Artificial and the impact on television. It 18 an hour and a half. Good morning and welcome to the Media Technology and state panel. This is part of a larger twoday session called remaking American Police history, where were all talking about history and how its going to be taught and talked about and consumed over the years. This conference is sponsored by the department of history at Perdue University and katie and lisa and gore. Were going to discuss how this issue is tied in the future. My name is connie and director of the research for scholarship and engagement. Were a new entity at the brian lamb school at perdue do you. Our efforts are to get people to use the cspan guides, 2,000 years of political history. Thats what were counting on. I tweet c. J. Bubbly and the weeds at cspan. Wed be interesting to following you especially history commercials using cspan guidelines and research. Heres what were going to do today. We have three excellent panelists all with different areas of interests under this topic. They will speak 57 minutes and we will open it up with q a. I hate to read introductions. You can read it. I will ask you the question that arent on there. Market, where did you grow up . I grew up in little rock arkansas, connie. How kid you make the move to little rock arkansas to where did you go to school. Northwestern university. I wanted to go to a big city and be somewhere other than the south and i got in. How did you choose history. You know, one of the reasons i chose history was my high school was century rock high school. It was the 30th anniversary of the crisis at little rock senior high. The time i was in high school was the time we were all being made very aware of that history, the high school walls were reckoning that history and it became a majority socially diverse high school. Understanding my own personal connections to some place that played a significant role in the civil rights story is one of the reasons i did this. Last bio question. What professor or teacher, no matter whether grade school, high school, university level, made the most different in your career path . My graduate advisor, the late michael before. Kat at the nuns of university of pennsylvania. Because we are the cspan archives. I was tickled all three of our panelists have been in to the ar kivs. Here is mark and part of a program called lectures in history. Or they go across the country looking for professors siching certainly historical issues in their classroom and get a class. The modern liberal left comes something. You have strong leftist movement both within outside formal politics, a push towards a more left it movement. Its also the moment the modern life is coming together. There are young people in high schools and post collegiate have different ideas what it should be. Robert omeara has a code that is history now for some of us. I turn it to you. Thank you for doing this. Its great to be with the panel on all of you, watching this in cspan. I was set to writing my most recent book, the code and approached it five years ago, as a political history of Silicon Valley. It mafred into something much broader but that political spine is still there. In the evolution of computer hardware and interindustries, particularly from california on the west kest, to the present, particularly the last 24 years it become as story about media. Im intensely interested in putting the state back into the story of Silicon Valley, a state that has for quite a while portrayed itself as a techolibertarian. And when government got involved they messed things up. And fundamentally enough politics of both parties held up this beautiful example of American Enterprise and entrepreneurialism and action. There is a government and political story that runs throughout. There also is a Media Information dissemination story. What we see manifesting right now, you have these Large Technology companies, like Alphabet Google and facebook through which so many information flows. Yet there are companies that do not see themselves as media companies. Theyre not in the business of media as if theyre newspapers. Their whole selfconception truly is one not being against traditional media, media is like government, an old style institution. We look at this historically, we not only cecil con see Silicon Valley growing fast and bringing products to market quickly. The growth is how these very Large Companies are working today and why its challenging to change the Business Model that isnt about creating ever more powerful algorithms that can scrape information. Also a community i refer as a gallopagos, the Financial Centers and flow of money through the complex, how Silicon Valley came to be. It was isolated enough geographically and terms of people paying attention. If you read a story in the Washington Post or New York Times any time before 1980. First of all, that term comes up rarely and when it does, Silicon Valley. Even when you had National News coverage and news magazines like fortune, were promoting Silicon Valley, it was a far away species, a very different type. If we look at the way entrepreneurs, steve jobs and bill gates came to the world, it was these shaggy haired iconic disruptive from a larger narrative of american capitalism. One of the things we discovered when we looked back, there is a business industry that comes in the technology in our modern age to have an immense influence on politics and government and media. Its very distinctive but deeply committed to national economy, state governments or local governments, old money. Where did the money for the Technology Revolution come from . Where did the funds that flowed into the initial venture funds that started these iconic Entrepreneurial Companies and semiconductors and personal computing on and on . It was the rockefellers, whitneys, the wall street bank, the establishment of establishment. Even ones like apple that presented itself from the beginning successfully as a counterculture of a dream of a company, a place that thinks different. Why did apple break apart from the pack of other personal computer makers in the 1970s. They had a beautiful product. They had two steves, steve wozniac, who designed a beautiful powerful elegant motherboard inside the computer and steve jobs, who could tell a really good story and understood how to present this device to the world. They also had management expertise coming from other Companies Much more traditional and well established that kind of took these two guys in the garage and turned it into a real operation. We see this again and again. Recognizing this whole ecosystem has a history and is singular and distinctive, is a product of the last 75 years of America Political history and social history, its really critical understanding and crapling with the immense influence of these companies today. Ill leave it at that. Meredith has a book called Artificial Intelligence, how computers misunderstand the world. I will ask you some questions like where did you grow up . I grew up outside philadelphia on a small quakers farm. How did you make it from philadelphia to nyu . Well, i was at penn before this. I was at temple before this. Microphone. Before i was at nyu, i was a professor at temple and a professor at the university of pennsylvania, and i studied Data Journalism. Its a practice of finding stories and numbers and using numbers to tell stories. New york is really the epicenter right now of people who are working on Data Journalism and also people who are working on major issues around ethics in technology. Especially ethics in Artificial Intelligence, my other specialist. What teacher moved your life . One of the stories i tell in the book is about when i was in high school and i was in an Engineering Program for kids. All right. Go ahead. Do we need to start over . Absolutely not. I will ask you the question, what teacher actually changed your life . One of the really important educational experiences i had in learning to use technology happened when i was in high school and i was in an Engineering Program for kids. We would get taken once a month to the rca plant in this small town where i grew up. It was rumored that they were Building Nuclear weapons there. Actually, what i did was i went on this little bus to this Engineering Program and they gave us spare computer parts and said, here, build a computer. I actually built my own first computer. It was great. I learned from that i had the power to create technology and also there are a lot of wasted spare parts laying around at Tech Companies which seemed like useful information. I learned about power, power to build things. As margaret said, theres a lot of economic power behind Building Technology. That was important knowledge to becoming a data journalist. In looking at the cspan archives, i found you at the yelp headquarters. I didnt know there was a yelp h. But there you were. Technology will not solve every social problem. Lets take homelessness. The fix for homelessness is not making an app to connect people with services better, the fix for homelessness is giving people homes. We need to think about pushing back against techno chaufism and using the right task. Sometimes that is a computer and sometimes it is not. Thank you. I want to talk a little bit about understanding Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is about the outer limits of technology. I started writing it because i was having a really hard time with people understanding what the heck i was doing in my work. I build Artificial Intelligence systems for artificial reporting. People say, like a robot reporter . I would say, no. Like a machine that spits out story ideas . I would say, no. I realized if i wanted to understand what the heck i was talking about and what i was working on, there needed to be more basic understanding of artificial against in the world. I started researching the book. And i realized that we dont often get good definition of ai. We talk about ai a lot but theres this fog that descends when we talk more precisely about it, a lot of confusion. When youre having a conversation between two people about ai, one person is talking about the hollywood stuff with killer robots and a computer that will take over the world and the other person is talking about computational statistics. Its really important if were going to have policy discussions about Artificial Intelligence and the roles in society, that were all talking about the same thing. One of the things i give in the book is i give a concise definition of artificial against and i show art firblg intelligence, and i show readers what it looks like, ai. Specifically, i look at Machine Learning, which is a form of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a subdiscipline of Computer Science, the same way algebra is a subof mathematics. Theres Machine Learning, expert systems, natural language processing and natural language generation. Machine learning has become the most popular subfield of Artificial Intelligence. This linguistic slippage has happened, where people say, im using ai for business. What they actually mean is im using Machine Learning for business but the two terms have become conflated. Its important to keep this distinction in mind. Another point of confusion is Machine Learning, like Artificial Intelligence sounds like there is a little brain inside the computer. I was once at a science fair and this ai system i built and this undergraduate came and said, you built an ai system. I said, yes. Is it real . I said, yes. Then, he starts looking under the table, like theres something hiding under the computer, as if there is a little brain in there. I realized this linguistic confusion is really profound. We need to talk about the fact that real Artificial Intelligence, real Machine Learning is not actually about centions in the computer. Its a bad term, honestly. What Machine Learning is, is it is computational statistics on steroids. Machine learning prediction is essentially making statistical predictions. Its amazing that it works so well most of the time. Its amazing we can use math to figure things out about the universe. But, math cannot tell us everything. Prediction can tell us likelihood but it cannot tell us truth. We need to keep these ideas in mind and we also need to think about hollywood. Hollywood ideas about Artificial Intelligence color our beliefs. And every student who comes into your classroom and starts learning and starts thinking about technology and starts thinking about history is also simultaneously thinking about hollywood and thinking about hollywood images of Artificial Intelligence. We need to make that distinction, we need to make the point hollywood imagery, ai, is totally imaginary. Calling it general artificial against. That is the sing gularity of machines of robots will take over the world all totally imaginary and the real one is called narrow ai. Machine learning even though its called magical is ai and its just math. Another thing i realized when i was doing the research for the book was that the confusion over Artificial Intelligence is almost deliberate. People have been using confusion about technology as a gate keeping method to agrandize their own importance, and make a lot of money and keep certain kinds of people out of the profession, because when you really trace it back, all of our ideas about technology and Society Today come from a very small and Homogenous Group of people. Theyre mostly Ivy League Educated white male mathematicians. Theres nothing wrong with being a White Ivy League male mathematician. Some of my best friends are White Ivy League male mathematicians. But the problem is people embed their own biases in technology. For example, if you look at the way that we dont have women and people of color represented at the upper echelons in Silicon Valley, that is a we can draw a direct connection to the fact that women and people of color are not represented in the upper echelons of mathematics, right . At the harvard math department, arguably one of the best math departments in the world, there are two senior professors who are women, in 2019. There are two. You know when they started . 2018. Right . So there are Structural Forces at work, inside technology, fields that are extremely important, but people in technology fields, people in mathematics and people in physics dont actually think the social structure forces are important. They think that what matters is just the math. Any think that solving mathematical problems and technological problems is so superior to these pesky little social problems that they get a pass, right. And so this is the root of an idea that i call tech know chauvinism which we saw in the earlier clip. Tech no chauchlism says that technology is superior to other kinds of solutions that using a computer is a superior technology, which is really about saying that math is superior and is really about a kind of bias. All right. So what i would argue is, again, lets think about using the right tool for the task. Sometimes the right tool for the task is a computer. Other times its something simple like a book in the hands of a child sitting on a the parents lap. And one is not better than the other. Its simply whats appropriate. We can also think about the environmental cost of our rush to use ai to replace existing systems. And we can say, what is behind the rush to use ai . Is it tech know chauvinism . Is it a desire to make vast amounts of money . And and see actually giving us the world that we want . We can also look at the way that ai systems function, which is that any replicate the world as it is. The way you build an ai system is you take a burcham of data and build a Machine Learning model thats a mathematical mod of whats happening in the data and use the model to predict values and make decisions about future data. But the problem that in model has no sentience, it has no soul and it just replicates what already exists in the world. If you think the world is already pretty great, then, yeah youre going to want to replicate it exactly. But i would parriargue that thed includes sexism, includes racism, includes generations of biased decisions about who gets a mortgage. The world includes in the u. S. A vast amount of residential segregation. So if we use ai systems to say decide who gets a mortgage to buy a house then we are just representmy indicating generations of inequality. So we need to think about niece ai systems as replicating the world as discriminating by default. And we need to question whether were actually building the Computational Systems that get us toward the world as it should be. Thank you very much. Now we go to katie brownle from purdue university. A history professor. Katie is the republic of entertainment going to be the title of the book. No its a title i came up with a for a grant application. I do not like it. So any ideas, let me know. Okay. You can read on the screen katies bio. But katie tell me about where youre from. Im originally from michigan and went to the university of michigan and then did my graduate university at boston zblufrt how old were you when you knew you wanted to study history as a profession. It was my freshman year at the university of michigan. I went into study business because i thought that would get me a job. And i took a history class with matt lassiter. And the first day of that class completely opened my eyes to now amazing history was. My jaw was dropped after the lecture. And i decided i wanted to learn more about history. And by the end of the year i wanted to become a historian. So your first book was show biz politics what was that about. It looks at the role of entertainment in american politics leading up to ronald reagan. How our political culture shifted to make becoming a celebrity and what i call show biz politics a core components of now politicians gained power and credibility. Thats a great transition into the clip we chose for you. This was an interview cspan with you at the organization of american historians is that right. Sounds right. There is a really compelling beach when you have nixon handwriting on it it says reagan appeals to the heart. We appeals to the minds. Are we missing something by not invoking reagans strategy . And he gathered this team of media advertisers, television kpeks, roger ailes notably. They agreed what went the wrong in 1960 he didnt use media effectively and didnt turn himself into a celebrity the way kennedy had. He made Television Central and revamped his strategy and followed what kennedy and reagan did. And this is really significant, because at the end of the day he believed and the people he surrounded himself with believed that the difference between nixon the winner and the looser was the embrace of the show biz politics style. To take all of that into the next project and the Cable Television industry. Excellent. Thank you. So i am honored to be on this panel by two people whose work i admire so much, especially because they have both completed theirwork and im drawing on it for my own work. Pu mine is a work in work in progress. Ive done the research and trying to put together all the pieces and think about the larger book narrative which really looks at the political history of Cable Television and really builds off my first book, because it really starts with nixon and this president who firmly believed that communications mattered and Communications Policy mattered as well. And the book did the core question is, what is the relationship between media, technology and the state . And thats something ive been thinking about as im looking over the ways in which Cable Television dramatically changes over the past half century. For the cable industry, politics were deeply intertwined with all aspects of its business. Political battles, whether they played out at the local or state level with National Elected officials or with f. C. C. Regulators are really at the core of the industrys history. And these political debates propelled very transformations in the idea of what Cable Television was, and it could actually function. Because for the first two decades that Cable Television existed it emerged with the advent of broadcast television. And it was simply a way to extend the reach of broadcast television originally. So if there was a troubled in terms of reception due to terrain or distance, cable could provide broadcasts. It would amplify the reach of broadcasts. But then during the 1960s and 1970s cable become became seen as a new technology that could be an alternative form of how tv could function in society, that could have very specialized programming, that would empower viewers to have more control over what they were watching and to quote unquote vote with the their remote control. And so the industry recognized that their was so centrally tied to these political debates about what Cable Television meant. And this is especially important because they were not part of the decisions that were being made about how their business should function. They were firmly Cable Operators were firmly on the outside of the political and Media Establishment during the 1950s and 1960s. And this meant that broadcasters who were part of the political establishment had these relationships with regulators and and congressman. They really limited kwhafs possible for cable to function as a business. There is this really powerful clip of bill daniels a cable pioneer available through the cable centers oral history. Its done in 1990. So after the industry expanded very rapidly during the 1980s. And he lists all of the steep opposition that Cable Television once faced in the 50s and 60s and he rattled off the quote list of our enemies when we first started. He slowly counts on fingers abc, nbc, kbz cbs, the movie owners City Councils state governments, power companies, lawyers, lobbyists. And then he add that particular change came from congressional representatives who quote didnt like it because their broadcast buddies at home on whom they were dependent to get elected didnt like us. And in really captures the environment of Cable Television in the 1950s and 1960s because it really did suffer at the hands of a Regulatory Regime that came tremendous social, economic and cultural power to the broadcasting industry. There was a close collaboration between broadcasters and congressional leaders, president ial administrations and the fcc that created a very favorable Regulatory Framework that benefitted congressman and president s who were very eager to be in the eye of their constituents on local or National News. And so they benefitted from this. And then the broadcasting industry also benefitted from this arrangement, because they experienced very little competition in exchange for foregrounding these official voices from government. And then there were certain values that really underpinned in arrangement that allowed for the corporate monopoly of the three networks to dominate for about two decades. Even a little bit longer. But politically what is so central is that politicians believed they needed broadcasters to get elected. And, you know, knicks isnt really key here. The 1950s and 1960s are a moment in which politicians are grappling with the age of television, and hiring consultants who are telling them you need to go on tv. You need to have these advertisements. You need to be part of the news. They believe that broadcasters have a lot of political power and they have to have favorable relationships with them. Culturely this depended on the idea of objectivity and the trust the public had in big institutions. So network news was primarily, you know, seen as objective source of information that gave out the official line, you know, think of walter con cite are kite and thats the way it is. Overwhelmingly relying on government sources to shape their presentation of the news. And then intellectually another key component is that broadcasters shaped research about how television functioned. So all of the studies that supported that the broadcasting model with these three corporate networks, that informs in the best interests of the country, they were actually done by the Research Departments of the networks. So, again, they were able to shape the intellectual framework as well. And so during this time, again, the 1950s and 1960s, the f. C. C. And congress created really strict regulations that ensured that cable could not compete in the top 100 markets. It limited the type of programming that cable could use and could offer subscribers. And basically made it so that the only way cable could really function was if if extended the signals of the broadcasting industry but it couldnt necessarily offer a competing service. Or an alternative forum of television. But this starts to change over the next two decades. As political changes and the white house, congress, state and local governments, combined with the activism of Cable Operators, their formation of an effective lobbying organization and consumers to transform not just the regulatory structure but the very ways that television functioned in american politics. And this is the story that my book will hopefully continue to outline. These changes started in the president ial administration of richard nixon. It was its not an accident that richard nixon, who so firmly believes in the power of media to shape his political success, something i charted in my first book becomes a president who is very passionate about teleCommunications Policy, who takes it seriously. He firmly believed there was this idea of liberal bias in Network Television. And so he wanted to do something to challenge these institutional structures that gave Network Television so much power. And he ultimately empowered many white house staffers who worked for him to pursue a very revolutionary approach to television, that would allow Cable Television to emerge as a competitor to broadcasting. He created the office of teleCommunications Policy. And it existed for only eight years. But this was an incredibly influential office, because it started to pierce holes in some of those reigning assumptions will television, notably it capitalized on the growing critique of objectivity manifests on the left and right in the early 1970s. And it encouraged new research about the economics of Cable Television and whether or not it can can flourish as a new type of business. That ultimately dismantled the economic justifications of the broadcast monopoly. In the aftermath of nixons presidency, congress continued to debate appear take seriously some of the policies that originated in the knicnixon whi house. And the newly elected postwatergate reformers, they took away the emphasis on attack the waging war against broadcasters nixon used but took seriously the idea that he his office of telekpupgss put forward about the need for diversity and comprehensive tchgs programming that could benefit all aspects of of Civic Engagement and government. The televised watergate hearings, i see as a really important moment, because it elevated the prestige of the legislative branch and its members. And it taught congress if they were the stars of the show that they could gain in power and shift of the power back to the legislative branch. And so in the aftermath Congress Starts debating can we integrate Television Coverage as a way to bring restore more power to what they were doing, more visibility, more faith in what they were doing . They were looking for television . How do we have more of a more attention, more cameras focused on what we are doing . The problem is network news only had half an hour, maybe an hour they wanted to dedicate to public affairs. You needed a different type of television in order for in work. And the cable industry thats where they were taking advantage of some of the political shifts and new ideas. And they proposed a solution. One that would benefit them and would benefit congress. And this is something that cspan founder brian lamm argued in the oral history when he recounts how he sold the idea of cspan to cover what congress was doing to quote unquote turn the lights on congress. He said he told people in the cable industry that only by becoming a player in the news could cspan challenge the authority and power that abc, cbs and nbc ultimately had. And he was right. Cspan launched in 1979. And over the next decade politicians debated how cable should be used, not if it should be used. And the politicians that once dismissed the industry because their broadcasting buddies didnt like us eventually saw Cable Television as a tool for political advancement. And they forged relationships with the industry that were at times collaborative and at times very contentious but they were tp always very consequential. And the process of political leaders are becoming very eager to manipulate the cable dial. They the style of government and how they were communicating and engaging with their constituents became transformed by the core ideas of a market populous, niche marketing and entertainment that made cable powerful and popular. Since the 1960s, the Financial Success of the cable industry depended on the industrys ability to defend define and distinguish cable tchgs as a new technology and a new form of television. And it really reshaped the way people thought about media and the way that media functioned in american political life. Appear so by 1990s, the conquered list of enemies that bill daniels outlined by conquering all the enemies, forging relationships and becoming a power player itself, American Society and the medium structures on which it depended were fundamentally transformed. The terrain had shifted. But and this is one of the key argument that is i really want to bring out in the book, that in the process of shifting that terrain, its not just that politicians came to rely on Cable Television more or consumers came to rely on Cable Television more to interact with politicians, but through that process pliks began to look more like the programs that were actually on the dial. Thank you process sfoo. Thanks very much katie. Thanks to all three of you thats great. [ applause ] were going to open up. God i was just getting ready to say we are opening up the phone lines. Its all automatic. You just grab were opening up are for q and a in just a minute or two and if you would let them know and theyll get a microphone to you so we can get your questions on. As they do that, let me ask each much you, since this is a panel about media, technology and the state tell me in each of your areas where you think the state let people down. So where in that history, Margaret Omeara did the state let the American People down in Silicon Valley and that history . Well, i think there was a critical moment in the early 1990s when the internet which had been around since 1969 as a product of the Defense Department used by Government Employees and by researchers exclusively up until the early 90s its becoming commercialized. And the commercialization of the internet involves a set of decisions and regulatory decisions. And there is a really interesting its the moment when Silicon Valley, or at least the generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs turned to millionaires, turned political activists start making kind of becoming a presence in washington. And its the measurement and that is partially because bill clinton who is elected in 1992 works very hard starting from before he declares his candidacy to woo Silicon Valley and to make the democrats the party of Silicon Valley. And prior there had been close ties with republicans both at the national and state level. But there is a moment where theyre trying to figure you know, a medium that is defined as the wild west. And that where the advocates from the internet from the valley are talking about it as a frontier, talking about it in a very Fredrick Jackson turner sort of way. Sort of wide open spaces waiting to be conquered, limitless possibility. But are arguing for keeping the something that on principle that sounds very good to members of both parties as well as defenders of free speech, which is keeping the internet free and as out of the influence of the media companies, including cable, as possible. So there is a political battle essentially in which media is defined by as the telecoms and as as the Cable Provider who want to control have control over the information flow and where newly formed organizations like the Electronic Frontier foundation, the eff argue to keep it a jeffersonen internet so to speak, place where many different voices can blossom. And leaders of both parties, republicans first in the opposition in congress and then after 1995 as the majority in congress led by newt ginrich and democrats in the white house are its one of the few things in the mid1990s the two parties agree on by and large. But what was not realized and this is less a case of the government letting letting the American People down but really not realizing that some of these scrappy little companies, these some of these guys would become google, become facebook, would become, you know, even Silicon Valley itself, even those people arguing for the jefrds yan internet. Even mitch caper who was part of the Electronic Frontier foundation. Who wrote about the notion. Later reflected that we had no idea people were use the internet we were to naive. We had no idea people would use it for bad as well as good. Neither did regulators or politicians in the 90s. There was no conception and such a boutique issue and the technology was so very little understood meredith and i were talking last night about there is few people in washington that now really dwras. The technology, which is a real challenge. And lack of that gulf of understanding of what you know, ai is not Machine Learning. Its not in thing this transposes into when you have policy making. So at the end wsh why is the internet economy why is our current tech economy, the software plant platforms so unregulated . Theyre not regulated like the cable tp companies were. Theyre not et the regulated like nearly everything else. What we are do something now kind of grappling with a post hoc regulatory Decision Making akin to the gilded age and progressive era where the new Economy Companies grow so large and we need to to back we need to figure out a which to contain and channel this this energy in a way that allows them to continue to grow and do their business but also not to have these second order and third order effects. And that sort of between 1993 and 1997 there is a a moment that is so consequential to what happens where the Media Technology landscape is now. And the state didnt realize what they were deciding to do or not to do. Lets go ahead and take our first question. Well the get your thoughts on that too. These panels these panelists are great and so interesting. Im wondersing as somebody interested in local radio and we have somebody who here who built a low power fm station our fm in louisville, kentucky. Im wondering what you see as the potential for a Democratic Media or policies that could potentially promote a jefferson yan internet or you know, radio, television, computing from the bottom up that actually brings the voices of people in localities to the surface. Who wants to take that . Well i can start by saying i dont have the solution. But i can tell you that thats a debate that has been at the core of regulatory issues. When connie asked the question of how has the state let the people down, i would have actually said that i i think that politicians are constantly, you know, throughout theyre having the regulatory debates in the 1970s and the 1980s and rethinking about how they can restructure the regime that many people are pointing out the problems. There are a lot of problems what can we do about it . The language of diversity that we need to to have diversity of voices, localism, we need to empower local communities, return the media back to the people, that is so powerful in their debates. And how theyre framing it. And theyre talking about the importance of consumers. You know, and really privileging their interests. But what they actually do is theyre really shaped more by their selfinterest. And you see a Corporate Structure without. And so so i think there is the tension that has always been there. And so its kind of wading through, you know, what what these policies could actually do, would they provide more diversity, more more ways for local communities to have control . Door they actually just replicate some of the Corporate Structures that allow for you know the massive amounts of mergers that happen in the 1980s and 1990s that then stifle those very ventures youre talking about, kate. We have a question up here while we wait for the mic tlgt let me ask you meredith, you were a member of the media, a reporter for the philadelphia enquirer now you are a member of the media in the new area you work in. How have you or have you been welcomed by the Journalism Community in this new area you want to work in. One of the really wonderful things about working in journalism as opposed to working in tech for me is that journalism is vastly less sexist than the tech industry. The sexism you face as a woman doing Computer Science, i found it unbearable. Everything they say about the social forces that conduct women out of tech careers, theyre all true. All right. So journalism for all of its faults is just an extraordinary place compared to the tech industry. So it feels like a privilege to be able to do what i love, which is Building Technology in a realm that i really love and to be able to actually communicate with people about what im doing. You find that fournl are journalists are open to the idea of using your data in terms of in their stories. So Data Journalism is a fast growing field. People have only really been talking about Data Journalism since say 2006. But it actually dates back much further. So the first time that somebody used a computer for an investigative reporting story was in 1968. It was a reporter named phil meyer who looked at the detroit race riots and the dominant narrative at that point was that the race riots were most of the people involved were lower class. And so he did in analysis where he did a survey and so used the tools of social Scientific Research in order to, you know, conduct a survey. He used a main frame to analyze the survey results and found gnat participants in the race riots cut across the class spectrum. That tells us a very different story about who was participating in the race riots and also what does it mean for the community . So Phillip Meyers work in the 60s morphed into computer assisted reporting which is a kind of doory name. But thats what we called it in the 80s and 90s when the big revolution was that every reporter had a desk top computer. We were moving off of main frames. It was a big revolution you could use spreadsheets and databases. So Data Journalism is what we started calling it when we used more internet tools in the in the alts. Okay. Thanks. Yes. Excellent panel. Absolutely amazing. I love the conversation all four had. My question is to meredith. And id like to know if you think that would it be fair to say that there are causal lengths between the rise of ai and decline of humanity over the last 30 years . And if so what can we do in the humanitiys to take on tech no chaufism. Its not questioned its just about being relevant. But there is a mentality that rewards tech no chauf nims which is pie humanities are not attractive to policy makers. Economics and have has the ear of the police make he shall not humanities. I want to ask you what could the humanies im worried about tech no chaufism wn mitchell and wanting to fix it in our own ways. Thats a good question, what can we do to work against this . I think it starts with admitting that tech no chauvinism exists and pushing back against it. Saying technical slugs are not necessarily superior to Say Solutions from the social sciences or humanities. That each is valid. I think we have to look at funding inequality. You have to look at the funding for the humanities and social sciences versus the funding for data science, for darpa. And we have to remedy that particular inequality. Because there is a lot of nonsense that gets funded through the nsf and through darpa. And a lot of the funds could be reappropriated and put into the neh and into the nea. So we have to think about the money. We also need to address economic inequality in terms of the pay gap. So one of the reason that is we dont have more data journalists is because of the really profound pay gap between what you can make as a journalist and what you can make as somebody who does ai in Silicon Valley. So you go into journalism appear say you are going to make 30 or 40,000 a years as a starting salary. You can make literally ten times as much as a starting salary, just out of college doing ai. And thats absurd. And that didnt used to be the case. So in, say, the 1960s when we were 60s and 70s when Technology Policy was developing, the gap between what you made as a doctor or lawyer and what you made as a social worker is smaller. And now the gap between a Technology Executive and teacher, like its its unfathomable. So one thing we can do is we can pay teachers more. And if we pay teachers more i mean not Just University teachers but k through 12 teachers. If we pay teachers more we will have more talent in the classroom teaching our Younger Generation about technology. So right now we have i mean when i meet Computer Science teachers a lot are wonderful some used to be gym teachers and ended up teaching Computer Science, which is teaching kids how to use google docs because that was the economic logic of a cash strapped cool district. I think its about economics. Its about looking at our priorities. And its also thinking about race and ethnicity. Because part of the narrative inside technology has been that the technology is objective, that its unbiased. And therefore superior. And when you ignore incredibly important social factors, like race and ethnically and ungs ifs and how Structural Racism functions, you build systems that do not get us toward the kind of society that we want to live in. So i think we need to interrogate systems. There is a discipline of of Data Journalism called algorithmic analytical reporting which is my little corner. And its a really promising field. One of the things that we do in algorithmic accountability reporting is we look at the black boxes of allege richls increasingly used to make decisions on our behalf. And interrogate them and say are these fair or just . Generally the answer is no. Right. And so we also build our own algorithms in order to look at how systems function and to find the flaws in the system. So marpgt omeara when you were looking at the history of Silicon Valley whats your take from what you heard here. I think this has a history. And tech know chauvinism has a history. And think about Silicon Valley comes from two two professions that were entirely all white and all male. And not necessarily elite. They were sort of they were there were plenty of you know penniless boys from South Carolina who got scholarships to mit and so there is a sort a lot of the founding generation of the valley were men of from a modest background, went to Rice University because it had free twoation. Came to stanford for grad school because you could work and go to cool. Not the ivy leaguers they stayed east. Its all whiting with all male. Its the world of engineering where womeny were not Department Chairs could say if a woman wanted to major in math. It was sr. Sorry we dont women in the program. This was the 50s and 60s. The other convert was kind of finance slash mba executive management. And you know, the Harvard Business school didnt admit women. The mba candidate admit women. You had the homogeenz world worlds. The batan as my friend and another Silicon Valley historian talks about a relay race, passing the baton from one generation to another. Thats the magic, the Semi Conductor generation advises and mentors and funds the personal computer generation that then in turn does the same to the internet generation then to the social media generation. But they have this what they say is pattern recognition. I give money to im going to invest in this guy in this person because they went to stanford, Computer Science, wearing a hoody and somewhere on the spectrum. And yeah, bus its also this gut thing where you you give resources to people because you just believe in the person not just the product. So that is and thats part what have makes it work backup thats the challenge is part of if you want to explain the magic of Silicon Valley its the insularity. But the other negligence of the history is there is a political history here. There is a lot of money darpa is an nsf for funding silly things but its the giant in computer skroins science because of the government you a tart over the last 40 years. Everything else was cut. Even computer scientisting ambivalent about taking money from the pentagon whose politics had to find a way to say well im working on this thing that doesnt have basically darpa is the oem way i get money for what i want to do. And so certain parts of the government and the military is the one part of the u. S. Government that keeps on getting money. Gets appropriations. And the rest, i mean, not even neh and nea god bless hem them. But other parts of the researches establishment are cut away whereas military agencies funding basic research but yes for certain it has to have some long range applicability for some military purpose in some way. So all the things are feeding in. And this isnt to say that this is intractable and we cant fix it. But recognizing the politic willing history and the the way that this has been structured and embedded in this larger narrative of political history that we all so many people in this room write about and think about. So many people watching are thinking about and living. That recognizing that thats the way you identify how you perhaps change. And you and anyone looking at history does show all the instances of where things did change remarkably. And so there is if we are frustrated by the imbalance and i think technologyists themselves are renesoning needs to be reframing and incorporation of whether we call it ai ethics or something else, there are understanding the history is the way to get to a different future. Thanks. Next question. When you look at Political Polarization and dysfunction today, you have to look at cable tv and the internet as two of the primary drivers of this. Theyre right at the top of the list. And i just wonder what you think and theyre only growing stronger and more important in American Daily life. What is the way out of this . I wonder what you see in terms of what comes next and what is the way out of sort of fixing this problem . Katie brownle . Its a great question. And i think the dominant narrative around cable is that, you know, it has created this polarization. But i think that that that narrative does foreground the technology more. That cable is doing this. Rather its people a variety of politicians who are using cable platforms to pursue different strategies, right. So newt ginrich really brilliantly seeing an opportunity to to take cspan and turn it into a way to blast his opponents, even though no one else is watching. And nationalize congressional politics in new ways. And and so i think that, you know, its important to think about how, you know, there are choices in terms of how the medium is used. But then its also the ramification of relying putting that faith in the market, right. If its going to be about competition and what sells, becomes defined as news, then then you have a very different style of news. And i think thats one of the shifts thats important to understand, is that the news as it existed in the 1960s and 1970s, sure, advocated for, you know, finding in consensus. But it was very much one that was driven by white, welty and middle class men, who were part of the establishment. And it didnt allow other voices to come into play. And so i think one of the things to appreciate about what cable does in terms of you know, providing at first tens and then hundreds, and now we have so many more channels, that it does give voice to different perspectives. And so there is a shift. There is this is a shift for for more elitist perception of what constitutes as news and where people are going for their information to this more diverse and again bringing in the mechanic principles, right that counts as news is what people think, what they tune in to, how they vote with remote controls. There is a payoff. But its also important to note that, you know, this older system of of broadcast Network Television also had a lot of problems inherent in it as well. And in terms of solutions, again, i dont have any concrete ones. But i you know, i think just kind of recognizing that what the medium offers, recognizing limitations, recognizing whats whats driving it in terms of the economic challenges, and the political choices that are being made in terms of how to deploy those media formats are really important to consider. So margaret, omeara, i saw a statistic in some of your work where you said that 10 of the American People at the height of Walter Cronkitee doing the evening news watched him today if i did the math right its like 23 times that number not the percentage but the number are involved in twitter and facebook and that kind of thing. Take what she said and go from there. Well, yeah, and theyre two very different types of information dissemination, right. Exactly. Its scaled up in user base. But also the way people interact with information. The way someone watched Walter Cronkite in 1967 was you sat down in front of the television at a certain time and you had 30 minutes. That creates a high bar for news. As katie was saying its highly curated but curated by people in power. Taking by what government officials by the late 60s you get pushback on that but its a certain point of view and world view and point of view of the Ivy League East Coast based educated media. You kwont have silly news is to stories. What cable creates initially and what the internet has exacerbated is this the spin cycle, the 24 7, the hunger for content in which trivial things become multiday news stories and the way in which the many millions of people are using including us the way we use media is less deliberate you dont sit down and say i will look at twitter 30 minutes and learn everything i need to know its not cure eighted you get a blizzard of information. Everything comes in little snippets. Some of it is of great import. Sort of one of the upsides the internet age is the intense transparency. We know everything seem to know everything going on in the world including a lot of bad stuff. And there is a lot of bad stuff that was going on that wasnt revealed. And now there is revelation. But it also becomes one becomes immune to the dsh all of the bad stuff. You dont takes things as seriously. Whereas when Walt Cronkite stopped in 1968 and turned to the camera and had a editorial moment wrp the vietnam war has reached a stalemate. We are in something we cant get out of in the which we expect. That ricochetted through politics. Lyndon johnson didnt run for reelection. It was just we dont have the moments anymore, even though there is so much more consumption of so much more information. Next question. Go ahead. Hello. One of the things i really appreciated meredith about your your stance and getting in there and doing the technology reporting, especially for those of us who are historians, i dont think were doing a good job of capturing the tide that were all standing in. When you speak to most people will ai or things like thaton start to even speak to them about some of the people in the field they dont know who some of the basic like ray kerswell or some of the other people who are really sort of formulating in layer of complexity around us. And we in our own realm havent really delved into it too much. We havent imported that much of the history of Silicon Valley into what were teaching our students the way we have with the history of the steel industry. We havent integrated that to make it really a part of their understanding. And because we havent we have only maybe a few little articles here. And media has, surprised itself by realizing when we did the facebook movie, my gosh that was less than ten years ago. But its moving so fast i think historians are not prepared for the speed of the industry sometimes because we like two, three, four, five decades back to look at things. But we havent been given that sort of space. I try to bring that for the students and radio audience, i i look for people doing this mainly elite, i think it has to be more of a crossover from people like you who are bringing in technical perspective into technical writing. And gichgt more of a Historical Perspective. And ive really enjoyed all three powerful minds have i haven us in morning. I like that a lot. What is what is the big point you think ill like this for the whole panel in addition, what do you think the biggest thing that historians are missing about this moment of technology . You know, whats whats the secret . Where is the book that its going to kind of break in loose and wake us up to in to realize that we are in a renaissance and not realizeding it. I think its margarets book. Available for preorder. If you read margarets and my book next to each other i think it will probably give a really good a really good historical overview as well as technical overview of how do we understand all of these forces . I think that we have only been dsh people publishers have only been investing in books that counter the dominant technology narrative in the past three to four years. So its really not surprising that the we havent had such a narrative until now, because publishers are driven by marketing imperatives. And everybody pleefd that technology was the future and everybody believed the tech rhetoric and believed the communalist rhetoric about cyberspace is going to be different and change the world, and empower people. And only in the past three or four years have people started to say maybe thats not strictly true. So im really excited that that that that dialogue is happening now. One thing that i would also say that is important for historians to start grappling with is how is the question of how will we do history in the future . Because when you think about twitter posts as an historical archive, for example, those are not being preserved anywhere. All right so what you get from twitter as a civilian is you get a garden hose of twitter data. And there is a fire hose of all the twitter data but you have to pay for it. And twitter is for the going to be around forever. So whats going to happen to all of that data new think about newspapers and you think about how are newspapers archived . Well we know a lot about how to archive print news, because you can go to any library and find a newspaper from 1849 and you can read the entire paper for the entire day in 1849. You can see the ads, the copy, who wrote what and thats a useful tool for history. But you cant actually go to say the boston globe and see everything written in the boston globe on a given day in 2002. Because there is the print paper and then there is the digital version of the paper and then there is the website, and there is social media. And there is good knows what else. And then the ads. The ads change for everybody. So you cant see those. And theyre like made with a proprietary Ad Technology because 2002 is the stone age in internet time. S in a really big problem. Like the fact that all of our systems we have invested in all the technological systems for, you know, for creating media thats really great. But at the same time were shooting ourselves in the foot because in five years youre not going to be able to read any of todays news, especially not the more cutting edge digital news. So Data Journalism products are really hard to preserve. So katie brown ell picking up the mirror to your own industry, people teaching history, what do you think. I think one of that question makes me think about the key idea that has emerged from alm of my research, looking at the cable industry. And that is the fact that how technology is defined is a political process. And i think thats really important to understand, because, again, just seeing all of these different moments, looking at cable and how people were talking about how it could be used, its potential, and the policies that should shape its development. This is so deeply embedded in the politics of that particular moment. And it changes so dramatically. And thats one of the fascinating things about the cable astray is because its not a new technology in the 70s. Its not a new technology in the 90s. But the ways in which its talked about and its potential and how it will solve all of these problems really has changed because of those political battles that are being fought. A lot of times in the public eye. And a lot of times behind the scenes as well. And so i think its really important to understand that and then to think about how whos influencing that discussion of how this technology is being defined. Youve got consumers. Constituents, writing to their their representatives. Demanding access, demanding certain things. Lobbyists are playing a key role in terms of how they shape the Public Relations debate. And you know politicians, how how any understand technology frequently is shaped by how they use it. And so i think that those are those are key things to consider at this moment when everything is changing so quickly. Its hard to keep up with technology there is a reason my book will end in the 90s because i think it the environment changes really. You think that now katie. Im firm. Thats what i thought too. Because, you know, because all of a sudden everything does escalate quickly. But i think the fundamental questions in terms of power structures are still at play. So margaret, are historians up for this challenge. Of course, come on, connie. One of the things historians are good at. Where we are in tech. Meredith like she said throe or or four years ago its changing the future. Now we spunk violently to the other side now its bad, bad, bad, so bad. Where i find myself whereas before i was the person saying well maybe it isnt all good. This is more complicated now im look we have supercomputers in our pockets guys. This is really they have done some good things. Lets think about. What historians are good at is showing this complex, nuanced, making sense of all the data, showing the good and the bad, showing how and which you can grapple with and understand a phenomenon as not just all good, all bad but providing Historical Context and helping helping people understand something as a very you know, this complex subject as something that is, you know, actionable. But you i think thats really where the historian superpower is is bringing this together. And i think the other dimension is historians as teachers of history as writers of history also have an obligation. I share merediths deep alarm with the state of the internet archive broadly defined. Which is that we as historians need to be archival activists and talking about how here is how historian dos what they do and produce the things that that others read and learn from. And here here is what needs to be done with in new digital archive. Not just digitizing things but thinking about how you grapple with the twitter feeds. And the ee femoral advertising on the entertain. How you preserve the record, the not just the broad record of the web itself. Because people are trying to do that but thats not yet an institutional project on the scale that other archives have been in the past. So lets talk and think about this. And make people aware of why the gaps exist and how they need to remedied. We have time for another question. The fact that polarization has been exacerbated by many Cable Companies and Tech Companies like facebook and swirt twitter to be selfappointed arbiters of political speech, use of stahl inist phrases like hate speech used to try to suppress conservative or traditionalist views on politics and social issues. A couple of examples of this recently have been the case of the students from coughing Catholic High School went to the lincoln memorialen and berated by an American Indian activist and the example of a new york city man posted a parody of nancy pelosi on line. And got pill ried how do you government policy makers and scholars addressing the weaponization of political differences in their future writings . Could we combine that question with the question from professor burken as well . I wanted to ask very interested that you talked about public policy. You talked about technology. Where do you see the influence of advertisersof advertisers in the shaping of . Ive often said to my children, the inventor of the mute button ought to get a Nobel Peace Prize as i mute out the commercials but to what extent do they influence or the competition for them influences the kind of programming that you see not just on general television, but on cable tv as well . Who wants to start . Weaponization . Cdcs questions is very connected because the advertising, the adbased model, the Business Model that is the model by which these platforms and think about facebook, google, youtube, think about the places in which speech gets hurt and where are the companies that are driven by two things, the adbased model and shareholders and for Profit Companies they are also informed by politics and i see it being the and where they went to graduate school. The evil idea of we are in the business of creating a platform in which conversation can happen but, the way that this is functioned now and these are incredibly Important Media companies and the platforms have become places for speech of all kind and that actually what is being understood as censorship for companies that dont want to take sides or dont know how to navigate and have become curators of media. The algorithm is the underlying mechanics and to sell ads for individual users, its making and creating what i refer to as a runaway train. This process in which you have different pieces of content produced by different people that has a way of spiking out and also reactions to that. I see, i dont see in from my understanding the fight for neutrality, which is actually based now these things are very different from when it was a Search Engine created by a couple graduate students, much more powerful and embedded in different parts of life. So, this is the great dilemma of these companies, they will need to take sides without taking sides if that makes sense. At the same time they have to serve their adbased model because how do you change it . Probably the way its going to be changed is with the state and some sort of regulation, what would that look like and how do you preserve the jeffersonian internet dimensions of it and allow different types of voices to be heard across the spectrum, at the same time without having the state of affairs that we have now which no one seems very happy with . I can tackle the advertising question. One thing to add to your question makes me think how i havent really spent a lot of time analyzing but its an important component to the story, that the argument for Cable Television in the 70s and 80s that are really hinged on the idea that subscribers would be the one that cable would be serving. The power of the consumer, they would offer new types of program its an interesting shift in terms of the Business Model where the cable industry begins with all of these ideas about how they are gonna be different from broadcasting and they will solve problems that people are talking about with the broadcasting model. But as they become more of a consolidated media structure they take on the ideas embedded in broadcasting and they become a new player in the model as they replicate it. One of the things that im really interested in is advertising fraud. So, they estimate that Something Like 7 million of internet advertising is about ad fraud. So, there is a vast amount of fraud in internet advertising. Has also heard that organized crime is heavily invested in ad fraud and so so this is something i would like to write about but i havent found the right hook yet. So, i think its a major complicating factor when we think about the success of facebook, google, twitter and the ad model. I would also be really interested in looking at the Historical Perspective and how did newspapers address this because there was a similar advertising crisis in the wild west era of the newspapers because you could just print a whole lot of newspapers and then throw them away and then claim and the advertising circulation that came into being. We do have the iab, internet advertising bureau, but their effectiveness is limited, i guess. So, im really curious about that. And then, margaret i wanted to pick up on something you said and katie, i was reminded of this by your work and the way that government regulation has advanced around Cable Television. I was thinking about the way that Telecom Policy evolved and the way that broadcast regulatory policy evolved and, ive been thinking lately about the Silicon Valley idea of iteration. Thats an idea i really like, i like the idea that we can try something and see if it works and then, if it doesnt, you try to do better. And i think about the way this fits with the law. The law evolves in the law is the original artifact that iterates that even the constitution we have iterations of the constitution. And i wonder if when it comes to regulating the social media platforms, we should regulate and iterate, we should let go of the idea that we have to get it right on the first try and, lets just try something, because doing nothing doesnt seem to have worked very well, so maybe lets just try something and put it in place for little bit and if it doesnt work lets change it, lets iterate. I am the timekeeper so we have to wrap up. Thank you very much, lets give them a round of applause. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. [ applause ] thank you. I week we feature American History tv programs of a preview of what is available on cspan3 connectors and history, american artifacts here on cspan3 expect saturday on book tv a 7 p. M. Eastern, in her latest book, women on the ground, zara hunk looks at the challenges that female arab and middle eastern journalists face when reporting. All of the authors were able to push through whatever barriers they had and my openly and honestly about their deepest struggles. One of the essays that comes to mind, as you mentioned her, its such a raw and honest account of grief and loss and reflection today. Reporter sunday Princeton University professor on race, gender and class in america. Her most recent book is brief, letter to my sons. I have to arm them with intellectual tools that allow them to flourish in school and ethics and value and also a way to make sense of the hostility that they encounter every day from people at times whose responsibility it is to treat them as community members. 9 p. M. Eastern on afterwards, president brent bozo on his book unmask a big medias war against trump. All modicums of decency have been cast aside not from donald trump to his opponents but from his opponents to him, they call him far worse things, they are attempting to do far worse to him and what they accuse him of doing to them. It is telling they have no right, none. Reporter watch book tv every weekend on cspan2. In 1979 a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea, let viewers make up their own mind. Cspan open the doors to washington policy for all to see , bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. And today the big idea is more relevant than ever on television and online cspan is you unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind. But you by your cable or satellite provider. This conference continues now with biographers looking at political history. This talk was part of a twoday conference called remaking american political history. This is an hour and a half. Welcome, thank you for attending our session on this beautiful friday afternoon i will have to compete with the outdoors and hopefully we can convince you that you made the right choice hanging out with us to talk about media and biography in political history. Between the four of us weve written at least 17 biographies , it might be more than that guy was losing count