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Tag Archives: journalism
Who was (is) right – Orwell, Huxley, or neither?
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
That is a quote from Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. That, and Huxley’s “Brave New World” are on my to read list. What do you think? Either of them right about the world we live in or will live in?
For Arpit – who is Clay Shirky?
This is a backgrounder primarily for Arpit who discussed with a few thoughts on Clay Shirky’s latest piece on Newspapers.
I wrote an intro for readers of paradox1x, on Clay Shirky, back in September.
A few favorite pieces:
Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can’t Get Up
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
There’s a paradox at work – Social Software and Media links for Thursday
Clay Shirky: Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can’t Get Up
The interesting thing about this piece, written way back in 1995, is that it leaves wide open the concept of information.
Just what is information? People instinctively grasp for “facts” as their definition. But in computing, we think otherwise. Can music be described as information – sure can. Opinions? Yep. Visual arts? Certainly. Video. Yes, even video. Anything that can be described in ones and zeroes can be thought of as information that can be transmitted and shared on a network.
Well, what about advertising? Yes, that too.
Jeneane Sussum: The Value of Words: These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.
There is a paradox at work here. As the cost of generating and transmitting information decreases, more of it becomes available, thus increasing the need for better filters.
Advertising, Newspapers, and Libraries were the premier filters of the pre-Internet age.
So were the ‘big 3’ TV stations, radio conglomerates, record companies, book stores and magazine stands for that matter.
Search engines, blogs, social networks, and smart aggregators are those of the now.
How the practices of the old evolve in the infrastructure of the new, how new disciplines arise to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, will determine how informed, or how uninformed, we will be as a society.
Other interesting links for today:
P’unk Avenue Window: What should a modern library be?
reddit: Young Deer hit by google map VAN. Caught on street view.
keithhopper.com: A Brief History of Hyperlocal News
Fanboy.com:
Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)
MediaPost: Yelp Reviews Spawn At Least Five Lawsuits
Epicenter: eMusic Says Data Supports Long Tail Theory
Epicenter: Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down
ComputerWorld: What the Web knows about you
Another newspaper using Django to rapidly stand up a Web site
NYTimes launches the Congress API
Nice work New York Times.
Irfan Essa: “We’re talking about a new breed of people”
Miller-McCune: Deep Throat Meets Data Mining: In the nick of time, the digital revolution comes to democracy’s rescue. And, perhaps, journalism’s.:
Investigative reporters have long used computers to sort and search databases in pursuit of their stories. Investigative Reporters and Editors and its National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, for example, hold regular computer-assisted reporting training sessions around the country. And the country’s major journalism schools all deal in some way with computer-enhanced journalism. The emerging academic/professional field of computational journalism, however, might be thought of as a step beyond computer-assisted reporting, an attempt to combine the fields of information technology and journalism and thereby respond to the enormous changes in information availability and quality wrought by the digital revolution.
I would be remiss to write about computational journalism and not mention Irfan Essa, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who teaches a class in computational journalism and is often credited with coining the term. He says both journalism and information technology are concerned, as disciplines, with information quality and reliability, and he views the new field as a way to bring technologists and journalists together so they can create new computing tools that further the traditional aims of journalism. In the end, such collaboration may even wind up spawning a new participant in the public conversation.
“We’re talking about a new breed of people,” Essa says, “who are midway between technologists and journalists.”
Chris Amico’s “Tools for news”
Tools for news is a Django driven application that lists web apps, references, software, and more that would be useful to anyone building a mashup, but in particular if you are a journalist. Via DigiDave.
Doc Searls: “What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called ‘data or ‘information’ but rather to feed hungry minds?”
Doc Searls: Beyond mediation: We are all media now, right? That’s what we, the mediating, tell ourselves. (Or some of us, anyway.) But what if that’s not how we feel about it? What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called “data” or “information” but rather to feed hungry minds? That’s different.
I believe that we truly are the media now.
When we criticize ‘the media’ we are criticizing ourselves. Media is intermingled. It’s everywhere and each of us take part from the smallest of web forums to the largest of social networks. That implies a civic responsibility.
People hate that word – responsibility – but there it is. And when it comes to media – the responsibilities that spring from it are now shared by us all.
Newspapers, news organizations, and social media in transition
This much is clear – by the end of 2009, there will be many fewer newspapers publishing in America.
Some attribute the fall of newspapers to:
- Willful ignorance on the part of those working at the papers. – Clay Shirky
- Corporate greed and shortsighted management. – John Morton
- The journalists themselves, for being too slow, too stubborn, too head in the sand, and more. – Jeff Jarvis
- Progress (the Internet) – Jack Shafer
- Innovation and Creative Destruction (the Internet) – Fred Wilson
- Innovation and Creative Destruction (the Internet) – Brad Feld
- Profitable businesses that won’t take risks and lack vision – (a version of the Innovator’s Dilemma) – resulting in self-induced, profit squeezing death spiral – Jay Rosen
- Profitable businesses that won’t take risks and lack vision (a version of the Innovator’s Dilemma) – resulting in self-induced, profit squeezing death spiral – Dan Gillmor
- the Internet – Kevin Drum
- The Innovator’s Dilemma (Disruptive Technology (the Internet) meets established business culture) – Ezra Klein
- The Innovator’s Dilemma (Disruptive Technology (the Internet) meets established business culture) – the TLF
- Stock owner demands – public ownership’s quarter driven profit demands – Georgie Anne Geye
Coming from where I come from, with the experience that I had at Philly.com, I couldn’t help but think that Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky’s point of view is a damaging re-write of history that obscures complicated truths. This is disappointing for me because both of them have important knowledge for newspaper organizations that can help them in their on going efforts to evolve, and their posting of what are essentially pieces that incite rather than provide insight did no one any favors. Jeff Jarvis, in particular, has been a major force in pushing along papers to meet the future. And I am literally a *fan* of Clay Shirky’s writings – I share many of them with who I work.
It could be that Clay Shirky was trolled by the off the wall piece by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate about Jeff Jarvis. It was a true blue hatchet job. Still, I felt the need to reply in comments to Shirky’s piece and to Jeff Jarvis’s piece celebrating Shirky’s article.
Me, replying to Clay Shirky (paraphrasing):
Sadly it is people like Rosenbaum who get the limelight, when perspectives of those within the industry are far, far different.
In fact they are so different that I say it is a dangerous re-writing of history to say that “The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.”
You can pull famous examples such as Dan Gillmor or Jay Rosen or Jeff Jarvis himself.
You can look directly at archive.org to see the competitive state of newspaper websites in the late 90s or early 00s (note when they stopped evolving – the .com crash).
Undeniably there some within news organizations that are (were?) willfully ignorant – for sure – however I can tell you from personal experience that the majority of my ex-co-workers were not keeping their heads in the sand and had fought (are fighting) tooth and nail to bring culture change to their organizations.
Take a look at
http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/
1997.
These organizations were doing fabulously well in their economics btw. So much so that what is occurring is a textbook example of “the Innovator’s Dilemma” (thank you Henry Copeland for suggesting that book to me so long ago!).
You are more correct in your glacier analogy – however – think of it as a slow approaching death – a frog in a slow boiling pot of water.
Speaking of Dan Gillmor – I remember the difficulties he faced in getting his first blog off the ground within Knight Ridder. But he wasn’t alone in pursuing the future.
It is factually incorrect to state otherwise.
If there are any lessons to be learned by all this – they won’t occur if the narrative becomes a simplistic “we spoke – they ignored”.
And to not expect people to cry out as they lose their jobs – jobs that many have been fighting to transform when they are still relevant (the reporting not the papers) is bull.
Oh, and speaking of those in the trenches, consider speaking to Wendy Warren, Will Bunch, and Daniel Rubin of Philly.com, the Daily News, and Inquirer.
As Jeff Jarvis himself spoke well of two years ago:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/03/25/saving-journalism-and-killing-the-press/
This narrative of “us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get” needs to stop.
Me, replying to Jeff Jarvis (paraphrasing):
I’ll call bullshit on Clay and you both on the idea that no one has been “caught up in this great upheaval”. I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky. I share his writing with folks at work all the time and I’ve actually quoted him to you in various responses to you over the years.
There have been many newspaper folks fighting for change in that industry over the past ten years.Ya know, there is part of me that is downright mad at this – it almost resembles a re-writing of history.
I maybe in your ignore list now Jeff, I’m not sure.
But I am secure in knowing that of the many, many people losing their jobs and careers in the midst of this ongoing revolution – a revolution I feel part of as an early adopter, promoter, evangelist, software engineer, blogger and more – there are thousands that do *not* deserve blame for what is going on.
I WILL NOT thumb my nose at them.
They fought, and in many places continue to fight, to drive business and culture changes in organizations that still have relevant value in a world where we are no better informed then we were 10 years ago according to Pew.
Change is life. But the big story here isn’t in the numbers of people who willfully looked the other way. There was some. But not the vast majority of people I worked with in the trenches at Philly.com.
Hell no.
And my heart goes out to them who fought (and continue to fight) with everything they have – to turn their ship around from the glacier that Shirky is right to indicate.
When the definitive history of this is recorded, hopefully it will capture the truth – that many of the guns pointed at the patient were those of the patient – but willful ignorance was the least of these. That many knew they were pursuing immediate profits over long term investments. Others were fighting for change and evolution to meet the future in every single project they worked on and found frustrating blockers in culture and immediate ROI turnaround demands of established businesses meeting the calls of investors. That culture and technology were dealing death blows to the ‘paper’ as information costs dropped towards zero and we each became empowered with our own printing presses – the Web.
There are *many* reasons. But I repeat – the narrative of “us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get” needs to stop.
Everyone needs to get over themselves already.
Elsewhere and recent:
Talking Points Memo has announced it will be sending two new additional paid reporters to Washington DC while it has been reported that newspapers will be sending far fewer to cover happenings at the Capitol.
Pew Research Center, in a recent study, has announced the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of news.
Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) is buying Consumerist from Gawker Media. More on the news at Consumerist.
Business Week takes a look at other business models for journalism including a glance at Spot.us.
And at the LA Times an important milestone has been reached Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.
Meanwhile, Gabe Rivera speaks some hard to hear truth (to some) about automated news filters: Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work.
Jay Rosen summarizes the moment: Migration Point for the Press Tribe:
The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on–also called their business model–no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.
Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans–is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it’s time to panic.