Thoughts on Dissemination
Clare Birchall
Contemporary Culture, Kings College London
To accompany
this final seminar in the series, I wanted to ask what media form would be best
suited to the dissemination of the outcomes from a seminar series on the
subjects of transparency, surveillance and privacy. The blog on which this
position statement appears has been the medium of choice up until this point.
There is also a special issue of Big Data
and Society in the pipeline, as well as a documentary and a Vine being developed.
Announcements have been made over listservs and commentary via Twitter.
Traditional media outlets, too, have been turned to in order to communicate the
very prescient concerns of this network. The final seminar is dedicated to
discussing dissemination and outputs.
In this
position statement, I want to think about the same issue from a slightly
different angle. Running alongside my pragmatic concerns as a co-investigator
with how to achieve impact and maximum outreach, I want to think about the role
and limits of revelation in public life as well as the ways we can experiment
with media forms to highlight the problematics inherent in the ‘objects’ we
study.
Jodi Dean insists that revelation and transparency
are beside the point. “All sorts of horrible political processes are perfectly
transparent today. The problem is that people . . . are so enthralled to
transparency that they have lost the will to
fight” (2002: 174). She calls for “decisive action” as remedy. Alasdair
Roberts makes a similar argument: “The significance of Abu Ghraib,” he writes in this context, “may
also lie in the extent to which we
overestimated the catalytic effect of exposure” (2006: 238). For him, democracy has to involve the
responsibility of the public to act upon the information it apparently has a
right to. Jeremy Gilbert asserts that any tendency towards transparency “has to
go beyond the mere telling of secrets and become real acts of what we might
call . . . ‘publication,’ or ‘publicity,’”
(2007: 38) which involves the politicization of an event or issue – making them objects of debate,
discussion, and intervention. While coming from different political angles, all
of these writers insist on the need for action, decision, politicization, to
accompany transparency measures, exposé, and revelation. Something has to ‘happen’
because of the new information and data released into the public sphere.
If we call on the
language of Jacques Rancière, we could say that “the distribution of the
sensible” has to alter because of the new space such information and data takes
up. Rancière’s distribution of the
sensible is an aesthetico-political settlement. It is, in his words:
a delimitation
of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise,
that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form
of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about
it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the
properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (2004: 12-13)
The distributive regime determines what
action, reaction, and thought is possible in any given situation. It is political precisely because in every
‘distribution of the sensible’ equality is either undermined or affirmed.
A distribution determines “those who
have a part in the community of citizens” (7); it “reveals who can have a share
in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and
space in which this activity is performed” (8). Equality is when those without
part, the unrepresented, come to take part; those without a share, have a
share. In a process of subjectivisation, this involves refuting the subject
positions one is ascribed by the system, and finding a name or
identity-in-relation that will enable full participation and recognition – akin
to the work the term ‘proletariat’ once performed. An instantiation of politics
based on equality, then, is when demands for a new division and sharing of the social whole are
granted.
In this way, the Snowden revelations
or the Panama Papers potentially alter the distribution of the sensible, changing
what can be known, but the revelations can always be absorbed into the white
noise of communicative capitalism, be contained by various discursive manoeuvres, or prompt only weak
tweaks to a robustly inequitable system before any new division has taken place.
In light of this, it might not
always be desirable to reach the most amount of readers or audience. It might,
rather, be preferable to reach readers in particular ways or at particular
times to maximize attention and the chance for action. Such an approach to
dissemination means keeping in mind two things:
1) the confluence between form and content;
2) the political economy of media forms.
To take the first of these, I’d
like to briefly describe a project I devised with the help of my collaborator,
Pete Woodbridge. Having put on a colloquium concerned with the politics and
practices of secrecy, I wanted
to disseminate recordings of the talks and sessions in a manner that did
justice to the theme with which they were concerned. Pete and I decided that we
wanted to emulate the experience of the secret. To do so, we “leaked” an
instruction on listservs and social media to visit a website and enlist for
more instructions. For those who signed up, a message was secreted to them with
instructions on how to find and decrypt the talks online and the necessary
passwords. The instructions self-destructed, erased themselves before the
viewers’ eyes. The secret was briefly revealed. We also made the data available
on a torrent so that files of the talks were distributed over the network like
fragments of a secret. If users downloaded the
files as a torrent onto their computer, they were emulating the secret
societies that the grandfather of secrecy studies, Georg Simmel, wrote so much
about.
In terms of the second point, it is necessary
as academics engaged with the politics of transparency, that we
self-reflexively consider the political economy of the publishing and
distribution networks we engage with. The links major academic publishers have
with ethically dubious enterprises has been well documented by Ted
Striphas, Gary
Hall, Janneke
Adema and others. Though we
all have to work within the constraints and demands of modern academic jobs
(not least the REF in the UK), it is important to place the ethics of
publishing above metrics. With these concerns in mind, and working with
like-minded colleagues such as the aforementioned Gary Hall and Janneke Adema,
I have been involved with various alternative publishing projects such as Liquid
Books (an experimental series
of open-edited and open-access books); Living Books About Life (a series of open-edited and open-access books funded
by JISC); and Open Humanities Press (an open access publisher focused on critical and
cultural theory that acts on principles of access, diversity and transparency).
In practice, an ethical publishing means,
whenever possible, fulfilling the following goals:
·
working
on a non-profit basis – all OHP books and journals, for example, are available
open access on a free gratis basis,
some of them libre too;
·
using
open source software – OHP journals generally use either Open Journal Systems
or WordPress;
·
operating
as a collective - of theorists, philosophers, researchers, scholars,
librarians, publishers, technologists etc. OHP operates as a networked,
cooperative, collaborative, unpaid multi-user collective;
·
gifting
our labour – rather than insisting on being paid for it. We see this as a means
of helping to de-center waged work from its privileged place in late capitalist
neoliberal society;
·
and
working horizontally in a non-rivalrous fashion - OHP freely shares its
knowledge, expertise and even its books with other presses such as Open Book
Publishers at Cambridge, Open Edition in France, and the Hybrid Publishing Lab
at Leuphana University in Germany.
I mention
all of this by way of raising the following questions: What form of
dissemination will do justice to the concerns of privacy, transparency, and
surveillance? And: What would ethically informed modes of
transparency/revelation/dissemination look like? How can we ensure that our
revelations will be actionable? That they will alter, for the better, the
distribution of the sensible?
