the most vital piece of equipment in the Patriot Movement’s arsenal”. The internet served the movement extremely well, Castells argues, as its network structure replicated the autonomous, spontaneous

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networking of militia groups and of the Patriots at large, without boundaries, without a definite plan but sharing a purpose a feeling and most of all an enemy.(Castells, 1998)

The commercial colonisation of the Internet

Since the 1990s however, the internet has come increasingly under corporate control. Pickard writes of how the internet commenced its existence as a project of the military and technocratic university groups, financed by the taxpayer funded government support. Subsequently however, despite the “utopian raves and dystopian rants that followed the heady 1990s rhetoric of internet triumphalism”,(Pickard, 2008) commercial forces have succeeded in colonising and increasingly dominating “what was once hailed as an open domain”. Pickard continues, noting that a number of political critiques of the internet have been developed, which have observed the way in which “internet networks increasingly serve the aims of transnational corporations via strict privatization of content and unregulated transborder data flow”.(Pickard, 2008) In addition, it has also been argued that the “public domain’s digital commons are undergoing a kind of enclosure, impoverished by a proprietary logic driven by a copyright system run amok”. (Pickard, 2008) One writer who has sought to take a theoretical approach to these developments is Lee Salter, who has adapted Habermasian concept of colonisation to developments online. For Habermas, colonisation is a function of the interaction of two related concepts, the lifeworld and the economic and political subsystem. The lifeworld is defined as “a background cultural resource which provides a basis for meaning and understanding”, and it is animated by communicative rationality. The economic and political subsystems, by contrast, are animated by instrumental or technical rationality. It is when the instrumental rationality of the economic and political subsystems “surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there at the expense of moral-practical and aesthetic-practical rationality”(Habermas, 1987:304; quoted in (Salter, 2005)). This colonisation has occurred on the World Wide Web, Salter argues, and this can be seen not just in the increase of commercial content or information retrieval mechanisms, but also with regard to the development of legal structures on the Internet.(Salter, 2005) Despite this creeping commercialisation, opportunities continue to exist on the internet for alternative voices to emerge and create spaces in which to express views that differ from those of the corporations that seek to dominate the internet. While there is a long history of opposition groups using electronic media forms such as radio to overthrow oppressive regimes, Pickard mentions the cases of Algerian resistance to French rule in the 1950s and Iranian resistance to that of the Shah in the 1970s, “the rate size and spontaneity of current digital media-enabled activism arguably constitutes a quantitative leap”(Pickard, 2008). Pickard lists regime change in the Philippines, the WTO protests in Seattle and a dramatic last minute turn around in the Spanish elections as demonstrations of the potential power of internet activism, all a result of the internet “amplifying cooperation”.(Pickard, 2008) Pickard names a number of successful attempts to create space for political expression on the internet. These include the Independent Media Centre, or IndyMedia, Free Republic, Democratic Underground and Move On.(Pickard, 2008)

Web 2.0 Activism contests colonisation

While space continues to exist on the internet for anti-capitalist activism, its practitioners are constantly aware of the need to contest the ongoing colonisation, and compete against corporate and commercial voices for space online. These activists seek not only to continue the struggles of the real world, but to struggle for control ogf the Internet itself

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. An example of the kind of approach that has been taken by some activists is that of the Egyptian activist and blogger can be seen to be taken by Hossam el Hamalawy argues that the socialist movement with which he is affiliated, International Solidarity Tendency needs to collectively organise a Web 2.0 presence. This is necessary, he argues, because while businesses and other groups have begun to exploit the potential benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, left wing activists have not.. Thus:

With a quick Google search on the implications of Web 2.0 on “business”, you get tons of results–articles, postings and books. But you don’t get the same amount of literature on what these changes mean for revolutionaries.(el-Hamalawy, 2009)

As well as its utilisation by commercial entities, Web 2.0 has also been exploited buy what el Hamalawy sees as his enemies, the “super-reactionaries” such as Israel Barack Obama and the Vatican. Thus it is necessary for socialists such as himself and the movement of which he is a part to establish a presence in the Web 2.0 arena and utilise the technology to compete for space within it. For him, these opponents have been quicker to understand the potential of Web 2.0 as a tool for mobilisation and communication and this is something that needs to be addressed. One of the ways in which el Hamalawy has sought to do this has been to create a new blog called “Lenosphere” in which he has posted a list of socialist blogs from around the world (el-Hamalawy, 2009) In addition he has subsequently posted a number of blog posts in which he provides information and tutorials on the potential uses of tools such as Twitter and Diigo, as well as the potential uses of such technology to assist in real world protests. With regard to Twitter, for example, he emphasises the usefulness of the tool for live blogging from the site of a strike or demonstration. Over the last few years in Egypt, Twitter was used to spread information about demonstrations and arrests, and el Hamalawy urges his fellow Egyptian activists to exploit the technology to the fullest extent possible:

you can blog while you are at demonstrations in the streets, provide continuous updates, as well as alarm your comrades about police moves, arrests, minute by minute. I also recommend that comrades in Egypt have a ready-typed text in the “drafts” of your mobile phones messaging menu saying something like: “State Security is at my house” ready to be sent out right away to your twitter page.(el-Hamalawy, 2008)

He has also developed tutorials on the use of the social bookmarking site Diigo and has created a group on the site to collect and share bookmarks of relevance to his cause.(el-Hamalawy, 2009)

Neil Scott, meanwhile, writes of his own experiences of internet activism on the virtual community website Second Life. In this virtual world, he writes, there has existed since 2006 an organisation known as Second Life Left Unity or SLLU. Since its inception the group has established its presence in the virtual world by buying virtual land and building a ‘hub’.(Scott, 2009) One of the tasks that this group set for itself in the virtual world was to oppose the online activities of fascist groups such as the French Front National or FN, led by Jean Marie Le Pen. A number of fascist groups had previously attempted to use the virtual world to recruit teenaged gamers to their cause, and in 2007 The FN set up an office in Second Life. In response, Second Life Left Unity organised around the clock demonstrations against the right-wing movement at the site of their virtual building.(Scott, 2009) These protests attracted the attention of the real-world media, who reported on the atmosphere that prevailed in the Porcupine area of the Second Life universe, quoting first-hand accounts such as this one:

“The first night I arrived at the protest ... it was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute,” wrote James Au, whose website, New World Notes, reports on events in Second Life. “By the second night I came ... the conflict had become more literal, for many residents had armed themselves. Multi-coloured explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air of Porcupine.” Some activists threw exploding pigs.(Burkeman, 2007)

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The FN group banned SLLU from the land they owned, but the leftist group responded by buying land directly next to that of their opponents. SLLU issued a press release to the media in which they stated that they would be “manning a protest there until FN go or are ejected. Wherever fascists are, we will ensure they get no peace to corrupt and lie to decent people”.(Burkeman, 2007) Eventually, as a result of media attention, and the detonation in their headquarters of a ‘pig balloon bomb’ – an act for which the SLLU denies responsibility, claiming to be a non-violent group – the real-life FN leadership ordered the withdrawal of their organisation from the medium of Second Life.(Scott, 2009) As well as engaging in conflict with extremist political groups, SLLU has also engaged inant- corporate activity. One instance of this was their participation in an online strike organised by an Italian Trade Union that represents the Italian staff of IBM. SLLU assisted the union in mobilising Italian staff and other supporters from around the world to disrupt high level executive meetings that were being held by the company in Second Life. As a result of the strike and its resultant publicity, the CEO of IBM in Italy was forced to resign, and the company itself resumed previously stalled industrial negotiations with the union.(Scott, 2009)

Conclusion

The Internet has long been known as an effective tool for political campaigning. Since its use by the Zapatista movement in the early nineteen-nineties it has come to be used in a number of ways by individuals and groups from all over the world, representing the entire gamut of political opinion. This function of the internet, however, has come under threat in recent years from the continuing colonisation of the internet by commercial interests. As the overall content of the Internet becomes increasing commercial in nature, and its legal framework is ever more moulded to suit corporate interests, the space in which people are able to express views in opposition to these interests is inevitably decreasing. Because of the importance of the internet to political activism in the real world, anti-capitalist activists who use the internet have responded to the creeping commercialisation of the medium by seeing the Internet as a medium on which they must compete for space. Rather than simply focusing on real-world campaigns, activists, such as those mentioned in the article have shifted their focus to competing with their opponents to ensure that the Internet continues to exist as a space for them to express their views and participate in real- world politics. As we have seen, some of the ways in which they have sought to do this include the development of networks on the blogosphere and the sharing of expertise relating to Web 2.0 technologies, and the direct virtual conflict that occurred in Second Life.

References

BURKEMAN, O. (2007) Exploding pigs and volleys of gunfire as Le Pen opens HQ in virtual world. The Guardian.

CASTELLS, M. (1998) The Power of Identity, Malden, Blackwell.

CHADWICK, A. (2006) Internet Politics: Staes, Citizens and New Communications Technologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

EL-HAMALAWY, H. (2008) The Revolution will be Twitterized. http://arabist.net/ arabawy/2008/04/24/the-revolution-will-be-twitterized/ accessed 20/4/09

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EL-HAMALAWY, H. (2009) Web2.0 & revolutionary socialist organizing. http://lenosphere. org/2009/02/web-20-and-revolutionary-socialist-organizing/ accessed 23/3/09

PICKARD, W. W. (2008) Cooptation and cooperation: insttitutional exemplars of democratic internet technology. New Media & Society, 10.

SALTER, L. (2005) Colonization tendencies in the development of the world wide web. New Media and Society 7, 291-309.

SCOTT, N. (2009) My activist Second Life. http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Left-unity-in-Second- Life accessed 20/4/09

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The World Wide Web and the demise of quality journalism

Kyle Anderson

Newspapers married to a traditional delivery mechanism are trapped in a time warp. Based on 500 year old technology, they have been delivering the same product to this very day, and now have nowhere left to improve. In contrast, the web is less than 20 years old and is unlimited in how its delivery mechanism can be improved and exploited.

All print and web publishing has its costs, which are primarily journalism and production. In media, these costs are funded by advertisers. But the equations for balancing costs against advertising revenue in order to make a profit are very different between print and web. This has changed the source and dynamics of journalistic input and it will soon become very apparent that the quality and credibility of professional news reporting and editorial comment is in decline. The web offers lower production costs, a better deal for advertisers, faster time-to-market and a two way dialogue between publisher and consumer. Yet does this mean that the online product delivers a better editorial experience for the reader? Overall, the web levels the playing field but at the same time reduces the quality of the game.

The medium and the message.

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘the medium and the message’ in his pivotal publication, ‘Understanding Media: The extensions of man’ (1964). McLuhan proposed that it is the medium that affects society more so than the content that is delivered by that medium. And now 45 years later, this concept remains as relevant as ever in a discussion of how web technology is about to deal a final death throw to the traditional print publisher.

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The demise of newspapers

Traditional media stands still whereas the internet continually evolves. Newspaper publishing has been described as smearing ink on smashed trees. Publishing (broadly described as the dissemination of information) has its origins in stone tablets and papyrus, but the first major breakthrough was achieved when Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440. For the first time, the press enabled widespread dissemination of information in a short time frame. Except for some technical advances, such as wooden type blocks giving away to computerized typography, and the inclusion of colour pictures, the basic delivery mechanism has not substantially changed in the last 500 years. Newspaper publishers are trapped in a delivery time warp. Simply put, there is not much more value that publishers can extract from print technology.

The Internet on the other hand, is a continually evolving delivery mechanism, constrained only by current commercial issues such as delivery speed, screen resolution, and usability of portable devices. Unlike stagnant print technology, the web is constantly improving. For example, only fifteen years ago, delivery speeds were 9600 bits per second, while in this current age of household broadband, speed is approaching 15mb per second.

In the 1990s newspapers reluctantly realized they had to embrace the internet. But in many cases they squandered this opportunity for two reasons: they modeled their response on an internet emulation of a print product, and they believed they could maintain their revenue model. They failed to grasp that the internet would continually improve in capability, while at the same time becoming more cost effective. As an example of this dated mindset, Real View Technologies, an Australian company, offers a delivery mechanism to print publishers which is best described as a PDF page turner (Real View Technologies 2008). One user is PANPA (Pacific Area Newspapers Association), an organization which is supposed to represent the current state of the art of major Australian newspapers (PANPA 2009). But where is the advantage in simply re-displaying a facsimile of a print page on a modern computer screen?

Comparison of traditional print to online publishing

Print newspapers address a largely local audience. The Sydney Morning Herald is a newspaper for the people of Sydney while The Age is read by Melbournians. Online publishing takes a global approach and is disseminated in an instantaneous time frame. For both advertising and editorial, traditional print is a delivery-only mechanism; content is pushed one way from publisher to consumer. Apart from the letters to the editor section there is little opportunity for the consumer to provide feedback to the publisher. Online media however is a two-way mechanism. Most sites offer a section for opinion and feedback, while for advertisers, the EBay-like “ask the seller a question” puts the buyer into a direct dialogue with the seller.

The capital cost of traditional publishing and online publishing.

Newspaper publishing is a very capital-intensive business. For example Fairfax spent $220 million on a new printing plant for The Age and Financial Review at Tullarmarine (The National Library of Australia 2006), and in 2000 the same company announced a $70 million upgrade of their Chullora site for the purchase of a single printing press! (Fairfax Ltd. 2000). By contrast anyone with a PC and an internet connection can declare themselves an online publisher.

Where does the revenue come from to pay for these huge costs? It is not from selling newspapers, since the cover price of a newspaper is far less than the cost of paper stock, printing and distribution; it comes instead from advertising.

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Newspapers believed that by simply acquiring online technology, that they would switch newspaper advertising to online advertising and emerge at least revenue neutral. Implicit in this is an assumption that online advertising delivers the same revenue as its print equivalent. However, as newspapers now well know, this is simply not the case. If an advertiser switches an ad from print to online, even if both distribution methods are owned by the same publisher, the online ad generates substantially less revenue than its print version. As both News Ltd and FairFax have discovered, even though they have major investments in the employment market through their online products CareerOne and MyCareer, the revenue stream from these online products does not make up for the revenue lost in their print products. As an example, a quarter page print ad in the Saturday edition of MyCareer costs $5215 (Adcentre, quoting SMH Employment Advertising Rates 2008), while an ad which conveys the same message is available on MyCareer online for 30 days at a cost of $180 (MyCareer website 2009).

Vertical integration in traditional media

For various reasons including the need to publish in very tight timeframes and competitive market forces, newspapers have had to own and manage the entire delivery mechanism, from journalists’ computers, to plate making, printing and even delivery trucks. Traditionally none of this has been outsourced. This delivery chain again highlights the enormous capital cost of being a traditional publisher. The web on the other hand is almost 100% outsourced. If you have a laptop and an internet connection you are immediately online to a world wide technical infrastructure, which allows you to deliver your message instantaneously into a global market.

The cost of funding a newspaper

How does a newspaper recover the high capital costs and the high running costs of their operation? A publisher will always claim that advertising and journalism are completely independent. Except for so called advertorials, the notion that an advertiser can receive favorable journalism by placing ads is deeply discouraged. Nevertheless, a newspaper is funded through its advertising; this advertising revenue pays for productions costs, and for all its journalism. A newspaper sets its advertising rates therefore, to balance its high editorial and production costs. By contrast the web has none of these high costs and so can bring its product to market with a much lower advertising revenue stream.

Zoned advertising is another example of how the web is much more efficient than print. Zoned advertising in traditional print has to some extent offered different advertising for different markets. The News Ltd. Cumberland newspapers for example, publish a dozen or more versions of essentially the same newspaper into different suburbs, each carrying a modified mix of advertising. But, this does not come cheaply since multiple press runs are required. Online publishing however, through the use of various tools such as DoubleClick, allows the advertiser to target advertising content on a highly specific basis. All of this comes at little increased capital cost.

The cost of quality journalism

The art of journalism is now threatened by online media. In the past, famous mastheads such as The Washington Post or The New York Times, or closer to home, The Sydney Morning Herald

38 Gathering for Odious Advanced Thinking (GOAT), Volume 1 2009 © Smoking Goat Publications or The Melbourne Age, have inspired and attracted only the best journalists to be part of these prestigious organizations. The publishing machine feeds itself. The quality mastheads attract the best journalism which generates a higher readership, which attracts more advertising, which generates higher ad revenue, which positions the company to further improve its journalistic offering. But this is clearly a circular argument. The key parameter in this equation is that quality journalism is funded through advertising revenue; if advertising revenue declines, newspaper management (stuck with its huge printing costs) can only react by reducing journalist head count. We have seen this occurring in newspapers all over the world. Now the machine, rather than feeding itself, enters a spiraling state of self emaciation. Revenue declines, journalism standards decline, page count and readership decline and the mastheads lose credibility and value.

Employment options for journalists

Online publishing blurs the distinction between publishing and journalism; as noted in the online space, anyone can be a publisher and so too anyone with a point of view can deem themself a journalist. But as has been widely observed, the credibility of online sites, from blogs to Wikipedia and even to the online arms of traditional print publishers, is highly questionable. The internet offers a democratic culture; everybody is on an equal footing, the industry is supposed to self- regulate, but there is no equivalent to the centuries old stone façade of the traditional publisher. You do not visit an online news site in the same way that you walk through the hallowed halls of The New York Times and believe that you are in an environment of credibility and respectability. An amateur journalist blogging into one or several websites competes on the same basis as a professional. The net affect is a lowering in journalistic standards. The web creates a level playing field (anybody can be a journalist) but the quality of the game declines.

Why are advertisers switching from print to online?

Apart from brand building exercises, advertisers are largely driven by a very simple principle when it comes to placing ads. What is the reach of the ad and what is the conversion rate into sales? Both of these are easy metrics to monitor and advertisers can clearly compare the cost and effectiveness of print advertising versus online. Online is undoubtedly winning over print in this regard as evidenced by the flight of advertisers to the web in virtually every category, including traditionally important ones of automotive, property and employment. The web is a technically superior medium at a lower cost, with better reach, better metrics and better conversion rate than print.

Publishers versus online product.

Newspaper publishers will not disappear. (Some will). Instead they may migrate from a purely print format of the past, through a hybrid print and online format at the present, into a purely online format in the future. An example is The Seattle Post Intelligencer. This is a 146 year old newspaper that in March 2009 shut down its printed edition. This involved reducing 88% of PI news staff from 165 to around 20 people (Yardley et al. The New York Times 2009) The PI is the first major US city newspaper to shift to a fully digital proposition. Online they are frequently referred to as an experiment. Bercovici from Conde Nast Portofolio coins the headline ‘Web- Only P-I: Worthy Experiment. Won’t Work’. While Karp from Publishing 2.0 uses the phrase ‘The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intellegencer’s Print Advertising Experiment’. Even the PI executive producer states: ‘Our strategy for moving forward is to experiment a lot and fail fast—that’s how we’ve been operating the Web site for years, and

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it’s been a very effective formula for growth’ (Nicolosi, Seattle PI Website 2009). The idea that the PI has lost part of its intrinsic appeal demands attention. Their shift to a tertiary phase of digital publishing has dealt significant blows to their legacy and credibility.

It clearly has not been an easy journey for the PI, as is often the case with early adopters of technology. It has seen its ‘online readership fall to 1.4 million unique users in March from 1.84 million in February and 1.80 million in January. It also ranked 32nd in March on the list of top US newspaper websites, down from 29th in February and 21st in January’ (AFP 2009). It now exists as a website with ‘mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting’ (Yardley et al. NY Times 2009). Whether it fails or succeeds will be a function of two factors: its ability to maintain an advertising revenue stream, and its re-investment of this revenue to fund quality journalism.

As original PI reporting declines, several competitive online projects have emerged. An example is The Seattle Post Globe. This is a not-for-profit news site started by about 30 journalists, most of whom are former PI staff. This again demonstrates how the low cost of entry into web based publishing has enabled these journalists to become their own publishers without the huge capital cost associated with traditional newspapers. The Post Globe is best described as an attempt to fill in the Seattle journalist void. Their goal is for professional journalists to continue serving the community as watchdogs which investigate and inform the public on key issues such as city politics (Seattle Post Globe Website 2009). However, even though setting up an online publishing product requires less capital than its print equivalent, its chances of success are still based on a sound business plan which must include an identified revenue stream.

If a news distribution company reduces its news staff from 165 to around 20 people the quality of the journalistic product cannot possibly be maintained. Fewer resources translates to less research, less checking of facts, less investigative journalism and an overall decline in quality of news reporting and editorial comment.

To revisit McLuhan, it is clear that the web as a news distribution medium is a far better solution than print, which is now in its final death throws. But the medium only provides a channel for distributing the message. It is also clear that the demise of respected traditional newspapers will bring about a lowering of journalistic standards. A powerful new medium might well be in place, but the message that it carries will begin to lack credibility, as the art of journalism loses its authority.

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Reference list

Adcentre (2009). ‘SMH Employment Advertising Rates’ Fairfax Ltd, p4. http://www.adcentre.com.au/media/532971/08rec_ratecard_8pp.pdf

Agence France-Presse (2009). ‘Rocky start for fledgling online news ventures’. http://www.google. com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jLDqxlKFH8FKB2LJEpVueB4cUCYg

Bercovici (2009). Conde Nast Portfolio. ‘Web-Only ‘P-I’: Worthy Experiment. Won’t Work’. http:// www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2009/03/17/web-only-p-i-worthy-experiment- wont-work?TID=email

Fairfax Ltd. Corporate Affairs (2000). http://www.fxj.com.au/announcements/mar00/chullora. html

Karp (2009). Publishing 2.0. ‘The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intellegencer’s Print Advertising Experiment’. http://publishing2.com/2009/03/16/ the-great-seattle-advertising-experiment-what-will-happen-to-the-seattle-post-intelligencers- print-advertising-dollars/

McLuhan, M (1964). ‘Understanding media : the extensions of man’. Cambridge Press.

MyCareer Website. Fairfax Ltd. (2009). http://mycareer.com.au/employer/home.aspx

Nicolosi (2009). The Seattle PI. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/403794_newseattlepi.com16. html

PANPA (2009). http://panpa.realviewtechnologies.com/default.aspx?xml=panpa.xml.

Real View Technologies (2008). www.realview.com.au

Yardley & Perez-Pena (2009). The New York Times. ‘Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web’. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/media/17paper.html?em

The National Library of Australia. (2008) ‘Australian Newspaper Plan: Select chronology of significant Australian press events from 1951 to 2005. www.mla.gov.au/anplan/heritage/1951-2005.html

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