Why Failed Societies Are Relevant to Social Media

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I've been working on for a while in the background, titled, "It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind". This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I've written about organizations and failure - Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations - in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl
Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.
Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future


• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience


• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control


• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises


• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges


• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land


• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks


• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes


• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that's easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn't allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations
In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known - and mostly successful! - people.

"Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal." - ALBERT EINSTEIN

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - CHARLES DARWIN

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - EPICTETUS

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - THOMAS EDISON

"It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success." - HAVELOCK ELLIS

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it." - ANAIS NIN

"We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us." - RABINDRANATH TAGORE

"Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other." - SHANTIDEVA

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." - JOHN DEWEY

local tags: archaeology, boxes_and_arrows, culture, failure, mental_models, organizational_culture, selfdefinition, social_media, social_systems, state_of_mind, success

The Aargh Page: Visualizing Pirate Argot

What happens when this classic vernacular interjection meets linguistics, data visualization, and the Web?

The Aargh page, of course. (It should really be The Aargh! Page, but this is so fantastic that I can't complain...)

Here's a screenshot of the graph that shows frequency of variant spellings for aargh in Google, along two axes:

Note the snazzy mouseover effect, which I'll zoom here:

Looking into the origins aargh inevitably brings up Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in several Disney productions based on the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember seeing the movies as a child, without knowing that they were the first live action Disney movies broadcast on television. So do plenty of other people who've created tribute pages.

Aargh may have many spelling variations, but at least three of them bear a stamp of legitimacy, as the editorial review of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Paperback) at Amazon.com explains, "If you're using the 1991 edition or the 1978 original, you're woefully behind the Scrabble-playing times. With more than 100,000 2- to 8-letter words, there are some interesting additions ("aargh," "aarrgh," and "aarrghh" are all legitimate now), while words they consider offensive are no longer kosher. "

There's even International Talk Like A Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19th every year. The organizers' site offers a nifty English-to-Pirate-Translator.

Most random perhaps is the Wikipedia link for Aargh the videogame, from the 80's, without pirates.

local tags: culture, disney, events, film, linguistics, media, pirates, visualization

Egosurf.org: The Medium Massages You

egosurf: vi.

"To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for one's name in a fanzine."

Now a consumable service at: egosurf.org

From the about page:

"egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself."

local tags: attention_economy, blogging, identity, media, science_fiction

Musical Signatures From Your iTunes Library

We rely on many ways of recognizing people, near at hand or from afar; faces, voices, walks, and even the scents from favorite colognes or perfumes help us greet friends, engage colleagues, and identify strangers.

I was in high school when I first noticed that everyone's key chain made a distinct sound, one that served as a kind of audible calling card that could help recognize people. I started to try to guess who was walking to the front door by learning the unique combinations of sounds -- clinking and tinkling from metal keys, rattling and rubbing from ceramic and plastic tokens, and a myriad of other noises from the incredible miscellany people attach to their key rings and carry around with them through life -- that announced each of my visitors friends. With a little practice, I could pick out the ten or fifteen people I spent the most time with based on listening to the sounds of key chains. Everyone else was someone I didn't see often, which was a fine distinction to draw between when gauging how to answer the door.

There are many other audible cues to identity -- from the closing of a car door, to the sound of foot steps, or cell phone ring tones -- but the key chain is unique because it includes so many different elements: the number and size and materials of the keys, or the layering of different key rings and souveniers people attach to them. A key chain is a sort of impromptu ensemble of found instruments playing little bursts of free jazz like personalized fanfares for modern living.

The sound of someone's key chain also changes over time, as they add or remove things, or rearrange them. That sound can even change in step with the way your relationship to that person changes. For example, if they buy a souvenier with you and put it on their keychain; or if you give them keys to your apartment. Each of these changes reflects shared experiences, and you can hear the difference in sound from one day to the next if you listen carefully.

And like those other ways of recognizing people I mentioned earlier, which all reach the level of being called signatures when they become truly distinctive, the sound of someone's key chain serves a sort of audible signature.

Until now, the sound of a keychain was perhaps the only truly unique audible signature that was not part of our person to begin with (like the voice). Now that Jason Freeman has created the iTunes Signature Maker, we may have an audible signaure suitable for the digital realm. The iTunes Signature Maker scans your iTunes library, taking one or two second snippets of many files, and mixing these found bits of sound together into a short audio signature. You choose from a few parameters such as play count, total number of songs, and whether to include videos, and the signature maker produces a .WAV file.

I made an iTunes signature using Jason's tool a few days ago. I've listened to it a few times. It certainly includes quite a few songs I've listened to often and can recognize from just a one-second snippet. Calligraphers and graphologists make much of a few handwritten letters on a page: music can say a great deal about someone's moods, outlook, tastes, or even what moves their soul. I listen to a lot of music via radio, CD's and even live that isn't included in this. I'm not sure it represents me. I think it's up to everyone else to decide that.

But what can you do with one? It's not practical yet to attach it to email messages, like a conventional .sig. It might be a good way to bookend the mixes I make for friends and family. I can see having a lot of fun listening to a bunch of anonymous iTunes signatures from your friends to try and guess which one belongs to whom. There's real potential for a useful but non-exhaustive answer to the inevitable question, "What kind of music do you like?" when you meet someone new. Along those lines, Jason may have kicked off a new fad in Internet dating; this is the perfect example of a unique token that can compress a great deal of meaning into a small (digital) package that doesn't require meeting or talking to exchange. I can see the iTunes signature becoming a speed-dating requisite; bring your iTunes signature file with you on a flash drive or iPod shuffle, and listen or exchange as necessary.

At least the name is easy: what else would you call this besides a "musig". Maybe an "iSig" or a "tunesig".

Unique ring tones, door chimes, and start-up sounds are only the beginning. Combine musigs with the music genome project, and you could upload your signature to a clearinghouse online, and have it automatically compared for matches against other people's musigs based on patterns and preferences. Have it find someone who likes reggae-influenced waltzes, or fado, or who listens to at least ten of the same artists you enjoy. Build a catalog of one musig every month for a year, and ask the engine to describe the change in your tastes. Add a musig to your Amazon wishlists for gift-giving, or even ask it to predict what you might like based on the songs in the file.

You can download my musig / iSig / tunesig / iTunes signature here; note that it's nearly 8mb.

I'll think I'll try it again in a few months, to see how it changes.

local tags: culture, identity, itunes, media, music, signatures, sound

Mental Models and the Semantics of Disaster

A few months ago, I put up a posting on Mental Models Lotus Notes, and Resililence. It focused on my chronic inability to learn how not to send email with Lous Notes. I posted about Notes, but what led me to explore resilience in the context of mental models was the surprising lack of acknowledgement of the scale of hurricane Katrina I came across at the time. For example, the day the levees failed, the front page of the New York Times digital edition carried a gigantic headline saying 'Levees Fail! New Orleans floods!'. And yet no one in the office at the time even mentioned what happened.

My conclusion was that people were simply unable to accept the idea that a major metropolitan area in the U.S. could possibly be the setting for such a tragedy, and so they refused to absorb it - because it didn't fit in with their mental models for how the world works. Today, I came across a Resilience Science posting titled New Orleans and Disaster Sociology that supports this line of thinking, while it discusses some of the interesting ways that semantics and mental models come into play in relation to disasters.

Quoting extensively from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen? the posting calls out how narrow slices of media coverage driven by blurred semantic and contextual understandings, inaccurately frame social responses to disaster situations in terms of group panic and the implied breakdown of order and society.

"The false idea of postdisaster panic grows partly from simple semantic confusion, said Michael K. Lindell, a psychologist who directs the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University at College Station. 'A reporter will stick a microphone in someone's face and ask, 'Well, what did you do when the explosion went off?' And the person will answer, 'I panicked.' And then they'll proceed to describe a very logical, rational action in which they protected themselves and looked out for people around them. What they mean by 'panic' is just 'I got very frightened.' But when you say 'I panicked,' it reinforces this idea that there's a thin veneer of civilization, which vanishes after a disaster, and that you need outside authorities and the military to restore order. But really, people usually do very well for themselves, thank you.'

Mental models come into play when the article goes on to talk about the ways that the emergency management agencies are organized and structured, and how they approach and understand situations by default. With the new Homeland Security paradigm, all incidents require command and control approaches that assume a dedicated and intelligent enemy - obviously not the way to manage a hurricane response.

"Mr. Lindell, of Texas A&M, agreed, saying he feared that policy makers in Washington had taken the wrong lessons from Katrina. The employees of the Department of Homeland Security, he said, 'are mostly drawn from the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and from police departments. They're firmly committed to a command-and-control model.' (Just a few days ago, President Bush may have pushed the process one step further: He suggested that the Department of Defense take control of relief efforts after major natural disasters.)

"The habits of mind cultivated by military and law-enforcement personnel have their virtues, Mr. Lindell said, but they don't always fit disaster situations. 'They come from organizations where they're dealing with an intelligent adversary. So they want to keep information secret; 'it's only shared on a need-to-know basis. But emergency managers and medical personnel want information shared as widely as possible because they have to rely on persuasion to get people to cooperate. The problem with putting FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security is that it's like an organ transplant. What we've seen over the past four years is basically organ rejection.'

If I read this correctly, misaligned organizational cultures lie at the bottom of the whole problem. I'm still curious about the connections between an organization's culture, and the mental models that individuals use. Can a group have a collective mental model?

Accoridng to Collective Mental State and Individual Agency: Qualitative Factors in Social Science Explanation it's possible, and in fact the whole idea of this collective mental state is a black hole as far as qualitative social research and understanding are concerned.

local tags: culture, hierarchy, katrina, media, mental_models, organizations, resilience, semantics, social_systems

Reality TV Revisits Its Origins

Apparently, if you wait long enough, all circles close themselves. Case in point: I've always thought Golding's Lord of the Flies nicely captures several of the less appetizing aspects of the typical american junior high school experience.
And I've always thought that much of the reality television programming that was all the rage for a while and now seems to be passing like a Japanese fad, is simply a chance for people on all sides of the screen to revisit their own junior high school experiences once again -- albeit with a full complement of adult secondary sexual characteristics. When I do channel surf past the latest incarnation of the primal vote-the-jerk-off-the-island epic, Golding's book always comes to mind.

Then a friend recommended Koushun Takami's Battle Royale as recreational reading. Battle Royale is, as Tom Waits says, 'big in Japan' - it being a Japanese treatment of some of the same themes that drive Lord of the Flies.

The editorial review from Amazon reads:

"As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one "winner" remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television."

And so the circle closes...

local tags: literature, media, social_systems, surrealism, television

Foiling Comment Spam

A tip o' the hat to Richard Boakes for foiling a second-rate spammer by buying up the domain they were promoting with comment spam before they did.

local tags: blogging, media, spam

A Very Postmodern 4th of July

I went to the 4th of July concert on the Esplanade this past Monday, for the first time in several years, expecting to show some international visitors genuine Boston Americana. After all, 4th of July celebrations are singularly American experiences; part summer solstice rite, part brash revolutionary gesture, part demonstration of martial prowess, part razzle-dazzle spectacle as only Americans put on.

I suppose a unique American experience is what we got: in return for our trouble, we felt like unpaid extras in a television production recreating the holiday celebrations for a remote viewing audience miles or years away. It was - de-centered - hollow and inverted. It's become a simulacrum, with a highly unnatural flow driven by the calculus of supra-local television programming goals. The center of gravity is now a national television audience sitting in living rooms everywhere and nowhere else, and not the 500,000 people gathered around the Hatch Shell who create the celebration and make it possible by coming together every year.

Despite all the razzle-dazzle - and in true American fashion there was a lot, from fighter jets to fireworks, via brass bands, orchestras, and pop stars along the way - the experience itself was deeply unsatisfying, because it was obvious from the beginning that the production company (B4) held the interests of broadcasters far more important than the people who come to the Esplanade.

There were regular commercial breaks.

In a 4th of July concert.

For half a million people.

Commercial breaks which the organizers - no doubt trapped between the Scylla of contractual obligations and the Charybdis of shame at jilting a half-million people out of a summer holiday to come to this show - filled with filler. While the commercials aired, and the audience waited, the 'programmers' plugged the holes in the concert schedule with an awkward mix of live songs lasting less than three minutes, pre-recorded music, and inane commentary from local talking heads. We felt like we were sitting *behind* a monitor at a taping session for a 4th of July show, listening while other people watched the screen in front.

I bring this out because it offers good lessons for those who design or create experiences, or depend upon the design or creation of quality experiences.

Briefly, those lessons are:

1. If you have an established audience, and you want or need to engage a new one, make sure you don't leave your loyal customers behind by making it obvious that they are less important to you than your new audience.

2. If you're entering a new medium, and your experience will not translate directly to the new channel (and which well-crafted experience does translate exactly?), make sure you don't damage the experience of the original channel while you're translating to the new one.

3. When adding a new or additional channel for delivering your experience, don't trade quality in the original channel for capability in the new channel. Many separate factors affect judgments of quality. Capability in one channel is not equivalent to quality in another. Quality is much harder to achieve.

4. Always preserve quality, because consistent quality wins loyalty, which is worth much more in the long run. Consistent quality differentiates you, and encourages customers to recommend you to other people with confidence, and allows other to become your advocates, or even your partners. For advocates, think of all the people who clear obstacles for you without direct benefit, such as permit and license boards. For partners, think of all the people who's business connect to or depend upon your experience in some way; the concessions vendors who purchase a vending license to sell food and beverages every year are a good example of this.

For people planning to attend next year's 4th of July production, I hope the experience you have in 2006 reflects some of these lessons. If not, then I can see the headline already, in bold 42 point letter type, "Audiences nowhere commemorate Independence Day again via television! 500,000 bored extras make celebration look real for remote viewers!"

Since this is the second time I've had this experience, I've changed my judgment on the quality of the production, and I won't be there: I attended in 2002, and had exactly the same experience.

local tags: 4thofjuly, boston, culture, customer_relationships, media, postmodernism, television, ux

Paper blogging: A New Medium? Retro? Old School? Arts and Crafts?

Proving that satire is one of humanity's fundamental instincts, Packetrat strikes a blow for (wood)fiber-based communications networks with paperblogging, or plogging.

Outstanding.

local tags: blogging, humor, media, satire

Minnesota Researchers Debunk Metcalfe's "Law"

A recent article from ZDNet - Researchers: Metcalfe's Law overshoots the mark - reports that two researchers at the University of Minnesota have released a preliminary study in which they conclude that Metclafe's law significantly overestimates the rate at which the value of a network increases as its size increases. The study was published March 2, by Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly of the university's Digital Technology Center.

Here's some snippets from the paper:

"The fundamental fallacy underlying Metcalfe's (Law) is in the assumption that all connections or all groups are equally valuable."

I'm always happy to find a declaration in support of quality as a differentiator. Of course, quality is a complex and subjective measurement, and so it is no surprise that Odlyzko and Tilly first recall it to relevance, and then continue to say, "The general conclusion is that accurate valuation of networks is complicated, and no simple rule will apply universally."

It makes me happy when I see smart people saying complicated things are complicated. Odlyzko and Tilly are academics, and so it's in their interest for mostly everyone else to believe the things they study are complicated, but I think that there's less danger in this than in basing your business plan or your investment decisions on a fallacious assumption that a very clever entrpreneur transmogrified into an equation - which somehow by exaggeration became a 'law' - in a moment of self-serving marketing genius. I know this from experience, because Im guilty of both of these mistakes.

Moving on, as an example, Odlyzko and Tilly declare,"Zipf's Law is behind phenomena such as 'content is not king' [21], and 'long tails' [1], which argue that it is the huge volumes of small items or interactions, not the few huge hits, that produce the most value. It even helps explain why both the public and decision makers so often are preoccupied with the 'hits,' since, especially when the total number of items available is relatively small, they can dominate. By Zipf's Law, if value follows popularity, then the value of a collection of n items is proportional to log(n). If we have a billion items, then the most popular one thousand will contribute a third of the total value,
the next million another third, and the remaining almost a billion the remaining third. But if we have online music stores such as Rhapsody or iTunes that carry 735,000 titles while the traditional brick-and-mortar record store carries 20,000 titles, then the additional value of the 'long tails' of the download services is only about 33% larger than that of record stores." {citations available in the original report}

This last begs the question of value, but of course that's also a complex and subjective judgement...

And with this they've introduced context as another important criterion. Context of course can take many forms; they make most use of geographic locality, and then extend their analysis by looking at how common interest in content on the part of academics functions as another index of locality, saying, "Communication networks do not grow independently of social relations. When people are added, they induce those close to them to join. Therefore in a mature network, those who are most important to people already in the network are likely to also be members. So additional growth is likely to occur at the boundaries of what existing people care about."

The references alone make this paper worth downloading and scanning. Read more of Odlyzko's work.

local tags: complexity, metcalfe, metcalfes_law, networks, odlyzko, quality, theory, zipf

How Much Information Does the World Produce In a Year?

How Much Information? 2003 is an update to a project first undertaken by researchers at the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley in 2000. Their intent was to study information storage and flows across print, film, magnetic, and optical media.

It's not surprising that the United States produces more information than any other single country, but it was eye-opening to read that about 40% of the new stored information in the world every year cones from the U.S.

Also surprising is the total amount of instant message traffic in 2002, estimated at 274 terabytes, and the fact that email is now the second largest information flow, behind the telephone.

Some excerpts from the executive summary:

"Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks."

"How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections."

"Hard disks store most new information. Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%."

"The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media."

"How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper."

"Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3,500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting."

local tags: information, media, research, social_systems

When All Mail Becomes Junk Mail...

Here's a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.

A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me "King Arthur Competition" and "King Arthur - Was He Real?" For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.

An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), "Irish Clan Aran Sweaters", and "Classic Irish Imports". This truly an easy one, since it's a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. "No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer..." Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you've mis-spelled?

A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings "Groupwise email", "Ecarboncopy.com", and "Track Email Reading Time". These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.

A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is 'related'. The sponsored links include "OLAP Excel Browser", "Microsoft Excel Templates", and "Analysis Services Guide". A related link is, "Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR". These are simple word matches - none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.

Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered "Free 4th of July Clip Art", "Fireworks Weather Forecasts", and "U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale". Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.

Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for "Organic Pastas" and "Fine Italian Pasta Makers". Someone's doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it's clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.

Beyond the obvious - you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side - what's happening here?

Three things:

1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.

2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google's sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,

3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google's sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google's ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.

The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn't an act of marketing or advertisement?

local tags: advertising, gmail, google, semantics, spam

IP vs. the iPod

From the good people of the EFF:

Senator Orrin Hatch's new Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copyright infringement. He wants us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only targets "the bad guys" while leaving "the good guys" alone. He says that it doesn't change the law; it just clarifies it.

He's wrong.

Right now, under the Supreme Court's ruling in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (the Betamax VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burners are 100% legal - not because they aren't sometimes used for infringement, but because they also have legitimate uses. The Court in Sony called these "substantial non-infringing uses." This has been the rule in the technology sector for the last 20 years. Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs have depended on it. Industries have blossomed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of innovation. Don't let this happen on your watch - tell your Senators to fight the Induce Act!

local tags: activism, eff, government, ip, ipod, music, privacy

Gmail and Keyword Targeted Ads: What Are Friends For?

Five minutes after logging into my shiny new gmail account today and sending out a hello message toa few friends, I got a taste of new technology pranksterism: an old friend sent a reply to my hello loaded with keywords for everyone's favorite flavors of spam. Naturally, my friend had read the Gmail intro that outlines their keyword targeted ad policy, stating that one of the conditions of participating in the beta was that Google would serve up ads related to the content of my messages within the new UI.

I don't know how aggressively Google will match ads to content, but I haven't seen anything tied to Scranton, PA on my screen yet. As a riposte, my friend should soon see plenty of discount remedies for embarrassing medical conditions, debilitating psychological illnesses, and other matters of questionable taste.

Funny or not, I find it a bit spooky that my mail is being parsed in order to drive advertising. Yes, un-encrypted email is basically as private as a post-card - but it's highly unlikely that the local post office is going to slip a brochure for travel agencies and package vacations into friends' mailboxes to accompany the post-cards I send them while I'm visiting Barcelona or Tenerife.

And then there are the inevitable followup questions: what kinds of patterns is Google building on top of this? Are they using geomatching to ID clusters of themes within zip codes? Maybe creating a history of my searching behavior and the number of times I follow the links placed by the engine, to establish a baseline for how susceptible I am to advertising? Or how often people in certain networks read and reply to messages with certain kinds of content?

I don't think paranoia is appropriate, but there is a double-edged sword in every technology - especially one like this that combines accumulating personal data with tremendous interpretive power.

And even if I did sign up for the free account knowing that Gmail use implied acceptance of this practice, privacy remains a fundamental right. You can't create valid and binding contracts that require or permit illegal activity.

Look out for travel guides to Scranton...

local tags: advertising, email, gmail, google, privacy, semantics, spam

When Good Firmware Goes Bad

I've loved my shiny new iPod since November of last year, when I gave in to an acute case of technolust and bought the 40GB model. Six months on, despite the entry cost, the inability of Apple products to live happily in a PC universe without loads of expensive accessories, and the disconcerting set of scratches that appeared on the display almost immediately, I'd still say I was very happy.

That is until last week. Apparently, while I was running a standard firmware update (to the 4/28/04 release), the basic file system on my iPod became corrupted without warning, and everything on the pod was -- erased. *38 GB* of all sorts of personally and professionally important files evaporated without so much as an unhappy face...

As it so happens, I was planning to wipe and rebuild anyway, so I've decided to look at this incident as an example of pre-emptive self-cleansing on the part of an exceptionally eager to please iPod, instead of a catastrophic file system failure.

But I'm still pissed. I have strong memories of using a Mac at a design studio in '99, and deciding that I should wear a helmet to work because it crashed so often. This reminds me of that in a more personal and equally frustrating way.

And it's going to cost Apple some money, to boot. I just decided that I'd replace my aging Dell laptop with a tasty new Powerbook - and now I think I'll be buying something else. Great design and marketing don't make up for unreliability.

local tags: apple, ipod, ux

The Felicity of Spam

It's been awhile since I've had time to read the Word of the Day emails that I get from the good people at Merriam Webster and Yourdictionary.com: long enough that I've set up a filter directing their daily contributions to the betterment of my vocabulary into a one of those dead-end Outlook folders that you see highlighted in bold, but never manage to do anything other than bulk delete every few months when you recognize the number of unread messages has crossed from two to three digits. (The count of unread words of the day in my folder is now 91 - just about time to purge again.)

But now, thanks to the atrocious epidemic of spam that's raging without surcease, I don't need to feel bad about ignoring the latest juicy word to drop into my Inbox.

Now instead of knowing that it will only be shunted aside and ignored for months before its' summary termination, I can calmly watch as it's disposed of without ado.

Now all I need to do for a rich and unusual lexical lesson is peruse the subject lines of the dozens of spam messages that the layers of filters deployed by my ISP haven't corralled as parasitic trash.

Thanks to the pertinacious conclave of spammers who've found the means to pollute the Internet with offers of discount medicines and penile enlargement disguised behind word combinations generated by dictionaries and scripts, there's a veritable smorgasbord of uncanny solecisms gracing my inbox every day.

Things like, "libidinous plutarchy", "inconspicuous megohm", "charcoal expectorant", and others not even worth mentiong despite their remarkable incongruity bring me unforeseen verbal richness.

Aside from the surrealists and their experiments with automatic writing during the 30's, who but a spammer would ever think to send out a message about "albania seethe pfennig columbia" - which by the way would make a great name for comic book villainness "You haven't won yet, Albania Seethe! Justice will be done!"

My day is already good when I can look forward to reading about "erosible integument", which I seem to remember overhearing the last time I was within fifty yards of a geochemistry lab.

"Systemic cohomolgy" sounds like a pretty cool degenerative disease, or maybe a death metal band.

"Afghanistan surname baboon" is the sort of thing I'd expect to hear coming from one of those early artificial intelligence programs trying to recreate human speech: the sort that you used to see on Nova in the early 80's; you know the scene - lots of twenty-something guys who haven't been out in the sunlight enough even though they're at UC San Jose are all standing around a radio-shacked amateur version of a speaker cabinet looking intently at an amber monitor, while one of them types "Hello. How are you today?" on a keyboard without a cover, only to end up visibly crestfallen when a tinny synthesized voice spits out something akin to gibberish above, and in the end they utter the inevitable combination of exuberant pronouncements regarding natural language processing, and conditioned realism about the fallacies of science fiction expectations.

Some of the spammers no doubt prefer to take a more Zen minimalist approach to fomenting palaver, using single words that bespeak a substantial degree of amphiboly; "gasify", "archfool", "deciduous", "involute" and "burg" are examples of this tradition.

Then there are the imperatives, not to be casually ignored without some measure of trepidation: "deconvolve", "rebut", "throb", and "migrate" for example.

With all these SAT words flowing uninterruptedly into my mailbox, there's practically no excuse for not doing the Times crossword in pen.

So I say "Thank You Spammers!" Spam On! Whenever I want a tasty linguistic morsel, I'll just shut off my spam filters...

local tags: linguistics, media, semantics, spam

The Voice of God?

Seen a lot of movie trailers? Always been curious about who owns the voice?

Thanks to JV for the answer:

"...Don LaFontaine, who is lovingly referred to in trailer circles as the 'Voice of God.' A veteran of 40 years and more than 4,000 trailers, his rumbling basso has enticed millions with dramatic intonations like "In a world where . . .'"

Here's the full article, from the WSJ.

local tags: advertising, culture, film, trailers

Ten Things The Media Doesn't Want You To Know

Courtesy of the media awareness and activism group Freepress.net:

1. A handful of companies dominate
Five media conglomerates - Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp. and NBC/GE - control the big four networks (70% of the prime time television market share), most cable channels, vast holdings in radio, publishing, movie studios, music, Internet, and other sectors. [Consumers Union/Parents Television Council]

2. Big Media are a powerful special interest in Washington
Media companies intent upon changing the FCC media ownership rules have spent nearly $100 million on lobbying in the last 4 years. FCC officials have taken more than 2,500 industry-sponsored junkets since 1995, at a pricetag of $2.8 million. [Common Cause, Center for Public Integrity]

3. Consolidation fosters inferior educational programming.
After Viacom purchased the independent KCAL in Los Angeles, children's programming plunged 89%, dropping from 26 hours per week in 1998 to three hours in 2003 (the minimum requirement set by Congress). TV stations air programs like NFL Under the Helmet and Saved by the Bell, claiming they meet educational programming requirements. [Children Now, FCC]

4. Cable rates are skyrocketing
Cable companies lobbied for and won deregulation in 1996, arguing that it would lower prices. Since then, cable rates have been rising at three times the rate of inflation. On average, rates have risen by 50%; in New York City, they've risen by 93.7%. [US PIRG]

5. Big Media profit from a money-dominated campaign finance system
In 2002, television stations earned more than $1 billion from political advertising - more than they earned from fast food and automotive ads. You were four times more likely to see a political ad during a TV news broadcast than an election-related news story. [Alliance for Better Campaigns]

6. Big Media use the public's airwaves at no charge
The total worth of the publicly-owned airwaves that U.S. broadcasters utilize has been valued at $367 billion - more than many nations' GDPs - but the public has never been paid a dime in return. And the broadcasters claim they can't afford to be accountable to the public interest! [Alliance for Better Campaigns]

7. Independent voices are fading
Since 1975, two-thirds of independent newspaper owners have disappeared, and one-third of independent television owners have vanished. Only 281 of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets are one-newspaper towns. [Writers Guild of America, East; Consumer Federation of America]

8. Consolidation is killing local radio
The number of radio station owners has plummeted by 34% since 1996, when ownership rules were gutted. That year, the largest radio owners controlled fewer than 65 stations; today, radio giant Clear Channel alone owns over 1,200. [FCC]

9. Consolidation threatens minority media ownership
Minority ownership - a crucial source of diverse and varied viewpoints - is at a 10-year low, down 14% since 1997. Today, only 4% of radio stations and 1.9% of television stations are minority-owned. [Writers Guild of America, East]

10. The free flow of idea and information is being stymied
No copyrighted work created after 1922 has entered the public domain - an incubator for new ideas - due to corporate-sponsored legislation extending copyright terms. If laws being considered today had been in effect a few generations ago, you wouldn't have access to products such as VCRs and copy machines. [U.S. Copyright Office, FCC, Electronic Frontier Foundation]

local tags: activism, culture, freepress, globalization, ip, media

Kill Bill Volume I

It is difficult to anticipate what one is supposed to take away from just the first half of an eclectic and heavily stylized movie released far away from its conclusion. Nevertheless it's safe to set this qualifier aside when reviewing it, since some combination of director, producer, studio, actors, and distributors obviously believed the first half of Kill Bill Volume I was solid enough to stand on it's own as an offering, and accordingly released it with all the customary fanfare. Regardless, I was disappointed (even after establishing low expectations in the first place). The action and fighting set pieces were fine (Yuen Wo Ping did a much better job creating interesting choreography for Kill Bill Vol. I than for The Matrix: Reloaded), but the story used as Kill Bill's skeleton is so flimsy it is almost in the way - especially when presented in the - disjointed plot / narrative we're accustomed to seeing from Tarantino - and aside from a few scattered moments of inspired cinematography ( the water bucket and fountain in the zen garden), I found the film flat.

As an homage to samurai movies, it was largely faithful: Tarantino managed to convincingly recreate the feel of a Saturday afternoon B-movie on cable television. But from a Hollywood director in 2003, that's a loosing gambit. What made the original Samurai movies Tarantino apes in Kill Bill a satisfying experiecnce was their essential foreigness, and the very different viewing contexts and associated expectations that enveloped them. Lacking both of these key supporting elements, I'm left wondering about the point of the exercise for the moment.

local tags: film, kill_bill

Recent Acquisitions: The Dead Boys, Gang Starr, The Chemical Brothers

It's to be expected that punk cognoscenti (and - shudder - would be punk cognoscenti...) would dissagree violently over the influences, origins, quality, relevance, and importance of almost every band that anyone else arrogating the label 'punk cognoscenti' to themselves has ever had the temerity to point to as "seminal". (A term which, by the way, may be uniquely suited to punk music by virtue of its etymology). So it's no surprise that even in a set of reviews of Young Loud and Snotty as trite as those offered by Amazon patrons, the infighting is rife and the grammar is bad. Frankly, it's amusing. After all - if you'd buy the album in the first place, would you really care what anyone else thought about it? If ever a music was tortured by its own critical and commercial success, and all the concommmittant disputational vagaries, it was punk...

Not nearly so the case with rap and hip-hop, which became wont to use material declaiming it's stars massive monetary prowess very soon after emerging from the inchoate chaos of block parties and DJ duels in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and many other places that suburban white record buyers still fear to visit. So it was without any taint of gone-rotten-anti-capitalism that I picked up Full Clip, A Decade of Gang Starr at the same moment. I gree with the review on this one - there are several juicy cuts missing, but the overall package is an excellent retrospective of what Guru and DJ Premier achieved between '89 and '99.

Lastly in the new acquisitions department, Come With Us makes the drive home from work positivley invigorating.

local tags: music

The Hives at The Roxy: Veni Vidi Vexatious

Instead of a fun and furious live set from an up and coming retro Mod punk outfit, this was a frankly disappointing example of the misfortunate mismatching that occurs when the media apparatus determines what it wants us to like. Friends loaned me their second album just as the publicity wave was cresting a few weeks ago, and I was mildly excited by the energy I heard on repeated listenings; their live performance didn't sustain the feeling, however, and given what I saw Tuesday, I wouldn't recommend that anyone hoping for as much from them on stage as on disc take the time or trouble.

The basic problem? Bluntly - Howlin' Pete Almqvist wouldn't shut up. I know it's a challenge to play a full set when your catalog is as brief as theirs, but there's just no excuse for stopping after every two-minute song to chatter about how wonderful your band is, and how terribly entertaining you just were; especially when it takes you longer to chatter about your song than it did to play it in the first place. At it's worst, this is like musicus interruptus - it demolishes the natural cycle of building and releasing tension that any dramatic performance in the Western world not explicitly billed as experimental should follow. I've never been this genuinely annoyed with a headline act. I'll confess to feeling a bit frazzled before I set foot inside the club, as I'd flown up from Atlanta only an hour before the show, after two full days of user research at an engineering conference (the joys of practicing IA on a tight budget...), but I wasn't alone in feeling the interruptions and disliking them. On my left was a table of five frustrated concert-goers yelling the inevitable "You SUCK", continuously. I'd say it was lack of experience, given their age and newness, but I know The Hives have toured for years, and it seemed that their refusal to engage was more capricious than accidental.

Oh, Mooney suzuki was there as well. What's with the Snake? I didn't mind their product (and it had those sly "we're art school kids larking about with the identity of musicians" timber), but the vocalist looked and acted too much like Nicholas Cage doing his best Mod impression of Elvis to allow me to simply immerse myself in the music. The drummer looked like one of the Nerds from Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

local tags: events, music