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Bruno Latour at ZKM

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A couple of months ago Glen Lowry asked me to consider presenting a lecture about NowPublic for a course at Emily Carr University in Vancouver based on sociologist Bruno Latour’s concept of DING. The particular concept of DING (or “thing”) is drawn from an exhibition organized by Latour and Peter Weibel at ZKM (the centre for art and media technologies) in Karlsruhe. The exhibition in question is titled, aptly enough, Making Things Public. In the accompanying introduction DING is defined as the earliest word for parliament, considered to have originally held the meaning simultaneously of thing and assembly (or gathering space).

This is the story of how I have begun to think about positioning these two territories (Latour’s concept of DING and NowPublic) in respect to each other in preparation for the presentation. I’m not planning on giving everything away here, and even if I could it may be misleading since the comments I receive below may change the specifics of the talk I will be giving. This means that what follows is (as they say around here) a bit “meta”: it is an outline of the topic. What I will try to do is set the ground for students who may be less aware of the current debate about user-generated content as it relates to news.

For clarity I should probably admit that I am neither a journalist (though I seem to have found myself working amidst writers and journalists) nor am I, strictly speaking, an academic (though I teach occasionally and have been referred to recently as an “egghead”). I am first and foremost a designer, and that is how I earn my living. I spend my days concerned with usability, deadlines, production requirements, specifications, and of course, many compromises. In any case, in the boardrooms of a start-up venture, there is little room for the open discussion of theory so I usually give in to my “egghead” tendencies in secret. When I read a theoretical text (which is often) my lens is a fairly pragmatic one; I use what I read to generate ideas, break wrote thinking patterns and to create working models that are able to handle complex informational structures and communication challenges.

The approach:
What I have decided to do is to take some concepts that are common to a participatory news network (NowPublic, specifically) and to the “Making Things Public” introduction  and pass them through what amounts to a Latour shaped sieve. Hopefully that will allow some of the more relevant concepts to become visible so that they can produce some lines of flight to explore.

By making that process of discovery available here on NowPublic I am also interested in exploring the inverse: re-purposing the tools we’ve developed to capture news events to initiate an academic discussion in a manner that displays the kind of agency and reflexivity embodied in the concept of DING – providing an assembly space and voice for things.

The good news is that Latour’s concepts seem to accommodate such messiness (which is further useful because whatever connections I’m able to present will be based by necessity on the first reading of a complex set of ideas, so they will be the product a certain amount of skimming and poetic license).

The topics:
Of the many terms that fall through my Latour-shaped filter I have selected five from which to begin exploring: Representation, Social Relations, Assembly, Mediation and Uncertainty. I will add to that a sixth term proper to NowPublic (one I use to explain internally some of the attributes of our network): the “news object” (things such as a photograph, video or a twitter “tweet” about a news event).

One of the things that Latour’s approach allows (in fact, requires) us to do is to flatten out (and essentially erase) the difference in scale of the topics we cover. I will try to explore whether some of the ideas that hold true at the scale of a “news object” in the ecosystem of a developing news story also hold true for NowPublic itself in a larger ecosystem, that of traditional media, and the debate that is ongoing about the relationship between user-generated content and traditional journalism.

Shifting ground:
Mainstream media, and the Press as we know it, is undergoing a quick and intense shift, which isn’t news to many of you, but may be to some. As Clay Shirky has pointed out, it’s not a small change:

NowPublic is by many accounts the world’s largest participatory news network, and because of that it can be seen to act, at least in a peripheral way, as a critique of the traditional understanding of Journalism. We are therefore pulled not only into discussions surrounding “social media” and “web 2.0″ but also, and perhaps most controversially, “citizen journalism”. I have to say that “citizen journalism” is a misleading label for what happens on NowPublic. It has been suggested that it would be like labelling someone a  “citizen dentist” (a saying we can attribute to either Michael Tippet or Leonard Brody – who, along with Michael E. Meyers are the founders of NowPublic). What that also recognizes is the difference between “as it’s seen, as it’s spoken” news, the packaging of that news and the analysis that follows.

As the institution of journalism adjusts to shifting ground both user-generated content and the work of professional journalists will each have a role to play, though there is substantial contested ground as to what those roles might be. In any case “Citizen Journalism” has become the recognized label in the debate so we’ll stick with that at times, as it’s easier. For a good introduction to some of the pressure that user-generated news puts on the Press see Jay Rosen’s piece: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press. In that post Mr. Rosen outlines that:

And also:

So the debate around Citizen Journalism is not only the matter of the technologies of news gathering but also the fundamental question about what is and is not news, and who decides what is in the realm of “legitimate debate”.  This leaves us to navigate between, in Latour’s terms, matters of fact (things proposed as singularly True) and matters of concern (things important enough for legitimate debate).

Back to Latour, Back to Things:
The shift described above, as Mr. Rosen points out, is a result of the increased ease with which anyone can publish the accounts of news events (you don’t need to buy airtime or own a printing press). The obvious result has been a greater number of subjects (authors, producers, readers) and objects (photos, videos etc…) at play in the dissemination of those accounts. Sites based on user-generated content, like NowPublic, potentially provide a stage upon which we can trace the work done by the news objects produced in relation to a given event (as well as the subjects involved in the process). We can examine how news objects are produced and by whom, how they are subsequently viewed, shared and linked to other objects and how the resulting actions result in an interconnected process of developing trust and value. We can explore how the uncertainty around faithful representation of news events – brought about by the volume of contradictory news objects and points of view – can actually bring subjects and objects together again, as Latour would say, “to reconstitute the social bond”.

AHIS 333: DING
In addition to this story I have set up a channel on NowPublic under the #DING tag. I have added more resource information there, including links to some good reading as well as the NowPublic Scan (real time twitter posts) tuned to some of the concepts above. You can contribute to the ideas here by commenting on this story or to the channel by posting to twitter with posts that include the words bruno latour or AHIS333.

The assignment:
Glen and Simon have asked me to put together a bit of an assignment to go along with this talk. In addition to reading the piece by Jay Rosen noted above I thought it might be interesting to have you share briefly (via comments on this story) what information you consider “newsworthy” and what sources you are most likely to trust. You may want to discuss whether the most reliable news is brought to you by your friends and family, by a favorite blog, a newspaper, or a network such as Fox News or PBS. In other words consider the “brand” of truth you are most likely to subscribe to and the apparatus through which you extend yourself into the news ecology. Consider how these sources attempt to present a faithful representation of news events, and how they assemble the available “news objects”.

There is of course a third alternative, one that proves more useful for designers, and proves more useful in identifying, evaluating and executing a communication agenda: style based on the idea of technique. In this case style relates to a method for solving problems when faced with alternative possibilities during the design of an object. A “craftsman” home is recognizable as such because during the design process fundamental decisions on the form of elements such as joints, columns, frames and trim were made in accordance to a consistent set of functional and aesthetic principles, or if you will: a set of techniques. When this set of techniques is dictated by the desired outcome “I want a craftsman home” these techniques amount to a set of rigid, wrote, principles and approach idea number two above. When, on the other, hand we apply the notion of technique to a project in which the end form is not pre-determined but instead has a fluid outcome – like the responsiveness required to manage a brand identity – technique becomes a manner of expression where the possibilities of the medium being used can be explored. In that case “style” is a manner of expression, a way of solving design and communication requirements based on intention and original investigation through the appropriate use of the techniques of a given medium.

This week’s reading, an excerpt from Schmitt and Simonson’s Marketing Aesthetics provides a systematic approach to brand identity management based on tracing the relationship between corporate expression and customer impression.  The authors’ proposed definition of “Marketing Aesthetics” is “the marketing of sensory experience in a corporate or brand output that contributes to the organisation or brand identity”.  Their evaluation criteria for the effectiveness of communication is grounded in the tradition of a psychological method.  What is central to this method is an understanding of the integration process that takes when individuals are confronted with isolated impressions of a given entity which are then assembled into a cohesive impression of the entity as a whole.  While this idea originates from the study of the perception of individual expression it is here attributed to organisations and brands. The framework is based on the manipulation of two aesthetic concepts which we will discuss in the next class: styles and themes.

Style, for the authors refers to a manner of expression of the components of a brand’s identity. The expression of a particular style is the result of an integration of stylistic elements, like colour, shape or smell for example, into a consistent pattern of use in the context of a given brand.  Each identity element, whether signage, packaging, web site or physical environment is also evaluated by the consistency of its adherence to themes, which tell the story of a brand, or say something about its positioning or express any other message.  This evaluation requires an understanding of the techniques and metaphorical potential of each medium: the form of product design rather than its function; the peripheral messages of communication design rather than the primary ones, and; the symbolic aspects of spatial design rather than the structural. This idea leads us away from the analysis of the objects themselves and towards their metaphorical quality.  The system requires faith that design somehow invests the objects with a secondary or deeper meaning, and that these meanings can be consistently assembled into clear pieces of communication.

Note on the Project Due Date: Since it turns out that there will be a class during the May long weekend the Project 1 deadline will be extended by one week. The new due date is May 23rd, 2009.  Conceptual Roughs will be due on May 16th.

Coordinating this communication is somewhat natural and even to some degree sub-conscious if you are an individual (remember corporation stems from corpus, the Latin for body)… the task gets more demanding when you are managing multiple bodies… or multiple selves I guess. The goal of any brand model is to assist in generating (or evaluating) uniformity across multiple elements, channels and brands within an organisation. Brand models are plentiful, and no single model can capture the complexity of the human relationships both within and outside of an organisation. What they tend to have in common is an understanding that it is not just the literal messages that matter but the gut feeling that goes along with them.

All you have to do is peruse the business section at your nearest book store to realise that the world needs another brand model like a fish needs a bicycle (thanks Bono)… still i thought it would be good to dig up this simple model by Thomas Gad. It’s pretty clean, and  makes it a good starting point for an introduction to the brand evaluation process. In his book 4D Branding, Gad proposes the central tenet of the “Brand Mind Space”.  What this term alludes to is the mental construct that those who experience the brand make when confronted by the totality of its identity elements.  This mind space, intrinsically individual and ideal, is where all channels of a brand’s identity find common ground.  It is the territory which, ultimately, all brands seek to claim.   I was disappointed to find that his book is currently unavailable from my usual sources – so I’ve added a description below of the 4D concept and a couple of diagrams I used in class to illustrate the idea, but first a primer:

A brand’s essence, this mental construct, or “mind space” is reinforced through multiple channels.  There are innumerable texts providing brand strategy models to describe the way this “mind space” is constituted.  Using the current example (Gad’s Four-Dimensions) we can expand the thought in the following way:  a given product or service impresses upon us a reaction based on the way it promises to fulfill four basic types of needs: functional, social, mental and spiritual.

A car, for example, is an extension of its functional dimension, the quality of the drive and its reliability.  But it is also has a social dimension, it may be one kind or another of a prestige automobile, or a rugged off-road vehicle, both of which suggest their own affiliation to a specific group of owners.  It may be particularly fuel efficient or electric, or may have an honest service policy, things that speak about a spiritual dimension.  Finally it may be particularly safe, or come with roadside assistance, giving peace of mind and addressing a mental dimension. Here is a diagram that expresses this idea, comparing a Hybrid vehicle (tending towards the spiritual) and an SUV (tending towards the functional)

When combined these four dimensions create an identity for the product or service that distinguish it from other products, a kind of DNA, as Gad would put it.  Purveyors of branded culture feed our senses, probing us into awareness of the supposed virtues of products, using every communication channel available.

Successful brands create a sense of community by assigning cultural value to themselves and these easily digestible values become a ready-made extension and a public declaration of our own values and affiliations (through our consumption patterns), until the brand reaches the stage of being, very literally, a mark of personal identity.  This notion of identity, both corporate and individual, must adapt to the rapid pace of technological and social change.  Identity is a fluid and constantly evolving concept that needs, in this context, to be responsive to external and internal modification. What can be termed “social media” is also a driver of the new responsiveness required by brands and corporations as previous broadcasting techniques are overtaken by conversational situations.

Next class we’ll look at what the techniques of each medium are and how they can be used to communicate an agenda that is in line with the core values of an organisation.

1. Gad, Thomas: 4D Branding: Cracking the Code of the Network Economy, Prentice Hall, 2001.