Bootcamp Christmas
This years Christmas pixel picture depicts (in its fashion) an obscured memory of an actual event. Shipping off to bootcamp six days before Christmas, 19 December 1977. In the picture our plane makes a close pass by Santa's sled on its way to Chicago. Santa must have been out doing a dry run - getting that year's route down, its unclear. 
Most of what I rememeber takes place In a bar lounge at Logan airport. There were five of us; four white guys one black guy, John Hurt, the only one whose name I remember today. We were all from the Boston area, but not all the same age. Our recruiting Petty Officers had dropped us off five hours early for our flight. A long wait lay before us, we settled in and made the lounge our base, having a couple of rounds beers (for tranquility's sake). As of other times songs I heard during this interlude stuck with me. Here it was early Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the bar radio Breakdown: I don't care if you love me I don't care if you don't
The feelings I had in that moment, the particular qualities of them its hard to say now, but quite different than when I arrived at the University of Maryland to start college four years later. A swirling mix of apprehension, anticipation (of a kind), dread, adventure (sense of), relief (that things were finally in motion - I had joined the Navy in July and had to wait months for an opening). There was of course the sense of nascent adulthood, being on ones own for the first time. Last which I'll speak of here was a feeling of camraderie. There was a promise made to help each other when we got to Great Lakes. A chit that was cashed in at a number of points.
I remember very little of the actual airplane ride to Chicago. There were more of us recruits on the flight, who apparently had been wandereing elsewhere around Logan airport. During the fight there was a discussion of the recently late Lynryrd Skynyrd band. Plane crashes are always a great inflight conversation. This only highlighted to me that This was my first airplane trip (modest upbringing and all)
Following that stage of the journey was the far more prosaic bus ride from O'Hare up to Recruit Training Command Great Lakes The grim prison like exterior of the place, the plentitude of barbed wire fencing and World War two era buildings stark against the waning light of the day.
The final event of the day was the adminsitrative details of mobbing in. Getting our gear (Peacoats etc.) our dog tags and forming up in chunks of sixty or so souls into training companies. Company 383 for we who passed through in that hour.
Christmas Day itself, a few days latter was un remarkable and largely unmemorable. We were left alone that day, a brief respite from the individuality breaking apparatus which held us in its brick grasp by that point. Frankly a break like that would been more appreciated more a few weeks latter. We spent the day in the smoking room, a room at the end of the building that bridged two bunk bed halls, writing letters, it was too soon to have gotten any, and in the drying room, each company had one. These were just what they sound like - a room sized clothes dyer. They were the only places in all of Great Lakes consistantly and reliably warm.
Tuesday, 24 December 2013 23:39 EST #
Surveillance Psychology
And Through the Wire (we cling like leeches)
In the NSA debates there were a few import shaping events in the last week. Two semi-official pushbacks which I think are important for a reason I'll get to in a moment. First, a hand-picked Intelligence reform panel strongly criticized current practice Gov't review panel suggests NSA stop holding massive phone database | Ars Technica. Second a Federal Judge, DC district court Judge Richard Leon ruled that telephony metadata collection is possibly unconstitutional as the NSA is doing it Updated: Federal judge finds NSA phone spying likely unconstitutional | Ars Technica:. I'll leave to lawyers and others to say exactly what was decided, or what Pen Trap and Pen Registers constitute "Pen Registers" and "Trap and Trace Devices" | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project. The Lawfare Blog had a wrap-up post over the weekend that rendered comprehensive commentary Lawfare - The Week That Was: All of Lawfare In One Post.
In simple terms at issue was a 1979 Supreme court case, Smith v. Maryland, which established that information that the phone company uses to manage your calls and billing information; numbers time duration, has a strange status. You may not think it's public information, but it's not private either. Incidentally this case involved the investigations that David Simon covered as a Baltimore crime reporter and later used to base the TV program the WireWhite House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts - NYTimes.com.
Pushing back
This Judicial and bureaucratic pushback is important because because of the official doubt it places in the public discourse. Part of what Journalism academic Jay Rosen refers to as the Snowden Effect. Professor Rosen, it should be noted, has signed on as an advisor to Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media News organization being led by Glenn Greenwald.
I don't want to run through the entire leakers and generals - Heroes and villains debate right at this point. It's subjective from the start, and I feel conflicted. The debate is more important its detractors claim, but I find it difficult to justify a personal judgement from a single perspective for an institutional one encompassing multiple perspectives, especially having been in the service myself.
Another degree of difficulty here is the frission between state and commercial practice on privacy. Between the 1990's when I began reading of datamining and data warehousing and the early 2000s reading of the Total Information Awareness program, Super SQLs and the power of arbitrary association. The state no longer had your back of privacy. A great threshold was being crossed I vaguely knew, and it wasn't good Government and corporate surveillance draw wide concern - The Washington Post.
This is the heart of the matter and point I want to make here. The public perception and acceptance of the accumulating loss of privacy and autonomy. There is a acquiescence in the common man in lieu of express elite signalling that there are breached norms.
The name I give to this is the surveillance psychology effect. It manifests iteself in all the I'm not/wasn't surprised at all
reactions to the Snowden revelations. People will tell you they figured we were doing these things all along. The same people who regarded descriptions of echelon as a paranoid delusion. Who now take the line that only the guilty or perhaps the divergent need worry. I was surprised. Surprised at the totality and ambition of it all. This is not a monitoring but an owning. Our reaction is a whistling past the graveyard of democacy. A reflexive and defensive mumble. A Shrug to ward away understanding you have no real rights, no privacy. That you are viewed as either inconsequential or dangerous to those who feel they own society.
Overreach
The tin ear the intelligence community has (and that is the best face that can be put on it) is that this is how their overreach is viewed, with forboding, and they cannot see that. Overreach in infrastructure, in the capabilities built, and in their attitude. Which boils down to: to keep you safe we must keep you like a pet or a child.
Their approach is Omnibus. That is a significant statregic decision. Rather than track actions causes and effect, or even attribute meaning to them, in the real world. The NSA collects all communication, transmitted information, and applies algorithms of association to it.
There is the inevitable dangers of Mission Creep as limitless capability invites limitless application. For the public its hard to say what the government's interest are for all this capabiltiy (which they determinedly try to keep secret from the public New NSA Documents Make Case For Keeping Surveillance Programs Secret : The Two-Way : NPR) Beyond their oft repeated intent on preventing another 9-11, is the idea of a future consisting of state competition, economic resource struggle, at a cold or semi-war level informing their great effort and expense?
Is the heavy footprint of the NSA in internet communication presaged by concern of a breakdown of international order by crime and criminal regimes eroding efficacy of electronic commerce. This is an existing concern already attracting policy research Cyberthreats : the emerging fault lines of the nation state (Book, 2009). This level of invaisiveness, intrusion into everyones natural rights of privacy, to control the effect of criminal behavior on civil society when less than catastrophic may someday strike people as misbegotten a practice as lobotomies in the mid-20th centry.
There is also what I call the Anti Snowden. The potential of NSA leakers whose intent is not to put information in the public sphere, for public examination. Rather those who would leak information into unauthorized private hands. To Stratigic Forecasting corporate entities or security contractors, who have little or none of the NSA's reticence concerning rights or dedication to the public good. Institutions who may be covertly interestd in illegally monitoring opponents of private interest (the EFF the ACLU Greenpeace Sierra club, anything with Occupy in its name) using public capability.
As I understand this nation the people are always sovereign. The people answer for what is done in their name, never a secret to who it is done to. There is no necessary darkness, descent to the supposed level of others to fight on their terms. Actions that must be hid from the delicate sensibilities of ordinary citizens. The people via a social contract decide what kind of nation/people we will be; not a layer of self serving elites behind a curtain of secrecy
This overides the intelligence communities sense of mission. They can never offer more to our safety and well-being than a good name delivers. All they can offer is Mass Surveillance and a demand for quiescence. And then we were the Turkeys all along.
Monday, 23 December 2013 21:00 EST #
Signifying Nothing
Recently we have endured series of breaks in the regular order of congress. By regular order I mean nothing more than Robert's Rules and the steady merging of the budget cycle into the daily agendas of congress. By breaks I mean government shutdowns. Mass procedural furloughs; which in ordinary times are more a dyspeptic threat that an actual event. These moments come round at the critical junctures where a vote has to occur to let the government continue to spend or borrow. The vote for a continuing resolution on an outdated budget for instance.
Continuing resolutions are failure already in that somehow a budget for the current year never got written. I suppose a solid budget ought to take a number of CRs before it gets stale. Our current budget may still be defending canals over those upstart rail-ways they want to build. The debt ceiling is another opportunity for mischief. Raising an artificial ceiling for debts already encumbered, ought to be a mere notary function, not a point to rethink the past. A brief look at when these occasional shutdowns occurred show a cluster of them a generation ago Every government shutdown ever, in one chart. Establishment DC really hated Jimmy Carter.
These patent political crisis will lead eventually to an constitutional crisis as one side or the other takes it upon themselves to take things to an unilateral resolve. This is governance by blackmail/hostage taking where one side has essentially withdrawn from the process and waits in the ally with a monkey-wrench.
There is also a strange disbelief in elections built into this current world view. A growing sensibility that elections don't really mean much; They don't settle outcomes and don't legitimize anything. A facile consensus has formed now, that the 2012 election produced no mandate or direction. Every political decision becomes a throw-down test of raw power The 13 reasons Washington is failing.
The objectives and tactics of this political game are simple. There is the nein crew: a small group within the house of representatives. Their method and madness is to say no (vote no) and only no. To not legislate, to prevent executive action. If, in the exasperation of the people as nothing is accomplished they collaterally damage or destroy belief in the agency of government, this is counted as an added bonus. No longer a majority, this faction seeks to control the nation from the collapsed position of minority interest "The Tea Party is better understood as a reactionary conservative force.".
In this view Obama-care, about which so much has been made, is merely a stalking horse. It is simply a marker, a thing to say "no" to. A convenience of mis-association, a blank wall to write "socialism" and other terrors on to. I'm personally dubious that President Obama should have accepted the personalization of the issue on himself -- allowed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a largely congressional apparatus cobbled out of long existent policy pieces to be reduced to Obama-care for the purposes of some vague exercise in branding.
From this juncture it is worth looking at what drivers of faction might be preventing the rather minimal level of commodity that the American political system needs to work. First the American two party system is merely a ready-made coalition system. Some might question how extreme factions come to exist in a system dominate by two mainstream parties that have been largely successful at keeping third parties at bay. The reason is simply that factions and movements form freely within these broad coalitions.
Randall Munroe in one of his tour de force xkcd comics made a chart of the US congress across time showing ideological subgroups are almost always at the heart of congressional strength and party influence xkcd: Congress. Worth noting here is that xkcd put this chart together using DW Nominate data (Dynamic Weighted Nominal Three-Step-Estimation). This is a statistical algorithm that measures how well roll call votes can be explained (correlated) by a members party affiliation or against other ideological spectrums. This is explained well in a side bar on the chart by Randall Munroe, NOMINATE is well known enough to have a Wikipedia entry, and further Poole and Rosenthal (the system's developers) have written books home - voteview.com - PolarizedAmerica.com.
Strong factions can form within the parties, it is unsurprising that in a rule laden system like congress tyranny of majorities can be quickly replaced by tyranny of minorities. Pseudo-rules like the Hastert dictum - that votes ought to pass only with a majority of the controlling caucus - and the filibuster (more the modern threat of filibuster) requires a de facto Senate super-majority for all votes. These can place an effective veto over national policy in the hands of any group that can exert discipline over as few as fifteen to thirty votes 'People don't fully appreciate how committed the tea party is to not compromising'.
Since this elevated level of faction seems to equal dysfunction in government The Mischiefs of Faction: The Complicated Relationship Between Redistricting and Polarization, the role of things believed to be generating it should be examined. People speak of Gerrymandering a reference to a early governor of Massachusetts denoting pernicious congressional redistricting. Additionally closed primaries and population segmentation sometimes called the Big Sort are pointed out. Do these effects really exist though? The Monkey Cage blog, recently partnered with and hoisted onboard the Washington Post has been working a push-back against these notions.
Factions are endemic to the American System. There are many causes some may have direct effect others only as catalyst. The Monkey Cage blog in taking the fight to the pundits (who cede ground to the argument) is in danger of determining that since no particular cause seems to be driving it, that polarization itself doe not exist The political middle is dying. But it's not redistricting's fault..
First is redistricting causing increased polarization? Gerrymandered congressional districts are clearly hinky. Often an offence to aesthetics and common sense. Contra to the idea that this automatically equals bad politics Monkey Cage notes there are two potential strategies at work in redistricting (1) Create deliberate ultra safe districts (2) maximize final party share in the legislature by creating as many districts as possible that can be won by narrow but likely majorities. These strategies negate each other and the rational presumption is that the latter is preferred. Additionally John Sides notes that "Polarization happens mainly between redistricting cycles, not because of them" Zombie Politics: Redistricting and Party Polarization - The Monkey Cage.
A possible counter to this is that redistricting is generally in the hands of state legislatures where extreme factionalism reigns and a strategy of manufacturing safe districts for extreme ideological view points may be their precise interest.
Some feel that the way candidate primary elections are held produces officials ill-equipped for the give and take of politics. They look toward primary reform. Particularly to Open Primaries (not restricted to party) and Top2 primaries, a version of an open primary where only one primary is held listing all candidates where the top two vote-getters are passed on to the general election to ameliorate this. California with open Top two primaries show as high or higher levels of partisan ship in office as closed. Reforming primary elections won't make government better. No evidence yet that politicians elected in this manner do (or do not) behave or vote differently once in office, intuitively they might, but institutional pressures seem as strong or stronger influence on them.
The next villain is residential sorting. Both big and little varieties: Bishop, Bill, and Robert G. Cushing. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Print. Conventional thinking is that there is a bifurcation of the country as a whole eg. red state blue state. At county level it is a far more intricate picture, often a urban/rural split. At the local level desire for good place to live/schools bring right and left together. As John Sides noted not everyone wants to live as cloistered from other opinions as some Most Americans are not like Antonin Scalia. A counter to that part of what makes a 'good' locality is like minded people. A handful of bike rides last spring and summer through some newly built neighbourhoods in Milton and Lewes Delaware, a fast growing area, left me in little doubt that people were somehow managing to flock together at a street local level at least. Still the fact that holding a pre-election to select a candidate has transmuted primary into a verb, to "primary" someone, offers a plain language window onto the problem. Candidates run leaving no corner to turn to the end of the spectrum especially on right.
The party and its leadership are no longer sole source of big money. Many hidden and big money political action committees can supply the start up costs of of a congressional campaign that isn't beholden to a state party committee at all. Once in office the lack of little tools like earmarks (geographically specific project add-ons to spending bills, pork) which have fallen out of favor due to the air of impropriety that hung over them marks the end of leadership leverage over individual members, to reorient them to any broad party consensus.
The broken policy coming out of Washington today is an example of politics being played as raw game of winner takes all power. The point isn't to produce an nominal end suiting a majority of the people, but to assemble power and rule with it to the exclusion of other ideas and ways Republicans and Democrats really don't have much in common. It is precisely the dysfunction of today's political, the inability to deal with or even meaningfully consider long term problems that belies the political scientist's dismissal of concern and insistence that the normal run of a resilient system is at play. Secession revolution and civil war are in this nation system's past. There is nothing we have known that is that out of reach now, no American Exceptionalism that says it can't happen here. Not the least outcome, perhaps, is simple slow failure of the American system.
The collateral damage of the sequester, with its un-thought-out slashing cuts, is a pointless numbers game that does not consider what any individual program may be trying to accomplish. It leaves the responsible agency with an inability to prioritize, An inability to plan or front load expenses on any project that requires any degree of capital investment. The sequester cannot be read as policy but the absence of it. In education it prevents or effectively kills any national policy leaving a program of small effects and localism bordering on abandonment Sequestration Cuts Lead To Bigger Classes, Shuttered Arts Programs In Schools. The Navy is also dependent on acquisition programs of enormous expense, pinned against the un-sheddable human resource cost of training and manning these ships and bases. New ship classes bring sharp upfront costs long before they hit the water and begin delivering functional value. What gives, inevitably, is the quality of the training and preventative maintenance -- the readiness of the fleet DOD loses spending flexibility designed to blunt effects of sequestration - News - Stripes.
I served in the Navy years ago, it serves me as a ready example, a marker for the travails of the rest of the federal government. I know a little about it's mission and processes and can envision the point where it becomes just a big bobbing pile of underfunded rusting steel on the water incapable of defending the nation. Sequester budgeting will get it there.
The problem with sequester cuts is that it fosters an ad hoc approach to governance. At best treading water, but not planning. It plays to weakness. Narrow reactive focus on immediate problems, rather than co-ordination and comprehensiveness. This approach to cost cutting is the very essence of penny wise pound foolish. Cutting funding for grants that fund basic research may seem inconsequential now, but it is what narrows productivity and possibility in the future. Personally rather than feel any relief from our lowered tax deficit I feel a profound sense that my tax dollars are being wasted by this blindfolded and senseless regime of spending cuts. Adding insult to this is the cheap maneuvering by both parties to have the other take action to reign in entitlements.
Those most vehement against federal spending and for deficit reduction tend to be ideologically incapable of seeing government's function. They are forever looking towards a simpler past where all things unconsidered just take care of themselves. Liming the outline of a non existent state between Hobbes and Locke falling short of Smith never approaching Rousseau.
What many of these anti-deficit provocateurs want is small, but not necessarily democratic government. And to that end it's not really about debt or taxes. not withstanding the surety some have that the budget could be balanced by finding one more welfare mother and taking away her government issue Cadillac These are political simplifications marking a deeper gulf. To the extent that it is ideological it is not about the virtuous. That is, it is not about good government, its not about inclusiveness social justice or even fairness. It is about power. Control over the direction of society. Control over who wins and who loses. Control over the lives of others. And in America the lines of demarcation are drawn around race and class.
The demi-monde small government advocates desire is beyond democracy. It is a political process frozen in one advantages moment in time. Small government does not buy more liberty by the absence of big government, just power concentrated in fewer hands. The franchise of participation is guarded and restricted to a narrow outcome. A blanket of resentment poisons the air. A demarcated subset claiming a truer citizenship initiates a program of exclusion. A privilege is made of natural rights. paid for by allegiance to a regime of inequality.
Thursday, 19 December 2013 21:41 EST #
Boston Globe Forward
As a corollary to the previous piece on The Washington Post I wanted to write a short post on the paper I grew up with -- the Boston Globe. I wanted to write something about the first headline I can remember reading. It was first time I can recall reading the front page at all (although I might have the year before when the Red Sox won the Pennant). Regardless it was first time I did not auto default first to the comics which I knew could be found by laying the paper face down on the floor and opening up the very last page.
This is headline I remember; from the Fall of 1968 only days before the election that year.
Morning news November 1 1968
I would've been in the fourth grade at the time, having just turned nine a few weeks before. I remember where I read this too. By the back door of our house in Holliston adjacent to the basement steps where the late season morning sun would create a temporary warm bright greenhouse-like space with plexiglass panel of the screen door (switched out the eponymous
screen a New England month or more earlier. A large dark headline, but it was a dramatic moment, in US history and in the Vietnam War. When my nephew for a class project prompted me to remember something from the sixties I thought of this. The next day I started a search for it to see how clean a memory it was. It didn't really take too long, at that, to root it out of the Internet from the recollection I had of it. An October surprise cast on a brutally divided public opinion against an unpopular and morally suspect war.
At the time it brought me up sharp. I stopped and thought about the world I was living in, somewhat bewildered. I was an inattentive youth, for sure, this made that clear. I suppose I didn't believe it was my job at the time to care or worry about adults. Their world was a labyrinth, an impenetrable mystery. The quality of the resolution I made at the time was simply to mark it, and pay more attention from then on until things like this could be comprehended. Or at least classified. I knew vaguely of a Vietnam difficulty but this was a war and I was confused. War was a specific thing, it meant World War Two, a thing or things past. Now there were others, going on now. In places I knew nothing about.
It is a common and dangerous belief that the moment one is living through is uncommonly dire and troubled. That in these times there are barricades to be manned and fronts to be marched to, calling for extraordinary measures and sacrifices. Mostly it is merely the unfortunate ordinary churn of the ambitious. In any regard from that day forward I read the front page of the Globe every day, and later any paper in whose city I found myself.
Monday, 30 September 2013 08:25 EST #
Washington Post Modern
The Washington Post is being bought by an internet billionaire This Week in Review Why Bezos is buying the Washington Post, and what's next for it Nieman Journalism Lab. The billionaire in particular is Jeffery Bezos of Amazon, Bezos the disruptor, here buying into the old media. Almost like buying a small bookstore in a sleepy seacoast town -- and putting an Amazon.com logo over the lintel.
Amazon was a first generation internet company. Explicitly it moved across the land as brick and paper displacer. First bookstores then books themselves as e-readers came into their own. The internet, a network of screens, was a new distribution medium. One combining many of the best features of telephony television, and libraries and few of the worst. There was a great deal of low hanging fruit in those days, a great deal of money, fortunes to be made by those fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. I admit I placed Jeff Bezos along with Steve Case and many others too numerous to list into that category.
It's also not really possible to to assess the personality of Bezos as a measure of his new stewardship of the Washington Post. His other side projects The Odd Philosophy Behind Jeff Bezos's Weird Investments - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic the space missions and fantastic clocks show the fascinations of youth and wealth that has outstripped adult imagination.
I was also struck by the sheer volume of advice that came with the commentary, on the sale. More advice I imagine than billionaires are used to getting Jeff Bezos Should Run the Washington Post Like Amazon New Republic, Five things Jeff Bezos should do to reinvent the sinking ship that is the Washington Post - Tech News and Analysis mark a small portion of it, even former staff jumped in Mr. Bezos Goes to Washington (DC) | Politics & Prose Bookstore. That first article is by former FCC head Julius Genachowski. Briefly after this story broke some were saying this would increase the likelihood that Bloomberg will buy NY Times, or that the Koch brothers the LA Times. This remains to be seen.
Internet is many things. A sliding of the world into a new interactive communication medium. All of them making money in different ways. All too disparate to be regarded as a single comprehensible thing. An online bookstore is not online newspaper. Its not that simple. However well-run your information management and catalog system, your point-of-sale money and exchange system. It is not simply a content-management-system with a feeding system of reporters/editors shoveling words into the boilers all day long. Newspapers are the publishing industry in miniature. Yoked mostly to the special purpose of the new if not the novel. Any newspaper placed online will begin to adopt the behavior of an online aggregator. The pressure of ongoing events leads to collection and commentary even as resources engage with the occurrence.
Reminiscing the Paleolithic
The Washington Post was (and is) a "big" deal with genuine history Washington Post-Wikipedia A newspaper started in 1877 headed by privately then grudgingly publicly by a single family, the Grahams, in both matriarchal and patriarchal modes for eighty years. A major story broken that shook and shaped the entire nation; the Watergate scandal. A legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, who was as "big" as editors in the business ever were. Further as if that weren't enough going back into the dawn of the last century, they had their own theme song/march (I guess that's what they called walk-on-music back then) written by none less than John Paul Sousa.
Along the way the Post checked its rival, the Washington Star, into the boards and came away with its best columnists and in a show of magnanimity doubled its comics page to accommodate the majority of the Stars comics. This brought about the age of monopoly, as DC like most large US cities dropped to one daily and evening editions evaporated. There was the Washington Times, operating somewhere outside the economy, and it did have its impact, but the Post steadily assumed the mantle of paper of record of the Government of the United States Why the Sale of the Washington Post Seems So Significant - James Fallows - The Atlantic.
So why did Graham family give up now?. How did paper lose so much value worth only $ 250 million at the end, only $80 million for the Boston Globe the paper I grew up? Compare this for the prices obtained by Instagram and other internet services. You might conclude that valuation is not entirely rational or linear.
Before going into those questions its worth taking a brief look at what got sold to the Begums, and what didn't. Essentially only the single concern -- the Washington Post newspaper was sold. All other elements of the Washington Post company: real estate such as the headquarters building , the online magazine Slate, Kaplan reviews, and significantly Washington Post Labs all remain with the publicly traded company run by the Grahams. These presumably are all normal business that will continue to respond adequately to market conditions. It is the the paper that is going private and stepping outside shareholder scrutiny and demand.
Strength through failure is overrated
The failings of the Washington Post (and other big city papers) is both obvious in its generalities and puzzling in its particulars. It is like finding yourself outrun by a glacier. Daily newspapers find themselves joined at their morning swim by modern media types and paced by the velocity of news. Newspapers have faced decades of semi competition from first radio, then television, and television's multiverse changeling; cable -- which freed television from the need to be broadly compelling. Finally (the) internet: near the entire corpus of human information digitally distributed among the set of joined file spaces. The internet is hardly a single static thing having taken many forms already, a communication growing through clients thick and thin out of the marriage of computation and telephony. There is no more focus to it than there is to the world Online news hasn't killed newspapers.
From my day job, as a clerk matching existing MARC bibliographic records to existing books, par of which involves cataloging books from the broadcast archives at the University of Maryland (a collection of radio and television era material) Mass Media & Culture, UMD Libraries. I know that radio and television had to prove their advertising model and the mix of information and entertainment that carried it into households, prove it in a more rigorous way than newspapers were expected to, particularly at the time. They didn't just have to figure it out once either -- as each technical cascade of innovation erupted and layered the landscape with another strata of ash everything adjusted again. Television changed radio. fm changed am, as the telephone changed telegraph.
Another factor that has disadvantaged traditional print newspapers is the emergence of the the 24 hr and sub-24 hour news cycle. Inevitable as it seems it always struck me as caused by capacity as much as called by some necessity. Most don't need constant news the subjects of news need nothing from them, but radio and television are always on the air and cable news made every minute a news minute.
It was a differentiation point; a selling point and through the mechanistic tyranny of the clock and the competition of hours news escaped beyond morning and evening editions to become as necessary as oxygen to modern life. All politics and business. Mass disasters and other calamities, a subset of news, of course don't wait for day parts to occur and serve to demonstrate the part of journalism's mandate that information (profession and infrastructure) is safety and a public good. It's worth pointing out that sports news has played its part in real-time reporting as well.
The sense of being overwhelmed by the news is a by product of the merging of news and analysis. Getting more of the why and what in the news is a good concept, but masks the difference between information and understanding. Commentary inside the twenty-four hour news cycle rarely adds to the latter.
The main factor that affected the newspaper business is the collapse of the advertising model Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph - The Atlantic 2012 Derek Thompson. An often mention adjunct to this is their failure to guard the classifieds . Paper's late secret: classifieds were a tremendous cash cow. Classifieds would have had to move online in whole or part before Craig's list or E bay to have kept that game. Likely even the expectations Craig's List itself had at time would not have generated sufficient foresight of disruption to see this. A more obvious error perhaps is that newspapers never tried to connect their classifieds strongly to their brand, before they encountered competition.
The moment of truth for advertising revenue flow was the revolt of advertisers on the web. Already online advertisers were attracting a different national local split that the print versions. National brands -- cars -- internet travel services. Tiny vague non-local ads didn't measure well with consumers and fueled a spill-over skepticism leading to an inability to appeal to advertisers that benefit most from big time-sensitive ads. Newspapers are simply a very different from a web page. They are permanent physical objects. You probably don't, generally, read the ads at the same time you read the news, but you remember they're there. There is an attention offset, you've scanned them as you go, and will go back to them if you need them. The inability of online advertising to produce a believable return on investment with ongoing and subsequent doubts of the daily print newspaper reach represents lead to a fall of a house of cards for the newspaper business.
Looking back on it many see a subsidy effect by department store philanthropists. Paper's 2nd little secret: local businesses had been underwriting journalism.beyond nominal value for decades. As long as the cash flowed these beliefs by local business owners desiring recognition, in prestige, in community and other intangibles, made a certain sense.
Maybe what journalism wanted, what it always wanted was a Sugardaddy. A Daddy Warbucks with deep pockets. Perhaps journalism requires patrons like any other art or cultural catalyst. A sponsorship, if you'd prefer; the sort of public largess enjoyed by sport team owners. At any rate a comfortable equilibrium between interested parties, a consistent revenue stream from news consumers, and a mutual beneficial arrangement that all can see and value. Journalism will never be able to paywall itself off to freedom.
Transition and pivots
The Washington Post is undergoing a number of transitions simultaneously: ownership, decreased resources, digitalization of operations, transitioning away from paper. This last the most far reaching. Newspapers like the Post were always a bundle of services under a single banner, or brand. They were paper embedded in that medium like the ink that carried the message. The future isn't paper though. It seemed to me like they've know that for a decade. The paper slowly shrank, then withdrew then withdrew altogether. I refer to this as the Washington Post's Berliner era. Strictly speaking the Berliner format is 12.4 by 18.5 inches. If the Post never got that small, it certainly left the open plains of the American broadsheet behind. Graphically it was tight and balanced, but the comics became a microform.
My own experience, over the last decade is that the Post became much harder to buy. It disappeared from the familiar blue kiosk boxes, they lay empty or disappeared themselves. It became scarcer at stores around the University of Maryland. At the Student Union store there were lengthening hiatuses around various semester breaks. Eventually a few years ago now the Washington Post (Along with the Baltimore Sun, USA Today and NYT) just stopped coming.
Before the Post put up it's recent paywall I lived a double life between their paper and digital products. Paper on Sundays (from a 7-Eleven -- subscriptions didn't work out in my neighborhood). Paper at lunch on weekdays, when I had time. I was increasingly dependent on RSS feeds, but losing a sense of the paper as a whole in the process. When their first App came out I gave up weekday paper, I stopped imploring the convenience store at the U. Maryland to continue ordering the one solitary copy they seemed to buy. I read the paper on an iPod touch.
When their second App came out this Spring it was a greatly improved beast. It had comics; that's largely what I mean by that. More broadly ii had worked out a presentation of stories, features, photos and columns that did not leave half their identity on the doorstep. I accepted this as an acceptable form (I had an iPad by this time), and bought a digital subscription. although as a financial matter that meant giving up the civilizing ritual of the Sunday Paper.
Its unlikely I took that path alone or that the Post developed those Apps just to grab another percentage of readers. So another transition the Post is executing is the transition to mobil. In as many ways as this continues the transition from paper this represents the death of desktop, of strategies that depended on a browser and the open web.
The last transition the Post is trying to accomplish is the transition to mobile. This is as much the death of the desktop, of all the Post's website paywall and trapper-keeper strategies, as the death of paper. It is the birth of mobile.
What value the services sold by a enterprise like the Post? The public resists directly valuing it at full cost. Advertisements give information to people as consumers which reliably measures, up to a point, as traffic and sales for retailers. Smaller lesser mobile ads are also smarter targeted and potentially more able. Crafted, ideally, to be seamless with, even augment, the formal news content provided. The key of course is collection and sale of information about individuals through active tracking and data mining. Services existing on the web alone already sense this Why does Twitter buying MoPub matter? It's all about persistent identity and mobile ads Tech News and Analysis. To the corporations they belong to news divisions are simply fungible content.
The future is ubiquitous atomized news on platforms. People it is presumed want to know particular things, in reference to particular places, at particular times of day. The mobile web enables this. Engagement is achieved with this targeted news, but there is a considerable downside. This comes from siloing: confirmation bias, and a similar term the filter bubble developed by Eli Pariser. Both are related by a narrowing of received information: confirmation bias describes an internal human tendency to seek out and only retain information that reinforces what they already believe and what supports their current choice sets. The filter bubble is an external process where the institutions that deliver information to us through algorithms and simulacrums of ourselves only sort only pleasing conformations our way.
The ultimate value of news is not to the atomized individual, but to the community, to ad hoc groups to the society as a whole. The shared discussions and decisions they make. An ongoing dialog among ordinary people with each other in a virtual public sphere. Not as a decided fact from on high being learnt simultaneously. Not under the ageis guidence or control of government. As the governing, not governed.
Friday, 16 August 2013 11:59 EST #
A Matter of Metaphor
A couple of weeks ago I watched an early summer rain-storm fall on a small arm of a large pond in Delaware. This was Red Mill pond in Milton, which has occupied its present spot for a hundred years or more, though its eponymous mill is long gone. In a strange phenomenon of nature I couldn't recall seeing before, the fresh rain water flowed in thin broad channels or streams over the murkier pond water. The light reflected off these differing patches of water in a way that threw them into contrast. The pond normally maintains a strong green glow through the mid-year months near that of a summer lawn. There is no mistaking its photosynthetic vibrancy. Initially the two waters were not mixing the one flowing over the other, but eventually and untrammeled by the unceasing pelt of the rain on the ponds surface they began to merge. The rain water pooling on the surface darkening it and slowly sinking down and dissolving in.
The effect was similar to oil and water at first blush but the medium was of like, not opposed substances. The pond water was older and dustier than the rain water. Full of existing mineral and organic entities imposing their own form and impermeable barriers. More a matrix, a substrate of phytoplankton, than the solitary word water conveys. The rain water falling on it was cleaner purer, and far far simpler.
Same pond portion, on another colder dryer day /pb
This seemed at once a naturalistic observation, as such a natural metaphor. A layering a merging, sorted out through the complex adjudication of physical rules. Certain similar phenomenon occur in multiple relatable places throughout the natural world. In physical nature living nature and in higher psychological states of being. Plato's body to the body politic. Hobbes' Leviathan, lumbering shadow of the ship of state Not only processes but shapes circles spheres cones curves. The repeated occurrence of the golden mean spiral for instance occurs at many levels from macro to micro environments. There is something about these that is at once extensible transferable relatable to other things, capable of explaining one part of nature to another, that begs use.
Some, at a moment like this, might start arranging in their minds lines for a poem -- to carry the metaphor over. The rhythm in my head tends to prose over poetry. It slows to rehearse the argument, construct an inventory of terms. There are those that consider poetry to be the highest best expression of an idea. I accept that in general poetry is the strongest form of language. By that I imagine I am saying it is the most particularized compact deployment of language. The right word in the right place. Poetry carries too, I suppose, an extra appeal to emotion, in its heart-beat cadence. To sense and sensitivity. A primacy as well to image symbol and arrangement.
I might not have spent that much time even considering the muster of poetic expression if I did not keep in the back of my thoughts the fact that I know someone who has gone on to make a living at line and meter.
Stripes cover you in rain. / We are grew and grew, / a particular mood tooth / Kind of day: beans on toast / and become / the professor of transformation.
This is the poet
Hoa Nguyen (I refer to her that way to distinguish her from my friend the
poetical Tran Nguyen who; however, has never read G.M Hopkins yet carries a life-ring from the Deutchesland wherever she goes). I knew Hoa as an undergraduate when words were not yet her vocation. The quoted lines are from
Rain Poem contained in her collection
As long as trees last (Book, 2012) , p.8) I thought of Hoa recently while reading this article from the Atlantic
Literature Is Dead (According to Straight, White Guys, At Least) - Joel Breuklander - The Atlantic:. "Mannered...soft", the charge is laid against modern poetry.
So Obvious feathers on a heart pen (p.12). It's hardly dead.
I prefer prose when I write because it more closely resembles the run of thoughts in my head; the slow array of language. Although, to be sure it ain't prose exactly. I like the mounted argument with its seeming loose pile of concrete verbiage. A ramp to the highest wall. The thinner edge worked under the most ponderous opinion. Prose is such a simple machine.
Prose allows you to unlimber not only metaphors similes and the like, but also the space to deploy analogies and compound-complex allegories. The only thing holding me back here is the lack of enough discipline and education to rigorously apply these devices. My metaphors remain mixed, my sheets bent to my lines if tied down at all. The canvas becomes a torn curtain of loose ends. The way is lost, things go adrift.
Here, reflecting on this unsuspected aspect of a summer rain I incline to natural metaphor. Another facet of the world assuming a form of similar impression. Youth, perhaps. Youth merging into the adult world. With its own ideals, ways of being. Reticent resistant, but gradually accepting of established roles and responsibilities. What is the metaphor saying then? Youth dissipates; loses itself in adulthood? That rain/youth is a temporary or initial state, is it the pond that is permanent? Which is the more natural, without rain, what for the jealous pond? The rain water is, we could imagine, part of a fuller cycle involving evaporation and the sun, identifying the rainwater as an emergent clarity returning.
Nature has process -- cycles that run on thermodynamics and entropy alone. At first we may be tempted to regard this as an ideation outside of nature. That is nature identified strictly with the organic, the realm of the living striving and winding round, crowded and recursive. Nature is a mix of the organic and inorganic. They imitate each other in process and in form, (crystals grow, stars are born) a branching, area-filling fractal extensiveness is common to both. The laws of physics apply and rule the possibilities of both and the common elements of matter make up both the organic and in organic realms.
Nothing in nature occurs with absolute necessity. What we call nature is our observation and description of it. The statistical account of it we deploy is still a better model the one of command and edict. Nature is what we see, the laws of nature what happens. Often what we are talking about when we talk of nature is proscribing behavior, of natural phenomenon, but more that of people.
At the end of this I'm just content for avoiding bringing around yet another metaphor of youth as incandescent, burning (and burning out). The young have no reason to believe that the regularity of nature that orders things and imposes paths through the forest good and bad does not not apply to them. At the same time false dichotomies and rushed streams of some naturally ordained life should not impede desire and infinite possibility.
Tuesday, 16 July 2013 11:59 EST #
