Political history where were all talking about history and how its going to be taught and talked about and consumed over the years. This krrchs is sponsored by the department of history here at Purdue University and is organized by one of our panelists, katie burnell. Thank you, katie, and nikki hemm hemmer. My name is connie doebele. 50,000 hours of american politica history in their classrooms and in their research. We do some other things, but thats what were concentrating on at this conference. I tweet at cjdoebele and the center tweets centerforcspan. We would be interested in following you as we reach out to specifically history professors throughout the country who are interested in using the cspan archives in their classroom and in their research. So we have three excellent panelist panelists that all have different areas of interest under this topic. Theyre going to speak for five to seven minutes and then take a lot of q a. Were going to start with Margaret Omeara. I hate to read introductions. So there is her introduction. You can read it. I dont need to read it for you. I need to do what i was taught to do, which is in the brian lamb school of questioning, is to ask the questions that are not up there. Margaret, where do you grow up . I grew up in little rock, arkansas. How did you make the move from little rock, arkansas, to where did you go to school . Northwestern university. To northwestern . Yes. How did do you that . I wanted to go to a big city. I wanted to 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 little rock central high school. And i was, in my senior year, was the 30th anniversary, the fall of 1987 was the 30th anniversary of the crisis at central high and the little rock nine returned, and it was a real the time i was in high school was a time that we were all being, you know, being made very aware of that history, where at least certainly within the walls of that high school were reckoning with that history. By that point it had become a majority minority very, very socioeconomically diverse high school. Understanding my own personal connection to a place that played a significant role in the American Civil Rights story is one of the reasons i did this. Last bio question, what professor or what teacher, no matter whether it was grade school, high school, university level, made the most difference in your career path . My graduate adviser, michael katz, late michael b. Katz, from the university of pennsylvania. Because we are the cspan archives, i was able to and i was tickled to find that all three of our panelists are in the cspan archives. They have all appeared on cspan. Here is Margaret Omeara talking about the vietnam war and the protests. This is part of a program that does called lectures in history. They go across the country and they look for professors teaching historical issues in the classrooms and actually bring the cameras into the classrooms and get a class. 1960s is a time, yes, when the modern left, liberal left comes together and you have strong leftist movements, both within and outside formal politics, a push towards more leftist solutions. But it is also the moment when the modern right is coming together. Because there are also young people on college campuses, young people in high schools, young people who are just postcollegiate, who have very different ideas about what america is and what it should be. Margaret omeara has a book called the code in Silicon Valley and the remaking of america. It seems crazy that thats history now, but it is for some of us. It is. I turn it to you. All right. Well, thank you so much, connie. Thank you, katie, for organizing this. And, meredith, its just great to be on this panel with all of you and to be speaking to the people in the room and the people who will be watching this on cspan. So i set to writing my most recent book the code and approached it when i started about five years ago, thinking of it as a political history of Silicon Valley, and it morphed into something broader, but the political sign was there. The course of writing evolution of the high technology, computer and hardware industries in california and west coast, but more broadly from the 1940s to present, particularly when you get to the last 25 years, it also becomes a story about media. So, im intensely interested in, as scholars say, putting the state back into the story of Silicon Valley, a place that has for quite a while portrayed its as a techno libertarian paradise, in which politics and government was something to be avoided, that when government got involved, things got messed up. Funnily enough, politicians of both parties held up as a beautiful example of American Free enterprise and entrepreneurialism in action. But theres actually a very critical government story, political story that runs throughout. There also is a media story, or information dissemination story. I think going to something we see thats manifesting now, you have of course very Large Technology companies, like alphabet and google and facebook that are media platforms through much so much information flows, yet theyre companies that do not think of themselves as media companies, not only sort of a verb, say theyre not in the business of media as if they were newspapers, but also their self conception truly is one of being against traditional media, being something that media is like government, something to be an oldstyle institution. When we look at this historically, we not only see how the culture of Silicon Valley in particular, Business Culture that was based on growing fast at all costs, elbowing competitors out of the way, bringing products to market quickly, so the growth mindset of Silicon Valley is something that is animating how these very Large Companies are working today, and also why it is challenging to change the Business Model to something that isnt about creating ever more powerful algorithms that can scrape information. Also, a community that grew that i referred to in my book as a galapogos. Its a distinctive ecosystem that grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, connected to centers of finance and government on the east coast, notably through flow of money through the industrial complex, why Silicon Valley came to be, itself. But it was isolated enough geographically and in terms of not a lot of people paying attention. If you read a story in the Washington Post or the New York Times that referred to Silicon Valley anytime before 1980, first of all the term comes up rarely. When it does, it is in Silicon Valley. And there were even when you did have National News coverage, news magazines like fortune were profiling entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it was as if it was this sort of strange, beautiful far away species, a very different type. If we look back to the way in which entrepreneurs like steve jobs and bill gates were presented to the world when they first came to prominence and their Companies First came to prominence, it was a shaggyhaired iconic, very different and disruption from the larger narrative of the american capitalism. One thing we discover looking back that there is a distinctive Business Culture that grows in the Technology Industry, a Technology Industry thats come in modern age to have an immense influence on politics and government and on media. It is very distinctive, yet it is deeply connected to old economy institutions, whether they be National Government or State Government or local governments. Old money, where did the money for the Technology Revolution come from . Where were funds that flowed into the initial venture funds that started these iconic Entrepreneurial Companies and semiconductors and personal computing and on and on . It was the rockefellers, whitneys, where the money was. Wall street, wall street banks. Most establishment of establishment is underneath. And these companies, even ones like apple, for example, which presented itself in the beginning, very successfully, a countercultural dream of a company, a place that thinks different. Why did apple break apart from the pack of other personal computer makers in the late 70s . They had a beautiful product. And they also had a singular the two steves, steve wozniak, who design aid beautiful, powerful, elegant motherboard inside the computer, but steve jobs, who could tell a really good story and understood how to present this device to the world, but they also had management expertise coming from other companies that were much more traditional and well established that kind of took these two guys in a garage and turned it into a real operation. You see this again and again and again. So recognizing, a, that this whole ecosystem has a history, that this whole ecosystem has a history, that it is both singular and distinctive, but it is a product of the last 75 years of political history and social history is critical to understanding and grappling with the immense influence today. And ill leave it at that. Thank you very much. Meredith broussard is our next speaker. Meredith is from New York University and she has a book called artificial unintelligence how computers misunderstood the world. And im going to put up your biography but ask you questions like, where did you grow up . I grew up in a small quaker town outside philadelphia. How did you make it from philadelphia to nyu . Well, i was at penn before this, at temple before this sorry . Microphone. Oh, microphone. Before i was at nyu, i was a professor at temple and professor at the university of pennsylvania, and i study Data Journalism. I practice Data Journalism. It is a practice of finding stories, numbers, and using numbers to tell stories. And new york is really the epicenter 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, which is my other specialty. So what teacher moved your life . One of the stories i tell in the book is about when i was in high school. I was in an Engineering Program for kids. All right. Go ahead. Do we need to start over . No. Absolutely not. Ill just 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. 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 they were Building Nuclear weapons there, but 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. So i actually built my own first computer. And it was great. And so i learned from that that i had the power to create technology. Also that there are a lot of wasted spare parts laying around at Tech Companies that seemed like useful information. And i learned about power. I learned that i had the power to build things. I learned that, as margaret said, theres a lot of economic power behind Building Technology. So that was important knowledge that took me into becoming a data journalist. So in looking for you in the cspan archives, i found you at the yelp headquarters in washington, d. C. I didnt know they had yelp headquarters, much less one in washington, d. C. So here you are. Technology will not save us from every social problem, so lets take homelessness, for example. The fix for homelessness is not making an app to connect people with services better. The fix for homelessness is giving people homes. So we need to think about pushing back against techno chauvinism, using the right tool for the task. Sometimes that tool is a computer, and sometimes its not. Meredith broussard. Thank you. So, i want to talk a little bit today about understanding Artificial Intelligence. So my book artificial unintelligence is about the inner workings and 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. So i build Artificial Intelligence systems for investigative reporting. I would say this, people would say you mean it is like a robot reporter . And i would say no. And they would say, its so like a machine that spits out story ideas . And i would say no. So i realize that if i wanted anybody to understand what the heck i was talking about, what i was working on, there needed to be more basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence in the world. So i started researching the book. And i realize that we dont often get good definitions of ai. We talk about ai a lot, but theres kind of a fog that descends when we try to talk precisely about it, theres a lot of confusion. Often when you have a conversation between two people about ai, one person is actually talking about the hollywood stuff with the killer robots, and, you know, a computer thats going to take over the world, and the other person is talking about computational statistics. All right. So it is really important if were going to have policy discussions about Artificial Intelligence and role of technology and society that were all talking about exactly the same thing. So one of the things that i do in the book is i give a concise definition of Artificial Intelligence and i show readers exactly what it looks like when somebody does ai, specifically i look at Machine Learning which is a form of Artificial Intelligence. So Artificial Intelligence is a subdiscipline of Computer Science, same way that algebra is a sub discipline of mathematics. And inside the field of Artificial Intelligence, there are a lot of subfields, Machine Learning, expert systems, natural language processing, natural language generation, but the interesting thing happened where Machine Learning has become the most popular subfield of Artificial Intelligence, and so this linguist particular slippage happened. When people say i am using ai for business, what they mean is i am using Machine Learning for business. But the two terms have become conflated. It is important to keep this distinction in mind. Then another point of confusion is that Machine Learning, like Artificial Intelligence, sounds like theres a little brain inside the computer. So i was once at a kind of science fair for grown ups, doing a demo of an ai system i built, and this undergraduate came over and said, you built an ai system . I said yes. Is it real . I said yes. I was kind of confused. Then he starts looking under the table, like theres something hiding under the computer. As if there is a brain in there. So i realized that this linguistic confusion is profound. So we need to talk about the fact that the real Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is not actually about centien s in the computer. Its a bad term honestly. What Machine Learning is it is computational statistics on steroids. Its making statistical predictions. Its amazing that it works so well most of the time, and its amazing that 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. So, we need to keep these ideas in mind. And we also need to think about hollywood, because hollywood ideas about Artificial Intelligence color our beliefs. Every student who comes in the classroom and starts thinking about technology and starts thinking about history is also simultaneously thinking about hollywood and thinking about hollywood images of Artificial Intelligence. So, we need to make that distinction. We need to make the point that hollywood imagery ai is totally imaginary. Researchers call it general Artificial Intelligence. That is the singularity. Thats the machines that think. Thats the robots that take over the world, and its all totally imagery. And real Artificial Intelligence, what we actually have, is called narrow ai. So, Machine Learning, even though it sounds magical, is a n narrow ai and its just math. So another thing i realized when i was doing the research for the book is that the confusion over Artificial Intelligence is almost deliberate. People have been using confusion about technology as a gatekeeping method. To grandize themselves, to make a lot of money and to keep certain kinds of people out of the profession. When you really trace it back, all our ideas about technology and Society Today come from a very small and Homogeneous Group of people, 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. The problem is that some people embed their 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 direct connection to the fact that women and people of color are not represented in the upper echelons of mathematics. So at the harvard math department, there are two senior professors who are women. In 2019, there are two. And you know when they started . 2018. All 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 these Structural Forces are important. They think that what matters is the math. They think that solving mathematical problems, solving technological problems is so superior to these pesky social problems that they get a pass. So this is the root of an idea that i call techno chauvinism, which we saw in the earlier clip. It is the idea that Technological Solutions and technological problems are 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 it is something simple like a book in the hands of a child sitting on a parents lap. One is not better than the other. It is 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 techno chauvinism, is it desire to make vast amounts of money . And is that actually giving us the world we want . We can also look at the way the ai systems function, which is that they replicate the world as it is. The way you built an ai system, you take data, build a Machine Learning model that is a mathematical model of whats happening inside this data, then use that model to predict values, make decisions about future data. The problem is that this model has no sentiens, has no soul, and it replicates what already exists. If you think the world is already pretty great, then yeah. Youre going to want to replicate it exactly. But i would argue that the world includes sexism. The world includes racism. The world includes generations of biased decisions about who gets a mortgage. The world includes in the u. S. A vast amount of residential segregation. So for using ai systems to decide who gets a mortgage to buy a house, then were actually replicating generations of inequality. We need to think about these ai systems. As discriminating by default and question whether were actually building the Computational Systems that get us to the world as it should be. Meredith broussard, thank you very much. So now we go to Katie Brunell from Purdue University, history professor. Katie, is republic of entertainment going to be the title of the book . No, it is a title i came up with for a grant application. I do not like it. So any ideas, let me know. All right. You can read on the screen katies bio. Tell me a little about where youre from. Originally from michigan. Went to university of michigan and then did my graduate work at boston university. How old were you when you knew you wanted to study history as a profession . It was my freshman year at university of michigan. I went in to study business. I thought that would get me a job. I took a history class with matt lassiter. First day of that class completely opened my eyes to how amazing history was. My jaw was dropped after that lecture, and i decided i wanted to learn more about history. And by the end of that year, i wanted to become a historian. Your first book was showbiz politics. What was that about . Looks at the role of entertainment in american politics, leading up to ronald reagan. How our political culture shifted to becoming a celebrity and what i call showbiz politics, a core component of how politicians gained power and credibility. Thats a great transition into the clip we chose for you. This was from an interview that cspan did with you at the organization of american historians. Is that right . Sounds right. Theres a really compelling speech when you have nixons handwriting on it. And he actually says, reagan appeals to the heart. We appeal to the minds. Are we missing something by not invoking reagans strategy . He gathered this team of media advisers, advertising execs and television producers, roger ales notably, and they all agree what went wrong in 1960 is that he didnt use media effectively and he didnt turn himself into a celebrity the way kennedy had. He completely revamped his media strategy, made television central, and followed what kennedy did, and followed what reagan did. And this is really significant because at the end of the day, he believed and the people he surrounded himself believed the difference between nixon the loser and nixon the winner was what embraced that showbiz politics style. Take that into your next project on 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 their work and im drawing on it for my own work. Mine is still very much a work in progress. Ive done a lot of the research and im 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 it 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, 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 fcc regulators, are at the core of the industrys history. And these political debates propelled varied transformations in the idea of what Cable Television was, and how 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. If there was a trouble in terms of reception due to terrain or distance, cable could provide broadcast, amplify the reach of broadcast. Then during the 1960s and 1970s, cable 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 their remote control. The industry recognized that their business was tied to what Cable Television meant. This is especially important, they were not part of the decisions 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 and had relationships with regulators and congressmen, they limited what was possible for cable to function as a business. Theres a really powerful clip of bill daniels, cable pioneer, available through cable centers oral history. Done in 1990. After the industry had 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 rattles off the quote list of our enemies when we first started, and he slowly starts counting on his fingers, abc, nbc, cbs, Telephone Company owners, movie producers, local tv stations, city council, State Governments, lawyers, lobbyists, and added a challenge came from congressional representatives who, quote, didnt like us because their broadcast buddies at home and whom they were depending to get elected didnt like us. I think this 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 gave tremendous social, economic, power to the broadcasting industry. Theres a close collaboration between broadcasters and congressional leaders, president ial administrations and the fcc that created a favorable Regulatory Framework that benefitted congressmen and president s that were eager to be in the eye of their constituents on local or National News. So they benefitted from this. And the broadcasting industry also benefitted from this arrangement, they experienced very little competition in exchange for foregrounding the official voices from government. They underpinned this arrangement that allowed for corporate monopoly to dominate for two decades, even longer. What is essential, politicians believed they needed broadcasters to get elected. Nixon is key here. 1950s and 1960s are a moment in which politicians are grappling with the age of television. And theyre hiring consultants who are telling them that you need to go on tv, you need to have advertisements, you need to be part of the news. So they believe that broadcasters have a lot of political power and that they have to have favorable relationships with them. Culturally, the regulatory model depended on the idea of objectivity. A trust that the public had in big institutions. So network news was primarily seen as objective source of information that gave out the official line. Think of Walter Cronkite and thats the way it is. Overwhelmingly relying on government sources to shape their presentation of the news. Intellectually, another key component that broadcasters shaped research how television functioned. So all of the studies that support the broadcasting model with these three corporate networks, this was in the best interest of the country, they were done by Research Departments of the networks. Again, they were able to shape the intellectual framework as well. So during this time again, 1950s and 1960s, fcc and congress created strict regulations that ensured cable couldnt compete, limited the programming that cable could use and offer its subscribers, and basically made it the only way cable could function is if it extended the signals of the broadcasting industry. This starts to change over the next two decades as congress and state and local governments combined with the activism of Cable Operators, the formation of an effective lobbying organization and consumers to transform not just the regulatory structure but the very ways that television functions 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 richmond nixon. It is not an accident that nixon who so firmly believes in the power of media to shape his political success, something that i charted in my first book becomes a president who is very passionate good telecommunications and who takes it seriously. He firmly believed that there was this idea of liberal bias in Network Television and wanted to do something to challenge institutional structures that gave Network Television so much power. And he ultimately empowered many white house staffers who worked for him to pursue a 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 the raining assumptions about television. Notably it capitalized on the growing technique of objectivity manifesting 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 could flourish as a new type of business. That ultimately dismantled the economic justifications of the broadcast monopoly. And in the aftermath of nixons presidency, Congress Continues to debate and take seriously some of the policies that originated in the nixon white house. And the newly elected post watergate reformers, they took away kind of the emphasis on the waging war against broadcasters that nixon had used but took seriously the ideas that his office of telecommunications put forward about the need for more diversity and a more comprehensive Television Programming that could benefit all aspects of Civic Engagement and government. The televised watergate hearings, i see it is as an important moment because it elevated the prestige of the legislative branch and its members and it taught congress that if they were the stars of the show, that they could gain this power and shift some of the power back to the legislative branch. And so in the aftermath, Congress Starts debating how could we integrate television coverages away to restore more power to what they were doing and they were looking for television. How do we have more attention and more cameras focused on what were doing. The problem is network news only had half an hour, maybe an hour that they wanted to dedicate to Public Affairs so you needed a different type of television in order for this to work. And the cable industry, that is 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 lamb argued. In an oral history, recounting how he sold the idea of cspan to cover what congress was doing to quote unquote turn the lights on congress, he told people in the cable industry, that only by becoming a player in the news could cspan challenge the authority and the power that nbc, cbs and abc ultimately had. And he was right. Cspan launched in 1979 and politicians debated how cable should be used and not if it should be used, and the politicians that once dismissed the industry because theyre 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 collaborate and at times very contentious. But they were always very consequential. And the process, as political leaders are becoming very eager to manipulate the cable dial. The style of government, and how they were communicating and engaging with their constituents became transformed by the core ideas of a market populism and that made cable so powerful and popular. Since the 1960s the Financial Success of the cable industry depended on the industrys ability to defend, define and distinguish Cable Television 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. And so by 1990s that conquered list of enemies that bill daniels outlined by conquering all of the enemies and forging relationships and becoming a power player itself, American Society and the media structures on which it depended were fundamentally transformed. The terrain has shifted but, and this is a key argument that i 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 became to rely on Cable Television more to interact with their politicians, but through that process politics began to look more like the programs that were actually on the dial. Thank you. Thanks very much. [ applause ] so were going to open up. I was getting ready to say well open up the phone lines. Were going to open up for q a in a minute or two and if you could let them know and well get a microphone to you. And as they do that, let me ask each of you, since this is a panel about Media Technology and the state, tell me 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 really critical moment in the early 1990s when the internet, which has been around since 1969 as a product of the Defense Department used by Government Employees and researchers exclusively up until the early 90s, its becoming commerciali commercialized. It involves a set of regulatory decisions, and theres a really interesting and its the moment when Silicon Valley, or at least this the generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneus s turned millionaires turned political activists start making, becoming a presence in washington. It is the moment and that is partially because bill clinton, who is elect fld 1992, works very hard starting before he declared his candidacy to woo Silicon Valley and to make democrats the party of Silicon Valley. And prior, there had been close ties with republicans, both at the national and the state level. But there is a moment where theyre trying to figure a medium that is defined as the wild west. And that where the advocates of the internet from the valley are talking about it as a frontier, talking about it in a very Frederick Jackson turner sort of way. Although not consciously, sort of wide open spaces waiting to be conquered, limitless possibility. But they are arguing for keeping 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 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 the cable providers who are you know, want to control the information flow, and where newly formed foundations, like Electronic Frontier foundation, are arguing to keep it in jeffersonian, and leaders of both parties, republicans first in the opposition in congress and then after 1995 as the majority in congress led by Newt Gingrich and the democrats in the white house, it is one of the few things in the mid 1990 that the two parties could agree on by and large. What was not realized and this is less a case of the government letting the American People down, but really not realizing that some of the scrappy little companies, these guys would become google, facebook, would become even Silicon Valley itself and those people who were arguing for the jeffersonian internet, even mitch kaper, who wrote and talked eloquently about this, this notion later reflected to me, we had no idea that people would use the internet we were so naive. We had no idea people would use the internet for bad as well as for good. And neither did regulators and neither did politicians in the 90s. It was such a boutique issue and the technology was so very little understood. Meredith and i were talking last night, there is very few people in washington that now really grasp the technology, which is a real challenge. And that lack of a gulf of understanding of ai is not Machine Learning and not something that it transposes into policy making. So at the end why is the internet economy, these tech platforms so unregulated . Theyre not regulated like the Cable Companies were. Theyre not regulated like nearly Everything Else. And what were doing now is were grappling with a kind of posthoc regulatory decisionmaking where new Economy Companies grow so large. And it is like, okay, we need to back up and figure out some way to contain and channel 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 television, computing from the bottom up that brings voices of people in localities to the surface. Who wants to take that . Well, i could start by saying i dont have the solution. But i could tell you that thats a debate that has been at the core of regulatory issues. And when connie asked the question of how has the state let the people down, i would have actually said that i think that politicians are con stan constantly having regularations in the 1970s and 80s and thinking about how to restructure the regime that many people are pointing out the problems. And there are a lot of problems and what can we do about it and we need to diversity of localism and empower local communities, return this media back to the people. That is so powerful in their debates. And how theyre framing it and talking about the importance of consumers and privileging their interests. But what they actually do is theyre really shaped more by their selfinterest and you see a Corporate Structure without. So i think that there is that tension that has really always been there and so it is kind of waiting through what these policies could actually do. Would they provide more diversity, more ways for local communities to have control or do they actually just replicate some of the Corporate Structures that allow for the massive amounts of mergers that happen in the 1980s and 1990s that then stifle those very adventures that youre talking about. And we have a question up here and while we wait for the mic to get there, let me ask you, you were a member of the media. You were a reporter for the philadelphia enquirer and now a member of the media in this nir era that you work in. How have you or have you been welcomed by the Journalism Community in this in area that you want to work in. One of the 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 that 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. 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. So you find journalists are open to the idea of using your kind of data in terms of in their stories. Yeah. So Data Journalism is a fastgrowing field. People have only been talking about Data Journalism since, say, 2006. But it actually dated 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 this analysis where he did a survey and to used the tools of social Scientific Research in order to conduct a survey, he used a main frame to analyze the results and he found the participants in the race riot cut across a class spectrum and that tells us a different story about who is participating in the race riots in detroit and also what does it mean for the community. So philip myers work in the 60s morphed into computer assisted reporting which is kind of a dorky name but that is what we called it in the 80s and in the 90s when the big revolution was that every reporter had a desktop computer, right. Were moving off of main frames and it was this big revelation that you could use spreadsheets and data bases. So Data Journalism is what we started calling it when we started using more internet tools. Okay. Yes. Excellent panel. It is amazing. I love the conversation that all four of you. My question is to meredith and id like to know if you think that would it be fair to say that there are causal links between the rise of ai and the decline of humanity in the last 30 years and, if so, what can we do in the humanities to take on techno chauvinism. My understanding is digital humanities doesnt question techno but there is a mentality that rewarded techno chauvinism and why they are not attracted to policymakers so those social Sciences Like economics have years of policymakers not the humanities, it is part of a bigger problem but i wonder about solutions, those of us in humanities do and i wonder to techno chauvinism in our own ways. That is a good question. What can we do to work against this. I think it starts with admitting that techno chauvinism exists and pushing back against it. And saying that Technical Solutions are not superior to solutions from the social science or from the humanities, that each is valid. I think we have to look at funding inequality. You have to look at funding for the humanities and the social sciences versus the funding for data science, for darpa, and we have to remedy that particular inequality because there is a lot of flon sen nonsense fund through darpa and a lot of 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 reasons that we dont have more data journalists is because of the really profound pay gap between what you could make as a journalist and what you could make as somebody who does ai in Silicon Valley. So you go into journalism and say youre going to make 30,000 a year or 40,000 as year and you could make ten times as much as starting salary just out of college for ai. And that is absurd and that didnt used to be the case. In 60s and 70s whether Technology Policy was developing the gap between what you made as a doctor or lawyer and what you made as a social worker was much smaller. And now the gap between what you make as a Technology Executive and what you make as a teacher, its unfathomable. So one thing we can do is we can pay teachers more. And if we pay teachers more, not Just University professors but k through 12 teachers and if we pay teachers more than well have more talent in the classroom teaching our Younger Generation about technology. So right now we have i mean, when i make Computer Science, a lot of them are wonderful and some of them used to be gym teachers is the cash strapped school district. I think it is about economics. I think it is about looking at priorities and also thinking about race and ethnicity. Because part of the narrative inside technology has been that the technology is objective. That is unbiased and therefore superior. And when you ignore incredibly important social factors like how race and ethnicity and 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 integrate systems. There is a discipline of dana rhythm that is my Little Corner and it is a really promising field. One of the things that we do inial go rhythmic and we interrogate them and say are these fair and just. Generally the answer is no. And then we also build our own algorithms in order to look at how systems function and to find the flaws in the system. So margarita, when you were looking at your history of Silicon Valley, what is your take from what you heard here . I think this has a history and techno chauvinism has a history. And think about Silicon Valley comes from two professions that were entirely all white and all male and not necessarily elite. There were plenty of penniless boys from South Carolina who got scholarships to m. I. T. And went on to there is a lot of founding generation of the valley where men from a modest background went to Rice University because it had free tuition, came to stanford for grad school because they could work at the same time. All of the ivy leaguers stayed on the east coast and worked for fortunate 50 companies. And so it was all male. So it is the world of engineering where women were not you could say if a woman wanted to major in math, like sorry, we dont allow women in the program. This is the 50s and 60s. And the other vertical was finance mba, executive management. And harvard didnt admit women. They had a very homogenous world. And the magic of Silicon Valleys is the baton and as my friend leslie bollon talks about is passing the baton from one generation to another. The semiconductor generation funds the computer generation and does the same to the internet generation and then to the social media generation but they have pattern recognition. I give money to im going to invest in this guy, in this person, because they went to stanford, Computer Science and theyre wearing a hoodie and somewhere on the spectrum. And, yeah, because it is also this gut thing where youre giving resources to people because you just believe in the person not just the product. So that is part of what makes it work. That is the challenge. It is part of if you want to explain what the magic of Silicon Valley is, it is the insull airity. And there is a lot of money. Darpa is funding a lot of silly things but darpa is the giant in Computer Science because of government austerity, Everything Else got cut away. And scientists deeply ambivalent about taking any money from the pentagon, they had to find a way to say im working on this thing that doesnt have darpa is the only way i could get money for what i want to do so certain parts of the government and military is one part that keeps on getting money, gets appropriations, and the rest, not even neh and nea but other parts have been cut away whereas military agencies are funding basic research but it is for certain some long range applicability for some military purpose in some way. So all of these things are feeding in. This is not to say this is intractable and we cant fix it but recognizing the political history and 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 who are watching are thinking about and living that recognizing that, that is the way you identify how you perhaps change. And anyone looking at history does show all of these instances of where things did change remarkably. And so there is if we are frustrated by this imbalance and i think technology themselves are very frustrated by that they recognize there needs so be some reframing and some incorporation whether we call it afix or something else, there is understanding this history is a 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 list. And i just wonder what you think about 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. It is a really great question and i think the dominant narrative around cable is that it has created this polarization. But i think that narrative does foreground the technology more, that cable is doing this. Rather this is people a variety of politicians who are using cable platforms to pursue different strategies, right. So Newt Gingrich, a really brilliantly seeing an opportunity 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. So i think that is important to think about how there are choices in terms of how the medium is used but also the ramification of relying and putting that faith in the market. If it is about competition and what sells, becomes defined as news, then you have a very different style after news. And i think that is one of the shifts that is important to understand, is that the news as it existed in the 1960s and 1970s, sure, advocated for finding this consensus, but it was very much one that was driven by white wealthy and middle class men who are part of the establishment and 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 providing at first tens and then hundreds and now we have so many more channels that it does give voice to different perspectives. So there is a shift. A shift for more of an elitist perception of what constitutes as news and where people are going for their information so this more diverse and again bringing in the market principles, what counts as news is what people think and tune into and how they vote with mir remote controls. So i think there is a payoff but it is also important to note that this older system of broadcast Network Television also had a lot of problems inherent in it as well. In terms of solutions, again, i dont have any concrete ones. But i think just recognizing that what the medium offers, recognizing its limitations, recognizing what is driving it in terms of some of the challenges and the Political Choice that are being made in terms of how to deploy the media formats are really important to consider. So margaret, i saw a statistic in some of your work where you said that 10 of the American People at the height of Walter Conkrite doing the evening news were watching him and yet today if i did the math right it is like 23 times that number and 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. So it is scaled up in user base but also the way that people are interacting with information. The way that someone watched Walter Conkrite in 1967 was that you sat down in front of the television at a certain time and you had 30 minutes and 30 minutes creates a high bar for news. As katie was saying, it is highly curated but also curated by people in power. It is taking what government officials, by late 60s you get some pushback but it is a certain point of view of the Ivy League Educated east coast based media but very limited so you couldnt have silly news stories. So what cable creates and what the internet has exacerbated is this spin cycle, the 24 7 just hunger for content in which trivial things become multiday news stories and the way many people are using, including all of us, the way we use media is much less deliberate. Now i shall look at my twitter for 30 minutes and learn everything i need to know. It is not curated. It is a blizzard of information. So anything is in little snippets and some of is great import and one of the upsides of the internet age is this intense transparency and now there is revelation. But it becomes immune to all of this bad stuff. You dont take things as seriously. Whereas when walter con cite stopped in february of 1968 and turned to the camera and had a brief editorial moment in which he said the vietnam war has reached a stalemate, this is something that we have we are in something that we cannot get out of in the way that we expect, that had ricochetted through politics. Johnson didnt run for reelection. We dont have those moments any more even though there is so much more consumption of so much information. Next question. Go ahead. One of the things that i really appreciated, meredith, about your stance, to get in there and doing 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 about ai or things like that and you start to even speak about some of the people in the field, they dont know who some of the basics are like ray cursewild or those formulating this layer of complexity around us and we in our own realm havent delved into it too much. Havent imported 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 a part of their understanding. And because we have only a few little articles here and media has surprised itself by realizing when we did the facebook movie, oh, my gosh, that was less than ten years ago but it is 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 we havent been given both of that space and i try to bring to my students and Radio Audience that look for people that are doing this and i think it has to be more of a cross over for people like you who are bringing this technical perspective into technical writing and giving it more of a Historical Perspective. And i really like that a lot. What is the big point you think that and for the whole panel what do you think the biggest thing that historians are missing about this moment of technology . Whats the secret . Where is the book that is going to break this loose and wake us up to realize that we are in a renaissance and not realizing it. I this is its margarets book. Thanks, meredith. Available for preorder. I think if you read margarets book and my book next to each other i think it will give a really good historical overview as well as technical overview of how do we understand all of these forces. I think that weve only been publishers have only been investing in books that counter the dominant technology narrative in the past three to four years. So it is really not surprising that we havent had such a narrative until now because publishers are driven by marketing and everybody believed that technology was the future and everybody believed that the techno libertarian rhetoric and everybody believed the new communalist rhetoric is that cyberspace is going to change the world and empower people and only in the past three or four years have people said maybe that is not strictly true. So im really excited that that dialogue is happening now. One thing that i would also say that is important for historians to start grappling with is how the question of how do with do history in the future. Because when you think about twitter posts as an historical archive, so what you get from twitter as a civilian is a garden hose of twitter data and there is a fire hose of all of the twitter data but have you to pay for it. And twitter is not going to be around forever. So what is going to happen to all of that data . You think about newspapers and you think about how are newspapers archived . Well we know a lot about how to archive print news because you could go to any library and you could find a newspaper from 1849 and you could read the entire paper for the entire day in 1849. You could see all of the ads, you could see all of the copy and who wrote what and that is a useful tool for history but you cant actually go to say the boston globe and see everything that was written in the boston globe on a given day in 2002 because there is the print paper and then the digital version of the paper and then the website and then there is social media and there is god knows what else and the ads. Yeah, the ads change for everybody. So you cant see those. And theyre like made with a proprietary Ad Technology that doesnt exist any more. Because 2002 is ages ago in internet time. So this is a really big problem. The fact that weve invested in all of the technological systems for creating media, it is 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 cuttingedge digital news so Data Journalism projects are hard to preserve. So Katie Brunell, pickle up that mirror to your own industry, historians, people teaching history, what do you think. Well i think that question makes me think about the key idea that has emerged from all 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 that is 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 that is one of the fascinating things about the cable industry is because it is not a new technology in the 70s, it is not a new technology in the 90s but the ways in which it is talked about and it is potential and how it will solve all of these problems really is changed because of the political battles that are being fought, a lot of times in the public eye, and a lot of times behind the scenes as well. So i think it is really important to understand that and then to think about how, who is influencing that discussion of how this technology is being defined. You have consumers, constituents writing to their representatives, demanding access, demanding certain things. Lobbyists are playing a key role in terms of shaping the Public Relations debate and politicians, how they understand technology frequently is shaped by how they use it so those are key things to considerate this moment when everything is changing so quickly. It is hard to keep up with technology. There is a reason my book will end in the 90s because i think the environment changes you think that now. That is what i thought, too. Because all of a sudden everything does escalate quickly but i think some of 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. I think one of the things that historians are very good at doing is where we are in tech as meredith said three or four years ago it was changing the world, it is the future. And now weve swung violently to the other side where it is a 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 and now im like, we have supercomputers in our pockets. Guys, theyve done some good things. So what historians are good at is showing this complex nuance, and making sense of all of the data, showing the good and the bad and why you could grapple without an understanding phenomenon not just as all good or bad but providing Historical Context and helping people understand this complex subject as something that is actionable. But i think that is really where the historians super power is, is bringing this together. And i think the other dimension is historians as teachers and 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 be talking about here is how historians do what they do and produce the things that others read and learn from, here is what needs to be done with this new digital archive, not just digitizing things but thinking about how you grapple with the twitter feeds and with the ephemeral advertising, how do you preserve that record and not to mention just the broad record of the web itself and because that is itself, people trying to do that but that is not jet 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 these gaps exist and how they need to be remedied. We have time for one more question. Exacerbated by attempts by Cable Companies and Tech Companies like facebook and twitter to become selfappointed arbiters of proper political speech through use of stalinist phrases like hate speech that have been used to try to suppress conservative or traditional views and a couple of examples have been the states from the Covington Catholic high school went to the Lincoln Memorial and were berated by an american indiana activist and a parody video of nancy pelosi online and got so how do you scholar scholars addressing the future writings. Could we combine that question with professor berkin as well. Very interesting that you talked about public policy. You talked about technology, where do you see the influence of advertisers in the shaping of ive often said to my children that the mute button, the inventor of the mute button ought to get a Nobel Peace Prize because i mute out the commercials. But to what extent do they influence or the competition for them influence the kind of programming that you see not just on general television or not just but on cable tv as well. Who wants to start . Weaponization, advertising . I see these two questions as very connected because the advertising, the adbased model, the Business Model, that is the model by which these platforms and think about facebook, think about Google Youtube and the places in which these debates about whose speech gets heard is where the companies are driven by two things, one, theyre adbased model and shareholders and forprofit companies but also are informed by a politics, a small amount of politics that i see the point of origin being the gates Computer Science building on the campus the home of sergei penin and others went to school and the idea of were in the business of creating a platform in which conversation can happen. But the way that this is functioned now that these are incredibly Important Media companies, that these platforms have become places for speech of all kinds and that what is being understood as censorship of some voices is a product of companies that dont want to take sides or dont know how to navigate, theyve become producers of media and what is enabling the companies to do what they do and to sell ads, to have very tailored ads is created 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 then also reactions to that. And there is no i dont see, from my understanding and understanding how the history of the companies and how the Companies Work and think and what is driving them, i dont see censorship, i see a desire to keep this and fight for this neutrality which is actually is based now and very different from when it was a Search Engine created by a couple of graduate students. Theyve become much more powerful and embedded in different parts of life. So this is the great dilemma of the companies that theyre going to need to take sides without taking sides, if that makes sense. And at same time they have to serve their adbased model because how do you change it and probably the way its going to be changed is with our third part the state but some sort of regulation and what is that regulation going to look like and how do you preserve the jeffersonian internet and allow different types of voices to be heard across the spectrum at the same time without having state of affairs that we have now which no one seems very happy with. I could tackle the advertising question and give it to you to take it home. But one thing to add that your question makes me think of that i hadnt really spent a lot of time analyzing but i think is a really important component of the story is that the argument for Cable Television in the 70s and 80s hinged on the idea that subscribers would be the one that cable would be serving. So again, that empowerment of the consumer, that they would offer new types of program, from espn to mtv to cspan and all of the channels and the argument behind it is that this pay tv, hbo for example, one of the early models of this, that that would be all subscription based and some have remained subscription based but majority of them have shifted towards advertising model and that happens over the 80s and into the 90s as well. So i think that is an interesting shift in terms of the Business Model, where the cable industry begins with all of these ideas about how theyre going to be different. Theyre going to be different from broadcasting, solve some of these problems that people are talking about with the broadcasting model. But they actually, as they become more of this consolidated Corporate Media structure, they take on some of the very structures and very ideas that are embedded in broadcasting and they become a new player in the model and they replicate it. I would say that one of the things im really interested in, in thinking about the ad model, is im interested in advertising fraud. So they estimate that Something Like 7 billion of internet advertising is about ad fraud. So there is a vast amount of fraud in internet advertising. Ive heard that organized crime is heavily invested in ad fraud nowadays. So this is something ive been wanting to write about for a long time but i havent found the right hook yet. So i think thats a major complicating factor when we think about the success of facebook, google, twitter and their ad model. I would also be really interested in looking at the Historical Perspective of how did newspapers address this. Because there was a similar advertising fraud crisis in the wild west era of newspapers. Because you could just print a whole lot of newspapers and then throw them away and then claim that you printed this number and so that was your circulation so we have things like the Advertising Bureau of circulation of abc that came into being. And we do have the iab, the internet Advertising Bureau, but theyre 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 by your work on kind of the way that government regulation has advanced around Cable Television, i was thinking about the way that Telecom Policy evolved, the way that broadcast regulatory policy evolved and ive been thinking lately about the Silicon Valley idea of iteration. Because that is an idea that i do really like. I like the idea that, okay, we can try something and see if it works and then if it doesnt, then you try to do better. And i think that the way that this fits with the law. Because the law evolves, the law is the original artifact that iterates, right. Even the constitution, we have iterations of the constitution. So i wonder if, when it comes to regulating the social media platforms, we should regulate and then iterate. Let go of the idea 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 lets put it in place for a little bit and if it doesnt work, lets change it and iterate it. Very roosevelt. Yeah. Im the timekeeper so we have to wrap up. Thank you very much, dr. Broussard, dr. Brunell, dr. Rammera, lets give them a round of applause. Thank you. [ applause ] tonight on American History tv at 8 00 eastern, world war i. After more than four years of war, the u. S. Army in france launched the news are gone offensive, the 47day battled in the armistice that ended the great war in 1918. We travel to northeastern france with historian mitchell yokelson and a guide to tour several battle locations. And along the way, we discover several artifacts of the great war. Watch American History tv now and over the weekend on cspan3. Liftoff. Today, watch live coverage of the launch of spacexs commercial crew test flight marking first launch of astronauts on american soil since 2011. The live coverage of the spacex crew dragon launch is at 12 00 p. M. Eastern with liftoff at 4 30 p. M. As nasa astronauts launch to the International Space station. Then a post launch briefing with nasa administrator Jim Bridenstein at 6 00 p. M. Eastern. Thursday at 11 15 a. M. Eastern on cspan2, all day live coverage of the spacex crew dragon as it docks with the International Space station. Then the opening of the hatch between the two space vehicles. And the event between the spacex crew dragon and iss crew. Watch live on cspan2. Online at cspan. Org or listen on the free cspan radio app. Up next from Purdue Universitys political history conference, a panel of biographers talk about some of their subjects. They include sammy davis