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Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Happy travails 
| | I missed my plane out of Palm Springs, and now I'm sitting in Las Vegas waiting for an 11:30 flight that gets into Denver at 2:30am. I should be at the hotel by 3:30. That should leave me ready to start bright and early at Digital ID World at 8am or whenever. |
| | Cell coverage seemed to be here for one call, but not after that. Same thing happened in Palm Springs. Maybe it's my phone. No biggie. At least I got a dial-up here at LAS. I'd almost forgotten how one worked. But I can't do long distance since I have no idea what my phone credit card number is, if I even have one. That's how long I've been dependent on cellular telephony. |
| | The big surprise about Palm Springs: it's still hot there: mid-90s at night and just under 70 at night. It's 82 right now, at 10pm. (And there I was, hauling around all this cool-weather gear left over from Foo Camp.) It'll be in the low 40s when I arrive in Denver, though. |
| | Very pretty trip above the desert, flying up here. Out the window of the plane on approach to LAS, Las Vegas looked like Mos Eisley on Tatooine to me. Hence the photo above. |
| | One of these days I'll put up a collection of my shots from airplane windows. Most of 'em suck, but a few are pretty amazing. |
The Great Frame-Up
| | George Lakoff on Alternet: The Frame Around Arnold. As usual, George nails the tendentiousness in most storytelling, even though we call it "reporting." Newspaper and TV reporters require a story. Each story requires a frame. How was the election of Arnold Schwartzenegger framed? He lists the main ones: Voter Revolt... The Great Noncommunicator... those Kooky Californains... The People Beat the Politicians (Arnold's own frame)... Just a celebrity... Up by his bootstraps...The Right Wing Power Grab... |
| | His main point: It is a general finding about frames that if a strongly held frame doesn't fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept. |
| | He goes on to examine the election in terms of Moral Politics, the book he wrote in 1996 and updated in 2002: |
| | The 'Moral Politics' discovery is that models of idealized family structure lie at the heart of our politics — less literally than metaphorically. The very notion of the founding fathers uses a metaphor of the nation as family, not as something we think actively about, but as way of structuring our understanding of the enormous hard-to-conceptualize social group, the nation, in terms of something closer to home, the family. It is something we do automatically, usually without consciously thinking about it. |
| | It's deep but accessible reading. Go for it. |
Inexpert opinions
| | Tristan opens by explaining that he's conversant around certain subjects, though not expert in them: |
| | I can probably talk about the intricacies of XHTML and WAI but I do not consider myself an expert in those areas as far as I see it: I do understand the specifications, do know how to implement them, and know what most hardcore geeks would know about them. Because of the people I surround myself with (my social network (more on that later), I consider myself literate in the subject but would defer to other people if looking for true expertise. |
| | ...when a new subject crops up, I first do a google search but, more and more often, I now also do a Feedster search in an attempt to get more context. The secret sauce in all of this is RSS, a small easy to use protocol that sits at the core of the weblog world. Where it not for this tool, I would still have to visit sites one by one and go through thousands of google pages to find the proper page. Because blogs are based largely on linking and commenting on links, the blog worlds provides me with some context about a particular link. This, in turns, allows me to more quickly grasps new concepts. |
| | I am not alone in this. This kind of concept sits at the core of what the blog world is about. Because blogs generate conversation amongst bloggers, pockets of expertise are arising. The mass media are now being surprised by the rise of people who are moving from blogs to mainstream media but shouldn't be. After all, the deep secret of many in traditional media is that expertise is something that one acquires over time by covering a particular subject. The links one makes with sources are established by doing story after story in a particular area of expertise. That's exactly what bloggers are now doing and that is why blogs are representing such a revolutionary thing in information dispersal and in expertise building. |
| | Steve and Jon were talking expertly about XHTML, among many other things, last night. I found myself needing to become conversant in it; but also needing to disclaim any expertise. That's because it continuously amazes me that I am considered an expert on a matter just because I include it among the subjects I talk and write about, even if I disclaim any expertise in the process. |
| | One of Tristan's subtle points is that various blogging tools help us (fellow bloggers among other journalists) develop better ways of scaffolding our growing knowledge about complicated subjects. |
| | This contrasts with what I gathered by listening to Bill O'Reilly on Fresh Air. O'Reilly is what I called a "certidude" a few months ago: a guy who is fully convinced of his rightness and his opponents' wrongness. I'll buy that O'Reilly studies history and knows a great deal, that he has a strong spiritual life and that he's only trying to "solve problems" on his shows. But I don't think he's the kind of guy who would be willing to admit that there are good reasons to scaffold opinions with partial understandings, and that there are large subject areas that are so full of gray that true experts must respectfully disagree about the shades of white and black involved. To O'Reilly, everybody should have a strong position to state at all times, to attack and defend, and to otherwise help manufacture broadcasting that's entertaining, if not informative. |
| | I'm also concerned about the level of closed-mindedness behind various campaign efforts. It worked with Isa and Schwarzenegger against Gray Davis in California. But I doubt it will work for the democrats against George Bush a year from now. Or sooner. Listen to William F. Buckley in a column titled Bush is Evil: |
| | Dean is campaigning against Bush using language that would be appropriate in campaigning against a public enemy. One assumes the sincerity of Dean's passion, which is doing yeoman work for him with Internet ideologues and with Manichaean Democrats drawn to the proposition that the only way to understand Bush is to know that he is evil. |
| | Is it predictable that after Dean sews up the nomination, winning in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, he will confront a body of previously inert Democrats who will be reluctant to endorse an anti-Bush campaign based on the incumbent's venality? |
| | If that happened, how quickly would it happen? The nomination might well be sewn up by early March of 2004. How soon after that would Candidate Dean discover that the drumbeat which has been propelling him isn't resonating over hill and vale into the body of voters needed to proceed with the election of a new president, which is something different from the excommunication of a sinner? |
| | That test could come before Dean is anointed. It is entirely possible that the people who go to the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire will be wondering whether they are being coopted by the moral absolutes of Candidate Dean, who is asking them to dispatch him to kill the dragon in the White House. |
| | I think Buckley mischaracterizes the nature of Dean's support via the Net, but I think he's right about the motivations of many Dean supporters, and of the limits of those motivations. |
| | When I went to a Dean meetup in Santa Barbara, I found most of the attendees were far less interested in Dean than in getting rid of Bush. As a friend of mine, a devout Dean supporter, often puts it, "I just want the bastard gone." |
| | That's one reason why I can't get with the program. But it's also a reason why I read more blogs while reading fewer papers, watching less TV and listening to less radio. My mind is still open on the matter. |
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