On Newspapers and Being Human by Abby Mullen.
From the post:
Last week, an opinion piece appeared in the New York Times, arguing that the advent of algorithmically derived human-readable content may be destroying our humanity, as the lines between technology and humanity blur. A particular target in this article is the advent of “robo-journalism,” or the use of algorithms to write copy for the news. 1 The author cites a study that alleges that “90 percent of news could be algorithmically generated by the mid-2020s, much of it without human intervention.” The obvious rebuttal to this statement is that algorithms are written by real human beings, which means that there are human interventions in every piece of algorithmically derived text. But statements like these also imply an individualism that simply does not match the historical tradition of how newspapers are created. 2
In the nineteenth century, algorithms didn’t write texts, but neither did each newspaper’s staff write its own copy with personal attention to each article. Instead, newspapers borrowed texts from each other—no one would ever have expected individualized copy for news stories. 3 Newspapers were amalgams of texts from a variety of sources, cobbled together by editors who did more with scissors than with a pen (and they often described themselves this way).
Newspapers have never been about individual human effort. They’ve always been about collaboration toward a common goal–giving every newspaper in every town enough material to print their papers, daily, semi-weekly, weekly, however often they went to press. Shelley Polodny states that digital outlets have caused us to “demand content with an appetite that human effort can no longer satisfy,” but news outlets have never been able to satiate that demand, as the Fremont Journal of December 29, 1854, acknowledges.
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The borrowing, copying, plagarism, that Abby’s describes is said to be alien to our modern intellectual landscape. Or at least it is if you try to use the “O” word for a once every four (4) years sporting event at the behest of the unspeakable, or if you attempt to use any likeness of a Disney character.
The Viral Texts project, which Abby participates, is attempting to map networks of reprinting in 19th-century newspapers and magazines.
A comparison of the spread of news and ideas in the 21st century may well reveal that the public marketplace of ideas has been severely impoverished by excessive notions of intellectual property and its accompanying legal regime.
If it were shown modern intellectual property practices have in fact impaired the growth and discussion of ideas, by empirical measure, would that accelerate the movement towards greater access to news and ideas?