Blogcritics Author: Spincycle

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Interview with Eric Berlin, Blogcritics Executive Producer

Spincycle — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:19:12 EDT

This is the third interview in a series that will end with the analysis of normative questions around Blogcritics.org and blogosphere in general. To read the interview with Christopher Rose, click here, and for the interview with Lisa McKay, click here.Eric Berlin is Executive Producer at Blogcritics.org. Eric has been with Blogcritics.org since August, 2004 and is the publisher of BC Network site Online Media Cultist.Can you tell me about your current role in BC and how you came to be involved with it?Well, I am the Executive Producer at Blogcritics. I take the position to mean doing whatever it takes to move the site forward and take it to the next place, wherever that next place happens to be.I had been writing a sort of e-magazine by the name, Dumpster Bust, in 2003 and 2004 and I would distribute it to friends and fans via e-mail list. Then in November 2004, I started an eponymous blog. It had just been a month since I had started the blog when I discovered Blogcritics.org. It was an extraordinary moment -- I'll never forget it. I simply couldn't get over how great it was to have a community where writers from all over the world could congregate and write about pop culture and politics and everything in between and chat and argue and laugh and hang out.I got pretty involved, pretty active right away, and became an editor a few months later I think.It was apparent to me from the very beginning what an enormous value that BC offers to both writers and readers. As a writer, I noticed that my own writing was improving, that I was reaching a much larger audience than I ever could have on my own, that I could access free review materials, and most of all, I was making connections and even friendships with great, interesting, wonderful people from all over the world.I became an Executive Producer somewhere around the late summer of 2005 and moved into helping provide editorial oversight, though over time my role has evolved to mostly take on business development and public relations.Tell me a little more about your decision to blog under real name plus what do you do for your "real" job?I use my name because I want to present who I really am, "expose" my writing and the person behind it.It's a little strange being that "naked" before the world sometimes, but that's a decision all writers must make.My "real" job is producing websites for a company in Los Angeles. I do try to keep the two roles separate to an extent, though you can of course infer that there's tremendous crossover in terms of what I have the privilege of learning and experiencing each day.Blogcritics is a passion and a job that has to fit into the cracks of my regular life, but that's something that millions of fellow bloggers out there are also contending with. It's a balance thing. Relatively few can pull a full-time wage from blogging so it's an activity born of passion and devotion and even obsession for most!Volunteerism Fred Turner, a professor at Stanford, recently published a book called 'Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism'. What impresses me about BC is this volunteerism. You do a full time job and still take time to volunteer.I think that people -- including the 1,700 "writer-bloggers" of blogcritics, our passionate readers and commenters, our most involved site users, and most of all our hardworking and dedicated and monumentally talented editorial staff members (which includes many of the site's best writers!) -- put in so much effort because they are passionate about the site and our community and want to see it grow and prosper and do well.That's certainly what drove me and what still makes me eager to get up in the morning, flip on the computer (it's usually on all night, actually!) and see what's happened since my last visit.By the way, I am now one of the three co-owners of Blogcritics.org so my position is no longer strictly a volunteer position. I suppose you are alluding to the fact that the success of BC and the volunteerism that we see on it is due to its symbiotic nature.Yes, BC is symbiotic -- I like to use the somewhat cheesy term "people power" -- Blogcritics is a grassroots success story (we've never had a dime of investment) literally powered by its membership.So our "sinister cabal of superior writers" help one another to succeed, producing stories and work that is good and beneficial to the Internet community.CommentingBC has an open commenting policy and an open attitude towards accepting new writers. I am sure there must have been plenty of behind the scenes discussions about it. Tell me a little about the process of deciding about policies around BC.Open commenting has been around since I joined the site in 2004, and it really falls under the umbrella of creating a wide open community that is open to multiple viewpoints and that has as low a barrier to entry as possible.Because of the increased menace of spam, we may one day have to require membership for commenters, but for now we can maintain this arrangement as we always have.VisionTell me a little more about the vision you have for BC.Whew... that's a big one! Blogcritics is in a very exciting phase right now in that we're expanding into a suite of sites that we call the BC Network.Desicritics, our first network site, is now a year old and is thriving as a platform for people who live in and are passionate about the Desi world.Now we are looking to create specialty "niche" sites that can capture a new audience that isn't necessarily into the more magazine-style format that BC presentsGlossLip has now launched under the direction of Dawn Olsen and is a fantastic place to check all things celebrity and gossip, subjects in which there is an insatiable audience for new stuff, and particularly when it's done with style and attitude and savvy, which basically sum up everything that Dawn is about.We've also just within the last few weeks launched BC Forums into private beta and will very soon go wider with it. Just in testing, we've seen the explosive potential of this area -- which provides yet another way for our community to communicate, interact, joke around, or just hang out. (Since this interview, the BC Forums have been launched.)So that's really the vision right there -- providing new ways for our audience and potential audience to learn, interact, and communicate, creating cutting edge content-community networks online.Eric, I was talking to the other Eric - 'Olsen' - and he was telling me of he quickly realized that he would have to assume responsibility if the site has to go anywhere. There are always key actors in a grass root organization. In a way, I am questioning how grass root is a grass roots organization? You are creating a media company from bottom up and I am interested in understanding how norms and policies are decided.Yes, Blogcritics is as grassroots as it gets -- most people don't realize this!The only full-time employee is founder and publisher Eric Olsen, so he is the "man at the helm" for emergencies, trouble shooting, fire patrol, you name it!Phillip Winn is our technical director and lives outside of Dallas. I live in Pasadena California and EO lives outside of Cleveland. And our editors live around the world -- several key editors live in the UK which is great because it gives us "wide coverage" in terms of the unending 24 hour production cycle.So it's all virtual, all grassroots, all people working together to create something that's never been done before. That's the thing that's important to remember: Blogcritics is singular in so many ways.That's why it was named as part of the AlwaysOn 100 in the trendsetter's category, I believe, and that's what makes BC so fascinating.Now Eric, a harder question! Do you see this as a model for running media organizations? Even mainstream ones? What the advantages to it? And what are the problems? Is this a model for a more accountable media?Well -- I see your questions as taking on a few different issues. Let me start with the first one.I do see virtual organizations and small teams of founders working closely together as the present and future of software development. The barrier to entry is so much lower than it has ever been, which is a huge boon to the Internet industry and people who simply dig the Internet and technology.I'm not sure if it's the model for "mainstream ones" -- I think it depends on the particular circumstances but certainly it's there as an option.At the same time there's really no replacing in person day-to-day contact. As to your other question about a more accountable media, I think you're talking about the role of the blogosphere in making the mainstream media and other institutions more accountable?I believe so but I am also interested in talking about ownership and editorial policy decisions that are decided differently than they are today. BC is creating a new type of socially owned media company and do you think media itself can be reorganized via this principle and what kind of issues do you see around it.Well, I think media in general is in a state of great flux with the role of traditional media companies declining in some ways and changing rapidly to deal with changing times while new and online media companies are gaining audience and credibility and dealing with the many issues that come along with that accountability and responsibility.Take for example Mike Arrington at TechCrunch -- he's an interesting case in that he outright declares that he's not a journalist while reviewing start-ups and tech companies, issuing opinions, and so on, all while openly investing in many of these companies, reviewing competitors, etc.We've really arrived at a new place!It seems blogosphere itself is going under reorganization as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time?I see a blogosphere that is maturing and dealing with issues that come with it, pretty similar to what I mention in terms of the greater online media community. I see the blogosphere and traditional media companies, which are online, incorporating elements of one another.Yeah,.. WP, NYT, BBC - all have blogs…Yes, I've recently covered how companies like Reuters and The Economist are incorporating blogs into their online offerings.My overarching theory on all of this boils down to a term I call "hybrid social media," which I think is the future of news online.I have covered some of the issues you raise in the article, Netscape Is the Future of News.Very briefly, hybrid social news posits a future in which news will incorporate three main forms of content: original content produced by the online media company publishing the site, social news content driven by user submissions and user voting, and administrator or editor-selected content, which includes editor-selected pieces from all over the Internet, including those submitted by the general audience.Blogcritics.org has always tried to combat that trend by forming an open platform where competing ideas and ideologies and values can co-exist together under a big tent of sorts. That said, a lot of our stories revolve around popular culture so can therefore escape some of the combativeness found in the arena of politics.Though of course we do have a politics area that can get rowdy at times but generally does very nicely in bringing in a vast array of news stories, thoughts, and opinions.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview with Lisa McKay, Executive Editor of BC

Spincycle — Fri, 11 May 2007 23:05:08 EDT

This is the second interview in the series that will end with the analysis of normative questions around Blogcritics.org and blogosphere in general. To read the interview with Christopher Rose, click here.Lisa McKay is Executive Editor at Blogcritics.org. Lisa has been with Blogcritics.org since August, 2004.You joined BC at a time when BC was much smaller than today. Tell me a little more about how you came across BC and what led you to join it.I came across BC a few months before I actively joined, while I was in the process of looking for good sources of movie and music reviews. It was unlike anything else I had come across – it still is, really – and I started checking in on a daily basis to read stuff. Eventually, I worked up the courage to post a comment here and there, and then decided that maybe I should actually join the site and try to get some writing done. You work full time, are a mother of a young son and a wife. How do you juggle your responsibilities?Actually, only two of those facts are true at present – my son just turned 21 and has been away at college for the past couple of years, so juggling parental responsibilities hasn’t been part of the equation for a long time. Having said that, I think that people make time to do the things they want to do if they want to do them badly enough. My husband and I both have pretty intense interests outside of our work and our family life (which includes a lot of shared interests), and we’ve been very supportive of each other’s pursuits, so part of it is that I have a built-in support system, and part of it is that I’ve become very good at multi-tasking and prioritizing. Even so, I wish I could use all 24 hours in the day sometimes. You started writing under the pseudonym 'Distorted Angel' and then changed few years to start writing under your real name, Lisa McKay. In an article explaining why you started writing under your real name, you say that part of the reason was to lay claim on the articles that you have written. This works both ways – now people know whom to hold accountable when they see a 'perceived' injustice or have an axe to grind. Has blogging under your real name been a problem? How comfortable do you feel about commenting and blogging about contentious topics?It probably says something about the nature of what I write that using my real name has never been a problem. The place where the discussions really seem to get personal is in the political arena, where people seem to take everything to heart and can get quite ugly when they disagree. I don’t have the stomach for that type of discourse, so I stay out of that particular venue. I have opinions on pretty much everything, and I have no problem with expressing them when asked directly to do so, but I really don’t see those contentious discussions as serving much purpose. There are a lot of people who like to “argue” just so they can call names – it has nothing to do with actually listening to what other people are saying – and I just don’t have the time for it, as I see it as unproductive. At the heart of your decision to blog under your 'real name' is an ethical question that surrounds online media outlets – the issue of accountability. Of course there are real people behind these 'false' online identities and they often are accountable but somehow the cost free nature of leaving even the most borderline crazy comment or article under an assumed identity does probably sabotage perhaps reasoned commentary? What are your thoughts on the issue?While I understand the reasons that many people have for remaining anonymous online, I do believe that a false persona makes it easier to say things that one might not say when using one’s real name. The faceless nature of the Internet makes that easier anyway – even when using a real name, I think many people say things to faceless strangers that they would never dream of saying in person. Accountability online is certainly a different animal than it is with print media, or with television or radio journalism. This is still in many ways the wild, Wild West, and I think one probably has to work a bit harder in the blogging arena to build up a reputation and to build trust among one’s readership. Once you’ve built up that trust, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a pseudonym or not – you maintain integrity the same way you would if you were using your real name, by doing your homework and being honest. Blogcritics has grown exponentially over the past three years from a small fringe Internet outpost to a relative decent size media outlet. Tell me about some of the key inflection points in this journey – as you see them.Certainly the biggest change was when we went from a self-publishing site where anyone could publish just about anything they wanted to, to what we have in place right now, where every piece that’s published has been edited. We work very closely with our writers to make sure that we publish polished and well-written pieces while still retaining that which makes us unique, which is our multitude of voices. Our strength has been our continued refusal to homogenize what we do – writers find it easy to feel at home here because we don’t have an editorial “voice” in any of our content areas – we ask our writers to be excellent, but other than that, we ask them to be themselves. I’m not sure there are many places with a readership as big as ours that can offer that. Blogcritics is trying to create the norms of running a media organization on the fly. The key policy decisions – open commenting, open attitude towards accepting new writers, etc. – tell me about the behind the scenes struggle that has gone on around them and the kind of ethical questions that you have had to deal with to come to this place.We’ve certainly had our share of policy discussions about the open comments policy. As is the case with every site that allows open comments, we get our fair share of flakes and cranks and just plain ugliness. We have yet to come to the point where we squelch that in favor of having more civil conversations, and I think that’s another area where we’re unique. We do have a comments editor who applies our very liberal comments policy with a very gentle hand, and I think that’s about all the control we’re going to have on that for a while. Our open attitude toward accepting new writers seems to work very nicely now that we have editors in place. People are either excited about the challenges and take advantage of the opportunity, or they leave because they don’t make the cut or they don’t want to put in the work. In either case, that works to our advantage, and it’s raised the level of our writing tremendously. BC’s growth has been a really organic process, at least from my vantage point. There have been growing pains to be sure, but we move past them pretty quickly. Perhaps this current place is not the final resting place of this ongoing change. Tell me about your vision of Blogcritics.org for the future?That’s a great question – I wish I had a crystal ball. The quality of what we publish just keeps improving – we’re attracting some really amazing writers, and the section editors are continually working to shape coverage and come up with new ideas. I envision us getting bigger and better.What kind of policy decisions do you think are integral to how you see BC? As in what kind of policies can you not see BC without, if any?Well, I think we’ve set some editorial standards over the past couple of years in terms of what we will and will not publish (in terms of quality, not content). I can’t see us without those any more – we’ve really raised the bar, and the writers have really risen to the challenge. This is part of the process by which we become accountable.From the policy decisions of BC to how do you look at the role of a Critic? Is there merit in everybody being a critic kind of model? It certainly seems like a competitive market of ideas. What do you see are the positives and negatives of blogosphere?Well, it depends on what you’re looking for, I think. The blogosphere has certainly democratized the whole process of criticism, which isn’t to say that everything everyone writes is good, or even worth reading. Sometimes you want to stand around the office water cooler and talk with your friends about the film you saw this weekend, and the blogosphere can certainly provide you with that, and sometimes you want an informed opinion about something, which is what real criticism entails. I think one of the neat things about BC is that we provide both; we have some very enthusiastic reviewers who can give you a very entertaining man-in-the-street opinion about something, but they aren’t necessarily approaching it from an academic point of view, and we have other writers who are incredibly well-informed, educated, and knowledgeable about their area of expertise, and they offer a very different perspective. The challenge and the beauty of the blogosphere in general is that the reader needs to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. In general, we may need to wade through more stuff, but in the end I think it sharpens our powers of discrimination and makes us better consumers. Blogosphere is widely credited with making mainstream media more accountable. Do you see that as its job? If not, then what do you see are the roles of the blogosphere?I don’t think it’s the blogosphere’s job to hold the mainstream media accountable. I think that’s our job as citizens, and we’re failing at it miserably. We have the media we deserve. The roles of the blogosphere are as varied as the folks who populate it; I don’t think it has a defined role, or is “supposed” to be one thing or another. It’s a tool, a means of communication, a marketplace of ideas, of commerce, of social interaction – it’s a way of organizing, presenting, and retrieving information. It’s a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s continually evolving. It is whatever we want it to be at any given moment.It seems blogosphere itself is going under reorganization – as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time?As soon as people figure out that there’s money to be made somewhere, things change. Certainly that’s happened in the blogosphere, but a lot of the people who are Internet entrepreneurs are also in the business of putting the tools of production and commerce into the hands of the end users. That’s us, and that’s a good thing. I think the business models we’re used to have changed, and are continuing to change. Since I have no business background at all, I wouldn’t even want to hazard a guess as to how this is going to look in five or ten years’ time. If you told anyone twenty years ago what we’d be doing online now, they wouldn’t have believed it.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Movie Review: The Namesake

Spincycle — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:23:33 EDT

The FilmNamesake is a mediocre film by Mira Nair and based on an equally middling novel by Pulitzer Prize winning London born author of Indian descent, Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a coming of age story of an ABCD, Gogol Ganguli, by "another badly confused Deshi" (ABCD), Lahiri.The novel traces the story of Gogol Ganguli, son of first generation Indian immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima – presented in the movie as cardboard characters, whose one-dimensional struggles superfluously adorn the movie –and his struggle to come to terms with his cross-cultural identity. Gogol goes through various expected phases of someone shooing away a psychological ghost - unexpressed anger, rebelliousness, and then rapprochement that comes at the behest of his father's unexpected death and later through his wife's infidelity. While the issues are real, they seem to have been frozen and then perfunctorily staked over by an inane screenplay by Nair's usual collaborator - her Harvard peer Sooni Taporevala. It appears that by trying to cram in too much – a bi-generational story - it is not able to do any of the stories justice. Samosas, Rasogullas, and Indian RelativesNair captures the perversities of an immigrant's life with great humor and great eye for detail. We get to sit in the endless uncle-aunty parties full of Bengali food, and watch as our little ABCDs squirm when talked to by the way 'uncool' uncle and aunties. We get to see how the American raised children take in the soot laden, chaotic Indian cities and the clinging relatives on their visits to India. Of course the Indian relatives themselves remain caricatures of humans.Gogol wants his overcoat backGogol's overcoat has been done a disservice. Much like the name of Virgnia Woolf was expropriated by the mediocre and unrelated epoynomous play, "Who is afraid of Virgina Woolf?", Lahiri leans on the exoticness of Gogol to rescue her. Lahiri doesn't have the intellectual depth to even throw in a line about why Russian authors were popular in India. Gogol's deeply ironical and existentialist short story Overcoat becomes a peg on which Lahiri tries to hang 'the namesake', Gogol Ganguli's pretentious superfluous problems. Visual Metaphor and NairThe Atlantic Ocean shimmers exhibiting a grey luminescence; the humid chaos of Calcutta streets is viscerally alive; and the forlorn winter landscape of New York, marked by decay, stoically real. Mira Nair is a master auteur. She has an astute eye for capturing the elemental affective truth of a place. Nair is also edacious. While she has a wonderful aesthetic eye, she uses it with the indulgence of a nouveau aesthete. Nair unhesitatingly and unfailingly puts her camera in front of every scar, every photogenic shot, and includes it.Editing: Weaving a tapestry with unusual neighborsThe movie has been edited in a way that provides for abrupt transitions between different environments. It appears to be a deliberate strategy to highlight the often times almost schizophrenic existence of an immigrant in multiple environments, and continuation and disruption that characters feel as they straddle (or travel between) different microcosms.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview: Christopher Rose, Comments Editor for Blogcritics.org

Spincycle — Tue, 8 May 2007 10:50:00 EDT

The following interview with Christopher Rose was conducted via email a few months ago. The interview is part of a series that will end up in an article that provides history and analysis of Blogcritics.orgHow did you come to be involved with Blogcritics.org (BC)?I just surfed in one day and was drawn in by the way the site is so open and accepting to all kinds of people. I made a few comments and then, nervously as I was a fairly novice blogger, applied to join. After a few months I was offered the role of Comments Editor, which I mostly love.Can you tell us a little bit more about your role in BC and how it has grown?After becoming Comments Editor I also started contributing ideas, some well received, about how we could develop the key qualities of the site into other areas. Hopefully some of this will start to become more apparent over the course of this year as we look to develop some more sites.You are part of three major projects aside from BC. Tell us a little more about those projects and how you juggle your responsibilities.I don't know how major they are, but I love the potential the web offers to develop new ideas quickly and economically. In addition to my own three blogs, I love the idea of citizen journalism and have developed a repeatable model of how such sites can be launched and made interesting, relevant and profitable very quickly, and this is something I'd like to develop more fully. I am also developing an entirely original idea which has the (modest) twin aims of making people's dreams come true and ploughing a lot of money into micro-credit financing projects to help the world's poorest people to help themselves. I think the micro-finance model is very strong due to its inherent sustainability and that it doesn't create welfare dependency, but actually empowers people to help themselves. The project just needs a little work on the payment system and a little legal clarification to be fully actualised, but I need to find solutions to those two issues, so if anybody reading this would like to help, I'd be very grateful! I am also developing a new news and reviews site to indulge my love for Robots, it's called Robot of The Week. Beyond that, I am also outlining four hopefully major new online projects, two for BC and two of my own. Taking on a bit more than I can handle is possibly one of my signature habits, but I like to be busy - and life is for living, right! Ethics, Normative Standards, Policy Making, and BCAt the heart of your decision to blog under your real name is an ethical question that surrounds online media outlets – the issue of accountability. Of course there are real people behind these 'false' online identities and they often are accountable, but somehow the cost free nature of leaving even the most borderline crazy comment or article under an assumed identity does probably sabotage perhaps reasoned commentary. What are your thoughts on the issue?I think it's mostly a question of personal preference. I have several online identities, of which the most well known is Alienboy. It's a name I started using for online gaming, which was reinforced by the fact that I live in Spain, so I am indeed literally an alien boy! I have a semi-dormant-due-to-lack-of-time blog called Alienboy's World, and when I first joined Blogcritics, I carried on using that ID for a while. I then decided that the character of Alienboy just didn't seem right for Blogcritics and reverted to using my full name. Alienboy still has a lot of plans for new sites that will be developed down the road away, but these are temporarily on hold. I don't see the identity issue as an ethical question unless people abuse it by pretending to be other people, which is obviously totally unacceptable. As to sabotaging reasoned commentary, that's actually a more complicated issue. Freedom of speech is obviously a major concern and ought to be protected, but if people abuse that by making deliberately insulting or offensive remarks then I think there is a case for careful and restrained editing. It's an incredibly fine line that calls for some serious and careful judgment before hitting the delete key and an issue that I try to keep in the core of my thinking at all times. In the end, I just do the best I can and hope that will be acceptable but it is impossible to please all the conflicting points of view all the time.Can you elaborate on how norms are created within a new media organization? The kind of decisions that you had to take, along with rest of the BC community, about the nature, editorial policy and style, and commenting policy of BC.When an organization forms, obviously the decisions are taken by the people who start it up. The three people that own and maintain BC are mostly incredibly open to input and tolerant of a very broad range of views, and I think that is an important part of what BC is about. It would have been a much less interesting proposition if "The Troika" had tried to imprint their own very diverse views onto the site and wisely they have largely avoided that. On the other hand, they are all so very busy with stuff that it can be a bit hard to find out what they are up to. I hope to be able to help bridge that gap and enhance the level of communication between us all over the coming months. Blogcritics is trying to create the norms of running a media organization on the fly. The key policy decisions – open commenting, open attitude towards accepting new writers, etc. – tell me about the behind the scenes struggle that has gone on around them and the kind of ethical questions that you have had to deal with to come to this place.Those policies were in place before I joined so I can't shed much light on those early days but I feel they were absolutely crucial decisions. Dogma and other rigid belief systems are absolutely the enemy of all humankind and I very much doubt that I would have become involved with the site if it limited itself in that kind of way.In your role as a Comments Editor, you probably have had to deal with ad hominem attacks, spam, and other conflagrations with people using all sorts of sophisticated ways to get their message across. Tell me a little more about the challenges and how you deal with them while maintaining a free open commenting policy. There is a perpetual and natural conflict between freedom of speech and the need to maintain the site's neutrality, its open door policy, and simple readability. It's obviously important to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect and try to maintain some basic level of good manners or simple common civility. On the other hand, to simply not allow any kind of personal remark would render the site sterile and stifling. Wisely, the site uses guidelines rather than rigid rules, which is much more time consuming to manage, but I believe that it is well worth the extra time and effort involved. How do you deal with people who post multiple comments under different names? Should this practice be frowned upon and why?It's not actually that common. There are a few who like to do that for dramatic effect, which is fine. When it is done to create a false sense of support for somebody's point of view, that is basically just lying and is not tolerated. The worst is when people pretend to be other already known characters in order to create false content and is also not tolerated.What kind of policy decisions do you think are integral to how you see BC? As in what kind of policies can you not see BC without, if any?I just think that as long as BC maintains its open door policy and avoids becoming controlled by dogma, it will remain the fascinating multi-faceted jewel it is.From the policy decisions of BC, how do you look at the role of a Critic? Is there merit in everybody being a critic kind of model? It certainly seems like a competitive market of ideas. What do you see are the positives and negatives of the blogosphere? There is information and there is the interpretation of information. Making sense of the ever-increasing complexity of the world we live in is a vital part of contemporary life. There are many often conflicting takes on all that on BC and that dialectic struggle is part of what makes it so special. The blogosphere is widely credited with making mainstream media (MSM) more accountable. Do you see that as its job? If not, then what do you see are the roles of the blogosphere?It's both more complicated and simpler than that. There has been a huge flattening of society worldwide, although obviously different parts of the world are at different points in that process, which has been going on for at least fifty years now. A lot of the old school mainstream media have imitated the blogosphere by adding comments space to their websites for example. That's a step in the right direction, but until they value it as highly as sites like Blogcritics do, it often seems like a token measure rather than really getting the point. To answer your original question, it's certainly not the blogosphere's job to make the MSM do anything. They will either come to understand the nature of the new world order we live in and adapt to it or they will fade away into history. Blogcritics has grown exponentially over the past three years from a small fringe Internet outpost to a relatively decent sized media outlet. Tell me about some of the key inflection points in this journey as you see them.The two key points for me have been: 1. The incredibly smart decision by the founders to accept all (legal) points of view on the site and not limit the BC space on any cultural or ideological grounds and 2. The later introduction of having all articles edited rather than self-published. This has been crucial in establishing a massively popular, well-written, non-dogmatic site. The fact that the whole operation, editors and writers alike, is entirely voluntary is pretty impressive, too. We really do work hard to help the writers improve their writing ability and bring their work to as wide an audience as possible. Perhaps this current place is not the final resting place of this ongoing change. Tell me about your vision of BC for the future? I think the main site can carry on as it is. I would like to see all the fantastic content by a diverse range of great writers put to better use. I think the simple fact that we have around 1,700 (and rapidly growing) writers offers a lot of potential for the rapid creation of other, more focused sites in the future. I have a few ideas for the kinds of sites we could develop, sites that would offer compelling content around specific themes and those conversations are ongoing. I don't really know what other ideas the troika may be considering.It seems the blogosphere itself is going under reorganization – as media companies poach top bloggers and buy more electronic media assets. Do you see a more corporatized blogosphere in a few years time? Probably both yes and no!Unless a company understands the interactive essence of the online world, its attempts to operate on the web will be compromised. For example, trying to prevent employees from expressing their views is symptomatic of the old way of doing things. It's been well documented that companies that empower their workers and include their feedback in the company's development have a competitive edge over those businesses that try to run an old school centralised command and control structure which sees workers as nothing more than cogs in a machine. I believe in transparency and that carries through all levels of a business in a particularly powerful way that transforms everything it touches, to the mutual benefit of all. A corporatized blogosphere that seeks to control what is said will always be inferior to one that allows true free expression.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Political Economy Of Everyday Conversation

Spincycle — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 03:06:47 EDT

The word "communication" comes from the Latin word communicare, which means "to make common." We communicate not only to transfer information but also to establish and reaffirm identities, mores, and meanings. The two major localities where communication takes place are the consumption of mass media and everyday conversation. While both inform how we view the world, and what is considered important, scant attention has been paid to understanding the nature and shape of everyday communication and charting its impact. In the entire realm of what is considered communication, arguably the most important part is the everyday conversation - the repeated mundane conversation. I say this not because everyday conversation occupies the most time, for admittedly consuming mass media does that, but because everyday conversation is still the primary site where people seek approval. While the motivations for entering into a conversation remain largely the same, the nature of everyday conversation has changed dramatically over the last century. Firstly, today the conversation is carried out between socially competitive peers rather than empathetic family members. Secondly the things that provide value, or things that people seek approval on, have changed from "being a good son or daughter or some other social relation" to fickle, competitive identity markets based on consumption of commercial products (or related training like cooking shows, home improvement shows, and travel shows) and entertainment. In other words, with increasing atomization and resulting heightened anxieties about identity (for we no longer get most of our identity from family or some other archaic system, but through consuming the right kind of entertainment and consuming appropriate products), everyday conversations have effectively become negotiations of cultural identity among social or (generally "and") economic equals. The negotiation of commercialized cultural identities is done via issues like sports, movies, and other cultural products while contentious topics like politics, religion, and race -- with little or no commercial value -- are frowned upon as conversation topics. The key ideal in conversation is politeness and conformity. It is just not polite to bring in contentious topics except to mention harmonious approval, cues for which may have been exchanged before. Given that the motivation for everyday conversation is garnering social approval, attention is paid to storytelling, artful handling of anecdotes, and sarcasm, and not on "accurate" objective reasons. Additionally, the exchange about product preferences is liable to be subjective, hence not eligible for closer scrutiny, and anchored to some accepted commercial shtick or parameters of "coolness" or "hipness."This ineligibility for closer scrutiny is there for a reason. It is in the protection of that kernel of irrationality and some vague notion of individuality that can one sell absolutely anything. Trillions of dollars in this economy ride on the fact that millions of people will wake up tomorrow and make a suboptimal decision -- or more accurately be convinced about their economically sub-optimal decisions -- about their decision to buy some product. The other important facet of everyday conversation, as I mentioned earlier, is that it is done primarily between economic and social equals. Conversation between classes has altogether dried up. This drying up can be seen as a result of drying up of places where these interactions used to take place. Cross class interaction or conversations always took place when the person from a lower class offered a service to the person from the higher class. The fora for these exchanges of anecdotes and stories between economic classes have almost dried up under current economic regime. The mom and pop stores manned by neighborhood people have been replaced by chain stores that hire salaried employees with high turnover and whose only focus is to provide an efficient economic transaction and offer an empty courtesy. These routine commercial interpersonal transactions not only keep us from learning the difficulties across classes, hence possibly build empathy, but also have a profound impact on our everyday interaction with other people - even of similar social status. Let me weave in another anecdote here to illustrate the point. When I first came into this country, I was often asked some variation of "How are you doing?" at the beginning of each conversation. I frequently responded by providing full descriptions of how I was doing. It was only after many months and after receiving numerous impatient glances that it dawned on me people expected nothing but empty curtsies. The normative point I want to make is that our everyday conversation affects the nature and extent of our knowledge and style of argumentation. For example, it affects whether one is interested in politics or not, and the political proclivities one may have. The site of everyday conversation needs to be reclaimed to build a healthy body politic. Specifically for politics, we may need revival of public conversational spaces, what Habermas writes about and what Tocqueville observed.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview with Bill Thompson, BBC Technology Columnist - Part II

Spincycle — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:08:57 EDT

This is the second and concluding part of the interview with Bill Thompson, noted technology commentator and analyst. The first part of this interview was published on March 9th, 2007.Are we really post-Capitalist as you put it? I would still argue that Capitalism still trumps. The usage patterns of websites etc. still largely reflect the 'old economy'. More importantly, I would argue that the promise of Information Age has long been swallowed by the quicksand of Capital.When I say post-Capitalist, I don't mean it's not capitalist. If you look at the move from the feudal economy to Capitalism, the accumulation of capital became important. It still remains very important. It is still what drives things. The rich get richer, the powerful remain powerful and those who have good creative ideas get appropriated by the system. We are seeing it happen already with the online video world where now if you create a cool 30 second video, your goal is to monetize that asset and basically you put it on Youtube and try to advertise it - you become part of the system and that this continues to happen. Just in parenthesis, the idea is that we are post-Capitalist not in that we are replacing Capitalism but it’s a different form of Capitalism – its Uber Capitalism, its Networked Capitalism. We need a new word for what we can do now. It doesn't mean that those with capital don't dominate because they do and they will continue for some time, I imagine. The sense that the network had some sort of democratizing influence is misguided. It hasn't. It has enabled much greater participation. It may well make it possible for more people to benefit from their creativity in a modest way, but I don't think it will do anything to challenge the fundamental split between the owners of capital, those who invest their money and that counts as their work, and the wage slaves, the proletariat, those who have to do stuff every day in order to carry on and earn enough money to live. I don't think it will change that at all. I think your comments are just spot on. It is great to hear comments that show an astute understanding of the political economy of the net especially at a time when one constantly hears of the wondrous impact of the Internet to revolutionize everything from Democracy to Economy. Yeah. The network is a product of an advanced Capitalist economy largely driven by the economic and political interests of the United States although that balance is starting to shift. We see what is happening - particularly India and China are starting to have some influence, not very strong at the moment but growing, on the evolution of the network. But again India and China are trying to find their own ways of becoming industrial capitalist economies. They are not really trying to find their ways to be something completely different."Copyright is not a Lockean “natural right” but is a limited right granted to authors in order to further the public interest. This principle is explicitly expressed in the U.S. Constitution, which grants the power to create a system of copyright to Congress in order to further the public interest in “promoting progress in science and the useful arts." (Miller and Feigenbaum, Yale) UK's copyright law dates back to Statute of Anne from 1709, which states – "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." Both seem to see copyright as something tailored towards public good. The modern understanding of it has sort of disintegrated into a sort of "right to make as much money as one can". Am I correct in saying that? Please elaborate your views on the subject.Copyright started out as an attempt to restrict the ability of publishers of books to control absolutely what they did under contract law and to establish limitations on the period in which a work of fiction or indeed any written work could be exploited by one group of people, and to ensure that after certain amount of time it was available as part of the public domain to serve the public good. So copyright has always been about taking away any absolute right so that the creator of a work of art, fiction, literature or non-fiction has so that everyone can benefit; take away the absolute right and give away in return monopoly over certain forms of exploitation during which period they are expected to make enough money or gain enough benefit to encourage them to carry on creating. So the idea is that it is a balance – give the creator enough so that they can create more and encourage them to do that because it is good but make sure that the products of their creative output fall into the public domain so they can be used by everyone for the wider good on the grounds that you can never know in advance who will make the best use of someone else's creative output and therefore it should be available. So, the fact that the early years of the last century a cartoonist in the United States called Walt Disney drew a mouse based on other people's ideas is great and Disney and his family have had a lot of time to exploit the value in the mouse but there are other people now who could do a better job with it and they should be allowed to get their hands on the mouse and do cool stuff with it. That’s the idea and that is the principle that is being broken by large corporations who see economic advantage to themselves in extending the term of copyright, in limiting the freedoms that other people have because they don't care about the public good, they care about their own good. And legislatures, particularly in the United States but also elsewhere, have been bought off, corruptly or not, and have not been true to the original principles, which is that in the end it should all go into the public domain so that anybody who wants can make use of it and exploit it in creative ways that we cannot yet imagine. In a sense it's an expression of humility – its saying that we cannot know for sure who will be able to do the best with its work and therefore it is the interest of everybody that it should be available to everybody. That was the breakthrough – the insight – of copyright law 300 years ago. We are coming up to the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first codified copyright law and I think we should big party for it. The point is that – the point is most eloquently made not by Larry Lessig, who is good, but by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and his point is just that copyright is broken and it needs to be rebalanced and we need new and different approach to copyright and in a sense it is the one area of law where we actually do need to start again. I am advocate always of trying to make old laws work with new technologies. I think that we should be very cautious about making new laws because looking back historically it does seem like today's politicians are more stupid and more corrupt than those of older days and therefore are less likely to make good laws – that just seems to be the case. Correct me if I am wrong. And therefore we should avoid giving them the ability to screw things up. But with copyright we are forced to. So we have to engage with the political system, we have to make sure that the people who have political power understand the issues and we have to force them to do the right thing. In other areas for example libel laws, the existing legal framework has proven remarkably robust. There have been problems over jurisdiction and problems over enforcement but the laws themselves have applied pretty well in the networked world and we haven't needed too many new laws and that is a good thing. Copyright is the one area where we clearly do. This completes two of the major questions that I had. I would now move on to digital literacy and fragmented informational landscape. Google has made facts accessible to people – too accessible, some might say. What Google has done is allowed the people to pick up little facts, disembodied and without the contextual information. It may lead to a consumer who has a very particularistic trajectory of information and opinions. Do you see that as a possibility or does the fundamental interlinked nature of the Internet somehow manages to make information accessible in a more complete way? In a related point do you see that while we are becoming information rich, we are also simultaneously becoming knowledge poor. That is such a big question. In fact, I share your concerns. I think there is a real danger – that it's not even just that there is sort of a surfeit of facts and a lack of knowledge, its that the range of facts which we have available to us becomes defined by what is accessible through Google. And as we know that even Google, or any other search engine, only indexes a small portion of the sum of human knowledge, of the sum of what is available. And we see that this effect also becomes self-reinforcing so that somebody is researching something and they search on Google, find some information, they then reproduce that information and link to its source and it becomes therefore even more dominant, it becomes more likely to be the thing people will find next time they search and as a result alternative points of view, more obscure references, the more complex stuff which is harder to simplify and express drops down the Google ranking and essentially then becomes invisible. There is much to be said for hard research that takes time, that is careful, that uncovers this sort of deeper information and makes it available to other people. We see in the world of non-fiction publishing, particularly I think with history, every year or two we see a radical revisionist biography of some major historical figure based on a close reading of the archives or access to information which was previously unavailable. So all the biographies of Einstein are having to be rewritten at the moment because his letters from the 1950s have just become available and they give us a very different view of the man and particularly of his politics. Now if our view of Einstein was one defined by what Google finds out about Einstein we would know remarkably little. So we need scholars, we need the people who are always going to delve a little more deeply and there is danger in the Google world - it becomes harder to do that and fewer people will even have access to the products of their [careful researcher's] work because what they write will not itself make it high up the ranking, will not have a sufficient 'page rank'. So I actually do think Google and the model of information access which it presents us is one that should be challenged and it should only ever be one part of the system. It is a bit like Wikipedia. I teach a journalism class and I say to my students that Wikipedia may be a good place to start your research but it must never be the place to finish it. Similarly with Google, anybody who only uses the Google search engine knows too little about the world.You bring up an important point. Search engine design, and other web usage patterns are increasingly channeling users to a small set of sites with a particular set of knowledge and view points. But hasn't that always been the case? An epidemiological study of how knowledge has traditionally spread in the world would probably show that at any one time only a small amount of knowledge is available to most people while most other knowledge withers into oblivion. So has Google really fundamentally changed the dynamics? This is not a fundamental shift in what it means to be human. None of this is a fundamental shift in what it means to be a human. Things may be faster, we may more access or whatever but we have always had these problems and we have always found solutions to them. And I am not sort of a millenialist about this; I don't think this is the end of civilization. I think we face short term issues and we historically have found a way around them and we will again. That Google's current dominance is a blip. In a sense - it will go, I don't know how. Ok, here's a good way in which Google's dominance could go - so at the moment we have worries in the world about H5N1 avian flu mutating into a form which infects humans. Lets just suppose that this happens and that somebody somewhere writes an obscure academic paper which describes how basically to cure it and how to prevent infection in your household. Well all the people who rely on Google won't find this paper will die and all the people who go to their library and look up the paper version will live and therefore the Google world will be over. How about that? There is something, perhaps not quite on that scale, something will happen which will force us to question our dependence on Google and that would be a good thing. We shouldn't ever depend on anyone like that. Thank you, Mr. Thompson for your time.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview With Bill Thompson, BBC Technology Columnist: Part I

Spincycle — Fri, 9 Mar 2007 13:15:11 EST

While technology has become an important part of our social, economic, and political life, most analysis about technology remains woefully inadequate, limited to singing paeans about Apple and Google, and occasional rote articles about security and privacy issues. It is to this news market full of haberdasher opining that Mr. Bill Thompson brings his considerable intellect and analytical skills every week for his column on technology for the BBC. To those unfamiliar with his articles, Bill Thompson is a respected technology guru and a distinguished commentator on technology and copyright issues for the BBC. Mr. Thompson's calm moderated erudition of technology comes from his extensive experience in the IT industry at varying capacities and a childhood that he spent without computers. "I was born in 1960 so I grew up before there were computers – around. Indeed, I never touched one at school." It was not until his third year at Cambridge University, while he was running experiments in psychology, that he first touched a computer. He says that in many ways his first experiences with the computer formed his mindset about computers, something that has stayed with him for over 25 years -- that computers are there to perform a useful function. Mr. Thompson went on to get a Master's level diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1983. After graduating from Cambridge, he joined a small computer firm and then quit it to join Acorn Computers Limited, creators of the successful BBC Micro, as a database consultant. He left the enterprise because "they wanted to promote me" and joined as a courseware developer with Instruction Set. After a stint with PIPEX, he found himself running Guardian's New Media division a decade or so ago when the Internet was still in its infancy. After working for a few years managing Guardian's online site, Mr. Thompson left to pursue writing and commenting full time. It is there in the field writing and providing astute analysis on technology related issues that Mr. Thompson finds himself today. I interviewed Mr. Thompson via Skype about a month ago. Here's an edited (both style and content) transcript of the interview.The technology opinion marketplace seems to be split between technology evangelists and Luddites. Your writing, on the other hand, manifests a broad range of experience; it reflects moderated enthusiasm about what computers can do. I find it an astute and yet optimistic account.I am fundamentally optimistic about the possibilities of this technology that we have invented to both make the world a better place and to help us recover from some of the mistakes of the past and make better decisions as a species, not just as a society, in the future. It informs my writing. It informs as well the things that I am interested in, and the areas that I want to explore.Our relationship with machines was once fraught with incomprehension and fear. Machines epitomized the large mechanized state and its dominance over the natural world. There was a spate of movies somewhere in the '70s when refrigerators and microwaves 'rose up' to attack us. Over the past decade or so, our relationship has transformed to such a degree that we not only rely on fairly sophisticated machines to do our daily chores, we look at machines as a way to achieve utopian ideals. Dr. Fred Turner, professor of Communication at Stanford, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism traces this rise of digital utopianism to American counterculture. How do you think the relationship evolved?The way you phrase the question leads me to think that perhaps it was the exaggerated claims of the artificial intelligence community that led people to worry that computers would reach the point at which they would take over. And the complete failure of AI to deliver on any of its promises has led us to a more phlegmatic and accepting attitude, which is that these are just machines -- we don't know how to make them clever enough to threaten us and therefore we can just get on with using them. The fact is known that Skynet is not going to launch nuclear weapons at us in a Terminator world and so we can then focus on the fact that the essential humanity of the Terminator itself, certainly in the second and third movies, is a source of redemption. We can actually feel positive about the machines instead of negative about them. When you have a computer that is around, that crashes constantly, that is infected by viruses and malware, that doesn't do what is supposed to do and stuff like that, you are not afraid of it – you are irritated by it and you treat it as you would a recalcitrant child that you might love and care for and that has some value but is certainly not something that is going to threaten you. And then we can use the machines. That then actually allows us to focus on what you call the Utopian or altruistic aspects. It allows us to focus on machines in a much broader context, which is to recognize that human agency is behind it. The dystopian stories rely on machines getting out of control but in fact we live in a world in which the machines are being used negatively by people, by governments, by corporations, and by individuals. The failure to have AI allows us to accept that -- to reject the systems they have built without rejecting the machines themselves. And for those who actually believe that information and communication technologies are quite positive -- (it allows us) to focus on what could be done for good instead of just dismissing all of the technology as being bad. It allows us to take a much more complex and nuanced point of view.When I look at the Internet there is this wonderful sense of volunteerism. It is incredible to see the kind of things that have come out of recent technology like the open source movement, and Wikipedia. There is a palpable sense of volunteerism that pervades the medium. Even Internet companies seem to have, regardless of what they actually do, adopted sort of socially nurturing missions. How did these norms of volunteerism get created? Has technology created or merely enabled these norms, as in made it easier for people to volunteer, or are we witnessing something entirely new here?If you look at common space peer production, as Yochai Benkler calls it - what motivates people - that is exactly the same question as what motivates altruism; it sits on it perfectly. Because what we have with contributions to open source projects like Linux or positive contributions to Wikipedia, is what would be seem to be on the surface just pure altruistic behavior. So we can ask the same questions – what do people get in return? And do they have to get something in return? Pekka Himanen in the Hacker Ethic, I think, nailed what people get in return -- the social value you get from that, the sense of self-worth, the rewards that you are looking for -- all of that makes perfect sense to me. I don't think we need to ask any more questions about that. You get stuff back from contributing to the Linux kernel or putting something up on SourceForge. The stuff you get back is the same sort of stuff you get back from being a good active citizen. It is the same stuff as you get back from, say, recycling your trash. The question as to whether something new is emerging, whether what's happening online, because it allows for distributed participation - because the product of the online activity is say, certainly in the case of open source, a tool which can then itself be used elsewhere, or in the case of Wikipedia, a new approach to collating knowledge. Whether something completely new or radical is coming out of there still remains to be seen. I am quite skeptical about that. I am quite skeptical of brand new emergent properties of network behavior because we remain still the same physical and psychological human beings. I am not one of those people who believes that singularity is coming, that they are about to transcend the limitations of the corporeal body and that some magical breakthrough in humanity is going to happen thanks to the Internet and new biomedical procedures. I don't think we are on the verge of that change. I think that the Internet as a collaborative environment might emphasize what it is to work together and change what it means to be a good citizen but it doesn't fundamentally alter the debate. But the kind of interactions that we are seeing today wouldn't have happened if it were not for the Internet. For example, the fact that I am talking to you today is, I believe, sufficiently radical. But has it changed anything fundamentally? Okay, it has allowed us to find each other but there was in 13th century medieval Europe a very rich and complicated network of traveling scholars, who would travel from university or monastery to share each other's ideas, they would exchange text. It was at a smaller scale, it was much slower, and it was at a lower level but was it fundamentally different to what we are doing in the blogosphere or with communications like this? Just because there is more of it doesn't mean it is automatically different.Let me move on here to a related but different topic. I imagine that the techniques which have been developed around this distributed model be applied to a variety of different places. For example, lessons from open source movement can be applied to how we do research. Can lessons of the Internet be applied elsewhere? Certainly alternative forms of decision making are emerging within companies. Is the Internet creating entirely new decision models and economies? That’s quite a big question. There's a sort of boring answer to it which is just that more and more organizations and more and more areas of human activity are reaching that third stage in their adoption of information and communication technologies. First stage is where you just computerize your existing practices and the second stage is where you tinker with things and perhaps redefine certain structures but the third stage is where you think, okay these technologies are here so let's design our organizational processes, structures, and functions around the affordances of the technology, which is a very hard thing to do but something which more and more places are doing. So just as in the 1830s and 1840s, organizations built themselves around the capabilities of steam systems and technologies and in the 1920s they built themselves around the new availability of the telephone, so now, in the West certainly, it is reasonable to assume that the network is there, and the things it makes possible it will continue to make possible. So you start to build structures, workflow, and practices, businesses, and indeed whole sectors of the economy around what the 'net does. In that sense it is changing lots of things. As I said, I think that’s a boring insight. That’s what happens! We develop new technologies and we come to rely on them. It’s happened for the past five thousand years. So while it may be a new one, it’s the same pattern. Joseph Schumpeter got it right in the 1930s talking about waves of 'Creative Destruction' and everybody is now talking about that in the media but fundamentally there is nothing different going on there. There is a more interesting aspect of that which is: are some of the outputs of the more technological areas - the open source movement and things like that - creating wholly new possibilities for human creative and economic expression? And, they might be. I don't think we know yet. I think it's too early to tell. We have seen the basis of the Western economy and hence of the global economy move online (become digital) over the past twenty years. As Marx would put it, the economic base has shifted. We are seeing the superstructures move now to reflect that. The idea of economic determinism is not right at every point in history but certainly the world we live in now is a post-capitalist world. We still use the word capitalism to describe it but in fact the economy works in a slightly different way and we are going to need a new word for it. In that world – we have a new economic base – we will find new ways of being. And we will start to see an impact in art and culture, in forms of religious expression. You know we haven't yet seen a technologically based religion and it is about time we saw something emerge where the core precepts rely on the technology.Watch for the second part of the interview with Bill Thompson, which will focus on issues like political economy of the Internet and copyright law.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview with Dr. Victor J. Stenger, author of God: The Failed Hypothesis

Spincycle — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 18:58:32 EST

Dr. Victor Stenger is professor emeritus of physics and astronomy with University ofHawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado.Q. When did you first realize that you were an atheist? Was it a sort of a Eureka moment or a gradual realization?In high school I started reading a lot of popular science, especially astronomy, nuclear physics, and evolution. I began to see Catholicism as irrational but I did not become an atheist immediately. When I was a graduate student at UCLA I attended a Methodist church and sang in the choir. When I lived in Hawaii, my wife and I sent our kids to church-related schools, although we did not go to church. Finally, in the 1980s I began to get involved with the skeptical movement and learned about Humanism. The more I gained from experience, the more I read, the more I realized that the God concept had no merit.Q. Church attendance and belief in God have remained relatively steady in US, while there has been a precipitous decline in Western Europe. What do you think is behind this?Big money is given by extremely conservative, wealthy sources in the US to churches and other organizations such as so-called think tanks to brainwash Americans. Europe is less vulnerable to what Chris Hedges, in his best-seller, called "American Fascists". Incidentally, he is not an atheist. Q. On occasion when I chance upon religious programming on TV – it seems half gimmickry and half psychological therapy. In fact, mass religions from fairly early on took on the job of providing 'guidance' to people. What do you make of this sort of role of religion?While it is mostly good-intentioned, much in the religious right -- the AmericanFascist movement -- is motivated by the desire for political power and the helping people aspect is a phony con game that is part of the scheme. Q. This question is somewhat related to the previous one. Say if we were to find out that belief in God is psychologically helpful, can we argue for an evolutionary reason behind existence of religion? This question was famously asked by Time in its article – The God Gene – does our DNA compel us to seek a higher power? What do you make of these kinds of assertions?I don't think it's in the genes. I think religion evolved in cultures, ironically, byDarwinian means. Religion has always be the method used by those in power to keep the masses in line. For example, I was recently in India. There the vast majority of people live in misery and squalor. But they don't complain, they don't revolt against the rich, because the Hindu religion tells them it is their dharma - their fate. In the West, the divine right of kings justified their dominance. Today George Bush tells us that he is doing God's work. Q. People have often times argued that religion is needed to uphold moral values. Psychology literature points to that people are more liable to take advice from institutions or people they trust. Is there a case to be made for religion to be there as a service that disseminates morality?This is the prime example of how religious brainwashing works. People are told that morals come from God. But the facts say otherwise. Moral concepts such as the Golden Rule were around centuries before Jesus. They are the collective principles of humanity. Studies show that atheists are at least as moral as theists, and certainly there is a connection between fundamentalism, in Islam and Christianity, and antisocial behavior. I prefer to call myself a humanist rather than an atheist because Humanism is the source of our morality and provides a positive outlook on life. Q. Religion in everyday life is understood as something uncontestable while scientific theories are considered debatable. How can we provide a more open attitude towards investigating religion?Religion makes testable claims so these can be treated the same as any scientific claim. I document these in detail in the book, but let me give you one example. Most believers do a lot of praying and think it has a positive effect. These effects should be observable. Controlled experiments have been done and have found no effects. It could have turned out otherwise, in which case I would have to admit that science had found God. Q. It is a well known fact that very few people actually ever read the religious texts and it is likely that very few of those who read them understand them. So there is chasm between the way a religion is lived and the way it was fundamentally conceived and hence the numerous 'fundamentalist' movements. The argument that I am making is that 'faith' that is driving most religious people is of a vague though absolute kind. Debunking the extraordinary stories of the books, and even providing convincing arguments against God is unlikely to change the views of the majority of religious people. Probably. But there are still a lot of people I think I can reach with rational arguments: agnostics; believers who are not too sure; young people, especially college students who are learning to think critically and have not yet formed their views. Also I provide ammunition for those who think like I do to use in their arguments with believers. Q. Science thrives on the parsimonious model. One shouldn't create something if it isn't needed to explain the phenomenon at hand. Hence if all 'natural' phenomena can be conceivably explained by variables at hand then why devise new ones. This, I believe, is one of the chief arguments that you try to make about absence of God. Can you expand a little more on this?In an earlier book, Has Science Found God? I refute the claims that there is scientific evidence for God. In this book I go much further than just the absence of evidence argument that you reiterate in your question. I claim there is positive scientific evidence against the existence of the God most people worship, as in the absence of support for the efficacy of prayer that I mentioned earlier. Q. It is a well-known scientific corollary that absence of proof is not proof of absence. The kinds of models that you describe in your book are really a probabilistic debunking that derive their strengths from 95% confidence intervals and unlikelihood of the hypothesis but not proof that it doesn't exist. Can you shed a bit more light on this?The word "proof" has at least two different meanings. In logic and mathematics, a proof or disproof is with certainty given the starting assumptions. In science and law, proof means beyond a reasonable doubt. The latter allows one to conclude thatGod can be "proved" not to exist if the data show this beyond a reasonable doubt.Note I use "show" rather than "prove" in the subtitle to avoid that confusion. Q. One of the arguments that is made by people who believe in God is that there must a reason to our existence. This is sort of an existentialist argument that says that we must have a cause behind our lives and only human lives, I may add. What do you think of this?That is simply a pious hope. There is no basis, and I would add, no evidence, for this. In fact, the universe looks just as it should be expected to look if there is no special role or purpose for humanity. However, it is important for me to add that this does not mean that we cannot find purpose in our own lives in family, work, art, music, doing good deeds, and so on. In fact, releasing the bonds of religion gives us more freedom to explore all that life has to offer. Q. Tell us a little more about the kind of problems you see if we allow religious superstition to dictate policy and even science.As documented in several other books, the religion-based decision making of theRepublicans and Bush administration does more harm than good, threatens the health and well being of all of us, and increases the amount of unnecessary human suffering in the world. For example, most of the federal money spent on AIDS, in Africa and America, goes to advocating abstinence and none to condoms. Scientific studies showing that abstinence does not work are deleted from government reports. Q. Any final words to the believers and the non-believers?If scientific evidence were ever found for God or some other form of the supernatural, then scientists like myself would become believers. I give hypothetical examples of observations that would convince me that God exists. I ask all believers and nonbelievers to look at the data and argue about it rationally, without polemics or ad hominems. I try to do this in my book.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Book Review: The Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic Wastes by Felicia Drury Kliment

Spincycle — Thu, 1 Feb 2007 06:25:25 EST

There has been a glut of diet books in recent years that have tried to tap into the robust U.S. market for weight loss and, increasingly, healthy eating. From the 190,000 books that come up when I search for the word 'diet' on Amazon to the 164 million hits that come up on Google with the search of the same word, both the business and the need for diet information seem virtually inexhaustible. In this cluttered market comes Felicia Drury Kliment's Acid Alkaline Balance Diet: An Innovative Program for Ridding Your Body of Acidic WastesThe premise of this book is that a good balance between acidic and alkaline substances is crucial to avoiding a variety of chronic problems. And if acidic wastes, primarily stemming from food processing, are allowed to accumulate in the body over time, they will lead to a spate of problems. Kliment argues that while the body has evolved to handle naturally occurring toxic by-products of foods — such as the acids produced from the digestion of grains, the body is not capable of efficiently clearing artificial chemicals such as flavor enhancers, chemical preservatives, and pesticides. The diet plan this book recommends is that people go back to consuming the 'ancestral diet.' Kliment strongly recommends that people eat natural, preferably organic, unprocessed food. This book takes to task the companies that market processed, phyto-chemicals and fiber-lacking, calorie- and sodium-rich food sprinkled with a variety of vitamins as 'healthy' food. Kliment persuasively argues that not only are these 'healthy' foods' not healthy, but they can have an adverse impact on your health and waist.Kliment believes that enzymes are important for disease prevention and encourages people to eat raw foods with each meal that contain their own enzymes. Except, Vivian Chrisman, a nutritionist at Stanford University, argues that body has all the enzymes it needs to digest food and that enzymes eaten by people will most likely be neutralized by stomach acid. Crisman further adds that cooking a food can sometimes increase the bio-availability of certain vitamins, for example tomatoes are much better cooked than raw, for cooking increases the presence of lycopene and anti-oxidants. Oftentimes it seems that Kliment treats anecdotal evidence as indisputable facts. Kliment argues that her diet can help combat obesity, digestive ailments, hypothyroidism, cardiovascular disease, and even alcoholism, and 'female reproductive disorders.' It seems unlikely that these miraculous effects exist. One may argue that she relies on anecdotal evidence because insufficient clinical studies have been carried out with these treatments in mind but then again, why not wait to corroborate the claims before writing?There is very little doubt in my mind that eating predominantly plant-based, organic, unprocessed food would alleviate a lot of problems that afflict Americans today. And, while consistent overstatement of claims undermines the overall message of the book, I still believe that this book would prove to be useful to people struggling to find a simple, effective diet plan. Monika Kowalczykowski contributed reporting to this review.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Interview with Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, Authors of The World is Flat? - A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller - Part Two

Spincycle — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 18:28:04 EST

This is the second and concluding part of the interview with Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, authors of The World is Flat? – A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller. (The first part was published yesterday.) Q) Thomas Friedman in his book, The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st Century quotes Bill Gates, “Thirty years ago, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, and so many people can plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.” It seems to me Bill Gates is comparing a child born to fairly rich educated parents near Bombay or Shanghai given only a tiny fraction (about 1% in India) of people in India and China have access to “plug and play”, something which you point out in your book. Even if we agree with Mr. Gates, we still miss the close to 95% of population with its share of geniuses that don't live close to Mumbai and Shanghai. Can you shed some light on their chances for “success” or integration in the global economy?MR: What Gates and Friedman are discussing are the opportunities for the elite. Friedman writes, “I cannot tell any other society or culture what to say to its own children, but I can tell you what I say to my own: The world is being flattened. I didn’t start it and you can’t stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own future. But we can manage it, for better or for worse. You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation. While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 [the fall of the Berlin wall] — the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day.”While these lessons display concern for his children, he leaves it up to their imagination as to the way forward. Friedman’s daughter attends Yale, and there he sees the “precisely the sort of young person we want the America education system to keep churning out.” People getting degrees in biomedical engineering while having medical doctors and science professors for fathers.If only every kid in America had these advantages and could graduate from Yale, all would be well in the Kingdom of Flat. All they need is a wealthy daddy, a degree from U.S.-President-producing Yale, and we are off to the races. But for those of us whose children do not breathe such rarefied air, Freidman tells them to use their imagination. Ditto for our children who don’t breathe such rarefied air Chindia (China and India). The haves and have-nots are growing further apart in both rich countries and poor. But there is hope in programs such as microbanking. Bangladeshi Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Indeed, there is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, but few multinationals seem to notice. While most IT activity is focused on urban centers such as Bangalore, India’s Netcore is producing the $100 PC for the next billion. So, the big hope for addressing poverty isn’t about the “zippies” in Bangalore that Friedman writes about, it’s about the bottom of the pyramid. And when innovations happen there, entrepreneurs in Chindia will take them global at Chindia prices. Change is being driven by the bottom of the pyramid and not in the chrome and rosewood boardrooms and halls of the WTO or the World Bank or Wall Street. Q) Friedman has all sorts of suggestions for parents living in suburbs like Poughkeepsie. What would you like to say to the parents of young kids across America – Is it to vote to change the economic and social policy of the government? MR: Americans are just beginning to think about what can happen as early as 2010. Some forecasts show that, with an average growth rate of 8–10%, China’s GDP will, by 2010, have surpassed Japan’s, by 2030, China will have the world’s largest economy, and, by 2050, it could be double that of the U.S. Meanwhile, Washington leaves industrial policy up to the “free market” — or, as we write in our book, Washington has no industrial policy, which is perhaps the real issue — America does not have a national industrial policy that identifies and strengthens the industries in which it wants to be the master in the 21st century. America’s economic policies are, by and large, set by transnational corporations who wield excessive power in Washington. Their interests are not in America, but are in their stockholders. As more than one CEO has said, their interests may indeed lie outside of the United Sates. So, keeping this in mind, Friedman’s thesis could translate into “Go East, young man. Get your engineering degree, and move to Bangalore, because that’s where your job is going.”For starters, I’d tell parents to read Sen. Byron Dorgan’s book, Take this Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. It’s a real eye opener. Then visit his website to see the kind of legislation that is needed to put America’s industrial policy back on track. He calls for: (1) antisweatshop legislation that bar imports produced under internationally defined “sweatshop” conditions and hold companies accountable for using forced labor or denying basic human rights to workers, including the right to organize; (2) repealing tax incentives for American companies that enjoy all the benefits of being “American” — government services and subsidies, and U.S. Military protection — while discarding reciprocal obligations to the country — jobs, economic investment, and paying a fair share of the tax burden; And (3) capping trade deficits and stopping the $800-billion-a-year trade deficit hemorrhaging. These recommendations do not deal with every disorder caused by globalization, but they could jump-start a debate that Congress has long avoided. And they are not about “protectionism.” Instead they are about America formulating an industrial trade policy, because as, as former Reagan commerce advisor Clyde Prestowitz said, , “China and India have very clear national industrial policies. America does not.” Q) You bring out a variety of points that dismantle nearly all of arguments that Friedman makes in the book. What, according to you, did Friedman get right in his book? What does he get about global economic regime?RA: The main thing Friedman got right was that there is a need for a book on globalization that can reach the general population. Unfortunately, his book misinforms the public. We could not find a single falsehood in Friedman’s book. What he wrote, he mostly got right. But it’s what he didn’t write — it’s what he left out — that makes the book so problematic. There’s little more in his book beyond being a cheerleader for unfettered corporate globalization. And its important to recognize that, in some sense, this globalization stuff he writes about really does seem to work; if you consider that if four average blue-collar Americans join Friedman at a bar, the five of them, on average, would be a group of millionaires. As some of our politicians like to remind us, America is the economic envy of the world, and similar statistics to the bar scenario prove them right. That’s right, eh? Q) Thomas Friedman started of as a successful Middle East pundit, something for which he has actually received training. It is at best a strange transition from being a Middle East pundit to being an “expert” on globalization. Do Friedman's flaws in his economic analysis, as pointed out by you and numerous other scholars, emanate primarily from his lack of intellectual training in economics or his lack of intellectual honesty or is it something else entirely? MR: It seems Friedman is an opportunist. Remember, he started on his globalization quest when he was on assignment for the Discovery Channel doing “The Other Side of Outsourcing.” It seems to have occurred to him during that assignment, “Aha. A book!” You’ll see that he based many of the stories in his book on the Discovery documentary. Being a well-placed smart person, Friedman did what any capitalist would do, he used his celebrity assets to make money. And to him, we say kudos. Stiglitz, Bagwhati, Roach, Leamer and other well-respected, fully-qualified economists and business analysts can write their hearts out, but who will read them? Celebrity has its privileges.What’s unnerving is not Friedman, but the overwhelming traction of his book. This is best explained by Professor Roberto Gonzalez, “Ultimately, Friedman’s work is little more than advertising. The goal is not to sell the high-tech gadgetry described in page after page of the book, but to sell a way of life — a world view glorifying corporate capitalism and mass consumption as the only paths to progress. It is a view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace. It betrays [unconsciously reveals] a disregard for democracy and a profound lack of imagination. This book’s lighthearted style might be amusing were it not for the fact that his subject — the global economy — is a matter of life and death for millions. Friedman’s words and opinions, ill informed as they are, shape the policies of leaders around the world. Many consider him to be a sophisticated thinker and analyst — not a propagandist. It is a sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis gripping our society today.” Today we don’t play sports; we sit on the couch and play our sports vicariously through celebrity sports stars. Today, we don’t have much time to think; we let our celebrity pundits do that for us. Q) You heavily rely on paraphrasing and quotations from others authors to put forth your case. Was that a conscious decision or was it strictly a result of time pressures?RA: We’ll give you yet another quote to tell why! Here is Bill Moyers at the 2007 National Conference on Media Reform, “The degree to which this [free trade] has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is reflected in Thomas Friedman's astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because it stood for ‘free trade.’ We have reached the stage when the Poo-bahs of punditry have only to declare that ‘the world is flat,’ for everyone to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves. It's called reporting.” And that’s exactly what we want to accomplish with our book, going to the edge and doing some “reporting” on what those qualified to analyze and report on 21st century globalization has to say. We have 46 footnote references on our sources of information. Friedman has zero. We don’t make stuff up and tell stories about friends and elite CEOs. And we explore nine critical issues Friedman ignores or glosses over, along with an enumeration of 22 action items. Our book would be hundreds more pages if we expounded on each of these strategies and their rationales. We meant only to set the record straight on what Friedman is saying by providing the views of the experts, and then to provide the reader with a roadmap for exploring this vital subject further, for globalization affects all our lives and will be of even greater significance to our children and grandchildren. Simply stated, we all must learn about globalization and our available choices as we define our place in a global economy. We hope our analysis of Friedman’s book provides readers who were awed by his 600 pages of bafflegab with a second take on the monumental subject of globalization. To help our readers to develop their understanding of the issues, we have a shortlist of suggested readings and a comprehensive and growing resource list at www.mkpress.com/flat. Our message is “Wake up!” it’s past time to come to grips with the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution.Q) Friedman is often accused of writing newspaper plain speak, speaking in clichés and in analogies but avoiding facts and avoiding substance to story telling. The idea is, according to Friedman, to be a translator of the economic jargon and make it accessible to the public. Is there any merit in this idea? Are economic facts about the current global regime so complex? RA: A translator of economic jargon would be great. We open our book saying that the person on the street, especially in America, has little clue what globalization is all about. But few have any doubt that change is placing the world under great stress, that it is being “turned upside down.” And the person on the street may suspect that it has to do with the word, which increasingly appears in the press and other media: globalization. But what does it really mean? It would be great if a popularizer, a famous personality or pundit, would explain the many complicated political, economic and social issues connected to the phenomenon of globalization. Walter Cronkite or Bill Moyers could probably do that. Desperate for such information, millions of people, including leaders in business, government and education, have turned to Friedman’s mass market book to gain an understanding of globalization. Unfortunately, they are served up stories from friends, CEOs and other personal contacts of the author. These stories are not harmless, for they become solemn writ for lawmakers and opinion mongers.It’s not so complex to explain that multinational corporations, are by their very nature, aimed at maximizing shareholder value. To achieve this corporate goal, multinational corporations are literally going to the ends of the earth in search of dirt-cheap labor for both manufacturing and high-end knowledge-based workers. IBM recently laid off 15,000 employees in America, while hiring 45,000 in India. There is nothing complex about that idea. But shipping jobs overseas and hollowing out America’s middle class is only part of the picture. America is exporting its pollution by relocating manufacturing facilities to countries where environment laws are lax or non-existent. Let’s not forget about the human abuses lurking behind famous brand names and companies. Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee cites Wal-Mart among others as repeat offenders. Friedman has nothing but awe for Wal-Mart’s supply chaining, failing all mention of Wal-Mart’s darker side cited by Kernaghan. Like other US retailers, Wal-Mart claims to be enforcing decent labor conditions, but investigators find otherwise. Kernaghan points out that the same companies have won enforceable rules in trade agreements to protect their trademarks, labels and copyrights, yet regard protections for workers as “an impediment to free trade.” “Under this distorted sense of values,” says Kernaghan, “the label is protected but not the human being, the worker who makes the product.” What’s so hard for the laymen to understand about that? Plain newspaper speak is great if it conveys substance. Friedman is especially destructive when he opines on public matters outside his supposed expertise. His thinking seems to be anchored by Ayn Rand's social philosophy: Let the strong prevail, let the weak pay for their weakness. There is no doubt that many of those who read Friedman are now convinced the world is flat (perhaps they also believe the moon is made of green cheese). But newspaper plain talk doesn't make it so. Having paid the price of wading through Friedman’s almost 600 pages of grandiloquent prose and bafflegab, there are those who want to protect that investment by clinging to the idea that they have gained a full understanding of globalization. Albert Einstein once wrote, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Friedman’s simplistic treatise on globalization fails that test.While Friedman’s personal anecdotes fascinate many readers and make for good tales at cocktail parties, it’s what’s left out of story after story after story that makes the book such a flawed distillation of globalization. Thus, it is what’s ignored on the many issues that Friedman touches upon that makes the book dangerous, for it gives average readers a false sense that they are gaining a true understanding of this broad and complex subject, globalization.

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.