First, the background:

On Friday, Arthur Brisbane, the public editor (I guess it’s another way of saying “Ombudsman” or “Sacrificial Flak-Catcher”) of the New York Times published a now-famous piece, asking, Should the Times be a Truth Vigitlante?

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news
reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they
write about.

(snip)

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with
the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The
Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters
imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that
the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way
that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when
the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there
other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

The reaction has been pretty heated. MetaFilter pithily said “Duh.”  Jay Rosen wrote a post name-checking his longstanding criticism of the whole “View from Nowhere” approach adopted by the press. And Gawker snarked that the NYT should instead just make stuff up.

Here was my reaction, republished here:

It’s interesting to see this issue break out into the open like this. In retrospect, the only thing that’s surprising is that it’s taken this long. Consider: internet sites like Snopes & PolitiFact owe their very existence to the breakdown of trust in our existing news institutions on the part of the audience. We read stuff (often sent via e-mail from the semi-mythical disgruntled conspiracy theorist uncle). Checking our newspaper/TV/radio/whatever, there’s a he-said/she-said story. So we go elsewhere to figure out if what we were originally sent is true or not.

Steve Yelvington long ago identified this as the most crucial (but neglected) part of the media in a societal ecosystem: being the “Town Expert.” (The other two roles are of “Town Crier” and “Town Square” – which media orgs more or less have a handle on.)

Can’t tell you the number of proposed startups that came through the Knight News Challenge in the last two years aimed at resolving this basic issue – how can we trust what we read? Many of them are seeking to assign some kind of a numeric “reliability score” to the source of the information. Which is interesting in theory – a published climate scientist getting a 99 score, for example, while a Big Oil-funded hack gets a 12.

But in practice, systems like this would probably fall prey to the same phenomenon that plagues Digg or other sites that rely on crowdsourcing to determine importance/credibility — the efforts of a committed radical few to rig the results in their favor. Still, it would be interesting to see a major media outlet start to offer little links in superscript next to attribution, that lead back to a page describing where that quote came from, who the person is, and what their history/agenda is.

We’re all struggling with the effects of the disintermediation taking place because of web technology – that much is evident to just about anybody working in media, advertising or marketing. The problem is that this is taking place at the end of a long, slow movement toward the utter blandification of content. The reasons for that are complex – some of them have to do with the influence of “risk management” thinking at media organizations, where the litigiousness of modern American society has driven deep-pocketed news organizations to water down stories out of fear, in order to evade expensive libel suits. The rest do have to do with the drumbeat these past 40 years of accusations of “liberal bias” in the press, and the attempts to defuse such accusations by applying the aforementioned “he-said/she-said” construction to stories, so that we can say, “Well, at least we gave them a chance to reply.”

Truth Vigilantes, New York Times, OJR, Robert Niles, false equivalency, he-said/she-said, view from nowhere

I guess it was inevitable.

Back in the 80s, hip designers realized that consumers were willing to become walking billboards for their product logos, all for the sweet, sweet tradeoff of being able to flaunt our ability to buy outrageously overpriced clothing. Slap a big ol’ logo or even just the name onto a t-shirt, mark it up 3000%, and the nouveau riche (but inwardly crippled by insecurity & self-loathing) will fork over fat wads of cash to be able to demonstrate their affluence. And so Guess, Armani, Jordache (remember them?), Dolce & Gabbana and Nike all slapped their logos on otherwise ordinary mass-produced items, and watched their profits soar.

First, from T-Post, an interesting little take on spreading the news, via clothing. These funky designs have actual stories that you can read on the back.

These t-shirts will at least keep the person waiting behind you in line at Starbucks well-informed.

I can see a real use for this kind of thing in places like Egypt, Syria, Russia, China — places where the government not only has censored the TV/radio stations, padlocked the printing plants, but DDoS’d the internet and shut down the cellphone grid. In places like that, just having a few people walk through the crowd as passive human billboards, with the latest information on their bodies, is a helluva tool to spread information.

Upside: It radically boosts your revolutionary chic.

Downside: It makes you a target for camel-riding truncheon-wielders.

Next up is a nifty little device that plays a programmable video loop, and that can be fashioned into clothing or attached to microphones to play sponsor’s messages during interviews before, during, or after big events.

It’s called VideoNameTag, and I took a demo unit with me to Kiev, when I taught a group of journalists and professors at the University of Mohyla’s Institute for the Digital Future of Journalism. You can see them puzzling over how to fit it onto their wrists – although they were certainly interested in the prospect of being able to broadcast the latest news via wireless connection to a couple of people walking through crowds.

They’re gearing up for an especially contentious election season in Ukraine this year; one where the pro-Putin crew is already pulling out all the stops to keep a lid on dissent. Not sure how much something like this could help – but then again, having a person walking through the crowd and playing a loop, such as the famous sequence showing the death of Iranian protestor Neda Soltan – could provide a form of information dissemination that would transcend the attempts at censorship.

If I were a weaker man, I’d just fold up my tent and move on.

However, upon closer inspection, I find myself saying “Yahbut …” a lot throughout this FUD screed.

Pariser has an entire web site devoted to this concept, called, The Filter Bubble. 

To all this sturm und drang, I can only respond by calling upon the wisdom of the Great Philosopher, Sgt. Hulka:

Lighten up, Francis.

There are some very large issues here, ones with deep roots, that I fear that Eli doesn’t really grasp. As I’ve written before, I started working in newsrooms back in the early 80s, when the decisions as to what went on the front page, what went in the “A” section, and what got left as lonely curled-up fragments of waxed paper on the layout room floor, was all up to a human editor. I’ve worked for some great editors. I’ve worked for some really batty editors.

And I’ve been at the mercy of editors and publishers who, after receiving a fat envelope on the first of every month from the ruling party in Venezuela, called me into the office and told me that the stories were to be positive and happy, optimistic about all the great changes the Adecos were bringing. So excuse me if I don’t buy into the concept that The Machine Is Scary. Particularly when no matter how you slice it, the Machine is Still Us. 

The reader surveys told us that fewer than 50% of the viewers even LOOKED at the front page anyway – most of them were on their way to the back of the paper, to read the late-breaking box scores from baseball games, and the rest were flipping to the gossip columns in the Lifestyle section, to see who had been spotted out with whom at the big Maraven barbecue.

So even back in the heydey of human intervention in trying to place information in front of the public based on the concept that “Starving children in Africa should be at least as important to you as a squirrel dying in your front yard” … even then, the whole horse-to-water problem arises. Yeah, sure, you can argue that someone will at least glance at the information on the front page on their way back to see whether Andres Gallaraga struck out again … but then again, maybe not. And even if they do, what does it matter if they’re not paying attention?

Or, to use the Web 2.0 construction, if you put the information in front of them and they’re not engaging with it anyway? How much do we want to force-stuff the information equivalent of Cod Liver Oil down the intellectual gullets of our readers?

I think that the entire problem, as laid out here, is the kind of thing that Old Media types find really comforting, because it provides them with a club with which to revisit arguments that anyone working in New Media was sick to death of chewing over back in, oh, say, 2003. The web is deceptive. The web is EEEE-bil! Come on back to the old dead-tree walled gardens.

Sorry, but that ain’t gonna cut it.

The digital universe is evolving so that we do not just depend on what Google shows us … but on what we get from the people in our social graph. Or have you been one of the lucky ones that doesn’t have a cranky uncle sending them conspiracy theories about Tower 5 on 9/11, or Obama’s birth certificate, or Vince Foster, or … ?

OK, sure, it’s a bummer that Facebook is removing a lot of the contradictory voices from your News Feed. But there are still a million, million ways that the things that they say come into your world – not least because ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SPECTRUM – both with Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/Rachel Madow and Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Fox & Friends – there are legions of researchers culling & curating the digital firehose, on the look out for the bit of info that can be spun into something to make you do the “Holy shit, Martha!” in front of the boob tube.

So.

The contradictory voices are there. They are presented by voices that mock & disagree with them – in much the same way that newspaper editors, radio hosts and TV anchors did back in the pure human filtration days – but the voices and bits of information are there.

I do agree that there is a serious problem in our society today that a large segment is seemingly living in its own reality, with its own set of facts an interpretations. But this has been true before in our history as well (See: Davis, Jefferson et al.).  But this problem predates the web, and is attributable more to talk radio and the removal of the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time than anything else … and to the failure of the American educational system to produce large swathes of the citizenry capable of critical thinking.

So imagine my weary non-surprise at the latest mind-boggling numbers about the sheer amount of data/content/1s and 0s streaming through all these bundles of fiber we’ve laid around the world.

Way, way back in the early personal computing days, I remember having a conversation with a fellow geek. He was talking about the latest advances in floppy disk technology; and yes, these were still the old 5 1/4″ floppy disks that actually, well … flopped around when you waggled them in your hand. Not that you wanted to do that very much – the thin plastic disk inside was prone to slip around and maybe even crinkle a bit.

Anyway – we were talking about how the amount of data you could store on such a disk was about to increase from the then-standard 360K disks were almost due to an upgrade, so’s they could store 720K.

Wowie-zowie.

And then … some day in the near future (his eyes grew distant, focusing on such a massive, magical shift in storage technology) … “You know what comes after that?”

His voice grew hushed. Almost reverent.

“A megabyte!”

At the time, I was writing programs in BASIC to be executed in the 16K space available on our old TRS-80s. I was impressed. With a megabyte of storage … wow. The possibilities were endless.

Skip to this news. With the sheer amount of content streaming down all these here Intertubes:

In terms of pure data center traffic around the world, traffic is
projected to go from 1.1 ZBs in 2010 to an estimated 4.8 ZBs in 2015,
four times the amount. 4.8 ZBs is a hard-to-imagine number, so Cisco has
quantified it to equal 66.7 trillion hours of streaming music at 160
kbps, 15.5 trillion hours of standard-def web conferencing or 4.8
trillion hours of online streaming 720p HD video.

…the need is going to be ever-greater for The People Formerly Known As Journalists to filter that torrent. To use their human judgment to identify what is important and worth paying attention to from that which is not.

Or, as Clay Shirky, so eloquently puts it:

Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.

Clay Shirky, zettabytes, information overload, failure of filters, global internet traffic, TRS-80, floppy disk, 360K format

I put this together in about 5 minutes, after following the increasingly alarming messages coming out of #Tahrir via @acarvin. Knowing what I do about nerve gas (VX and/or Sarin) and mustard gas (whose effects I saw myself in the wheezing of my great-uncle Pete St. John, who had gotten a dose on the Western Front in WWI), it freaked me out that the Egyptian military may have taken such a drastic step.

It turns out that they were perhaps using some kind of new tear gas – one that is invisible, but that still stings like a sonofabitch. If you’ve clicked the link above, you were taken to a page of clinical data from autopsies of British soldiers killed by gas in WWI. Grim, grim reading. Basically, the gas causes chemical burns all over your body, and you die from choking on the ragged, torn-up lung tissue that you cough up as you drown in your own blood.

Yeah. Fun times. There’s a reason we as a species have reacted with horror at anyone using these kinds of chemical weapons ever since.

Anyway, the rumor mills flew into hyperspeed on Twitter & social media, and you could see the rise and fall of the meme (fostered by a Twitter account purportedly belonging to Mohamed El Baradei) of chemical weapons use.

Quick Hit: Saw this on BoingBoing, followed it over to Applied Abstractions, and just couldn’t resist commenting on it, for 1) the benefit of my international students, who might wonder WTF is up with this and 2) to keep me from yanking out my own hair by the fistful. The idea is that consumers will have to buy digital books not as downloadable files, but on cards called Digi Short, which will be inserted into the back of customized (i.e. DRM’d to death) Kibano Digi Readers.

Apparently, the one advantage would be that said “books” would thus be exempt from VAT in Norway, although the list price will be the same as a download.

Nut graf:

The Norwegian publishing and bookselling industry, an astonishingly
backward group of companies when it comes to anything digital, yesterday
introduced a new concept for e-books that, even for them, is rather
harebrained. They want to sell e-book tablets where you can buy books
not as downloads (well, you can do that, too) but as files loaded on
small plastic memory cards, to be inserted into the reader [article in Norwegian].
This preserves their business model (though they can probably stop
using trucks and start using bicycles for distribution). According to
their not very convincing market analysis, this is aimed at the segment
of the book buying market who do not want to download books from the net
(but, for some reason, seem to want to read books electronically.)

This is such an awful, awful, CueCat-level thinking approach to digital distribution. The whole point of having a mobile device like the iPad or Kindle or Nook is so that you can do instant purchases & consumption of content. You walk past a poster advertising the new blockbuster action movie, now available as a Blu-Ray or for download – you know you’re going to have an hour to kill on the commuter train on the way home, and you missed the movie in theaters, to you decide to splurge. Out comes the tablet, button is pushed, movie is set to download in the background as you continue walking to the train station/subway/hovercraft depot.

Hint: You want to ENCOURAGE your customers to make impulse buys of your content, rather than make it tougher for them & thus allow time for second thoughts to creep in.

Making the public buy, collect, sort & carry with them little plastic cards with books on them? Good God. It displays the desperate attempt to keep the content all within the walled garden; if we can’t sell dead-tree editions or shiny little discs (goes the thinking), well, maybe if we just shrink it all down to credit-card size, we can keep people having to pay us for physical objects. And as long as the Big Publishing controls distribution, pricing & availability of a physical object, well then, all the old rules still apply.

Only they don’t.

The old rules haven’t applied for some time now.

People will not carry around little cards with books as data on them, slotting them in and out of a tablet reader. And even if (via some alien mind-control ray that bathes the Earth in Luddite Stupidity) they do, a thriving business will soon spring up, dealing in the blank pieces of plastic that can then be filled with the data.

The media business is no longer, and never will again be about, the control of big belching factories that churn out physical copies of stuff that gets trucked from A to B and then put on shelves. It’s about paying attention to every other step that used to lead up to that point. You know, all the stuff that newspapers and TV stations and movie studios and record companies ignored, and is the reason so many of them are in trouble.

That is, concentrating on creating something wonderful. Useful. Delightful.

Cool.

It makes me sad to see that so many companies are still thinking in terms of how to defeat the digital revolutions, rather than on how we can use the web to do so many totally new, amazing art forms.

UPDATE: The initial reports (see the fact that this was a “Quick Hit”) seemed to indicate that it was Digi.no that was doing this. It turns out that it is a company named Norli Libris, whose attempt at rolling the clock back has elicited comment from other bloggers, as well as the mighty EnGadget. I thus fixed the attribution & links at the top of this post, and added a graf explaining more about Norli Libris.  Thanks to @sigvald for pointing this out via Twitter (and to Google Translate for helping me decipher the Norwegian story on this.)

ipad, ebook, publishing, luddite, digi.no

I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working on producing “establishing shots” using whatever equipment is available to you at the time; in this case, it means holding the iPad up in front of your face and doing slow 360s, talking to the camera, so the audience can see for themselves what the landscape around you looks like.

They absolutely loved their brand-new iPad 2s. It was like seeing little kids getting handed Magic Mirrors. They were polite enough for most of the day, but about mid-afternoon, I just lost them in the wilds of the App Store. Also - I will never understand how the Ukrainian women manage to walk down these uneven, treacherous ancient cobblestone streets in stiletto heels.

I also taught them the basics of shot selection, framing, the Rule of Thirds, and some basic stuff about editing and shot sequencing as a means to create emotion. It was about a semester’s worth of material crammed into a one-day lecture, but at least I opened them up to what is possible, and where they can go to try to learn more on their own.

This is still a beautiful city, even if the sky in unrelenting slate gray, and the wind from Siberia knifes right through you after the sun goes down…

At night, the streets of Kiev are filled only with the rumble and clatter of Dr. Zhivago trolley cars, and the whistling north wind. The architecture here is like the people; kind of battered, but still full of character. Resilient.

I haven’t gotten to see as much of this city as I would like; I’ve always been working too hard, or pretty much exhausted & creaking from the demented flight schedule it takes to get here from Los Angeles. Still, the little I have been able to discover on my own has been delightful.

This time around, my students arrived in my classes with significant New Media skills. Some of them were already creating infographics, and this girl is already ghost-blogging for big financial companies. As you can see, she is quite determined; meanwhile, behind her, another of my more active and vocal students gasps in horror at the convoluted assignments I have inflicted on the class...

One of the greater joys of this class was seeing my students help each other out. When they got stuck with some of my more technically challenging exercises, they reached out to each other, and shouted advice back and forth across the classroom.

There is no better feeling for me. I am only here for such a very short time; I keep wishing that I had an entire semester to really reach deep into these young people, to help them draw out their skills & refine them. But seeing their willingness to follow me down these strange multimedia pathways, and to help each other out along the way … leads me to believe that they will continue to help each other out after I am gone.

This time around, it’s the social media aggregator/publisher Storify.

Then the message came up on the screen, telling me that I should push the “Power” button on the front of the Mac, hold it down until the whole machine turned off, and basically do a hard reboot.

Not. Good.

When I managed to restart Doc Octocore, I immediately launched all the diagnostic programs I had.

Seriously, this is something you never wanna see on your computer…

Now I begin to understand why my Mac has felt like it's trudging through slush the last couple of months. Apparently, ever since I toyed with Carbonite as a backup solution, then quickly rejected it because it was bringing the web connection to an absolute crawl - well, deleting Carbonite apparently never means that you're actually done with it. It's like Newt Gingrich ... the damn thing just won't go away. Just keeps hanging around, causing problems and contributing nothing useful.

To get rid of Carbonite, you have to start doing major surgery on the Library items on your Mac. It looks kinda like this:

All your favorites are there … the “It” clown, little Drew Barry more starting the fire, The Gunslinger, the creepy little monkey with his cymbals.

I’m not sure if the pix here were meant to be some sort of ironic counterpoint to the message that I’m trying to spread here in Bulgaria — that despite the travails of the Traditional Media in the developed world, All Is Not Lost, and working journalists are not trapped in an unending horror show from which there is no exit.

Which is pretty much the prevailing mind-set amongst my friends who still work at newspapers and in the publishing game.

This is quite a nice little space, as you can see – a sort of American cultural outreach center, where they are touting the works of Stephen King. I’ve always felt that King, when he bends his back to the work, can capture something truly essential about the American character that few other authors working in the late 20th century were capable of. When I read The Dead Zone in my mid-teens, I discovered a voice that was writing about the kinds of blue collar, but not clueless hickabillies, that I had grown up with. Some deeply flawed and dangerous … others sad and lost … others (too few, really) quietly courageous and steadfast in their core human decency. His deep distrust of authority and ability to see through the post-Watergate b.s. was like a bucket of cold water to the face. I’ll always love him for that, even if in subsequent years, his discovery of the coca alkaloids tinged his writing with a lazy streak, and he rarely approached the kinds of insight and characterization that marked his work in the 70s.