Fair Use Lab

The U. S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act will be held Friday, July 23, 2010 from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (eastern daylight time).

Shown live from The Great Hall in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building, the event will be shown in accessible streaming media and then re-broadcast, on-demand.

Featured speakers will include Attorney General Eric Holder, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, former Congressman Tony Coelho, and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez.  Their presentations will be followed by a facilitated panel discussion, moderated by Samuel Bagenstos, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and will include presentations by ADA experts who played significant roles in the development and passage of the ADA:  Bob Burgdorf, Yoshiko Dart, Chai Feldblum, Arlene Mayerson, and Bobby Silverstein.

See the ADA.gov website for links to live/on demand streams:
http://www.ada.gov/2010adacelebration/ada20webcastinfo.htm

I’ve mused for some time about the ways in which the public sphere has been transformed by blogging. I didn’t make an etymological connection between public sphere and blogosphere, though, until I listened to Rebooting the News #56. Jay Rosen spoke several times in that podcast about how the “sphere” of media is changing, and I got the connection, finally. Duh. “Sphere” is the root of both phrases, linguistically, and I would argue that public sphere is conceptually central to the vast hyperlinked network called the blogosphere.

The Wikipedia entry on blogosphere doesn’t say anything like this in its account of the word’s origin:

The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.^[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,^[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the term’s humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio’s programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena,^[3] and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers^[4] and “familiar strangers” in the blogosphere.^[5][6]

Rebooting the News #56 is a lively discussion of the rhetorical question, “Is blogging dead?” The interlocutors are Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and guest Brendan Greeley, who now writes for The Economist about technology and culture. I first knew his work when he was blogger-in-chief for Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon.

The liveliest part of the discussion wasn’t the future of blogging but its history, as experienced by three early practitioners. I listened to the podcast a second time so I could write these notes:

Brendan Greeley is now technology and policy correspondent at The Economist. Similar beats:

Jose Antonio Vargas | Huffington Post | Technology as Anthropology

Evgeny Morozov | Net Effect | FOREIGN POLICY

BG asks “Is blogging dead?”

Attention has moved to FB, that’s where people are.

Cross-blog links are decreasing, Technoratti  traffic has dropped while FB traffic has skyrocketed.

Dave: FB is blogging, why attachment to the word blogging, or to particular software, or form of presentation

Dave never did a Google Blog Search

BG: Could we define blogging as a set of habits?

Dave: natural-born bloggers,

Dave never liked word “blogging” – which he considers a trademark for Blogger software

Dave’s description: “unedited voice of a person”
Which Jay translated as “a person talking with you” – A medium for individuals

Jay’s first look at a blog – InstaPundit.com – didn’t know what he was looking at; appears at first glance to be  like a page from a book, magazine or newspaper, but it’s real power comes from linking to the blogosphere. Blogging is blog + blogosphere.

Concentration of “sphere” into several huge sites, not as decentralized as blogging was originally.

Dave sees this as cyclical ebb and flow of technology.

BG: holy grail of radio: finding voices of real people. Blogs provided a database of what real people thought.

Dave on Twitter search: 140 characters not worth searching for.

Next level of innovation: someone breaks 140-character barrier, and we’re back to blogging!

“Facebook is training wheels for whatever will come next”

Dave: Twitter is a river of news aggregator; notification system and blogging tool, an integrated aggregator and blogging tool. Can you imagine FB or Twitter without RSS?

Blogging was this in 2002, Twitter is now”:
DW: “an integrated aggregator and blogging tool”

Jay: Life cycle: new tools emerge, learning curve, adaptations evolve that shape tools to life rhythms

Dave: Twitter isn’t just an outgrowth of blogging, but also SMS, texting. Esther Dyson predicted this in 1990s when web went so graphic.

All these things are iterations of RSS, river of news systems

Jay: media industries grew up around fixed ideas about how media works, understood attributes as assumptions, as givens – ideas about media thought to be unchanging

Brendan: what we used to call blogging has turned into publishing. Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan

Jay: when journalism was professionalized, it came with “de-voicing” of individual journalists. Now a new age of personal journalism – “re-voicing” of American journalism

Dave’s epiphany: writing tool should not be in WP dashboard; something lost with transition from RadioUserland and Manila to WP. He’s working on new blogging software.

Dave: When everyone thinks it’s all locked up, it’s about to blow wide open.

Dave: “Once the users take control, they won’t give it back.”

I’ve been musing about 40 years of experience with two careers that necessarily intertwine and overlap. The first is my career as a media professional. The second is my career as a person with a disability. You could think of one as the day job and the other as my second gig, but the experiences cannot be separated into such neatly distinct categories. If anything unifies my work in both areas, it is the concept of public sphere. Here is how Wikipedia currently defines it:

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”^[1] The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”^[2] and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.^[3]

The public sphere mediates between the “private sphere” and the “Sphere of Public Authority”,^[4] “The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor.”^[5] Whereas the “Sphere of Public Authority” dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class,^[5] the public sphere crossed over both these realms and “Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.”^[6] “This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”^[7] The public sphere ‘is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling.”^[7] These distinctions between “state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations…are essential to democratic theory.”^[8] The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.^[9] The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy, and how public opinion becomes political action.

The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to the public sphere.^[10] “Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate”.^[11] Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society.

The concept of public sphere is grounded in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who wrote the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962). I plan to undertake a systematic close reading of the book, which I will document here in the Fair Use Lab. The first step will be rendering the text in a format accessible to me.

Other Internet sources:

• Public Sphere Guide A Research Guide, Teaching Guide and Resource for the Renewal of the Public Sphere
• Transformations of the Public Sphere Essay Forum
• Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New German Critique 3 (1974)
• Spark summary of Habermas’ public sphere book

While browsing O’Reilly Media for information about accessibility of their  PDF ebooks, I found this statement about “Acceptable Use”:

Our PDFs are DRM free because we trust our customers to do the right thing. Reasonable sharing, as you would do with a print book, is allowed. You are free to copy and paste and print the document for your personal use. You are not allowed to place the content on a server for downloading, and you should purchase a site license if you wish to share the PDF with a group of developers on an Intranet.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Twenty years is significant, not because it’s a round number, but rather, because it represents a generation of experience gained since the law was enacted. Many of us who lobbied for the ADA believed at the time that it could take a generation or more, as it had with the Civil Rights Act before it, to fulfill the ADA’s promise of equal opportunity for Americans with disabilities.

I thought about the ADA several days ago when I passed through U.S. Border Control at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. It’s a journey I make every few weeks, so it should be routine. I have to admit that I still feel a sense of trepidation at crossing the border, proving my citizenship, and explaining my disability to suspicious officials who decide to ask about it. No, I am not a terrorist. I’m just a guy with a white cane who can find his own way through the airport, thank-you. No “special services” are required. After I clear customs, I always sigh with relief and think, “Well, they let me in again”

That civic ritual at the border is a kind of negotiation. It involves my identity as a person with a disability in a give-and-take dialogue with the disability attitudes of others. It reminds me of the day 20 years ago when I was invited to the White House for the ADA signing ceremony.  The event was held outside on the South Lawn, between the White House and the Ellipse. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors to enter. The Secret Service must have had a crash course in disability awareness, because it was the smoothest security check I ever passed. As I walked through the wrought-iron gate, I looked around and marveled, “Wow, they let me in here!” They let me and a thousand other people. We had every kind of disability in the human condition, and we used every kind of assistive device available at the time. I like to think we were the most diverse group of citizens ever gathered together at the White House.

The ADA signing ceremony was held outside, not because it was a beautiful summer day, but because the White House itself was not fully accessible. Many in our diverse group of citizens could not have entered the building. Long gone were the wooden ramps installed five decades earlier to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.

On its anniversary, pundits will debate what the ADA has accomplished since then. I am no pundit, but I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the ceremony. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is how you begin.”

That’s the crux of what I want to say to you today. The Americans with Disabilities Act was an unfinished project at the moment it was signed into law, and it remains an unfinished project today. It depends on us, and the work we will do, to carry it to completion.

My own work in the field of disability studies has been greatly influenced by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher of liberation. He taught non-literate poor people how to read by first convincing them that, through the daily work they did with their hands, they had culture and made culture. He believed culture to be an unfinished project that he called “the struggle for human completion.”

Listen to that expansive phrase again: the struggle for human completion. That is a worldview large enough to include all of us, whether we have disabilities or not. That is a project in which all of us are engaged. That struggle makes us human.

In the years since the ADA became law, we’ve begun to talk about something called “the culture of disability.” My thinking about it has changed over time, and I am not prepared to say that disability is a fully evolved culture in the same sense that we speak of Aztec and Mayan culture or even Deaf Culture. But I do believe that the work of disability is a significant form of cultural production. By “work of disability” I mean the daily problem-solving involved in living with a disability — making adaptations and negotiating accommodations along the lines of principles set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The work of disability is creative work. It’s work that addresses the impairments of individuals, to be sure, but it’s also work that makes society more flexible and tolerant. Each of you, disabled and non-disabled, has significant experience with this work, although you may not get enough credit for it. The recognition you received today is a step in that direction, and I congratulate you.

As you venture forth in the world, you will have to negotiate with people who see the disability, not the person. Some will look at you and see one more hassle, one more problem added to their plate. I want you to remember this: when I look at you, I don’t see problems. I see problem-solvers.

So go out there and get it done, this unfinished project called the struggle for human completion. Claim your rightful place in the public sphere, because the Americans with Disabilities Act has got your back. Good luck and good work to you.

[This talk was given to graduating students and scholarship winners at the Office of Disability Services reception at Wright State University. Thanks to ODS director Jeff Vernooy for the opportunity to share my thoughts with the next generation of leaders in the struggle.]