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November 13, 2002
Garrison Keillor is flaming. As one of our culture’s best story tellers ever, and as someone who has trademarked a transparent gentleness and a genuine civility, this outburst is remarkable. It’s short on particulars because, as the end reveals, it comes not from offended reason but from a broken heart.
(Damn! It’s available only to Salon premium members. Pay Salon the money, will you? It’s an experiment that deserves to succeed.)
USAToday today runs an op-ed by David Isenberg and me about why the telcos ought to be allowed to “fail fast.” This is based on the letter to the FCC a few dozen of us signed a couple of weeks ago.
But USAToday introduced an error into it. Where we said that the telephone network “was not designed” to handle anything other than voice data, USAToday edited it to say that it “can’t handle” non-voice data. Not right. This makes us look like dopes to people who are smarter than I, although I don’t think it actually much effects our argument.
November 12, 2002
(Notice the lens caps.)
“Help! Evil-doers have blinded me!”
Michael O’Connor Clarke of I Love Me, Vol. I, points out that Snopes says the above photo is a hoax. I say to Michael: Does exposing this fact make the world a better place? I think not.
I’m a panelist tonight at a meeting of the Jewish Technology of Boston Network (well, it’s something like that) along with Chris Meyer, Larry Weber and Scott Kirsner. I think it starts at 7:30 at Temple Betha Avodah in south Newton. I don’t know if you need to be a member, to be Jewish, to be Jewish technology or to have a Jewish member, but I’m looking forward to it.
Also, the syndicated radio program “Here and Now” is running a 4-minute interview with me at 12:20 EST. I’m talking about ebooks. They ran one a couple of weeks ago and I hope to be doing these fairly regularly.
Finally, USAToday apparently is running on Wednesday an op-ed that David Isenberg and I wrote.
The Boston Globe has an editorial today about the MCAS, the standardized test required to get a high school degree. It gives two examples. First,
West Roxbury teachers are becoming experts in the MCAS. They analyze the tests’ questions and students’ answers, looking for trends in what the tests ask and what errors students make.
Then they teach to those trends. Second, the editorial reports that the same school is fobbing students off onto computers, using a $1,667 piece of software called “Plato.”
To my amazement, the editorial isn’t using these two educational programs as examples of what’s wrong but of what’s right. This is giving students a “21st education at schools with 21st century resources.”
Gosh, torquing your entire math curriculum in order to have kids pass a test and plopping kids in front of instructional software is so 21st century. Heavens forfend that we should revert to teaching kids so that they learn to love learning, reducing class sizes so teachers can teach what each kid needs to learn.
That this comes from a generally liberal editorial board is all the more depressing.
November 11, 2002
Why is it that I find the computer game BlackHawk Down reprehensible but I’m ok with Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3)? In BlackHawk Down, you’re a righteous American soldier fighting local warlords who are starving their own people. In GTA3, you’re a hoodlum who succeeds by randomly killing innocent pedestrians and taking their money. Also, you hijack cars, kill policemen, and blow stuff up. Why do I have my moral polarity reversed when it comes to these two games?
I watched Pulp Fiction again the other night. I don’t want it to be one of my favorite movies, but it is. There, too, the fact that we side with hit men is oddly liberating. Unlike movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos where we’re responsibly reminded intermittently that the protagonists are capable of violence that separates them from us, Pulp Fiction is non-judgmental about its characters’ murderousness. It accomplishes a true suspension of moral belief. This isn’t used for any profound purpose — Tarrantino is no Dostoyevsky — but it does enable us to enter a world where the basic rules have been altered. It is the equivalent of science fiction, except instead of removing the law against time travel, the law against murder is removed. Call it “moral fiction.”
To be popular, GTA3 and Pulp Fiction had to be comedies. GTA3 even has its own radio stations playing parodies of various musical styles. (“Ah,” says the pretentious classical DJ, “that reminds me of the summer I spent reading Proust … in the original Italian.”) In suspending morality, they keep us so disconnected from the victims that we can laugh at what in real life would be horrific. If we were to connect with our victims, the morality would no longer be suspended; when Nicholson falls for the hitwoman who is to be his victim in Prizzi’s Honor, morality — sort of — comes back into play because the human connection is made. Not with GTA3 or Pulp Fiction. Both are unrelentingly disconnected.
In fact, the implicit disconnectedness is itself the source of humor: When in Pulp Fiction Travolta accidentally blows a kid’s head off in the back of the car, that it means nothing to him and Jackson except that they have a mess to clean up is funny. The suspension of morality is so obvious and so obviously a literary device that it has no more effect on my actual moral stance than watching Star Wars made me think I can levitate objects by channeling “The Force.”
I understand why parents are concerned about GTA3. And I understand why news magazines make a to-do about it: Show a 5-second snippet in which a player is shooting a cop and you’re guaranteed an 8 minute segment with outraged parents and indignant politicians. And I’m queasy enough about it that I don’t let my 11 year old son play GTA3 because I don’t know what “moral fiction” will feel like to him. But the truth is that I’m more concerned about heroic games like “Blackhawk Down” where the ultimate moral message is that being right puts one in a zone where everything is permitted. That to me is the most dangerous moral idea.
Salon reviews the new version of GTA. Salon says it’s art. I don’t know about that, but it sure sounds like it kicks fictitious ass.
November 10, 2002
I’m giving a talk to a library association this week and thought I’d talk a bit about the history of information. My point will be that the post-computer sense of information is utterly different from the old sense but the new sense is infecting our view of ourselves and our relation to the world.
Among the factoids:
1. I can’t find an instance of Herman Hollerith, inventor of the punch card, referring to the cards as encoding information. In his patent application he talks about recording “data”:
This method consists, essentially: first, in arranging a standard, template or index; second, recording for each individual, unit, person or thing the various statistical data, to be compiled, relating to such person, unit, individual or thing, by punching from or otherwise locating on sheets, strips or cards, index points…”
2. While I knew that Hollerith had been inspired by the way in which some looms were “programmed,” I didn’t know the following:
I was traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a punch phonograph. . . the conductor . . . punched out a description of the individual, as light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc. So you see, I only made a punch photograph of each person.
I like the way this ties holes in a card to the most personal and embodied of the “information” about us: how we look.
3. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defines “information” as follows (according to an interesting academic article by Rafael Capurro):
1. Intelligence given; instruction
2. Charge or accusation exhibited
3. The act of informing or actuation
“Information” at this point wasn’t something separable from the human conversational context.
4. The third definition points to the oldest sense of “information” as something more than what is known. Aristotle thought that the form of a thing impressed itself upon the potential which is the human mind and that is how we come to experience the world. “In-forming” was thus our most basic human relationship to the world, the way in which soul and body met the world itself. That’s a lot different than our abstract sense of information today.
5. There is no N in Hollerith. (Ack. Thanks, Adina.)
Capurro has another article, which I haven’t yet read, called “Hermeneutics and the Phenomenon of Information.” Here’s the abstract:
This paper deals with the perspective of interpretation theory or hermeneutics of the process of information storage and retrieval as it was conceived in the early eighties. Further developments in the information technology as well as a broad international discussion on the hermeneutic paradigm in the information field were added to the original paper from 1986. The main thesis concerns not only the interpretative nature of information-seeking processes but also the role of interpretation with regard to the fragmentation of knowledge. Information is the shape of knowledge at the end of modernity. On the basis of the existential turn of interpretation theory the role of pre-understanding is stressed not only with regard to the information retrieval processes but also to the specific worldly situation in which the inquirers are embedded.
Aw, what the hell, here’s a summary of sorts from the beginning of the article:
First, with regard to the abandonment of the primacy of scientific rationality, information is admitted to be fragmentary, to come in pieces. The fragmentation is two-fold: in reducing knowledge to pieces, the original contextuality disappears or becomes tacit. Knowledge becomes, literally, partial, dependent on prejudices or on the knower’s frame of reference. This relativity of knowledge to a changing horizon of interpretation also brings to the fore of epistemology a new category: that of truth as now, at the end of modernity, inseparable from that of relevance.
Second, with regard to the abandonment of the subjectivity-objectivity opposition, information is described as having a certain commonality. Information is something basically human which should be in principle accessible to everyone. Modern knowledge is something common, shared by a community, for instance by a scientific community.
Third, with regard to the abandonment of the idea that knowledge is something separate from the knower, there is the notion of mediation. Modern information technology disseminates all kinds of knowledge all the time to everyone in a way prefigured by printing. Information becomes part and parcel of media, becomes a medium.
November 9, 2002
Art Medlar writes to a mailing list:
A friend points out that google’s raw ordering of pages by rank can be had by searching for “http”:
Cool!
Jim Law points us to the Hypergene Media Blog about participatory journalism (“news from the bottom up”). Lots of good information and ideas. For example, here’s a snippet:
Over the past month, we’ve been inundated with political TV advertising. In the final weeks before election, according to The Lear Center, TV stations air four times as many political ads as campaign stories and devote twice as much time to advertising as to news.
Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center, sums it up well: “Many station managers feel that putting political news on their airwaves would be ratings poison for their news broadcasts. It looks like that fear doesn’t apply to airing paid political ads during those same shows.”
November 8, 2002
Eric Raymond reproduces a Microsoft memo assessing their battle against Open Source software. Eric also comments on it and draws lessons for the Open Source movement. (That a software development paradigm has been turned into a “movement” is itself telling.) The Register summarizes and comments on the memo also.
The shortest summary: Microsoft’s own surveys show that they’re making no headway against Open Source.
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