OccupyUC!

Fliers - I'll be canvasing campus all day Monday with a few of the student groups!

Editors & Publishers, Information & Entropy

A publisher increases entropy by reproducing information. An editor decreases entropy by introducing new information.

Take the example of a bookshelf full of books:

After reading the books, an editor would process their information, and create a new book. A publisher on the other hand would select their favorite book and merely replicate it.

While in both cases the entire shelf has expanded, only the editor decreases entropy by introducing new information. (Note: this example is of a closed system)

The Peoples Estate

Last night (10/20/11) I watched 23 Occupy Cincinnati protesters be arrested and have their camp torn down by the state (Cincinnati Police Department). As a photographer I’ve become selectively numb to visual information, trained to record and not react. What pierced my senses was the audible voice of the scores of supporters marching up and down the streets singing and chanting in solidarity. Without the benefits of digital technology the rabble would only have echoed a few city blocks before disappearing into the din of the interstates bounding our downtown district; but with cameras rolling and laptops streaming, our unified voice was heard round the world.

Throughout the past few years I have studied to be an effective member of the 4th estate, to be a photojournalist. As I watched the collapse of our financial systems through the lenses of both traditional and social news, I began to ask myself just what the difference is between a journalist and a citizen. I found myself confronted with the fact that both have equal ability for their bias to be heard across the nation. Having grown up along side the Internet I was entirely incapable of distinguishing one from the other, and to differentiate between the two I had to take a step back from what it means to live in a digital nation.

Traditionally, the 4th Estate has been viewed as the processes responsible for keeping a citizenry informed of information they need in order to vote in their best interests. More broadly, it controls a democracy’s means of information production. Over the past century these means had centralized into major newspapers chains and broadcast networks: if a citizen wanted their opinions to be heard by the rest of the nation, they had to go through the editors of this 4th Estate.

The Internet has freed the process of mass-publication from the corporation owned editorial bottleneck. Collaborative media sites such as Wikipedia allow the people to assemble their own records of information, and social news sites like Reddit and Digg allow a population to decide for themselves what information is most relevant through daily democratic processes.

Institutional whistle-blowers no longer need to pass information through a corporate censor before the people can access it, and activists such as Jullian Assange have revealed important information relevant to our elected officials. All of this has been possible through an entirely decentralized system of communication and control. Every single laptop and smart-phone has near equal opportunity for its signals to be heard across the nation, and every signal’s message is equally as insignificant when compared to the roar of the digital crowd.

Nearly two and a half centuries into its existence, the problems we face through our experiment in democracy run deeper than just the economic. The types of reforms we are capable of instituting are those where the people are able to address a problem before it gets so bad as to drive us into the streets by the millions. What our citizenry needs is a way to give direct feedback to our elected officials. Today every citizen has the ability to directly communicate with the entire nation, and we are all becoming members of the 4th Estate.

We have the technology, we have the infrastructure, and we have the cause to peacefully unite the digital roar of the citizenry under a single flag. We have the ability to embody the voice of the 99% as a force louder than any lobbyist or corporate donation. We the People have the potential to develop a system with which to steer our representative democracy through the coming century. Without control over the leash of our People’s Estate, our representative democracy will continue to drag us in whichever directions those in power decide.

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson