Day: August 7, 2005

Categories
Media

I still wish I could breath underwater

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I watched the movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on DVD tonight. It starred Bill Murray and a host of other well known actors. Critics hated it, or loved it — in about equal measure. I also loved it and hated it, in about the same measure.

It’s a odd movie with odd sets and an odd story. I would watch one scene and decide I disliked the movie; in the next, though, I would be laughing over some dry piece of visual or verbal humor, and the confusion would start all over again.

Ultimately, though, I liked this movie. I liked it a lot. I liked the odd sets, including the cut away ship, exposed to the camera like an ant farm. I liked the music, which enters at odd moments. I liked the characters, but not all of the time. And I loved the end. I loved the end so much, I watched the last set of chapters on the DVD three times, and may watch it once more before going to bed. All I will say is that I came close to crying, and still may. And I have a burning desire to hear the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” again. For the first time.

A. O. Scott at the NY Times wrote:

As someone who was more annoyed than charmed by “Tenenbaums,” I should have been completely exasperated with “The Life Aquatic,” with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.

Save the money you might spend watching that piece of crap Dukes of Hazard and rent The Life Aquatic. If for no other reason than a good David Bowie song, and for the visual delight.

Categories
History

Subtle impact

Twenty years ago, most people would probably say that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the single-most significant event of the last century. Five years into a new century and history is already writing a different story.

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The event has received a great deal of coverage in weblogs, as well as other publications.

Among webloggers there were those who come out with a hearty ‘Well Done!’ in regards to the bombing; and those who deplore the event as barbaric and unnecessary. Most acknowledge that they don’t have any ready answer, as to whether we should have dropped the bomb or not. As to whether the act was a war crime or not, well, they say history is written by the victors. As Curtis LeMay said of his own part in the firebombing of Japan before the atomic bomb was dropped, if the US had lost the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal.

The depth of knowledge about the atomic bombing varied widely among the webloggers. Some adhered to the rote view that “millions were saved” because of the bombs, a number and notion that has been largely discredited over time. I found one weblogger who talked about Hiroshima being in China. (I won’t embarrass him by linking–note: it isn’t.). On the other hand, Susan Kitchens has been writing a set of posts that details the events, day by day, leading up to the bombings, and the aftermath.

Some webloggers wrote empathetically of the bombing and the inhumanity of war. I found, though, that many people have a detached view of the event: they know it was a Bad thing for people to do to other people, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. But it was something that happened a long time ago.

One weblogger wrote the following, which says more than just the few words imply:

Yesterday was the 60th aniversary of the Atomic Bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, and on Tuesday is the 60th aniversary of the Atmoic Bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. This resulted betwen 50000 and 150000 deaths i dont know how many and i cant be bothered to check anyway remember the dead

Another weblogger who lives in Hiroshima wrote:

I did not know anything about sufferings that people who lived in Hiroshima back in 1945.

I watched a TV program on atomic bombing last night. I learned a lot, and realized that I really have not known about how much and how many people suffered from the bombing until now. I am not trying to victimize myself for just being born and raised in Hiroshima. My parents are not originally from Hiroshima, so I do not really have relatives who can tell me how it was back then.

Joi Ito was asked to provide his perspective on the event in an op-ed for the New York Times. I found his writing to be a frank, dispassionate, and unflinching look at the viewpoint of today’s younger, affluent, less traditional, and more future thinking Japanese:

WHEN people ask my thoughts on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I always feel uncomfortable. As a Japanese, I know how I’m supposed to respond: with sadness, regret and perhaps anger. But invariably I try to dodge the issue, or to reply as neutrally as possible.

That’s because, at bottom, the bombings don’t really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.

Joi has received some heat for his writing from those who think he didn’t display the ‘proper’ perspective on the event; I, personally, valued his honesty and insight.

Joi’s writing and his mention of the future leads, indirectly, to another August 6th anniversary: it is the Web’s birthday, as it was on this day in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee released a set of documents detailing his vision for a “World Wide Web”. I could ask Joi and others which they consider the more significant event–the bombing of Hiroshima or the invention of the Web–but I think I know the answer: in Japan, and elsewhere, the lessons of the past must compete with the hope for the future, and hope can be a powerful force.

Categories
Diversity Technology Weblogging

Technology is neither good nor evil

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Technorati has been coming under fire a great deal lately, including this latest by Om Malik, who writes:

So this is where I lose the plot – I tag my post, Technorati benefits, and despite all that, my tags help spammers who clog my RSS readers gain more readers. That’s absolutely rotten! So essentially the spammers can write a script, generate tags, stay high on the Technorati listings and fool people into visiting their sites. By tagging I am helping this scumbags, the RSS-link blog spammers. This is clearly not going to help Technorati (or infact anyone’s reputation) as a good search tool.

This is a conversation we’ve been having for months, as I noted in Malik’s comments. He wrote an email asking for references, saying he’d searched on Google for the terms and I responded back with several links to several posts, including some of my own — most found by going to Technorati rather than Google. And therein lies the rub: a year ago, Technorati could do no evil. Now, Technorati can do no good. Neither is the absolute truth, because we’re applying terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to what is nothing more than technology, and technology just is. I don’t care for Technorati’s Top 100, because I see absolutely no value in it from a technological perspective, but much harm based on how the list is used to attach ‘authority’ to certain webloggers. However, I do like the ability to look at one of my posts in Technorati and see who has linked to it and, more importantly, what they’ve said. There is no inherent implication of authority in this, nor any indication of moral righteousness: it is just a reading of what is, and can’t be, shouldn’t be misused in implying value in the post. Now that many of the scaling and implementation issues are being taken care of, this service is very helpful. As for tags, I disagree with Technorati automatically converting categories into tags, as there is no overall value in this. I have categories that make no sense outside of the context of the weblog, and all they’re doing is polluting the environment. However, I found explicit tags to be helpful when I was trying to keep up with all of the recent BlogHer writings; not to mention those on Hiroshima. As for spamming, I’ve noticed that tags that are both very active and very time specific overwhelm the spam. BlogHer in a month may be filled with spam, but right after the conference, the links were relevant. Again, challenges in implementation aside, there is no implication of good and evil in tags; they are a service, nothing more. Not, I hasten to add, a way of ‘defining’ social groupings or any of the other glorious sounding purpose associated all too often with ‘authority’ (read that link) based technologies. Speaking of BlogHer, among those posts found in Technology, I was happy to read about the pushback against lists such as Technorati 100 that happened at BlogHer, but less than thrilled when this was, in my opinion, misconstrued as an ‘opportunity’ to replace ranking indexes such as Technorati 100 with something better. In particular Mary Hodder suggested …a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. She had this idea going into the BlogHer conference, based on a dinner she attended one night with several people, including Ross Mayfield, who wrote at Many to Many:

Following Liz’s read of BlogHer, one of the more interesting points to come out of the conference is the need for constituent algorithms — ways of revealing hidden groups. For the BlogHer community, the Technorati 100 was more than a whipping boy, but an index where a group was under-represented. Mary Hodder’s approach, spot on, is to develop alternative indexes.

Ross then goes on to discuss the limitations on indexes, such as the authority implicit with each, which left me puzzled as to why he would approve of the development of alternative indexes. Yesterday, Mary released her new effort to identity alternate algorithms based on a dinner she had with Ross, Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, and others in Paris a couple of months ago. It’s a very detailed and thoughtful post, and I respect the amount of work she put in it, but it seems to me that no matter how much the community is involved in this effort, it’s just propagating the same problems, because the issue isn’t about technology, it’s about people and how we behave. If women are not as visible in weblogging (or technology or politics and so on) because of some esoteric to do with technology, then our problems could be easily solved. I would personally devote my life to finding the Woman Algorithm — the algorithm to give equality to women. But, as we’ve seen with the recent linking to BlogHer reports, the issue isn’t that simple. Even considering the fact that BlogHer was about women in weblogging, the single most linked individual post on the conference, was Jay Rosen’s–one of the few men to attend the conference. Why was Jay’s the most linked? Well, some of it was because he provided a viewpoint that led to debate. He used a ‘confrontational’ term that was guaranteed to trigger furious discussion. I linked to him for that specific reason, as did other people. However, Halley Suitt also wrote a post that generated much debate, and though it was also well linked, not as much as Jay’s. Does this, then, mean that Jay’s was a better post? No, not necessarily. If you look at those who linked to Jay, you’ll see two patterns: people who linked to Jay because of what he said, and others who linked to Jay because of who he is. What is the common characteristic of those who linked to Jay without specifically referencing the ongoing discussion? They were all men. Is this relevant? Well, considering the purpose behind Blogher, I would say the results aren’t irrelevant. I suppose we could compensate by having all the women at BlogHer link to Halley just because–but that doesn’t solve the problem, it just ‘hides’ it in this particular instance. Links based on the work are something that can be measured accurately with technology, and used to derive some overall value–interest if nothing else. But the latter, this linking because of who a person is, can’t be normalized with technology; no matter how clever the algorithms or how open the process. Not unless we start adding demographic metadata to our weblogs such as sex, age, economic classification, race, married status, political party, and so on. Though there are those who wouldn’t hesitate to put this information online, most would, rightfully, look askance at the process. Even if we tried to analyze a person’s links to another, we can’t derive from this anything other than person A has linked to person B several times. If we use these to ‘define’ a community to which we belong, and then seek to rank ourselves within these communities, all we’ve done is create a bunch of little Technorati 100’s — and communities that are going to form barriers to entry. We see this ‘communal’ behavior all too often: a small group of people who know each other link to each other frequently and to outsiders infrequently; basically shutting down the discussion outside of the community. Continuing, Mary writes:

So the tension is, do we in the blogosphere figure out a more sophisticated, open standard based metric that reflects the way we see blogs, within and across communities, in order to score blogs? And do we do this within topic areas? Or does using a more sophisticated algorithm across all blogs make more sense? Or do we allow this all to be done for us, possibly in an opaque way by some of the blog search engines or by people who are trying to figure out blogger influence and communities for their clients, or do we write off those efforts because we know they cannot possibly understand us anyway? I have to say, I’ve resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I’m seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I’m at the point where I’d like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us.

I think Mary should stop with …I hate rankism. I understand the motivations behind this work, but ultimately, whatever algorithm is derived will eventually end up replicating the existing patterns of ‘authority’ rather than replacing them. This pattern repeated itself within the links to Jay Rosen’s post; it repeated itself within the speaker list that Mary started for women (“where are the women speakers”), but had its first man within a few hours, and whose purpose was redefined within a day to include both men and women. Rankings are based on competition. Those who seek to compete will always dominate within a ranking, no matter how carefully we try to ‘route’ around their own particular form of ‘damage’. What we need to challenge is the pattern, not the tools, or the tool results. Of course, I realize that mine is just one opinion among many and this work will continue regardless of what I write. As a tech, I’ll be interested to see the algorithm develop and even provide whatever insight I can. That is, if my rank gives me the necessary authority.