Entropic Facebook

Where signal does not stand a chance of rising above the noise:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/04/facebook-groups-misinformation

“It’s still the same old story …”

Last night San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the first Insight Panel for its 2017–18 repertory season. The topic was Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Elektra,” which will be given its first performance tomorrow night. The production is being shared with the National Theatre in Prague and the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, and the staging by Keith Warner was given its world premiere in Prague about a year ago.

Personally, I found that the most interesting part of last night’s discussion arose from the contribution by Anja Kühnhold, who is responsible for bringing Warner’s staging to San Francisco. After apologizing in advance for any problems with her English, she did an excellent job of accounting for the revisionist qualities of Warner’s concept. This included both shifting the context of the narrative to a museum and extensive use of video to supplement the action on the stage.

All this led to a generous amount of informative discussion on questions of dramatic interpretation, particularly when the drama is as intense has Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play of the same name, which was based substantially on Sophocles’ drama, also of the same name. This discussion continued into the Q&A session with the audience, when a gentleman who had attended the final dress rehearsal (one of the benefits of SFO membership) made note of his difficulty in following the synopsis. (The audience for open rehearsals is given a single sheet with cast information on one side and a synopsis of the plot on the other. English supertitles are displayed during the rehearsal.)

This observation left me surprised and a bit perplexed. The dark fate of the House of Atreus had been part of the “core curriculum” for the first semester of my freshman year. We did not read Sophocles, but we did read all three of the Oresteia plays by Aeschylus. For that matter, we also read the Odyssey. I remember how, after Odysseus killed all of Penelope’s would-be Suitors, their souls all made a mass entrance into the underworld. As they come pouring in, Agamemnon is sitting off to the side, musing the the virtues of having a faithful wife!

The fact is that the story of Agamemnon’s children avenging his murder by his wife is a very old one. (That brief moment in the Odyssey strongly suggests that bards were singing about it long before Aeschylus turned it into a play.) Its inclusion as “core curriculum content” suggests that the story is not only very old but also very enduring (as enduring as, for example, the murder of Abel by Cain). Why should a synopsis of Strauss’ opera (which would basically be a synopsis of Sophocles’ play) be difficult to follow?

These circumstances strongly tempt me to get back on my hobby-horse about how the Internet has created a society that is not only ignorant of history but also proud of that ignorance. However, I may be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The issue is not so much a neglect of the past as it is a focus on the immediate present that is so intense that there is no room for anything else. For better or worse, there is a prevailing mindset that cannot seem to deal with any past more distant than the latest text message or tweet; and anything that is retained in memory only lasts long enough to spur a reaction. After that is is “out of sight, out of mind.”

In that context I find myself looking forward to seeing just what Warner and Kühnhold have done with the idea of creating a staging based on a museum. After all, museums serve as vessels for memories, just as writing does. As vessels, they bring the distant past into the immediate present, simply by virtue of our inhabiting the space that they occupy.

We used to benefit from those vessels for their ability to fend off ignorance of history. When Hofmannsthal wrote his play, he was, in many respects, building a “German museum” for an ancient Greek narrative, so ancient that it predated the writing of the first dramas. Strauss reconceived that “museum concept” through the music of his opera. Why should not the staging of that opera take that “museum concept” to yet another level? If we cannot turn the prevailing tide of ignorance of history, perhaps we can at least revive a bit of interest in the nature of memory.

On the Entropy of Stupidity

This morning ZDNet published an informative article by Steve Ranger entitled "Encryption: In the battle between maths and politics there is only one winner." This is a piece that offers an impressive amount of information concerned with the technology of encryption; but, sadly, it is one of those pieces that embodies Anna Russell's description of having been written by a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts." The problem is that, where politicians are concerned, expertise is rarely, if ever, the deciding factor.

The result is that Ranger got his headline wrong, simply because he does not appreciate what politics can do. Perhaps because he is based in the United Kingdom, he may not have heard of the powers of our country's state legislators. Ultimately, they have turned out to be even less enlightened than those Papal Inquisitors who defied Galileo. Having gone to high school in a suburb of Philadelphia, I could easily see the absurdity of the Scopes Monkey Trial; but long after that trial had become distant history, there was at least one state legislature that passed a law declaring pi to be equal to 22/7; and I seem to recall another that declared it equal to 3!

Because those who have devoted themselves to the value of mathematics and science as tools see truth as an objective concept, they tend to disregard the relevance of social factors. Thus, while social theorists have no trouble seeing reality as a social construct, mathematicians find such a proposition to be thoroughly absurd. Ironically, those of us who look beyond the objective can persist in believing that reality can be a social construct with the same certainty that Galileo persisted in believing that the earth moved!

None of this should trouble mathematicians to any great degree, because, so the most part, the social world does not care what they do. As long as calculations that deal with mortgages and taxes (for example) work out reliably, there is no reason to worry about what a theorem of abstract algebra does or does not tell us. Encryption, on the other hand, is very much a product of the objective truths of abstract algebra; and it is very unlikely that the sorts of politicians who like to monkey around with the value of pi are likely to get very far in a book like Cryptography for Dummies. (One wonders how far they would get with the Hacking for Dummies volume!)

So, yes, in Ranger's "battle," there is, indeed, only one winner. However, that winner is "political reality," rather than "objective reality." The more serious question is not who the winner is but how we, as a society, can live with the power of politics to trump objectivity, even when serious issues, such as the many uses of digital technology, are involved.

Memorializing Robert Silvers

As a reader of The New York Review for more decades than I recall, I did not have to be reminded of the significant role that Robert Silvers played in editing the content of that "paper," as he called it. Indeed, I had mixed feeling about reading all the memorial encomiums in the latest issue, even when they were by some of my favorite contributors. Nevertheless, one sentence by Zadie Smith struck me as worth singling out of attention:

He [Silvers] was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least it came at the price of a readable sentence.

This may be the best diagnosis of the current backlash against expertise that I have encountered thus far. Yes, Michael Gove was probably on to something when he declared, "We've had enough of experts;" but, like many who make such sweeping generalizations, he could not distinguish the baby from the bathwater. Rather, he was incorrectly generalizing expertise as the work of a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts," as Anna Russell put it in making fun of rabid Wagner fans. Indeed, the last time I invoked Russell's turn of phrase was in a reaction to a full-page advertisement by the Harvard University Press (in The New York Review, no less) touting the number of "experts" they had published.

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the feeling that, while I believe in the "readable sentence" as much as Silvers and Smith do/did, it is hard to avoid feeling that it is an endangered species. Ultimately, it is being driven to extinction by the proliferation of tweets, suggesting that the Darwinian process may be as applicable to mindsets as it is to organisms. Put another way, we now live in a world in which our very resources of information, broadcast media as well as the Internet, no longer required the "readable sentence" as a useful too for communication. Indeed, those who even care about "readable sentences" are probably, themselves, doomed to extinction over the next decade or so. How else are we to explain the dangerous expressions of extremism that we encounter wherever we choose to look, even at the ballot box?

Robert Taylor and Silicon Valley Myopia

Reading Steven Musil's obituary for Robert Taylor on the CNET Web site was a sobering experiences. Having worked on the fringes of the Internet even before that label was hung on it and having followed activities at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center dating from not long after the place was founded, Taylor's name was familiar to me, even if I never crossed paths with him. Ironically, though, when I finally found myself working in Palo Alto, it seemed almost as if he had fallen off the map.

For example, it seems as if Douglas Engelbart always managed to secure himself some turn in the ongoing buzz, even if that turf was relatively narrow. On the other hand, even though I was one of the early adapters of the Alta Vista search engine, it never occurred to me to associate it with Taylor. In many ways Taylor was the quintessential victim of Silicon Valley myopia. Silicon Valley would never have been what it was without Taylor's contributions. Nevertheless, there was a period about twenty years ago marked by an outpouring of papers about "the Silicon Valley phenomenon;" and Taylor's name never showed up in them.

I suspect one of the reasons that news of Taylor's death triggered my thoughts is that it has a remote connection to the book I am currently reading, Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989. I realize that one of the reasons I am so unhappy with the book is that, regardless of how well or poorly it is written, its thesis drives me up the wall. Put as succinctly as possible, the author seems to be making the case that, where music-making practices are concerned, promotion will trump achievement every time. (Yes, I chose that noun deliberately, because there is probably a corollary applicable to politics!)

Perhaps it was because of his connection to the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that Taylor did not have to obsess over promotion. However, one consequence of his work was that there were more people trying to get a slice of the funding pie while the pie itself did not grow accordingly. Of course where music is concerned, there was not much pie in the first place; but it does seem that the world the Internet made is one in which the idea of fair compensation has atrophied to a level that makes it barely recognizable. So one can appreciate that promotion may be more important than it once was, but it is hard to avoid anticipating a reduction ad absurdum when promotion is so important that it can be achieved even when one does not have anything to promote!

Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

Attacca Quartet Explores Music by Michael Ippolito on their New Album

This Friday Azica Records will release its second album of performances by the Attacca Quartet, whose members are violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee. As usual, the album has already been assigned a Web page on Amazon.com, which has been set up to process pre-orders. The title of the album is Songlines; and it consists of four compositions by Michael Ippolito, all of which are less than ten years old.

Azica’s first recording of Attacca came out in March of 2013. Its title (following the case conventions on the cover) was fellow traveler: the complete string quartet works of JOHN ADAMS. While Adams himself has endorsed Attacca’s performance of his music, I must confess to finding it a bit disconcerting to encounter the adjective “complete” applied to a composer who is still alive (particularly when the age of that composer is so close to my own)! Furthermore, if we take “string quartet works” to include music involving string quartet and orchestra, then the album overlooks “Absolute Jest,” which was first performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet performing with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) conducted by SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. (It would have been simpler, and more accurate, to say just “string quartets!”)

Nevertheless, it is worth dwelling on the “fellow traveler” part of the title, since Songlines seems to have been a product of such fellow travelers. Last year Attacca was named Quartet in Residence at Texas State University of Music, where Ippolito is currently Assistant Professor of Composition. So, at the very least, Ippolito and Attacca are “fellow travelers” in academic life. Nevertheless, all of the compositions on this album predate the arrival of Attacca at Texas State in 2016. (The group was formed in 2003 when all four members were students at the Juilliard School.)

This recording was my “first contact” with both the ensemble and the composer. I feel necessary to begin with a sort of disclaimer when it comes to the general topic of new music for string quartet. Those who follow this repertoire probably know that San Francisco is the “home base” of the Kronos Quartet; but it is also a city that enjoys a generous number of more recently-formed quartets that share Kronos’ interest in exploring and presenting new repertoire, often motivated by commission. To highlight two particularly appropriate examples, Friction Quartet celebrated its fifth anniversary this past September; and the Thalea String Quartet, which is currently quartet-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was featured as a “next generation” string quartet during KRONOS FESTIVAL 2017 at the beginning of this month.

This posed a difficulty when it came to listening to Ippolito’s music. The problem was that all five of the selections on this album suggested that the composer had been listening to too many Kronos recordings. This is probably a warped perception. However, it highlights the fact that, while there is, indeed, far more diversity to the string quartet repertoire than Kronos has covered, it was unclear that Ippolito had established a a voice that is distinctively his own in this genre. His biographical statement in the accompanying booklet suggests that he has cultivated a substantial catalog that includes orchestral writing, as well as chamber music; but, even across this single album, there is a sense that he has not explored very far beyond the bounds of a relatively limited comfort zone.

To be fair, this may be an occupational hazard in the world the Internet has made. Results of creativity are often subjected to almost immediate distribution on a global scale, meaning that just about anyone interested in “new music” has opportunities to explore far more than (s)he can handle. The downside to all this is that we run the risk of becoming a society in which the superficiality of “consumption” tends to trump the slower-paced culture of attentive listening. It used to be that universities provided sanctuary from market-based thinking that cares about little more than efficient production to satisfy consumption; but the “inconvenient truth” is that a university run by such market-based thinking often ends up questioning whether or not a music department provides “value for money.” In such desperate times my personal feelings about Ippolito’s work as a composer seem to pale against more serious questions concerned with whether or not our society is willing to view him as productive member.

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Will the World Economic Forum Have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment?

The television channel for BBC World Service News has begun to run self-promoting advertisements about its coverage of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This year’s gathering will begin on January 17 and will last for four days, meaning that it will probably conclude around the time that Donald Trump will be taking the Oath of Office for President of the United States on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Those who have followed this site for several years known that it has pulled no punches in writing about this event in the past. In 2014 it went as far as to compare Davos with Prince Prospero’s fortified castle from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death;” but Davos seems to be far more insulated from harsh (if not deadly) realities than Prospero’s castle. Even when the Forum invites the likes of Joe Stiglitz, it has been clear that the gulf between inviting a participant and paying attention to him/her continues to entail an unscalable width.

Still, one has to wonder how the rich and mighty have been so successful at maintaining their oblivion. Will their gambits continue to work in an age when Great Britain voted to secede from the European Union and the United States voted Trump to succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States? Think of the mileage the Brexit leader Michael Gove got out of his declaration that his followers “have had enough of experts.”

Davos has traditionally been the venue in which the rich and mighty get to drink from the deep pool of expertise and then go forth with their policies refreshed. The reality, however, it that, being all-too-human, they only listen to observations that reinforce opinions and strategies that they already have, which is why someone like Stiglitz can only survive by realizing that he is fighting a losing battle.

So the question to ask is whether or not those “wise men of Davos” can sustain a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment and recognize why so many people around the world chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the motto, “Good riddance, 2016?” Do they view Gove and Trump as nothing more than “outlier” points on whatever multidimensional landscape currently feeds their econometric models? Alternatively, has the “echo chamber” effect of social media combined with fallacious attempts to extract knowledge from Google snippets so numbed their capacity for decision-making that they do not even realize that the “wise men” epithet can only be read sarcastically? My guess is that Davos will continue to provide the cloud of ignorance that has nurtured its denizens for many years. The raison d’être behind the venue’s isolation may well be that it supports deep thinking by insulating attendees from the hassles of day-to-day life; but history has taught us that it is just another echo chamber where world leaders in both business and politics can reassure each other that they are all making wise decisions without worrying about how well those decisions mesh with down-to-earth reality.

Orchestra Strikes in the Age of “Citizen Journalism”

Following the news about the current strike by the members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) reminded me of what it was like being a writer covering concert performances during the last such strike in my home town of San Francisco. That was an occasion when my colleagues and I found ourselves as loose ends, committed to covering concerts that we knew were not going to happen through the writing both previews and reviews. On March 13, 2013, contract negotiations for the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) reached an impasse that led to the musicians going out on strike. As the city’s primary outlet for print journalism, the San Francisco Chronicle did a reasonably admirable job of trying to collect the “basic facts” and align them with how they were being interpreted from both labor and management points of view. Those of us working through the Internet were not so lucky. SFS was quite industrious when it came to putting out press releases. However, because the Communications Department was part of the “back office,” the dispatches we received carried only a single point of view. On the other hand the musicians themselves had to be cautious about saying too much to anyone for fear of jeopardizing any interactions that were still struggling to take place.

In politics this comes down to what is sometimes called “owning the narrative.” When one side of a negotiation dominates access to the media, it can be very difficult for the other side to establish that it, too, has a narrative. The one thing that we in San Francisco knew was that the musicians did not want to disappoint their audiences. As a result they arranged to commit their own time to giving performances in venues other than Davies Symphony Hall, and writers like myself and some of my colleagues could pitch in to get out the word about when and where such performances would be taking place.

A little over three and a half years have elapsed since the SFS strike was settled after about half a month of time on strike. For those of us viewing the PSO strike from the other side of the country, it would appear that narrative ownership has achieved a more balanced state. PSO has a blog site, but it does not take the objective reader long to realize that the narratives on this blog are coming from management. In this case, however, there is also now a site called Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Within that site there is a STRIKE UPDATE division, which provides the musicians with the opportunity to present the narratives that they “own.” This means that readers “on the outside” can examine the numbers that have been released on the PSO blog and then read an item-by-item rebuttal from the musicians.

This is fine as far as it goes; but, as any number of philosophers (going all the way back to Socrates) have observed, “understanding” is almost never just a matter of “having the facts.” There are any number of reasons why opposing sides should be developing different narratives; and they cannot be reduced to trivial distinctions between haves and have-nots. The problem is that a fair amount of expertise is required to read either side of the story, not only for its “facts” but also for the implications and consequences that arise if those facts are accepted. Asking someone whose primary interest is in listening to the performance of music in a concert setting to untangle the knots of conflicting narratives is about as absurd as asking a labor negotiator to sit in for the striking concertmaster.

We are thus faced with the classical problem of an Internet that allows us to see more and understand less. Put another way, we, as detached observers, may have more resources that we can consult; but that does not imply that we know what to do with them. All we can do is watch from a distance and try to make sense of it all, possibly with input from those better informed than we are who also happen to have a certain degree of objective detachment. In other words, things are not much different from the way they are when the news sources are trying to report a delicate hostage negotiation. In this case, however, the hostages are the concert-going public.

Using Hypermedia to Write about Music Performances

This morning I found myself allowed to observe an exchange between a colleague and one of his readers. The reader had expressed a desire that my colleague could have augmented his text with sound files, which is a question dear to my own heart. How can any of us do a satisfactory job of writing about a listening experience without providing the reader with appropriate listening matter?

To be fair, technology is not on the side of those of us doing the writing. The authoring tool I had at my disposal when I was writing for Examiner.com basically allowed me to incorporate one image and embed one video from YouTube. These would be placed at the top of the article, and that was that. The tool I use to write this particular article is a bit better. I can embed both images and video at the most appropriate location in the text, but the only way I can incorporate audio is if it happens to be the soundtrack of a video.

Charles Rosen was in a somewhat more advantageous position when he was writing for The New York Review of Books. The editors created what amounted to a blogging site for their authors; and on December 28, 2011, Rosen contributed an article entitled “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time.” This amounted to a review of a recital given in honor of Carter’s 103rd birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Rosen embedded four audio excerpts from the concert into this article. However, he could only do this because the 92nd Street Y had opened an account of SoundCloud, where audio files may be shared in a manner similar to the sharing of video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks that Rosen created for his article no longer work (although there is a link to an MP3 file taken from another recital at the very end of the article, which, as of this writing, is still functional). The good news, however, is that the Web page of the excerpts that Rosen cited are still on the SoundCloud site. Thus, while this is a step in the right direction, it also demonstrates that we have a long way to go in using real-time media to make a case when writing about a performance.

Most important is the question of intellectual property. The resource that Rosen used had been created by the producers of the recital, which reinforces the announcement most of us know by heart prior to any concert, making it clear that we should not be using our personal devices to capture any portion of the performance. (I rather like the kind explanation that Kathy Barr gives before every Old First Concerts recital, in which she explains that holding up a video capture device blocks the view of others.) The fact is that those of us charged with writing about a performance do not have the right to create examples with media capture technology, nor should we. After all, time spent fussing with equipment takes away from paying attention to the performance!

However, even when a third party provides “authorized” media, there are still problems in how those media can be used effectively. Once again I must raise the issue that what we are doing as writers is tightly coupled to an experience that depends heavily, if not entirely, on the flow of time; and what we commit to any document can never be anything but static. The best way to appreciate this distinction is to consider what happens when the static medium is not present. Having had to sit through more lectures about music than I can enumerate, first in classrooms and later at conferences, I am struck by how often it is the case that the lecturer will play a recording and then talk over it, saying things like “Now!” just before the particular moment in which (s)he wants us to pay attention to that recording. (Even with all that support, there will still be cases in which listener may not be sure what was brought to his/her attention.)

The point is that capture and reproduction will never be enough. If one wishes to explain a time-based experience, then one must do it by creating another time-based experience. This means that we have to stop typing at our keyboards and learn the craft of audio and video editing suites. Writing as an old dog that is willing to learn new tricks, I must still confess that all this turns the effort of documenting into a substantial project, My work habits are such that I want to do my writing about an experience while that experience is still fresh in my mind. If I spend too much time assembling my media support, that freshness may wear off; and I may find myself losing my grip on the argument I wished to make in the first place.

This leads to the conclusion that, flawed as they may be, words are still the preferred medium, even when we are charged with accounting for a time-based experience. There is no “method” that serves all of us. After all, there is as much diversity in the “experiencing” as there is in the experience itself. The bottom line is that our own memories are the most valuable resource when it comes to documenting a time-based experience. For my own part I have my own techniques for trying to “reconstruct the past” before I begin writing; but I have no reason to assume that any of my colleagues have techniques that are even remotely similar to my own. Nevertheless, we all do what we can, always well aware that some of those experiences are much harder to document than others!

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

Speaking Truth to Power is no Guarantee that Power will Comprehend

This past Tuesday James Gleick put up a fascinating post on the NYR Daily blog. His title was "What Libraries Can (Still) Do;" and it amounted to a valuable analysis of how the resource of a public library could be qualitatively different from that of a computer connected to the Internet, emphasizing the positive value of that difference. He then signed off with a zinger of a punch line:

The masters of Internet commerce—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple—sometimes talk as though they’re building a new society, where knowledge is light-speed and fungible, but a marketplace is not a society.

This allowed him to hit squarely on the head a nail in desperate need of being hit. Unfortunately, that desperation has a lot to do with the prevailing ignorance among those "masters of Internet commerce." We have known for some time that the movers and shakers in the world of the Internet have been blithely ignorant of the social world. Many of them might even attribute their success to that ignorance. The bottom line is that they are so fixated on the marketplace that they believe that the very concept of society is outmoded, if not downright counterproductive. Thus, whenever social disruption rears its head, whether it involves death threats, identity theft, or just plain harassment, the "masters of Internet commerce" turn a blind eye and hold to their faith that the workings of the marketplace will take care of everything. Unfortunately, the result goes beyond the disappearance of society (and, along with it, any viable sense of the concept of governance) from the Internet. Because the Internet is so ubiquitous, society no longer signifies in the world at large except among terrorist groups for whom cultures that have neglected both society and governance can now be recognized as easy targets.

What Would Will Rogers Say?

My favorite Will Rogers quote would have to be the following:

I do not support any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

These days it seems as if the Republicans are setting the bar for a "disorganized political party" and seem to just keep raising it. Could it be that the Internet has turned us into a culture that prefers anarchy to governance, even if the side-effects of anarchy include the laundry list of social abuses that now take place regularly on pages of the World Wide Web? Once upon a time the "futurists" were predicting that, by giving every individual his or her own voice, we would finally achieve a "true" democracy. Ironically, those futurists seemed blithely ignorant on how Athenian democracy was first conceived and how it actually worked. Rather than democracy, we have abundant opportunities for the unbridled execution of power, leading to the detriment of many for the sake of those who can shout louder than anyone else. At least the Democrats can take comfort that Will Rogers no longer can make fun of them.

Is Eric Schmidt the Donald Trump of Technology?

There was a time when I could always count on Eric Schmidt (now Executive Chairman of Alphabet, the corporation formerly known as Google) to get my dander up every time he made a public statement. However, I see that the last time I had such a reaction is more than a year ago; and I was kind of thankful that he was finally allowing me more time to concentrate on my interest in the performance of music. This weekend, however, Schmidt was at it again, using the BBC News Web site as his bully pulpit for a muddled sermon about artificial intelligence that betrayed just how much the use of that noun "intelligence" is little more than a con job.

This morning, writing for CNET News, Lance Whitney decided to focus of Schmidt's interest in music recommendation and his accusation that Apple employs "elite tastemakers." As usual, Schmidt offered up a flamboyant display of his own ignorance. Anyone who still believes that the Internet is involved in anything other than efficient marketing must be under the spell of some pernicious Kool-Aid. Whether it involves ranking search results (not to mention displaying those results in a frame of advertising links) or making recommendations to "music consumers" (not to be confused with those who actually take the time to listen to music), the game is never about predicting future trends, as Schmidt seems to think. The fundamental premise of marketing is that consumers are sheep, and all they need is a sheepdog to follow. What this means is that recommendation need involve little more than what everyone is consuming now, rather than what they are likely to be consuming in the future. When a trend starts to form, no matter for what reason, technology can amplify it; and this basically makes for a larger body of happy consumers (not to mention the performer involved in the trend). This is not so much rocket science as freshman statistics, and Schmidt probably knows this full well as it applies to the core competency behind Google.

What is more interesting than whether or not Schmidt "gets" any concepts involved "knowledge-based" technology is that he seems to have latched on to learning the rhetorical style of Donald Trump. Having seen how Trump has managed to garner so much attention by saying so many outrageous (not to mention inconsistent) things, it would appear the Schmidt has decided to get in on that game. Could it be that his BBC gig was little more than a rehearsal for a desired appearance on Fox News?

Clash of the Idiots

Gary Wills had a great post on NYRblog yesterday. The title was "Holy Ignorance," which he appropriated from Olivier Roy, a French anthropologist who specialized in studying belief systems. The basic argument is that fundamentalists are immune to argument based on reason. They see the use of logic to justify any with which they disagree as a test of the strength of their faith, which makes them hold to their beliefs with even greater strength. Wills wrote this in an analysis of the Pope’s decision to write an encyclical on climate change and its connection to selfishness. Almost immediately five Catholic Republicans who are part of the rush to candidacy in the next Presidential election denounced the Pope for knowing nothing about science, regardless of the fact that they knew even less (even collectively)! Clearly, Wills saw all five of them as evidence of “holy ignorance!”

What is interesting, however, is that a parallel line of argument can be developed about Muslim fundamentalists. This, in turn, may tell us something about what makes IS tick. While they are not necessarily grounded in Islam, their goal is to subvert all Western forms of government in their territory and replace it with a caliphate. This actually turns out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they are determined to reinstate a pre-Enlightment approach to governance based on little more than raw power. However, at the same time they know they can appeal to Muslim values to win others to their cause. Ironically, they do all this through some of the most sophisticated Internet advertising (yes, that is ultimately what it is) yet to be designed.

Perhaps the Pope should pay more attention to the book of Revelations. The prediction of the great war of Gog in the land of Magog could well involve Christian Fundamentalists in battle with Muslim Fundamentalists (hence the inspiration for my own choice of title for this post)! That is quite a change from the early nineteenth-denture hasidim, who thought Napoleon was Gog (worth remembering on this anniversary of Waterloo)!

HBO Becomes Part of its Own Story (again)

HBO seems to be running up an interesting track record when it comes from taking the news as a point of departure and then becoming the news. I suppose I was first aware of it when John Oliver ran a monologue about net neutrality that concluded by encouraging viewers to make their thoughts known to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), explaining how they could do so through the Internet. It was pretty simple, since the FCC had set of a site for collecting comments; and the viewer response to Oliver was massive enough to crash that site. More recently, The Jinx led to a revival of attempts to investigate the role of Robert Durst in several unsolved murder cases.

Last night, however, Oliver raised the stakes to an unexpected height. His show had been off the air for a couple of weeks, and he had told viewers that this would be the case. Last night we found out why: Oliver had traveled to Russia to interview Edward Snowden on the issue of government surveillance. This turned out to be a major undertaking, and the show ran about fifteen minutes longer than usual. As had been the case with net neutrality, Oliver began with an extended monologue with his personal stamp of low humor aimed at bringing awareness to admittedly complex issues. There was also a fair amount of low humor in the Snowden segment, but not enough to mask when things got serious. Oliver even persistently argued that at least some of Snowden's actions could justifiably be called irresponsible, and he even managed to milk a reluctant acknowledgement from Snowden. Nevertheless, he let Snowden say his piece about the irresponsibility of current surveillance activities; and, to his credit, Snowden gave some rather good explanations for the why and how the National Security Agency could get away with doing what they did (and are probably still doing).

I suspect that the most important result of the show was that Oliver went a long way towards undermining the efforts of our government to demonize Snowden. It is clear that Snowden will never set foot in the United States as long as he runs the risk of being tried for treason and then executed. Nevertheless, his is a major voice in any debate that takes place over the complex relationship between security and privacy; and last night he demonstrated that he is given more to calm and rational speech than to the strident rants that have become so popular in our excuse for national discourse.

The net neutrality broadcast had particular impact because it ended with an action item. Last night there was also a need for action regarding a legislative stand on the content of the Patriot Act that must be reviewed by June 1. However, Oliver did not push for a write-in campaign, because it would be more difficult in this case. Therefore, the major impact of his broadcast may have been to demonstrate to the so-called "news" networks that neither Snowden's voice nor the issues he has raised can be ignored if we are to maintain even the pretense of a free society. Unfortunately, this is a matter of considerable complexity. Perhaps Oliver's next program should discuss how our country has allowed its educational system to deteriorate to a point that we no longer have the skilled minds to take on such complexity.

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

If it Ain't One Thing …

I have been braced for the fact that the move to Yosemite on my MacBook Pro would be unpleasant, but I have to confess that I was unprepared for the quantum leap in unpleasantness that I would face. The bottom line is that Yosemite is such a mess that, for the most part, Apple's own Help Desk staff are powerless to be of much assistance. In this brave new world the only assistance comes from discussion groups, and the best ones are the ones not based on Apple Web sites. Thus, when I had to contend with an installation that hung after only 50% of the new system had loaded, I discovered that I learned most of what I needed to know by reading discussion groups while waiting on hold. My telephone connection went through right about when I figured out what I had to do, which means that, at least, I was able to verify the validity of my actions before taking them (with a guy who could barely articulate his words clearly, possibly as a result of battle fatigue). Since then I have had to contend with folder management taking over my entire machine and a Java inconsistency that interfered with my using a piece of software vital for my Examiner.com activities. The latest had to do with iTunes starting spontaneously, leading my wife to ask why she was hearing music coming from the computer room while I was out of our condo.

There has been word in the technology news that Tesla has been recruiting Apple hardware talent. I hope they are not doing the same for software. The idea of cars out there on the roads running software written by the folks that brought the world Yosemite makes my blood run cold.

Does the Internet Undermine Utilitarianism?

Tim Parks' NYRBlog post about the Charlie Hebdo affair, "The Limits of Satire," basically tries to analyze the situation from a utilitarian point of view. In other words he is more interested in the usefulness of satire than in questions of freedom of speech (or, for that matter, hate speech) that have occupied the mass media ever sense the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office. He argues that the utilitarian objective of satire is "to produce an enlightened perspective on events, not to start riots." While I do not question this position, I feel it overlooks the extent to which it has been undermined by the Internet. When Jonathan Swift wrote his "Modest Proposal" essay in 1729 (the case study behind Parks' analysis), he could reasonably assume that his readers would be members of an "enlightened" class of Englishmen, rather than either the starving Irish or a coven of insane gourmet chefs. American satirists, such as Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, probably also take for granted that most of their regular viewers are similarly "enlightened" and thoughtful, looking for something other than having their opinions reinforced by Fox. The problem is that, thanks to the Internet's capacity for mass distribution of content to sites about which we know little if anything, such content is now encountered by less "enlightened" audiences; and, more often than not, the consequences are not good.

Parks gave another telling example. After it appeared, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was just another book, enjoyed by many readers and respected by many others. Then it got on the Booker shortlist, and the newspaper India Today decided that it was now worthy of attention. They ran an interview with Rushdie, after which a large swath of South Asian readers learned that the characters included prostitutes named after Muhammad's wives. That was the one small step that led to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, putting the author's life at risk.

I take the Rushdie story as a case study in pre-Internet mass communication. Charlie Hebdo, on the other hand, is a post-Internet story. Whatever benefits satire may provide for "enlightened" discussion, we can no longer assume that it is read only by those those respect such an enlightened stance.