Category Archives: Media ecology

Reading the pulse

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This morning’s Observer column.

One of the few comical aspects of the spending review is the frantic attempts by all concerned to predict how the victims of Osborne's axe will respond. The major newspaper groups and the Tory party will of course be deploying the usual – expensive – steam-age tools: opinion polls and focus groups. The cash-strapped Labour and Liberal Democrat parties may have to resort to cheaper techniques – inspecting the entrails of slaughtered goats, perhaps. In the interests of levelling the playing field, therefore, this column offers them a better idea: intelligent data-mining on Twitter.

It’s taken a while for the penny to drop, but finally the world is waking up to the fact that the phenomenon of social networking might actually tell us useful things about what's happening out there in the world beyond the Washington Beltway and the Westminster village. Not only that, but the resulting data might even be useful for predicting what’s likely to happen…

Boxed in

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Dave Winer had to read eight speeches by steam media big shots explaining their strategy for dealing with the online world. His typically thoughtful summary of what he found reads:

For Jay’s [Jay Rosen, NYU] class, our assignment is to figure out how these guys are trying to adapt.

Here’s how I visualize how they’re doing it. Imagine a box made of cardboard. It’s big, but it’s light. Pick the box up and move it from one place to another. When it gets to the new spot, it’s still a big cardboard box. It still can contain the same stuff as the box did when it was in the old place.

That’s the transition each of these execs feel they have to make. The stuff in the box are news stories. The box is their editorial structure. The old place is print. The new place is the Internet.

Spot on. But it’s not just media moguls who don’t get it. Academia can be just as obtuse.

Twitterphobia and the mainstream media

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Yesterday, the Greater Manchester police service implemented a brilliant idea — to log on Twitter every call they received over a 24-hour period. The Chief Constable, Peter Fahy, explained that he wanted

to use the experiment to demonstrate that only a third of the incidents reported are genuine crimes, with two thirds being ‘social work’ concerning incidents such as alcohol-related disturbances, relationship disputes and mental health issues.

Fahy told The Manchester Evening News, which is aggregating the tweets on its website: “This is not a gimmick. This is a genuine attempt to show people 24 hours of policing work. Crime is only one part but an important part of what we do.”

IMHO, the experiment was a brilliant success. It highlighted the amazing range of things that the police service is called upon to do, and made that point more forcefully than any official speech by a senior officer or Home Secretary could do.

But guess what? Some sections of the UK mainstream media — press and radio — spent the day carping about an alleged “waste” of police resources. Shouldn’t Manchester bobbies be out arresting criminals rather than sitting in an office “tweeting”? (Funny how that word can be used as a sneer. On the ‘Today’ programme, John Humphreys — Britain’s Technophobe-in-Chief — described tweets as “tiny Internet telephone messages”.) In fact, the tweets were done by two members of the Manchester force’s media department. But it’s interesting to see how unacknowledged bias (and technophobic snobbery) infects journalists who would bristle if one called them biased or partisan.

Marrgate

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Apropos my earlier post about Andrew Marr’s extraordinary outburst at the Cheltenham Literary Festival…

I was genuinely puzzled by the outburst. If intelligent people suddenly do silly things, it’s generally for a reason. It could be that they’re drunk, or depressed, or tired — or just that they’ve been goaded beyond endurance and suddenly snapped. I wondered if Marr had had some terrible experience in Cyberspace. My first thought was that it might have something to do with the fact that he made the mistake of picking up an online rumour about Gordon Brown popping anti-depressants and then putting the question to the then Prime Minister live on prime-time TV.

Now (Wednesday) we’re beginning to find out what may have been behind the Cheltenham mindstorm. It seems that there was a backstory that he had succeeded in keeping out of the mainstream media for years by using Court injunctions. But somehow the news had leaked out via the Net. Guido Fawkes spills the beans and goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of the Westminster media elite:

Yesterday on the Today programme there was a discussion as to if the mainstream media would sit on a story that Guido would not. Sarah Montague dismissed the idea that there is in fact a cosy media elite. Well here is another story that everyone in the Westminster media knows yet won’t publish. It involves three household names; Jackie Ashley, the Guardian’s cheerleader-in-chief for the Brownies, Alice Miles of The Times, who cheers for the Cameroons and Andy Marr, Gordon Brown’s much favoured BBC interlocutor.

If this story was about soap stars, footballers or chart-toppers it would be all over the papers. If an actress on EastEnders had an affair with an actor on Coronation Street who was married to the star of Emmerdale which resulted in a love-child it would be front-page news on every newspaper. Yet Andy Marr fathering a child with Alice Miles whilst married to Jackie Ashley goes unreported. Across newsrooms, at Islington and Hampstead dinner parties it has been common knowledge for years. These three journalists are at the heart of the politico-media nexus that constitutes the new ruling class. The producers and editors who are the media gate-keepers would not be keen to dish the dirt on their own… despite the fact that it would be of huge interest to the public.

All very sordid. But at least it explains why Marr opened his mouth without first engaging his brain.

Amazon enters the Singles market

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This is a really interesting development for anyone interested in long-form journalism.

Amazon issued a call today for “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length” for its e-book store.

Specifically, per Amazon’s guidelines, that means non-fiction works in the 10,000-30,000-word (30 to 90-page) range that deliver a well-researched and thoughtfully executed argument related to business, politics, science, history, current events or other topics in the field of intellectual discourse.

Qualifying works will be labeled as “Kindle Singles” and sold in a corresponding section in the Kindle Store for “much less than a typical book.”

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti in a statement. “With Kindle Singles, we’re reaching out to publishers and accomplished writers and we’re excited to see what they create.”

The Kindle Singles category seems like the perfect place to offer individual copies of works that typically wind up in anthologies — historical and contemporary essays on political theory and philosophy, for instance — that are simply too short to be bound individually, but too important not to be in circulation. The section could easily take aim at the education market by allowing students to forgo the purchase of course readers and unwieldy anthologies — often peppered with works that never become part of the course material — and provide additional visibility for “accomplished” self-published writers of non-fiction.

Why e-books are a weight off my mind (and on my conscience)

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Last Sunday’s Observer column.

When the history of e-reading technology comes to be written, an Irishman named Michael O'Leary will be assigned a small but significant role in the story. This is not because the chief executive of Ryanair has a secret life as a geek, but simply because he has perfected a system for squeezing his customers until their pips squeak. And therein lies the tale…

Andrew Marr attacks ‘inadequate, pimpled and single’ bloggers – Telegraph

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Extraordinary outburst by Andrew Marr at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

“Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism.”

Responding to a question from his audience at Cheltenham Town Hall he added: “Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. It is vituperative.”

Oh dear, oh dear. And there I was thinking that Marr was an interesting and thoughtful chap. Apart from the absurdity of someone as plug-ugly as Marr complaining about the physical appearance of others, I’m reminded of the sneering of Dan Rather’s Crossfire producer at the “guys in pyjamas” who dared to question the accuracy of Rather’s journalism.

Remember what happened to Rather? I wonder if Marr does? It’s a sobering story of what happens to mainstream journalists who become complacent and lazy. Until today, I had thought that Marr was better than that.

LATER: Krishnan Guru Murthy has some sensible comments on this. I also wondered if Marr has actually read any serious blogs. One charitable explanation of his strange outburst is that he’s confusing bloggers with the anonymous commenters who are the scourge of the Guardian and other sites which allow anonymous commenting.

Today I heard a recording of his remarks at Cheltenham. He sounded, in a way, like a guy playing a gullible (and adulatory) audience for cheap laughs. His first stab at “bloggers” raised a titter, so he pushed ahead, at each point waiting for the next laugh.

Quote of the day

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So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

[Clay Shirky]

‘The Social Network’: or why Sorkin is not de Tocqueville

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Lovely, perceptive review by Larry Lessig of the Facebook movie. From ‘The New Republic’.

As with every one of his extraordinary works, Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”

Not every account of a new world suffers like this. Alexis de Tocqueville showed the old world there was more here than there. But Sorkin is no Tocqueville. Indeed, he simply hasn’t a clue to the real secret sauce in the story he is trying to tell. And the ramifications of this misunderstanding go well beyond the multiplex…

And here’s the best bit:

But the most frustrating bit of The Social Network is not its obliviousness to the silliness of modern American law. It is its failure to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story. In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows. This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite. Instead, we’re just shown a big explosion ($25 billion in market capitalization—that’s a lot of dynamite!) and expected to grok (the word us geek-wannabes use to show you we know of what we speak) the world of difference this innovation in bombs entails.

What is important in Zuckerberg’s story is not that he’s a boy genius. He plainly is, but many are. It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is. And it’s not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history, told with different technologies at different times and places.

Instead, what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone.

Yep.

A Flickr of interest

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This morning’s Observer column.

At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.

So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…