L'etat c'est moi... et vous...

The State's an ephemeral thing
Yet 'praise unto thee' we all sing,
Did you once stop to think
This thing's not so unique
What a volatile sich ist das Ding.

It's hard to believe that Dewey wrote this in 1927, because (emphasis on the role of the telegraph aside), it feels like it could have been written today. It is very challenging to come up with a specific part of the reading to talk about because there were so many different points that came out as compelling. The transformation of religion from a public to private sphere; where modern states get to involve themselves in private transactions; loyalties to family versus state; and above all that most difficult of questions... what IS a state?

While I would love to spend time exploring so much of what Dewey had to say about the evolution of democracy and the dangers of holding modern governmental forms as sacrosanct and the logical evolution of human society (and did in previous drafts of this post...), the crux of where Dewey is relevant to our studies is fairly clear, as he spends a great deal of time talking about the role of communication technology in democratic discourse and evolution. On page 144, it says "The transition from family and dynastic government supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular government was the outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs by which men had been bound together." While he does allow that technology has been key for the advancement of democracy, he also deplores the availability of distractions and misinformation that allow people to abdicate from their own participation in democracy so easily.

Lanier would doubtless agree when Dewey says (p. 162), "Of course, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by mankind, but it does not equal, probably, the increase in the amount of errors and half-truths which have got into circulation. In social and human matters, especially, the development of a critical sense and methods of discriminating judgment has not kept pace with the growth of careless reports and of motives for positive misrepresentation." This has been a problem for humanity for the last hundred years, at least. The pace of technology has far outstripped our ability to cope with it and develop a capacity to distinguish between what is useful and what is not. Still, this brings us back to last week's reading and explorations of how we might start sorting through our huge collections of data and making some sense of it. Are we still just gathering information? Have we done ourselves a massive disservice by devoting so many resources to increasing our ability to gather information without increasing our ability to analyze and interpret it effectively?

Ultimately, the most resonant part of the Dewey, that brought me back to Pachauri's lecture and Jeffrey Sachs', was this: "Humanity is not, as was once thought, the end for which all things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is the center of interest and the measure of importance." (p. 176) While it is important to try to step out of the relentless narcissism that seems to afflict our species, it is precisely that narcissism that might get us out of the mess we've created. This course so far has brought forth many dystopian and utopian looks at the future, and definitely highlighted several challenges we have to face, but I am not as of yet convinced that we're doomed. Granted, it's only February, so we'll see where the reading takes us from here.

Vroom Vroom! Information Superhighways!

The problem with data creation

Is it lacks any standardization

My X and my Y

Are different to that guy

And prevents sharing interpretation

All three readings this week made me incredibly happy... for entirely different reasons.

I like economic theories. I do. Comes presumably from having a mother that is an economist. While Benkler is not solely focused on economic concerns, his theories are strongly driven by economic factors. While I read it from the viewpoint of someone who is a firm believer in capitalism, I do definitely see the merit of the open source movement and the value of incorporating non-market production into market economies.

I had several concerns with some of Benkler's speculations, most notably on page 13, where he spoke about the changes in media distribution. While I do think that this is possibly the best description of Internet information distribution I have ever read, he fails to acknowledge that access and distribution are not at all remotely neutral yet between the solitary information provider and the megacorporation. Despite the ability of solitary entities to gain some followers, their presence in the grand scheme of the information being shared is ephemeral because of their lack of capital backing. Are we in a period of transition? Undoubtedly. But media distribution conglomerates are not losing relevance-- they're merging with each other and forming larger corporations. As popular as Winston the Cat is, he will never have the same influence of a single one of hulu.com's advertisers because he lacks the capital backing. It's okay, I'll wait for you to finish the video before I continue. He's a weird looking cat, isn't he?

Where Benkler's ideas really DO start to be thought-provoking though, are in parts like page 14, where he says "More ambitiously, we begin to see in agricultural research a combined effort of public, nonprofit and open-source-like efforts being developed and applied to problems of agricultural innovation. The ultimate purpose is to develop a set of basic capabilities that would allow collaboration among farmers and scientists, in both poor countries and around the globe, to develop better, more nutritious crops to improve food security throughout the poorer regions of the world.” Without analyzing at length, because it merits an extensive post (or paper) of its own, perhaps it is more productive to uncouple the analysis of communication collaborations for educational/research purposes and ones for entertainment purposes.

When just looking at educational/research purposes, the power of a network of that size becomes awe-inspiring, but also begins to create some of the problems outlined in "The Fourth Paradigm". What do you do with so much data and so many collaborators without standardizing your information delivery? How do you handle peer review? How can you assure quality and authenticity of data?

When I was coming up with the discussion questions for this week's class, I kept coming back to a few ideas, mostly ones of information sorting and information retrieval. In my line of work, I do have a lot of concerns with both of these things-- I work with digital video. Issues of archival metadata, file compatibility and data integrity are huge. Even as we continue to create terabyte after terabyte of information, we do so without adequate answers to these questions. I'd gotten so used to looking at it through such a narrow lens, I hadn't even considered the similar (and far more pressing) problems facing scientific fields or the catastrophic consequences that not answering these questions would have for a large sector of the economy and our long-term collective knowledge.

One last thought... Gray says, "And note, parenthetically, that the Internet is really turning into an object-oriented system where people fetch objects." It was a side note in a much greater question, but it really resonated. I have been trying to think of all the things I use the internet for-- academic research, social interaction, shopping, casual research, playing stupid games... he's not wrong. These are all objects. I'm striving to think of what else it could be used for and when framed in such general terms, it is difficult to imagine.

Theories of Communcation, post 1

This blog will take a slightly different direction now as we move into the spring semester's class: Theories of Communication. Similar ideas, a slightly more modern bent. In the first week's collection of readings, we have looked at an article on the quest for the perfect stove (Burger Bilkhard's "Hearth Surgery"), Arjun Appadurai's fascinating look at the creation of minority and majority identities and how that is playing out in new ways on a global stage, "The Fear of Small Numbers", and received a brief introduction to the problems of world poverty, unsustainable development practices and the impending doom of humanity in "The Bottom Billion" and two lectures by R.K. Pachauri and Jeffrey Sachs. That last description wasn't meant to sound flippant so much as to express the breadth and complications of challenges facing global society in 2010. It is very easy to get caught up in the minutiae of one's own life and hear phrases like "globalization", "climate change", "Kyoto protocols", etc. and have them bounce off your ears. You recycle, you attend a liberal institution, you oppose the war in Iraq, you donated to the Red Cross in Haiti, you use public transportation, you consider yourself moderately well-informed. Then you read things like this and realize that you know absolutely nothing.

As a way of organizing our thoughts, we have been asked in this blog to... "Identify one concept per reading that you find especially useful for helping to understand trends you see at work around you or in a wider global context. Explain the idea in your own words and briefly reflect on the insights the concept provides or the dilemmas it helps to explain and/or resolve," and "list ideas you find personally useful here, whether as tools for understanding your own experiences or for analyzing contemporary issues that you find particularly interesting." Alright then.

Reading "Hearth Surgery" opened up my eyes to an aspect of climate change and global emissions that I had never even considered before. When the article began, it broke down the carbon emissions generated by Third World cooking fires as being commensurate in carbon dioxide emission to a car, as well as producing substantially more black carbon. When I read the sentence, "Given that cooking fires each release one or two thousand grams of soot in a year, and that three billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet”, I think my jaw dropped, both from the sheer lack of information available on this topic in the mainstream and the lack of funding this work seems to be getting. So often climate change is framed as a problem solely the product of industry in developed nations, a byproduct of economic privilege that the entire world must now sacrifice to correct even though most have not reaped the economic benefits it provides. While it is undeniably true that the onus of cleaning up our environmental irresponsibility should fall on wealthy nations, why aren't suburban Americans loathe to give up their SUVs being informed that there are research directions that we can take that don't (yet) involve them sacrificing any part of their lifestyles to do good things for their environment and their fellow man? A stove! It's a stove. It seems like it would be anathema to environmental workers to cater to the self-interest of the privileged to advance their goals, but perhaps if it was framed more like this, initially, they could get more funding for what they want to do. Reading that article first helped to frame the breadth of subjects we are going to be looking at as well as the unexpected directions we will be taking.

The central message I got from "The Bottom Billion" was "Narrow the target and broaden the instruments". So many of the problems we are facing in the world today seem insurmountable, in part because there are so many goals that seem to be in conflict with each other. However, if we begin to focus on specific issues and expand our arsenal of tools to address them, I think we will achieve successes beyond our wildest dreams.

"Fear of Small Numbers"... So much of my limited graduate work so far at TC has overlapped with work that my partner did in her undergraduate career. I studied film and literature and a bunch of dead European white guys who wore funny outfits... she studied queer theory, modern social movements, political organizing and mobilization. So starting reading like this means a lot of me raising my head from the screen and saying, "Hey, Amy, I have a question for you..." It's good to have someone like that next to you when you're trying to figure this out. That being said, I think that one of the more interesting ideas posited in the article is found on page 43-- "Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people’, minorities are major sites for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. Minorities, in a word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project. And it is this betrayal- actually rooted in the failure of the nation-state to preserve its promise to be the guarantor of national sovereignty- that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or eliminate minorities. And this also explains why state military forces are often involved in intrastate ethnocide.”

Here's where my clearly defined separate paragraphs on each reading/piece we studied will blur, because this feeds directly into things said by both Sachs and Pachauri about the perpetual political destabilization and violence of impoverished regions.

It is very difficult to step out of my own frame as a liberal New Yorker to understand this at a visceral level. Each instance of minority violence, particularly intrastate, that immediately comes to mind, whether in Serbia, Rwanda or of course Nazi Germany, has its own rationalization, but when framed like this, particularly with the overshadowing issues of resource scarcity, anxiety and need for an 'other' to blame your lot on, the similarities all become chillingly clear. It seems that the more that wealthy nations and liberal idealists project a notion of global citizenship and our responsibility as citizens of the planet, the more violent and visceral the need is to cling to smaller, more easily locatable labels-- labels of nation, religion, ethnicity, tribe. So what happens to the state when they can no longer adequately define their 'people' is that they define their minorities and persecute them, thereby defining themselves as separate in the process. With so much of human history being defined as a struggle between 'us' and 'them', I think it is fallacious to pin so much of this hostility on the failures of the national project. It's just easier to organize persecutions of the 'other' when you have a military, a state authority and a sense of legitimacy on your side.

I highly doubt that we will see the collapse of the nation as an organizational identity in our lifetime. Identifying one's self as a global citizen is too big and as a religion, ethnicity or tribal affiliation too small for economic function and viability in a global marketplace. So will we see things moving more towards the mega-state (European Union, etc.), with several smaller countries with less in common in terms of smaller identity groups, banding together for economic competitiveness against countries that have a more... "coherent" sense of self (America, China, India, for the most part)?

Cellular organizations as exemplified both in the direction of terrorist organizations and internet sensibilities do represent a very potent new evolution in structuring conflicts (and other interactions) with the nation-state, but do they have the economic viability to compete in a global market in any way that isn't solely destructive or based on individual transactions? Will Al-Qaeda ever behave as a nation? Can it engage in treaties with countries? Can it trade in scale with nations? Will it ever want to? How will the definitions of legitimate global players change based on these evolutions?

On page 28, Appadurai says, "This double character of global capitalism in the era of the Internet is what allows us to understand better the cellular nature of the new terrorist networks. Connected yet not vertically managed, coordinated yet remarkably independent, capable of replication without central messaging structures, hazy in their central organizational features yet crystal clear in their cellular strategies and effects, these organizations clearly rely on the crucial tools of money transfer, hidden organization, offshore havens, and nonofficial means of training and mobilization, which also characterize the workings of many levels of the capitalist world. Indeed the grayer areas of the world of banking and finance are clearly complicit with the workings of the networks of international terror.” Is this to say that Al-Qaeda should be more properly thought of as a mega-corporation? And if so, has global capitalism (see recent Supreme Court decision re: campaign financing and the legal status of the corporation) reached a point where we are moving more towards corporations over countries? If so, we reach additional troubling considerations with the ideas of minority and majority, as well as self-definitions of identity. Also, we begin to wonder who exactly we should be negotiating with when needing to develop global consensus on global issues.

That was a lot for a first reading. I look forward to the class discussion tomorrow to address some of these ideas and concerns.

Also, probably next week, depending on the size of the reading, I will return to limerick prefaces.

Fall Paper

Acacia Graddy-Gamel

MSTU4016

Fall 2009 Final Paper

In modern pedagogical practice, the concept of memorization has become somewhat maligned. Technological advances permit students to have almost instantaneous access to facts and thus devalue the virtue of committing them to memory. Advances in technology have made it possible for people to divert their mental resources to critical analysis and making connections instead of pure retention. Pedagogical theories have not quite caught up to these advances in technology and educators must still strike an effective balance between ensuring a core base of knowledge and avoiding coverage of easily accessible data. At the beginning of the semester, I had not given much thought to how pedagogical practices had evolved over time, or the sheer energy and focus on memorization in past educational practice. More than that, I had never considered how a focus on memorization could mitigate a capacity for critical analysis. As the semester went on and we moved through different media, the connection became clear.

As early as mid September, we were reading Havelock and Plato and learning how Plato viewed the role of memorization in education. With memorization being the sole way to pass on a cultural legacy, an oral tradition precluded proper analysis. As Havelock stated about Plato in our reading, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.”

This was a revolutionary concept that we now (typically) take for granted. In our later readings, Havelock presents Plato’s view that the real purpose of education is to equip someone to lead an examined life. To my mind, there has really never been any other relevant purpose to education than to teach problem solving skills and critical reasoning. As progressive educational institutions have steadily moved away from memorization in the classroom, Plato would likely be pleased with the result.

Certain technological advances, particularly print, made it possible to start uncoupling the acts of accessing information and memorization. People began to use their capacities to memorize to instead visualize scenes from the books they were reading and divert more mental capacity onto separating themselves from their texts. A byproduct of this was that they also started to separate from each other. Reading is a deeply solitary act, as many of the readings in this class have discussed, and a million people reading the same text will have a million interpretations of it.

The act of mass-producing media removed control of the content from the individual and on to the institution, whether a private publisher or a church. So while people might have the mental freedom to analyze a text, they still only received the perspective intended by a given institution. A classic example of this can be found in the formations of the biblical canon. There is still disparity between the Protestant Old Testament (39 books) and the Catholic Old Testament (46 books). That is not just a great deal of discrepancy between the two perspectives, but representative of the level of control that media producers and distributors have over material before it gets to the consumer. The Bible is also an excellent example of this movement from memorization to critical analysis because of the gate-keeping function the Catholic Church provided. People were discouraged from reading it on their own; it was material that was intended to be accessed through a priest. The idea of critical interpretation by laypeople was also anathema to the Church and part of what spurred the Reformation. So in this case, access and capacity to analyze were inextricably interlinked and ability to memorize was very much a secondary concern, further reinforcing the notion that physical possession of a text precluded the need to commit it to memory.

In order to access specific pieces of information, though, readers needed to have a deep fluency in a particular text. This is a huge difference from the position that consumers of media find themselves in now, when the command of a few key words online will instantly summon a passage. Unfortunately, they also summon a hundred other unrelated things, which leads to the development of a new skill set that these medieval readers would not have to use nearly as heavily: discriminating amongst a surfeit of seemingly related information to locate precisely the information one is looking for. As Birkerts says in the Gutenberg Elegies, “In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality. The possibility of maximum focus is undercut by the awareness of the unread texts that await. The result is that we know countless more “bits” of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional. We depend far less on memory; that faculty has all but atrophied from lack of use.” (p. 72)

So the question becomes: what place do these new skills have in an educational environment? Is it the responsibility of educators, as Plato would like, to teach these critical thinking skills over memorization? Is it their responsibility to balance the crucial older skills of literacy and mathematical reasoning with newer skills of analysis, multiplatform research and media literacy? I would say so. Beginning this course, I was already inclined to believe that it was the province of education to teach critical thinking, and after completing this course, I am even more convinced that it is absolutely necessary to cultivate these skills from the earliest possible age, not just to enable people to navigate the rapidly changing technological landscape, but also to help them regain a sense of meaning and footing in a world that is suffering what Birkerts called “a loss of depth” (p. 73).

While it would seem easy to paint a rosy picture of technological access sacrificing our capacity for memorization and granting us this hitherto uncultivated capacity to analyze and draw connections, it is an unfortunate byproduct of our technological that our critical abilities are devolving along with our memories. People are overwhelmed by content and do not take the time to evaluate their sources. When we read Lanier at the beginning of the semester, he expressed a concern about the vast repository of unverified information available on the Internet and the common mistake people make of not checking sources or doing any form of due diligence when gathering information online. It is a very real concern and educators have an additionally difficult task of teaching a new form of research and vetting to a generation used to having information at their fingertips but shockingly unused to questioning its validity.

In writing these blogs and doing this reading, I have come back to this same idea of shunting the task of information retention onto external sources and freeing up one’s mental resources to make connections between those sources. That somehow, if we can train ourselves to effectively access and utilize these external repositories, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of insight that we could not reach before. The more that I’ve come to think about it though, the more I worry that that will not happen until we also renew a set of skills that we have been neglecting in this process of aggregating this information: the skills of discernment, depth of study and singular focus. I don’t see that one necessarily has to preclude another. With some training and prioritizing, I believe it will be possible for people to apply the mental discipline necessary to committing an epic poem to memory to formulating thoughtful connections between pieces of information with focus and engagement, even if they have not committed those pieces of information to memory themselves. I have not been turned into a pessimist by this realization, but rather acknowledged that the problem is far more complex than I initially thought.

One of the things I found most remarkable about this reading was the high esteem with which McLuhan views television. In modern critical study of film and television, film is considered the far more involved medium than television—requiring an active participation on the part of the thoughtful viewer—who considers plot, structure, character behavior, lighting, artistic design, editorial work, camera work, auditory decisions and exploration of themes. While the content is important, the medium is equally important, and does serve (hot medium?) all of the information necessary to the viewer, but leaves a great deal for the viewer to resolve on their own in terms of connecting the information presented to other films and mediums that they are familiar with and being certain that they are accessing all of the data being delivered. Many casual viewers of film are not conscious of all of the data they are receiving (particularly auditory data) and how it affects their interaction with the media.

That being said, free television has quickly become the unwanted stepchild of modern art forms (and in some ways technology). Many shows appeal to the lowest common denominator, require a minimum of involvement or audience participation and demonstrate an acute lack of thoughtfulness and information perceived. The idea that this form involves more participation than film is… bewildering to me. Perhaps it was a response to the relative newness of the form when he wrote this.

Overall though, some comments to touch to another point of McLuhan’s, albeit from a slightly tangential perspective. McLuhan says “The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. lt is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV's mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn't want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”(p. 443).

The problem with this demonstrated in modern society comes in the popularity of hero tales, particularly in television and film. As a personal note, I’m a huge fan of hero tales, and my girlfriend despises them (for the reasons I’m about to outline). I studied film and literature in college; she studied social movements. People watch films and television about epic protagonists who engage in sweeping dramatic actions and get caught up in the power of the story. They feel, through their identification, that they are participating in the story, and that they are actually effecting societal change by participating in a viewing activity. However, they are not actually changing anything. A sense of personal epic narrative has actually stunted people’s capacity to engage in real change that involves group movements and slow progress. Are people really participating in television? Does it give viewers something to do? Do they fill in information or do they just substitute their own experience of the real world with the experience of characters and thus become more inoculated to a passive relationship with the real world because they cannot have the sweeping narrative of fiction?

Sales are not a bad thing

The wonders of selling to me

Through the ads on prime time TV

Lose their appeal

And all of their zeal

When you see I get hulu for free

While the Beninger reading brought up a lot of fascinating ideas in terms of social control and technology, one thing I’d like to focus on is the concept of marketing, which has changed drastically as communications technology has advanced. The connection between marketing tools and popular entertainment has become so inextricable as to be unexamined by the consumer. If you watch free television or listen to free radio, the cost to you as a consumer is sitting through the advertisements of the show sponsors, who assess demographic data of the program and try to determine what sales method would deliver their product most effectively to you. As Beninger says, on page 20, “Although advertisers were initially wary of broadcasting because audiences could not be easily identified, by 1930 sponsors were spending $60 million annually on radio in the United States alone”. That problem of audience identification and isolating effectiveness is one that he goes on to elaborate later in the text—exploring mediums from questionnaires to house-to-house interviews and the famed Nielsen ratings system.

While most advertising is appealing in a general sense, it is only with the advent of the Internet that we really get targeted ad content. Google has made a fortune on the business model that by analyzing the things that you, as the individual, are interested in (and then selling that information to marketers), they can sell to you and only you. By having a wide variety of ads available to target people who use certain language in their searches, marketers can appeal specifically to people with a much higher rate of success. It is a ruthlessly efficient advertising system, and what’s more, consumers are in some ways grateful for it, because they are receiving product awareness of things much more likely to appeal to them and likely receiving far less marketing inundation that does not.

If you step away from the clichéd view that all marketing is bad and designed to sell you things you don’t want or need—that marketing creates a sense of false need in the consumer who can get along perfectly fine without a product—you begin to see the true genius and benefit of these targeted marketing models—both to buyers and to sellers. While this data accumulation is without doubt an almost insidious form of social control, it is also a way of respecting and acknowledging everyone’s different interests and needs and permitting more demographic subgroups to flourish. No longer are all women ages 18-25 viewed equally and sold to equally. I prefer to look at it as a positive thing, despite the sinister overtones. I live in a capitalist society. I use products. I like to know about new products that may appeal to me. I know that what appeals to me will likely not appeal to most people. Therefore, I appreciate being marketed to directly and unobtrusively, using the Google and Facebook models. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between media technology and advertising over the next fifty years, particularly as pay models (iTunes, etc.) start to assert their presence. Make no mistake, they’re still collecting demographic data about you and selling it, you’re just not seeing the results as directly.

No need to send a horse. Stop. I've just revolutionized communication. Stop.

Centralizing communications

The telegraph transformed many nations

I can send such clear orders

To my colonial borders

And boost epic real-time wealth creation

Carey writes about the telegraph changing the news and speaks to how the unlimited distance of the wire service created a need for “objective news”. The word limits of the telegraph required only the barest facts to be conveyed, leaving the majority of the article to be fleshed out in the newsroom by people who were not present for the event. This form of editorial flexibility leads to a curious sense of “objective” journalism. If readers labor under the view that they are getting the absolute facts because the root content is the same from paper to paper, it forces news outlets to bury their biases even deeper.

It made me think of current movements in the blogosphere where people cite news articles or report on events directly and openly acknowledge their biases. Now that we live in a time where people have such free access to generating their own content and opinions about shared ‘news’, readers are more active critical thinkers and conscientious writers have found it expedient to divulge as much of their own bias as possible up front. While on one hand, this is a boon for readers, there is still a substantial schism between this amateur reporting and the professionally vetted news institutions. However, the sheer volume of contributors makes it extremely difficult to isolate the information that one would care about and verify that the source of the material is legitimate. In viewing this commentary through this lens, it becomes almost laughable to think that objective news reporting is even possible, especially through a fifty word telegraph.