Metamedia

Separated at Birth? Lauren, She of the Cheap HP

TechCrunch gives us the goods on that "sassy Lauren, she of the cheap HP" - Ladies, it's all about the glasses. Pace Dorothy Parker, it there anything sexier than an intelligent woman in glasses? No. Thank you Lisa!

Meanwhile - Separated at birth - Shelley Fabares and the unglassed Lauren?

What I Will Miss About Newspapers

Seth Godin asked recently, "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" I will miss these two things: perusal and closure.

Perusal

Perusal is not the same as surfing. Perusal is bounded and hence focused in a way entirely different from surfing hyperlinks.

A pleasure of a newspaper is to flip the pages back and forth, letting the eye wander from headline to headline, choosing morsels and tasting as little or much as you wish, one section at a time.

Yet this is all focused within the clear bounds of a well-known organization. The choices are varied but limited, and chosen to fit together well; there's no anxiety about what might not be there, because it's all spread out before you.

Partly the pleasure of perusal is the pleasure of working within an established and well adapted convention, a convention with varieties. We have our favorite regular items and sections, a place to start or even an established strategy, but at any given read, new items for that day may grab our attention and draw us in.

Closure

Reading the newspaper brings a satisfying sense of closure, a sense of completeness as you finish the last section. This is also partly due to its bounded nature.

When done, you are done, complete, with no nagging knowledge that something has been left out, that there is still an infinitude of other possible pages.

In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as the pleasure of closure one finds in poetry. Longer than a lyric, more discursive than a short story, less of an odyssey than a film or novel, a good enjoyable newspaper read ends on a note a satisfaction, emphasis on the "satis" - just enough.

And the one thing the hyperlinked web does not provide is satiety.

First Newspapers; Next Cineplexes?

Joining the national trend, Seattle just became a one newspaper town, a fact about which there was a good deal of nostalgic bemoaning.

Newspapers I like. Cineplexes I do not. I don't think there will be any nostalgia for their sterile, cattle-call environment; obnoxious commercials; raucous, unruly patrons; and usuric food. And Hollywood teen testosterone palaver projected on analog antiquities.

There will be no Nuovo cinema Paradiso for Generican Mall Cinemaplex Twelves and TwentyFours.

Here's a picture I snapped of a recently closed one. Hope it will not be the last.

It's a mile from my house & I'd never been in it. Last week, it just closed one day. The odd black bars over the logo and an empty parking lot were the only sign. About the only thing that could spice up its decrepitude would be an invasion of zombies.

How fitting for a ghostplex.

Links

• From Cinema to Cineplex
• Douglas Gomery's Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (online review here)
• Michelle Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance: 1930 -2000
  

Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns against third-party internet snooping

Web inventor warns against third-party internet snooping Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks out against collection of users' data by commercial companies

"The power of this information is so great that the commercial incentive for companies or individuals to misuse it will be huge," he said. "It is absolutely essential to have absolute clarity that it is illegal."

[From UK Guradian - Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns against third-party internet snooping | Technology | guardian.co.uk]

Smart man, Sir Berners-Lee, and I am glad to see someone of his stature is speaking out, and that many concerned politicians - at least, ironically, in the UK, are speaking out as well.

In the US, I think it is time for an explicit amendment to the constitution declaring a fully excplicit Right to Privacy for actual people (as opposed to corporations), including rights to control of the digital information about us.

Of course, the real issue is: who will define "misuse" ??

Eric Schmidt and Transparency in the Social Panopticon

From Charlie Rose's interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google -

Eric Schmidt: Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest.

And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything. So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects.

And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others. It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.

[From Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is “Unlikely” To Buy Twitter And Wants To Turn Phones Into TVs]

[Emphasis mine.]

Precisely. Those platitudes sure sound nice when you first hear them - until you realize that one of the great exceptions to this new transparency are corporations, who use control of the law to protect their own inner workings from any type of transparency, scrutiny, and oversight, while extracting exactly that kind of information from their "information suppliers" (more usually but misleadingly called "users".)

There are a lot of strategies available to legal persons like corporations that are not available to actual persons like you and me. They may not be able to hide some things as much as they used to, but as Schmidt notes, the outcomes don't change much - indeed this whole phenomenon would not even be happening if that were so, if companies had more to lose in the battle for social control than they can make in selling goods and services.

Why doesn't this transparency that keeps things honest apply to corporations? In this very interview, Schmidt wasn't exactly transparent about certain of Google's business plans.

Until the day I know as much about Google as they know about me, Schmidt's words will just remain platitudes, deeply ironic ones.

Indeed there is really nothing that new about this type of transparency, for it is just another view of The Panopticon.

In Bentham's Panopticon, the guards watch the inmates. In the Social Panopticon, the guards let the prisoners watch each other, too, for both entertainment and profit. But in neither do the prisoners watch the guards except for exactly when, where, and how the guards want them to.

Count Him Not Among Your Friends

"Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world."
    -- Publilius Syrus

There’s a site online called Swivel  http://www.swivel.com/ that is a rather quirky combination of social network and data set visualization tool.

It allows you to upload or reference existing data sets, then visualize them in various ways, compare them to other data sets already on the site, share them, tag them, comment and get comments on them.

It just started earlier in the year, but already has rather wide range of topics. For anyone doing visualizations of statistics, for either the social or hard sciences, this site could be a useful adjunct to class, as well as a lot of fun.

Here's a nice example of a graph made in Swivel by seema, illustrating an interesting instance of traditional politicians' continued misunderstanding of the power of social software in the recent Obama MySpace debacle:

Imus and Cho as Information

What do the recent Imus and Cho episodes have in common ? 

Seen as information, they are both essentially about the same thing, though perhaps for different reasons.

They are about attention.

When I teach web site design in classes, as I used to teach Critical Thinking about media, I start with this quote:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

- Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate economist

That is how the two cases are similar; a difference is motivation.

Imus wants attention because he is paid by companies to gain attention so that listeners will hear the advertisements for their products.  Those who gain attention on commercial media make money.

After all, that's what ratings do: measure attention (indirectly to be sure) and prices are adjusted accordingly. I worked for a company once in New York which took the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings every night, and adjusted and scheduled television and radio advertising for the next day for every zip code and demographic in every major market in America; an eye opening insight it was.

Imus is good at gaining attention; I don't have to explain to you who he is or put a link on his name, even if you, like me, have never actually heard his radio show.

A white person making disparaging racial remarks about blacks publicly in America will gain attention much more than blacks doing likewise, for instance, in rap music: an irony numerous commentators have noted in this affair, though without seeing its roots. The issue is which gains more attention (from a particular audience, of course; follow the money to find out who that is).

Imus worked for a company, CBS, that is in the attention business: they make money by being paid by other companies to direct and channel attention onto their products and services.

That is what they really do: CBS is not in the news business, nor the entertainment business, nor the television business: they are in the attention business.

As for Cho, he was after something more than money. Something that lasts after death.

When I said to some students that Cho's motivation must have been attention, they retorted, "But he killed himself. He's dead. He can't get attention now."

I simply said: kleos aphthiton.

The undying fame of the Homeric hero. Fame, fama: to be talked about. Achilles is dead, but his undying fame lives on; we still talk about him. And his poet, too. In fact someone even more famous is named after him. Dido, too.

They didn't believe me, until ...

Attention! Until of course, the package with the videos and letters arrived at NBC and were of course immediately broadcast to the world: for, like CBS, NBC is a company that exists to make money by gaining and focusing attention for the companies that pay it to do so.

And NBC did exactly what Cho knew they would, because of course that is what they exist to do.

He is dead, but his message is not.

Not until eclipsed by the next thing that garners more attention.

Is this what one must do to achieve attention in a world of information overabundance ?  33 people dead one day at Virgina Tech, 127 the next in Iraq. Where is our attention purposefully directed by those who control the media of attention?

Sadly, I can only quote from one of my favorites of two thousand years ago, an epic of eventual victory, but how bittersweet, a paean to that fateful goddess Fama: rumour, gossip, news item, top headline, this just in, 15 minutes, notorious, infamous, famous, fame.

Fame, far the swiftest of all mischiefs bred;
Speed gives her force; she strengthens as she flies.
Small first through fear, she lifts a loftier head,
Her forehead in the clouds, on earth her tread.

Last sister of Enceladus, whom Earth
Brought forth, in anger with the gods, 'tis said,
Swift-winged, swift-footed, of enormous girth,    
Huge, horrible, deformed, a giantess from birth.    

As many feathers as her form surround,
Strange sight! peep forth so many watchful eyes,
So many mouths and tattling tongues resound,
So many ears among the plumes uprise.

By night with shrieks 'twixt heaven and earth she flies,
Nor suffers sleep her eyelids to subdue;

By day, the terror of great towns, she spies
From towers and housetops, perched aloft in view,
Fond of the false and foul, yet herald of the true.