The debate about social media and autocratic regimes can be (roughly) divided into two camps: idealists and realists. Idealists — my camp — believe social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative government; realists believe it won’t.
Because the events in North Africa and the Middle East are so important, both in themselves and in what they will lead us to expect about the future, I have been reading realist arguments especially closely in this period, and it was in this spirit that I came across Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution, by Andrei Soldatov, an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru.
I’m going to be on the Peter Schiff Internet Radio show, Thursday at 6:35 PM EST, talking about Zombie Economics. It should be interesting. A while ago, I had quite an interesting chat with Russ Roberts, whose views are, I think, fairly similar to Schiff’s, so i’m hoping for some creative interaction on the Keynesian and Austrian approaches to thinking about financial crises and depressions. I planned a full scale post on this, but haven’t had time yet.
The exciting Berkman Center (where I spent the 2008/09 academic year as a Fellow) is accepting applications for both its Academic Fellowship program for an early/mid-career academic as well as its open Fellowship program. It is a fantastic place to spend some time so I highly encourage people with interests in Internet and society types of topics – very broadly defined – to look into these opportunities. Please spread the word! Berkman is genuinely interested in having a diverse set of voices and perspectives represented among its fellows. To achieve that, it is important that this call is circulated widely.
I’ll be participating in a live Q&A session for the Guardian on this topic next Thursday (23rd) 1-4pm (UK time). Philosophers, philosophy graduates (and anyone else) with good ideas for what to say are welcome to email me with suggestions or advice at C-dot-Bertram-at- bristol-dot-ac-dot-uk . And if you’re interested, perhaps a current philosophy student or an intending one, then please tune in.
I first heard about David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace from Mark Athitakis when we were on a panel in New York a few weeks ago. The book consists of transcripts from a prolonged interview with Wallace conducted just after Infinite Jest appeared. I’ve published some comments on the book elsewhere, but wanted to pluck out and pass along a long passage — one that Mark read during the panel discussion.
It spins out from a reference to the Interlace system in IJ, but you can skip the background without losing the point. (Ellipses in brackets are mine; otherwise they are sic from the text, as with much else.) [click to continue…]
This is pretty good, though it tails off towards the end. The material about breaking the “colour bar” on the Bristol buses, the St Paul’s riot of 1980 and the growth of drugs in the 1990s is all very well done. (Best seen by going to “Playlist”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvI01RauSKU&feature=PlayList&p=70E1676A5ED3BE2A&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=1 )
For those who are (a) not suffering from holiday hangovers, and (b) do not have something better to do tomorrow morning, I’ll be on C-Span from 9am to 9.30am discussing the differences between liberalism, socialism, fascism. I’m anticipating some lively callers to the show …
In this Newsweek piece, Sharon Begley suggests that a failure of the Copenhagen climate talks may not be such a bad thing, but hastens to add
Seeing the failure of Copenhagen as something short of Armageddon is not contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake.
It’s good to see that reflexive contrarianism is falling into disrepute. Maybe one day we’ll see political reporters writing something like “I may not be ‘savvy’, but I call a lie when I see one”.
Andrew Gelman and John Sides have a “very good piece”:http://bostonreview.net/BR34.5/ndf_election.php at the _Boston Review_ on the reasons why journalists and pundits got so much about the 2008 presidential election wrong, with responses by Rick Perlstein, Mark Schmitt and others. In their response to the response, John and Andrew say:
bq. Will these efforts get political scientists invited to Joe Scarborough’s kaffeeklatsch? Probably not. The media ecology fetishizes novelty in reporting and certainty in commentary. And yet the academic study of elections shows that what is certain is almost never new, and what is new is almost never certain. We might only bore Fox & Friends with our scholarly qualifications and caveats, or simply look foolish trying to present our research in soundbites. [click to continue…]
A DC-based friend wrote today to say that he had finally abandoned the Washington Post, a paper he used to really like. The final straw was this piece allegedly written by Sarah Palin, a substance-free rant claiming that a cap-and-trade scheme for CO2 emissions would be economically ruinous. But much more damaging is the observation that, if this piece had come out (with the obvious stylistic variations) under the byline of George Will, Robert Samuelson, David Broder or any of the other rightwing/Villager hacks on the Post op-ed page, it would have slipped by without any real notice. The sooner this insult to the memory of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee1 goes out of business, the better.
1 Yes, I know Ben Bradlee is still alive, and even still associated with the paper. But his memory will be forever associated with the Post in its glory days, and not with the travesty produced by Fred Hiatt and Katharine Weymouth.
First: why aren’t you reading more Squid and Owl? Last week we had assassination by siege engine and undersea regicide. Now we are off on a thrilling mock-Kipling romp. You are a fool not to click.
Martin Kelner’s “utterly cynical piece in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/apr/13/hillsborough-disaster-liverpool-martin-kelner-bbc rather sums up the attitude of metropolitan journalists. OK, so he focuses on the BBC rather than asking directly, “why don’t those mawkish Scousers shut up about their 96 dead?”, but the comparisons to Diana and Jade Goody are there for a purpose (there are some excellent comments by readers in response). Actually, I think the BBC’s coverage of the anniversary has been rather good, especially Kelly Dalglish’s fine radio programme (not mentioned by Kelner, but also featuring interviews with the parents of the Hicks sisters). There are lots of good reasons not to shut up after 20 years. Not only has there been no apology from the police for their actions, but many things haven’t changed. I was reminded of this whilst listening to the current Chief Constable of South Yorkshire explain how much the police have learnt and how it wouldn’t happen today. Oh really? Well as we know from the G20 protests (and other recent events such as the de Menezes shooting) the police still try to get their “blame the victim” story in early. They still represent themselves as helping the victim but being prevented by a hail of missiles that no-one else saw. Videotapes that might have provided evidence of police misconduct or ineptitude still disappear, or cameras “malfunction”. And the police still get to compare their notes after events involving deaths, just to make sure that their stories are consistent and supportive of the institutional stance. Yes, all good reasons not to shut up.
Just about everyone has already piled on to the latest development in the George Will saga – the Washington Post’s belated publication of an opinion piece by Chris Mooney and a letter from the World Meteorological Association pointing out (very politely) that Will was lying in every paragraph of his notorious piece on global warming. And just about everyone has the same take: in the absence of a retraction or correction, the Post is taking the view that Will is entitled to his own facts. (Here’s Matthew Yglesias, for example, and Mooney has a huge list of links at his site).
The absolute refusal of the Post to take a position on the truth or falsity of what it publishes (along with the continued scandal of anonymous sourcing) leads me to a steadily more negative view of the question of whether we actually need newspapers and whether we should regret their seemingly inexorable decline. The standard claim is that without reporters, we in the blogosphere would have no material to work on. But Will’s recycling of long-refuted Internet factoids (something very common among rightwing pundits in particular) shows that, in important respects, the opposite is true.
More importantly as far as political and business news goes, there is almost always someone with an interest in having any given story published. If newspapers are unwilling to take a stand on which stories are true or false, their only function is that of gatekeeper – determining which stories see the light of day and which do not. The potential for corruption in this role is clear, and the reality was obvious particularly in relation to the Iraq war.
Update Lots of readers have inferred that I welcome/wish for the demise of newspapers or opinion columnists. Actually, having written (and been paid for) an opinion column in a national newspaper for the past fifteen years, I am deeply ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, the deplorable handling of issues like climate change (particularly in opinion pages, but to a significant extent in news as well) the early years of the Iraq war (if anything worse in the news pages than the opinion section), and the ‘inside baseball’ approach to political news in general leads me to think we would be better off without them. On the other hand, there’s obviously a lot to lose here, and it’s not clear how, if at all, some of it can be replaced.
Of course, what will happen will happen, regardless of what I think about it. But maybe if those making decisions about how newspapers are run think more closely about episodes like this one, they might see the need for change, and that change might enhance their chances of survival.
Tyler Cowen has a “couple”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/should-you-bet-your-views.html of “posts”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/should-you-bet-your-views.html arguing that columnists (and others) should not be required to bet their views. I’ll confess to having mixed feelings on the underlying question – which is whether you should make cheap talk on politics etc more expensive. On the one hand, if you view public opinionators as political actors (as they surely are), then they ought to be held accountable for their screw-ups. A certain degree of epistemological caution is entirely warranted, for example, when advocating major wars and the like, and I’d dearly love to see people who screwed this up (for what were at the time entirely obvious reasons) held properly accountable. On the other hand, if you view public opinionators as providers of novel heuristics etc, there may still be some value to their arguments even if they are wrong much or most of the time, as long as they are wrong because of ways of viewing the world that are (a) under-represented in public debate, and (b) help one grasp features of situations that are not immediately obvious given other heuristics. In other words, even if these ways of viewing the world are usually wrong, they can potentially supplement and improve other ways of viewing the world that are more usually correct. How to calibrate the balance between these two desiderata is not immediately obvious to me. One can still say that in an ideal world, one would see people who are _both_ more likely to be right than not _and_ provide relatively novel and interesting ways of viewing situations enjoy a prominent place in public debate. The continued prominence of e.g. Thomas Friedman (who is both often wrong _and_ the Davos Consensus Made Flesh, and Dwelling Amongst Us) suggests that the real world incentives don’t run in this happy direction.