Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
Does anyone recall Gissing’s New Grubb Street? The book ends with the successful writer embarking upon the new commuter magazine, Chit-Chat, and abandoning the long slough work of novel writing and real thought. Chit chat opposes thought because it surfs (surfaces?) the top of the head and ignores the plumb of heart. Goes without saying that Gissing found this offensive, and equally, that he found it inevitable, and equally that he probably would have wanted it to be he winning, for none of the authors depicted in this risibly bleak Naturalist account is particularly rewarding or otherwise worth copying, and none is even as sexy or powerful as London’s Martin Eden, which takes a different–American?–Naturalist take.
Do I see Twitter as chit chat? It *is* the vehicle of fast talk and it can encourage the semblance of conversation, and conversation–fast–is fun. But tweeting is not real dialogue, just as we can always discern when someone talks to his phone vs his friend face to face. It’s speech snippified. Okay, no problem there. But it is also not particularly revolutionary, just as SMS wasn’t–and has effectively, already, disappeared.
People will always find fast if not better (wrong evaluative) ways of communicating or seeming to communicate. “Satisfactory” comes to mind rather than “better.”
What do I like doing? I like being at parties or seminars or classes or meetings and holding multiple conversations simultaneously, especially if they are wildly disparate topics; I like being more than one person at any time, I suppose, where “person” is the spun, woven thread of a single conversation. I like losing myself in talk.
I think a lot of people are like this. Twitter seeks to provide the means by which one can effectuate that. But it doesn’t really. I can see something like that one day doing it perfectly, but in the meantime, one has to wonder: what’s wrong with just having a party, symposium, class, seminar, meeting, conference–with seeing people. And talking.
Leaked cables show U.S. tried, failed to organize against Ecuador compulsory licensing
Leaked cables show U.S. tried, failed to organize against Ecuador compulsory licensing.
Compulsory licensing:
“Compulsory licensing authorizes generic competition with patented, monopoly protected drugs. Generic competition reduces costs and enables public agencies to scale-up treatment and other services.”
The losers are the untold millions unable to pay for the drugs they need and, what’s more, shut out of any future that promises a better world. But it’s not a surprise. So much of the idea of the nation formed and reformed over the last 150 years is about presenting a theatre of war for private corporations, not for “the people.” Indeed, the people who count, who matter, are already, in this logic, part of the moneyed interests. Yet, I’m hopeful, for the very fact that Ecuador is doing this, and that Brazil has also intervened with a not too dissimilar option, and that sites such as infojustice.org exists, and that there could even be such dramatic revolutions in northern Africa and in the Arab Gulf states, all these things, recuperations of the enthusiasm we saw prior to 9/11 and the Iraq War, all give me hope. There is a sense of social justice.
Scientists Cast Doubt on TSA Tests of Full-Body Scanners – ProPublica
Scientists Cast Doubt on TSA Tests of Full-Body Scanners – ProPublica.
Why is an open government policy and programme important? Because, as we see from the ProPublica article and from the very recent history of the Japanese nuclear reactor responses and suppressions and collusions and misdeeds, governments suppress information that affects the wellbeing of their nations’ residents. It’s not a matter of ignorance or accident. It’s a question of actual intentional suppression.
I tend to believe things are getting better, for a couple of reasons. One is that there are tools now that more people have access to and also know how to use, and there is a sufficiently large enough audience for this sort of information. (Proportionally, it may be quite a lot smaller than before, but the actual numbers, the quantity, is what counts.) Second, the *point* of government is evolving and clarifying. As we continue to emerge to a kind of post-enlightenment democratic complex, one less woven with racist and racialist threads, though these are obviously still colouring the material of our being, to one that actually allows us to claim as our identity our ambitions. Yes, that’s wildly optimistic.
On Our Radar: Nations Race to Carve Up Arctic – NYTimes.com
On Our Radar: Nations Race to Carve Up Arctic – NYTimes.com.
And why is there not a flood of science fiction works on this matter? There will be wars, visible or not, bloody or not.
Harper wins majority, CBC projects – Canada Votes 2011 – CBC News
Harper wins majority, CBC projects – Canada Votes 2011 – CBC News.
This is bleak news indeed. Only good part is that Layton is now the Opposition, not Ignatieff.
Data Privacy, Put to the Test in a Supreme Court Case – NYTimes.com
Data Privacy, Put to the Test in a Supreme Court Case – NYTimes.com.
This case is enormously important. One way of looking at it is not from the perspective of “control,” as in, “I want to control my public persona,” which puts a lot of weight on “control,” but on the similar dynamic of what it means to be(come) a commodity. It’s not quite the same as chattel slavery; hardly. The object in question–the consumer who leaves a trail of identity constituting the soul which holds him to account–is not being asked to do things. But the loss of privacy here, which is tantamount to the commercialisation of public identity by others in despite of the will of the person (and we can further include the marketing of genetic code, blood, and other body tissues: what’s the difference?), is effectively a modern form of slavery by other means.
The point I’m trying to make is oddly not the libertarian one that we absolutely own our own selves, but rather the more complex one that we never do. And for that reason, we need to establish defensible boundaries of identity, much as in the same way we have set perimeters defining the limits of our home, our family, even “our” nation. All these are conventions, though “family” is also probably a thing that comes before and after convention. But its extent, and the degree to which we can act on and with it, is a thing of convention, a thing, that is, of social definition and negotiation.
Sperm quality and counts worsening in Finland
Sperm quality and counts worsening in Finland.
This is very worrying. Testis cancer–testicular cancer, such as Lance Armstrong recovered from–is curable, even if caught relatively late, but also increasing in incidence. It used to be quite uncommon.
And sperm count have been dropping in more and more places….. suggesting the environmental pressures—like pesticides, plastics, organophosphates, etc.–are having generational consequences. It’s not just the current generation, in short, that is affected; it’s subsequent ones.
The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post – NYTimes.com
The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post – NYTimes.com.
The Carr-Benkler wager relates to the economic significance and sustainability of “free” or volunteer content contribution, with Benkler arguing on behalf of volunteer peer production, a k a, “free” content contribution, vs professional (and implicitly for fee) work.
2011 was supposed to be the year when the wager is to be called….
I.B.M.’s Watson – Computers Close In on the ‘Paris Hilton’ Problem – NYTimes.com
I.B.M.’s Watson – Computers Close In on the ‘Paris Hilton’ Problem – NYTimes.com.
It’s an interesting point, and IBM has earned the feather in its cap. But it’s really silly to think that the contest means anything beyond the immediacy of the sophistication of the hardware demonstrated.
And if there is anything to take from this it’s probably simply that our present education system is lousy, or that factoids do not make the human, or that the biggest dirty secret about what makes humans human is that they are cheap. Historically, humans have been by and large cheaper than beasts of burden (when those were available) and beasts of war. Humans can mostly follow instructions better than, say, a cat, but probably not as well as a smart border collie (and they are all smart). Ask a shepherd which he’d rather have: a stupid human or smart dog.
What has made humans distinct is the effort put into that question by religious organisations that have sought to distinguish humans from everything else; and not all religions, of course, have done this. Indeed, numerically speaking, most have not. So we can look instead to the very simplest fact of human distinction, and it’s simply the conscious boasting of it (“I am, I think, I am, I think!”), coupled with humans’ amazing ability to hang around, decade after decade, while even the smartest dog will never see its third decade.
I.B.M.’s Watson – Computers Close In on the ‘Paris Hilton’ Problem – NYTimes.com
I.B.M.’s Watson – Computers Close In on the ‘Paris Hilton’ Problem – NYTimes.com.
It’s an interesting point, and IBM has earned the feather in its cap. But it’s really silly to think that the contest means anything beyond the immediacy of the sophistication of the hardware demonstrated.
And if there is anything to take from this it’s probably simply that our present education system is lousy, or that factoids do not make the human, or that the biggest dirty secret about what makes humans human is that they are cheap. Historically, humans have been by and large cheaper than beasts of burden (when those were available) and beasts of war. Humans can mostly follow instructions better than, say, a cat, but probably not as well as a smart border collie (and they are all smart). Ask a shepherd which he’d rather have: a stupid human or smart dog.
What has made humans distinct is the effort put into that question by religious organisations that have sought to distinguish humans from everything else; and not all religions, of course, have done this. Indeed, numerically speaking, most have not. So we can look instead to the very simplest fact of human distinction, and it’s simply the conscious boasting of it (“I am, I think, I am, I think!”), coupled with humans’ amazing ability to hang around, decade after decade, while even the smartest dog will never see its third decade.
newspeak 