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2009: Volume 2, Numéro 1, pp. 149-165

 

Twittering in the OECD’s “Participative Web”:
Microblogging and New Media Policy

Tamara Shepherd

Concordia University, Canada

Texte intégral: PDF TDM: HTML PDF

Abstract:

The recent popularity of microblogging site Twitter raises regulatory concerns
that outstrip the purview of emerging new media policy, such as the
recommendations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). The OECD’s 2007 report, Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web
2.0, Wikis and Social Networking, frames user-generated content as key to the
development of public discourse. Yet the report tends to ultimately conceive of
user creations in terms of their contributions to the production of market-based
value. Sites like Twitter both challenge and uphold such a reading, which
becomes apparent upon examining the ways that policy adheres to certain popular
myths around the Internet and digital technology. These myths—including this
paper’s main concern, the myth of the “End of Geography”—work in the service of
policy recommendations that reflect neoliberal, capitalist value systems. As
such, new developments in new media regulation need to integrate critical
perspectives on techno-myths in order to take a more nuanced approach to the
structural inequalities that pervade online culture.

Keywords: New Media Policy; Twitter; Social Networking; Microblogging;
User-Generated Content; Celebrity; Citizen Journalism

Résumé:

La récente popularité du site de microblogues, Twitter, soulève des inquiétudes
sur la réglementation qui surpassent la compétence des politiques des nouveaux
médias, telles que les recommandations posées par l’Organisation de Coopération
et de Développement Économique (OCDE). Publié en 2007, le rapport de l’OCDE
intitulé Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social
Networking, encadre le contenu créé par l’utilisateur comme étant la clé au
développement du discours public. Cependant, le rapport tend ultimement à
concevoir les créations des usagés en terme de leurs contributions à la
production des valeurs basées sur le marché. Des sites comme Twitter font défi
et défendent ces interprétations, ce qui devient évident lorsqu’on examine la
façon dont les politiques adhèrent à certains mythes populaires entourant
Internet et la technologie numérique. Ces mythes—incluant l’objet principal de
cet article, le mythe de la fin de la géographie—travaille au service des
recommandations de politiques qui reflètent les systèmes de valeurs néolibéraux
et capitalistes. De ce fait, de nouveaux développements dans le domaine de la
réglementation des nouveaux médias ont besoin d’intégrer des perspectives
critiques à propos des mythes technologiques afin de prendre une approche plus
nuancée aux inégalités structurales qui imprègnent la culture en ligne.

Mots-clés: Politiques de Nouveaux Médias; Twitter; Réseautage Social;
Microblogue; Contenu Créé par l’Utilisateur; Célébrité; Journalisme Citoyens

Introduction

While blog-hosting sites like Blogger and LiveJournal have been popular since
the late 1990s, they have recently become included in the designation of “Web
2.0”—the much-lauded participatory Internet spaces consisting mainly of
user-generated content (UGC) within social networks (O’Reilly, 2005). To
designate content as “user”-generated indicates a differentiation between
non-professional users of Internet technology and professional writers and
Webmasters working for institutional or corporate sources of content.1 Because
users are not professionalized and thus do not typically have access to the
server space and technological infrastructure of institutional or corporate Web
domains, much UGC appears through the infrastructural platforms of hosting sites
that allow casual users to “self-publish” with little to no monetary investment.

The hosting site Twitter has recently become a popular incarnation of blogging
activity; Twitter use is known as “microblogging” (Java, Song, Finin & Tseng,
2007), a kind of hybrid between blogging and social networking, where users post
“tweets” of 140 characters or less that respond to the site’s orienting question
of “what are you doing?” (About Twitter, n.d.). This simplicity is key to
Twitter’s popularity, in addition to the way that the site “accept[s] messages
from SMS, Web, mobile Web, instant message, or from third party API projects, .
. . mak[ing] it easy for folks to stay connected” (Why do so many people seem to
like Twitter?, n.d.). Its integration with mobile technology (Krishnamurthy,
Gill & Arlitt, 2008), coupled with its streamlined format and interface, has
earned the site a substantial six million unique visits per month (Kazeniac,
2009). Users can open an account by providing a full name, screen name and valid
email address, allowing them access to this public means of expression and
community dialogue. Despite Twitter’s remediation of a kind of public
communication, few regulatory policies exist that circumscribe its (or other
hosting sites’) mediations of public discourse. Individual posts (tweets),
folksonomic tagging (trending topics) and communities (following) are given
relatively free reign on Twitter, which encourages users to “contribute their
creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms” (Terms
of Service, n.d.). When contrasted against draconian sites like Facebook,2
Twitter’s terms of service appear refreshingly open—especially in regard to the
site’s rejection of typical corporate-style intellectual property rights
structures in favour of a commons-based approach to copyright.3

Yet Twitter is somewhat anomalous in its approach to intellectual property, and
it may not stay as progressive in the coming years. As of mid-2009, the site
operates at a loss: “While our business model is in a research phase, we spend
more money than we make.” Although, the site adds, “We plan to build Twitter,
Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class
talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business” (How do
you make money from Twitter?, n.d.; What’s next for Twitter?, n.d.). Despite
these claims of maintaining “an inspiring culture and attitude”, generating
revenue through social networking sites typically involves the integration of
premium (paid) services, advertising and/or data-mining. Moreover, sites like
Facebook presumably add the selling of user content to these profit-making
strategies—hence its policies that claim ownership over all content posted to
the site.

In light of such potentially exploitative aspects of UGC hosting sites, current
debates around Internet policy need to address the ethical issue of regulating
corporate jurisdiction over public discourse. Government regulation can be
viewed as an ethical code for public dealings within that jurisdiction. Although
as Silverstone (2004) points out, neoliberal ideologies tend to complicate what
he sees as the best-case scenario of policy as an applied ethics, a set of
“morally informed but rarely interrogated prescriptions for, or proscriptions
of, practice” (2004: 441). In Canada, the recent federal ruling against
Facebook’s violation of privacy law marks an important step in this direction
for Internet regulation, and yet it stands as a somewhat isolated example of
policy enforcement (Bardeesy, 2009). It also shows how regulatory emphasis on
privacy may come at the expense of attending to the insidious ways that Web 2.0
sites profit from user content. As Benkler (2006) argues, the current Internet
regulation schemes that establish “proprietary models of information production
at the expense of burdening nonmarket, nonproprietary production” need to be
reconstituted to protect user creation (2006: 380).

One example of this kind of proposal comes, perhaps surprisingly, from the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international
economic research organization that prepares statistics and reports for its 30
mostly developed-world member countries.4 The 2007 OECD report on the
Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking
was developed to address regulatory concerns raised through a number of public
and industry debates, including the OECD-Canada forum in Ottawa on October 3,
2007. The report calls for national governments to include stipulations that
explicitly deal with UGC in their Internet policies—stipulations that are
missing from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s
(CRTC) Perspectives on Canadian Broadcasting in New Media (2008). One of the
OECD’s main goals is to support global business, but it also maintains the
importance of public discourse in bolstering democratic values through the
“openness and the decentralised nature of the Internet” (OECD, 2007: 93). Yet
despite this appeal to the public value of UGC, the language of the OECD report
belies its fidelity to certain Internet-related myths that uphold the dominance
of transnational corporations amid the developments of Web 2.0. Primary myths
here include: the centrality of technological innovation, the Internet as
“global village”, democracy and equality through diversity of expression, and
participation as liberation. This paper will address these myths in light of the
OECD’s stance on UGC, using Twitter as an illustration of how UGC fares in the
relatively unregulated province of Web 2.0 today.

Methodologically, a focus on the language of the OECD report and on the
discursive significance of Internet myths is not meant to divert attention from
the substantive effects and practices of new media policymaking. Following the
work of Chakravartty and Sarikakis (2006), this paper aims to “be attuned to the
role of language and presentation on legitimizing policy normative frameworks”
(2006: 139). The kind of language used in the OECD report not only permeates
government documents, but it also offers discursive structures that inform
public conceptions of Internet policy. The method involved selecting specific
quotations from the report, determined by the extent to which its language
pointedly illustrates the “digital myths” (Mosco, 2004) under discussion. As
such, this study models itself after Livingstone and Lunt’s (2007) study of the
semantic conflations of “citizen” and “consumer” in the rhetoric of the United
Kingdom’s regulatory body Ofcom, the implications of which also resonate with
the OECD Report’s discursive strategy. The notorious rhetoric of consumption
figures center stage across diverse articulations of Internet policy, reflecting
the centrality of market logic in the ethical and regulatory attitudes toward
Web 2.0, especially around notions of users’ rights and intellectual property.

Technological Innovation

From its introductory paragraphs, the OECD Report (2007) exhibits an underlying
faith in the social, cultural and most of all, economic benefits of
user-generated content. For instance, in its list of the concerns central to the
regulation of UGC, the report privileges the foremost goal of “Enhancing R&D,
innovation and technology” (2007: 72). Despite their status as amateur
production, user contributions have been central to new developments in digital
technology, for example through the open source software movement. For the OECD,
however, user competencies are best translated into “business” rather than free
culture. The report claims that “new forms of digital content innovations are
often based less on traditional scale advantages and large initial capital
investments and more on decentralised creativity, organisational innovation and
new business models for content production and diffusion” (Ibid: 74). By
emphasizing innovation here, the OECD report constructs a vision of the new
paradigm for R&D in business and policy.

This statement also provokes a discussion of digital myths, following Mosco’s
(2004) definition of the typical structure of these mythic accounts. Mosco
describes how typical technological myths tell of a revolution brought about by
the “End of” something—in his account, History, Geography and Politics. Such a
revolution opens the opportunity space for a host of liberatory consequences,
which in the myths, flow directly from the adoption of computer technology
(Mosco, 2004: 86). In the OECD’s version of these myths, UGC heralds a
revolution in participatory technological innovation, which will alter the
corporate fabric of transnational business.

The centrality of technological innovation to this discourse papers over what
Mosco (2004) identifies as the work of marketing to draw out the appeal of
computer technology. As Mosco claims, public fascination with the intricacies of
computer technology is not inherent, but rather it requires the political
economy of marketing to promote technology using the discourse of liberation.
This discourse gets produced and circulated not only by corporations, but also
by governments. Mosco outlines the government’s role in constituting this myth
amid a neoliberal climate that compromises its legitimacy:

> One of the few areas left for . . . [government] to establish a genuine,
> universally recognized allure is with the new technology. As a result,
> governments scramble to spend money attracting high technology companies,
> putting computers in schools, expanding business and household access,
> whatever it takes to strengthen identification with the new
> technologies. (2004: 43)

The way that technological determinism pervades the rhetoric of both
corporations and government bodies is not a coincidence. Mythic portrayals of
technology serve as vehicles for neoliberal governments’ strategic maintenance
of the existing structure of proprietary corporate control, as opposed to
promoting any “revolutionary” innovation.

In contemporary multistakeholder policymaking, ownership claims of transnational
corporations tend to remain dominant (Chakravartty & Sarikakis, 2006: 10, 38).5
To uphold this dominant position, companies and governments use marketing to
portray improvements in technology as socially beneficial, and thus ethically
sound, in a “network economy”. In the OECD report’s (2007) summary, for example,
“more active users, consumers and user-centered innovation were seen to have
increasing economic impacts and social importance” (2007: 15). While the
inclusion of UGC’s social significance is exclusionary on many counts (most
obviously to those without access to the technology), it also serves to equate
innovation with technological advancements, discounting other sources of
creativity. Innovation thus works as a “buzzword” for economically-minded
corporations and governments (Menou, 2004).

Ultimately, while heralding UGC as a socially and culturally liberatory
phenomenon, user creations are harnessed into market logic under the rhetoric of
technological innovation. OECD policy recommendations thus discount the creative
impulses of the “users” behind a site like Twitter, focusing instead on their
activities as consumers. The OECD report (2007) recommends that

> member countries should implement regulatory frameworks that balance the
> interests of suppliers and users, in areas such as the protection of
> intellectual property rights, and digital rights management, without
> disadvantaging innovative e-business models. (2007: 78; emphasis added)

The report’s construction of a dichotomy between suppliers and users depicts
users as essentially consumers; as such, regulatory focus turns away from
protecting UGC, and toward corporate intellectual property rights and digital
rights management as central concerns for facilitating “innovative e-business
models”. The OECD’s recommendations to governments have more to do with
bolstering online commerce than with encouraging user creativity. This can be
seen as a great irony of the use of “innovation” in recommendations upholding
entrenched capitalist models that often punish, rather than reward, creative
digital production (Lessig, 2008).

The rhetorical force of the language of innovation serves a parallel function to
the ways that Livingstone and Lunt (2007) see the term “citizen-consumer”
employed in the discourse of the UK’s Ofcom. In their study, the authors note
that the move to conjoin citizen and consumer allowed Ofcom to elide its
responsibility to citizen interest, since “citizen interest is difficult to
define, requires the construction of diffuse stakeholder alliances, and is less
amenable to quantitative research” (Livingstone & Lunt, 2007: 59). Like
“innovation”, “consumer” lends itself to programmatic and quantitative market
logic, making it fit more readily into positivistic policies. For instance, on
Twitter, a platform that arguably enables citizen engagement and public dialogue
(as I will outline below), users are also encouraged to participate instead in
the economic cycle of value by shoring up the consumption of celebrity; one of
the central attractions of the site is its ability to make the stars seem “just
like us”, according to Metcalfe’s (2009) article for the New York Times.
Twitter’s association with celebrity renders it another avenue for public
relations and self-branding, typically in the service of increasing a star’s
profile and fan base. A more direct relationship between UGC and the market
often takes place on blogging sites other than Twitter, where bloggers
incorporate advertisements and product reviews as economic “incentives for
creativity”, as described in the OECD report (2007: 73). Yet when creativity is
subsumed under market logic, is its status compromised? The semantic implication
of “user-generated content” itself indicates a general cultural shift in the
definition of creative authorship, one that co-opts creativity as a mechanized
(generated) and commodifiable property, ascribed with market-determined value.

In terms of policy recommendations, the OECD (2007) applies economic logic to
innovation in the hopes of fostering “new business models for content production
and diffusion” (2007: 74). This does not necessarily reflect an interest in pure
creativity, but at the same time, the idea that creative/innovative UGC promises
improvements to business models characterizes innovation as market dynamism. As
Terranova (2004) describes, the “biological turn” aspect of technological myths
posits the bottom-up system of creative production as a “natural” process.
Creativity and innovation are seen as intrinsic human qualities, feeding an
illusion of “immanent control, which operates directly within the productive
power of the multitude” (Terranova, 2004: 122). Naturalized versions of
creativity tend to elude the ascription of ethical codes onto creative
production. In this way, corporations and governments deploy myths of immanent
control in order to disguise the way that networks remain structured and
regulated. Just as neoliberal governments call for deregulation that actually
entails “re-regulation”6, UGC’s dynamic innovations often end up under the
proprietary jurisdiction of transnational capitalism.

The Global Village

Discourse around the innovations of Internet phenomena often contain an implicit
sense that network technologies diminish the geographic distance between people
worldwide. In Marshall McLuhan’s notorious aphorism, the world has become a
“global village”. While the OECD report’s (2007) mandate involves making
recommendations for specific member nations, an underlying sense of the global
importance of UGC often emerges. Consider the OECD’s introductory description of
its report, for example: “This study describes the rapid growth of UGC, its
increasing role in worldwide communication and draws out implications for
policy” (2007: 9). The report goes on to characterize UGC’s growing global
presence as a result of “strong network effects”, where “a small number of
platforms draw large amounts of traffic . . . becoming to be the most popular
Websites worldwide” (OECD, 2007: 9). With a small number of Web 2.0 sites
attracting disproportionately large numbers of users, UGC plays a central role
in the fabled global village.

While the OECD report (2007) does consider the “digital divide” as the main
threat to achieving worldwide communication through UGC (2007: 68), it
overwhelmingly maintains a global-village goal for Internet technology. Mosco
(2004) terms this the “End of Geography” myth, which begins from the premise
that the Internet is spatially independent, that “computer communication makes
space infinitely malleable, the logical extension of a process of freeing people
from spatial constraint with all its confining economic and social implications”
(2004: 92). According to Mosco, this myth obscures the way that place can be
“painfully persistent”, such as in geolocation software and place-bound legal
systems. To this I would add online surveillance mechanisms that tie population
demographics to precise locations. And less ominously, place also seems crucial
for Internet communication that organizes local citizen movements (e.g.
Sreberny-Mohammadi & Mohammadi, 1997; Ford & Gil, 2001).

Douglas (2006) has argued in a similar vein that, counter to the end of
geography posited by the global village concept, what the Internet has actually
prompted is a “turn within”: “technologies that enable us to look out beyond our
borders can also encourage us to gaze at our navels, and it has turned out that
the latter use is more profitable and cost effective than the former” (2006:
620). Despite technological potential to connect worldwide, she argues, American
media has tended toward an ethnocentric and narcissistic focus on itself. The
turn within implicates a recent ethical debate around mainstream journalism that
has tended to produce what audiences want, rather than what is ethically
responsible, for the sake of the bottom line (Hamelink, 2000). Douglas herself
cites U.S. journalism as a case example of the turn within, where celebrity
stories and advertising dominate news media, revealing a “soft determinism” in
how uses of technology are subject to overriding ideological parameters (2006:
625). Douglas’s theory thus takes issue with statements like the OECD Report’s
(2007) assertion that UGC tools “constitute an outlet for citizens to express
themselves, potentially creating greater social cohesion and identification”
(2007: 99). Such a statement assumes a neutrality to UGC technology, where other
social, political, economic and ideological influences remain separate from
global communication.

The global village myth nevertheless serves as a powerful allure of Internet
communication; Twitter in particular has been celebrated for its role in
facilitating citizen journalism that, in association with traditional news media
(Thurman, 2008), succeeded in disseminating key information about the recent
political upheaval in Iran. Following the June 12, 2009 federal elections, which
faced allegations of fraud by incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an
estimated several hundred thousand supporters of opposition candidate
Mir-Hossein Mousavi staged demonstrations, mainly in Tehran. The government’s
response to these protests involved cruelty and violence—intended to be shielded
from the rest of the world through a ban on foreign journalists and a severing
of satellite signals and Internet connectivity. Some of the few images, accounts
and videos that did make it outside of Iran’s borders did so through citizen use
of Twitter; the brevity of tweets helped them to be transmitted even without
reliable Internet connections (Iran protesters using tech to skirt curbs, 2009).
Moreover, the association of Twitter with mobile technology furthered its
utility in an uncertain day to day living situation for many Iranians.

The fact that the site was able to get messages about the events in Iran across
to Western viewers was heralded in the press as a victory for Twitter itself
(Grossman, 2009; Khan, 2009); as CBS News Science and Technology Correspondent
Daniel Sieberg mused, “the revolution will be blogged” (cited in Iran protesters
using tech to skirt curbs, 2009). While Twitter was instrumental in raising
global awareness of the situation in Iran, only a few days after the start of
the protest, the trending topic “#iranelection” was superseded in popularity by
a massive number of tweets concerning a pivotal episode of U.S. cable reality
program, Jon and Kate Plus Eight—in which an opportunistic couple with eight
children lament the tabloid scrutiny they have faced since the onset of their
marital troubles. Following this, nearly a month after the Iranian election,
discussion around the death of pop icon Michael Jackson superseded both
“#iranelection” and “#jon&kate”, dominating the Twitter trending topics by an
enormous margin (Twitter trending stats, 2009). As Sweetser and Kaid (2008)
argue, such a celebrity focus may be partly responsible for political cynicism
among citizens/users. It also reveals how the absence of professional codes of
ethics in citizen journalism does not mean that content produced is necessarily
exempt from the “turn within” effect. The fact that Twitter discussion around
American entertainment media has surpassed that of a major political uprising
thus lends credence to Douglas’s (2006) contention that the global village myth
conceals an increasing cultural narcissism manifest in Twitter’s collusion with
the U.S. celebrity landscape.

Celebrity has indeed been a central focus of Twitter since the site gained
significant popularity during the 2007 South by Southwest music and culture
festival in Austin, Texas (Terdiman, 2007). Since that time, some of the most
notorious uses of Twitter have involved celebrity tweets, such as actor Ashton
Kutcher’s challenge to the cable news channel CNN over who could more quickly
gain one million followers (Kutcher won—as of October 2009, he has more
followers than anyone else on the site). What is significant about this
particular example is that Kutcher had not appeared in any major film roles
during this period; his Twitter activities seemed to function primarily as a way
to maintain his celebrity status despite his current relative obscurity. In this
way, Twitter offers a platform for celebrities to conduct personal public
relations campaigns, which appear to succeed in garnering media attention over
the less-valued Twittering of non-famous users.

So what does this mean for emerging Internet policy, like the OECD
recommendations, that tend to collapse differences between users through “global
village” rhetoric? In some ways, celebrity users of Twitter function as
corporations rather than as citizens, as illustrated through the labour that
entertainment personas like Kutcher perform as part of their careers of staying
publicly relevant. Moreover, the celebrities with the most Twitter followers
tend to be associated with the U.S. entertainment industry in particular, which
combined with the site’s origins and operation in the U.S. (San Francisco),
serves to highlight the way that Internet properties are still situated in a
specific place, and still mitigated by geopolitical boundaries. While Twitter
claims that all users’ tweets are legally located in the U.S.,7 international
user content is in fact subject to both domestic and U.S. jurisdiction,
potentially creating confusion in regard to the “location” of Internet content.
In a more general sense, the popularly mythologized ambiguity around place and
location online obscures not only the legally binding delineations of geography,
but the Internet’s colonization of the private sphere. UGC often originates in
the context of the home; this context is in fact subject to public legislation,
resonating with one of the most-publicized detriments of a global village: a
loss of privacy.

Difference, Diversity and Participation

Along with the global village myth comes the notion that UGC furnishes a
platform for free expression, thereby increasing the diversity of viewpoints
that become publicly available. This increased diversity is linked in turn to a
more democratic social fabric, which takes into account the concerns of all
citizens. As we have seen with Twitter, increased diversity is not always
automatically tied into democratic process, unless choosing to follow a certain
celebrity over another would be considered democratic. Similarly, the OECD
report’s (2007) wording of the “diversity” proposition proves somewhat less
preoccupied with the social aspects of the Internet’s democratization: “The
Internet can be seen as an open platform enriching the diversity of opinions
(including product reviews), various political and societal debates, the free
flow of information and freedom of expression” (2007: 90). By including the
expression of product reviews among UGC’s free forms of expression, the report
engages in a typical “consumer-citizen” rhetorical conflation of product choice
with democratic ideals (Livingstone & Lunt, 2007: 52). Increased diversity
supposedly results from increased competition in the Internet’s “marketplace of
ideas”, although market forces have in fact been proven to ultimately decrease
the diversity of goods and services available (Freedman, 2005: 17). UGC’s
diversity of expression myth nonetheless becomes framed as an aspect of informed
consumerism, rather than as a true embrace of alternative viewpoints.

Moreover, the OECD report (2007) asserts that UGC guarantees an increased
cultural diversity over time: “According to the long tail effect, a more diverse
and substantially increased set of cultural content will find niche audiences
and users, potentially expanding creativity” (2007: 64). As mentioned above,
this creativity is conceptualized as “innovation” with market benefits,
specifically in regard to the performance of niche “audiences and users”, who
suspiciously resemble consumers within niche markets. Recalling Douglas’s (2006)
turn within, market segmentation proves (ironically) to underlie the presumption
of the Internet as global village. Terranova (2004) concurs that digitization
has facilitated the dividing up of market preferences in a way analogous to the
fragmentation of information in the Internet’s packet-switching network (2004:
34). Yet it is important to temper a technologically deterministic view of the
Internet’s role in market segmentation by acknowledging the ways that neoliberal
interests have shaped social perceptions of the technology’s uses.

In the quotation above, the OECD report describes increased diversity and its
segmentation of audiences and users into niche markets as a result of the “long
tail effect”, a piece of marketing logic that predicts the economy’s shift away
from goods with mass popularity, towards a larger number of niche products
(Anderson, 2006). While the long tail concept has typically been applied to
economic models—such as the revenue-generating schemes of online companies like
Amazon.com—user segmentation is said to reverberate down to local levels, which
the OECD asserts will promote various public and social benefits. “The
availability and diversity of (local) content in diverse languages is
increasing”, the report claims: “as more participate in building and cultivating
culture and the democracy associated with egalitarian cultural development,
greater general identification of users with culture and society may develop and
less alienation result” (OECD, 2007: 65). When examining Twitter as a case
study, however, it becomes apparent that this utopian vision of local UGC does
not necessarily come to fruition. As illustrated by the example of the Iranian
election aftermath, momentary local (and international) mobilization tends to be
subsumed under the homogenizing force of U.S. entertainment culture.

Attention to celebrity over local politics on UGC sites highlights how the term
“diversity”, as employed in Internet policy documents like the OECD report,
works to negate a real, situated, embodied notion of diversity in favor of a
market-based notion of consumer choice. For example, myths of the Internet’s
attendant bodily transcendence tend to obscure the ways that embodied
difference—along axes such as gender, race, class, age, etc.—underpin even the
most superficial conception of diversity. Because mediated interaction happens
virtually rather than face-to-face, so the saying goes, “on the Internet, nobody
knows you’re a dog” (Steiner, 1993). This myth can be seen as a subset of what
Mosco (2004) identifies as the End of Geography, in that the physical
situatedness of the self, including place and body, becomes irrelevant due to
the technology’s compression of space-time (92). Yet compression is not the most
accurate way to describe the action of digital information networks. Terranova
(2004) claims that rather, the key processes at work here are “microdissection
and modulation”, where the Internet does not result in disembodiment, but a
micro-fragmentation of the body:

> as it is split and decomposed into segments of variable and adjustable sizes
> (race, gender, sexual preferences; but also income, demographics, cultural
> preferences and interests)[, i]t is not only the messages that are fragmented
> and constantly renewed and recombined, but also the receivers of those
> messages, in the form of bits of information archived and cross-referenced
> through a million databases. (2004: 34)

Terranova invokes philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “dividuals”, or
subindivdiual units, as an illustrative term to describe the micro-level
fragmentation engendered by the niche marketing and targeted ads made possible
by extensive data-mining.

In addition to the way that “dataveillance” violates privacy rights (e.g. Chung
& Grimes, 2005), data-mining becomes a concern for its gendered, aged, raced and
classed application to target marketing, often setting up and reinforcing
heteronormative media images through its construction of certain “typical” niche
audiences using aggregate demographic statistics. Twitter users provide this
kind of demographic information about themselves, both intentionally and as a
side-effect of using the site:

> our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever
> you visit a Website (“Log Data”). This Log Data may include information such
> as your IP address, browser type or the domain from which you are visiting,
> the Web-pages you visit, the search terms you use, and any advertisements on
> which you click. (Twitter privacy policy, n.d.)

The data collected is used to identify specific markets that can be appealed to
using “personalized” information. Targeting specifically
gendered/raced/aged/classed products toward segmented markets tends to reify
identity stereotypes in promotional imagery and discourse (e.g. Herring, 2003).
This ubiquitous logic of segmented niche markets undergirds the subsequent,
popular addition to the infamous “dog” saying: “but they know you buy dog food.”

The positive flip-side of data-mining is that sites like Twitter are said to
promote greater civic and social participation. For instance, under the section
heading “Social Impacts” of UGC, the OECD report (2007) lists “Increased user
autonomy, participation and communication” as key outcomes. Accordingly,
Internet movements toward more autonomy and participation “imply a shift away
from simple passive consumption of broadcasting and other mass distribution
media models (couch potatoes) to more active choosing, interacting and creating
content . . . and a shift to a participatory ‘culture’” (OECD, 2007: 64). This
statement portrays participative users as the polar opposites of passive (and
slovenly) couch potatoes; participation becomes synonymous with action. The
model active participant in new forms of media consumption has been discussed
vigorously within Media Studies scholarship (e.g. Bucy & Gregson, 2001). In
fact, Jenkins’s (1992) work on “textual poachers” is notorious in this regard.
His more recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(2006), outlines several domains where users actively participate in media
creation, constituting their own meanings and cultures rather than passively
absorbing mass-produced entertainment. The OECD report echoes some of Jenkins’s
assertions in its own claim that increased user participation has “led to the
democratization of media production” (2006: 64).

Yet, in addition to the barriers to true “democratization” erected by unequal
access and skill levels, increased participation in digital media production
does not necessarily translate into political activity (e.g. Barney, 2008);
consider the way that Twitter tends to level-out political events like the
Iranian protests with media events like the Jon and Kate “scandal”. Moreover,
the OECD report itself subsumes participation under market imperatives: “More
active users, consumers and user-centered innovation . . . are spurring new
business models and are beginning to bypass, intersect with, and create new
opportunities for, traditional media and content-related industries and access
routes” (OECD, 2007: 15). By mobilizing the positive connotations of
participation as part of an expressly economic initiative, the OECD report
highlights one of the dangers of the participation myth: its association with
liberation. Chakravartty and Sarikakis (2006) argue that one of the biggest
problems with the celebration of participation and transcendence afforded by new
technologies is its “adverse consequences for the laborers of the new
Information Society whose labor hours—once regulated and largely defined—spill
over into the private sphere and invade leisure time” (2006: 113). Regardless of
whether it brings pleasure to users, the labor of UGC plays a role in
maintaining the productive lives of mainly corporately-owned hosting websites,
such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, which would obviously cease to exist
without user labor. By framing this labor as “participation” and participation
as “liberatory” a misleading optimism obscures the insidious ways in which the
private sphere gets colonized through Internet technologies. The OECD’s emphasis
on the centrality of the “participative Web” in its title engages a utopian
ideal that obscures the rather thornier ethical issue of free online labor.

Conclusion

Stemming from Mosco’s (2004) description of digital myths heralding the
revolutionary impact of Internet technology, this paper has argued that these
myths underpin the rhetoric of policy recommendations from the OECD (2007) and
the practices of microblogging site Twitter. Central myths examined—involving
technological innovation, the “global village”, difference and diversity of
expression and liberatory participation—show that despite pronouncements of
beneficial social impacts, an overarching market logic often compromises the
progressive potentials of UGC. While ethical policymaking might help retain some
of UGC’s promise, for Chakravartty and Sarikakis (2006), legitimate policy
practice typically crystallizes mythic accounts of the Internet in favor of
neoliberal deregulatory agendas. Such agendas produce policy recommendations
organized around binary understandings of technology that promote a hierarchical
distribution of users. By positing technological infrastructures as the source
of social change, policy-makers perpetuate mandates that are “technologically
deterministic with the assumption that the market and technology are inherently
neutral forces” (Chakravartty & Sarikakis, 2006: 14). The myth of determinism,
along with Darwinist models of market competition, further supports attendant
myths about the social consequences of the increasing ubiquity of Internet
technology. In this regard, UGC appears to have arisen out of the competition
model, as a response to consumer demand. Yet its location squarely within a
market model should raise some criticism of its celebrated status, especially
since hosting sites like Twitter are not quite as benevolent as they may seem.

Ultimately, of course, Twitter functions as a business (although it is an as-yet
unprofitable business), while simultaneously portraying itself as committed to
its users. As the site’s “About” page asserts,

> Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are
> holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract
> ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling
> service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.

The site’s benevolent posturing works to conceal the key function of the “for
now” which indicates that Twitter will eventually seek to profit from its user
content upon growing further in popularity. As such, policy recommendations from
the OECD need to find opposition in recommendations that will protect UGC, with
the crucial input of civil society groups concerned with Internet user rights
(e.g. Clement, Moll & Shade, 2001; Mueller, Pagé & Kuerbis, 2004; Guttman,
2007).

The examination of new media myths subtending Internet policy discourse should
be used to suggest ways that policy might redress some of the negative
consequences of popular mythic misconceptions. In the OECD report (2007), for
example, intellectual property rights dominate the discussion of what is at
stake for federal regulators. The focus on intellectual property, however,
obscures some of the more pervasive implications of information networks,
particularly in terms of their relation to culture (Terranova, 2004: 7). For
Chakravartty and Sarikakis (2006), this imperative translates into a necessary
inquiry into the neutrality with which technology is generally imparted (2006:
163). In order to open up policy discourse beyond utopian ideas of technological
change, regulators should focus on the structural underpinnings of Internet
inequalities. For example, the authors suggest that examining the structural
poverty responsible for the digital divide would be more productive than simply
addressing access or “use”.

The regulatory convergence necessary for rendering such a comprehensive picture
of global structural inequalities may not yet be upon us, but there is certainly
room within the technologically focused recommendations to encourage a code of
media ethics for users (Hamelink, 2000). This code would ideally be able to
transcend the limitations of regulation in fostering a public media culture
where social platforms like Twitter might be mobilized in their most
revolutionary ways. As Silverstone (2004) reminds us, regulation is itself
fraught with the ethical complexities of a neoliberal agenda, and thus does not
necessarily guarantee the right to communicate. He argues that while the
uncertain ethical terrain of multistakeholder policymaking may (at best) be able
to regulate media production, “A responsible and accountable media culture is
another matter entirely, for it depends on a critical and literate citizenry,
and a citizenry, above all, which is critical with respect to, and literate in
the ways of, mass mediation and media representation” (2004: 440). In the
interest of achieving this kind of holistic social accountability, regulators
need vital public consultation that may in fact retain some of the optimism of
Internet myths in working toward an ethical framework for encouraging
media-literate citizens.

Notes

1 Or see Benkler’s (2006) definition of “The User”: “we are seeing the emergence
of the user as a new category of relationship to information production and
exchange. Users are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes
producers. They are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining
the terms of their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how
they consume it” (2006: 138-139). This definition posits greater autonomy for
users as opposed to consumers, yet as this paper will argue, such autonomy is
the function of myth more often than it is a reality.

2 According to Facebook’s Terms of Use, the site holds legal ownership and all
licensing rights of any content posted by users, indefinitely.

3 From Twitter’s Terms of Service, under the heading “Copyright (What’s Yours is
Yours)”: “We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide
to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You
can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also
remove any text and images you have stored in the system”.

4 For further information, see the OECD website: www.oecd.org.

5 The authors describe the contemporary terrain of global governance, focusing
particularly on the role of transnational corporate actors.

6 McChesney explains: “Deregulation in media policy means, in reality,
re-regulation purely to serve powerful corporate interests with no concern for
the general public whatsoever” (2007: 142).

7 As outlined in Twitter’s privacy policy (n.d.): “If you reside outside the
U.S. your personally identifiable information will be transferred to the U.S.,
and processed and stored there under U.S. privacy standards. By visiting our
Site and providing information to us, you consent to such transfer to, and
processing in, the U.S.”.

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About the Author

Tamara Shepherd is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Joint Doctorate in
Communication at Concordia University in Montr éal, Canada. She has published
and presented papers on aspects of user-generated content and labor, from a
feminist perspective. Her dissertation research looks at the policy implications
of girls’ cultural production on the Web.

Citing this paper:

Shepherd, Tamara. (2009). Twittering in the OECD ’s “participative web”:
Microblogging and new media policy. Global Media Journal -- Canadian Edition,
2(1), 149-165.
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