When an image file breaks a monopoly
When is a QR code not just a QR code? When it provides a way around information chokepoints, and is spread by people power.
Last week I wrote about my fall project, and in that piece, I detailed one critical part of my research path: the way technology breaks strangleholds on media distribution. Today I want to go deeper on the relationship between technology innovation’s impact on media change and information access, and on the critical human part of this change.
The printing press was my example last time. Before Gutenberg brought his printing press to market, books were painstakingly hand-copied. There are about 780,000 words in the King James Version of the Bible, even more so in the Latin version produced at the dawn of the printing press. Producing a single Bible required a level of literacy, skill, and human labor few institutions could match, but fortunately the Catholic Church had all three in spades thanks to its control of literacy education and free labor in monasteries across Europe. The hand-copied model was a slow process that required a literate group of scribes capable of that work, and because of that, it created market scarcity that accrued power to the institution that employed the copiers. I meant it last week when I said the German abbot Trithemius was seeing the end of his life’s work. The printing press upended the Church’s book production monopoly.
But my current work is concerned with how that informs what’s going on in digital spaces. We are more than 500 years post the first Gutenberg bible. A monopoly (control by a single entity) was broken, but over time it reassembled itself as an oligopoly (control by a limited group) by the industries that sprang up in the era of printing. Gone were the Catholic abbots and priests who wrote out the scriptures. They were replaced by publishers who formed new forms of quasi-monopoly control around the expensive printing presses, paper and ink that would come to define this new era.
Printing was remarkably cheaper than hand-copying books but material costs were still quite high. Because books were printed at faster rates it meant material costs multiplied greatly over a shorter term since printing presses were in the business of speed and volume. Slowly, from the early days of the Gutenberg press to the dominance of publishing houses by the 1990s, we rebuilt walls around access on both the publishing and distribution side of the written word. Exclusive control of the book trade was more diffuse but unmistakably controlled by elites with wealth who could afford the costs of being a publisher.
The printing press wasn’t the end of book monopolies. It created new power centers that in time cornered this new market just as hand-copiers cornered their own now-obsolete market. This is not just economic power, though. It is also gatekeeping power, defined as the media maker’s control over what gets made, when it gets made, and how much of it gets made. The public is subject to all of this. It can influence gatekeeping choices by what is purchased, but it never truly knows the array of options possible at the choice of what to produce. There are books written but never printed and distributed, and it’s all because of gatekeepers making choices based on their own view of what is good and what will sell.
One way to think about media gatekeeping power is to try and imagine who holds distribution power, and then visualize those gatekeepers as potential chokepoints.
The old model …
Book → Hand Copier → Public
… replaced by a new model …
Book → Publisher → Retailer/Distributor → Public
… gives some sense of what changed.
We didn’t get rid of the monopoly, really. We split it into two gatekeepers and then multiplied the competitors who possessed that power. The hand copier was both publisher and retailer (distributor) in the old model. In the new model, that role was split between publishers (think Random House or Penguin) who exercise power over what to print, and then retailers (think your local bookstore, or Barnes & Noble, or Amazon) who decide what to sell from that print catalog. I add “distributor” to that classification because it can also include things like libraries. I’ll get to this last one in a bit.
Both chokepoints work together but notice the downhill effect. Publishers limit what retailers are able to offer, so it isn’t a free-for-all. Retailers, though, can dictate how publishers think by what they choose to carry or how they position it in stores in ways that affect sales. Buried on a shelf in the back vs. on a display table at the front door makes a world of difference in sales.
And the public? Books are cheaper and more abundant in the new model, but they have no way to access a book directly. Out of luck, truly.
If you put on your evil tyrant hat for a second, imagine that you want to control information. It could be specific information, or access to ideas, or access to an entire culture. It could be that you’re in charge and don’t want alternative views of the world out in the wild. Whatever, it’s your autocracy.
In the book world, you the tyrant look at those two chokepoints and see possibilities. Maybe you push publishers to not print a title, either through law or by rhetorical pressure. You could look at the distributor side and pressure retailers, or limit what libraries carry. Practically, good censors do all of the above. They might ban a book and create an outcry, and by the time they loosen the restrictions due to blowback, printers have stopped printing it because there’s less market for it, something we’d call a chilling effect.
If you think about the old world, the universe of books possible is neatly defined by what your bookstore or library carries, and that makes it a perfect vehicle for information control. In an offline time of brick-and-mortar purchases and card catalogs, the boundaries of our consumption options determine the reality of what exists for consumption. The Jedi librarian Jocasta Nu said it best in Attack Of The Clones:
“It does not exist!
But that isn’t the end of the story, not in the days of internets instead of holocrons.
The promise of the internet age is we have all moved from being mere consumers to the triple role of consumers, creators and distributors. The internet creates self-publishing, but the social internet creates networks that can act as recommendation engines and point the way for how to access something. We have exponential access to both distributing our creations and consuming what others create.
The evil tyrant saw their two chokepoints splinter into billions of nodes and spokes. Trying to suppress information no longer means controlling just publishers and distributors. You have to go to war with the internet itself.
Which brings us back to libraries and the simple power of a QR code.
Back in April, the state of Oklahoma passed into law HB 1775, which prohibited teachers from “making students feel discomfort or guilt based on their race or gender.” Classroom instruction is one facet, but because learning encompasses more than that, we’re also talking about media - reading, videos, and listening material. The predictable impact of this legislation is that school and classroom libraries were suddenly under scrutiny, and we saw cases where titles were withheld from student view because of the law. Chilling effects, in other words. Teachers self-censoring their instruction and their materials so as to not run afoul of the censors who passed this law.
This isn’t unique to Oklahoma. Texas passed a similar law this year that allows anyone to challenge a title in a school library, and it has resulted in books being pulled off shelves (titles including Anne Frank’s diary and the Bible). It’s a sad irony that many of the people championing these school censorship laws are also complaining about cancel culture, but it’s happening all over the U.S. and librarians are at the center of the fight.
Just last week, a Michigan town defunded its public library because some residents were upset that it carried LGBTQ titles. Censorship also isn’t just limited to books. Last week a high school in Nebraska shut down its student newspaper because the staff was producing articles about LGBTQ issues. Notice the common theme here: censorship and inclusive access for LGBTQ perspectives, power used to shut down ideas moving from the edges to the public sphere of discussion via media. In a non-digital world, these laws and censorship moments would be a pretty effective strategy, and their proponents seem to think so which is why this fight is happening all over the country. But it’s dated thinking. Teachers, libraries and schools are the window on what books are possible, and an absent book is an invisible book if what’s inside the walls was the only thing defining the book space. But we aren’t there.
Anyhow, in the case of Oklahoma, a teacher named Summer Bossier tried to work around HB 1775 by providing students a hyperlink embedded in a QR code, one that points to a list of banned books. It is a list that includes ways students could access these books for free. The books technically weren’t in her classroom or in the school library. All Boismier did was provide information. But again, the bans aren’t about physical books. They are about distribution, with books being the particular vehicle in this case. The school reprimanded Boismier and she ended up resigning because of the conditions placed on her. From the story:
“[The Norman Public Schools district] essentially asked me to commit to keeping politics out of my classroom if they were to reinstate me,” she said in an online message. “It is my firmly held belief that education is inherently political; therefore, being apolitical is both an impossibility and (in of itself) a political stance.”
Boismier is out of the classroom, obviously, but if you think about the simple technology at work, you see the censor’s dilemma. The list is assembled, and the QR code exists. Every person in that school becomes a distributor, even — ESPECIALLY — after the teacher is gone. Getting rid of the teacher creates the potential for a Streisand Effect, wherein an attempt to suppress something inadvertently becomes publicity for that thing.
Publicity heightens awareness and makes it even easier to spread Boismier’s list. The school replaces a single node distributing a URL with an army of outraged students and community members. These new distributors don’t need school technology to spread, and so shutting down school-based pathways to communication does no good. These kids and parents are already highly networked on social platforms, chat apps and other types of internet communication technologies. Anyone who’s spent a hot minute with Gen Z knows how resourceful they are and how resilient their digital communication pathways are. Censorship is a lost cause, and in fact will only embolden them.
Now, all of what I’ve just said has been about the distribution side. It covers how published material can more easily go around gatekeepers and reach the public, and it’s dealing with that second of the two gatekeepers (distribution). But as I wrote last week, I’m thinking about both sides of this equation. Access is higher, but so are publishing opportunities. Self-publishing on blogs, podcasting, video shows, social influencers, eBooks and print-on-demand all are ways that creators are making paths around publisher gatekeepers at the point of production. The internet is publisher and distributor, and technology has reduced those two chokepoints to a single point again. But unlike in the hand-copied days of old, it’s widely decentralized across a range of technologies and platforms. In the hand-copied model, the Church itself was the start and end of what got published.
Now?
To stop an idea, you have to go to war with the internet itself. The internet, in all its decentralized and uncontainable glory.
Gatekeeping is a form of power. It is control over what defines the universe of ideas by the decision to publish or allow access. The people and institutions that controlled this power have used it to limit the range of acceptable discourse in ways we might support or dispute, but it is power.
In my case, I’m interested in matters of religious affiliation and what constitutes orthodoxy or fundamentalism. But the playing field for creators has been open for two decades now, and it is more diverse. Other ways of thinking or talking about matters of faith have entered the chat, and the schism we are seeing in American fundamentalism is a reaction to a loss of status quo distribution power as new voices gain traction. The path to this new paradigm is not linear, and it will be extraordinarily messy. But it will force fundamentalism to reckon with the reality that its authority has partially been buttressed by centuries of gatekeeper power in bookstores, communities and libraries. When that control is wiped away but the belief structure and the desire to control remains, what happens next?
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Twitter at @jeremylittau.