erhebung

We’re Not Plebs

I highly recom­mend reading this post about World Cup football com­ment­ators in the UK. It’s from Enemies of Reason, a great blog that somehow (really not sure how) ended up in my Google Reader. Here’s a para­graph from the piece:

Here are people who should know more than we do, but they don’t. In a lot of ways, you’re already ahead of them if you’ve bought a few packets of Panini stickers for the kids’ album because you know who the players are. It shouldn’t be that way. These people are being paid to be experts, yet they’re sitting back and approaching every game like a pleb. They talk only about the players they’ve heard of — Argen­tina is Messi and Tevez, for example; South Korea is Ji-​Sung Park — from the Premi­er­ship or the Cham­pions League, and that’s that. No both­ering to look any further. There is no world of football outside of England, or the top teams in Europe — everyone else is just ballast. Just spin out some old flannel about shocking defending and put some whizzy circles around players in the replays at half-​time, and that’s job done. It’s crass, inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous of the vast majority of foot­ballers and teams at the World Cup.

I was struck most by “inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous [of the audience]” and it got me thinking about a doc­u­mentary the BBC had put out about Atlantis (yes, really). When I watched a bit of the doc­u­mentary, it intrigued me, and I was quite enter­tained by it (good pro­duc­tion values, engaging host, etc.), but I dis­covered, after a series of short Google searches, that dozens of little details that were stated as “fact” (or not qual­i­fied in any way) were either largely dis­cred­ited theories or incred­ibly tenuous extra­pol­a­tions. And yes, of course: it’s tele­vi­sion, it’s not a history book; but why shouldn’t it at least try to be a bit more rigorous? Telling us some­thing is a theory (albeit a largely dis­cred­ited one) doesn’t diminish its value as an inter­esting anecdote (I’m thinking of the small segment about “evidence” of human sac­ri­fice at a Minoan site); but it does, perhaps, make everything less black and white, and the “plebs” who watch tele­vi­sion need things to be simple. Or so the argument goes. But it’s not really an argument, just an excuse for lazy programmme-​making.

It didn’t used to be like this: Kenneth’s Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are two examples of engaging, enter­taining programme-​making that doesn’t skimp on its research or dumb-​down its subject-​matter. And there are still good programme’s being made, so mainly I’m just ranting.

Tele­vi­sion has always been getting dumber, though, so none of this is espe­cially rev­el­atory. The frus­trating thing when it comes to inform­a­tion and research, whether about foot­ballers or Atlantis, is that here and now in 2010 inform­a­tion is incred­ibly easy to access, anywhere, and at any time. People, well-​paid BBC pundits and doc­u­mentary pro­du­cers in par­tic­ular, have iPads and netbooks, 3G and wireless, Google and Twitter. With the power of all that at our disposal, it shouldn’t be dif­fi­cult to find out some anec­dotes about the Serbian football squad, or to see what current thinking is on human sac­ri­fice in Minoan civil­isa­tion. And if we really can’t utilise all this tech­no­logy at our disposal, for simple tasks or for complex problems like fixing a broken oil well, then we’re probably doomed.

New WordPress

So, there’s a new release of Word­Press, and so if you’ve got a Word­Press blog, it might be a good idea to upgrade. Not sure what it does that is special or new, but I can tell you the default Dash­board skin is a lighter shade of grey.

Walls Suck

UPDATE: It seems I can access the article, but I’ve got to go through Google; it is here. I don’t know what this means, but it’s cer­tainly an indic­a­tion that the internet doesn’t like walls, fences, or anything similar. (At the top of the page is a small banner that reads: “Archive Article — Please enjoy this article from The Times & The Sunday Times. For full access to our content, please sub­scribe here.” So, some (most?) content will be duplic­ated in a public “archive”, perhaps for SEO-​related reasons?)

Well, there I was thinking I could read an article about Edward Heath, when I get stopped (somewhat slug­g­lishly — lots of javas­cript seemed to be in play) by an invit­a­tion from The Times to sign up and “preview” their “new sites”. But I didn’t — still don’t — want to preview their site “for a limited period”, or learn about what makes them worth­while, or become a member; I just wanted — still want — to read the article. I have been fenced out. If I was in the UK, I could go to the library and read the piece. And if the article was in today’s edition of the news­paper, I might even be able to buy a copy. But I’m not in the UK, so neither of those options are viable (and both are silly: I learned about the piece online, so I should be able to read it online). If I want to get through the fence, I must pay.

If I were to pay, what then? Would I sub­sequently pay for eye-​catching, highly recom­mended articles from The New York Times and The Wash­ington Post, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker? If I wanted to read a selec­tion of, say, 6 – 12 articles (a not unreas­on­able number) during one 24 hour period, would I need accounts with each and every pub­lic­a­tion? Or would I “micro” pay, a dollar an article, perhaps? (I’m being delib­er­ately dif­fi­cult here, but it’s not a stretch.) If I did pay, could I share the link with others, or would they too hit a wall they’d have to pay to get through? It all seems immensely com­plic­ated, expensive, and unsatisfying.

The internet allows people to pick and choose from far more sources of content than ever before. This is not news, but it’s worth thinking about what things were like before the internet, RSS feeds, and the myriad delivery systems. We are no longer in a world of just news­pa­pers, radio, and tele­vi­sion. You don’t need to choose between The Guardian and The Tele­graph: you can have both, in small doses. It’s up to you. You like the Sudoku at The Tele­graph? Help yourself. But you think their edit­or­ials are a bit, how to say, con­ser­vative? No problem: switch tab to The Guardian. Neither of them have good book reviews these days? That’s fine, just head over to The Times Literary Sup­ple­ment and see what essays they have on offer. This is the internet I know.

I’ve seen my first pay wall (see the image below) and I’m worried: it seems like the internet just got one site smaller; it feels like a step back­wards; and what happens next? My students, many of whom fre­quently find them­selves at sites like The Times, will find this sort of stuff limiting. Will they open accounts? Or will they just turn and go some­where else? Some will try, but most won’t be able to pay, if it comes down to that: no credit cards, no elec­tronic currency. Their curi­osity will hope­fully lead them to ingenious ways around the problem. But sites asking for money (micro or oth­er­wise) will put off a great many of my students.

Anyway, enough hastily written venting.

“No, you can’t read the article.”

A Spy Like Manning

And fairly pre­dict­ably, the Wikileaks vs Wired.com saga con­tinues (Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter share the byline again). The comments beneath the article make for amusing reading. Here’s a snippet from the piece (but you really need to see the whole thing):

“No, I’m not going to give the logs to someone who suggests that I might have been drug-​addled when I decided to turn in a spy,” says Lamo […]

In his chats with Lamo, copies of which were provided to Wired.com by the ex-​hacker, Manning described a crisis of con­science that led him to leak a headline-​making video of a deadly 2007 U.S. heli­copter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

A spy? Perhaps. But to be honest, if I were asked to choose between a spy like Manning and a journ­alist like Poulsen, I’d take the spook, every time.

More on the wider story here, here, here, here, and here.

Soh-​Kah

Whether or not you believe that inform­a­tion wants to be free (and why, really, would it want to be com­mod­i­fied?), it seems that this year World Cup coverage, at least, really does want be free: ESPN has a flashy (lit­er­ally) site with Gamecasts (not sure if I’ll be able to handle US-​accented “soccer”, but we’ll see) and the BBC website lets you listen live (on Radio 5 Live) to all the world cup matches and watch live the fixtures that aren’t over on ITV (ITV is a com­pet­itor channel which has his­tor­ic­ally always shared World Cup broad­casting rights with the BBC to ensure there is no monopoly; but I think the final is shown on both). I like the sim­plicty of the schedule on the BBC site: very easy to see what is what. I missed the first two games (too tired: crashed), but will try to keep up. More inform­a­tion on where to watch over on Life­hacker (and I read some­where else that UnivisionFutbol.com is streaming, too, and their site is very pretty; what I really want, though, is to somehow be able to watch while listening to com­mentary in Italian — few things beat the excite­ment of Italian football com­mentary, and even if you don’t under­stand, you understand).

A screen grab of the BBC’s pleas­ingly straight­for­ward World Cup schedule.

Genuinely Dangerous

There’s a story I found on Foucault blog that is playing on my mind as I can’t quite decide how I feel about the situ­ation. Ini­tially it is straightforward:

The person who leaked the so-​called “Col­lat­eral Murder” video of the US Apache heli­copter attack on unarmed civil­ians in Baghdad, res­ulting in their deaths (including two Reuters journ­al­ists) has been arrested, according to a report in Wired.

The Wired report, which contains lots of details and inform­a­tion from friends of the man arrested, SPC Bradley Manning, says that Manning was arrested after he told a former hacker of his leaks. It also contains the news that Manning leaked other material, including 260,000 dip­lo­matic cables from the US which has not been pre­vi­ously reported, as far as I know.

But then things get quirky:

Wikileaks has denounced the news in its Twitter feed this morning, saying about the Wired reporters:

“Adrian Lamo&Kevin Poulson are notorious felons,informers&manipulators. Journ­al­ists should take care.

“State­ment: Wash­ington Post had Col­lat­eral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.

“Alleg­a­tions in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 clas­si­fied US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”

However, they have not yet denied the story, and claim in fact that their security pro­to­cols prevent them from even knowing the source of their leakers.

The “former hacker” men­tioned is Adrian Lamo, an intriguing char­acter. And one of the article’s writers, Kevin Poulsen (slammed by Wikileaks along with Lamo), isn’t exactly dull: he’s a “former” hacker himself and has had a book written about his exploits. So, Wikileaks is angry about the ethics of the piece, but both Lamo and Paulson (they’re acquaint­ances, probably close friends, as far as I can tell), seem to be standing by the line that the FBI were informed about the source of the leak because of the huge risk to national security:

Lamo has con­trib­uted funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s fre­quently con­tacted by hackers who want to talk about their adven­tures, and he has never con­sidered reporting anyone before. The supposed dip­lo­matic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genu­inely dan­gerous to U.S. national security.

Poulsen has responded to Wikileaks response to his article:

@wikileaks I’m going to “hell” for reporting on the arrest of an alleged source of yours? So military deten­tions should be kept secret?

As replies go, that one seems a little oblique. Delib­erate evasion, or is he missing what Wikileaks seem (to me) to actually be saying (very indir­ectly): that Lamo and Poulsen were com­plicit in alerting the author­ities and that it was less a case of reporting on news than of blogging about what they’d done (albeit blogging in a manner that appeared to be journ­alism). And more fun­da­ment­ally, Wikileaks are really saying it was unprin­cipled and wrong. But that might be reading too much into things. It might be as simple as one former hacker deciding to protect the interests of his country by getting in touch with the FBI and another former hacker then writing an article about what the informant did and the after­math. Whatever really is going on, I’ll be watching for developments.

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

Twenty-​Ten

So, 2010 is here. We’re not quite at manned missions to Jupiter, yet, but NASA does have a few inter­esting missions planned. On a related note, I like io9’s 15 Reasons To Live For The Next 10 Years.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm imper­man­ence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your con­sulta­tions:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an inter­esting year.

It Won’t Be Free

A feisty, noisy article by Libby Purves on the subject of “content” and its “value”. Worth a look. Dying cry, though, or clarion call?

Flickr Adds Galleries

Last week Flickr unveiled Gal­leries, a new feature that allows users to con­struct and publish (on Flickr) col­lec­tions of other people’s Flickr pho­to­graphs (more inform­a­tion can be found in the amusing FAQ). So far I’ve made three gal­leries, my favourite being this one. Part of me wants to pair themed Flickr gal­leries with com­ple­mentary 8tracks playl­ists, as I think it would make for a fas­cin­ating mashup; but another part of me knows that it probably isn’t really feasible to pull the two tools together. I await eagerly the day when merging a music playlist and pho­to­graphy gallery is a simple case of dragging, dropping, and hitting “Publish”.

Tweaking Appearances

The theme I’ve just begun using on erhebung is Rodrigo Galindez’s Modern Clix. I liked the old theme, Neo­clas­sical, but it never hurts to change things a little, every once in a while.

One of the biggest advant­ages of this new theme is that images in posts can be wider (436px or 596px) than they could be in the old theme; the down side of this is that images in the older posts, posts written for the old theme’s spe­cific­a­tions, may appear a little too narrow. This is a problem I have no imme­diate plans to remedy (manually editing 200 chunks of HTML code is tedious).

So, a new look, and hope­fully one that is readable on all browsers. If you encounter any problems, let me know.