Evgeny Morozov has recently delivered a scathing (and funny) dissection of a collection of TED ebooks, including most prominently one by Parag and Ayesha Khanna. Leaving aside the superficiality of the ideas he mocks (I have not read the works in question) he points out something rather more disturbing in their work – the anti-democratic streak that appears to run through it eg:

We cannot be afraid of technocracy when the alternative is the futile populism of Argentines, Hungarians, and Thais masquerading as democracy. It is precisely these nonfunctional democracies that are prime candidates to be superseded by better-designed technocracies—likely delivering more benefits to their citizens…. To the extent that China provides guidance for governance that Western democracies don’t, it is in having “technocrats with term limits.

It gets worse though – after the publication of Morozov’s critique, Vishrut Arya found an interview with Ayesha wherein she reflects (from around 2:00 on) on the exciting possibilities that augmented reality glasses would enable people who didn’t like homeless people to simply delete them from their sight. When I read this I assumed it was meant by her as some kind of warning but on listening she follows this with “…so now we have enhanced our basic sense”.

I am not surprised to find TED giving credibility to this kind of pundit – I am, however, disturbed and disappointed to see that my alma mater, the LSE, giving her a platform by making her director of their Future Cities Group (while she finishes her PhD there). Seems like another potential Said Ghaddafi embarrassment in the making. Certainly Beatrice and Sidney Webb would be turning in their graves!

I was listening to a BBC podcast – Newspod for 22 June which covered as its lead story Ed Milliband’s recent speech about immigration. Listen to how it was introduced by Andrew Peach – I’ve highlighted the key words. “It’s rare for politicians to admit they’ve got it wrong but today the Labour leader Ed Milliband, himself the son of immigrants, has done precisely that. He’s made a speech in which he acknowledges that millions of people have legitimate concerns and more needs to be done to address them.” The BBC is of course entitled to say that Labour’s immigration policy compared to that of the conservatives cost them votes but in this introduction using those words Peach is clearly stating that that policy was wrong and that anti-immigrant sentiment is legitimate and must be addressed. In my view this is a clear (if inadvertent) breach of the BBC’s duty of impartiality and provides a good example of how careful journalists must be in choosing their words (assuming no ill intent). Here’s the link if you wish to make a complaint to the BBC.

I’m writing a book chapter at the moment about the use of “user generated content” by journalists from the traditional media and to justify why I concentrate on the traditional media I thought I’d dig up a statistic or two about how dependent the public remains on traditional media for its news. I went looking for an update of Robert W. McChesney’s “The Titanic Sails On: Why the Internet won’t sink the media giants” written in 2000 and found his 2011 updated book The Death and Life of American Journalism. On page 17 I found this striking statement, “Harvard’s Alex S Jones estimates that 85% of all professionally reported news originates with daily newspapers and that he has seen credible sources place that figure closer to 95%”. Thinking this sounded like an interesting study I looked up the source and found Alex Jones’ book Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. On page 4 he says, “my own estimate is that 85% of professionally reported accountability news comes from newspapers, but I have heard guesses from credible sources that go as high as 95%” (emphases mine). In other words either Jones has failed to cite his own research or (more probably) McChesney is reporting second hand and third hand guesswork.

This kind of thing really annoys me particularly when it takes me several minutes to get to the bottom of what turns out to be nothing more than a guess, and particularly when I know that there are a number of studies that discuss the sources of news with a greater deal of rigour. For example, there is How News Happens which argues that in Baltimore in 2009 95% of original news stories came from traditional news outlets, particularly newspapers (although its methodology has come under fire), or Paterson’s fascinating 2007 study showing that the leading online news sources (and to a lesser extent newspapers) are heavily dependent on news agency copy.

The excellent folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project have recently released an update of their 2009 report on reputation management and privacy attitudes among US internet users. The ‘top line summary’ says, “Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts” but I would be cautious about suggesting that from the data. True, 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009 and 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile, up from 36% in 2009 but since these are measures of “have ever done” one would expect figures to have risen given more than two years have passed.

It’s worth noting that from the report that (consistent with other research) young and old have the same likelihood to set their profiles to be private.

Of course it has a role for easy, quick communication of relatively unimportant information but I fear that its very availability and ease means that like some kind of online kudzu it is expanding and driving out longer-form online discourse – particularly blogs. This is particularly problematic for academics like myself. It used to be that I would string together 500 words and more about an academic subject or something in the news and post it on my academic blog (okay, I admit I was a grad student with a bit more time on my hands) but now I tend to just tweet or Facebook post about it because the blog form implicitly demands more engagement than I feel I can give. It seems to me that possibly for similar reasons gradually nearly all of the blogs I used to read by fellow academics giving me their insights into trends and papers have died away*, replaced by tweets simply directing me to relevant web addresses.

Don’t get me wrong–I love to read and pass on the kinds of references to papers and to newspaper articles I get–see my twitter feed– but by the time a tweeter tells you who sent them a web address, very briefly summarizes why you might want to click and perhaps provides a hash tag to indicate its subject all that remains to be said is that said document or image is “enjoyable”, “provocative”, scary etc. A blog posting by contrast does not have to be that much longer but allows the writer to provide at least a little more context for the resource that they are talking about or indeed to provide a small but nonetheless useful addition to scholarly knowledge without all the psychic and administrative burden of turning out an academic paper.

Moreover, I have recently realised thanks to the news about Datasift providing companies with access to archives of tweets back to 2010 that although Twitter has kept everything, if I as a user ever did want to find an insightful tweet from even a week ago unless I had favourited it or I had been using third-party programs to archive a particular user or hashtag I would be out of luck. I always supposed that the limitations of search in tools like TweetDeck or Twitter.com itself were just a coding problem not reflective of an underlying technical problem.

* Mind you, this rant which I have been saving for a while now was inspired in part by the excellence of a Nathan Jurgenson blog post which reminded me that academic blog excellence is not yet dead.

The cartoon below (sorry have lost the original source) presents a number of other good reasons I dislike Twitter…

I remember this phenomenon from my computer journalism days. I had assumed this was long gone but it’s still around as captured by BBC News Online. Doubly depressing because the CEO of CES seemed to be defending the practice. And triply depressing because I suspect its place at the number one spot of the BBC’s video coverage on News Online at the moment is nothing to do with its critical stance and everything to do with the models being shown to illustrate the story.

Update: And even more depressing than the above – @aleksk tweets i received the worst & most graphic abuse i’ve ever had online when i applauded the ban of booth babes at E3 on Guardian Gamesblog in 2006.

All of which reminds me that on one press trip a major tech vendor took journalists for a ‘jolly’ to the Lido in Paris (like the Folies Bergeres) – you can imagine how the female journalists on the trip felt…

I’ve just been listening to a segment on TV and TVOD on the BBC’s Media Show and it has reminded me just how far outside the mainstream my media consumption practices are. The average British household apparently ‘watches’ four hours of TV a day – a record high figure. This probably includes ambient sporadically viewed ‘TV on in the corner’ but still how on earth do they find the time? I probably watch an average of an hour of TV a week. X Factor has been an extraordinary success for ITV – I have never watched it (and probably haven’t watched ITV at all in a year). The channel I view programmes from most is probably (you guessed it) BBC4. Even with the proliferation of DVRs, TVoD etc, people still watch 88% of their television ‘live’. I watch or listen to almost nothing in that way any more. By far the bulk of my audiovisual media consumption comes in (audio) podcast form – about 1.5 hours a day – because I can do it while doing other things eg cycling to and from work.
It’s really odd to realise just how far outside of the media consumption mainstream I am (and it’s hard for me to imagine myself into the heads of more typical media consumers).

Considering that I had no hopes that anything at all would be agreed in Durban I suppose I should be pleased that a binding global climate treaty has been decided… kind of. The Guardian describes this as a breakthrough but there are a few points in the coverage of the Durban deal in the FT which rather deflate my expectations. First of all the treaty will not be “legally binding” but rather an “agreed outcome with legal force” and is not clear how this will be interpreted. Secondly, while the Kyoto protocol will be extended, the length of the extension is not clear and to my astonishment according to the FT, “the countries signing up to the extension are only likely to account for around 15 per cent of global emissions”. I hadn’t realised the extent to which we have exported our pollution to developing countries. Lastly, while we’re promised a deal to be finalised by 2015, it won’t be implemented until 2020 so there will be almost a decade of further unregulated pollution before any deal kicks in.

As a journalist, what strikes me most is that the deal such as it is which in other times would be top news has been shoved off the front pages or into the corners of them by more parochial issues. Both the Guardian and Independent give the front-page lead to the coalition split over Europe which, granted, is a story of great significance but it is the 5th story and just a single paragraph on the Times front page and is not on the Telegraph or New York Times’ front pages at all. If the newspapers are right about this apparent lack of interest in the environment given our other woes there seems little chance that politicians will feel the pressure required from the public to work on an adequately stringent solution. (See Kiosko for today’s newspaper front pages from around the world).

I’ve been looking at Amabile, T. (1996) Creativity in Context : Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado ; Oxford. In it I learned Dean K. Simonton tried to find out the effects of stress on creativity by, among other things, correlating the creativity of Beethoven, Mozart and other composers with the intensity of the wars affecting their countries at the time. I also just learned that “it is said that Schiller kept rotting apples in his desk drawer because the aroma helped him concentrate on writing poetry… Dr Johnson required a purring cat, and orange peel, and plenty of tea to drink.” I much prefer Johnson’s prescription to Schiller’s!

It is certain that not enough children are reading books if by that you mean that children aren’t reading as many books as adults and particularly their parents would like but a BBC report of a new National Literacy Trust survey rather exaggerates and distorts the evidence.

The main problem is that it is a survey of 8-17 year olds but the statistics quoted aren’t broken down by age. Naturally eight year olds (who may not even know how to read adequately) are going to be significantly behind and will make the figures look worse. Also, the headline for the story given on the BBC News front page is “Pupils ‘prefer emails to books’” – a quotation that appears nowhere in the report. In the news piece and executive summary of the report it says “text messages, magazines, emails and websites were the top leisure reading choices of young people” which implies that’s what they like to read most but in fact the survey just shows that it’s what they read most often.

Lastly, I noted that the journalist said, “more girls admit they read text messages, magazines, emails, fiction, song lyrics and social networking message boards and poems than boys” – why “admit”?!