I think I've said this before, but it probably bears repeating. My little disclaimer regarding being an authority on nothing is not a disingenuous, reverse-psychology way of getting you to think I am an authority, or to attract attention. The last thing I want to do is to become some kind of an authority on stuff like this. Because with authority comes responsibility, and I'm not responsible for you. We can debate how that statement may not always be true, but when it comes down to you finding your way through life, you're on your own. So am I. My guess is, again, if you were like me, you already have enough authorities you're listening to, and you certainly don't need one more, least of all me.
A few of the most illuminating insights I've had in the last several years were not really new to me, I had in fact heard some of them before. In fact, I even thought I believed them. In reality, I didn't believe them. I may have agreed with them, but I didn't believe them.
If you read something I write, you're reading the thoughts and words I own. You don't own them, and they're not yours. Chances are, you'll either agree with them, or disagree with them. If it's something you agree with, you might go so far as to say that it is "true." But none of that means that it is true for you, that it is true in your life. It's just true in this mental construct you have in your head of things that are true that may or may not have anything to do with how you run your life. Those are things we seldom look at. Those are the things you own, and given the fact that they pretty much shape your life, it's probably worth your while to take an inventory of those things. Chances are you're a pretty busy person, and while you agree that it's probably a good idea, you won't do it. And that's okay I guess. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A lot of people, maybe even most people, get through life just fine that way. Life's like that sometimes.
But if you really want to own some of these ideas, then you have to make them your own, and you can't do that just reading them. It helps, but most reading today is merely passive consumption. You need to think hard about these things and then try them out in your life. Who knows? Maybe they're not true! Maybe I am full of shit after all! It's altogether too possible. But if you make these ideas your own, about the power of choice, the narrow space between stimulus and response, the value of being still, the nature of authority, the binding opposites of faith and fear, then maybe you'll be the authority in your life. Not the only one, by any means, but the final one. The buck stops here for me - there for you. If you are accountable for your life, whether to God or your fellow man, then you are responsible for your life, and if you are responsible for your life, then the authority for your life is yours.
If I write something and you merely agree with me, then fine. That's nice. It accomplishes exactly nothing, but it's nice. I don't want you to agree with me. Actually, I don't really care if you do or not. What I would want is perhaps to cause you to think a little bit more from time to time. A little here, a little there, who knows? Maybe it'll add up one day. Maybe not. It really, really doesn't matter. Except when it does. And that's an ambiguity I can live with.
One of the aspects of living in a group is that there is always a hierarchy. I don't care how egalitarian you might think a particular group is, if it's an identifiable group and the members of the group self-identify as such, there is a hierarchy. And we all live in groups, usually several at one time.
The people at the top of hierarchies are the authorities. In a group that doesn't necessarily require authorities, there will still be a hierarchy of authority. In the group of all artists, some artists will be recognized as masters, and they will be authorities. If someone wished to know what a good example of a type of work would be, they would reasonably be referred to the work of a master. Some people are always considered the best, and then there's everyone else with diminishing degrees of competence, attention and success.
Being an authority offers two things, a means of receiving attention, and the ability to influence events. As human beings, in general, we seem to require a certain amount of attention. And we're also predisposed to feel anxiety if we feel as though we are powerless to control events around us. Being in a position of authority can make us feel pretty good. Having no authority can make us feel powerless or disenfranchised and alienated.
We also have a good, unconscious, intuitive understanding of that fact; and we're behaviorally equipped to cope with it. In larger groups where our own chance of achieving authority is limited, we tend to identify with particular figures who we feel best represent who we are, those who would most likely act in our interests. Former President Clinton is famous for his natural empathy, which contributed to his success in positions of authority. Conservatives were noted for their rather darwinian social views, and so the notion of "compassionate conservatism" was crafted in order to attract those who feel as though government should acknowledge their suffering. While those who felt that government was the cause of their suffering would still feel comfortable that someone who shared their views would be running the show.
Often, we publicly identify ourselves with our chosen authorities. We do so in our conversations, in our writing, even in bumper-stickers or "I like Ike" buttons. These public proclamations of fealty are a surrogate means of garnering attention. Like-minded supporters will affirm and validate, while those who disagree will offer their own negative attention. I think we require attention and while we probably thrive more on positive attention, negative attention works almost as well. What we seem to hate is being ignored.
Some people will work to cultivate relationships with authorities. They do so with the expectation that they may be able to influence the person with authority. In some cases they become a kind of authority behind the authority. In many cases, they are simply people who wish to exploit their relationship as a means of garnering attention from others, and to attempt to exercise a kind of reflected or virtual authority. Sometimes, authorities seek to mutually preserve or enhance each other's authority in a kind of reciprocity agreement or mutual admiration society.
Authority often relies on symbols, because in many cases the people who are seeking the authority wouldn't be able to tell they've found one just by looking at them or talking to them. These symbols include some deliberately chosen for that purpose, and others that have come to be symbols of authority through long association. A badge is a powerful, deliberate symbol of authority, as is a uniform. A title or a degree is a symbol of authority. A white lab coat and a stethoscope are not a uniform per se, but people have learned to associate these things with the authority of a medical doctor. And people will be influenced by the symbols. Even just stating he was a police officer, over the telephone, was enough to convince the four Wendy's managers to humiliate one of their employees.
We rely on authority. We organize ourselves in groups in order to survive, so we require authorities to direct the actions of the group, and we're predisposed to accede to the demands of authority. When supposedly rebellious youths act as though they are "questioning authority," they're really just establishing their own authority structures. Nobody ever really questions authority, as in, "Why authority?" We all intuitively understand we need it, we all want some of it, and we're all prepared to follow it, too often, very blindly.
For groups, this is probably a good thing. For humanity, in the aggregate, it's hard to argue with the results. As individuals, I think there is a much different story. We are not individuals, as much as members of groups. All authorities will tell you so. "No man is an island." What else could authority tell you? Without the primacy of the group, what is the value of authority? Naturally, there is a great deal of truth in those things, but I think it's being exploited today in ways that it hasn't been exploited before, because we've lacked the means to command so much attention. As a result, we've either forgotten or been distracted from exercising our own authority over our own lives. We'd rather quarrel with a stranger than behave civilly when we disagree about an issue. You'll find ample evidence of that in the discussion pages of weblogs. People become merely something to hang a label on, "you leftists," or "right-wing wackos." That whole Golden Rule thing, well that's for another time when there isn't so much at stake, right? Challenge authority? Well, then you'll get called names, or worse.
Maybe we don't need to challenge authority so much as stop giving it so much attention. Recall that those seeking attention are often seeking authority. And those that have authority seek attention to retain it. Stop listening to all the talking heads and reading all the weblogs and take a little time to listen to yourself. Do you even have anything to say to yourself? My guess is, if you're like I was, probably not much. What's buzzing around inside you is something you've brought in from outside and it's taken up all the space that's inside you to be you. You can take it right back out again and make some room, but then you'll have to do some work to begin to appreciate and use that space. It's not easy. It's not easy at all. But whose life is it? Is it your leaders'? Is it your teachers'? Your columnists'? Your priest's? Your minister's? Your parents'? Your political party's? Your spouse's? Who gets to say what goes in that space that's inside you? Who has that authority? You've forgotten. You do. It would be a sad thing indeed to come to the end of one's life and never have exercised that authority.
And stop listening to me. I'm an authority on nothing. I make all of this shit up.
One of our cherished myths is an American mistrust of authority. Unfortunately, Americans are human beings, and human beings are remarkably ignorant about their own psychology and behavior. Well, most of them are anyway.
Anyone familiar with Stanley Milgram's experiments won't be surprised by this; but it seems a prank phone caller called at least four Wendy's restaurants in the Boston area, posing as a police official, and convinced the managers to strip search one of their employees at each restaurant. If you've read Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion, you'll know that researchers posing as doctors were able to call nurses on duty and persuade them to administer fatal doses of drugs to patients. Other researchers were on hand to stop the nurses before the drugs were administered. We nearly always listen to and obey other authorities and not to our own authority over our own actions.
Here's a tip: Before trying to save the world, maybe you should start small and work your way up. Try saving yourselves.
Once again I'll quote from a pair of giant shoulders, Thales: "Know thyself."
I'll return to this later. There are occasions when people do question authority, but the reasons they do so often have more to do with group dynamics and social psychology than a sense of personal autonomy.
Installed new versions of iKey, LaunchBar, the Wacom tablet driver/application and I purchased the upgrade to Snapz Pro X 2.0. The bundled version got pretty flakey under Panther, and the new version was only $19.00 as an upgrade from the bundled version.
I installed the latest security update from Apple the other night with no ill effects noted.
I haven't downloaded and installed the latest beta of iChat 2.1 though I expect I will get to that soon. There aren't too many people on my buddy list as it is, and most of them are Mac users so I'm not sure how useful it will be in the near term, but perhaps later on some of my Wintel-based siblings will have cameras and microphones and we'll be able to do the video-conference thing.
In other computer-related news, I've discovered the attraction of online first-person shooters by playing Halo online. It's a lot of fun, and an interesting experience. I expect I'm playing with a bunch of adolescent males, at least judging by the screen-names they give themselves, and most of them seem to be much better at it than me, but it is fun in an odd sort of way. I'm sure it's a dopamine thing with the reward system of my brain getting all kinds of stimulation when I run someone over in a Warthog. It's my best weapon.
I think this is kind of weird. Two times in as many weeks I have come upon white Ford Explorers involved in accidents in parking lot entrances.
Last Thursday, on my way to taekwondo class, I couldn't miss seeing a white Ford Explorer (I think this was a 2-door) lying upside down in the entrance to a local supermarket parking lot. That's something you don't see every day.
On my way to work this morning, I saw another white Ford Explorer (4 door) lying on its side in the entrance to a gas station/mini-mart parking lot. In both cases, the SUVs appeared to have been hit by smaller vehicles.
I think this morning's accident was a case of the Ford-driver attempting to beat oncoming traffic as he or she turned into the parking lot. I think they miscalculated. It was raining today, last Thursday was clear and dry.
This isn't an anti-SUV post. I own an SUV. I'm not an SUV-lover, but I don't have an irrational hatred of them either. This is just an "Isn't that odd?" kind of post.
What if the Sermon on the Mount had been a weblog post? Would it receive a "Fisking" by right-wing warbloggers? Would the disciples be arguing amongst themselves whether they were an echo-chamber or not? RSS 2.0 or Atom? Would Jesus be an "A-Lister?" Full posts or summaries? Comments available on the Savior's weblog? Would lettered webloggers pooh-pooh the Messiah's writing because he wasn't formally trained in philosophy, sociology, theology and psychology? Would it be a "smart mob" or a "flash mob" calling for Barabus? Would people be begging for links to their weblogs instead of healing from their afflictions? Permalinks? Would Jesus ask me to be his friend on Orkut? Would the MeFi posse do an investigation into the account of the Virgin Birth? Would Jesus cast the webloggers out at e-Tech? Would the two fish and seven loaves be like an early example of file-sharing? Would fishermen and bakers sue Jesus? Copyright, GPL or Creative Commons? Linux, XP or X? Would Jesus have his own IRC channel?
1789: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Perhaps you've heard this someplace before.
Frankly, I'm shocked and disappointed at Apple's conduct. I have not seen the ad in question, but if these reports are to be believed, then I may have to reconsider my opinion of Apple and Steve Jobs.
Any company that would use the work of a misogynistic, immature, punk who squanders his talent on the vain and the profane to promote their products has no taste.
(For the irony-challenged, my tongue is planted somewhat in cheek. That is to say, there are issues here, but there may be more than just one, and villainy is where you find it.)
"I think those who use the word 'spoiler' need to re-examine their otherwise steadfast commitment to civil liberties, to choice, to freedom," he said.CNN
It does give one pause to wonder what Ralph would make of this line of reasoning when applied to, say, owners of sports utility vehicles.
I happened to find a book called The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich. So far, it's a wonderful book. I think that if you're somewhat put off by Buddhism or eastern philosophy, you will find many of the same ideas in the very western tradition of thought outlined in this book. He begins with Socrates and the Stoics and goes from there. More about this after I finish the book.
This is interesting. Cher called CSPAN recently, and you can listen to it yourself here. I've always been a fan, and I still am. I suppose that makes me unsophisticated or something, but you like what you like. This is pretty cool, and she is too.
This is the topographic view of the same image of where I grew up. They're at the same scale. You can see the hill in this view. The dotted line running SW-NE is the Ni-Mo power line right of way. I can attest to the veracity of the wetlands symbols in the green areas.
Presented below is the image of where I live now, at the same scale as the other two images:
The red circle is right on top of my apartment. At this moment, it is 32 degrees here in Florida, while it is 22 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Syracuse, which is 19 miles from where my parents' house is, and about 24 miles from where I spent that early part of my adolescence. The dark areas above are water, the back of my apartment looks out over a rather pleasant retention pond. The white dot in the upper limb of the pond is a fountain.
The small white rectangular object below the red circle (not the one right under it, the one down there in the corner) in the picture above is the home where my parents lived from 1968-2002. I played the woods across the road and behind the house. The swath cut through the woods on the left is the right-of-way for the Niagara-Mohawk power lines. My brother Mark collected Maple syrup from the trees across the street. My father owned a big chunk of that woods.
The feature below the red circle is a row of cedar trees my father planted when he bought the property. That's about 2 acres of land in that trapezoid. I mowed that whole thing with a push mower one summer to pay my mom back for the $4.95 it cost to buy the Modern Library Science Fiction Collection.
The intersection near the top of the picture is the intersection of the East Milestrip Road and Rt. 20, the Oxbow Road. The feature in the lower right quadrant of that intersection is my grandparents' house. I'm not sure who owns it now. The house was built around 1885. It was a great house, even if it did need a lot of work. My Uncle Robert inherited it from my grandparents when they passed away in the 70s. I learned about amateur radio from Uncle Robert in that house and he taught me Morse Code and helped me learn enough theory to pass the Novice class license exam. I was WN2FEB back in the day. I worked for Uncle Robert one summer baling hay. That was some pretty hard work. Uncle Robert passed away a few years ago, sitting in his truck. His wife, my Aunt Helen preceded him by about 20 years I think. Maybe a little less. One of his sons, my cousin Stevie, lives right around here someplace in Florida. I've never met him. We used to have a lot of fun together when we were kids.
Between my parents' house and my grandparents' house is my Uncle George and Aunt Emily's place.
The buildings in the upper left quadrant of the intersection belong to my Uncle John and include the house that he built all by himself. I worked one summer for my Uncle John. He was a bee-keeper and that was a lot of fun, except for my first day on the job when I stood in front of a hive we were working and had my ankles stung about 20-30 times, much to the amusement of my Uncle John. Uncle John was a bachelor all his life, and he still lives in that house alone, now well into his 70s. He's my godfather and a great guy.
If you follow that long hedgerow that runs north to the East Milestrip Road, the feature on the north side of the road is where the barn was to my grandparents' farm. My Uncle Tony and Aunt Carol worked that farm while my grandparents were alive and I think there were some hard feelings when Grampa died and the farm went to Uncle Robert and not to Uncle Tony. When we spent our summer vacations with Gramma and Grampa, I used to play with my cousins, Debbie, Kathy, Elaine and Sam. Elaine and I are the same age. Sometimes I'd help them do chores, but I didn't much like doing that. It was hard work.
Just north of the edge of the picture is the place where my Uncle Bob (not Uncle Robert) and Aunt Rail lived. Uncle Bob died of colon cancer quite a few years ago. I left home in '75 and I think they moved into their place after I'd left. Before then they'd lived down in Greene, near Binghamton.
You can't tell from this photo, but there's a bit of a steep hill in the East Milestrip Road between Gramma and Grampa's house and the farm. We used to go tobogganing down that hill on moonlit winter nights. Scary as hell, and a lot of fun. You could sled down the road quite often too. And we had some fun coasting bikes down the hill in the summer.
In the summer my mom would drag us kids all along the edges of all those woods looking for berries. She called it "berrying." I hated berrying. It was hot. There were biting flies and mosquitoes, and the berry bushes had thorns. I was quite the whiner and complainer back then. Some things haven't changed much I guess.
Uncle Tony and Aunt Carol don't live far from the old place. You could walk there if you wanted to. I remember when I took my son Chris to meet Uncle Tony and Aunt Carol when we were up there for the kidney transplant, and Uncle Tony ended up taking us for a walk across the fields behind his house to the stone quarry that was where my Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Dave's house used to be. At one point we were in a field surrounded by hedges and woods and you couldn't see a road or a power line and Chris said, "Wow! It's just like Jurassic Park!"
Aunt Mary Ann is my mom's fraternal twin sister and she and Uncle Dave live in Colorado I think.
My mom and Aunt Carol get along great, they're both big into quilting.
My Aunt Gert and Uncle Bill have a place somewhere up there on the south side of the E. Milestrip. It may be that white dot with the black triangular thing next to it. I've never been there.
It was a pretty amazing place to grow up. When I wasn't complaining about berrying, weeding the garden, baling hay, moving bees or extracting honey, I was climbing trees, looking for fossils, gazing at the stars, reading books and dreaming about a future that always seems to remain a step or two ahead of me.
"Good morning, it's 36 degrees in the Sunshine state, so bundle up and don't forget to wear your booties 'cuz it's COLD out there. It's cold out there every day. And now for this morning's traffic report from our Eye in the Sky and Chopper One!"
(Thippp-thippp-thippp-thippp-thippp.) "Thanks Lisa, and good morning to all you happy campers! Those of you heading for hell this morning may want to leave an hour or so early, because it's backed up all the way from here to eternity. It's stop and go every inch of the way. No apparent cause for the congestion, just be advised, you will encounter significant delays on your way to eternal damnation. For Groundhog Day, this is your Eye in the Sky reporting from Chopper One, back to you, Lisa." (Thippp-thippp-thippp-thippp-thippp.)
Jonathon Delacour sent me a very kind e-mail in response to the link I offered this morning to his post from last year. He pointed out that I've misunderstood what he was writing about in that piece, and upon re-reading it, I agree that I have. I've asked Jonathon for permission to quote from his e-mail to address his concern, but given the time-zone difference between here and Down Under, I may not hear from him until tomorrow. In the interest of making a timely correction to my error, I'm going to anticipate that he will give his assent, and I'll quote him directly:
"In Riding Easy in Harness, I'm dealing with a totally different issue: the debts that artists and writers owe to 'a succession of masters under masters going back generations within a living community of practice'. The important issue is that the tradition stretches back over time and includes people who, even if they lived at the same time, may have hated each other (personally) or hated each other's work. One doesn't have to like something to be influenced (positively) by it."
Robert Scoble used to joke that he only had seventeen readers or something like that. If you don't know who Robert Scoble is, don't worry about it, suffice to say he has a lot more than seventeen readers. I do a little better than that, I have somewhere between 25 and 30, and I can probably name them all.
I used to have SiteMeter track this page. It kind of still does for the old Time's Shadow archives which are still available, but it only tracks Google hits these days. I consistently got between 50 and 60 hits a day. When I signed off in December I watched the SiteMeter counter to see what would happen, and after a few days tapering off it settled into a steady 25 to 30 hits a day, all from Google. So, a little subtraction, and I know that there are about 25 to 30 people who stop in here on a frequent basis to see what kind of fool I've made of myself this time. And that's a fine thing, having that many people care enough about what I write to take some time out of their day and stop by here. I'm not complaining by any means.
Before I had comments, a few people would suggest that I get them, and it seemed like the blogworthy thing to do. After casting around for an easy and inexpensive solution that was compatible with my host here, I found something that worked most of the time. It did add quite a bit of time for the page to load for some people. And at work, I couldn't even read my comments. But after going to that trouble, I was disappointed at how seldom anyone offered a comment; and sometimes when a comment was offered, it wasn't something that I necessarily welcomed. Both of these things contributed to my sense of unhappiness in maintaining Time's Shadow. And longtime readers will know: suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. The way things are, most of the time what I write doesn't merit a comment. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. I hope I harbor very few illusions as to the nature of what I offer here. But offering the facility for comments helps to create the expectation that I'll get comments, and that sets the stage for a tiny bit of suffering.
I suppose I could have encouraged more comments by asking, "What do you think?" Or, perhaps I could have found a better comment system - the one I chose pretty much sucked. But that just sort of ups the ante on the expectations game, doesn't it? I have to ask myself why I choose to do this? Is it for the comments? Truthfully, no. I would welcome intelligent rejoinders, and value them greatly, but they're not the main reason why I do this. So chasing after comments seems like a distraction and, ultimately, just an opportunity to increase my net level of unhappiness.
If I have happened to write something that you wish to comment on, or you would like to engage in a discussion or conversation with me about it, all you have to do is send me an e-mail. There's no e-mail link on this page, but you can figure out my e-mail address from the URL of this site. If that's not clear enough, it's: dave_rogers AT mac.com. There's no link because, if you're a first-time reader and I've written something that particularly offends you and you wish to fire off a flaming e-mail, you'll have to stop and type in my e-mail address, which is usually too much effort for the easily-offended. I'd venture to say that all of my 25-30 regular readers already have my e-mail address in their address books, so it's not much effort for them to drop me a note if they so desire.
Now, let's consider some other aspects of comments. The "Community" part of the title to this post refers to the little contretemps that inspired Shelley's post on community and writing, which in turn was inspired by something Don Park wrote and subsequently removed, which was inspired by something Danah Boyd wrote at her site, and the comments that ensued. Just to walk the cat all the way back, Danah was responding to something at Marc Canter's site. I note that Marc also offers comments at his site.
Just to save a bit of clicking, I'll quote Danah's post entitled: partying like a sex offender at Etech
How exciting - Marc Canter is organizing a party at Etech. Of course, in announcing it, he sweetly through up a picture that offends me at my core. "It appears that Jenn is quite a partier herself." refers to an image where a grinning man is holding on to a bent over woman with a face that's either in ecstasy or agony. But she's down on all fours, submissive to a man in a Santa suit. C'mon now. How welcoming is this party to the women???
Now, in my opinion, that's a pretty provocative title. If that showed up in my RSS aggregator, I'd probably want to read the post. My guess is that it is intentionally provocative for the purpose of garnering attention. My guess is also that Marc's use of that particular picture had a similar intent, to garner attention.
In her text, Danah offers that the picture Marc posted "offends me at my core." I don't know any other way to parse that phrase than that she was deeply, deeply offended by that photo. She goes on to describe the photo in the context that it offended her, which can be reasonably interpreted as being offensive. The picture can also be described in other ways that wouldn't necessarily be interpreted as being offensive, but Danah is offended so its her interpretation she's presenting. The point is, Danah's post seems like a perfectly reasonable response to something she experienced. If that's where it ended, my guess is I'd be writing about something else right now.
Danah offers comments in her weblog. The first five people offering comments seemed to wish to validate Danah's feelings, but the first person chose to write "Marc is being a jerk here," and the next several people simply agreed with that assertion rather than offer another point of view. The discussion begins to diverge a bit at that point, but the tenor of the discussion is decidedly negative toward Marc Canter with some rather offensive things being offered about him by some of Danah's supporters. Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.
Had Danah not offered comments, it would have been one person expressing her feelings about something Marc Canter did that offended her. By offering comments though, a very low barrier to entry, the post changed from being an expression of Danah's feeling to a "beat up Marc Cantor free-for-all." I don't see how this can be considered a "good" thing.
Now, probably neither Danah, nor the first poster who opined that Marc was a jerk probably intended for it to become an example of a kind of ugly "smart-mob." And Joi Ito who seconded and, perhaps unintentionally, thirded the notion that Marc was a jerk, probably didn't expect that a lot of other people would take their cues from him and offer their own endorsements, but that's what happened.
It was kind of emergent. (I know I'm not using that term in it's proper technical context, but it's pretty damn close. Close enough to tweak a few noses with it.)
What is the net effect of this post and the subsequent comments? Is Marc a better person now? Or is he still a jerk? If you were Marc, how would you feel? I know how I would feel, I'd think that Danah and her commentariat were the jerks. Which is uglier, a picture in poor taste, or the spectacle of a bunch of people taking cheap shots in public at another human being without confronting him about it personally? I think I know the answer to that one.
So, having comments is too low a barrier to our own behaviors, which, while not necessarily evil or even particularly egregious individually, can yield outcomes approaching that of evil.
In lieu of me trying to write anything original, and to entertain all the guests Shelley has so graciously sent my way, today I offer a blast from the past.
Truthfully, I'd been kind of waiting for Jonathon Delacour to offer something on the current subject under discussion; but then I remembered that he already had.
I wonder what the union of the set of webloggers who wrote that Janet Jackson's boob on the Super Bowl was no big deal, and the set of webloggers who opined that Marc Canter's invitation was offensive or tasteless (a much smaller set) would look like. That would be a good use of the semantic web, I think.
I tried to take a brief look just by visiting the weblogs of the individuals in question, and searching for any mention of Janet's appearance in the half-time show. Upon first inspection, none of the people who found Marc Canter's invitation tasteless seemed to have mentioned Justin Timberlake ripping off part of a woman's costume and exposing her breast on a national television program. It's possible I missed a comment or two, and I don't know what opinions any of them may have expressed at places other than their own, but my strong impression is none of them mentioned it.
It's hard to know what to make of that. Perhaps one explanation would have something to do with proximity. Marc is closer to their circle of influence, and therefore the urge to comment is stronger - they, or at least some of them, know Marc; while entertainers doing outrageous things on television has become something of an unremarkable norm in our culture. On the other hand, it is at least somewhat incongruous to me, given the espoused feminist point of view, with a particular emphasis on opposition to violence to women in Danah's weblog, that the event should have gone unmentioned by her at least.
We're probably past the point of making too much of this particular question, but I suspect any complete explanation would focus more on roles within communities and relationship maintenance, than on any one individual's concern with a particular social issue - in this case, how women are portrayed and treated in society.
I saw Along Came Polly on Saturday night. Not bad. Not great. I think the toilet thing has been done about to death now. Hank Azarea was looking pretty fit. I almost didn't recognize him. Alec Baldwin was pretty funny. How the mighty have fallen. Bryan Brown was funny as a thrill-seeking CEO.
I started to write something in my pedantic mode where I can almost see myself in a tweed jacket, brown corduroy slacks and puffing on a pipe. Although it's kind of fun, it's probably only fun for me.
When I do that, I'm trying to fashion a logical argument in order to persuade the reader about a particular point. But then I usually go and disclaim that I am an authority on nothing, which is true, and that folks should do their own thinking, also true. So I'm not sure the pedantic effort is necessary or appropriate or worth the effort in all cases.
I've been sort of participating in a discussion over at Shelley's Burningbird Weblog and Grill about community, one of my favorite topics. I say "sort of" participating, because mostly the things I write just seem to vanish into the ether. I did get a nice comment from Stavros the Wonder Chicken, and Shelley even quoted large sections of my comments. But nobody ever bothers to stop and tell me I'm full of shit, which would at least suggest somebody read what I wrote.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Look, here's what I would try to prove if I felt it was worth the time and effort, which it's not because sometimes you can't even lead a horse to water.
Most of the time, people have little real idea why they do the things they do. They just do them. Mostly the reasons why have to do with emotions and feelings, and little to nothing to do with logic or reason. Those emotions and feelings are the products of complex interactions between certain hardwired behaviors and perceptual receivers; a set of beliefs that are cognitively accessible, but most often function below the level of consciousness in conjunction with the more genetically fixed apparatus mentioned before; and certain habits of behavior which are also usually unconscious. See Dr. Antonio Damasio for further reference.
If we're asked "why" we did something, most of the time we'll be able to craft what appears to be a perfectly rational explanation. That explanation will almost invariably involve making assertions that cast ourselves in the best light. That is to say, among the set of possible explanations, we will choose the ones that make us feel best about ourselves. Some people have physical or mental deficiencies that cause them to make the opposite choice, but similar errors occur in either case. The explanation will not rely on the best available evidence, but instead will rely on ambiguous or incomplete information that is difficult to thoroughly refute, or false information which is nevertheless contained within the accepted set of shared beliefs, and which allows us to feel as good or bad about ourselves as we feel is normal.
We reason backward from our feelings. We encounter something, it provokes a feeling. If the feeling seems to be one that initiates a response, we will assess what we've encountered with our cognitive faculties in order to understand how to frame a response which is congruent with our interior emotional state and we'll choose the best response that supports our feelings.
Most of the time, this works well. Sometimes it doesn't work well at all. But, for the most part, none of us really believes this is what goes on; or, if we do, few of us are mindful of this process as we go about doing the things we do. Mostly we like to believe that we're rational beings acting in our own self-interests, and making conscious, logical decisions. While there is kind of a sense in which that assertion is true, it is, at best, incomplete and misleading.
There are some beliefs that are cherished. These are things we believe that make us feel good about ourselves, the future, or a particular object. When we listen to discussion and reasoning that calls upon our cherished beliefs in a way that is consistent with them, then we share a good feeling with and toward the person making the argument. Feeling "good" seldom invokes the cognitive process that critically, if imperfectly, examines the arguments and assertions being made. This is a very high barrier to overcome to get people to think critically about something for which they hold cherished beliefs. It's mostly impossible, short of getting kind of ugly. And it almost always gets ugly if those beliefs are genuinely flawed.
Anyway, I'm starting to get all pedantic again. Most of the discussions about "echo chambers" and "group-think" and "community" are carried on within a very narrow set of beliefs which have been cherry-picked to make us feel as good about ourselves as possible, even if they don't adequately describe the phenomenon they're trying to address. As long as we can feel "good," whether that's advocating for "emergent democracy" or "smart mobs;" or railing against sexism, elitism, or whatever other "-ism" that has provoked a response, then we're not going to be inclined to look much further into our own behavior, our own beliefs, our own reasoning. It is superfluous to the goal of maintaining an interior state of homeostasis - usually a feeling which can be described as "good" if only by noting its absence as in "I don't feel comfortable with..." Or, "I'm offended by..." Which is ultimately why we do the things we do: Because it feels "good." For the most part it works. But at the edges, it doesn't, and more and more we're finding ourselves living at the edge. And woe be unto he or she who challenges what makes us feel "good." They will be made to feel "bad!"
It's the time of the year for which I have the least affection. I think Valentines' Day is one of the cruelest things we've done to each other ever.
I note that General Clark has dropped out of the race. I'm a bit disappointed, but I'm not despondent. I kind of figured that was going to happen once I got the notion that he was the candidate I preferred. Choosing presidents has been a "lesser of evils" exercise for me for quite some time now.
Sunday's interview of the president was a preview of the campaign the incumbent intends to run. Wartime president, sacrifice, hardship, steadiness, proven leadership, etc. etc. Plus, he has a "vision" of where he wants to "lead America." I guess they weren't going to let the "lack of vision" thing get him like it did his dad.
It's been tough getting off of bottom dead center of late. I keep thinking of something that appears on a Homer Simpson cup I was given for Christmas: "Trying is the first step toward failure." Probably a Dark Ages phenomenon as well.
It occurs to me that "Lost in translation" would probably sum up much of what has been written about politics and the internet; but, no, that's not what I'm writing about tonight.
I watched the movie tonight! There's not a word I can think of to describe it, but it's one damn fine movie. I've read a couple of people dismissing it as American Beauty in Japan, and I think that's a pretty superficial criticism without a great deal of merit.
The movie that kept coming to my mind, although it is a flawed comparison, is The Bridges of Madison County. I think it's kind of interesting that Bridges, both the book and the movie, focuses on the woman's point of view, and were created by men; while Lost focuses mainly, in my (male) opinion, on the man's point of view and was written and directed by a woman. Now, I hasten to add that I think Lost is more balanced in terms of giving attention to the main characters, but the emotional center of the film is biased toward Bill Murray's character.
I'd pick the movie apart for you, but I find I'm too inclined to simply savor the memory of it for a little while. I'll watch it again and maybe I'll have something more to say.
One gathers Mr. Trippi and others like him would have us believe that somehow weblogs have made President Bush vulnerable. Apparently it's not because of the loss of 2.2 million jobs during his term. It's not because of Dr. David Kay's revelations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It's not because of a half-trillion dollar deficit.
Nope, it's because of the weblogs.
You should read Dr. Weinberger's account of Trippi's speech. Despite the fact that there are several other flatly false assertions, there are some interesting and worthwhile observations.
But let's ask ourselves what is Mr. Trippi doing in this speech? At the moment, Mr. Trippi is something of a hot property. He is largely credited with the strategy for Gov. Dean's candidacy that made him a virtual front-runner before the primaries. The candidate's losses in the primaries haven't seemed to have taken much of the luster off of his reputation either. So what is he doing?
Well, for one, he is among his people, so he is, in effect, preaching to the converted. He utters things like the bit of nonsense above to solidify his connections with the people he's trying to influence. If people like what they hear, they aren't very inclined to look at it critically. And these folks love to hear how influential weblogs are. The goal of the influence Mr. Trippi is endeavoring to assert in this forum is to strengthen his position as an authority within this amorphous, nascent social organism that is DeanForAmerica, or emergent democracy, or moveon.org, or whatever other manifestation this organism takes. They are the digerati, the techno-elites, the true-believers who believe that the internet "changes everything." And they have begun to act as a group in things like moveon.org and DeanForAmerica, and they will continue to learn and grow, and they will become more effective as a social organism unless competing authorities within the group begin to tear it apart as we saw with Ross Perot's Reform Party.
What is the value to Trippi in that context? Well, it's as he says, albeit obliquely, in his speech. You have to follow the money!
Money is a form of authority. It is almost a kind of universal solvent in that sense; it is a form of authority that nearly everyone recognizes. "Every man has his price," may not be exactly accurate, but it's true enough. We pay attention to people with large amounts of money who desire attention, even some who don't desire the attention. Indeed, one of the ways we prioritize our attention resource is by the presence of authority. One of the principles of influence is authority. In most endeavors, authority=money, and an identity function is commutative.
So, if Joe Trippi can improve his stature as an authority within this organism, he will improve his ability to influence where money goes in it; indeed, he will attract money. As the amount of money he attracts grows, so will his authority, as we saw with Governor Dean's campaign prior to Iowa. And money attracts attention, and money can demand attention, and people often confuse attention with authority.
Having authority, or being an authority, which are not necessarily the same things, can be a rewarding experience for a human being. Nothing quite gets the old dopamine pumps pushing out the good stuff like being the man in charge with lots of folks paying attention to you, and lots of money at your command. This is a biological function, and I'd venture to say very few of us are immune to it. When I transferred from being the executive officer of a destroyer, essentially the number-two guy in the food chain, where everyone else either showed me great deference or outright sucked up to me, to becoming a three-digit code on a group staff in the fifth row of boxes down from the tip of the org chart, I felt like I should have been issued a prescription to Prozac to kind of facilitate the transition. This is why so many congressmen go back on pledges of voluntary term-limits. Authority, or, if you prefer the inaccurate term - power, is probably more addictive than crack cocaine.
Trippi isn't speaking from podiums to tell hard truths to a troubled world. He's speaking from podiums to ensure he gets to continue speaking from podiums. Not everyone is always successful at that, but we seem to have a particularly motivated and susceptible group of followers in this case. We can all recall the young lady who was dying of leukemia and documenting her ups and downs in her weblog, can't we? What was her name? Yes, nothing much gets past the discerning and jaded eyes of the digerati!
Haven't they already established their own clarity of vision? Why, they're the only ones who "get" that "the internet changes everything!" The rest of us are the poor benighted dinosaurs, unaware of the evolutionary fate about to befall us. If we were only as smart as they are, why, we'd see it too! And the sooner we do, the better dammit! This is important stuff we're talking about here! Empower to the people!
They pay so much attention to the press and cataloging its deficiencies. They pay no attention to themselves or try to understand just what it is they're doing and why they're doing it. Well, where would the fun be in that? Then it wouldn't be emergent!
Enjoy the show folks. I just hope nobody gets hurt.
I seldom complete these first-person shooter adventure games. I usually get stuck on some level and lose interest. I don't recall if Halo offered an "Easy" level, but I managed to get through each of the missions although most of them required several attempts. I didn't have to resort to a walk-thru either. So maybe Halo is a bit easier than most of this genre, or maybe I just picked the Easy level.
The plot is interesting, but the action gets pretty repetitious after a while. It's a demanding game from a hardware perspective. It doesn't appear to exploit dual-processor cpus, so my 867MHz G4 wasn't always able to maintain high framerates when the action got pretty intense. Tip: Grenades are your friends.
I encountered one bug, although, fortunately, I couldn't replicate it. After destroying the shielding to the ship's engines, in the "light the fuse" mission, I had to make my way out by getting into an elevator that would take me out of the ship. The first time I successfully made my way into the elevator, the damn 'vator left without me. Literally. I was left standing in mid-air, a la Wile E. Coyote, while I watched the elevator floor receding above me. I couldn't fall, I couldn't kill myself, I couldn't get the elevator door to open, but I could walk around on air and shoot the walls. My grenades would just fall all the way down the shaft, so I couldn't even blow myself up. I ended up repeating that whole level and the second time around the elevator took me with it.
Haven't tried online play yet. I may give that a shot this week. All in all, not a bad game, but not that great either.
This weekend I browsed around a bit in the iTunes Music Store. Given the amount of Diet Pepsi I consume, I should probably just buy the six packs of the 20oz bottles to get the free music downloads. But that's neither here nor there right now.
I was looking for Now We Are Free, the song that is sung at the end of Gladiator. I had the impression it was something by Enya, but it isn't. It's sung by Lisa Gerrard. iTMS doesn't have the soundtrack to Gladiator, but I happened to find a live recording of the song by Gerrard from another album. It's quite affecting. I also downloaded Into the West, from The Return of the King, sung by Annie Lennox. Also a very moving song. I ended up buying both CDs from Amazon.
The "People also bought" list brought a group called Clannad to my attention, and I downloaded what I take to be some celtic folk music from one of their albums. But that then brought to my attention an album called The Celtic Circle, by a variety of artists, and I ended up buying five of those songs, including Sarah McLaughlin's Angel and four celtic songs.
I know nothing about celtic anything, but these songs make for some very nice listening.
I don't know quite what brought it to mind, but at some point I began to think of little Carlie Brucia while listening to this music. Now We Are Free and Into the West are already associated with death and loss, and Angel fit into the mood quite naturally. It was almost too much to take.
My Caitlin is eleven years old. She's been trained to scream a kihap, kick the shin or groin of anyone grabbing her arm and to yank her arm free working against the thumb of the person grabbing her. We practiced again this weekend. I don't know that things would have turned out any differently for her, but I would like to believe they would.
All right, Mr. Wizard, you're so smart. What is the answer?
Nothing can change everything. There's a double-entendre in there, but it'd be a distraction if I tried to explain it.
Look, technology is just an artifact, it's not everything. Technology changes. "Everything" pretty much remains the same.
Implicit in the vision of a world where the internet changes everything is the notion that there are some changes that are desirable. I would caution: Be careful what you wish for. But it would probably be helpful to know just what changes we think we desire.
Once you think you know what those are, you may be ready to begin. Maybe not too. That's how these things go.
You can't change everything. Your technology can't change everything. At best, if luck is with you, your use of technology might reflect something of the change you seek.
If you want more peace in the world - then you must find that peace within yourself. If you want more justice in the world, then you must try to become more just. If you want more charity in the world, then you must become more charitable. If you want less hate in the world, then you must understand your own hatred.
There are no shortcuts, no easy answers. Technology does not change human nature. You must understand your own nature and seek to change what you can within yourself. I can't change you. I can influence you, or probably not, but I definitely can't change you.
We've had the right answer for a very long time, but it's just so hard. Our success with our tools has caused us to believe that if we only found the right tools, the right set of laws, the right constitutional amendment, the right amount of self-esteem, the right amount of greenhouse gasses, the right amount of taxes, the right amount of territory, the right amount of literacy, the right amount of money, the right amount of bandwidth, the right syndication format, the right religion, a smart-enough mob, the most emergent democracy, just the right something...then, then all of our problems would be solved.
We put so much faith in our tools and so little in ourselves.
AKMA, if you're reading, when's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox? Love is faith in action. What is the message of Christ's death on the cross? That he died for our sins? What does that mean? In fifty words or less please. Freedom and bandwidth ain't free.
Doesn't it mean that we ought to live our lives trying to exhibit the same faith in ourselves that he exhibited in us by choosing his own death? If we could have that kind of faith in ourselves, as individuals, what could we do? Love is faith in action. Courage is love in action, the second derivative of the function of faith for all you math wizards. What is in our way to becoming, as individuals, more peaceful, more just, more charitable, more loving? You already know the answer.
You can't change the world, and you shouldn't try because it distracts you from changing the one thing you can change, if you work very hard. If everybody did that, my guess is it would change the world.
That doesn't mean you don't do the things you have to do to keep the ship from sinking, or people from starving, or blowing each other up. It just means that you try to pay attention to becoming "the change you wish to see in the world" as well.
As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking.
If you read Doc Searls' latest missive to the faithful, you'll find another example of this interesting view of the internet as some fundamental entity that changes everything.
In his post, Doc offers an interesting illustration from The Long Now Foundation that cleverly describes the relative rates of change for various aspects of civilization. Slowest to change is nature, and it's at the bottom of this list, fastest is fashion and it doesn't move uniformly "forward" as shown by the squiggly line in the illustration. In between are other elements of civilization and, in the main, I think it's probably an accurate description.
In Doc's post, he writes: "I submit that the Internet is a Nature-level change in civilization. It sits beneath everything. And therefore it changes everything, starting with culture."
There you have it, "it changes everything."
I disagree. First, because the internet is part of Infrastructure, not a separate component of civilization. To be sure, cultural change is facilitated by the changes in each of the layers above it, but it comes more slowly than the change in infrastructure. Second, the internet does not affect everything. It does not affect nature, and nature, more than anything above it, governs "what" people do. All the things above nature are related to "how" people do what they do.
What do people do? Nature tells us that we are born, we reproduce, and we die. In order to do that, we have evolved a complex set of behaviors that permit us to survive in order to accomplish the essential task of reproducing. That bedrock set of complex behaviors is the basic "what" that people do. We raise our children. We affiliate in groups, at various levels, because we've evolved to survive most effectively by working together in groups. We've evolved complex behaviors that facilitate affiliating in groups and directing the actions of groups. Layered on top of all that genetically encoded behavior, are cultural instructions that are essential to being able to function in a group. It is nature and nurture, but we must never forget that it is nurture in the service of nature. That is to say, the non-genetic portion of our human nature has also evolved and exists to facilitate the goals of the genetic portion of our nature, not some other "higher" purpose.
The internet does not, and indeed can not change that fact. At the end of the day, despite all our toys, we will still be hairless apes with opposable thumbs all competing with one another to either be or find the fittest mate in order to pass along our genes.
As an example, I point again to Dave Winer's Davenet piece. In his own essay, Dave engages in the same types of activities, the same sorts of behaviors that he condemns the broadcast media for. Dave uses exaggeration, he uses distortion, he uses words which are not true for the purpose of influencing his audience.
Let us, for a moment, try to imagine a world where the broadcast media did not exist, and the "many-to-many, world of ends" vision of the internet was a reality. How does that work? Who do we choose not to pay attention to? Because we can pay attention to only a tiny fraction of what would be, in the idealized vision of Searls and Winer, billions of voices. We would do exactly what we've evolved to do on the plains of the savannah. Some of us would seek to become authorities, and the rest of us would choose which authority we wished to listen to, and we would affiliate with one another electronically, digitally, and we would attempt to influence one another, just as happens now in the world of broadcast media. And the various ends, in their efforts to seize and hold attention, and to influence their audiences, would be just as casual with the truth as Dave Winer is, and broadcast media is. That's the way nature has made us, and that's why, when you were a small child, you were taught never to believe everything you read or heard.
Technology, to repeat myself again, in the finest tradition of Groundhog Day, does not change everything.
Many people are trying to understand Howard Dean's remarkable, almost incomprehensible, implosion from front-runner to asterisk. People attempt to understand what happened from their frame of reference, from what they know and believe, and from what they feel. Perhaps the best analysis I've read from a techno-centric frame of reference is Clay Shirky's Exiting Deanspace. Another one that is getting some attention from the high attention-earning webloggers is Arnold Kling's Downfall of the Anointed. I have some disagreement with his thesis as well, for much the same reason I disagree with Dave Winer's.
Dave Winer's frame of reference includes a large set of beliefs about the internet and what its potential may be in human affairs. This set of beliefs could fairly be called his vision for the internet. Dave Winer's vision shares much in common with many others' vision of the internet; indeed, as Doc Searls illustrates in this post, he is regarded by many as an authority on the internet and, as such, helps to shape and instill this vision in others. Dave's vision is squarely in the "technology changes everything" mold. I suppose Dave might argue with that a bit, as "everything" is an absolute we can all quibble about. But the expression is meant to convey the sense of trust and commitment people often have to their vision of the potential of a particular technology, which often causes them to consider and discard information that is inconsistent with their vision.
Dave's vision for the internet paints it as the ultimate truth-teller. Dave's a programmer, and he knows that in programming, "garbage in = garbage out." Data that is untrue is garbage. I believe Dave believes that most of our present means of gathering information, at least about political candidates, delivers only garbage.
Here's Dave's central thesis:
He did raise a lot of money on the Internet, and that's interesting, for sure, and he taught us so much, and if he had gone all the way, I believe he would have survived the onslaught of CNN, ABC and NBC, who were his real competitors, not the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. Read that sentence again, please. That's the core premise of this piece, and the point that all the analysis so far has missed. His challenge wasn't to get the most votes, because that would inevitably follow, once he won the battle with the television networks, a battle which he failed to even show up for.
"His challenge wasn't to get the most votes," is a telling phrase and he dismisses it with "because that would inevitably follow." I submit this is the worst fallacy of technological true-believers who persist in confusing the "what" with the "how." "What" candidates must do is get votes, and winning candidates must get the most votes. There is no "how" that can make that inevitable. Some "hows" are better than others, and the candidate who exploits the best "hows" will have fewer barriers to overcome than those who don't, but there is nothing "inevitable" about how a person votes, least of all based purely on matters of "how."
Dave, along with some other Dean campaign analysts, sets up the media as the villain in this passion play:
The Dean campaign taught us that you can't use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn't need them. If Dean didn't get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.
With "obvious financial reasons," Dave seems to be implying that the media conspired to portray Howard Dean in a negative light in order to ensure continued revenue from political candidates. Presumably because the internet "routes around" (many-to-many networked connections) the "gatekeepers" (the conventional media who sell advertising). I suppose I might find the argument a bit more compelling if Dave told us how much conventional media rely on political advertising, and if it is a significant, irreplaceable source of revenue. I don't think they rely on it at all. I believe, for the most part, television and radio are able to sell every second of advertising air time they have. Even CBS can turn down an "issue ad" during some of the highest-priced advertising minutes of any time, Super Bowl. It's a distorted view of the motivations of mass media. They are in the business of selling advertising, but they don't need politicians to buy advertising, they need politicians to demand attention in order to win eyeballs to sell advertising. Like it or not, the "Dean Scream" was an attention-getting moment. I happened to see that event as it was happening on television. The "eeeeyeaaahhh" moment didn't both me so much as the second growled recitation of all the states they were going to, that seemed over the top and I had the impression that he had somehow lost control of himself in that moment. I'm not sure what he was thinking, there have been lots of explanations, but I saw it live, before any of the media had repeated it, and it left me with a negative impression of the man. Not to say I immediately concluded he wouldn't be a viable candidate, just that I couldn't understand why he was behaving that way and one doesn't like to have too many of those kinds of moments with people one is considering for the job of Commander in Chief.
So, by his own action, Dean handed the media a means of gaining and holding attention. It was a sure thing they were going to show portions of that speech over and over again. I don't care what medium you think is superior, the "many-to-many," "end-to-end" medium of the internet, or the broadcast medium of television, that little episode would get played over and over again. On the internet, we even had the treat of technology empowering individuals to set the rant to music and posting it on their "ends" of the network to share with all the other "ends." That speech was going to get attention no matter what, and no medium could inoculate Dean to its effect. That was a "what" Dean did to himself, for which no "how" could redeem him.
As an aside, I wish to note that Dave neglected to mention the "murder-suicide" ad campaigns waged, on television, by the Dean and Gephart campaigns, that seemed to have had the effect of negatively influencing voters against both candidates.
Shifting gears a moment, let me address something else Dave wrote:
People laugh when Fox says they're Fair And Balanced, and of course we're meant to laugh, because it's a joke. It's a sign of how totally we are controlled, when our only way of getting information is through television.
This is another example of how one's frame of reference distorts one's view. The people Dave knows may laugh when Fox says they're "fair and balanced." I know a lot of people who don't laugh, and who genuinely believe Fox is both more "fair" and more "balanced." I don't happen to agree with them, but I don't think Fox chose that tag line to get a laugh. I think they chose it as a pointed reference to their competitors who they, and Fox viewers, view as unfair and unbalanced.
Dave also makes the dramatic claim that we are totally controlled when our only way of getting information is through television. I don't know quite what to make of this claim, other than it is offered for effect only. I'm not sure if Dave really believes it, because it is patently not true. People are seldom "totally controlled" by anything. They can be, and almost always are, strongly influenced by a variety of means, but I don't believe people are ever "totally controlled."
Dave goes on to note:
Last night, the night before two crucial primaries, Michigan and Washington, I circled through the cable news channels, about five of them, to see what's up. They're talking about the murder of a twelve year old girl. All of them, all the time.
"All of them, all the time," is clearly an exaggeration for effect. I watched and listened to a good deal of news yesterday and I heard about the murder of an 11-year-old girl, as well as the budget, the caucuses, the president appearing on Tim Russert and the commission to investigate intelligence failures in the Iraq war. So is a statement like this an example of how the "many-to-many," "world of ends," vision of the internet delivers a superior picture than conventional media?
What is Dave doing in this paragraph? Is he trying to "drive up big media's negatives?" He's trying to influence people, he's trying to shape beliefs. Sometimes, good data, that is, data that is true, doesn't seem like the best data to use to influence people. "All of them, all the time," is a more compelling message than something like: "For several minutes last night, each of the major news networks were covering the murder of an 11-year-old girl to the exclusion of other newsworthy events of the day." Dave wants to leave you with the impression that the conventional media are deficient in how they serve our information needs. Of course they are deficient. Every medium will be deficient to some degree, because we have an idealized view of what our information needs are.
He goes on for a few more paragraphs about the virtues of the internet as a medium, and the deficiencies of the Dean candidacy. He concludes with a prediction that some day a candidate will use the internet in a way that makes the television networks irrelevant. I don't think that's ever likely to happen, or, if it does, that the result will be in any way demonstrably "better" than the current process.
To get back to Dave's central thesis, the key challenge facing any candidate is to win the most votes, and to do that they must influence voters. The principles of influence are indifferent to the medium they are exploited in. In his Davenet piece, Dave writes things that are demonstrably not true because they help to shape the vision he hopes his readers will share. Virtue is not attendant to one medium over others. Every medium is exploited by human beings who bring with them all of their old habits, vices, failings as well as their strengths and virtues. Dean's campaign failed, ultimately, because it failed to influence sufficient numbers of voters to vote for their candidate.
The only thing that will every "change everything" is when all of us begin to understand who we are, and how we are. Focusing our limited resources of time and attention on technology to the exclusion of that effort impedes us from that goal, and helps to perpetuate the very things we rail against.
"You must become the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi
Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be on any voter's radar thus far in the primary season, and I venture to say Tim Russert won't ask any questions about it on Sunday.
Reading things like Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, and Descartes' Error one gets the impression that most of the time our faculties of reason are employed in the service of rationalizing our feelings; and that feelings, not necessarily the same things as emotions, are what govern most of our day-to-day cognitive decisions.
Every now and then, I get this "feeling" like I want to own an iPod or a mobile phone. It's strongest when I happen to be reading a lot of stories written by people who are very happy about owning an iPod or a mobile phone. Reading a happy story by someone instills a bit of that happy feeling in me, and I associate that good feeling with owning an iPod or a mobile phone. My imagination tends to embellish on whatever good news is being conveyed by the story, and I imagine what other "happy" uses I might put an iPod or a mobile phone to. It can get quite exciting for a little while.
Perhaps fortunately for me, spending money always seems to instill a "bad" feeling in me. This isn't a completely accurate statement, as there seems to be a threshold below which I have no problem spending money, and I'm quite capable of going broke buying things below that threshold. But every time I get the feeling I want to buy an iPod or a mobile phone, the bad feeling about spending that much money, or incurring another monthly bill, comes along and I then use my "reason" to "decide" why I'm not going to buy an iPod or a mobile phone.
In the case of the mobile phone, there's another "bad" feeling associated with owning one, I generally don't like phones. I seldom get calls that I welcome, most of the time they're bad news. And I've generally never really liked just talking on the phone - "liking" being another one of those "feelings."
We're such odd creatures. Well, maybe it's just me. Probably not, but I should probably give the rest of you the benefit of the doubt.
if it weren't for these damn citizens who don't happen to share my ever-so-informed opinion.
Being a variation on the common, if seldom explicitly uttered, refrain of shore-duty sailors everywhere: "This would be a pretty good navy if it weren't for all these damn ships."
Dave Winer seems to think that an "information system" based on the internet would make it possible "to be a responsible voter for the first time."
Some people look to leaders for solutions to our problems, and invest in them unrealistic expectations about what they may be able to achieve. Others look to new technologies for solutions to our problems and invest in them unrealistic expectations about what they can make possible. It's all quite beside the point.
Let's look at what some exit polls from the most recent primaries showed about how much voters relied on information from candidates' websites. If you'd like, I can save you a click and tell you that more than half of the voters polled in each state never visited a candidate's website. The percentage that said they rarely visited a candidate's website was in the mid-teens in each state. Were these all irresponsible voters?
What is a voter's responsibility?
A voter is trying to make a decision in the face of great uncertainty. For nearly all voters, it comes down to a "feeling." It's tough to argue with feelings. What is a "responsible" feeling?
It's a presidential election year, and thus the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Or so one might think, given the kind of rhetoric one encounters in many places, especially on the internet.
Presidential elections are important, there's no question about that. And the election of President George W. Bush and the subsequent discretionary war against Iraq demonstrates that choosing a president well is perhaps more important than at any time in the past. That seems an odd thing to say, given the balance of terror that governed the Cold War, and the years of living in a bipolar world under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. But for the moment, we exist in what is essentially a mono-polar world, and therefore restraint would seem to be a quality we'd desire in a president, given the fact that there exists no meaningful external form of restraint against the unwise exercise of American power.
Even with that in mind, the rhetoric of presidential election years is often overheated, and this year seems to be more so than in any other recent election. I find it uncomfortable to witness what supporters invest in their candidates. You'd think they were running for messiah, or that they were the messiah, come to earth to become the chief executive of the United States.
Some of us build these guys up into these giant figures that they patently are not, and then some more of us take delight in smashing them down. The press figures prominently in both activities, but they're not responsible for it. That's just a convenient bit of blame-shifting. Meanwhile, our attention and our efforts are directed at the creation, destruction and preservation of our illusions, while the issues we might otherwise wish to address go begging for our time and attention.
I don't think any of that is ever likely to change. Democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for everything else. Just consider this a virtual grain of salt.
"You must become the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi
My thanks to those who've noted my return to doing whatever it is I do here! Shelley, and Al, and Pascale, and James, and Rob, and to anyone else I missed, thank you.
One of the reasons why I shuttered Time's Shadow was because I was beginning to find that I didn't like the way I "felt" when I was writing it. After I stopped writing it, I still found myself visiting web pages where I was nominally somewhat sympathetic to the author, but where I knew I would find things they had written that would provoke me. Things, I hasten to add, that I usually would feel compelled to respond to in their comments, if they offered them.
At that time, I was still reading Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion; a book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding a bit of what makes us tick. In it, the author reminds us of the principle of homeostasis, and that it seems to apply to psychological states as well as purely physical ones. The author sited cases in which families that had endured many years of stress because of an alcoholic family member would often continue to experience family stress when another member of the family began acting out if the alcoholic member received help and began addressing their addiction. People grow accustomed to feeling a certain way, and we behave in ways to maintain that feeling, even when it isn't necessarily in our best interests to do so.
When I was in therapy, I was counseled to pay attention to what I was feeling in moments of severe stress, and there was a little cognitive routine, or algorithm that I'd been taught to follow in those moments to help break the cycle of habituated behaviors attendant to the particular stressor. I had a great deal of success following this practice, but I now recognize that I only employed it on those occasions when my stress level was significantly higher than what I was accustomed to. What I didn't appreciate perhaps was the level of stress that I was accustomed to and subconsciously expected and therefore tried to maintain in my life. So while it is obvious there are occasions when there is too much stress, there are also occasions when there is not enough.
Perhaps you've had this experience: You go for a long drive at highway speeds while listening to the radio in your car. When you arrive at your destination, you shut off the car and go about your affairs. The next time you get into the car and start it, you're startled by how loud the radio is. It's exactly as loud as it was the last time you were in the car, but you were accustomed to a noisy environment, and so you had the volume set high to overcome the noise level associated with driving at highway speeds. When you were driving, the radio didn't sound excessively loud because you were unconscious of the noise level.
It's the same way with stress in our lives. We grow accustomed to a certain level, even though it may still yield negative health consequences. (Just like a radio loud enough to be heard above road noise can still cause hearing loss.) I think the difference with stress is that we also grow accustomed to how we "feel" under that level of stress, and that feels "normal." If the normal stressors in one's life are removed, what seems to happen is that we engage in behaviors that are likely to increase the level of stress to what we were accustomed to feeling.
I think this is the nature of habituated behavior, which I don't think is necessarily the same thing as conditioned behavior. Conditioned behavior is a particular response evoked by a particular stimulus. They're similar, but I don't think they're the same thing. A habituated behavior is something we engage in to maintain the internal state of homeostasis on an ongoing basis. A conditioned behavior would seem to be more episodic. I'm by no means an authority on this, but I thi
