Consuming the same media as your peers is what social scientists call homophily, better known as ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Ethan Zuckerman, blogger and internet theorist, has been trying to fight this instinct online. He offers techniques for surprising and challenging readers with news that they didn't know they wanted.
I have thought about this idea for a long time. I have listened to people talk about communities on the internet. The problem is that communities on the internet are self selected and that leads to homophily. This is not an idea that is new in my life. When I was young all of my friends were close to my house. All you needed to be my friend was to be close to my house and us not want to punch each other. Until 6th grade this seemed to be the same for all the kids in my neighborhood.
In Junior High School people grouped together by interests. Since I could get around on my bike, I could be much more selective about the people who I hung out with. In high school I had a car and could be very selective about my friends. I think that homophily is happening all the time. The question is about how much can we filter out the views of other people? Can we get in a world that we never have any outside opinions? I think we can, but it is up to us not to do that. We the people have to drive ourselves to find views that are different than our own. Too many people do want to do that right now.
I heard a story today about Rushmore Drive from On The Media. Rushmore Drive is a search engine that is focused on Black people. Not only African Americans, but Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and Black people anywhere else in the world. The idea is that Google is currently a one side fits all solution. Minority have different ideas of what should show up on search results.
I am interested in the idea that different things are important to different people. Right now Google is the king of search. I am not sure if Google gives the same search results depending on who is searching. Do people with the same ethnic background want the same search results. I am not sure the best way to figure this one out.
There are two possible outcomes if this kind of search is important. Large search engines will let people tweeks the results that come to them. Letting people actively and passively edit the results that are served up to them. Smaller search engines will pop up that try to cater to people. I think that these search engines will not stop an ethnic ideas, but other lifestyle groupings. I think that gamers will get their own search engine, photographers will get there own search engine, and movie fans will get there own search engine.
I searched for Rich Thomas on Rushmore Drive. I come up second on this search, which is better than Google where I show up 4th. My photo comes up on the search, but my blog does not come up on the blog search. It is good to know everyone can find me if they are looking for me.
Search might not be the same in the future. There is an idea that we are getting to the end of Keyword search. Tagging has already had an impact on the way searches work. Who knows what search will be about in another five or ten years. It is possible that Google is something that is no longer important in 10 year.
I was listening to David McCullough and Tom Hooper on NPR's Talk of the Nation speak about HBO's John Adams. When asked about the differences between the movie and the book David McCullough that the difference between movies and works of biography is like "A simular melody being played by two different instruments." This is just an amazing quote to me.
I have been hard on movies for not understand the source material. Often the problem is with comic book movies is they do not understand comic books. If you are going to play the melody you need to understand the source, but you do not need to play every note the same. That can even be a little boring. As a fan of the source it is important to not get too hung up on the movie being that different.
I was listening to the California Report today on KQED. They did a story about news papers dying. They story was mostly about the LA Times. The story seemed to be something right out of The Wire. They are talking about the death of newspapers. It sounds really bad to hear this.
When I hear the reporters talk, it is like they have the right to be in that business. It is like Newspapers do not need to make money. The problem is that just selling ad innovatory is no longer going to work. Newspapers got fat on not having competition for the type of ads they could sell. This made newspapers lazy and they are paying the price now.
I am sorry to hear this story. In 20 years I think we are going to look back at the Tribune company purchase and see one of the great missed chances of the 21 century. I do not think newspapers are really going away, but they are going to change a lot. If I was Sam Zell I would be pushing to make all the the Tribune Newspapers into a single national news paper. I think we are going to see more national newspapers in the future. The Internet is making place less important. I think the Tribune Papers are in a great place to take advantage of this.
Sadly I do not see this happening. I do not see Sam Zell or anyone else having the foresight to pull this off. Instead I see him gutting the papers until they are a shell of what they are right now. Making newspapers less important will lead to their downfall.
I am not sure if most people know or not, but I am a huge NPR fan. My guess is that most of my friends already know that. My favorite show on NPR is On the Media. I like this show because it looks at the news and how it is covered. In a world of spin and counter spin looking at the way the news is covered is very important.
People on both the left and the right thing that the media is the enemy. People on the center left and center right are cynical about the media. People in the center wonder why the media is not doing a better job. I do not think anyone is happy with the media, maybe for maybe some of the people in the media.
It is not enough to just complain about the media and throw your hands up. It is easy to just let the Daily Show be the only place you get your news. The problem is that will not make anything better. It will just let the people who watch To Catch a Predator decide what is on the news.
I think that listening to On The Media is doing something about it. It is at least a start in the right direction. There is also a lot of good blog material on this show.
Not only can you hear this show on your local NPR station. You can also hear it via podcast. That is how I have been listening to it.
The most compelling reason to ban plastic bags in my mind is litter. In one story I saw that plastic bags cause a big problem in the sewer system. You always see them blowing around the city. If banning plastic bags address this, it will be a good thing. I am not sure what kind of problem we are adding to get rid of the problem we have right now.
It is not clear to me how San Francisco defines a Grocery store. Being a single male, I do a lot of my shopping at convenience stores, are they going to be covered? I also get a lot of plastic bags from other retailers, will those stores be covered in some future bill? Has anyone done a study to see where the plastic bags are coming from?
There was a quote in the NPR story that made me think of my father.
"As far as I'm concerned I don't care what they bag it in, they could easily bag it in paper," Pat Coleman said. "And I'll recycle the paper. As long as it has handles on it."
For years my father would make the grocery stores put a paper bag in a plastic bag. That was the only way he could carry the bag. I have not see the bill say anything about the bags the stores offer having to have handles.
There is an interesting quote in the Mercury News story:
Craig Noble, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it would be disappointing if grocers rejected the biodegradable plastic bag option since more trees would have to be cut down if paper bag use increases.
The new breed of bags "offers consumers a way out of a false choice, a way out of the paper or plastic dilemma," Noble said.
The best thing about this quote is that the average person has no idea what Craig Noble is talking about. The average person does not know a biodegradable plastic bag from an old plastic bag. It might be bad PR for a store to use biodegradable plastic bags.
I still have the feeling this will blow up in SF's face.
I heard a story today about the TV show 24 and its use of Torture. Agent Jack Bauer is known for doing what ever it takes to get information. He is always able to get the information that he is looking for by applying the right kind of pain. The idea is that he only has a matter of hours to save the world. Of course you would use torture in that situation. It is just too important not to.
Of course the real world does not work that way. Agents who have captives do not have a matter of hours to save the world from an over complex plot. They do not know that they have the guy who has the one piece of key intelligence they need. They do not know which of the people they capture have important intelligence and which have meaningless information.
The truth of the matter is that torture does not work. Most of the time when people are tortured they say whatever they think will get the torture to stop. It is not a matter of truth at that point, it is a matter of getting the pain to stop. It is like beating a confession out of a criminal.
In the story they talked about the effect of shows like 24 on soldiers. Without clear guidelines from the leadership, soldiers looked to shows like 24 on how to get information out of prisoners. The producers of the show say that this is not their fault. They say people in the real world have to know the difference between fact and fiction.
To be honest I am not too worried about the effect on US soldiers. If they are looking to shows like 24 as a guideline, we have much deeper problem with the military and military leadership. I am worried about what people from the middle east thing when they see this show. I am worried because it is hard to pull apart fictions and truths when you do not live in a society.
Charlie Rose asked Kiefer Sutherland about the use of torture. Kiefer said that torture dramatic device. It is a way to show the viewers how dramatic the scene is. This bothers me more than anything else. I think that torture is a weak plot device. I think it is lazy writing.
One my problems with the torture in 24 is that it is always okay for Jack Bauer to do whatever it takes. He never lives with the moral weight of torture. The audience would always choose to torture the person who has the information. The stakes are always so high that it is always worth torturing the prisoner. I think this is a bad thing. I think that it effects the kind of hero that Jack Bauer is.
I have the feeling that 24 will only change if there is a dip in the ratings.
I am not surprised to hear that the movie and TV industry are big polluters. According to what I heard on Marketplace, the only industry that belched more emissions and consumed more resources was petroleum refining. This does not surprise me because usually time is so important that you can throw money at everything else. I wonder if people in Hollywood can change the industry? I always wonder if people in Hollywood can change the world where they make all their money.
I heard Barbara Ehrenreich on the cambridge forum on Sunday. She was talking about her new book Bait and Switch. I have not read her new book yet, but it sounds like her experience trying to get a job doing PR.
A couple of things she said struck me as odd. She said that the internet is a black hole when it comes to searching for a job. You never get any feedback. I do not see how different it is from the days of mailing paper resumes. I rarely got any feedback about sending a resume in the mail. I only heard back from companies if they had some kind of legal action against them.
She reacted very strongly to how much looking for a job is about personality. She was offended that people hat to hire people that they like. She said that she found looking for a job was 90% about personality and 10% about qualifications. My experence it more that getting a job is 55% personalty and 45% qualification. I think this is because so many jobs are about team work. If no one wanted to work with me, I would not be able to do my job. I think many people will hire someone slighly less qualifed if they will be able to work with the person.
One job coach told her not to have any experence on her resume older that 10 years. She sees this as a form of age discrimination. I wonder if is different than that. I wonder if people are only interested what you have done lately. In the high tech world it is seen as the world changes so quickly. What you did 10 years ago does not mean anything compaired with what you did last year.
I should read her book to see what it says. I have the feeling that I will not agree with all of it.
I was listening to the publishers of Bitch Magazine on KQED Forum this morning. I did not catch the whole show. They talked about fashion magazines and TV shows. They were talking about how important pop culture is. The idea that the O.C. is more important to high school kids than the evening news is a powerful idea.
I have read Bitch in the past, but it has been a few years. I am not a huge fan of Feminist Cultural Criticism in general. Like many disciplines it can let agenda and dogma get in the way of what is really happening in the world. The last time I picked up Bitch I did not find it to be different.
I listened to how they railed against pop culture. I wanted to call the show and pull out the old into The old Pogo quote "We have met the enemy... and he is us". The reason that fashion magazines make women feel bad about themselves is because it seems to work. The reason that sitcoms do not have deep female characters is because they do not have deep characters at all. The reason we sell a culture of celebrity of to our kids is because we do not have the discipline to keep it away from ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, I do not like fashion magazines either. I find them to be repugnant for the most part. I think it feeds many of the ills of society. I find magazines like Maxim and Stuff to be much worse that porno mags. Maxim and Stuff are selling a whole lifestyle of sexism and shallowness.
I cannot say I am proud of what the media presents to us. Like any other business the people in the media want to make the most money for their investment. Many times this comes down to appalling the the least common denominator, using ideas that have already been shown as safe, and showing people things they have already seen.
I think the media is just a mirror of who we are. It is a distorted mirror, but a mirror we are happy to look into. If we stopped watching it would go away. They talked about a few woman's magazines that did not make women feel bad about themselves, but those magazines always go out of business. I guess there is not a market there. We might not feel this way, but the people have the power when it comes to the media. It really is our fault for what the media shows us.
Maybe I should give Bitch another try. I might not agree what they say but I should be happy that someone is saying something.
Yesterday Thomas Friedman was on NPR's Fresh Air. I think that anyone who cares about the current war between Israel and Hezbollah should listen to him. I think that he sees this conflict from many angles. I am always impressed when I hear him speak.
I have to sum this up because I could not find a transcript. If you want to know all the words, you can listen to it for yourself. It really is worth your time listen.
I was stunned when he said that Hezbollah hates Israel more than it loves their own children. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah will stand on the ruins of Lebanon and said that he won. Israel is making microchip and you are potato chips and you won? Israel has the third most companies on the NASDAQ and Lebanon cannot make a light bulbs and you won?
Wow, these are powerful words. I have not seen anyone put it this way before. It is amazing. We need more voices like this if we want a better future.
Every year or so I see a story like this updating the state of men and women in college. The jist of the story is that women are doing better in college. It is getting to the point where women are doing much better.
Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.
'My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students,' said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. 'But the range among the guys is wider.'
From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men."
This does not surprise me. My experience in college and high school was like this. Men were at the top of the class, but women made better grades on average.
There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women's earnings far more than men's.
"That's the trap," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "In the early years, young men don't see the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money."
I am not sure what to make from this? I think it is good for America that grades to not equal income. School might help you get ready for work, but it is not the same thing. I am not sure what this will say for the future.
I wonder if I am going to hear NPR shows about this topic? What do feminist think about women doing better in college? What does the average liberal think of this? Will I see this story in the next week on the 24 hour news network? How will they treat the story?
I heard a story on NPR about how American houses are getting larger and larger. I found the story to be interesting. There is little info about why it is happening, but lots of reporting about how people feel about it.
Look at this quote:
"If you have people coming out from the city, where they are bombarded by people, the tendency is to isolate themselves," Lofaro says. "Their house is their community. It is not the community's community, it is their community."
I think that houses are getting bigger because we are in love with stuff. We love to buy stuff and we love to own stuff. We do not want to get rid of the stuff we have to get more stuff. We need more places to put the stuff.
I wondered why we love stuff. There seems to be a number of people who want to move the public sphere into the private sphere. Why go to the movies and act like a civil human being when I can stay at home with my home theater and make my own rules. Why have to deal with the people at the coffee shop when I can have my own expresso machine. I think Americans want to pull themselves away from the world. We only want to deal with people like us or people we select. It does not make for a great society.
Yesterday I was talking to Gerry to humans being bad at long term planning. He did not buy everything I was saying. Today on NPR Talk of the Nation was Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert talking about a commentary he just wrote If only gay sex caused global warming. The commentary is about how we are good at some risks and bad at other risks. I find this interesting. As rational as we can be, we are still victims of our brain.
The commentary it great. It talks about why we have a hard time dealing with specific threats. We need the threats to have specific aspects before we can act.
I have been listening to Fresh Air since I was in college, lets say it has been 16 years. In that time my favorite part of the show has been listening to Geoff Nunberg. When I hear him talk I feel smarter just by listening. He is a linguist and he writes about language. He writes about what people mean when they use words and how it effects the world.
Last week he did a Fresh Air commentary about Ann Coulter and public discourse. I suggest you listen to it because he has an amazing voice. Here is the transcript in case you want to read it yourself. It was an amazing commentary. First he makes it clear that what Ann Coulter does it not Satire.
Satire depicts things as grotesque in order to make them seem ridiculous -- what Stephen Colbert does in his Bill O'Reilly persona or Christopher Buckley does with the pointed caricatures of Thank You For Smoking. But Coulter isn't actually sending anybody up -- not herself, certainly, and not the targets of her remarks.
He points out that what Ann Coulter's rhetoric is more like smut.
That rhetorical maneuver doesn't really have a name, but it's a close relative of what we think of as smut. In the strict sense, of course, smut is the leering innuendo that veils sexual aggression.[1] But in a broader sense, smut can be any kind of malice that pretends to be mere naughtiness. It might be a leering vulgarity, a racial epithet, or simply a venomous insult -- what makes it smut is that it's tricked out as humor, so that if anyone claims to be offended you can answer indignantly, "Can't you take a joke?"
In that broad sense, smut can sometimes be innocuous fun. It's a staple of sitcoms, in what you could think of as a Wooo! moment. That's the moment when a character who's comically malicious or catty (think Betty White, Rhea Perlman, Joseph Marcell) makes a remark that's just offensive or risque enough to brush the limits of taste, and the studio audience reacts by saying "Woooo!!"
The current world of political dysfunctional discourse is nothing new. It just seems new because of the way it is televised by 24 hour news channels and written about in blogs. I am happy that I can listen to people like Geoff Nunberg cut through it.
I heard your interview with Laurie David and I had to write to you. I did not watch Earth to America because I cannot listen people who have made millions of dollars off television ads tell me how bad global warming is. I do not think TBS is going to stop taking ads revnue from people or companies who are causing global warming. Do these people not know that they are at the center of consumer culture? Did they not see the car ads during their shows? If they are not going to own up to their part of global warming what good is it for them to talk about it?
Larry David might drive a Prius, but what does his total environmental footprint look like? If you add all the money he made from car advertisements from Seinfeld, what does it look like? I am happy that Oprah did a show about global warming, but who is advertising on her show? How is Oprah going to spend the money she got from that show?
I am happy that Laurie David can pat herself on the back, but just getting these issues in the media does not really change anything. Hollywood is still making money off the business culture that is polluting. Until this changes, all of Laurie David's efforts are just window dressing.
One of the ideas behind Stanley Milgram theory is that a lost-letter could get to the right person in only six hops. This sounds a little strange to me. When I think about Six Degrees of Separation, I do not see it this way. I count a lot of people in this that I would not ask a favor of. I can get to George W. Bush in three steps. It does not mean I can ask favors of the people between us. It is a question of how you define degrees of separation.
