“We feel that we have recreated the mass media,” said Kim Malone Scott, director of sales and operations for AdSense.

Apparently replacing the mass media is no longer a goal.

Frontline is currently running a four-part series called News War: An Investigation into the Future of News, and they’re putting it all online as it airs. Part I (the only part that has aired so far) was fantastic, and I was happy to be able to see it in high-quality video with no stuttering. The accompanying site looks pretty, and is fairly easy to navigate, but the way the accompanying material presented is a wasted opportunity. The web content for Part I consists of some extra interview transcripts, an FAQ on the freedom of the press, some supplementary documents, and a really great curated set of links. All of these are of interest, but after watching the (gripping) documentary, going through this material feels a little like homework. Why not present this material at the appropriate times as I’m watching the video, so that I can not only go deeper or get some more context for what I’m seeing, but that I can make the decision to do so at the moment of seeing, instead of relying on my recall of what I finished seeing? It might be objected that doing so would interrupt the flow of the video, but the video is already split into segments. The relevant material for each segment could be presented after a segment, and linked to the appropriate shots from that segment to allow easy navigation back to what was just seen.

OK, enough about the architecture of the News War site. What about the Future of News? I’m going to withhold detailed commentary until I’ve seen the whole series, but Part I did a good job of explaining a facet of the Valerie Plame case that I didn’t understand all that well: how it represents the overturning of 30 years of de facto recognition of journalists’ right to not reveal the identity of confidential sources. Though this right was explicitly ruled not to exist by the Supreme Court, activist lawyers had succeeded in persuading states to adopt an interpretation of this ruling which did weakly recognize this right, and journalists were rarely subpoenaed. That has changed in the wake of the Plame case, since Richard Posner, and then a circuit court, stated that the activist interpretation was unsupported by the law.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, particularly Part III, which will look at “citizen journalism” and new media news. But I suspect that Frontline will drop the ball by looking to elites like Eric Schmidt for insights into this stuff. Schmidt basically shrugs his shoulders and says (I am paraphrasing here), “the Internet has determined that the power formerly concentrated in the press shall be concentrated here at the GOOG. It’s perhaps not ideal, but what can be done? We’ll try to send some traffic your way, though, ’cause hey, we have a kind of nostalgic regard for editors and all that manual processing of information stuff. Good luck with that making a living thing.” This kind of arrogant technical determinism is what keeps getting Google sued. Talking to chiefs of staff when you’re reporting on the government or the NYT is a good strategy; when you’re reporting on a loosely interconnected set of networked forums it may not be. Neither Schmidt, nor network architecture, nor Google’s algorithms will determine the future of news, and we needn’t sit back and accept the dissolution of institutions of news gathering and dissemination as inevitable.

The latest issue of Harper’s features an excellent roundtable discussion on how video games might be used to teach writing. Though most of it will be familiar to anyone who has followed recent debates about “serious games,” it is worth reading. Among the discussants, Raph Koster stood out as particularly insighful, and his comments about new forms of literacy really struck home:

What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation–of a painting, or a historical text–and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. … Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy.

Appropriation and annotation (or, to use the popular vernacular, remix and tagging) have been at the center of my interests for a while now, but it’s nice to see them being discussed in a high-profile forum like Harper’s.

Koster’s comments echo the views of my friend Dan Perkel, who has been investigating “copy and paste literacy” on MySpace. Many people focus on the “remix culture” of appropriation and annotation as if it is something new–but these practices have been around since the dawn of culture. What is new, as Koster and Dan indicate, is the general rise in people’s ability to recognize and engage in these practices: their literacy.

The discussion in Harper’s ends with a kind of lament that a population highly literate in appropriation and annotation will squeeze out the “great artist” by flooding our culture with lesser-quality niche productions. I agree with that conclusion but not the explanation. The era of the great artist will come to an end, not because of overcrowded cultural markets, but because a literate population will recognize appropriation and annotation at the heart of all creative production, and it will reject the myths of the solitary genius and the original creative act that have dominated for the last few centuries. The great artist will disappear, but there will continue to be great art.

Why do people blog? Questions about incentives are sure to arise soon after people begin talking about participatory media (or “user-generated content” as the business people call it). Yahoo! Research Berkeley has a whole team, led by Cameron Marlow, looking at what they call the “social motives” that lead people to participate on the web.

People discussing incentives to participate in media production often assume that producers are motivated by things like novelty or ego that will soon “wear off,” and that traditional economic incentives will have to come in to replace them. Vincent Maher believes that “bloggers in late capitalist society will begin to seek financial compensation for the time spent serving increasingly large audiences,” and Scott Karp says that “unless we develop economic models to meaningfully compensate the long tail, the ego payoff for most people won’t be enough to justify the effort.” In other words, there’s no such thing as free labor.

With economic incentives come the potential for editorial influence. An increasing number of (amateur?) producers monetize their content via contextual advertisments, a practice that makes them vulnerable to accusations of rational self-interest from folks like Robert Scoble. As Maher puts it, there is worry about whether these producers will end up “simply repeating agendas set by commercial advertising keyword and search indexes.” These worries are leading some to call for better “Chinese walls” in the blogosphere.

But is the economic payoff from contextual advertising enough to keep people producing, or to motivate them to produce in the first place? Nicholas Carr says no, which leads me to wonder why people bother with the ads at all, other than to “keep tabs on what Google is doing.” Furthermore, studies of the closely related phenomenon of open source software production suggest that economic motivations do not play a major role.

So is the monetization of user-generated content through contextual advertising networks a dead end? Will bloggers eschew the paltry sums they receive, in order to guarantee the purity of their editorial independence? I believe the answer is “no,” but not because producers are greedy sell-outs or because their advertising revenues will rise to the point that they would be fools to give them up. Instead, I would argue that in a capitalist society, revenues from advertising take on a symbolic value that exceeds their actual economic value: they are proof of participation in a system larger than oneself that values one’s contributions. Just as the open source software developer wants to believe that someone is using her utility, the blogger wants to believe that someone is reading. In many cases that someone is a friend or family member in direct communication with the producer, and no further proof is needed. But in other cases, like when people blog about a hobby or a topic of professional interest, feedback isn’t necessarily forthcoming. Contextual advertising networks excel at giving people the rich feedback they crave, which is why so many people (like me) who don’t even run ads installed Google Analytics on their blogs. Click logs give people the warm fuzzies, and actual payments, even if only for a few cents a day, are proof positive that actual people are behind those clicks.

This is all conjecture, of course, and ought to be followed up on by a proper investigation of the emerging political economy of “amateur” production on the web, an investigation that moves well beyond Nardi et al’s investigations of blogging practices and takes participatory media seriously as a political, economic, social and cultural phenomenon. (Note to self: get on that…)

Today brings the official announcement of Yahoo! Research Labs Berkeley, an experiment in which we’ll see what happens when we take the mobile media and social media research we’ve been doing at Garage Cinema and supercharge it with Yahoo! brains and backing.

This is really exciting: it means that great ideas from Garage Cinema, unmediated, and elsewhere will have a chance to be implemented and deployed to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Even better, Yahoo! is committed to making the Berkeley Lab a place for open, collaborative research–meaning we can publish and exchange ideas with colleagues at Berkeley and everywhere else. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

So next time you’re in Berkeley, stop by the Lab and say hi!