The Virtual Revolution – An OK piece, sort of
February 1, 2010
The BBC’s Virtual Revolution season kicked off yesterday with the first in a four-part series The Great Levelling ? Its OK, a decent history of things WWW and some of the people behind the whole ‘social change through techno-libertarianism’ movement.
Its mostly wrong of course. The program’s premise that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is somehow divorced from the infrastructure of the internet that it runs on is a stretch at best. To suggest that the web is non-hierarchical simply because you don’t have to ask to join in is falacious and the notion that just because addressing structures are not overtly government controlled, the traffic that they support isn’t subject to oversight is just plain wrong.
The presenter/writer starts from the wrong position. She takes the West Coast hippy route through the material casually disregarding the fact that the internet was designed as a command and control network. DARPANET and its progeny are/were all about hierarchy. Its in the DNA of the Internet Protocol. Domain Name Service is way to organise hierarchical lists of computers. The parasitic technology of TBL’s WWW cannot ignore this fact and at best disguises it through http addressing.
I just don’t see how you can paint over that core design philosophy with some vague San Franciscan musings that amount to a claim to have separated the physical infrastructure from the use of that infrastructure by power of the mind alone.
I prefer to think of the internet and www as a child growing up.
Born into a military family, DARPA laid out its morals, made sure that it ate its greens so that it had strong bones in later life. The de-militarising of the internet was the system going to school and meeting kids from the other side of town. Different folks but still recognisable, still ‘us’. The last 20 years have been it playing high-school football, getting to 2nd base with your best girl behind the bleachers, taking a part-time job to pay for a parts for a clunker to trick out. (I don’t know what any of that means by the way. I’m British. We have cricket. Its not the same)
The recent move to allow non-latin script in website addressing is the kid going to college, meeting radically new people and getting into all sorts of high jinx, maybe getting in trouble with the law over a misunderstanding. In parallel to that is the kid starting to take an interest in travel. Spreading to Africa, seeing poverty at first hand will change it, but still at its core is the Internet Protocol and the design philosophy of Cerf & co. This is where we are now.
Still to come the kid takes a trip around the whole world and graduates from college. Current WWW penetration is around 25% global population, so until over 50% of world population has access World Wide Web is not even an accurate name. That will happen soon enough and the East African Fibre Optic cable will help that process along.
At some point after the internet has reached everyone and everyone has had a chance to define their own space, exert their own influence, only then will we find out what is possible with this tool. The child will have grown up.
But unless a new infrastructure is put in place to run the traffic over, it will still be Vint Cerf and DARPA’s little nuclear resistant command and control network at heart. The values that it grew up with will not change.
A nicely designed piece of new media news support
December 29, 2009
I recently came across the BBC’s Polltracker flash app. I like it. Its easy to use, aggregates several different political pollster’s results over a 25 year period and comes with a handy guide to political polls in the UK, and their particular pros & cons.
Its very well done.
The Times They Are Confusin’
September 10, 2009
I’m really not sure what to make of The Times and its online version, TimesOnline.
Its a NewsCorp company, so like FoxNews, The Wall Street Journal or Truckin’ Life, is under the umbrella of the Murdoch family who have in the past, allegedly, exercised a high degree of editorial control. I’ll admit, I’ve actually never read Truckin’ Life, so it may be the dyed-in-the-wool liberal exception to the rule, but I suspect not.
What confuses me about The Times is the occasional radical deviation from the party line. I first noticed it in The Sunday Times, then in the ‘environment’ section of the Times Online version. The occasional random story will be completely out of place. Without ploughing through every piece of copy over the last year I can’t cite those, but here’s one that I can.
A week or two ago James Murdoch launched an attack on the UK government’s funding of the BBC and described the BBC as ‘the Addams Family of world media’. This came a few weeks after the Chairman of the Board, Mr Murdoch Snr, pronounced the end of free news on the internet. The Murdoch’s have apparently decided that the BBC is now killing journalism, as opposed to what its been doing for the last 87 years under its remit of ‘inform, educate & entertain’. So far, so what ?
Well the pay off is this. NewsCorp’s business model for new media journalism is flawed. All The Family members in the world can bleat all they want about other business models, it doesn’t change the fact that the Corp as a whole has to be concerned about declining revenue and it seems most unwilling to embrace change, and incidentally the pluralism that J. Murdoch said that the BBC was stifling in his lecture in Edinburgh. One world view is not pluralism James. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from a state-sponsored media outlet or a privately owned one, ownership and funding makes no difference to plurality (if that’s a word), its the control exercised over editorial that limits pluralism.
And then the editor reminds us what The Times used to do with a story about the newspaper being on the cutting edge of technology and open information flows – but 40 years ago.
Times have changed. Or should that be The Times has changed ?
Ahhh Paxman, there you are !
July 1, 2009
The BBC’s in-depth news show, Newsnight has a piece on Citizen Journalism vs Old Media and the recent coverage of Iran. Guests are Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post) and Anne MacElvoy (The Evening Standard). Paxman does his thing in an half-hearted kind of way.
Catching up with the Digital World
February 28, 2009
This is a keynote speech delivered by Richard Sambrook of the BBC at the Media Re:Public Forum held at USC Annenberg in March 2008.
Interesting summary of the state of the art (a year ago), for me that’s pretty up to date. I’m on a bit of a catch-up right now.
I think that Richard’s concentration by omission on the conflict between objective and subjective realities is actually, though probably old news, still very relevant. The questioners (after 36:00) kind of prove that with their takes on his presentation.
I think that (subjectively of course) there is a set of tools out there allowing easy subjective reporting. The objectivity side of things is something that must be cultural.
For those interested in the objective truth, objectivity can be a rasion d’etre to the detriment of real politique. Whether driven by a moral purpose that information should be correct and hang the consequences, or whether they are fundamentally positive about the human condition. First hand reporting and hard data will always be a superior method of moving towards a better AKA a truer world.
For those whose focus is influencing change, whether it be getting the litter bins emptied more often or a major national political shift (some would argue that amounts to the same thing in the UK), maybe the weight of conviction is the lever that must be used to get closer to a subjectively ideal world.
Do we want Spock or Bones as our information go-to guy ? Spock may be hard work and not much fun at a party, but you know that you’re going to get the facts. Bones could be telling you want he wants your to hear or what he thinks you want to hear. Maybe that doesn’t matter in most circumstances. Maybe in some situations you want the passion. Maybe you need both. In either case you probably need to know which you are getting.
