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.

Cheering for Bob Woodward

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Bob Woodward (aka the stenographer to power) says he doesn’t do Twitter. Dave Winer gives him a cheer. Here’s why:

I cheered for Woodward the way an addict cheers for someone who was smart enough never to smoke the first cigarette, or take the first hit of coke or smack. I am stuck in Twitter, like the frog in the boiling water. I notice it’s getting uncomfortable as they pull back features that were central to my adopting it in the first place. The ability to hack my own stuff in there. The level playing field where I could be as influential as the greatest media celebrity. The level playing field relative to Yahoo and Google and all the other Giants of the Valley. These are all lost, they were things I came to depend on, and now that they’re gone, like my friend Jay — I’m not happy. And as with Jay, it’s my fault for believing, for no good reason, that things would more or less stay as they were.

The only way to get what we want is to make the stuff work the way we want it to work. We can’t wait for Silicon Valley to do that for us, because they will never do it. It's not in their nature.

So mazel tov to Woodward…

Dave’s right. What enthusiasts for free services seem to forget is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the end, the providers of these services are doing it to serve their own purposes. And those sure as hell aren’t your purposes or mine. Why is why Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” lecture was so interesting.

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 iPad’s Killer App

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Although — as I’ve observed earlier — the iPad has lots of annoyances (mostly connected with the absence of multi-tasking), it has one unimpeachable advantage over every other portable device: a 10-hour battery life. Which explains why I now tend to bring it with me whenever access to a power socket might be problematic. At the Royal Society’s Web Science event last week, for example, it was slightly comical to see several great minds clustering round the few available power sockets in the room, like thirsty lions drawn to a shrinking water-hole, while I was able to go for a long day on an overnight charge.

This explains, btw, why the iPad is so heavy (far too heavy for use as an eReader). Apple’s market research suggested that battery life was one of the features most prized by potential users. So they built the device with a whopping battery. My experience suggests that it was a good decision.

LATER: There were some prim comments on blogs which picked up on this post pointing out that good battery life is “not an App”. The moral: some jokes don’t work. Sigh.

‘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.