Here’s one of the first pictures from the Phoenix lander. Great stuff, of course. But gosh, doesn’t it look dull? ‘A vast featureless plain” as General Darling in Blackadder used to say, before his adjutant suggested that he turned over the map to look at the printed side.
The Linux-based ‘network appliance’ market continues to grow. The Register is reporting that
Elonex has rolled out its sub-£100 Linux-based laptop, the One, but it looks like it’s going to prove harder get hold of than Asus Eee PC has been.
Elonex today unveiled black, pink, green, white and silver Ones to whet buyers’ appetites. However, it admitted that the initial batch with comprise just 200,000 machines, none of which will go out to punters until June…
My colleague Robert McCrum is standing down after ten years as the Observer’s Literary Editor. He’s written a thoughtful valedictory piece.
When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors, from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, to Anthony Burgess and Clive James. Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript.
The business end of books – WH Smith, Dillons and Waterstone’s – was run by anonymous men in suits whose judgments were largely ignored. Trade was trade. Literature was another calling. The atmosphere was dingy, time-hallowed and faintly collegiate. Every October, we all got together in the Guildhall and gave a cheque to the novelist of the year. In 1996, the winner of the Booker Prize was Last Orders by Graham Swift.
Now that world is more or less extinct. Many of the great names from those times (Hughes, Murdoch, Mailer, Heller, Gunn, Miller, Vonnegut) are gone. Books, meanwhile, have been pushed to the edge of the radar. A series of small but significant insurrections has placed the language and habits of the market at the heart of every literary transaction. The world of books and writing has been turned inside out by the biggest revolution since William Caxton set up his printing shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.
Heaven or hell? It’s too soon to say…
In the piece, Robert takes a sideswipe at a number of names US literary blogs — to which he attributes growing influence. One of them — Syntax of Things — isn’t overly impressed by his analytical skills.
As always, litblogs don’t necessarily come across as a good thing. In fact, they (we) are blamed for the fall of the great newspaper book review dynasty. Hell, if I knew I had that much power, I’d start a wiffle ball team and take down the New York Yankees franchise forever. Or I’d karaoke so well that I’d be able to rid the world of Madonna once and for all.
One passage from the Observer piece seems to have hit a nerve. It says:
Readers had been posting reviews on Amazon for year. Now these book blogs – in Britain, for example, a highly responsible site like Vulpes Libris – could take over and hand the power back to – time honoured term – the Common Reader. My view is that the Common Reader generates more heat than light. On closer scrutiny, we find that this creature, as fabled as the hippogriff, is just as uncertain as everyone else. The equation of Amazon plus Microsoft has left the Common Reader dazed and confused. How else to explain the extraordinary success in 2003 of Eats, Shoots & Leaves…?
Sigh. This is old-world elitist newspaper writing. It assumes that one’s readers will accept an Olympian stance simply because one has a job on a posh newspaper. It won’t wash any more. As Syntax of Things observes, with irony dripping from every word:
No qualification of highly responsible. Did I miss the seminar or not read the pamphlet that listed the qualifications of responsible book reviewing? Damn, I’ll have to Google around for it. Then again, it could be that it’s written in invisible ink on the back of the hand that feeds everyone this crap and calls it a gourmet meal. Highly responsible for what?
Here at Syntax of Things, we are highly responsible and possibly, in the eyes of outgoing literary editors for major newspapers, highly contemptible for reading books published by a former quality-control manager for a car-parts manufacturer. AND ENJOYING THEM, TELLING YOU ABOUT THEM, AND BRINGING RUIN TO THE SACRED EMPIRES.
God, I love having this power.
Interesting blog post by Darren waters.
It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer water cooler moments, in part because television has become less of a cohesively social experience.
PVRS, video on demand, BitTorrent, digital download stores, DVD box sets have all helped to fracture the common viewing experience.
We tend to watch our TV content out of sync with one another these days.
But last night I experienced a water cooler moment as a programme was being broadcast. It was social TV at the point of broadcast, and it was thanks to Twitter…
Needless to say, I found the post from Darren’s Twitter stream!
I’ve never voted Tory in my life, but the awful prospect is beginning to look like a possibility. A key determinant of how I vote next time will be the parties’ stance on the national ID card scheme to which Gordon Brown & Co are fanatically committed. On Friday Bill Crothers, commercial director for the Identity and Passport Service, announced that five companies had won the right to bid for the billions of pounds worth of work involved under a framework agreement announced on Friday. They are CSC, EDS, IBM, Fujitsu and Thales. No surprises there, then.
But get this. These companies will have to be compensated for lost profits, in addition to their bid and other costs, if the Conservatives win a general election and carry out their pledge to scrap the scheme.
According to the Financial Times report,
The promise of loss of profit payments – standard in government IT contracts where there is a change of government policy – was, however, attacked as “improper and quite extra-ordinary” by David Davis, shadow home secretary.
Mr Davis said he had written to the IT suppliers in February giving formal notice that the Conservatives would cancel the project, and had reminded Sir Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary, of the “longstanding convention that one parliament may not bind a subsequent parliament”.
“To guarantee these payments knowing that a future Conservative government has already said it will scrap ID cards is improper and quite extraordinary,” Mr Davis said. “I will be pressing ministers to explain under whose authority senior officials are making these promises.”
Stand by for the Labour argument that scrapping the ID Card would be wrong because it would cost too much in compensation.
Much is made of the fact that this kind of ‘compensation’ clause is standard for government work. Presumably, that’s because nobody would bid for the contracts without it. But doesn’t that tell you something interesting about the projects?
Sigh. Another book to add to the ‘must read’ pile — David Singh Grewal’s Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization. Here’s the abstract:
David Singh Grewal’s remarkable and ambitious book draws on several centuries of political and social thought to show how globalization is best understood in terms of a power inherent in social relations, which he calls network power. Using this framework, he demonstrates how our standards of social coordination both gain in value the more they are used and undermine the viability of alternative forms of cooperation. A wide range of examples are discussed, from the spread of English and the gold standard to the success of Microsoft and the operation of the World Trade Organization, to illustrate how global standards arise and falter. The idea of network power supplies a coherent set of terms and concepts—applicable to individuals, businesses, and countries alike—through which we can describe the processes of globalization as both free and forced. The result is a sophisticated and novel account of how globalization, and politics, work.
So after Hard Power, and Joe Nye’s Soft Power, students of International Relations will have to come to terms with Network Power. About time too.
Christopher Caldwell wrote a thoughtful piece about the book in yesterday’s FT. Excerpt:
At the heart of globalisation is a basic, and politically explosive, mystery; globalisation proceeds through the breaking down of boundaries, the unfolding of diversity and freedom of choice – so why is it experienced by so many people as a constriction, an oppression and a loss of freedom? In a brilliant and subtle book*, a Harvard graduate student has solved this mystery – even if he has not solved the problem. David Singh Grewal believes the answer lies in something called “network power”. Networks are the means by which globalisation proceeds. All networks have standards embedded in them. In theory we can choose among the standards and become more free. In practice, Mr Grewal shows, our choices tend to narrow over time, so that standards are imposed on us.
Here is how it works. Networks tend to grow. As time passes, one of the most attractive things about a network will be simply that a large number of people have already chosen it. This is network power. Once a network reaches “critical mass”, Mr Grewal says, the incentives to join it can become irresistible. Certainly some standards are intrinsically better than others. “But as the network power of a standard grows,” Mr Grewal writes, “the intrinsic reasons why it should be adopted become less important relative to the extrinsic benefits of co-ordination that the standard can provide.” People defect from alternative networks. Eventually those alternatives disappear altogether. The choice of networks becomes a Hobson’s choice. You remain free to choose your network, but the distinction between choosing to join a network and being forced to join one is less evident.
Mr Grewal sees such a “merger of reason and force” in many areas, economic and non-economic – from the Windows operating system to the ISO 9000 standard of industrial control to Britain’s adoption of the metric system. Since English has become the first global lingua franca, many non-native speakers have freely chosen to speak it. But, for someone who wants to participate in the global economy – which is to say, the economy – to what extent is this really a choice?
Networks, Mr Grewal believes, can impinge on our political autonomy, channelling it into situations where dissent is possible but pointless. Although people enter them freely, networks, like political systems, can bias outcomes. A new order can be camouflaged as a broadening of options. Networks vary along three dimensions, Mr Grewal thinks: “compatibility” (with other networks); “availability” (openness); and “malleability”. They tend to be open and compatible in the early stages, and open and incompatible in the later ones.
Hmm… Just tried to order it from Amazon.co.uk, but they’re claiming the book hasn’t been published yet in the UK.
From today’s Telegraph
A Telegraph analysis of government figures shows how bonuses for City workers and other financial services professionals have continued to soar, exceeding previous records by more than £500 million.
The recent annual awards were mostly triggered by large profits made early in 2007, before the credit crunch hit, but will fuel a growing row over whether bankers are encouraged to take excessive risks with investors’ money.
The £12.6 billion sum would almost match the £15 billion hole that has emerged in the accounts of British banks as much of their profitability proved temporary…
Comment would be superfluous.
Today’s papers are full of absurdly feeble stories about the ‘crisis’ now afflicting the government. Nobody really knows anything — so there are lots of ‘analysis’ pieces which simply string together every factoid and unattributable quote that the hacks have managed to garner.
Yesterday, Martin Kettle wrote this:
So far, very few MPs have gone public about their lack of confidence in Brown. But, make no mistake, such views are now the norm among increasingly large numbers of consenting backbenchers in private. These backbenchers have finally been pummelled out of their comfort zone by the events of this spring. They now fear Labour cannot win the next general election under Brown’s leadership. They say and believe that he has to go. They do not believe either that Brown will change or that – even if he did – voters would any longer pay attention to it. The question that now consumes these MPs is not whether Gordon Brown will step down – but how and when…
What this conveniently overlooks is that these are the same Labour MPs who lacked the bottle to challenge Brown’s appropriation of the leadership less than 12 months ago. In that sense they’re all complicit in the unfolding disaster. Although Martin Kettle still thinks it unlikely, it’s possible that they will eventually find the nerve to unhorse Brown. But that won’t make any difference. The game’s over. The electorate is bored with them. And besides the British system only works by alternating power between elected dictatorships.
Footnote: Puzzled by the Homburg reference? See here. And, while we’re on the subject, it’s interesting that in his memoirs Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s bagman, quotes Blair as telling him that Brown lacked the political qualities needed to defeat David Cameron.
This morning’s Observer column…
Q: WHAT DO Cyberspace and Cranford have in common? A: Both are places capable of being driven wild by rumour. Viewers of the landmark BBC1 series will recall how the most trivial aside could instantly be transformed into an incontrovertible fact. When it was rumoured that the railway would be coming to Cranford, for example, Eileen Atkins exclaimed with horror that this meant that the Irish were coming, and promptly expired at the prospect.
I was reminded of this while listening to the chatter of the blogosphere on Thursday night…
Seen this morning.