September 2003 Archives
I went to Barnes and Noble last night and saw the recent Britney Spears cover for Rolling Stone magazine and did a couple of double takes. What the hell is this picture trying to tell me? Does it say anything more than *#$%$ Britney? Every guy looking at that picture thought about sex. I certainly did.
Earlier in the day I read a story by Doc Searls about the decline of radio. In 1994-1995, the year after I came back to Minneapolis after college, there was a great, eclectic radio station that I listened to religiously. Rev 105 only lasted a year or two, it probably died just after the 1996 Telecommunications Act which led to the Clear Channel consolidation of radio. So it goes. Doc doesn't have to convince me that radio today is blander, and more boring than it has been in some length of time. He does make some good points about the technical changes that have gone hand in hand with the decline in radio.
The truth is, licensed over-the-air broadcasting, which Michael Powell and the FCC made such a big deal about "saving" with their ruling to relax ownership rules in June, is slowly dying in the "marketplace" where users continue to have approximately zero influence on receiver design decisions. The radio manufacturers gave up on AM a long time ago. There's almost no way to get a good AM radio anymore, even if you want one. Choice, which a market requires to express its preferences, just isn't there. AM radios in cars have approximately no treble at all. (Try turning the treble up all the way. It does almost nothing to AM and makes the FM sound chirpy.) The AM tuners in home radios and receivers are even worse.
On a technical side, I still have the radio receiver my dad brough in the mid-1970s. It's got a beautiful weighted dial which I remember spinning back and forth as a child. On the front panel there are two analog gauges measuring the strength of the signal and tuning accuracy. By contrast the newest digital tuner I have skips tens or hundreds of kilohertz whenever I change from one station to another. No wonder AM radio has died. There is one local bright spot on AM in my part of the world. RadioK at the University of Minnesota is becoming a greater and greater part of my listening repertoire, especially when public radio decides to hold one of its annoying pledge drives.
More importantly the Spears cover tells me one thing - sex is what is selling all of her records. I have no quarrel with using sex for marketing but the attention grab is so completely over the top it reaches a level hard to stomach or accept. I recently read an article about electronic jukeboxes that expressed great surprise over the depth of audiences musical tastes. Record executives expected people to listen to 20 or 30 percent of what was available on a streaming jukebox in a bar, instead people listened to 80 to 90 percent of the tracks available.
Listeners have shown remarkably broad tastes, too, paying to play a range of songs from virtually every album in the vault instead of sticking to the hits.There's a lesson there for the music industry as it starts using the Internet to distribute tunes, said Ecast Chief Executive Robbie Vann-Adibe. If what the music industry is producing "is any good whatsoever," he said, "there's probably an audience for it, if you can give them a way to access it and pay for it."
I know it is certainly true in my own personal experience with Rhapsody that I have a lot more music in my library than I would ever purchase in a record store. The benefit of a flat fee subcription fee is that I can try as much music as I want without an addtional cost. The result is that I've gone crazy with 100s of artists I was always mildly interested in but never excited enough to buy a tape or CD - Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, and more.
Searls continues his analysis in another entry and an SuitWatch email from Linux Journal. In that letter he points to a couple of open source, Linux based sound editing projects. I took a quick look at the website for ecasound and it looks a bit intimidating to someone who has never done any real audio editing or mixing. Like many Linux tools it looks like the work and system of one person working to scratch their itch. More power to them.
I fell into reading some more of the National Review Online as I perused John Derbyshire's columns. One of them led me to this piece by Jed Babbin on "The American Mood." His basic argument is that our enemies and our friends have misjudged us, as they so often do, and if another terrorist attack should happen our reaction will make the war on terrorism to date look like a pleasent negotiating round at some safe location where diplomats meet. The money quote is:
These nations also need to realize that our impatience will boil over if there is another 9/11. Many of them will refuse to believe it, but in many ways we under-reacted to 9/11. If there is another, no American president will have the luxury of a patient investigation about how it happened. The Afghanistan campaign will seem like Sunday school to whomever had harbored or helped the perpetrators. And those nations — again, Saudi Arabia is the best example — who talk peace but pay for terror may not survive.
But even more interesting to my mind is the wonderful revelation that country music is a better guide to our mood, in the heartland of America, than any column Maureen Dowd might pen for the New York Times.
This new American mood is something I haven't experienced before. Out in Real America — where Maureen Dowd is unread, CNN unwatched, and the Dixie Chicks held to a higher standard of loyalty than Democratic presidential wannabes — Americans are thinking in muscular terms. You don't read it on the op-ed pages, or see it on the network news. Some of it seeps into talk radio. But the one place you hear it loud and clear is in country music. The world would be a better place if Ayatollah Khamenei, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong-il, and their ilk tuned in. They might begin to understand.
I'm not sure either Dowd or Willie Nelson speak better for the 'mass' of Americans, but such is the art of the opinion column. One must look somewhere for a fact to infer the 'mood of the nation.' I personally don't pay much attention to country music but I don't discount that there are some people very angry about 9-11; people who think we've been too soft on the terrorists. And I can see where they are coming from. Thinking to myself what I would do if another major terrorist attack were to occur I try to imagine multiplying the whole-body despair I felt on that day two years ago as I watched the towers fall. I didn't see the live pictures because I was at work. Instead I remember the photographs that were posted to the internet.
And I remember reading the weblog entries. If another attack comes I can imagine myself joining the fight in some way more direct than my continued spending as a consumer has helped America to date.
But even the horrors of photographs can be selectively remembered and elided. I read about the people jumping from the buildings after the attacks but when I got home to see the actual television images of the new war I was surprised to see no pictures of falling bodies. As Tom Junod writes in a recent Esquire article "The Falling Man," within hours after and during the event itself the media and ourselves were already eliding the memory of the people who jumped to their death from a situation all of us could too easily imagine. What would we have done standing 70 or 80 floors above the ground, leaning out of a broken window trying to get a breath of fresh air as smoke and fire burned hotter and hotter at our backs. It's easy to say we would never give up. In fact it's necessary to say such things sometimes in order to go on living, else the despair will swallow us whole. Some images just cut to close to the bone.
But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
I spent most of last weekend pleasureably engrossed in John Derbyshire's new book, Prime Obsession. It is a historical and mathematical exploration of the Riemann hypothesis. The book is very good and when I finish it I may return to it here. But what this weblog entry is about are the strange assumptions we often make about authors we know nothing about.
The dust jacket copy mentioned that Derbyshire writes an online column, so on Monday I decided to look it up via Google. Sure enough I found his website with a complete list of columns and books. Most of his web journalism page links to columns he wrote for National Review Online and this is where the initial shock came in. How can this man be writing for a journal whose politics are, in my opinion, verging on the crazy end of the conservative spectrum? Somehow I'd unconciously made some assumptions about Mr. Derbyshire without having any evidence to back them up, since there is no mention of political orientations in Prime Obsession. For a brief hour I felt like I had been had. But then calmer thoughts prevailed, I read a few of the columns, and reached the conclusion that he can really write well.
It must have been a year or more since I download The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, from Project Gutenberg, but it is only today that I find a very interesting e-book reader that is designed specifically for free text files like the ones distributed by Project Gutenberg. The Jujusoft BookReader appears to be just the ticket, at least for Windows users. The program has a much nicer display than a text editor ever did. The reader is still in beta testing but there are some self-contained books to check out or else you can, like I did, just go for the risk of the beta version. So far there have been no problems and it looks great.
While looking for the long quote from "Network" that I put into the previous entry I came across a very interesting resource that I'm noting here because every once in a while I get interested in the verbal rhetoric of politicians and others. The site American Rhetoric appears to be the perfect place to find recordings and transcripts of famous speeches made by public figures and speeches taken from great movies.
Last week I started reading James Fallows article "The Age of Murdoch" in the September 2003 Atlantic Monthly. I put the article down for a time to see what was on television and found "Network" on Turner Classic Movies. This was one of the craziest juxtapositions I've experienced recently. So for your edification here are some quotes to compare.
James Fallows:
In the world beyond the FCC's purview the idea that the news business differed from other businesses had started to erode as early as the 1970s. The process involved "infotainment," corporate mergers, pressure for greater profits, and other well-known phenomena. The change within the FCC has been more distinct, though less publicized, and it is the background to this summer's drama....Sooner or later Murdoch's outlets, especially Fox News, will be more straightforward about their political identity—and they are likely to bring the rest of the press with them. There will be liberal papers, radio shows, TV programs, and Web sites for liberals, and conservative ones for conservatives. This result will hardly be new. Frankly partisan media have never ceased to be the rule in modern Europe. Our journalistic culture may soon enough resemble that of early nineteenth-century America, in which party-owned newspapers presented selective versions of the truth. News addressed to a particular niche—not simply in its content but also in its politics—may be the natural match to an era with hundreds of satellite and cable channels and limitless numbers of Internet sites.
An age of more purely commercial, more openly partisan media leaves out some of the functions that news was until recently expected to perform: giving a broad public some common source of information for making political decisions, and telling people about trends and events they didn't already know they were interested in. One way or another, self-governing societies must figure out the suitable commercial channels through which the information necessary for democratic decisions can be spread.
That's not exactly Rupert Murdoch's problem, though he helped make it the world's. If the pure-market approach doesn't do the job of informing the country, then eventually another sort of market process might kick in. Citizens who think they've landed in a vast information wasteland could ask their representatives to set new rules for the media: rules that recognize an obligation of the media beyond maximum profit, rules clear enough to survive interpretation by regulators or appeals courts with clear ideological agendas. In the long run the press does give the public what it wants. We're about to see just what that is.
Howard Beale (crazy anchorperson, and central character of Network):
You people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the 20th floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what s--t will be peddled for truth on this network.So, you listen to me! Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth, go to your God, go to your gurus, go to yourselves because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth. But man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We like like hell! We'll tell you that Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch - at the end of the hour, he's gonna win. We'll tell you any s--t you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds - we're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube.
This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!
When Peter Finch started into this diatribe I nearly fell over. I've seen the movie before and been amazed by Paddy Chayefsky's brilliant script, Sidney Lumet's directing and the acting of Dunaway, Finch, Holden and Duvall. The whole thing is an incredible work of cinema. Twenty seven years later and James Fallows is telling us that the transition that Beale was beginning to describe has come to its natural conclusion. Business has won. The news has lost. And never the twain shall meet again.
I finally changed the default design of Eccentric Eclectica. I basically combined the default clean style from MovableType with some of my own ideas about the sidebar, dropping the calendar, rearranging the lists of recent enties and the list of archives. The change is pretty simple and already I can see some tweaks I might make over the next few days.
One credit where it's due for the use of Adam Kalsey's ArchiveDateHeader plugin.
I love this title by Michael Truscello, The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism. (culled via wood s lot). This is another essay I have yet to peruse, but the skimming is interesting. Most of the text seems to focus on Eric Raymonds' famous Cathedral and the Bazaar essay. One of the parallels drawn between Truscello is the similarity between Cathedral and Brooks' Mythical Man-Month.
In part this links back to my previous post about language design. Do you focus on the architecture by trying to build a large edifice that will encompass all possible use cases? Or do you confine your work to a small domain that can be elegantly handled and understood? Raymond makes a distinction between the freedom, emergent properties of the bazaar style of development and desing versus the top-down, formal methods of the cathedral builders. But it occurs to me that this neglects the crucial dimension of scope. A lot of small tools can be linked together, a la Unix, into a very interesting whole, but aren't the small pieces just as rigourously designed via cathedral, linear methods. Some developer had to decide what itch he or she wants to scratch, and then advance toward solving that goal.
Paul Ford of Ftrain has produced 4,500 words (Processing Processing via wood s lot) on a topic that has fascinated me since I argued about whether language or thought came first in Mr. Borgerding's high school English class. How, in particular, do the languages we use to program computers affect the way we think?
I took a class in Scheme two years ago, when I was toying with the idea of going back to school to get a computer science degree, and was blown away by the elegant recursive structures you could create. Since the early 1990s I've thought that looping and recursion are an essential part of what we find aesthetically attractive. I'm still trying to find a way to express this but the demons of procrastination continue to plague me, part of my work on creativity through the MLS program at the University of Minnesota has touched on this, but the idea seems too big to easily understand.
An important part of the dynamic between the different languages Paul Ford describes is a matter of scope. He wants to find a language that is as elegant as Processing (which manipulates visual images) for the web. There may eventually be such a language but there will always be a tradeoff between complexity, elegance and abstraction. The web isn't even a full decade old yet so the current confusion of inelegant methods for handling content are to be expected. So far there aren't enough abstractions big enough to be manipulated by an elegant language. Instead everyone adds various pieces, new specifications, new programming languges. More accurately I should probably say that the abstractions of the current web are not easily amenable to the projects he wants to accomplish.
Virginia Postrel links to an article at Tech Central Station entitled "Mapping the Debate Over Technology" by Eugene Miller. I haven't read the entire thing yet but it interacts with some new books I just got from Amazon: Questioning Technology by Andrew Feenberg and Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier. More thoughts to come.
