NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen was invited by Sciences Po’s School of Journalism today to give an inaugural lecture to the fresh new crop of wannabe journalists. As soon as there is video available, I will link to it here. But for the time being, let me just try to convey the gist of what got through to me from this fascinating 90 minutes in the eerily retro-looking fifth floor François Goguel room at 56, rue des Saints Pères.

The title of his lecture was both elaborate and impossible to translate into French, because of our assimilating the word “public” and “audience” into one word: “le public”. It was: The People formerly known as the Audience and the Audience properly known as the Public.

As the title suggests, the lecture was built on two main historical developments, two shifts in power which Mr. Rosen described and explained for us in a compelling and purposeful way, although at times a bit too didactically.

The first shift occurred during the second half of the 18th century, more precisely: between 1759 and the French Revolution. Before this time, there was no such thing as public opinion, or if there was, it had no voice of its own, and therefore had no impact on politics. The political game was run privately and mostly in secret by the king and his court. In 1764, the King declared it illegal to print or publish anything about the reform of state finances. However, in 1781 Jacques Necker published a public record of the crown’s finances, entitled Compte-rendu au Roi. In fact the growth of an international market, the rising interdependence of nations, forced the government to be more transparent.
As the English historian Keith Michael Baker noted, there occurred at this time a “transfer of authority” (which Rosen dubbed more decisively a “shift in power”) from

“the public person of the sovereign to the sovereign person of the public”

Inventing the French Revolution, by Keith Michael Baker, page 172, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Mr. Rosen reminded us that public opinion grew and was not something that existed out of nowhere. In the English case, only members of parliament had the right to freedom of speech, and only as long as they exercised this freedom within closed doors: that is why they called themselves “the People indoors”, as opposed to the outside masses, who had no say in anything. At the famous 1919 peace conference in Versailles, a huge number of correspondents (100 members of the American press corps alone) were present for the first time at international negotiations of such a scale, and demanded to attend the negotiations themselves, which was unheard of at that point. Thus, public opinion entered as a factor that could influence negotiations themselves, through the mediation of… the media, who reported on their progress on a daily basis.

This first shift transformed the public into an audience, connected up to various sources of information, but increasingly isolated from each other. Thus, in the 1976 movie The Network, anchorman Howard Beale did something that exposed the situation of the mass audience, and broke this paradigm: for once, the atomized members, closed up in their private living rooms, but all watching the same TV channel, were encouraged to stop staring at the screen, go out to their windows, and scream: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore”, thus making themselves aware of their own presence. However, Mr. Rosen noted, the cries blend into one big inscrutable blur, because the public sphere they fall into is a void.

This is where the second shift comes in. The power that was exclusively in the hands of the media, that is the power to publish now lies in the hands of the people. Everybody has a newspaper: it’s their blog. Everybody has a news channel: it’s YouTube. Everybody has their own radio waves: it’s called podcasting.

This is why, Mr. Rosen concluded, we shouldn’t be talking of a mass audience. Yes, a mass audience is a particular way of arranging people in space. But that arrangement is now passé, as they have also an influence on their own position in that space, the information nexus. They are no longer isolated from one another. Thus, as Raymond Williams declared as early as 1958 (in his magnum opus Culture and Society):

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.

This is because you can never reach out and touch a “mass man” or a “mass woman”. As Williams explained:

They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people.

As journalists, we can either address people as members of a community (like a local newspaper does) or as “eyeballs” that need to be counted (like a national TV program would). It is of course advisable to see people more as a public than as an aggregate of eyeballs.

On those grounds, Professor Rosen presented what sounded a lot like the Decalogue of the aspiring young journalist:

1. Do not think of the recipients of your work as consumers, but as users. Journalists are people who make (not to be confused with “make up”) things, they do not find things. You have to make things that are useful.
2. The users know more than you do. This was originally noticed by Dan Gilmore, who realized that the aggregate of the people who read his posts necessarily contains more knowledge than he, even as a highly informed reporter, will ever gain. One must learn to harness this knowledge.
3. Journalism is becoming mutualized: people themselves become part of the distribution process.
4. A journalist should describe the world in a way that helps people participate in it. For example, data journalists must dig through tons of tables and lists of numbers and make this information digestible, easily understandable, so it can be used in an efficient way.
5. Anyone can doesn’t mean everyone will. Do not expect that just because you are out there blogging, that everybody will participate in the creative process. As a general rule, about 90% of the audience never interact with the content. Learn to accept it.
6. A journalist is just a heightened (I would say magnified) case of a citizen, not some separate class.
7. The authority of the journalist starts at the point where he can say: I have been there, you haven’t, let me tell you about it.
8. Listen to the demand and give users what they have no way to demand. In other words, you must not only give people what they want, and not only give them what you think they need, but combine both!
9. Don’t take the “view from nowhere” (this term Mr. Rosen would like to see adopted by others in the field, but apparently it hasn’t caught on yet). What he meant is that objectivity is increasingly mistrusted, as the users realize that no journalist can be entirely above and totally disinterested in the subject of his or her reporting. I would sum up this point in the following way: Objectivity is not a place. So tell people where you’re coming from. They will only trust you more for it.
10. Last, but not least, Mr. Rosen quoted Tocqueville’s assertion from Democracy in America:
    

    “Newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers.”

    The cost and difficulty of like-minded people to share information, pool what they know, and publish that knowledge, is falling. Thus, if you want to provide a valuable service to your users, you may want to try to identify such existing “associations” as are out there, and create the information circus that will serve them.

Finally, in the Q&A, Mr. Rosen mentioned a valuable new idea of his, which would be to borrow “levels” from the gaming universe, so that the media could tailor its content for different “user levels” – for instance, if you know everything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if you’ve been following the story for years, then the text you would be presented with on the latest direct negotiations will go much more in-depth, and will not bore you with explanations about who Netanyahu is and what his political background is. Another idea I found compelling was the comparison of journalists to museum curators, who must sift through the unimaginable amount of information so as to present an important selection in a comprehensible way. As Clay Shirky notes: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

You will find more of Jay Rosen’s ideas by typing his name into YouTube. Enjoy. And be sure to follow @jayrosen_nyu on Twitter. See if you can keep up.

Here are some of the things Amartya Sen said today at Sciences Po, in a conference he entitled “Capitalism and Confusion”. You can download a PDF version here. Although I believe prof. Sen would recognize all these thoughts as his, please do not quote directly since I may not have transcribed his exact phrasing.

A recent public opinion poll in the US asking “Which would you prefer: socialism or capitalism?” yielded 50/50 responses. Capitalism has been largely discredited due to the food and financial crises of 2008, which are ongoing today. People are thinking: “Maybe socialism is not so bad after all.” In popular opinion, it is more and more widely associated with universal health coverage, pension benefits, poverty relief.

That being said, the Soviet economy can hardly serve as a model for any country today. Market and economic transactions are necessary qualifications of any functioning economic system. Individual empowerment based on private ownership is the archetypal feature of capitalism. So we do have a fairly clear definition.

However, Adam Smith, whom we consider to be the founding father of market economy theory, never used the term “capitalism”. Nor does he put forth a theory of the sufficiency of the market economy. Smith has a reputation of being the champion of the pursuit of self-interest by all human beings. In fact, Smith definitely did not take that view and argued for the importance of the motivation of generosity.

And yet he is continually cited by the proponents of the now outdated, egoistic version of capitalism. See the sarcastic rendering of this paradox in Stephen Leacock’s limerick:

Adam, Adam, Adam Smith
Listen what I charge you with!
Didn’t you say
In a class one day
That selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all doctrines that was the Pith.
Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?

The famous phrase from Wealth of Nations (26-7), „ It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”, has been quoted over and over and the reading of Smith’s entire theory is too often confined to those lines. But even they themselves do not imply a claim of the adequacy of self-interest as the sole driver of economic success.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (IV-2), Smith writes: “Humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others.” He acknowledged from the outset the important role of non-profit value. Going beyond the simple tasks of regulation and control, Smith drew attention to the State’s positive actions in support of the well-being and developing the capabilities of the people. The state has supporting functions in safeguarding and promoting human life and freedom. Smith was deeply concerned about poverty, illiteracy and deprivation which might remain despite a very well functioning market economy. He was a defender of the role of the State in doing things that the market failed to do such as universal education and poverty relief.

Smith was profoundly uninterested in nomenclature and deeply interested in content. He was uninvolved in worrying about insignia. The question should not be: how are we going to call it? But: what do we want to achieve? Let us follow his example and not concern ourselves with preconceived nomenclature. Today, our system has shown its vulnerability, especially in cases of mistrust arising in the credit system. We today should not seek a „new capitalism”. It does not matter much what we call it. We need to deal with the current vulnerability and instability. The instabilities can be tackled not by faith but by choice, open-minded pragmatic choice!

In the long term, we must acknowledge the need of the State to promote healthcare as a part of its diverse obligations. Particularly in the US, which is the only rich country in the world without universal healthcare organized by the State. Kenneth Arrow shows that there are problems of asymmetry of information in the market of health care and health insurance. A patient often has very little knowledge of the medical characteristics of his illness and therefore it is difficult for him to choose the best treatment.

In this logic, the private insurer has good profit-based incentives to deny health insurance to anyone who has a probability of getting sick. So what’s the point?

A wrong belief, once established, is very difficult to dethrone. See the threat of „socialized medicine” in the US. Misperceptions abound in the US about the workings of universal healthcare in European countries like for instance: “you cannot choose your doctor”.

Let us bear in mind the opening words of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

We don’t want to kill the market economy but simply recognize the role of the State in ensuring its success. Let us recognize that the standard of living has increased not only because of GDP growth but also because of universal healthcare and public education. The role of market economy does not contradict the role of the State.

In Smith’s case, the whole point of his Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759 was to make it possible for us to work for each other instead of against each other. Even today, this approach requires pragmatically rethinking everything we have done wrong.

Robert Hefner, South-East Asia specialist @ Boston University, delivered a talk at Sciences Po about recent findings in ties between democratization and the percentage of Muslim population in Arab and non-Arab countries. The conclusion was simple and irrefutable: in non-Arab states, democratization progresses much faster, though “democracy” there is not exactly what we in the West tend to imagine, it is a specifically Islam-flavored and Islam-compatible democracy based on higher participation and state responsibility. In Arab states, on the other hand, there is a significant democracy deficit, even when by “democracy” we mean simply a competitive electoral system where the elected government has actual enforcable power.

Download notes in English or French.