From: "Ben Seattle" <icd-AT-communism.org>
Subject: M-I: Q & A -- Electronic News Service (fwd from LeninList)
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 21:38:32 -0700


[Louis Paulsen, on LeninList, asked my opinion on some
 questions concerning the proposed electronic news service.
  I thought this might be of interest to some m-i readers.  Ben]

Hi Louis,

Thanks for your interest.

Louis Paulsen:
>I certainly don't oppose cooperative Internet ventures,
>but I do have some questions:

I appreciate your questions.

I am trying to better understand how a electronic news
service will likely develop and evolve.  I believe that such
a news service, that serves the working class, is inevitable.

I believe that some people read my proposal and
immediately make all sorts of assumptions about what this
news service would or would not be like.  I think it is far
better to do as you have done--and ask intelligent questions.

I will reply with my own opinions.  Only time will tell if they
are accurate to any degree.  In many cases, your guess about
what this may look like will be as good as mine.

> As there are hundreds (at least) of parties and organizations
> with access to the Net, who is going to be the 'editor' of
> this news service and reduce the millions and millions of words
> down to a number which people can reasonably consume?

Because the hundreds (or more) of different groups do not get
along very well, it is not realistic to expect that there is any way
that a single editor could be chosen.  These groups are often in
very intense competition with one another for the support of
activists.  They are frequently not on speaking terms with one
another.  Fortunately, current technology does not require that
a single editor exist.

Here is what I wrote in LL9804.039:

    Readers themselves (thru a collaborative process)
    and competing political trends will rate articles
    and decide what will appear on various competing
    "front pages" that will function as windows into
    a single common database to which all trends will
    contribute.  Such a news service will eventually
    provide millions of readers easy access to a
    common indexed system of progressive articles,
    commentary and opinion on all important topics
    and will, furthermore, allow readers to add their
    own public comments or questions to all articles
    and, in this way, will serve as the launching
    ground for a large number of forums.

So, in short, there would not be a single editor, or even a
single group of editors.  There would be a *single database*
to which all trends contributed articles with a uniform format
(more on that in just a bit). Each political trend, or group of
like-minded people, would be able to decide for themselves
what articles were most important or useful for their own
purposes.  Each political trend would have the ability to have
its own front page--but would be free to use the articles
created by other groups (with whatever modifications they
believed were appropriate) because there would be no
copyright.  Instead of copyright, we would simply have a
common-sense tradition that appropriate credit (and
hyperlinks) to original material be given.

Even though there would be many competing front pages,
however, all front pages would link to a common database.
As soon as a reader begins to follow the hypertext links
(since the articles would be linked to one another in various
ways) or use the indexes, the underlying unity of the database
would reveal itself.  From the perspective of the reader, there
would be a *single source* full of a large amount of news and
information, organized such that everything is quick, easy and
convenient to find, read and comment on publically thru the
use of what I call "public interactive margins" (ie: public notes
that could be left in the electronic margins).  These margin
notes would be readable by other readers who would have
the option of viewing these notes or not, depending on their
preferences at the time.

In the experimental site I am working on (and which may
or may not resemble what will evolve in real life) the
common format of each article would include a short
title, long title, short summary and long summary of uniform
length limitations (ie: no more than 5 words, 20 words, 65
words and 200 words, respectively).  Readers who see a
portion of the article (ie: the title or the summary) would be
able to "drill down" to get more of the article.  If the reader
is sufficiently interested, she would be able to easily drill
down to the entire article and see what it is linked to and the
electronic margin notes which other readers have attached to it.

> What would this "news service" provide for people that will be
>  better than we can do right now with a web browser, mailing
>  lists like leninlist, USENET groups, and multi-link sites like
>  Jay's List of Progressive Resources?

Good question.  All of the above methods are useful--as is
the news service at your own www.workers.org.  All of these
resources offer us something we can learn from and use.
But something more systematic is needed.

The main issue here is that all of the above methods can
be unnecessarily time consumming when you want to find
something.

Suppose a reader, on the spur of the moment, becomes
curious about China.  She would be able, using the proposed
news service, to quickly see a list of all articles on China by
all groups on the left.  She would be able, depending on her
preference at the time, to see only the titles or the summaries
(and then drill down as desired).  She would also be able to
limit the time period used (ie: view only a list of articles from
the last six months, or only the articles from the period around
the massacre in Tiananmen square).  So this would be
something which combined features of all of the services you
list above, and somewhat extended and automate them.

In addition, such a news service would summarize key
articles in mainstream newspapers (such as the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal), magazines (such as
Business Week and the Economist) and leftist journals.  This
would help to insure wide coverage and far-reaching debate.
At the same time it would be far more focused and efficient
than a search using Yahoo or Alta Vista.  Extending the
example above, the reader would be able to get a list of
summaries of significant articles about China originiating in
mainstream newspapers and magazines.  The summaries
would be made by what would eventually be a sizeable
number of volunteers.

Also (and this is very important) all articles in the database
could be rated by readers.  As as reader, you would be able
to view (should you prefer) only articles with high ratings.

Furthermore, there is a phenomena in cyberspace that certain
people (or groups) have highly exagerated estimations of
their own abilities.  On the Spoon's M-I list, for example,
there used to be a guy named Malecki who made lots of posts
but actually had very little to say.  Readers of the proposed
news service would be able to easily filter out spam of this
kind using a variety of bozo filters.  You read an article that
appears to be full of complete nonsense?  You can press a
button and not have anything by that same author appear on
your screen for the next six months.  Similarly, you could
screen out electronic margin notes by bozo know-it-alls.

Collaborative filtering would be the most powerful tool.  A
reader could ask to see articles that were rated as interesting
by *those readers* who had given a favorable rating to the
same articles that she herself had rated favorably.  Put in
simple terms: this means you could choose to see what
articles are most popular with that subset of readers who
tend to agree with you.

Briefly, also, I will mention money.  How would all these
groups that often act like they hate each others' guts be able
to trust one another well enough to work around issues
involving money?  Fortunately, the answer here is simple:
This technology is becoming so dirt cheap that money no
longer needs to be the kind of issue it once was.  I am,
at present, playing around with a database that the public
would be able to update over the web.  It costs me only $40
a month.  Once  I get it going it would likely be able to handle
hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people per day.  This is
hardly millions, but the technology is getting cheaper and
easier to use every day.

>  How does your analogy of Iskra work?  Iskra was
>  formed very early in the history of the Russian
>  Social-Democratic Labor Party, at a time when many
>  questions regarding the application of Marxism
>  to the situation in Russia had not even been addressed.
>  It is now 100 years later.  The Leninist, Social-Democratic,
>  and reformist parties have traditions and have developed
>  their theoretical lines to an incomparably greater extent.
>  There are splits among these trends and there are
>  REASONS for the splits.  It would have been unrealistic
>  to try to publish a single "Iskra" for the RSDLP as late as
> 1910, let alone 1920, so how can there be a single "Iskra"
>  for all the descendants of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
>  in 1998?

Yes.  There are reasons for the splits.  The most significant
of these reasons, in my view, is the split between revolutionary
and reformist politics.  I have strong feelings on this myself.  It
is the influence of reformism, in my view, that is responsible for
the split in the working class and progressive movements and
that keeps the bourgeoisie in power.  Yet both reformist and
revolutionary trends would be able to contribute articles to this
common database while maintaining separate and competing
"front pages".  I believe that, in the long run, such an
arrangement would be very much to the advantage of
revolutionary politics.  Readers would be able to easily
compare, for example, reformist and revolutionary perspectives
on the same issues.  This can only facilitate political development.

Various trends that do not get along might be likely to
contribute copyright-free articles to a common public-domain
database--because the general sentiment of progressive people
would be in favor of doing so--and this sentiment would not be
easy to disregard.

The news service would function both as a platform for
cooperation between trends and as an arena of struggle
between them.  Because of the underlying unity of the
database, however, it would become very difficult for any
trend to use the tactics of "information isolation" to
advance its aims.  "Information isolation" involves keeping
readers ignorant of criticisms of an article or criticisms of a
political position.  Because of the ease with which all
readers would be able to post electronic margin notes, and
so forth, such a news service as I have proposed would
accelerate the development of what I call "transparency", in
which charlatanism and related phenomena would come
face to face with extinction.

I can picture a lot of this happening over the next ten years.
As I see it, we may be able to cast a very wide net and
concentrate into one place an immense amount of passion
and betrayal.  The resulting mixture could prove to be
very explosive.

Iskra ushered in a period of both cooperation and
competition between trends that considered themselves
to be Marxist.  Both the cooperation and competition were
of service to the working class.  Such an electronic
news service as described above could help similar
processes in the early part of the 21st century.

More at:

www.communism.org           (see "1917 was the beta version"
                                              task #1)
www.pix.org/pof/                 (see section dealing with proposed
                                             electronic news service)
www.pix.org/mad-form.htm  (Media Abstract Discussion)

Sincerely,

Ben Seattle
----//-// 14.Apr.98
email:    ben-AT-pix.org
web:     www.Leninism.org




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