Tag: media

Emergent transparency

Someone once said to me that they no longer read newspapers, because whenever they read an article about an area they were an expert in, the article was invariably 90% bollocks. Key facts would be missing, or misunderstood; known charlatans would have been interviewed and treated as holy; old or misleading conclusions would have been made. And if, this guy reasoned, that was true for the stories he knew about, it must be true for everything in the paper. Why, then, should he bother reading it?
Government is having the same problem, but it is made worse. It’s not that experts grumble into their beer about obscure nuances of law, as they’ve done that for 1000s of years. It’s not even just that experts can point out the fallacies of proposed legislation on the internet – and reach a large and active audience – although this is increasingly true. It’s that the internet specifically allows everyone to become an expert in whatever field. What we have is not Emergent Democracy, as many would have it, but Emergent Transparency. It’s not enough for a minister to say “Trust Me” anymore, because 5 minutes with Google usually finds every single lie, or spin, or misplaced understanding. To return to my non-newspaper buying friend, it’s not just that 90% of the statements about things I know about are wrong, but that I now know 90% of everything you make statements about. The internet hive mind is fact-checking as you go.

ben hammersley on why voters are staying away from the voting booths in droves. with the end of practical obscurity, a new polis needs to emerge.

Rethinking public radio

I am in a session at Berkman Center listening to Chris Lydon explaining how he, with the help of internet technologies, plans to be the next NPR. NPR, one of the standard-bearers of the american intelligentsia, has fallen to commercial pressures. One thing I miss with recorded voice is the ability to search through the voice stream. Clearly, speech is still much closer to the stream of consciousness than all the writing you can get done in a day. Capturing more of the worlds great thoughts though audio, and making it accessible to search strikes me as killer.

KAYWA in the news

Des Suisses se lancent aussi dans l’aventure. Ainsi, le Zurichois Roger Fischer présentera le 5 juillet a Tokyo, lors de la premiere Conference internationale de moblogging, sa plateforme KAYWA, permettant de mieux organiser son site.

as usual, there were some omissions and some wrong facts. typical journalism: “mieux organizer son site” come again? how about fact-checking 101 considering that roger sent a very informative email.

Is credibility doomed?

ivan amato reports about video insertion technologies:

The ability to manipulate video data in real time has just as much potential as some of these forerunners. “Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world, Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell.

clearly, these technologies erode the trust that average persons have in visual imagery. the parts of society that rely on television for their news are doomed.

Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance, You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened

amato then goes on to blame the internet because “so much internet content is unfiltered”. the opposite is true, actually. the only hope we have to counter these massive manipulations is decentralized publishing combined with a web of trust. already, mobile devices with integrated cameras are available, personal publishing is here (albeit not on a joe 6pack level yet), and the first crude experiments with trust metrics are being undertaken. big media relies on trust, and if this trust is gone, big media is dead.

Blogging beyond text

some people are experimenting with audio or video blogs. while totally a venue to explore for expression, i’m not sure about longer term viability. both audio and video are just too opaque, and until we have decent search algorithms that can penetrate into these files they are pretty much a 1-way street. a cool way to expand on this would be to SMIL-enable weblogs. (interesting fact: MMS, the next-generation SMS, is based on a subset of SMIL. convergence?) this could also be a very interesting topic for OSCOM IV in Tokyo.

Ending the reign of stupidity?

tara complains about old media and its taste for stories instead of facts:

I would like to watch the news and see accountable reporting that tells the facts, not the story. Books are for stories. I paid for home delivery of the newspaper and everyday I get a paperback in a plastic bag. What you read in the paper you see on the nightly news. It is the same story over and over again. They rarely bring attention to people who advocate significant change. If they do happen to release a story on advanced, progressive individuals and ideas, it might only be to expose a tattered past or anything remotely scandalous and of course violence.
There are a lot of fine journalists, but there is no good reporting here. Who, what, when, where, why have all been replaced by yellow journalism. The media is just another fast food industry. It has reduced the thinking public to attention spans and shock effect.

i completely agree with tara, and have long ago stopped reading papers or watching television. how people can waste time watching local tv is beyond me. a good newsreader provides much higher quality information, and a blog allows to write back. hopefully i will be able to contribute to this sea change with the blog business plan.

Al-Jazeera

For the first time, there is a tv station (al-Jazeera) that is not giving in to pressure from governments around the arabic world to censor its content. for the first time, arabic people can get real news, without the usual all-distorting propaganda. this will change the region for good, its things like that that are crucial in the fight against stupid fundamentalists. let the people have their own opinion, and foster economic growth.

Against censorship overreach

fundamentalist groups that want to curb freedom of speech are having a field day. do not give 1 cm. instead, consider the following quote from a hollywood producer:

What’s even more ominous is that CNN is currently running a poll on their website: “Would you accept more government involvement in your life if it meant more security against terrorism?” That’s really an are-you-still-beating-your-wife kind of pseudo-question, since whether you answer YES or NO doesn’t matter – it stinks either way. It is, in its own way, a kind of terrorist question. (Everybody stop now and go look up “terrorism” in the dictionary. Don’t accept what media tools say; just go look it up for yourself. We’ll wait.) What it doesn’t address is the bald reality that “security from terrorism” is impossible, due to the nature of terrorist acts. “Security from terrorism” is practically an oxymoron. Security is a comforting illusion, not an absolute. But if you answer NO to the CNN question, the perception is that one “supports terrorism.” The Spanish Inquisition couldn’t have twisted language any better.

another great quote:

Look, there are people in the USA today in 2001 who still want HUCKLEBERRY FINN out of libraries. Addressing the lunatic, repressive fringe only gives them legitimacy. If you don’t like a film, don’t give it 2 hours of your life. Period. Then shut up.