Xark!

Opening to change

Like a lot of people in the 1990s, Netscape opened the Web to me. I kinda became Netscape obsessed, doodling that Netscape logo on pads during daily editors meetings. But when Netscape became Communicator and faded away, the romance went out of browser software for me.

Fast-forward to roughly 2003. My friend Richard Green, who ran tech for the newsroom, called me into his office to show me the new browser he wanted to install on my computer as a test. Like everyone else in the mainstream world I'd been using Microsoft Internet Explorer (and a bunch of other MS products) for years by then. It didn't excite me like Netscape once did, but that didn't matter. Web browsing was no longer novel. It was something you did, and IE was the utilitarian tool you used to do it.

So when Richard told me Firefox was a better product, my first response wasn't "Great! A better browser might make me happier!" It was "Why is this tech-obsessed geek picking on ME?"

Adopt a reporter

Via Slate, apparently.

The folly of metrics

Here's the most basic thing I learned from studying mass media over the past few years: Advertisers love metrics.

For instance, there are only two particularly interesting numbers involved in buying print advertising (circulation and the price of the ad), whereas the metrics for a Web ad (traffic, rotation, cost per click, click-through rates, impressions, uniques, etc), give staffs of ambitious white-collar employees endless things to do with spreadsheets and Powerpoint. This has nothing to do with the relative value of print-v.-Web advertising, but it's a definite selling point for the Web guys.

Which is actually a problem, because as our stockpile of numbers grows, so grows our illusion of control. And the stronger our belief in illusions, the greater the likelihood of catastrophic errors.

Not that I fault people for measuring. The digital world gives us ever-expanding stockpiles of data, and analyzing it for trends and indicators makes perfect sense.

The question is, how many of us really understand what we're counting? Because if you've made one or more fundamental yet erroneous assumptions at the start, your staff of business-school-educated apparatchiks is going to generate reams of statistics reinforcing those assumptions.You'll make hundreds, thousands of decisions based on those fundamentally flawed but exceedingly precise projections, removing layer after layer of redundancy and inefficiency, re-shaping your organization into the perfect delivery system for your product or service.

And on the day that those projections stop working and everything collapses because you followed the metrics right down the rabbit hole, everyone will look at each other, shrug and say "Who knew?"

I loves me some data, but I remember that what I don't know about a topic usually exceeds my mastery. I understand what the apparatchiks can't afford to admit: We aren't in control. For all our planning and power, we are all ultimately just winging it.

It's why hiring the smart, experienced veteran is better than following the metric and hiring only cheap, specialized appartachiks. Unless you're doing discovery informatics, spotting and interpreting patterns is an art, not a science. Seriously: It says so right here, with 0.01 statistical significance.

If we landed on the moon today

Evolution via iPhone apps

Dan makes a brilliant point in The Power of Pace: "...we tend to underestimate the significance of the pace of change and is effects on powerful institutions."

I’d take it even further: We underestimate the effects it has on us as individuals, and thus on every aspect culture and society. Tools have always changed civilizations, but 21st century tech isn’t about tectonic shifts like the invention of the steam engine. It’s about a thousand aftershocks that change the ground we walk on. It alters not only what we do, but who we are as human beings.

Brain connections
First, we have to understand how our minds affect our brains. Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich explains the full implication of how massively what we do changes how we think:

Our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environment and that environment extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brains are challenged with.

What we pay attention to physically alters our brains, determining which synaptic connections and neural pathways get stronger and which atrophy. Merzenich uses the example of young soccer players in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their ability to head a soccer ball occurs at a rate higher than in populations of boys from a U.S. city. This is not because U.S. kids don’t have the same motor skills or brain power. Rather, they don’t pay as much attention to developing soccer skills. Their culture doesn't value those skills in the same way.

Meet the 2009 Charleston Snobs!

No, I haven't drafted my 2009 Manly Football League squad yet (Aug. 29th), but it's been a busy offseason for the Snobs as we head into our 19th year in the world's greatest fantasy league. The MFL is a touchdown-only keeper league, with each team granted three slots with which to protect players from the previous year's roster, but protected slots may be traded. With that in mind, consider that I'm set up to start this year's draft in the 3rd round -- with an unprecedented six protected players already on my roster (my only current roster holes are in the 6th and 8th rounds.

Here's the lineup:

Adrian "All Day" Peterson
He's not quite the consensus No. 1 overall, particularly in a touchdown-only league, but the third-year RB in generally considered as the best runner in the game. Average draft position: 1.1

Matt Forte
I drafted the Bears' 2008 rookie in last year's draft, then traded him away early in the season for WR Calvin Johnson and then-unseen rookie RB Steve Slaton. In the offseason I went and got him back, dealing Slaton and my 2010 No. 1 pick to reacquire him. Average draft position: 4.9.

Calvin "Megatron" Johnson
I'd coveted  this stud WR ever since he came into the league in 2007, and when I saw a chance to acquire him for Forte (who was essentially a reserve for me last fall), I jumped at it. Johnson was a 2008 star despite a train wreck at Detroit's quarterback position. Average draft position: 18.8.

Dwayne Bowe
Bowe enters his third year in the league as one of the most promising players at his position. He is big, physical and fast, and an off-season coaching change in Kansas City brought him a pass-friendly offense and a quarterback who can get him the ball. I picked him up on Monday as part of a three-team combo deal. Average draft position: 38.0.

Tony Romo
Best known for his celebrity girlfriends and the Cowboys' playoff troubles, Romo is nonetheless a fantasy god who finished near the top of quarterback scoring in 2008 despite missing several games with an injury. I'm betting the departure of Terrell Owens winds up having little net effect on his statistics. I drafted him in what amounts to the ninth round of the draft two years ago and he's been a mainstay ever since. I acquired an extra protected slot for him early in the off-season. Average draft position: 39.3.

Jason Witten
He suffered through a statistical slump in 2008, but the famously tough Witten is healthy again and should regain his status as Romo's favorite red-zone target. Not only is Witten considered one of two top-tier tight ends by most fantasy experts, his value is increased in leagues like the MFL that require owners to start a tight end each week. I traded an 8th round pick for him Monday as part of the multi-team deal that also added the protected slot I needed for him. Added bonus? Witten gives me a dangerous 10-point touchdown hookup with Romo. Average draft position (includes leagues where TEs are not required): 44.9.

Basically, this is the kind of super-talented starting lineup I've dreamed about for years. It won't be enough to win a title (you need quality depth or you're going nowhere), but it puts me in serious contention at the start for the first time in a long time (after winning the league's second championship game, I've lost my subsequent appearances a record four-straight times).

Geaux Snobs!

The Power of Pace

Press zen master Jay Rosen recently took to posing a particularly subtle koan: Why did confidence in the press go down 1975-2005 as the level of education among journalists went up? Most of the people who responded answered with my general feeling that as the press became more professional (and corporate), it lost touch with its roots, values and audience. I think that's still the most likely scenario.

Of course, life teaches that most-likely-scenarios often aren't likely at all, so I went looking for an alternate explanation and came up with this one: What if the problem is that that technological and cultural change in America occurred at a logarithmic pace during that 30-year period, while progress in the press took place at a linear rate?

If you entertain this alternate perspective, then you presume that the theory of the press expanded only a little over three decades. Also, you must provisionally assume that measures of "trust" in the press could include responses from people who are likely commenting on the institution's relative adequacy. Which is interesting because a person's critique of the press is generally correlated to his or her political perspective: Conservatives tend to ding the media for being biased against conservatism, while liberals tend to criticize the media in terms of its quality.

So here's why this this tickles my brain: The left-wing bias critique predates Jay's 1975 time frame. John Birchers, Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley had been making that argument for years by then. Edith Efron's The News Twisters was a best-seller in 1971. Certainly the idea became more mainstream over time, but here's the deal: What if these media-trust surveys have had somewhat less to do with measuring political bias and somewhat more to do with measuring an increasingly sophisticated populace?

As newspaper editor John Robinson put it, "The level of education of citizens went up, too. Media choices increased. Traditional press let them down." I think he's probably right about that.

I don't have any math to back up this pace-of-change argument, of course, and it's really just a metaphor in search of discussion. But the powerful thing about reading Ray Kurzweil's basic idea is that it gives you a radically different scale for contemplating change. And the more I think about Jay's question, the more I think that this alternate view addresses not only our relationship to the press but to other institutions as well.

What if the most sortable personality trait in today's society turns out to be a person's attitude toward novelty? People who welcome it, or who are at least curious about new stuff, enjoy all sorts of advantages. People who fear, resent or live in ideological opposition to newness, however, must feel increasingly besieged. What if change-positive people are just better adapted to modern life?

So here's an alternate way of looking at the political and cultural shifts in America this decade: What if the benefits of a positive attitude toward novelty just keep winning over more converts? Not because people suddenly gain a better understanding of those changes (even "experts" are perpetually perplexed), but because they see that change-positive people tend to have better jobs, better toys and better prospects than people who are change-negative.

Christopher Anderson argues that the "notion of technological progress as logarithmic is the conceit of the technological class," which might or might not be true (although I suspect he's being overly cynical), but even that critique stops short of addressing the pace of cultural change, which is linked to technological change but not married to it. I would contend that the cultural shift required to move from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Obama v. McCain in 2008 is far more surprising than anything produced by the semiconductor industry during the same period.

To be clear, I don't think this alternate view explains everything about press history between 1975-2005. And I'm generally suspicious of reductionist logic, particularly when it plays in the soft-science sandboxes of sociology, political science and communications. But you can mark me down for this one: In general, I think we tend to underestimate the significance of the pace of change and its effect on powerful institutions.

Truth & the Confederate flag

So it turns out that the ACC -- the once-upon-a-time Tobacco Road conference that now stretches from Miami to Boston -- has ditched Myrtle Beach for its 2010 baseball tournament because of the Confederate flag that still flies on the Statehouse grounds. 

Let's be realistic up front. Nobody cares about the ACC baseball tournament. As big league college sports goes, this is about as small as it gets. And let's be clear: South Carolina's fringe passion for the "heritage" of a Confederate flag that didn't fly above its Statehouse until 1963 is about as dumb as a box of rocks. 

But here's the part of this story you wouldn't get if you were just dropping in from another part of the country, South Carolina is an equal opportunity state when it comes to stupid politicians of any race. We didn't suddenly invent idiot politicos like Mark Sanford and Andre Bauer. They're a tradition.

'Free' wants to be big

This is a post I've hesitated to write, but given the recent back-and-forth over the book-length version of Chris Anderson's "Free" theory, I figured it was time. Because while I agree with Anderson's thesis, I also see in it the ironic demise of much of what I love about the DIY culture of networked media.

Stewart Brand said "information wants to be free" and got called a hippie for it. But if Information wants to be free, then Free wants to be Big.That principle suggests the reversal of another popular dictum of our decade, "Small is the new Big." And as a fan of Small, this disturbs me.

It's not all bad news, of course. But for professional content creators, it means we're still a long way from a robust business model, and that our future is likely to involve new bosses who may not be that different than the old ones we used to suffer..

Another 3-point plan to save American newspapers

Someone on Twitter posted a link to this "Three-Point Plan to Save U.S. Newspapers," which you're free to read. However, I think my three-point plan is much more practical and realistic.

FIRST: Richard Posner didn't go far enough when he suggested we outlaw linkiing. To really save newspapers, we need to make writing in public about news-related topics illegal without a federal license. And since civil penalties are for wussies, let's take this straight to the criminal docket. Federal licenses will be available to all Americans at absolutely no cost (provided you own and operate a printing press or an FCC-licensed TV station).

SECOND: Since people won't pay for news online and display advertising rates are in the toilet, it's obvious that we'll have to find another way to collect the 20 percent profits that rightfully belong to newspaper publishers by deed of Divine Providence. The best option: A federal online media tax, collected every month via your ISP bill. It will only cost you $10 per month, with the money going into a pool to be shared by federally licensed news media. We get to keep making the kinds of profits only drug kingpins earn right now, and you get to keep reading the high-quality mainstream news stories you know and love.

THIRD: Americans have grown used to getting their news for free, and exposure to the Worldwide Web has educated many of our fellow citizens to the generally shoddy state of print journalism in the era of cutbacks and furloughs. Studies suggest they'll never go back to their old habits. Solution? Since Superman is in fact reporter Clark Kent (buy a clue: they're the same guy, only Kent wears glasses!), we give him an ultimatum: "Either fly around the world so fast that it reverses the rotation of the Earth, taking us back in time to 1955, or you AND Lois Lane are GONE in the next round of layoffs!"

See? Three steps.

Simple.