The Literal and the Figurative

Thanks to my Vienna feed reader, I just encountered an Al Jazeera article that could not have been better timed after the latest Saturday Night Live. Elon Musk used his opening monologue to talk about his use of Twitter. He admitted that he tended to write a mixture of powerful insights with utter balderdash, leaving it up to viewers to decided whether he knew which was which. That seems the best context for the following sentence I just read from Al Jazeera:

Musk said on Twitter in April that SpaceX was going to put a “literal Dogecoin on the literal moon”.

This was his way of saying that Dogecoin would pay for a SpaceX moon shot scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

Needless to say, there is nothing “literal” about any cryptocurrency. It is just another artifact whose value is determined strictly by trading practices. (Those practices were exercised in “real time” during that Saturday Night Live broadcast, when the trading value of Dogecoin took a serious drop after one of Musk’s throw-away jokes.) Mind you, whatever efforts there may be to impose standards, the value of anything traded is inevitably figurative, which is why retirement plans tend to go for conservative investment strategies. Nevertheless, even the most cautious investors cannot be fully protected against the bad judgement of other investors!

Neelie Kroes: The New Spokesperson for European Cluelessness

According to a report that appeared this morning on the BBC News Web site, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, gave a speech at Cebit in Hannover at which she declared that billions of people around the world do not trust the Internet. There is something chilling and disconcerting about the fact that there are people in high positions of power who take this to be a significant insight. It is a sure sign that those who see themselves as world leaders are just as clueless about history as those who mindlessly evangelize Internet technology.

To the extent that computer networks were originally designed with little thought of oversight and regulation at the network level, the Internet is fundamentally anarchic. When access was limited to institutions with funding connections to the Advance Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense, there was a top level of oversight to the extent that those who attempted to abuse the network risked being disconnected from it. (On the other hand some of them were hired for their expertise in finding cracks in the walls of security and became pioneers with a technology that, by all rights, should now be much further developed than it actually is.) However, as those who used to haunt Usenet recall full well, with the first opening of a more public access to what is now the Internet came (almost instantaneously) the first effort to use the network as a medium for advertising. This, in turn, led to the development of a major technology that is less concerned with broadcasting the same message over the entire Internet through spam techniques and more interested in harvesting and analyzing data about individual users for the sake of more "targeted" advertising.

From that point of view, while I sympathize with Angela Merkel's indignation at having been hacked by the National Security Agency (NSA), I wish that she had been more aware that NSA was not doing anything to her that Google was not already capable of doing (and probably was doing as part of their advertising business).

The bottom line is that there was never anything built into the Internet that warranted trust, nor has anything particularly effective been retrofitted. In the early days of this site, I liked to compare the Internet to the frontier town of Deadwood, which, at the time, was the focus of a fascinating series on HBO. The Internet is still Deadwood. All that has changed is that the city limits encompass an even larger area.

The Dark Side of Keeping up with the News

Dan Whitworth, Technology Reporter for the BBC Radio 1 program Newsbeat, filed a nice little story about the link between the evangelized vision of the Internet as the ultimate source of information and the reality of malware.  It basically accounted for a variety of current techniques by which such malware is being spread through stories that purport to offer new information about the death of Osama bin Laden.  The real punch line, however, came from an interview with Rik Ferguson, Director of Security Research at Trend Micro, who was quoted as saying the following:

The fact that this is related to Osama Bin Laden is almost academic.

Whenever anything newsworthy happens, anything at all, that is taken advantage of by criminals in order to make their attack more interesting, more credible.

In other words the evangelists have seen their vision come to reality.  When a major news story breaks, people turn to the Internet, convinced that they will be better informed more rapidly than they would be through the “old-fashioned” media.  The idea that such a quest for information should entail vulnerability just does not fit into the equation.

Perhaps the best analogy would be Typhoid Mary, back in an age in which health standards for restaurants barely existed.  Hardly any were stipulated;  and, for all practical purposes, none were enforced.  One of the great advances in reform was the recognition of government responsibility for the physical health of its citizens, a responsibility that has been placed in serious jeopardy by current conservative ideologues.  When it comes to “digital health,” the Internet has emerged as a Deadwood-like culture, which not only avoids efforts to discuss issues of government but overtly scorns them.  In such a culture only the brutes survive, and their survival is predicated by their success in preying on those weaker.  Since this is a culture in which neither the brutes nor the weaklings have ever heard of Thomas Hobbes, it is unlikely that conditions will change in the foreseeable future.

Getting Even with TIME

Those who may have had a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment” over this morning’s announcement of Mark Zuckerberg as Time’s Person of the Year may find a bit more substance in this morning’s London Telegraph.  While I continue to be aggravated by this obsession with rank-ordering just about anything on the basis of quality (as in our obsession with the “Big Five” American orchestras, and not just because San Francisco did not make that cut), I felt obliged to scan the Telegraph’s list “Top 10 men and women of 2010.”  I took a bit of comfort in Zuckerberg’s absence from this article.  Indeed, while I may not have agreed with all of the selections, I found far more grounds for substance among those twenty names than I have ever been able to associate with Facebook, since, as we all know, earning power has nothing to do with such substance.  On the other hand I cannot really claim any surprise at Time’s selection.  After all, their Person of the Year issue for 2006 featured a mirror on the cover, in the middle of which was the world “You!”  I suppose that the best coverage I have encountered so far came this morning on the BBC World Service.  After announcing the selection the news reader ran through a few names of past individuals to be so honored by Time.  The first name on that list was Joseph Stalin.  Was the BBC trying to tell us something about the connection between the extremes of capitalism and those of totalitarianism?  Enquiring minds want to know!

The Cyberspace Audience

Those who have been following my "more formal gig" on Examiner.com know that I have taken a great interest in opportunities for concert experiences in cyberspace. Last night Laura Battle filed a story for this morning's Financial Times site that has taken my interest to the next level, considering the extent to which cyberspace may be a game-changer for the very nature of the business of classical music performance. As a case study she decided to examine Plushmusic, which she introduced as follows:

Since the mid-1990s the classical music industry has been accused of myopically cultivating a handful of profitable stars – many of them so-called “crossover” as opposed to echt-classical – to the detriment of up-and-coming musicians, who find it increasingly difficult to set up recording contracts. With the advent of broadband internet these performers and composers have been able to bite back by posting high-quality music samples and MP3 files on their personal websites or social networking profiles, and thereby undercutting the traditional dependence on labels. But until recently they have lacked support or a sense of community.

This looks set to change with the development of Plushmusic, a new kind of music website that went live last November and has just received its official launch. In the words of its founder and artistic director Adrian Brendel, cellist and son of the great pianist Alfred Brendel, it was “born out of the idea of giving musicians the opportunity to record things in a different way, and to use new technology for new projects”. The Plushmusic name might sound a bit kitschy (it could almost inspire a new subgenre of “easy listening” – heaven forbid) but its origins are reassuringly wholesome: in 1995 Brendel founded a chamber music festival in the Dorset village of Plush and the website has developed as an extension of its values and activities.

As at Plush, there is a strong emphasis on chamber music but there are also designated areas for opera, jazz and world music. Individual artists are given “channels”, where they can they can post free video excerpts or charge users for a complete streaming or download of a live concert recording. Classical guitarist Zoran Dukic, for example, has posted a number of free audio clips, while Julian Steckel has made available a film of himself performing Kaija Saariaho’s short piece for solo cello Spins and Spells, and pianist Aleksandar Madzar is charging £9.99 for a high definition recording of a concert he performed at last year’s Plush festival.

I have visited this site, and I must say that I came away very impressed. Thus, I believe that the conclusion of her piece deserves serious attention:

When asked if Plushmusic could pose a threat to the traditional record label, Brendel admits the project will prove “very subjective”, and explains that while Hyperion has been keen to engage, believing the project can be mutually beneficial, other labels have been less enthusiastic.

“It’s such a volatile space at the moment because no one really knows what’s going to happen in the short term or long term with the recording industry, but we’re seeing more and more general interest and we’re really encouraged by the reaction of musicians.”

It is, of course, early days, but if Plushmusic gathers pace and power the consequences could be quite provocative. Once sites such as this successfully supplant the role of record labels, it can’t be long before people begin to question the necessity of agents: if musicians can manage and market their own recordings, if they can nurture relationships with opera houses, music venues and festivals around the world, and interact directly with a pre-existing and potential audience, what need is there for middlemen?

Disintermediation has, of course, been one of the primary watchwords of e-commerce; and I suspect that debates will continue to rage over whether it is a virtue or a vice. However, what Battle neglected to examine in her report was the implications of these new cyberspace strategies for audiences, rather than performers or promoters. What will happen to performance practices if physical presence is displaced by virtual presence?

There is no simple answer to this question; and I suspect that, now that the seed has been planted in my mind, I am likely to cultivate it in a variety of ways in future writing (possible on Examiner.com as well as on this blog). The good news is that we are talking about something on a higher level than downloading a file for your iPod: The concert performance of music deserves more attention than it would receive if you are filling your ears with background sounds to block out realities you would do better not to ignore. However, a concert experience in the physical world is a social one, even when it involves little more than awareness of the audience sharing the experience with you. The risk that cyberspace will turn this experience into a purely subjective one, thereby impoverishing it, cannot be ignored. After all, even going to a movie theater to experience an HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera is a social experience that cannot necessarily be maintained through a computer screen. With the convergence (to invoke another watchword) of the Internet with television, some of that social experience may transplant to living rooms, as it tends to do for many sports events; but I would be reluctant to consider a World Series game as a model for concerts (which may be a mistake on my part)!

There are performers, such as Glenn Gould, for whom the audience did not matter. They are currently in a minority, and I hope they stay that way. This is not just because, where concert music is concerned, my only role is as audience. It is also because the social world is as important to the performance of music as I have argued it is to the development of technologies. Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game was ultimately a reductio ad absurdum of what happens when artifacts of creation are abstracted beyond experiences (even as audience) of creation. We must avoid the risk that the Internet will bring us closer to making that risk a reality.

What Really Matters on the Internet

I take a certain amount of delight when even the most polished of Internet evangelists can be brought down by the dead moose on the table that is pornography. Whether it involves what middle-aged men are really up to in Second Life or what the biggest Google search requests really are, even the more learned efforts to study the impact of the Internet on society turn depressingly myopic when questions about pornography arise. On the other hand everyone seems interested in litigation, so there is nothing like a good lawsuit to remind us that the moose is still on the table. This was made apparent by a brief report by Jeremy Kirk, of the IDG News Service, which just appeared on the InfoWorld Web site, short enough to be reproduced in its entirety:

A publisher of nude model photography is suing Microsoft for putting links and images of the company's content in search results taken from other Web sites that are illegally reproducing the material.

The company, Perfect 10, previously filed similar suits seeking injunctions against Google and Amazon.com over alleged copyright infringement.

The latest suit alleges that Microsoft's MSN image search feature creates unauthorized thumbnails of content owned by Perfect 10 and includes links to see a full-size versions of the images for free. The suit also says that Microsoft's MSN search engine makes passwords available to the company's perfect10.com Web site.

Microsoft also takes advertising money from Web sites that have stolen Perfect 10 images, and provides links to Web sites that offer passwords for Perfect 10's services, according to the lawsuit. The companies could not be immediately reached for comment.

Personally, I wish Perfect 10 all the best in their effort to find just the right stone to bring down Goliath. There seems to be an unwritten "law of Internet culture" to the effect that "if you can link to it, you can use it," which is sort of the latter-day version of the rule of thumb that you can make a photocopy of anything that fits on the glass of your copy machine. The older problem resolved itself more through standards of normative behavior than through court battles over property rights. This new case, on the other hand, may involve challenging what has become a normative practice; so its consequences are likely to be very interesting. I suspect the resolution may come down to recognizing the difference between the Internet serving us the way public libraries have traditionally served us and the Internet enabling us to create personal libraries through a path that ignores any compensation to the "authors" (in the most general sense of the term) of the material in those libraries. Mark Stefik tried to address this matter in "Letting Loose the Light," one of the pioneering essays on digital rights management; but his thoughts were overshadowed by the more technical content of that essay concerned with how property rights could be represented in a form suitable for digital processing. Perfect 10 may be providing the opportunity to shift this issue from an academic exercise to a question of normative practices in the real world of electronic commerce.

Speaking for the Government

It was good to see PC Magazine run Chloe Albanesius' piece about all the imagery now available in virtual mapping programs. Her lead lays all the cards on the table for the subsequent analysis:

Virtual mapping programs have garnered some criticism from those who believe they might be adequate tools for terrorists staking out U.S. landmarks, but there is little the government can do to prevent publication of these images, according to the federal agency that handles satellite photography.

Unfortunately, her paragraph about that agency could have been framed in more precise language:

There are no federal guidelines to which companies like Microsoft or Google must adhere before the release of programs like Microsoft's Live Search Maps, Google Earth or Google Street Views, said Dave Burpee, a public affairs officer with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency does not handle Internet mapping issues.

Presumably NGA is part of Homeland Security, although an alternative reading would have complete separation between NGA and Homeland Security. In either case the paragraph does not indicate any government agency responsible for "Internet mapping issues." This is probably a good thing, although Ms. Albanesius may have inadvertently alerted the government to this lacuna! More interesting, however, is the text that follows:

Burpee stressed that the NGA is "very much on the side of openness" and would not deign to tell Microsoft and Google how to operate their businesses.

But Burpee did acknowledge that "in a perfect world, for the support and defense of U.S. troops, it would be better if that [detailed imagery] wasn't there." But NGA does not "have the legal authority" to demand that the companies pull down mapping information, he added.

"Even if we wanted to do something about it, we couldn't," Burpee said.

Much of the satellite imagery used by such programs comes from international companies over which U.S. agencies have no jurisdiction, he said. The largest U.S.-based satellite imagery companies are Colorado-based Digital Globe and Virginia-based GeoEye. "The rest are all foreign," he said.

The most interesting bit is the quotation (which, remember, is from a public affairs officer of the United States Government) in the second paragraph. This seems to indicate that "for the support and defense of U.S. troops" is a modifier of the phrase "perfect world," meaning that it is one of the characteristics of such a "perfect world." Now, since only Victor Borge renders his punctuation marks as spoken text, we have to assume that the actual commas were supplied by Ms. Albanesius. So we are not absolutely sure whether the connotation that "the support and defense of U.S. troops" is an attribute of a perfect world can be attributed to her or to Mr. Burpee. If nothing else, it does reflect the sort of mind-set that has taken over the country in the post-9/11 age of "homeland security." Once again, when we read our texts, it always seems to be the little things that matter the most!

Giving up the Ghost of Print Journalism

According to Dawn Kawamoto's Blogma post this morning at CNET News.com, beginning in April InfoWorld will no longer have a print edition. Dawn's own take on this is in her final paragraph:

The print world, which includes newspapers, increasingly is finding its readers don't want to be couch potatoes. They want to participate via blogs, video posting or posted messages. That's a difficult thing to deliver when the printed word arrives carved in stone, via doorstep or mailbox.

Personally, I do not think that participation is the primary factor in sounding the death knell for print journalism; nor do I think it has to do with a sudden passion for the journalism business to save the trees or, as one of the comments to Dawn's post claimed, the temporary nature of journalistic content. Mostly it has to do with the struggle of the journalism business to break even, let alone turn a profit. Like any business in such a situation, the primary strategy is one of cutting waste.

In this particular case the real waste lies in the mass production of a large quantity of pages, most of which receive little more than a passing glance by most readers (probably even those who do their glancing during "bodily functions"). This is not to say that casual browsing is a bad thing; but, for most of my periodical reading, Google Reader seems to satisfy my skimming needs better than most printed pages do. There is, however, one disadvantage on the commercial side: When you browse with Google Reader, you do not see advertising on adjacent pages. Advertisers used to count on this, and some were particularly good with their placement strategies. However, the advertising business seems to be waking up to the need to explore other ways to grab eyeballs.

This, of course, is not the end of printing. Rather, it is the transfer of responsibility for printing from the publisher to the reader. Anything that requires serious reading (which, for my own habits, has yet to be the case for InfoWorld) is something that I usually decide to print; and it then follows me around to the many places where I do that serious reading. Electronic paper is not yet good enough to change this habit, nor are most portable devices. So paper is not yet dead, but publishers are beginning to recognize that they can make major cuts in the amount of money they spend on it. As a result, we are just likely to be using less of it; and that is good for the trees! (I just hope InfoWorld does not reveal that this is their idea of an April Fools joke!)

Confronting Addiction

HBO's Addiction Project, produced in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), goes on the air tonight. Having demonstrated their ability to deliver compelling social messages through both dramatic series (The Wire still being the best of the lot) and documentaries that demonstrate what you can do when you replace the financial table scraps of Public Television with a real budget (When the Levees Broke and, more recently, Bastards of the Party), HBO has now mounted a major project around a ninety-minute documentary supplemented by thirteen shorts. That's a lot of material, and HBO is engaging many of their resources to manage it. This includes four of the cable channels they now manage and their On Demand service. (I also thought I saw something about streaming video, but the only video I have found on their Web site thus far has been preview material.) Finally, the DVD (a four-disc set) goes on sale on March 20.

Entertainers love to recycle the motto that timing is everything. Since much of my own writing has tried to address the "addictive stance" we seem to be taking towards our abundance of technology toys, my own opinion is that the timing of this project could not have been better. However, while HBO describes this as a project targeted at Americans, I can only hope that at least some of the material they have produced can contribute to a global conversation on this problem. Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE ran a story about binge drinking in Europe that throws a new light on how we should be thinking about the social consequences of the European Union. Furthermore, while Germany may be taking innovative approaches to dealing with the elderly, the survey reported in SPIEGEL ONLINE indicates that this approach to alcohol is an addiction of the young:

Europeans from Cyprus to Ireland indulge in a rather intoxicating continental pastime: drinking. The champions of excessive or binge drinking are the Irish, Brits, Finns and Danes, according to a European Union survey on alcohol consumption released on Wednesday.

The study -- which polled 28,584 people between last October and November -- found that for young people in particular, the odd drink is not enough to satisfy their thirst: almost one in five between the ages of 15 and 24 consumes five or more beverages in one session, defined as the benchmark for binge drinking.

Binge champions are the Irish with 34 percent, followed by the Finnish, British and Danish with 27, 24 and 23 percent respectively. Italians and Greeks, on the other hand, tend to stay relatively sober: only 2 percent of those asked reported excessive alcohol consumption.

Since Germany is at neither the top nor the bottom of the list, SPIEGEL included one paragraph specific to Germany in their report:

Germany is currently discussing the dangers of binge drinking and ways to prevent out-of-control alcohol consumption following the much-publicized case of a 16-year-old student in Berlin who drank himself into coma by consuming 52 shots of tequila in one sitting.

I do not know if I, personally, have been too reductive in trying to gather these stories, and any others concerned with addiction, under my reality-is-too-much-with-us motto. I shall certainly be watching the HBO material with that project in mind, not so much to continue on my rants about our proclivities to deny reality as to try to throw more light on what it now means to "be in the world," a world that has now been made by our barreling ahead with major technological advances, most of them grounded in information technology and many of them based on the affordances of the Internet. My first blog tried to approach this as a problem of an educational system that attached more value to short-term training in the latest technologies and short-changed the longer-term perspective of the liberal arts. However, in taking that strategy, I may have been too focused on a symptom of a more general disease that is still very poorly understood; so I want to see if HBO will end up helping me with my understanding.

Pay Attention to Reality: It's the Law!

As I have written before, there seem to be an abundance of both motorists and pedestrians out there hell-bent (what an appropriate turn of phrase) on denying reality while in transit, shielding themselves with technologies like iPods and even (in one case in California) a laptop. Accounting for pedestrians may be the harder of the problems; but, according to Marguerite Reardon's Cellular Blog at CNET News.com, the problem with motorists may provoke changes in some states' motor vehicle codes:

The Wall Street Journal published a story Wednesday about state legislators writing laws to define a new driving offense, DWT or "Driving While Texting." It appears that lawmakers have been spurred into action by the increasing number of accidents that have occurred where electronic and wireless devices were being used by drivers.

I like the DWT epithet, since it implies that an active texting device can be as dangerous in the hands of a driver as an open bottle of booze. Ms. Reardon's sentiments are more libertarian, however, believing that common sense is a more reasonable approach than legislation; so a few words about common sense are probably in order.

There is an old joke about a mule that can do any kind of work on the farm, provided that first you whack him on the head several times with a two-by-four "in order to get his attention." Yes, this is a problem about attention; and anyone who spends a lot of time in a car, particularly in traffic and especially on highway patrol, knows that the average motorist has no more inclination to attention than that mule does! Technology has provided us with so many toys for escaping reality, that we now need to wake up to the fact that sometimes we really do have to attend to that reality. I do not know if legislation will wake up most of us, but I would bet that it will do a better job than relying on common sense! (I see Thomas Hobbes off in the distance quietly nodding in agreement.)

Beyond "iPod Oblivion"

I see that one of my posts at the beginning of this month addressed the topic of "iPod oblivion," the ability of the iPod to "shut off reality" that has been proving to be hazardous to both motorists and pedestrians. According to Candace Lombardi's Half Baked blog for CNET News.com, the distractions provided by ear buds may well be only part of the problem. Ms. Lombardi found an Associated Press report in the Chronicle documenting yet another story of a distracted motorist:

A California man whose car drifted into the opposing lane and caused a head-on collision may have been using his laptop at the time of the accident, according to reports.

I suppose that this will be greeted with the same kind of response that we find in reports of accidental shootings: Technology does not cause automobile collisions; people cause automobile collisions! While there may be some merit to this slogan, my guess is that there is a stronger motivating metanarrative behind this story that we may never know. Why should a "28-year-old computer tutor," who, by all rights, should know better, be trying to operate a laptop and a 1991 Honda Accord at the same time? What kind of pressure was pushing this guy to defy common sense so blatantly, or was he just as detached from reality as he would have been after having consumed a full bottle of cheap red wine? There is a nasty context that is impacting all of our lives; and the sooner we come to understand it, the more likely that we may be empowered to do something about it!

Confronting "iPod Oblivion"

Last November in my previous blog I cited an article by Christine Laue of the Omaha World-Herald explaining that iPods are becoming as big a road hazard as cell phones due to the increasing number of motorists wearing ear buds. According to Caroline McCarthy of CNET News.com, a New York state senator has decided that pedestrians are equally a hazard and equally at risk:

State Sen. Carl Krueger, a Democrat who represents New York's 27th district in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, claimed that the phenomenon of "iPod oblivion" has led to a number of fatal accidents on urban streets. While he did not cite any statistical studies that have indicated a rise in such incidents, he referred to the January death of a 23-year-old Brooklyn man who, tuned into his iPod headphones, walked into the path of a city bus.

The bill would effectively make it illegal to use any kind of portable electronic device--a music or video player, cell phone, smart phone, gaming device, etc.--while crossing the street in cities such as New York, Albany and Buffalo. Offenders would be slapped with a $100 fine and a criminal court summons. Joggers and bicyclists would have to limit their iPod use to city parks in which no street crossing would be involved.

"You can't be fully aware of your surroundings if you're fiddling with a BlackBerry, dialing a phone number, playing Super Mario Brothers on a Game Boy, or listening to music on an iPod," Krueger said in a statement. He added that while police in other major cities--such as San Diego, Calif.--have warned that tuning in to portable electronic devices may leave pedestrians vulnerable to threats from pickpockets and muggers, he believes the real threat is from road traffic.

Unfortunately, Senator Krueger has hit on the fundamental truth behind this foolishness, whether practiced by pedestrians or motorists: the popularity of the iPod owes a considerable amount (if not everything) to the fact that its users (as in the same epithet applied to drug addicts) do not want to "be fully aware of" their surroundings! Think of all the technology that allows us to escape reality, not just in portable devices but also on our desk at home. Is it any wonder that we have fulfilled Wells' vision of those mindless and ineffectual Eloi?