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Monday, January 22, 2007
Like, whatever 
| | So, I'm trying to put some numbers together for this piece I'm writing. (I'm also prepping for the Mobile Identity Workshop coming up Friday in San Francisco.) Specifically, I want to know how many cell phones are being used in the world today. Many search trails link back to Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users, a blog of the book Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi T Ahonen and Alan Moore. It's a good post, chock full of numbers. But there isn't a source in it. Where did the numbers come from? I'm yelling at the computer. I suppose I could credit the book, but I'd rather know the first source of the data. I want to know who came up with the numbers in the first place, and how, and where. |
| | Not knocking the blog, which is a good one. Just venting. |
| | Okay, here's a piece that says cellular connections in the world have reached 2.5 billion, and will hit 3 billion by the end of the year, and credits Wireless Intelligence as the source. There's no date on it. |
| | And here's a piece with numbers that are about a year old. But it does point to ABI Research. Like Wireless Intelligence, ABI Research wants you to pay for their numbers. You can dredge through their press releases for some crumbs, I suppose. Me, I'm moving on. |
| | And here's a Russell Beattie piece, from back when he was still blogging. That too has a link to Inquirer.net that Inquirer.net now directs to its home page. But at least Russell quoted from the piece. The source was "Parikshit Bhasin, country general manager of Nokia Philippines at a yearend briefing." |
| | Florence Chong in Australian IT today says "Some 2.4 billion people globally are accessible all the time because they carry mobile phones". Source? Nope. She adds, "The internet has changed the life of the modern person as well." I'll accept that. |
Making the scenes
| | Here's the graphic, linked back to the original: |
Out of the ... what was that?
| | Verizon Wireless (phone number: 800-000-0000) just called to find out, near as I can tell, that A) I have an account, B) I'm older than 25, and C) I'm a white guy. |
| | Once I told them that, they thanked me and moved on. Thus I was spared a sales pitch for some crap or other. I'm guessing. |
Fixing governance at the sources
| | Steve Uruquart: The Revolution Will Be Wikified. Wherein he introduces Politicopia, a new site that "gives people a solid handle on the Utah Legislature. Users create summaries of bills, pro and con arguments, comments, links, and more." |
| | Steve is the Rules Chairman of the Utah House of Representatives. Says Phil Windley, Before I worked in the Governor¹s office, I had no idea what that meant. It¹s a very powerful position because the Rules Committee essentially decides what bills make it to the floor and can be voted on. In other words, they¹re the gatekeepers who decide what legislation gets to a vote. Phil is the former CIO of Utah. Both men are Republicans. And both are very partisan about the Net. Theyr'e for it. |
| | Here's Steve on what needs to be changed and how to change it: |
| | In politics, intermediaries tightly control information. Those intermediaries are (1) special interest groups, (2) the media, and (3) bureaucrats. There's nothing wrong with the fact that those three entities exist; they can be quite helpful in proper dosage. The problem is the overwhelming degree to which those intermediaries filter content and control political dialogue. |
| | People and elected officials struggle to get around the intermediaries filter. "Elected officials?" you ask. |
| | Sure. Imagine an elected official who campaigns on really changing things for the better and, then, works hard to do it. What happens to that Mr. Smith? Likely, he'll get flattened. He'll give up, get thrown out, labor ineffectively on the fringes, or learn to get along. |
| | To be "successful" in the present system, who must Mr. Smith learn to get along with? The intermediaries. Think about it. Who has tools at the ready to best unseat an incumbent? You or a powerful special interest group? You or the media? You or career insiders? Hint: it ain't you. |
| | So, if an elected official wants to be re-elected, who does she pay more attention to -- you or those more powerful intermediaries? Again, it ain't you. For example, think about the dialogue on some of the difficult issues our nation faces (e.g., Iraq, illegal immigration, social security). How many nascent proposals to deal with those issues are smothered in the cradle by the media? Just about all of them. So, the status quo reigns. |
| | The people must wrest control from the intermediaries. How? By (1) improving access to information and (2) improving the ability to organize. |
| | Politicopia will improve people's access to information in my state, Utah, by presenting a wiki-based forum for the compilation and presentation of information on actual bills pending before the Legislature. If a citizen wants to learn about an issue and shape the dialogue, Politicopia will provide a quick and solid handle on the process -- without the intermediaries filter. And if a legislator wants to hear unfiltered suggestions from interested citizens -- instead of mainly hearing from organized special interests -- Politicopia will give him or her a new source of input. |
| | And he's not stopping with Politicopia, either. |
| | People need to be able to network with others in a broader application on that site and amplify their voices exponentially. Many wonderful experiments are being conducted on the Internet to build such a network. Politicopia is currently working with Britt Blaser's Open Resource Group to get such a platform in shape for Politicopia and other networking endeavors in the next few months. We can use your ideas. |
| | I met with Steve on my way to Las Vegas from Salt Lake a couple weeks ago, and with Phil on my way back. No two meetings have given me more hope for politics. Now you can see why. |
My pick: Colts
| | I was sorry to see the Saints get marched out of the Superbowl race. New England, too, now that the region is my second home. (This month excepted, I spend one week out of four there.) But a contest between two central-state neighbors should be fun. |
| | I just checked, and my guess was right: Indianapolis is closer (181 miles) to Chicago than Detroit (281 miles) or Green Bay (210 miles). For both the other is the nearest rival. So the Superbowl may be in Miami, but it'll still be an I-65 game. |
The story behind the story
| | There isn't a writer out there doing a better job of understanding and explaining One Laptop Per Child, or its purposes in the world, than Ethan Zuckerman. Nobody's knowledge and insight spans the small and the big pictures better. If I were an editor of a publication that wanted to cover OLPC in depth, I'd look no farther than Ethan. In fact, I would be honored and pleased to have Ethan — a terrific writer, technologist and human being — writing the piece. |
| | So, as it happens, a magazine Ethan identifies only as "a well-respected technology journal" engaged him to write about OLPC. Which he did. Ethan now reports, |
| | But then the managing editor of the journal got hold of the piece, and I discovered they wanted something very different from what I'd written - they wanted critique, tension and controversy about the project. I got a draft back that bore very little resemblance to what I'd written - it was filled with international development clichés ("In a world where half the world has never made a phonecall, does it make sense to give children a laptop?") and mean-spirited skepticism about the project ("if the laptops overheat, poor people can use them as pot warmers".) |
| | Basically, it wasn't something I was willing to have my name attached to. And so I withdrew from writing the piece and told the editor I'd been working with - not the editor who'd demanded these changes - that she was free to run the piece under her name using my research, but that I wasn't going to be associated with the tone or the conclusions of the piece... |
| | It's not that I don't think there's any tension, conflict or disagreement over the One Laptop project - it's just that I don't think the disagreement fits into a neat "He say, she says" form. Personally, I'm pretty convinced that the hardware¹s quite well designed and that the software is evolving rapidly. My concerns over the project have to do with whether educators will embrace the project or fight it, and whether the project's aims will be embraced in developing world schools. But that¹s more an open question than it is a breathless conflict. It's possible that the draft I came up with is simply so boring that it couldn't appear in this journal without some tension to draw in readers... but it raises the question of how one writes about science or technology when there's no great drama unfolding, just progress being made. |
| | This isn't far from the "story" problem that Dave wrote about the other day, when he expressed demand for Stuff That Matters insead of the usual Stuff That Has Emotional Impact. But the problem is actually closer to an issue Dave wrote about in Paul Krugman and Lies, back in September 2003. I followed that with The Story story, quoting Dave's post: |
| | An example, a story on file sharing last week. The reporter shows us one extreme, and then another. But the second isn't very extreme. And then the obvious thing that all copy editors seem to love. "The truth lies somewhere in between." The conclusion, that anyone who listened to music on a computer is a pirate, is not true. It's a lie. And because it's so well hidden, and sounds so reasonable, it's a worse lie. Better to come out with it. According to the NY Times everyone who listens to music on a computer is a criminal. Have the guts to call a spade a spade, if you really mean it, don't hide it in a mist of fake reasonableness. |
| | The context in that case was the "debate" that never happened over the entertainment industry's successful re-labeling of file sharing as "piracy". Just as misleading, however, are "debates" conducted largely for entertainment value, rather than to convey useful information. Debarah Tannen visited this at length in her book The Argument Culture. I'll repeat here some of the Tannen I quoted 3.5 years ago: |
| | The argument culture urges us to approach the world — and the people in it — in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done. The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as 'both sides'; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you're really thinking is to criticize. |
| | In fact Arguments are Instant Story, and that's why there's a journalistic "culture" around them. |
| | See, here's the bigger, deeper, almost unsolvable problem: stories are interesting. In fact, nothing is more interesting to human beings than stories. |
| | I realized that one day in 1980 when my friend Jerry Solfvin and I were busy cutting a hole in a ceiling of an old house in Durham, North Carolina. Between turns with a skill saw and pulls on our beers, Jerry asked, out of the blue, "What is the fundamental unit of consciousness?" That's the kind of stuff we talked about when the subject wasn't construction or basketball. With hardly a further thought about it, I answered "The story". I went on to explain that nothing is more interesting to human beings than stories. |
| | I had help from a book I had just read called "Writing to Sell", by the (soon to be late) great literary agent Scott Meredith. The book had a simple and straightforward thesis, proved constantly in Meredith's long experience: People are built to care about stories, all of which have three bones in their simple skeletons: 1) a protagonist to identify with; 2) a problem that assures struggle; and 3) movement toward a resolution. |
| | Whether your topic is a novel, a soap opera, a war, a sports event or a traffic report, if it doesn't have those three bones, we tend not to be interested in it. |
| | Sports are a perfect example of a pure story. Teams are protagonists. We care most about them when they're struggling toward some kind of resolution; and we care least about them when they're either losers or so dominant there's no struggle involved. If we're at a basketball game and the team we're rooting for is up 30 pionts with five minutes left, the struggle we care most about is getting out of the parking lot. |
| | "What's the story?" is a standard question asked of reporters by managing editors — perhaps thousands of times a day, around the world. Same goes for TV assignments too. |
| | Which brings us to the bottom line here. The word "story" is also synonymous with fiction. When you'd rather wow readers than simply inform them, you're headed in the fictional direction, whether you admit it or not, even if you don't get there. Keeping it real isn't as easy or as obvious as it might seem. Not if you want it to be interesting. |
| | In fact you can express pretty much anything within the three-bone format of a story. As Ethan points out, there are tensions in the open questions about OLPC. Problem is, they're not tensions of the sort this editor wanted expressed in Ethan's story. By saying the rewritten story isn't true, Ethan's saying it's just, well, a story. |
| | How much of what passes for Good Journalism is "just a story"? I don't know if it's possible to tell. A lot of it, that's for sure. |
| | Bonus link: Anatomy of a Smear Campaign. They used the sensationalism of unrelated crimes committed by doctors to threaten the livelihood of a well-respected and valued member of our community. At best, it¹s irresponsible reporting. At worst, it¹s an outright smear campaign. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Like, whatever - Monday, January 22, 2007, Luke Schubert, 1/23/07; 8:58:59 PM Re: Politicopia - Monday, January 22, 2007, Keith Dick, 1/23/07; 4:25:26 AM Re: My pick: Colts, Joe Berkemeier, 1/22/07; 1:40:06 PM
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