Churnalism is a brilliant idea - no surprise that it was originally one of Chris Lightfoot's. Basically, it allows you to determine how much of a given newspaper article was copied from which press release. There's a nice graphic visualisation, and a diff, so you can see precisely what was altered and what taken over in its entirety. It's right up there with Piggipedia and SukeyDating as a brilliant piece of geek activism.
However, here's something amusing. There's a basic API here; I chucked the text of the GSMA final press release from this year's MWC at it, and I was quite surprised at the results. The first article it extracted from Journalisted was none other than this piece in the Guardian from...February 2008. One consequence of churnalism is that your newspaper is likely to get repetitive.
As far as I can see, if there's anything missing here it's that the comparison is mostly the wrong way - having a newspaper article and wanting to know what vacuous NIB-fodder got regurgitated into it is a much more common use-case than having a press release and wanting to know which newspaper articles it got into. Actually, the latter use-case is far more likely if you're a PR and you're trying to measure how the talking-points are spreading. But once it has more press releases on file, it'll work better in that sense. And that's just a question of hoovering Businesswire, PRNewsWire etc up.
Showing posts with label memes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memes. Show all posts
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
in the future, trolls will be a natural resource like oil
Looking back at Tunisia, and forward at Egypt, I think there's an important point that this post almost hits but not quite.
Specifically, I'm fairly sceptical about "Twitter Revolutions" and such - if your revolution has someone else's brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? - but I don't think it's irrelevant.
I'm feeling a little sorry for Evgeny Morozov at the moment. He'd just hacked out a niche as Mr. Grumpy by royal appointment to the blogosphere, when first Wikileaks and then Tunisia and Egypt came sweeping through, and the Tunisian secret police hacked all the Facebook pages in the country, and the Egyptians turned off the Internet, just pulled all the BGP announcements... Sometimes it's not your day.
I do think, though, that there is an important way in which a whole lot of Internet tools contributed to the revolutions. I recently posted on the way in which people can at least for a while function as if they were part of an organisation just because they shared certain assumptions. It's the idea of the imagined community, which can be defined as a group of people who are behaving as if their weak social ties were strong ones. If you want a mental model of this, the revolution happens when enough people change state and start doing this, and it stops again when they revert to pursuing their interests in the normal way. Of course, what happens in between may have changed what those are and how they do it. From a different direction, look at Chris Dillow's post here - it's theoretically irrational to take part in politics, until it's not. The point when it stops being irrational, though, is the point when people stop thinking it's irrational.
In that sense, a lot of the work of starting a revolution is starting a myth. An ironic salute to this was the Egyptian government's decision to turn off the Internet, and later the GSM networks as well. If the value of the Internet really had been as a way to pass on the time and place to assemble, this would have been a serious blow to the movement. But once you're a really angry Egyptian, where else would you protest but Tahrir Square? It wasn't that they needed it for tactical communication, but rather for strategic propaganda. Also, once they took this step, they had also inadvertently demonstrated to the other world media that This Was It. The mainstream media remains very good at bringing its own connectivity, and the main barrier to them covering the news is usually that they don't think something is news. Giving Al-Jazeera and friends - who had been heavily criticised on the Web for being soft on the Egyptian government - a monopoly may have been a really bad idea as it forced them to cover the news or look indistinguishable from Nile TV.
I suspect that a lesson here is that the last thing authoritarian governments will do in future is turn the Internet off. For a start, they will increasingly need to keep it up for economic reasons - the ISP that serves the Egyptian stock exchange and central bank was left alone, and with time I would bet that it would become increasingly porous to information. But much more importantly, this is not a policy that has a great track record. Burma managed it, but started with advantages (not many users, only one network, and a strong position to start with). Iran did far better with its throttle-down-and-spy plan. Even though the Tunisians funnelled all the Facebook accounts in the country into one, controlled by the secret police, it didn't seem to help.
Jamais Casco (via here) asked if you could start a genocide on Twitter - a sensible point, as we know you can do so with the radio, the cinema, television, the newspapers, and (thanks to Serbian turbo-folk) rock'n'roll*. Terrorists tried to start a nuclear war with a spoofed caller-ID. Whether or not you could do that, you can certainly start a mob of quasi-fascist loyalist paramilitaries on QQ. Out of all authoritarian governments, China does best, with strategic trolling and semi-official moderators, which may be more important than direct censorship. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics makes the interesting point that Russia in the early Putin years didn't so much censor the Internet, as distribute government talking-points and favours to carefully selected bastards.
Then again, was the greatest success of the wumaodang model the 2004 US presidential election? The best way to fight one myth is perhaps with another. And the best ones are distinguished by the fact they are sometimes called principles. The really depressing consequence of this is that Paul Staines probably has a job for life, although the less depressing corollary is that he gets to herd several hundred idiots yelling about ZaNuLiebour for the term of his natural.
A couple of other interesting links: Charles Bwele makes the point that in much of the world, the so-called new media are more like the first ones. Did you know about the Grozny riots of 1958?
*The world's first genocidal remix is yet to come, but I wouldn't rule it out by any means. All art aspires to the status of music, and just look what people get up to with books.
Specifically, I'm fairly sceptical about "Twitter Revolutions" and such - if your revolution has someone else's brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? - but I don't think it's irrelevant.
I'm feeling a little sorry for Evgeny Morozov at the moment. He'd just hacked out a niche as Mr. Grumpy by royal appointment to the blogosphere, when first Wikileaks and then Tunisia and Egypt came sweeping through, and the Tunisian secret police hacked all the Facebook pages in the country, and the Egyptians turned off the Internet, just pulled all the BGP announcements... Sometimes it's not your day.
I do think, though, that there is an important way in which a whole lot of Internet tools contributed to the revolutions. I recently posted on the way in which people can at least for a while function as if they were part of an organisation just because they shared certain assumptions. It's the idea of the imagined community, which can be defined as a group of people who are behaving as if their weak social ties were strong ones. If you want a mental model of this, the revolution happens when enough people change state and start doing this, and it stops again when they revert to pursuing their interests in the normal way. Of course, what happens in between may have changed what those are and how they do it. From a different direction, look at Chris Dillow's post here - it's theoretically irrational to take part in politics, until it's not. The point when it stops being irrational, though, is the point when people stop thinking it's irrational.
In that sense, a lot of the work of starting a revolution is starting a myth. An ironic salute to this was the Egyptian government's decision to turn off the Internet, and later the GSM networks as well. If the value of the Internet really had been as a way to pass on the time and place to assemble, this would have been a serious blow to the movement. But once you're a really angry Egyptian, where else would you protest but Tahrir Square? It wasn't that they needed it for tactical communication, but rather for strategic propaganda. Also, once they took this step, they had also inadvertently demonstrated to the other world media that This Was It. The mainstream media remains very good at bringing its own connectivity, and the main barrier to them covering the news is usually that they don't think something is news. Giving Al-Jazeera and friends - who had been heavily criticised on the Web for being soft on the Egyptian government - a monopoly may have been a really bad idea as it forced them to cover the news or look indistinguishable from Nile TV.
I suspect that a lesson here is that the last thing authoritarian governments will do in future is turn the Internet off. For a start, they will increasingly need to keep it up for economic reasons - the ISP that serves the Egyptian stock exchange and central bank was left alone, and with time I would bet that it would become increasingly porous to information. But much more importantly, this is not a policy that has a great track record. Burma managed it, but started with advantages (not many users, only one network, and a strong position to start with). Iran did far better with its throttle-down-and-spy plan. Even though the Tunisians funnelled all the Facebook accounts in the country into one, controlled by the secret police, it didn't seem to help.
Jamais Casco (via here) asked if you could start a genocide on Twitter - a sensible point, as we know you can do so with the radio, the cinema, television, the newspapers, and (thanks to Serbian turbo-folk) rock'n'roll*. Terrorists tried to start a nuclear war with a spoofed caller-ID. Whether or not you could do that, you can certainly start a mob of quasi-fascist loyalist paramilitaries on QQ. Out of all authoritarian governments, China does best, with strategic trolling and semi-official moderators, which may be more important than direct censorship. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics makes the interesting point that Russia in the early Putin years didn't so much censor the Internet, as distribute government talking-points and favours to carefully selected bastards.
Then again, was the greatest success of the wumaodang model the 2004 US presidential election? The best way to fight one myth is perhaps with another. And the best ones are distinguished by the fact they are sometimes called principles. The really depressing consequence of this is that Paul Staines probably has a job for life, although the less depressing corollary is that he gets to herd several hundred idiots yelling about ZaNuLiebour for the term of his natural.
A couple of other interesting links: Charles Bwele makes the point that in much of the world, the so-called new media are more like the first ones. Did you know about the Grozny riots of 1958?
*The world's first genocidal remix is yet to come, but I wouldn't rule it out by any means. All art aspires to the status of music, and just look what people get up to with books.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Sunday, December 12, 2010
repetition, repetition, repetition
This would do as a HOWTO start a war.
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Here's Grant Shapps applying the same technique:
Give him some credit - he even let on what he was doing.
The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including "critics like the Guardian". Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: "Our argument should be narrow, and put with vigour – Iraq is uniquely dangerous."
In his memo, he said drafts of the dossier at the time had no "killer fact" which "proves" that "Saddam must be taken on now, or this or that weapon will be used against us." When Blair was launching the dossier three weeks later, he told parliament that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMDs.
Williams wrote: "Our target is not the argumentative interviewer or opinionated columnist, but the kind of people to whom ministerial interviews are a background hum on the car or kitchen radio. We must think Radio 5. Although the big Radio 4 programmes have to be done, we must not let them set themselves up as judge and jury."
Repeat, repeat, repeat. Here's Grant Shapps applying the same technique:
"We are still saying someone could have rent of £21,000-a-year paid by the taxpayer. How many could afford to pay that?"
Give him some credit - he even let on what he was doing.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
again with the nameless dread!
So there's this web application that does a corpus analysis of your writing and compares it to others....I chucked this post at it.
I suppose Charlie Stross is right in linking the Lovecraft mythos and international politics. Further evidence - I tried the post before that one, about satellites and private finance initiatives, and got the same result.
Update: But when I write for Stable & Principled...
I suppose Charlie Stross is right in linking the Lovecraft mythos and international politics. Further evidence - I tried the post before that one, about satellites and private finance initiatives, and got the same result.
Update: But when I write for Stable & Principled...
