Hrm
Well, I’ve either got another day or another month. Either way, it’s rather disconcerting to think that the job is over now. No prospects at the moment. Sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach is probably interfering with critical thinking skills.
The Perils of Blogging
“That’s why PR types, journalists and public intellectuals create and spread a vast array of meaningless, mis-interpreted or just plain made up numbers. Sexy numbers prosper in the struggle for memetic hegemony. And unless there’s some process to enforce honest signaling by penalizing over-interpretation, exaggeration, or flat-out lying, bogus numbers will dominate the meme pool, because for every truthful number, there’s always a nearby bogus number that’s sexier.”
Quoted from this post on the Language Log.
Before embarking upon this post, I should state that I have a great love of blogging and have since I discovered blogger back in 2000. I’ve noticed a few blogs go from niche sites to very popular havens of “news”. I like seeing what happens when people are confronted with power. It changes them in interesting ways. One of the primary things that occurs seems to be that the person ceases to write like someone scribbling down notes in a diary, and starts trying to entertain. This is a sign that they are testing out their prediction models. Once they are secure in their prediction models, then those conclusions are foregone, and new predictions are made by extrapolation from the previous generation that worked.
However, we can surmise from the above quote that bloggers don’t seem to have a good track record in evaluating factual evidence. If this is true, I can see how a series of incorrect but “sexy” sounding conclusions could lead a person in any number of incorrect directions, and only time and contradictory evidence could possibly begin the process of correcting the predictive model. If the model is wrong by multiple steps back, it may take a great deal of evidence to correct the skew. Unlike the “old media” which is judged primarily on it’s facts, bloggers tend to be judged more by their overall track record. Political bloggers especially seem to be free to hurl myriads of accusations, and if they are proved false, rarely issue retractions. There’s even controversy over whether or not bloggers need to disclose financial ties to companies whose products they review or political movements that they work for. Many do, but there are some who argue that they shouldn’t have to. According to the theories advanced by Kevin Kelly, we might see blogging as an extension of the larger phenomenon of technological advancement (The Technium). We might even directly relate blogging as a specific function of the larger vector. In this case, I think it’s apropos to call it the Mouth.
The Mouth of the Technium has begun to speak, in typical fashion, with a few coherent sounding bits mixed in with some jibberish. Occasionally our child strings together some sentences, but for the most part, it’s noise, not signal. That takes time, but eventually, the signal to noise ratio improves. As we’ve seen before, predictive models are merely externalized self-evaluation models. We turn them inside out to tune them, then turn them back right side out when paradoxes begin to present themselves based on our projection.
Blogging, as a phenomenon, (I’m not really fond of the B word) is also not the first mouth that the Technium has spoken through, nor will it be the last. The Technium reorganizes itself based on the voids that exist in our knowledge as a whole. The Technium exists to fulfill the prophetic phrase: “Vacuum Nequaquam”.
So how can we ensure more accuracy in this medium? Well, first we have to be realistic. Realism is a potential “killer app” for bloggers. Why? Simply put, because the blogger doesn’t have to go through an editor or censor to make sure that his content is acceptable or reconcilable to societal norms. The War Nerd is a great example of a blog that can say things that otherwise might not make it into more traditional publications. This form of realistic analysis doesn’t pull punches or blunt it’s edges for the sake of the audience, so I would term it, as a writing style, Uber-Realism.
Another way to ensure more accuracy is by neutralising bias. An absolutely unbiased perspective isn’t possible, but there are ways to play opposing biases against each other, like positive and negative charges in order to find a happy medium. Col Lounsbury is a MENA financial analyst who does a pretty good job of cutting through the crap that surrounds news from the Middle East. Biases from the left and right in the U.S. have distorted almost any news that makes it through, but with individuals like Lounsbury, it is possible to at least get something closer to an accurate picture. So I call Lounsbury’s Aqoul site a Bias-Neutralisation web log.
Uber-Realism and Bias Neutralisation may prove to be sexier than inflated numbers, but it will take time for these to supplant the “Old-Media-sexy” of Exaggeration. Snopes.com is already leading the charge here, so the battles for “memetic hegemony” are hardly over. There are certainly other directions that the medium can head in, like the inherently biased sites DailyKos.com and FreeRepublic.com. However, it remains to be seen whether these sites will be supplanted by social networking sites with political ties like Barack Obama’s My.BarackObama.com.
I think that ultimately blogging has a great deal of potential as a medium, and we will reveal a great deal about our own nature by the choices we make regarding this medium. Inherent Bias, Sexy Exaggeration and other “Old Media” viral tactics aren’t on the way out yet, but I see a lot of potential in these “New Media” tactics (Uber-Realism and Bias Neutralisation). Time will tell how soon we adopt the latter in place of the former.
Dream
I dreamed that I was taking care of Lil, and several members of my family were in my house. My mom was telling me how to take care of Lil in an irritating and condescending way, so I asked her to leave. She kept on, and I proceeded to tell her that I didn’t appreciate her disrespect for my authority in my own home, and then that she should fuck off. As I said this, my voice shrank to a whisper, although I was still heard. Then I grabbed Lil and left. I went to get in my car, but the neighborhood children were standing by my car. I pushed them aside, but then everything went black. I got up and saw that my car was gone and that my mother had smashed my keyboard over the back of my head. Then I realized that she had only taken the car, not Lil, so I picked her up and began running after the car as it careened around corners and nearly hit several other cars. Then I woke up.
Sudoku ranting…
Beat my Sudoku record today with a new time of 3:24. I really like the Go Sudoku interface, but the PSP version does this bizarre thing where it interrupts my game with a Please Wait! message. It’s not load time as I’m running the game off of the memory stick, so I can only guess it has to do with an incompatibility between the DAX custom firmware and the game. So anyway, I looked at the Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku interface, and I really don’t like it. The music in Go Sudoku is way better, and the fact that it tells you if you are right or wrong immediately helps the sense of urgency. Someone suggested Zendoku, but that kiddie picture crap makes me nauseous. There are a couple of homebrew apps that look underwhelming, but I may try them out in the next week or so. Off to bed before I turn into a pumpkin.
