Right now I'm sick as a dog. My only consolation is the storm outside my window, cool spell, and Florida winds that haven't dropped below 25mph since I got here. My illness seems resistant to conventional treatments, conditions outside seem resistant to normal expectations, and it goes without saying that this isn't the experience I was hoping for.
In short, I feel a lot like some members of the mainstream media in 2004.
Why so? This article explained blogs very well, and also nailed the dispersed intelligence that is both their local inferiority and their aggregated strength:
"The CBS executive who sniffed that a blogger in his pajamas was not to be compared to a professional news organization with its fact-checking resources was missing the point. Bloggers do not work in isolation. What the technology makes possible is the marshaling of thousands of fact-checkers. Blogs have created a whole new atmosphere of information, which has become linked together, harder to hide, and available to everyone with a computer.
Mr. Hewitt calls this "open-source journalism," in which an elite journalism establishment no longer has the monopoly on news and analysis, readers can collaborate with writers, and a free market of ideas and information can emerge."
Belmont Club's analysis sees a similar phenomenon, but from a different perspective. Blogs aren't just open source journalism, they're an enemrging neural net:
"The blogosphere is a specific manifestation -- and by no means the only one -- of the networks made possible by the Internet which can be imperfectly compared to the emerging nervous system of a growing organism. Once the software and infrastructure to self-publish was in place, it was natural that analytical cells, or groups of cells would take inputs from other parts of the system and process them. The result was 'instant punditry'.... It enabled lawyers to offer opinions on law; military men on things military; scientists on things scientific. And suddenly the journalistic opinion editors found themselves at an increasing disadvantage."
So, what's next?
"But the mainstream media could console itself in one thing. It still controlled the primary newsgathering apparatus. Yet even here the rulebook was changing. The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that in addition to the analysis cells which manifested itself in 'instant punditry', the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills."
It's an excellent analysis from an unusual perspective, as we've come to expect from Belmont Club. As a bonus, if you're curious about the "Fortress Unvanquishable Save By Sacnoth" post-title, this short story and these lyrics may help.
Men spin their tales of ages past
Leaves turning to ash, old legends die
Fear is the catalyst to warp frail minds
In lands beyond sleep, fleeing lost truths
Comets blaze the way to nightmare's return
Fortress of dreams invincible you areFortress Unvanquishable - free my mind
Fortress Unvanquishable - let me dream
-- Destiny's End, "The Fortress Unvanquishable"
Internet killed the media star
I agree from the begining to the end. I think their impact in Europe is even greater because here most of the media groups are deeply and undisguised influenced by leftist ideology.
Good post and a lot of good food for thought. Also, hope you get to feeling much better and quickly!
Happy New Year, Joe - get well soon. Maybe listening to me rant will help somehow:
If there were some really forward-looking network news executives out there - I know there aren't, but just pretend - who truly believed that they had that "duty to inform the public" that they're always talking about, wouldn't they regard the blogs as the godsend of all godsends?
Torrents of near-instantaneous feedback from news consumers, in an easily explorable format, without having to conduct surveys or hire expensive analysts. Raw vox populi not written to please news editors or closed-minded executives - an unprecedented opportunity to shake the old-style establishment media out of their obvious rut. Haven't they been telling us for years, "We want to hear from YOU?" Well, here's everybody - right in your face, practically crawling up your pantleg. Isn't it great?
Obviously not. That "duty to inform the public" was more like "the right to tell you how it is without putting up with your backtalk". They act like the bloggers have walked up to the front of the aircraft and demanded to take over the pilot seat. Saw people fly planes on TV, how hard can it be? Obviously the "news" is not something they share with the public, it's something they control. It's not about professionalism, it's about conformity. It's not duty, it's power.
Of course it's a great compliment to the blogs. Everything the media corporations put out is culled, edited, and approved by the chain of command. They can't believe the blogs don't work the same way, somehow. All of that polished, detailed, and obviously informed opinion that hundreds of blogs are just casually tossing out there for free - how can somebody not be spending millions of dollars to orchestrate all of this? What happened to the good old zipperheads who were content to just sit and listen to Walter Cronkite?
If the blogs really were awful - if they really were the prattle of uninformed dolts, amateur "journalists" and professional cranks, then the Big Media would be happy with them. They could take a comfortable, condescending view of them, and they wouldn't have to go on cable shows (some of which have actual viewers) and mount their clumsy counter-offensives.
Feel better and Happy New Year, dollface. Hope the rest of your Florida experience is more what you had in mind ;->
The loss of the Gatekeeper job is a cruel blow, but perhaps now we sill see less of Barbra and Alda and Meathead offered up as worthy commentators. Just today, that Short broad with her assessment that our aid to Tsunami victims was less honorable because it bypassed the U.N. - Some MSM editor decided her statement was deserving of publication. The MSM was never concerned about the real world because the world was what they said it was. Now, they have to wake up. That must hurt them.
Hope your illness is short lived Joe and are better by next year. ;>)
Can't quite figure this one out. Why is the RSS excerpt (at least on Bloglines) for this post not contained within the text of the post?
"Why have blogs risen to prominence in 2004? We start with the basics, then go on to add key concepts like open source journalism, blogs as a neural net, the innovator's dilemma, swarms, tipping points, opinion storms, the long tail, and more."
Quite a nifty trick.
Hmmm, I may be one of the few here that has actually worked in neural net applications-- do you dilettanti know what NNs do? They learn. :)
Be well soon, my faery blogfather.
Happy New Year to all the Knights of the Winds' Table!
Joe, get well soon. And Happy New Year! At least as happy as possible under the circumstances.
And, jinnderella, sure. I've worked with neural nets off and on since 1989. Even more interesting to me is that they're unpredictable. You never can tell what connections they'll form. And not a whole lot of “neurons” can do an enormous amount.
Dave, you're right, that's emergent behavior! So, do you think Wretchard is right, and the blogverse can become sentient? Or maybe it already is?
(i never meant you were a dilettante! anyone that reads Niven is totally savant! :) )
i never meant you were a dilettante! anyone that reads Niven is totally savant!
Actually that's how my thesis adviser described me. It wasn't an insult. It's how he described himself, too.
Hey Joe, just crawling back from a nasty bug myself. Here's a virtual toast of Nyquil (clink). Happy New Year!
I'll jump in on the neural net thing. Metaphores can be extended too far of course but this one seems to fit well enough.
Learning in neural nets is accomplished via the backpropagation of errors. Consider the blogosphere “neural net” as tasked with the creation of an explanation of why the memos were fake. Recall that the initial typographical reasons given were quickly discovered to be erroneous: the raised “th”, proportional font, Times New Roman, etc, were found as features on some typewriters of that era (albeit in some cases, machines whose use in the setting of an ANG base was implausible). “Kerning” turned out to be a red herring.
All these errors were backpropagated, and the network produced something different: rather than a “proof” based on enumerated typographical “impossibilities”, the best explanation for why the memos were fake rested on an “Occam’s Razor” argument: that the memos could be easily reproduced by MS Word in the default settings, producing a good match as measured by overlay (e.g. Charles Johnson’s work). Conversely, producing the memos on any contemporaneous typewriter was never successfully accomplished (see e.g. “The Shape of Days” attempt to do so). The simplest explanation was that they had been created by MS Word. Further work was done and linked to but this is roughly where the “tipping point” occurred in the public debate, as I recall.
But this is in the past, and is a trivial, toy example compared to what is in front of us for 2005. This will not be the year in which Iraq will definitively achieve normalcy, but it could be the year in which the opportunity is lost. Blogs will have a decisive roll to play.
RE: Robert's comment
The RSS/RSD description of Winds' posts comes from the limited-size "Excerpt" field in the editing interface, which is also used by Google and some other search engines for descriptions of the posts.
I'm encouraging my team to offer quick summaries in that field so RSS surfers can make an informed decision re: the relevance and interest of our posts, and surf to the ones they like. It can also up our keyword relevance, though human relevance comes first.
As you can see from this post's RSS description, there's an update coming that will add some new information and insights.
Finally, thanks to all for the good health wishes. I decided to see a doctor yesterday, and am now on Azithromycin - sort of an antibiotic tactical nuke. I won't be better for a few days, and my plans to scuba dive this trip are fried, but at least I now know that the flight back won't be a medevac nightmare. And lo and behold, the weather is improving today....
On my first post: a really brave frenchman (yes, he's french):
The Dissident Frogman
Joe,
"Why have blogs risen to prominence in 2004? We start with the basics, then go on to add key concepts like open source journalism, blogs as a neural net, the innovator's dilemma, swarms, tipping points, opinion storms, the long tail, and more."
You left out social network theory! :)
When Ars Electronica 2004 opens, the "Language of Networks" conference will be offering a glimpse of the state of the art in network theory and visualization
Wouldn't you like to see a visualization of the blogverse?
Get well quick, Joe.
"Wouldn't you like to see a visualization of the blogverse?"
Been done -- by Valdis Krebs, I believe. But I don't know where he put it. Take a look around his site.
No praktike, realtime. Like Ars Electronica. Visualisation in Scientific Computing, or ViSC, would show the social network diagram graphically, influence waxing and waning, connections sprouting and retracting, visualizing the flow of information and opinion. A static shot would be like trying to draw fractals by hand.
But I'll look at Vladis' stuff, thanx. :)
I see that he's evil. I suppose he has a very calming effect on the price of oil increasing, instead of decreasing? And it is rediculous to falt the black plight on manufacturing jobs. The black plight was caused mainly by the "great society" which caused the educted blacks to move out and left them with a matriarchal society.