An I.B.M.'er Learns the Joys of Forgetting Email

Luis Suarez is a "social computing evangelist" for I.B.M. that in the New York Times about cutting back on email. Instead? He largely used social networks, the telephone, and even occasional trips to someone else's desk. Sorry, but it sounds as though he largely substituted other forms of electronic communication, each with its own strengths and limitations. But I guess you have to consider the atmosphere in which he works and lives:

I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall. The postings in response were overwhelmingly positive — but I also encountered some skepticism. Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.

Good gravy, Gretel, how ever do you think he's know what we're saying if he doesn't click Reply? Pardon my cynicism, but to me this is a pretty lightweight piece. Either try completely foregoing email or not, but this is the "email lite" program, and not terribly interesting.

The Thoughtful Side of Cassanova

The Guardian has an article on a new biography of Cassanova. Some newly reopened archives in Prague are providing food for literal thought. Aside from Cassanova's legendary amorous adventures (which included a few men as well as women, supposedly), he was an otherwise busy man:

In addition to the vast History of My Life, he wrote a total of 42 books and plays, including a translation of the Iliad, a five-volume science-fiction novel, mathematical treatises and opera libretti. He was also a committed follower of the Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish cult holding a deep fascination for him to the extent that he attributed his life's successes to its power.

A Picture Is Worth All the Words on the Covers (and Between Them)

There's a great piece on the blog of Rob Haggart, a photography director, about how magazines now go about choosing what goes on the cover, from the headlines and come-ons to the almost inevitable celebrity. Here's a taste that shows you how insane the editorial process has become:

I look forward to the day when magazines can return to serving their audience and not the newsstand. Until then you’re stuck with 109, free, biggest, hot, ultimate, travel, toys, secrets, great, perfect, best, sex, abs, weight-loss, getaway, new, insider, easy, delicious, shortcuts, paired with a celebrity you keep seeing over and over on the covers of magazines.

Perhaps it's time for people to write (alright, email) editors and demand an end to the tripe, because I really wonder how well they sell, and whether the magazines even try to see if they can understand their readers, or if they just assume that they already know, so there's little reason to experiment or - gasp! - talk to the great mass of us unwashed.

Journalists Outsourcing Their Own Work

There are days I end up scratching my head, wondering what could possibly happen next. And then I get my answer. Today, it's in the form of a newspaper columnist in Texas who has just resigned because the person who had been doing some ghostwriting for him finally asked the editor for a byline. Here's a bit form the story that ran in the Guardian:

On his own blog, Burr tried to write the scandal off as a case of his being "a little overzealous"- which is an interesting way of describing getting someone else to do your work for you.

This, to me, is like becoming a shoemaker, and then hiring someone else to make the shoes for you because you get tired of doing so. Why bother to keep doing it?

Print While You Wait: Bookstores and Print-On-Demand

Blackwell's, a so-called high-street bookseller in London, will be installing book printing machines throughout its 60 stores in the UK, according to the Guardian. The current speed is 40 pages per minute, but a new model expected later this year should double the speed. Imagine wanting any of a million books and waiting 7 to 10 minutes to get what you want. It sure beats express shipping.

R.I.P. George Carlin

The comic who focused on social satire and a general disappointment with the species died last night of heart failure at 71. His routine "7 words you can't say on television" actually held literary legal weight. It actually became the official list of what broadcasters could not permit out over the air:

Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad.

Seeing them in print doesn't do them justice, because Carlin was a spoken word artist. It was the rhythms, the emphasis, the tones that helped make the routines so funny. Here's a link to the text of the original routine. But if you'd like to hear him, try this Youtube link.

Scientific Journal Gets Hoodwinked

The journal Materials Today in its July/August issue is running an opinion piece about "evidence" that Thomas Edison was involved in the murder of a rival. But a closer read shows that the victim was more likely Materials Today. This is a post I did a couple of days ago on my photography blog (as the topic was movie technology), but I thought that people here might find it interesting.

How Many Libraries Is Your Author In?

Someone on a writers' board pointed out this resource: a site that purports to tell you in how many libraries you can find the work of a given author. I have no idea how accurate this is, but it's amusing, none the less.

Great American Think-Off

An Oregon man won this year's Great American Think-Off. Craig Allen, a "retail instructor," came out first in a debate over the question: "Does immigration strengthen or threaten the United States?" The other contestants included a student from Minnesota, another from Minnesota who just got out of grad school, and a Tennessee alumni director. The statements by each of the participants can be found at the link. And just think - not a word about wearing a flag pin on your label.

Welcoming Bloomsday with Parody

There are people who take the mickey out of the work of James Joyce. There are people who out-and-out make fun of the Dummies series of books. But never before had I heard of anyone who fused the concepts together: Ulysses for Dummies. After you've read though the entire opus in about 73 seconds, possibly tarrying a mite for the simply animations, you can then spend your day with the real thing. Quick, the narrative started at 8:00 o'clock this morning.

New Author Signing Record

Ken Follett, a British writer who is apparently popular in Spain, set a new world's record for an author signing copies of a book at a single sitting, knocking off 2,050 in three-and-a-half hours at Madrid's book fair, according to an AFP story. The old record of 1,600 ... was also held by Follett.

Missouri Lawmakers Want to Outlaw Cyberbullying

This seems to me one of the biggest opportunities for unintended consequences and no good deed going unpunished: Missouri lawmakers want to criminalize cyberbullying:

"It used to be that adults would pooh-pooh bullying as a phase, but we're seeing increasing violent actions resulting from it," Sanchez said in an interview.

"The problem with cyberbullying is that kids aren't even safe in their own home, because they're being harassed through the computer or cell phones 24/7 potentially," she said.

How about turning off the damned computer and taking an interest in what your kids do online? How can you possibly define "cyberbullying" in such a way as to prevent abuse without completely tossing out protected freedom of speech?

Journalist Crowd Ambushes Bill O'Reilly Employee Trying to Ambush Bill Moyers

Oh, this was really amusing - a video clip of a producer for Bill O'Reilly trying to ambush and browbeat Bill Moyers for not going on O'Reilly's show on O'Reilly's terms. The producer kept using loaded questions to color the conversation and attack Moyers while claiming to be asking something straightforward. Moyers, being no fool, didn't back down and nicely said that he'd go on O'Reilly's show if O'Reilly would first go on his - for an hour, completely unedited. That's a tough format if you like to browbeat and make yourself look right. And then the journalists who were attending the conference where this happened started following the producer and used the same techniques on him. The guy kept walking - no wonder. Whethr you agree with Moyers's politics or not, I think it's clear that you don't play word games with someone who has been using them for as long as he has.

LA Times to Turn Sunday Magazine into Ad Shill

I read a story in the New York Times that made me sad

The Los Angeles Times has made plans to transfer control of its monthly magazine from its newsroom to its business operations and to replace the magazine’s entire editorial staff, according to two executives at the newspaper.

I've never written for the LA Times at all, let alone the magazine, but I do remember a conversation with a past editor, Martin Smith - a real gentleman who was praised by every writer I knew who worked for him and who, it was clear, had an understanding of how to focus articles for his audience.

But the LA Times has been a mess for a while, from what I've heard - and from what has appeared in the news. I'm sure this is all part of the roiling at the Tribune organization, which owns the paper. Sam Zell bought the company and is certain, I'm sure, that he knows what is best for the company. Unfortunately, many people who are primarily investors think they know how to make companies run well, and they often don't, particuarly when it comes to publishing. Some time back, I had a conversation with an editor I knew and wrote for. We were discussing the business magazine market and how badly so mny titles seemed to be doing. This highly experienced man was then editor in chief for a business magazine which had been started by someone with more money than sense, because Mr. Pockets kept second-guessing everything that the experienced editors were doing. The result was complete and total disaster.

A magazine or newspaper is an odd tye of business, because there are three communities to which it is responsible. One, absolutely, is the set of advertisers. They need to know that their financial support will translate into a return on their investment.

But that doesn't happen in a vacuum. To be useful, the publication needs a reading public. The money comes as a consequence of being well-read and well-regarded, and if owners keep under-cutting the editorial mission, they eliminate the ability to satisfy the public, and so the ability to attract advertisers.

A publication also has a responsibility to the community and to public discourse. It is by far the most hazy to accountants, but it is why many people care about a publication and why they are willing to buy it. Ignore the mission, and you might as well close shop and start the fire sale tomorrow.

The plan for the magazine was set in motion months ago. A new editor and others were hired, future issues were planned, and mock-up covers were made — all without the knowledge of anyone in the newsroom, including the top editor, Russ Stanton, the executives said. Mr. Stanton and other high-ranking editors learned of the plan last week, they said.

But the executives who described the plan cautioned that it might have changed since last week, after editors raised objections.

They said that Mr. Stanton, after hearing about the move, asked the publisher of The Times, David D. Hiller, and the president of the newspaper, Jack D. Klunder, to change the name of the publication, which is now called Los Angeles Times Magazine. He argued that to keep the name would lend the newsroom’s credibility to a product it did not control.

Can you imagine taking over a manufacturer and telling the factory workers and management that the marketing department would now run things? Just because someone can make money in real estate doesn't mean that he can necessarily do anything else. It's just that he has enough money to prove by example how bad his decisions can be. Then comes all the money trying to prove that it was the fault of everyone else. But when you're the CEO, you are responsbile. You cannot take the praise if you aren't willing to accept the blame.

When Broad Surveillance Changes Life

There's an interesting entry from a German blogger about broad telecommunications surveillance in Germany and how it has changed behavior:

Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime.

In at least one study, close to three-quarters of people knew about the data recording, 11 percent was already avoiding phone, cell phone, or email for certain communications, and over half "said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention." What happens when many people won't look for help when they need it because they fear telephoning or emailing someone, possibly even to set up an appointment?

Gamers to Decide SciFi Show Directions

The SciFi Channel is combining a new television series with a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to create a hybrid entertainment that hasn't worked before, but might this time, according to an LA Times report. Instead of having people watch once a week, the channel hopes to get them involved all week long, with the way fans play the game shaping what happens on the show:

"This is the Holy Grail for us, without a doubt," said Dave Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel, which has teamed with Trion World Network, an on-the-rise gaming company based in Redwood City, Calif. "This is groundbreaking, and I don't say that lightly."

Sci Fi Channel executives are mum about the title of the show and game and their premise, but they do hint that it will be set 80 to 100 years in the future on an Earth that looks very different from today. The team has summer 2010 as the targeted launch; more details are expected to be announced in July at Comic-Con International in San Diego.

It's an interesting concept, and one treading on ground that has and hasn't worked out in the past. The American Idol and Survivor type shows have been wildly successful, letting audience members vote on the results. But television and online gaming are quite different. One way the studios get people to come back every week is to leave the results in doubt. But in an online game, can you keep participants in the dark, the way you would with a vote, or will some of the suspense dissipate, as people must know what is going on to a significant degree to actually play?

George Orwell: Chinese Prophet

I might have as well written Chinese Profit, because that is the essence of a terrific Rolling Stone piece: China's All-Seeing Eye. The country continues to build an extensive system for monitoring all citizens, all the time:

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

However, the reason is as economic as political. There is a massive number of migrant workers that the Chinese themselves have created by destroying villages to make way for equally massive building projects. Migratory ranks could reach 350 million by 2025. As this has happened, the country has also created a division of citizenship, where those forced to be transitory, because their homes were destroyed, are denied full benefit of the growth in the economy because they aren't living in their homes.

It's a situation that, if fiction, would have done Joseph Heller proud. Keep in mind for a moment that there have been relatively widespread but largely unreported riots in China, especially over the cost of food. The idea is that you could identify potential troublemakers that have the greatest impetus to take some sort of action, because even the dispossessed have the national identification cards that tie all the disparate information together - one giant key search term for all personal data. This is an Orwellian state that came about because of the drive for profit, which is often synonymous with the drive for power.

Much of the technology that China uses is actually American in origin - at least some of which is probably being sold against clear U.S. prohibition. Now think about all the cameras that cities and states want to set up to "fight crime," even though there is a spectacular lack of data to suggest that the devices are actually cost-effective. Add in the FCC's floating the idea of a free censored version of the Internet. Include the incomprehensible amount of information that private industries have on consumers, and the historically demonstrated readiness of the American people to tolerate heavy restrictions on their rights to battle some amorphous enemy, and you have conditions ripe for a public-private partnership in a privatized police state.

Wisdom of the Elites

Susan Jacoby had an interesting piece on popular American dismissal of "elites." I'm ambivalent here. On one hand, I think there is a certain egalitarianism in this country that surfaces when facing rhetoric that is essentially an appeal to authority: we are experts and therefore you should listen to our arguments. Frankly, I can understand that impulse, because too often we see experts whose actions in surety are so incredibly wrong that it leaves the entire country to repent in its leisure.

But there is another problem. I think that people assume that data, information, knowledge, and understanding are the same thing. But the four concepts form a hierarchy, from lower to higher. If you don't have the information already collected and available to you by recall, you cannot start to develop knowledge, because you have to put that information into a greater context. And you cannot develop understanding until you can take various areas of knowledge and begin to see the connections among them. So not only does the university student assume that having information available is the same as knowing it even exists, but such kids assume that they can make use of what they find on the Internet.

While that may be true in some limited areas and ways, for the most part, without the necessary grounding, they are hopelessly incapable. Any little success they consider mastery, and they have no concept of how much richer and piercing their thinking and insight could be. It is the equivalent of saying that one could cook a sophisticated meal because the ingredients are at stores and recipes exist in cookbooks. Good luck with that dinner party.