应香港《传播与社会》学刊邀请，与美国华盛顿大学兰斯·班尼特教授的学术对谈
（邱林川、史安斌）
中文翻译版请查阅http://www.cschinese.com/
C&S Dialogue with W. Lance Bennett
LB: W. Lance Bennett
QS: Jack Linchuan Qiu & Anbin Shi
QS: Trained a political scientist, how did you travel to the
study of communication and media? Why do you find this
intellectual terrain interesting, especially -- given your highly
influential work over the past decades, starting from News: The
Politics of Illusion (1983, 5th edition translated into
Chinese in 2005) -- the interjunctures between politics and
journalism, and more recently between social movements and digital
technologies as shown in your award-winning article with Dr.
Segerberg?
LB: From my early days I was interested in language, symbolism
and ideologies. It seemed to me that politics involves powerful
language, symbolism and rituals that motivate people to follow
leaders, make sacrifices and take other actions. As a young scholar
I was impressed with works in sociology and anthropology,
particularly scholars such as Durkheim, Weber, Marvin Harris and
Victor Turner. People in societies create meaning beyond the
individual and beyond local life. How this process works has always
been fascinating to me.
However, there were not many scholars in political science who
were interested in these topics. Fortunately I was able to work
with Murray Edelman whose book The Symbolic Uses of Politics
was for me a classic. Also, my Ph.D. supervisor Robert Lane helped
me understand how ideology worked in everyday life for ordinary
people. And during my studies I was inspired by an earlier
generation of political scientists, including Harold Lasswell, who
explained the connections between individual personality and the
great symbols of politics.
When I finished my graduate studies, I wanted to contribute to
these traditions, but at the time, political science was not open
to such big topics. The field was dominated by quantitative methods
and small questions. I noticed that most of the people asking the
kinds of questions I wanted to explore were moving into the field
of communication. I was able to publish early work on political
ritual, the importance of storytelling in political processes, and
the book on the news.
News: The Politics of Illusion was based on a paradox I
saw in the relationship between American journalism and
politics. I noticed that despite proclaiming
itself the world’s freest press system, the daily news in America
was mostly filled with what government officials told journalists.
I wondered why a free press so often reported what the government
said. When the press did report another side of a story, it was
usually what the other political party said. Many issues were left
out of the news, and many stories in the news did not look beyond
what those in power wanted to say. In other studies, I found that
most press systems bend the news to how government officials spin
it. Important national differences exist in terms of how well
governments represent the interests of citizens, and how press
systems promote public accountability.
In recent years the U.S. news system has become so full of
political spin that many people began to lose confidence in it. At
the same time, the internet offered many channels of information
and many ways for citizens to communicate about things that
interest them. These changes prompted us to bring a team of
scholars together to work on Mediated Politics, the other
book that is translated into Chinese. In this book we tried to
looks at a number of trends: how journalism was changing, why young
people were turning to other information forms such as political
comedy, and how the internet offered new ways for people to discuss
issues and create public opinion.
As people all over the world began to experiment with digital
media I shifted my research to study how people use the internet
and social media to share information and organize popular
movements. As I followed these movements around the world and
studied the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, I saw
that communication technologies were making a new kind of public
opinion and political organization possible. This idea became the
basis for thinking about a new political logic based on
communication networks. That is the main idea in the article with
Alexandra Segerberg “The Logic of Connective Action” that you are
publishing in this journal. Next we published a book length version
of The Logic of Connective Action (Cambridge University
Press, 2013[JQ1] ), which adds many
empirical studies to our theoretical model, and looks at power and
organization in networks. I hope that the book can also be
translated into Chinese some day.
In addition to seeing how digital media are changing how people
communicate, I am interested in understanding how communication is
becoming part of social and political organization. This is
changing the core communication paradigm. For most of its history
as a field, the focus of communication has been on mass media, news
and information systems, media effects, and the sending and
receiving of messages. Now, we must add theories and methods for
understanding communication as social organization. There are of
course other scholars such as Manuel Castells who have already
pointed the way. My current interest is in how networked publics
form and take action.
QS: From your prolific writings we gather that you hold
progressive political values and normative stance for social
change. Yet at the same time, this does not get in your way as a
rigorous empirical researcher and critical thinker. How have you
managed to do this?
LB: I think that normative perspectives should be tested
empirically to see if they are valid or if they need to be changed.
For example, I am concerned that many government officials in many
countries today use policy frames that put the environment against
the economy. This means that when the economy is not doing well,
policies to help the environment always suffer. And, when the
economy is growing again, business pressures often work against
environment policies that might cut into profits or slow the
economy down. This common framing of economic and environmental
issues as competing interests is also a normative position. It is a
norm with powerful backers and a lot of propaganda driving it. When
we study this kind of communication as scholars, we can go beyond
just describing it, and asking whether it is functional. Is the
communication we are studying working well for society? What if
thinking about the economy and the environment as competing
problems causes even bigger problems? How can we communicate
differently about these issues?
Without having some normative guidelines in our work, it is
impossible to decide how well different institutions or systems in
society are working. Is the government working well? Is the press
working well? How would we know?
This general approach applies to most of the topics I study. For
example, looking at protest networks around the world invites value
judgments. Are these protests effective? How do we know if they are
effective? This kind of evaluation is different
from making ideological judgments about what is good or bad. I am
more interested in whether people create systems that work, and if
they can use communication to make them
better.
QS: Many are talking about big data these days, but few
discuss how to build a good team of big data researchers, involving
both social scientists and software engineers, for instance. Could
you shed light on this aspect of interdisciplinary team
building?
LB: This is a very interesting challenge for communication
research. How to build the interdisciplinary teams needed to
analyze big data? I know colleagues in communication who have found
research partners from fields as far away as physics. Many
scientific fields have already learned how to handle big data, and
having the technical infrastructure and the programming skills are
important for communication researchers. My early interest in big
data came out of developing the connective action theory and
wanting to study large public networks. I had to find colleagues
around the university to help me do the work. I looked for computer
scientists, information scientists, people in technology design,
and even people in the arts working with technology. I learned that
many of these people were also interested in working with large
data sets based on micro-blogging or social media.
The problem is that the approaches of computer scientists or
information scientists are often different from communication
researchers. They speak a different scientific language and use
different methods. This means that when teams come together, they
have to learn how to translate between the different scientific
languages and approaches. This can be very interesting, but it can
also be very frustrating. It is easier if the communication
researchers are able to lead the projects and use their theoretical
perspectives to guide the programmers and the technical team. This
leadership requires that communication researchers learn how data
can be captured, how databases are organized, and how to translate
theoretical questions into specific empirical operations. This
often means developing new theories and new methods, which is very
exciting.
One of my current projects involves understanding the
organization of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the United
States. We have a data set from Twitter, a micro-blogging platform
(like weibo) that is very popular here and in Europe. We have 60
million tweets. What do we do? We needed to
develop a model of how this social media network connected to the
other networks involved in the protests and how it linked these
other networks together. Unlike a lot of research that focuses on
the content of the microblog posts, which is often very hard to
understand, we decided that the content of the tweets was not so
important for understanding how the crowd was organized. Instead,
we focused on the uses of hashtags (#) that people attach to tweets
to direct them to different parts of the crowd. We also decided to
look at the links to other sites that people inserted in their
messages. This involved creating a new coding method to categorize
the content of the different kinds of links we found. In the end,
we created a simple model of how these direction tags and link
patterns were important for organizing the Occupy crowd at
different times.
In the future, we will see more communication scholars doing big
data work. This will change our ideas of research and methods and
how to display our findings.
QS: Like in most societies, popular discourse in
China holds that the Internet is changing the
world for good. Would you agree that the Internet, particularly
social media, brings about a brave new world of politics?
LB: The internet is neither good nor bad. There are many
conflicting ways that people, businesses and governments can use
it. Most governments are using it to gather information on
citizens. The recent scandal in the United States involving the
National Security Agency revealed that the government is gathering
information on emails and phone calls around the world and forcing
internet service providers to give up information on their
customers. These are not positive developments.
On the business side, companies now know a lot about who we are
and what we do. This is changing the way products are marketed and
how we act as consumers.
Citizens face other challenges in deciding how to use their
communication power. For example, it is not always easy to know who
the other people are in a big network, or how reliable the
information they are sharing is. Rumors can trigger public
reactions that are not always positive.
On the other hand, there are many signs that people can use
technology networks in positive ways: to share real problems with
others, to respond quickly to crises, to raise important public
questions, and organize communities of interest to address various
issues. In many parts of the world, the mobile phone is the most
powerful tool that citizens have ever had. New software systems are
helping citizens with many everyday problems involving health care,
transportation, public safety, and getting basic information and
services from government agencies. Many of these
projects are developed by non-government organizations (NGOs) that
provide interactive technologies to help ordinary people share
information about health problems, violence, crime, weather
conditions, food shortages, and many areas of life that governments
around the world are often not in touch with. These kinds of
technology networks are different from crowds. These are examples
of the organizationally-enabled networks that we discuss in our
article.
And of course, large crowds based on technology-enabled
connective action are becoming common around the world. There have
always been public protests, but the difference now is that people
can communicate their messages more clearly and coordinate their
actions more effectively, without having to become formally
organized, which is often costly or dangerous in many places.
QS: Is the rise of political extremism inevitable in
this era of Web 2.0?
LB: There has always been political extremism, and it has
existed without the Web. However, the Web gives it a platform that
may help it grow and reach more people. In the United States,
racist images of President Obama have circulated online and reached
large numbers of people. To some people these seem humorous, but to
others they are deeply offensive and harmful. The problem is how
societies decide to control this kind of extremist
communication.
The Web has often played a role in escalating ethnic or
religious conflicts. One of the more famous cases involved cartoons
of the Prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found very offensive.
Because of the internet, these images circulated around the world,
and created huge conflicts that might not have become so polarized
in an earlier
age.
The mass media can be controlled, but the internet is more
difficult. For example, in Sweden, an anti-immigrant party (Sweden
Democrats) has entered the parliament. Their 2010 election ads were
so offensive and extreme that they were not allowed on television.
However, the ads were soon posted online, and probably received
more viewers and more discussion that they would have on
television.
QS: Were you there in the 1999 anti-WTO “Battle of
Seattle”? How was digitally enabled action (DNA) around the turn of
the century different from, or similar to, more recent DNA
movements like the indignado, Arab Spring, and Occupy?
LB: When the WTO Battle of Seattle happened, I was in Italy
attending a conference. So, I watched days of protests on the
television news. When I returned home, I contacted numerous friends
who participated and then began a large project interviewing
different kinds of participants. The interviews from that project
are still available online at the WTO History Project website
(http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/).
As these interviews developed, it became clear that this was an
early case of a new kind of protest organization. Two interesting
changes became clear.
First, many different groups came together and decided to work
around their differences so that the main protest events became an
expression of the many different issues involved in the process of
global economic change. This relaxing of the divisions between
different issue movements also enabled people to express their
personal views without having to join group positions. This
personalization of politics has become a central foundation of the
kinds of digitally networked action (DNA) that we see
today.
The second interesting aspect of the Seattle protests was the
creation of digital media platforms that activists could use to
share direct reports, information and other kinds of content. The
most famous of these inventions was Indymedia, which grew as an
open source system to more than 100 outlets around the world. Some
of these Indymedia channels are still active.
These growth and the varieties of DNA have been impressive in
the short time since the WTO protests. Many commercial technologies
that people use today were not available 10 years ago: Youtube,
Facebook, and Twitter just to name a few of the platforms that have
been important for many uprisings in the Middle East, Europe and
the United States. Today, nearly anyone can try to activate social
networks to draw attention to issues. Most of these efforts do not
succeed, but some of them create dense organizational networks that
enable participants to coordinate their activities and connect with
audiences around the world.
QS: What are the real implications of contemporary
activism worldwide that is based on concerned citizens and NGOs
directly engaging each other often without going through
mass media or other traditional institutions?
LB: One surprising finding in our studies of European NGOs that
use technologies to activate social networks is that it actually
increases the chances of making news in the mass media. (These
findings are reported in Chapter 4 of the book version of The Logic
of Connective Action). It is clear that the role of NGOs is growing
in the global political system. With NGOs using digital
technologies to create issue publics, and large numbers of NGOs
linking together to share different issues, we see the creation of
global publics that change how people engage in politics. For
example, there were over 100,000 protesters outside the 2009 United
Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, and millions more around
the world participated through digital media.
The challenge of course is that power is still concentrated
within nations and within corporations, and many of these power
centers are not open to helping solve global problems. However,
many public networks have had success pressuring governments and
corporations to begin changing how they operate in some areas.
However these situations develop, they are of interest to
communication scholars.
The emergence of new information channels organized by NGOs is
also of interest to journalism education. Journalism is in crisis
in many countries. But there are likely to be new opportunities for
journalists (or storytellers) working for NGOs, foundations, think
tanks, and other places where interesting information is being
produced and packaged for publics.
Beyond NGOs, we also find that large networked protests like
Occupy Wall Street can make an impact on mass media debates about
various issues (these findings are in Chapter 5 of the book). For
example, the United States has experienced large increases in
inequality, which affects political power, the working of
democracy, and the chances of realizing the American Dream. Yet,
discussions of these problems were missing from mass media. The
Occupy protests created a powerful internet meme “we are the 99%”
which quickly became part of everyday discussions among the general
population. This idea of how rich the top 1% had soon entered mass
media reports and discussions. Even President Obama began to talk
about the problem of inequality.
QS: We know you are interested in
China. However, political communication research is mostly
embedded in the western world. If we still hold
the Hegelian belief that “China is an exception of all exceptions,”
from a global comparative perspective, what are the most
compelling premises to study a country like
China? What are the most pertinent
questions for young political communication scholars in China to
address?
LB: I am not an expert on China, although I am learning a lot of
interesting things. It is clear that China is an exceptional
country. The western media theories clearly have their limits. The
Chinese press system, the economy, and the government are all
different from the western systems that have been studied most
heavily. However, there may be some key concepts and ideas that
travel across different contexts and offer some basis for
comparison. For example, when my book on the news was translated
into Chinese, I began to receive emails from Chinese scholars who
explained that one of the reasons for their interest in the book
was that it showed how a more liberal or independent press system
could still be connected in strong ways to government.
Another example is the idea of connective action, which may be
of some use in thinking about digital media in China. As Alexandra
Segerberg and I point out in the article and in the book, one key
to understanding connective action is the personalization of social
identity and communication media in very different countries. The
reasons, of course, differ because countries and cultures are
different. In western democracies, market forces and globalization
have broken down old civil society and social structures, leaving
individuals ready to create network societies, as Castells calls
them. In other countries, civil society is not as independent from
government to begin with, so individuals become more isolated when
it comes to public life. When you add social media to this kind of
situation, you also get conditions for large-scale connective
action.
Another interesting comparison between China and western
countries is that social media are affecting how people receive
their information. For many younger people, social media become
like news feeds, and they are now part of the information
distribution process. People also have the technology to report
directly from the scene of events, and to create content and share
it with others.
In many countries, news organizations have started using direct
“citizen journalism” feeds as news sources. Of course, China is a
different situation in terms of how social media affect news
organizations and how those organizations respond.
I guess that the challenge is in deciding which ideas may be of
use for comparing China and other countries, and how those ideas
can be adapted better to the Chinese situation. I am excited to
hear about how Chinese scholars will use the ideas of connective
action!
QS: The bulk of your work deals with what you call “late
modern” or “postindustrial” democracies, a
category to which China perhaps does not
belong. China is still modernizing, its economy still
industrializing, its landscape still urbanizing. There seems to be
a fundamental mismatch between “late modern” social sciences and
the Chinese reality, including Chinese media systems.
What are the strategies Chinese scholars may use to address this
mismatch productively rather than being torn apart by it?
LB: Yes, this is an important difference to keep in mind when
theorizing and when comparing China to other countries. As I said
above, it is important to find the right level of analysis for
making comparisons. At a macro level, the differences between a
late modern and a still modernizing society seem huge. However,
different forces can sometimes produce similar outcomes. For
example, the causes of individualization or personalization of
social experience are very different, but the effects on
communication may be very similar. It is also important to
understand how these similar communication patterns may evolve
along different historical paths because of how different
institutions of government or business shape them.
QS: How do you see the role of citizen journalism
through Weibo and similar social media in the transformation of
Chinese politics and society?
LB: In the United States, a major journalism award was given to
an anonymous Iranian citizen who posted a video of a protest
following the 2009 Iranian elections. The decision was based on the
idea that this unknown citizen journalist was the best source for
understanding an important event. Citizens with mobile phones are
often in the best position to cover important stories and get the
news out fast. As I said above, this is changing how journalism
looks today and it will continue to change in the future.
As far as China goes, many observers have said that Weibo has
opened a new (although indirect) communication channel between
people and the government. There seem to be times when the
government understands that the people are sending important
information, and also seems to respond.
However, there are also many risks and problems that are not
easy to solve. How Weibo can be better integrated with the press
system seems a difficult problem. The media logic of social media
is different from mass media logic. People expect to interact with
information now, and add their own ideas and share it in their own
ways. This is very different than the logic of television news or
newspapers.
QS: A key challenge for China, like for the US,
is increasing social inequality, which made imagined community
illusory, civic engagement impossible. Revisiting his
hometown in Ohio, Robert Putnam illustrated this painful process
in a recent article for the New York Times entitled
“Crumbling American Dreams” -- although he didn’t mention the
Internet at all. Can digital media be used in a way that
helps decrease inequality and facilitate community building, rather
than the usual complaints of personalization, atomization, and
digital divide, leading to nowhere but anomie?
LB: As I said earlier, the Occupy Wall Street protests helped
start an interesting public discussion of inequality in the U.S.
However, social media cannot directly change economic conditions,
but they can raise a public voice about them.
As for whether social media can build greater social capital,
that is an interesting question. Putnam has long been skeptical
about the role of online communication. Most theorists of civil
society believe that social capital comes only from stable
face-to-face relationships. However, it is also clear that people
can develop emotional connections and trust through social media if
the conditions are right. One condition is that parts of virtual
communities must connect to the social world.
There must be real people living real lives somewhere at the center
of digital communication. It is interesting that some of the most
popular technologies among young people involve sending photos and
videos of their everyday life: school, friends, vacations, parties,
and home. Sharing these representations of real life may help build
new kinds of “imagined community.” People can still use avatars or
fantasy images of themselves in games, but they seem to prefer
sharing real life images in their online social relations.
QS: In a recent issue of Inside Higher Education, Dean
Ernest J. Wilson of the USC Annenberg School gave the field of
communication “a barely passing grade of C-” for the poor public
service provided by communication scholarship in talking to
the public, engaging the media industry, and helping form better
policy. Do you agree with this assessment? How can communication
studies as a field do better in public engagement?
LB: I disagree with his grade for communication studies. In his
article he compared communication to professional fields like law,
business, and medicine that have much clearer boundaries and
standards for their practices. Communication is everywhere, and
practiced by everyone. We don’t need licenses to communicate. And
as some of the questions above suggest, the ways in which people
communicate are changing rapidly and have different directions in
different societies. All of this explains why the field of
communication is not as clearly defined or dominated by single
methods and theories as some other fields. So to give the field a
bad grade just because it covers a more complicated and diverse
social reality seems to miss the point. I do agree, however, that
communication can develop more credible perspectives on policy and
design of communication systems. Government and business do not
always know what they are doing, and make serious mistakes in how
they develop different technologies or regulate them in society.
Communication can do a better job of developing credibility in
these areas.
Dean Wilson also gave communication a bad grade because it
borrows so many ideas from other fields, and does not have its own
unique theory. Again, this seems to miss the point that
communication perspectives exist in all the other social sciences.
In order to have good theories of communication, it is necessary to
borrow from sociology, politics, economics, psychology,
anthropology, art, literature and other fields. I think the
diversity of perspectives in communication is a good thing.
This said, I do think that work in communication is uneven in
quality. There is too much descriptive work that does not help
develop theories. And there is too much mechanical use of methods,
as people pick questions and design research because they like to
use a particular method. As a result of descriptive, methods driven
research, we do not develop good theory or a clear research agenda.
These issues can be addressed by better graduate education and more
careful research.
QS: Your other most circulated book in China is Mediated
Politics (2000, Chinese edition in 2011), co-edited by you and
Robert Entman. In the concluding section, you address the dilemma
of communication in the future of democracy: shrinking public
sphere, the rising cynicism, the interpenetration of image and
reality to create an illusion of democracy, echoing your 1983
book, News: The Illusion of Politics. Do you still hold
these views?
LB: This is an interesting question. When I look at the mass
media, I still worry about rising cynicism and a limited public
sphere filled with official spin. In the U.S., things may be even
worse now than when we wrote Mediated Politics. The press
system is in crisis, the ranks of public relations professionals
and spin-doctors outnumber journalists, and the public has lost
confidence in public institutions and the
press.
However, when I think about the Internet as an emerging public
sphere, I am more optimistic. The internet cannot solve all human
problems, or even most human communication problems. However, more
people have a voice today than ever before in human history. More
people have ways to get their voice into conversations with larger
numbers of other people than ever before. This communication is
noisy, uneven, full of rumors and not always very wise or informed.
However, we have also seen the creation of technologies that help
make crowds better organized, smarter, and more able to make
decisions. These are remarkable developments.
Even more remarkable is the fact that many of these technologies
are free and open sourced. They are created and shared by people
who do not own them or receive much financial compensation for
their work. This means that communication is recognized by many
people as a very important part of life. People see communication
technologies as important tools for solving problems and improving
the human condition. In these ways, I am more optimistic than in my
earlier work.
QS: Thank you very much for an engaging dialogue full of deep
insights.
[JQ1]Amazon
shows it was published on Aug 26, 2013. It’s already out right?
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