Flat Earth News: robots.txt

After becoming thoroughly absorbed by the fascinating insights in 'Flat Earth News' by Nick Davies, I can affirm that the book has greatly served to improve my critical understanding of news production.

 

The book, in his own words, 'names and exposes the national news stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.' The main thrust of the book details how growing commercial pressures on media producers have radically changed the role of journalists, limiting their role to that of 'churnalists' who simply no longer have the time to do their jobs properly.

 

Critical reviews of the book itself have focussed on some errant instances of the author's interpretation of the data he collected with the help of researchers from Cardiff University, and more strongly, out-and-out refutations from journalists working for the newspapers mentioned.

 

My reading is that while indeed Mr Davies goes after his targets with a ruthless polemic, the sheer volume of evidence collected from a myriad of sources involved in the industry suggests that he has correctly identified the main narrative which describes a true crisis in our mass-media.

 

I guess you'll have to read it to believe it.. and then?

 

Robots.txt


And then you read a BBC News Online story linking the new Obama administration's dedication to 'openness' with a change in the robots.txt file (which tells search engines how to index content on websites) on the whitehouse.gov server. Auntie goes with the angle 'By contrast, after eight years of government the Bush administration was stopping huge swathes of data from being searchable.'

 

Alas, this is a piece of Flat Earth News. This particular news-nugget appeared earlier on the BoingBoing blog, where commentators correctly explained that the old robots.txt file merely prevented the indexing of duplicate text-only versions (along with some other technical fixes).

 

It seems that while the most cursory fact-checking would have revealed this, it just goes too well with the prevailing narrative of the new administration. Davies talks in particular about how BBC News Online journalists are given 15 minutes or so to get an article up from it appearing on wire services, and how in many cases only one source is used.

 

While this particular instance may seem insignificant, Davies explains how the commercial pressures placed on journalists working today have enabled errors, some with much more important ramifications than this, to become commonplace in our mass media.

Can journalism make Gaza real to us?

One of the most startling and, if true, depressing anecdotes I have heard about life in Gaza is that living under constant threat of death destroys the human imagination. It has been documented that Palestinian children suffer trauma-related sleep disorders, but the anecdote suggests something more horrific. If all you have ever known is being in a condition of constantly trying to reach a safe place, of being unable to go to school or work with any degree of safety, of having to find food and water each day, then the brain becomes exclusively focused on the present. It must, for survival. At this point, neurologically, a person stops having dreams, and stops being able to hope, because hope implies a future, which is literally unthinkable.

Elaine Scarry has written about the annihilation of the mind during torture, which also breaks down a person’s connection to time. ‘It is commonplace that at the moment when a dentist’s drill hits and holds an exposed nerve,’ she writes, ‘a person sees stars. What is meant be “seeing stars” is that the contents of consciousness are, during those moments, obliterated, that the name of one’s child, the memory of a friend’s face, are all absent.’ After a certain amount or intensity of torture, the brain just goes.

The Guardian published an essay by Karma Nabulsi last week claiming to ‘reveal the reality of life under daily attack’. She writes: READ ON

The Future of the Internet: 2020 and beyond

Just before Christmas the latest Pew survey of experts’ views on the future of the Internet was published. Offering a series of predictions on how the Internet will look in 2020, the comments of those involved in the creation and development of the Internet, as well as business, government and academic thinkers, make for fascinating reading. Will technical or security considerations mean we need a whole new Internet, a ‘clean slate’? Will changing technology change how we relate to one another, for instance making us more ‘forgiving’ or ‘tolerant’? The survey covers issues such as privacy, security, the work/life balance, the use of virtual worlds for medical and military training, and whether the proliferation of mobile devices in the third world can bring development. Also implicit is the question of how we can predict the future at all. But just for a flavour, here are some quotes:

 

‘While air-typing and haptic gestures are widespread and ubiquitous [in 2020], the arrival of embedded optical displays, thought-transcription, eye-movement tracking, and predictive-behavior modelling will fundamentally alter the human-computer interaction model. What we think is performed almost in real time…’

 

‘This one sounds too much like the Kitchen of the Future at some 1930s World Fair; I think we’ll have better, more adaptable devices, but I doubt we’ll be air-typing’

 

‘…there will be ‘subvocal’ inputs that detect ‘almost speech’ that you will, but not actually voice. Small sensors on teeth will also let you tap commands. Your eyeballs will track desires, sensed by your eyeglasses. And so on.’

 

Sensors on our teeth! Thought-transcription! Its worth a look.

Ephemeral media

A new research team at Nottingham is looking at 'ephemeral media' through a series of workshops starting next year. The fleeting, ephemeral nature of online media content has been a real problem for those of us studying how people make use of news because you can't always find the news people say they consumed. I spent 6 months in a library basement reading newspaper editorials during my PhD which was profoundly boring but at least the media content wasn't going to disappear. Today, even digital archives we think are reliable are subject to political interference and we cannot be sure what is missing from the original story, or what stories are missing. So this attempt to get a grip on our ephemeral media is timely.

Obama and the CNN effect

Speculation about the likely foreign policy agenda of Obama in the past week has touched at times on whether the US will be more likely to intervene in situations of genocide or ethnic cleansing, for example in Congo. This brings to mind debates about the 'CNN effect'. In the 1990s the emergence of satellite TV stations like CNN suddenly increased the scope for live broadcasts from zones of conflict and catastrophe, making audiences demand "something must be done" and politicians being pressured into intervening (or pulling out). Many politicians anecdotally suggest they did feel some pressure. When political leaders lack a clear policy, media could expose this, leading to policy on-the-hoof, without due consideration. But what we've seen in the last week is a different kind of media pressure. These commentaries may be preparing the US public, or other publics around the world, such that when Obama does command an intervention, nobody is too surprised. This is a more subtle and long-term media effect, as the parameters of the "thinkable" and "do-able" under an Obama presidency are sketched out.

PhD call for papers: Great Powers and Strategic Narratives

 

Call for Advanced PhD student participants:

Catalytic Research Workshop: Great Powers after the Bush Presidency: Interests, Strategies and Narratives

International Studies Association Annual Convention New York City, 14th February 2009

Application Details

We are looking for well qualified PhD students to present at an ISA catalytic research workshop on Great Powers after the Bush Presidency to be held in New York City on 14th February 2009.

We would welcome applications from advanced PhD students working in the areas of Russian foreign policy and/or on how major powers seek to influence international affairs. Scholars working in International Relations and Communication Studies are encouraged to apply.

Applications should include a one page outline detailing the scope of the proposed paper and a full curriculum vitae. Applications should reach us no later than the 12th December 2008. The ISA will provide financial support to the successful applicant to attend.

Please email applications to Dr Alister Miskimmon, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London: alister.miskimmon@rhul.ac.uk

Further details here.

 

Online radicalisation: an explanatory fiction?

Earlier this year Nick Reilly, a young Muslim convert suffering Asperger’s syndrome and with a mental age of ten, tried to explode a nail bomb in a restaurant in Exeter. He did explode the bomb but in the restaurant toilet by mistake, harming only himself. Press coverage immediately described Reilly as a person radicalised ‘over the internet’, or ‘brainwashed online’ as The Times helpfully put it. What could this mean? For some years now security policymakers have been under pressure to find out how the online radicalisation process works, but little progress has been made. Yes, we know how Al-Qaeda and other groups use the internet for organisation and propaganda functions, but whether and how the internet is used for ‘brainwashing’ is a mystery. But this may because it is fundamentally unknowable. Why? First, it presumes that we can isolate the effects of online activity from the broad set of relationships any person encounters every day. But while certain combinations of offline meetings and online engagement may lead a person to become an advocate or practitioner of violence, it is unlikely to be the product of online activity alone. Second, and more importantly, it makes less and less sense to speak of ‘online’ or ‘offline’ behaviour in the first place. ‘Radicalising material’ may be sent by Bluetooth, consumed on a cellphone, and responded to by text messaging. Researchers found schoolchildren swapping images of Ken Bigley’s beheading in 2004 doing this on their phones. Where they being radicalised? No, and none of it was online anyway. Were security practitioners to try to trace ‘online radicalisation’ they would not be able to construct a complete explanation.

There appears a generation for whom an imaginary figure exists, the ‘sad loner’ sitting in his bedroom (never her bedroom) in the dark being radicalised, brainwashed, or programmed. This may be what the psychologist Burhuss Skinner called an explanatory fiction: something we need to visualise in order to make sense of a larger process. In psychology, that fiction was ‘the mind’, which doesn’t technically exist in any observable sense. So this is not like the Higgs Boson particle which is predicted in particle physics and which Cern’s large hadron collider may allow scientists to observe. It is a heuristic, a conceptual entity only. There are ‘vulnerable’ people like Nick Reilly at the start. And there are acts of violence at the end. Somewhere in between was presumed to be a process of online radicalisation. It is becoming increasingly clear this makes little sense.