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Archives for February 2005

Pattern precognition

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David Weinberger is posting interesting notes from a high-powered TTI Vanguard conference here in SF.

This post on Eric Bonabeau’s presentation caught my eye:

  Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem says that we tend to believe that the future is present in the mass of data and we just need to find it. But we use existing patterns to search the data, which can’t turn up new patterns. Humans are amazing pattern-detecting machines but we’re terrible at exploring alternatives. Eric suggests selective breeding: make new combinations, look at the results, pick the most interesting results, recombine them, etc. He does a live demo that discovers a “hidden bagel” in a 50-dimensional financial data set. (I have no idea what that sentence means once it gets past the word “bagel.”) It helps not to know what you’re looking for.

I’ve heard Bonabeau, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference (coming up again soon), give a talk on emergent behavior (among ants and in other places) and he’s always fascinating. This notion — that, since “we use existing patterns to search the data”, we’re blind to new patterns — has echoes and analogues all over the map, all the way from the little copy-editing exercise that Dave Winer periodically challenges us with to the disastrous failure of American policy in the lead-up to the Iraq war (a mistaken pattern so potent that much of the population still believes in a patently untrue scenario). Our minds fall into existing patterns like wheels in a rut; we “see” words spelled right even when they’re misspelled, and we “see” events unfold according to the sequence we expect, even when the information parading across our eyeballs tells us otherwise.

What interests me is applying this insight to journalism. We all know the hack’s drill: First you decide what your story is, then you go out and find the facts and quotes to fit. The sad truth today, however, is that this approach isn’t just for hacks: Most reporters in most newsrooms don’t have the time, the freedom or the resources to cover most stories in any other way. This is one of the big causes of the much-vaunted credibility crisis we hear so much about in the blogosphere and all of its attendant conferences. For an astonishingly high percentage of professional journalists, the news they recognize is the news that fits the pattern they have already selected as the template for their coverage. This keeps working until real news starts dancing in front of their eyes — and they miss it. (For instance, the story of the ringer reporter from Talon News was sitting right under the eyes of the entire Washington press corps. But it took a swarm of Web-based sleuths operating collaboratively across multiple blogs to piece the strange saga together and discredit President Bush’s friendly plant in the White House press room.)

“It helps not to know what you’re looking for” ought to be the proud banner of the journalistic generalist — the writer who can step into any situation, ask the right questions and get out with clear explanations for the rest of us. But reporters have tight deadlines and editors telling them what they want and, often, instincts dulled by years of repetition — and all but the very best and most creative end up coming out with what they went in for, rather than something unexpected.

One of the pacts I’ve made with myself as I’ve worked on my book is: Don’t go in with the story. Give myself the freedom not to know what I’m looking for. It’s less efficient, everything takes longer, there are blind alleys and extra interviews. But, if I’m persistent and lucky, maybe I’ll end up with something other than the same old patterns.

Newspapers and magazines and Web sites aren’t, can’t be, books, of course. They’ll always have deadlines; they’ll never have enough bodies or money or time. And more and more, the news that they miss is being covered by amateurs and solo operations on the Net. So forward-looking people in the business are all abuzz about new approaches to “citizen journalism” and “we media” and other ideas for harnessing the Internet’s many-to-many dynamics. Books are being written (congratulations to Jay Rosen, who has announced one that I will look forward to); new ventures planned.

Will some hybridization of old media and the new swarm dynamic help more hidebound publications find their souls again? I’m optimistic about the creative possibilities, skeptical about the business realities. But I don’t doubt that journalists could learn a lot from Bonabeau’s ants.

Replacements in pacem

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A little while ago someone posted to Metafilter a link to old live videos from 1981 of the Replacements singing a number of songs. I looked to see if “Johnny’s Gonna Die” was there, and it was.

The first Replacements album, 1981’s “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” was an explosion of punk brattiness in ultra-short bursts. The band members were still basically kids, and a lot of their music was fun but, well, disposable, as the album title promises.

Nestled there at the very end of Side One, though, was this desolate ache of a song, and it’s still a heartbreaker. The music begins with a sarcastic nod to the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” — a tongue-in-cheek vision to begin with, but the Replacements turn its rollicking bass line and chiming guitars into something hollow and stark. The lyrics simply declare the certain fate of a certain musician: Johnny Thunders was going to die. A decade later, he did. (Heroin will do that.) A few years later, so did Bob Stinson, the Replacements guitarist whose simple barren solos fill the song’s empty spaces. Watch him in that video, hammering on the high string.

From Elvis to Vicious to Cobain, self-destructive rock stars have cut a path across the decades that young musicians understandably find magnetic. Somehow, here at the very start of their career, the Replacements managed to stare down that whole bundle of mythology. When I saw the band play this song at a tiny club in Cambridge a few years after that video was recordered, I remember wondering about the snotty edge of “Johnny’s Gonna Die”: those “nah nah nahs,” like a schoolyard taunt, or the kiss-off in its closing “Bye bye.” Affection? Self-protection? I don’t know. Those lips were curled, but if you looked close, you could see them quiver.

This thing still on?

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For a variety of boring reasons I spent some time today upgrading my old Windows 2000 box to WinXP. I believe that Radio has survived the transition, but this is a test post to make sure…

Wall Street Journal liberals: And then there were none

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Over at the New York Times, William Safire has retired, and people are speculating about whether the paper will replace him with another conservative, or whether David Brooks constitutes a sufficient dosage.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal op-ed roster recently lost its one token liberal voice when Al Hunt decided to leave the paper. Hunt was never a terribly exciting writer, but at least he exposed the Journal’s readership to a glimmer of light from outside its own serenely hermetic universe. Would the Journal keep any room on its opinion pages — otherwise filled with the usual motley gang of social neanderthals, rad-lib[ertarians] and Bush sycophants — for a dissenting voice?

Apparently not. Today the paper told its readers that Hunt’s old Thursday slot was going to be filled by a rotating gang of commentary writers presenting outside-the-Beltway perspectives.

Look, I’m all for getting out of the Beltway. But getting out of your own partisan wagon-circle is also healthy. Doesn’t the Journal have room for a single dissenter? Or is that whole concept just so, like, pre-9/11 that the Journal doesn’t even think it’s worth addressing?

Tree-cutting and tag-spinning

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I have been mulling over a big old post about tagging and folksonomies, but book work has taken priority this week, and by now most of what I wanted to say has been said by others (here are some good links).

So this is all I think I’ll throw in to the discussion — and append to my previously posted skepticism that people beyond early adopters will pursue tagging with any avidity: “Tagging” is a great word. “Categories” are onerous; they sound like work. “Tags” sound like play — like a game we played when we were tots. (Hey, it’s ludic!)”Categories” also implies, to many users, a mental model in which each item must live in one category to the exclusion of others. “Tags” encourages overlap, duplication, experimentation.

I like the way David Weinberger puts it here, as he compares older-fashioned information hierarchies with folksonomic tagging: “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together…. The old way — trees — make sense in controlled environments where ambiguity is dangerous and where thoroughness counts. Trees make less sense in the uncontrolled, connected world that cherishes ambiguity.” And the world of software is so allergic to ambiguity that we should cherish any new development that opens a space within the digital realm for multiple meanings.

If the software that begins to harness the tagging phenomenon can stay true to the spirit the word evokes, I think it has a chance of overcoming human inertia and resistance to doing more than the bare minimum of metadata labor. Which places a premium (as Ross Mayfield points out) on ease of use. If people are going to tag things at all, you need to make it really easy for them to do it fast. Del.icio.us — once you set up its toolbar shortcut — is pretty good, though I think it would be great if it showed you how other people tagged a link before you did your own tagging. Technorati’s experiment with tagging for blog postings obviously has a very long way to go, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Will the whole thing get debased by commercialism and swamped by spam? Sure. Then we’ll return to the drawing board.

Astroturf journalism at the White House

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President Bush has relied on a ringer in recent press conferences: This guy named Jeff Gannon from a right-wing news site called “Talon News” spouts the GOP party line and lobs softball questions at the prez that repeat his own press releases. Metafilter and Salon’s War Room have more.

This is the dark side of the “now everyone’s a journalist” blogosphere meme, a concept that for the most part I think is positive. But once anyone can set up as a journalist, public figures can summon astroturf reporters to do their bidding, and officials can “paper the house” with sympathizers the way theater producers have always done on opening night. (This reminds me of what happened in movie criticism in the ’80s and ’90s, as a variety of bozos went into the business of providing movie “reviews” to borderline media outlets with the sole purpose of giving the movie marketers a bottomless well of positive quotes.)

The only answer, I suppose, is to say to the White House press office, hey, if your bloggers and guys-with-Web-sites get to ask questions at press conferences, the other side’s should, too. Get Kos and Atrios and Tom Tomorrow in there! Mix it up! (No way, I know.)