Mother and father against each other. We are pretty calm about that. We try to respect each others beliefs. And we just move along and it is just too much trouble to pack and go some place else. [laughter] [applause] she said i want to hear this. Before getting to the book signing we have a number of people to think. If you give me 60 seconds these people cannot go unrecognized. It took a lot to pull this together. You know this is under construction. The first person i want to acknowledge is joanne saunders. Raise your hands. She is the person responsible for pulling this together. Our sponsors. We are courtney clyburn, hope and price are sponsors in addition to everate we have elick electricians that pulled the wire together to make it happen, the Culture Center board, mcdonald law who is the architecture of this building. And we have a rule that says you have bill and beverly have been bringing in things. Sam walker, earnest butler, curtis man, the baptist church, nathaniel dick, and sharon holiday who is a cater. And todd with the camera is a volunteer. Mr. Craig in a blue shirt with a camera around here. The First Baptist church that allowed us to use their space. Tony price, dexter price, paul bush of the concerned mep fellowship. The city and the boys and girls club. And for those publicizing what the congressman is doing and thank you so much for everyone coming. Dr. George, we heard Michael Jordan was coming with her. Michael, stand up. If you walk through the bow of the ship, there are people there that will show you through the rest of the building if you are interested in a tour. Thank you congressman for being here, thank you for your time, and god bless you. Buy some books. [applause] booktv is on facebook. Like us to get publishing news, behind the scene information, talk to authors during live programs and other talk. The peoples platform taking back power and culture in the digital age is the book and the author is astra taylor who joins us from our new york studio. Ms. Taylor you write aboutop aboutopeb about openness and say it is an appropriate ideal for our time and the concept caught on. Does that apply to the internet as well . Is thatopen . Guest that is exactly what i am asking. It seemed like the internet was going to magically solve the problems of the oldede old media model. I am an independent filmmaker and i make films about philosophy. So kind of obscure educational films and part of the reason i was drawn to making them is because they were not on television or commercial media. And this seemed to usher in things for independent artist to create an open media landscape and not depend on gatekeepers who can say yes or no and control and influence the flow of communication. So the idea is the internet is open and that you know all of the problems of the old system have gone away. And so i was very interested in the question and the book is sort of me investigating it. How open is the internet . Is openness enough . I come to the conclusion that open is a misleading term. It can mean anything to anyone and it is very ambiguous and doesnt necessarily mean equal. The media system that is emerging online isnt necessarily more inviting than the system that proceeded it. A lot of the old problems carried over and i am especially interested in that. Host when the internet came online was it supposed to be an open platform . Guest it was invented in a ad hoc way for existing computers to network and communicate. It was an academic experiment funded by the government partly. The internet wasnt necessarily supposed to be what it has become. The excitement and rhetoric of it being this egalitarian system sort of corresponded with its mainstreaming and becoming something lots of people use and that idea picked up when social media became common because then it was clear that users have this opportunity to not only, you know, read or watch content on the internet but to contribute and to post their own pictures and their own ideas and opinions. So you know the idea well the internet did emerge from this public spirited, Academic Community as it spread we created this mythology around it. It is an interesting tipping point. We are seeing right now that there could be a darker side and there could be some problems if we dont intervene and try to protect the qualities we find so appealing about it. What i am alluding to is revelations about surveillance or invasion of privacy or there are corporations like google and facebook and amazon that are engaging in businesses practices that are not different than old Media Companies and we are finally being investigated and challenged on antitrust grounds and stuff like that. It is an interesting moment where people are becoming a bit more critical of this technology that they were extremally optimistic about. Host you write the internet has tilted in favor of the most massif players and people are beginning to recognize that silicone valley platitudes about changing the world and dont be evil are not enough to ensure the biggest corporations on earth will behave well. Guest i think there is a paradox at the heart of the landscape and that is what intrigued and motivated me to write the book. As our experience of engaging with media becomes more personalized and individualized and we have our own phone with access to an enormous amount of information and there is a pe personalized experience and the personalization goes further than what we just put on our phone but all of them personalize our allegor rhythms by checking on this and the more connected they are to this enormous centralized system that is opaque and we dont understand and few people understand the link from their device that is in their pocket to this enormous infrastructure and you know these data centers that are ultimately making everything run. We talk about the cloud which is very out there but there are massive server farms and a handful of companies that, you know, control a lot of web posting. Even the cia contacts web posting to amazon and netflix and pintrist as well. It feels like we are in charge of the our own media destination but there are these, maybe not gate keepers, but there are channels we are shunted down because they are unavoidable. You have to use google if you want to find things on the internet. As the companies become more common and weave into our life they have enormous power and influence and we have to ask ourselves what their responsibilities are. If we give them so much of ourselves and trust with private data what is their responsibility . Host where does the interest lie when so much is in their hands . Guest a good example is this incident from last week where facebook released news it was conducting or had conducted an ex experiment in january of 2012 where it segmented about 700,000 users and did a controlled experiment where it hid sad or happy post from users to see the way that would affect what those users posted. So it manipulated the news feed to see if there could be an emotional con behavior. And there was an enormous outcry because they felt like they were being treated lab rats. But facebook wrote up the results and proudly announced them with a press release and thought the world would be excited about it. They were responding to news in 2011 and 2012 that facebook was making people sad and they thought they would do this experience if there was happy news you would feel happy but people felt manipulated and creeped out instead. So that shows these are not neutral platforms and the decisions people making are not clear or transparent to users and that ultimately facebook does, you know, tweet its news feed and it has to create an environment that is conducive to the Business Model and that is advertising because people dont pay money to use facebook. We pay with data and that is useful to the advertisers who are facebooks ultimate customers. The responsibility of facebook is that it presents itself has a channel to communicate with friend or organizations or Even Companies that we like and yet at the same time it is not a neutral panel and has its own bottom line it has to serve and it ultimately needs to figure out or needs to be regulated in such a way that there is some aspect of transparency and some aspect of clarity because it is not enough just that we see ads on the side of the screen and say those are advertisements because there is tweaking and manipulate that is not visible to users but could Impact Society in big ways. Not just affecting the users mood but there was an ex experiment in 2010 that facebook could have consequences on voter turnout. And elections have been decided with a few hundred voters and that is significant. Some researchers determined they had influenced over 300,000 facebook users to actually vote by doing a massive experience with tens of millions of facebook users. This is an incredible power. Pretty stelth and not always visibility. I think there is limits to what these companies can do with these channels. Reporter any structures of the old media system you write however flawed relieve the burdens by individuals providing capital, leverage, and facilitate the transmission of knowledge and skills from one generation to the next and at their best institutes help through a progress caused risk aggregation. Guest this is an interesting article to make because my identity is an independent filmmaker and doing stuff i felt existing institutions were not doing. It was quite a challenge for me as i was following the debate about the internet and looking at what was happening to institutions of journalism or the Publishing Industry and saying maybe there is a productive and necessarily role for the cultural institutions to play a role. We heard there could be eliminating of the middle man and filmmakers or musicians or blogers would go direct and find their audience. And this was a straight forward vision. I am pointing out is there is a new wave of gate keepers that, you know, yes, there is a challenge to the Publishing Industry through a company like amazon but amazon is a powerful middle man now and we have to contend with that. But i also, you know, wanted to ask what is it we want of our institutions if we are so critical of them and we feel that the Mainstream Media and journalism have disappointed us and we would rather put our face in an independent bloger, my question is why dont we think about ways to make the practice of journalism more ideal and more what we want it to be and more accountable and diverse, more able to do the important work of, you know, challenging the powers that be and not being tuned into them. You have to do that by finding ways to fund the institutions and giving people that practice these platforms the space to do the work. It is easy to get caught up in the idea that individuals can do it on their own and now we have the internet we can pull ourselves up by our boot straps and go to city hall and tweet about the results. But i talk to many journalist and blogers and one thing i talk to, for example, an established reporter in baltimore said that is a wonderful vision but i have been to city hall every day for years and there are not any blogers there. So we need to find a way to make it work and be sustainable for people. And the internet cant magically do it for us. Host how does it happen . Guest well, i think that, you know the problem is that many of the problems with the old Business Model, the sort of Business Model of legacy media havent been altered at all with the development of these new communication panels. So that is one sort of obvious point that this wasnt being made very often in these conversations and that is yes, we have new tools, but the model of funding things hasnt changed at all. So going back to the term of people talking about the fact journalism is in a period of transformation because you dont need to go to the newspaper to get the crossword puzzle or read about foreign affairs. You can get it all separately. So there is a significant change. But the thing is for whatever online startups there the models of finding them is still advertising. It is Digital Advertising which is bringing in quite a bit less revenue than traditional print revenue. And advertisers have been empowered by the move to the digital sphere and convergence where you go online to read books, talk on the telephone, do cross words puzzles and now advertisers tract you through all of the different realms and collect data from you and are very empowered compared to the old days when they depended on the newspaper man so they could reach an audience. I think we have to imagine first for foremost alternatives to the advertising model. And that is something that has not been widely discussed. There is some excitement for crowd founding and things like kick starter but discussions of things like public financing, or having a Public Interest demand on these giant tech corporations are just things that have been out of the public conversation and so one thing i do in the book is remind people that at the onset of television there was public outcry when people realized advertisements were controlling too much of the media. They didnt realize things were rigged and there was a citizens that discussed camel news hours was sponsored by camel cigarettes and they said we need a little space for others. And we might be reaching a similar moment online where we need to think about carving out spaces for something that is not totally handed over to the advertiser funding portal. Because that is what is supporting so many of the services and platforms and so much of the content that we consume in that space. Host and one of the things you write is that the public good is increasingly financed by private money. Do you support moving the internet under title 2 . Guest to reclassify it . Host right. Guest definitely. This is the issue of, you know, Net Neutrality and i think it captured the publics imagination for good reason saying Internet Service providers shouldnt be able to charge for an internet fast lane which means discriminating against smaller sites or business or startups or nonprofits in favorite of big content companies that can pay for swifter service. The only way of solving the problem at the root is to reclassify the internet as a Telecommunication Service and then it could be regulated as a public utility or treated as common carrier which is how we treated landline telephones or the post office. The post office ultimately has to offer services to everyone at fair rates and isnt in the business of discrimination. So i think that would be a good first step if we want to maintain some of the wonderful and truly democratic aspects of the internet we have taken for granted. It isnt the radical step when some people say it is regulating the internet but is about access to the internet and the people controlling the onramps. There are not that many companies. Just time warper and comcast and lot of us depend on them to access the internet and they should have to allow us to access the sites we want and not pick winners and losers. I think it is fair and minimum baseline for, you know, the peoples platform as we know it. Host in your book you are critical of google books. Why . Guest what i am trying to do in the section when i talk about google books is say that we like to invoke analogy and talk about it being a universal library and that is language that representatives of google use. And i quote people from the photo sharings at flickr which is owned by yahoo says they are stewards creating a space for people to share photographs. And whenever there are social movements and the people in the middle east used facebook and twitter and twitter was referred to as the town square. So i am looking at the way these metaphors and library and land trust and town square are civic minded but we are entrusting these duties to private corporations and ultimately in the end google isnt a library. Google is an advertising business and gets 96 of revenue from advertisers so i would like to challenge people if we want a library and a digital universal library and something that protects knowledge and it is there for us to learn and to, you know, remember your history and engage as citizens then i think we have to create some structures that will explicitly support those in instead of trusting that Important Role to these private corporations that are there to serve their shareholders and generate profits and they have their responsibilities and their fiduciary responsibilities as corporations and they are not the library of congress. Google books has a lot of utility but it could be shutdown at any moment if it isnt prompt profitable enough. We use this analogy but dont know how to bolster them and create things we want the int internet to be. It is more of a Shopping Mall than a digital town square. Host you write about the companies that are