Signal To Noise Ratio
Even though most of my time is spent writing a book, I've been wondering why I'm blogging less, reading blogs less, watching less cable news and listening to less talk radio and more music. I've come to the conclusion that the whole mediasphere signal-to-noise ratio has been out of whack since the election in November. 2008 was such an historic year for news with a groundbreaking election contest vying for attention with a once in a generation economic collapse. For the managers of media outlets to try to sustain that intensity and interest level past mid November was a fools errand. But that doesn't mean they didn't try.
For the right wingnuts the task was easy--"the end of the world as we know it"--go stock up on guns and ammo and get ready for the counter-Obama revolution. But to listen to Glenn Beck spin his paranoid fantasies or Rush Limbaugh sputter on while his ad revenues tank is not even mildly amusing anymore. But I am also finding myself bored by the rantings of Keith Olberman and Paul Krugman. Krugman's attempt to convince progressives that Bank Nationalization was the only way out of a coming Depression are now being slowly but surely walked back into the land of reality. Olberman was so happy playing the lead in his own "Special Comment" version of "Network" ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore") that he misses George Bush more than Karl Rove does.
The Great Swine Flu Scare will probably turn out to be another case of very low signal-to-noise. The trouble is that as the number of media outlets that need to be programed with "news" 24/7 explodes, the amount of real news doesn't really increase and so we fill our airwaves and Internet with increasingly mindless commentary in which the more outrageous claims ("The Coming Great Depression") are the only ones that break above the clutter. The fact that we seem to have a fairly competent President in office doesn't stop the media (right and left) from screaming about the latest coming crisis. This of course is not new and certainly the media did a general disservice to our country in the breathless reporting of terrorist threats in the post 9/11 era, egged on by the Bush Administration's spoon-feeding. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard long chronicled this media "death of reality".
He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, "dies out."
We are everywhere confounded by this term reality. Reality TV is no more "real" than the sitcoms of years passed--it's just cheaper to produce and so we use it to fill up the thousands of hours on Bravo and Spike and all the other hundreds of cable networks that don't pass the "who cares" test. Perhaps the economic crisis will help sort all this out. Maybe we don't need four hundred channels of TV. Maybe we don't need 346 million blogs. Maybe the careful (and expensive) editing of the New York Times and The New Yorker actually count for something.
Only time will tell.
Jon, I don't know if I agree with how you conclude, but I did arrive at a similar observation regarding non-news dumbing down the webisphere, creating what I call "the cluttersphere":
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/tpmgary/2009/03/hey-is-someone-pumping-helium.php
May 9, 2009 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's hard to imagine what the insignificant noise-maker Taplin is talking about here. He links to Krugnman's column, in which the Nobel-Prize-winning columnist explains that banks are the only players who can't lose under Geithner/Obama's beneficent influence.
Obama won't let them fail, and won't nationalize them either, so if they go bankrupt again and again and again, we have to keep bailing them out. Obama already committed us for $12.8 trillion in guarantees and direct subsidies, and Taplin talks about Krugman's analysis being "walked back into the land of reality."
The noise on the internet that Taplin describes is mostly insignificant noise-makers like him, writing lame-o columns where they claim to understand the economy better than Krugman and Warren Buffett and Joseph Stiglitz.
But some of us still trust Nobel-Prize-winners and (relatively) beneficent billionaire investors more than insignificant noise-makers like Taplin, and if he really wants to improve the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet...
Jon Taplin should just shut up.
May 9, 2009 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure...and that reality is that the banks must be saved so the rich folk get to keep the money they had before all this went so wrong because if we don't the boogeymen hiding under our beds will get us. Well at least that is what I get out of the coverage in the MSM...along with 'Good economic news to report on, the stock market was up today( even if 10,000 more people lost their jobs)'. I guess people losing their jobs doesn't matter as much as rich investors doing well.
But nice to see Taplin is continuing his, imho, unfair vendetta against Krugman. Consistent if nothing else.
May 9, 2009 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jealousy?
May 9, 2009 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking of boogeymen, that is another green-eyed monster...
May 9, 2009 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. The real problem out there is the gamemanship that's being played against the public on the bailout, which is being totally ignored with the exception of a few. Naomi Klein, for one, is really pointing out the most obvious clues that everyone else can't see because the trees are blocking their view of the forest. I suggest Mr. Taplin you need to pay attention to the undercurrents rather than the waves - it's the undercurrents that's the story, not the waves.
May 10, 2009 10:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Please, Rutabaga, winning a Nobel prize doesn't mean that you are right about everything. He might be right. He might not be. But don't ask us to shut our mouths and agree with everything he says because he won a Nobel prize.
May 11, 2009 4:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Krugman's attempt to convince progressives that Bank Nationalization was the only way out of a coming Depression...
You expect this sort of thing from wingnuts, not TPM Cafe headliners.
Krugman has written about the importance of saving the banking system to prevent another Depression. He has further argued that nationalization is the only fair way to deploy tax-payers money in rescuing the banking system.
Look, here's how he closed his column of February 22 - "What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups. And the road to that system runs through nationalization."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html
Perhaps you shouldn't give up reading completely if you are planning to take swipes at writers you want to disagree with.
May 11, 2009 5:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Rutabaga
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/this-is-not-another-great-depression/
May 11, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Was there a higher signal to noise ratio in the past? I don't know. I go back to the 60's and such people as Walter Cronkite. I was a young man then. I took media icons such as Cronkite seriously. I had a (naive perhaps) view that the media mirrored something like Rousseau's General Will. In retrospect I'm not so sure.
But that should be our criterion in judging a media outlet: how close does it reflect the something like "General Will" of the people. Demanding metaphysical reality is to court disarray. Just ask the philosophers.
There is no doubt that the times requires considerably more robust public discourse than what the is providing.
For example: where is the discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian issue other than in such venues as this one (thanks MJ). The MSM is totally missing in action.
It isn't so much that the media faces the problem of having to produce pap to fill their 24/7 schedule, it is that there are large swaths of issues that they SIMPLY REFUSES TO COVER. It is taboo, verboten.
I can see why some topics are best not discussed in public, but the self-censoring goes well beyond those obvious cases.
There is also the problem of homogeneity in the media. We need contrasting voices. The American people can take it: a new (perhaps revised) Fairness Doctrine?
May 9, 2009 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Taboo, or apparently not cost-effective?
Here is a hypothesis about signal to noise: Local signals have intrinsically higher ratios than non-local signals.
What this means is that as we try to extend consciousness (sensation and awareness) farther from our individual momentary realities, it gets noisier and more subject to distortion. As we have more and more to keep track of we have less and less attention to give to each thing/process. This applies to both geographical locality and introspection. The noise comes from environmental sources and also from inner fallibility magnified by theory-laden ideology (right wingers tend to evaluate data different from left wingers, and each introduces spin in the process).
The world is a distribution and we individuals who would "see" beyond internal and external confusions (noise, unnecessary spin,...) must see it as an ecosystem.
May 9, 2009 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Was there a higher signal to noise ratio in the past? I don't know. I go back to the 60's and such people as Walter Cronkite. I was a young man then. I took media icons such as Cronkite seriously. I had a (naive perhaps) view that the media mirrored something like Rousseau's General Will. In retrospect I'm not so sure.
But that should be our criterion in judging a media outlet: how close does it reflect the something like "General Will" of the people. Demanding metaphysical reality is to court disarray. Just ask the philosophers.
There is no doubt that the times requires considerably more robust public discourse than what the is providing.
For example: where is the discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian issue other than in such venues as this one (thanks MJ). The MSM is totally missing in action.
It isn't so much that the media faces the problem of having to produce pap to fill their 24/7 schedule, it is that there are large swaths of issues that they SIMPLY REFUSES TO COVER. It is taboo, verboten.
I can see why some topics are best not discussed in public, but the self-censoring goes well beyond those obvious cases.
There is also the problem of homogeneity in the media. We need contrasting voices. The American people can take it: a new (perhaps revised) Fairness Doctrine?
May 9, 2009 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
The 24-hour news hole is one problem. And what we see when we look at it is large amounts of repetition. CNN and MSNBC will repeat large blocks of "coverage" in their entirety. (I don't watch them, but have to presume Faux News does the same.)
Viewers, too, are to blame. By rewarding those who program the sensational as opposed to the informative, they create a feedback loop of mediocrity. As any news director (or their ad sales counterpart) will tell you, it's possible to see when viewers switch channels - usually during "foreign" coverage or other stuff less intriguing than the screaming-headline-generation material.
During the Cronkite days, too, news networks used to do program length coverage of stories - perhaps one of the best examples of the type was the CBS Vietnam-era "World of Charlie Company".
So what we can take from this are: (1) Quantity does not equate to quality, and (2) Viewership rewards mediocrity by watching it, which equates to increased ad sales, which leads to increased revenues for networks and local affiliates, as well as cable carriers.
It is a business, after all, not a public service, at least as practiced today.
May 9, 2009 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
So as I said, while bankers may find the results of the stress tests “reassuring,” the rest of us should be very, very afraid. Paul Krugman
. . . the Obama administration’s economic stimulus efforts . . . are not nearly large enough to cope with the mammoth job losses that are occurring. Bob Herbert
Hey, everybody! I'm writing a book. Jon Taplin
May 9, 2009 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
And your point here is???
May 9, 2009 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've been wondering why I'm blogging less, reading blogs less, watching less cable news and listening to less talk radio . . . since the election in November.
A better question would be why were you spending more of your valuable time engaged on these dullish practices before November.
May 9, 2009 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, you know perhaps you should not be so harsh on Jon. I'm 60 years old and it took me until recently to realize that CNBC is composed almost entirely of Wall Street shills. I can see you saying "sheesh Andrew, you must be slow or something" but the fact is that everything seems obvious AFTER you realize it's truth. You say to yourself "why on earth did I not realize this before?" and you try to do better next time.
The problem is that we have to literally dig ourselves out of a mountain of social conditioning to finally realize these obvious truths. You have to take them on one at a time otherwise you wind up with the everything-is-a-conspiracy bunch. You should be more tolerant about things that in retrospect you might be inclined to think were obvious all along.
What happens once the light bulb light up in your brain is that you see how the newfound awareness helps explain a lot of things that were fuzzy before (but that in itself is not an absolute criterion for truth or reality as Taplin likes to say). We do the best we can and as Kant says (having read Rousseau) “nothing on earth is good intrinsically except the good will” and go from there.
May 9, 2009 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hah!
"The problem is that we have to literally dig ourselves out of a mountain of social conditioning to finally realize these obvious truths."
Even buried under a mountain of self-imposed archetypes and icons, even a simple paradigm shift can free the soul.
The trick is in finding the right key for the prison cell.
May 9, 2009 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's so EASY!!
Allow me to translate your post using my Newt-to-English dictionary:
"I have it all figured out."
Allow me to paraphrase a bit of dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna:
Arjuna: How can ome tell if they themselves or another are enlightened?
Krishna: If they are born and they live and they toil, then they are still on the path.
So eds, check your pulse. Still beating? Good. Then stick your paradigm shift snakeoil up your boundless ego.
May 10, 2009 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
So much for reasonable conversation on the internet.
May 10, 2009 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
So eds, check your pulse. Still beating? Good. Then stick your paradigm shift snakeoil up your boundless ego.
Oh, please, Zipperupus, talk about boundless ego. Do grow up. Making your point by quoting Hindu gods? Spare us. What is the term? Sophomoric?
May 11, 2009 5:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
If I may, I think Z was MISSING the point that way. If Z is sticking a point into a strawman, ... BFD.
Z. seems to think I said something was easy. Of course I did not.
May 11, 2009 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
dullish practices? Is that what you offer here?
I suppose "dullish" is an antithesis to "sensationalistic".
May 9, 2009 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gee, I am reading blogs more and more to find out and figure out what is really going on in DC and on Wall Street and those other places that try to send out their own version of the news.
Thank God for TPM.
I mean, thank you Josh and the rest of the folks at TPM.
May 9, 2009 3:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Olberman was so happy playing the lead in his own "Special Comment" version of "Network" ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore") that he misses George Bush more than Karl Rove does
I mourned the day this sportcaster was hired to takeover the prime primetime segment. It was a clear sign that MSNBC was totally giving up on trying to do news and going whole hog to not just political commentary, but political commentary with adolescent comedics added (like "puppet theatre," zany music effects, and "oddball" infotainment segments,) aimed at the male twenty-something demographic. I couldn't believe the grownups that felt his show was an improvement in the news coverage situation simply because they agreed with him politically. At least the daytime MSNBC blabfests target a grownup, if low level, audience.
Do you know what happened to Aaron Brown? I find I still his style of pandering to the hunger for commentary without leaving information behind.
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard long chronicled this media "death of reality".
Nothing new. See Thoreau for one good example.
I think it's important not to confuse what the current state of blogging has wrought, i.e., everyone a pundit, with the 24-hours news cycle junkiedom that Ted Turner tried to wrought. They are two totally different things. And actually, we have moved toward less of the latter. Everyone focuses on the same story, whether it's the election or the flu, due to the punditization and everyone feeling they need to express an opinion and go over it in detail ad nauseum. The citizen reporters who were going to replace the newspaper reporters covering everthing else going on in the world are still mostly missing in action, as Lemann noted quite well a couple of years ago, most still go for opinonating on, (or at best, researching,) the same topics du jour.
In a way, sometimes I think we've been on a steady trajectory in one direction since the O.J. Simpson trial, only exascerbated by the internet. I don't mean to imply it has to, or will, stay this way. Perhaps enough with media power or audience power will get to the stage you are at to make for "change."
May 9, 2009 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is brain rot happening in this country and the rot is brought to us by our friends in the MSM and their sensationalized news. Home invasions, disease pandemics, train derailments, mass shootings, child abductions, plane crashes, drive-by shootings, high speed chases and the impending Armageddon...with 90 minutes of local coverage telling you what to do if this ever happens to you.
We get 120 minutes of 'news' between 5:00-7:00...very little of which is news that is fit to report. It is sensationalized hype that draws outrage as the victim's families are interviewed and the ensuing calls for government (local, state and federal) action to save us from the evil which walks the Earth. God forbid that there is in depth analysis about the economic issues facing us, health care reform or the endless list of 'real' issues facing us. But we'll hear from the childhood friend of the latest shooting victim telling us what a tragedy her death is.
BREAKING NEWS!!!!! A Tsunami just struck Chile!!! At 5:30 we'll tell you what you need to know, to help save your life, in the event that one ever hits our coastline.
A vast wasteland for mindless sheep.
May 9, 2009 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
The consumer culture created in the post war years is coming to an end; it is a simple matter of survival, both biological and economic. A growing majority understands consciously or intuitively that media messages designed to compel us to consume things that we don’t need is a threat to our survival, individually and collectively. People who lack psychological defenses against those advertising techniques end up obese and suffering from diabetes and metabolic syndrome. They don’t live as long and if they do reproduce then their children either inherit the same tendencies or learn from their parent’s example.
At the same time media corporations are economically dependant for survival on that shrinking minority of insecure and defenseless consumers. That quite literally is a dead end.
It is ironic that blogs have helped many develop critiques and alternatives to the consumer culture while at the same time refusing to consider the possibility that they no longer need validation from the media. TPM is no exception, while providing research and reporting that undermines the prevailing narratives it ends every day with a 100 second summation of mindless media blather. I would like to think otherwise but I don’t think something is real for Josh unless it ends up in cable news.
The mediasphere no longer represents cultural consensus, it only represents a dying culture.
May 9, 2009 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
The best thing about the Internet is that you no longer have to buy a shortwave receiver and maintain an antenna in the back yard in order to get a wide variety of views about world events.
May 9, 2009 5:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seduction is powerful stuff, huh!
May 9, 2009 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
You can even get the US view on http://www.voanews.com/english/index.cfm
May 9, 2009 6:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem is that you can get too many views of too little significance.
About libraries, yes, time value is important except for the classics. There is an instability problem when "progress" progresses too fast. The effect is similar to bubble formation in economics.
May 9, 2009 7:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the library owns the current books, but whichever one that I'm looking for is usually checked out. Another advantage of the digital world is that any number of copies can be made available.
Also, libraries suffer from mass media's selection bias. The local branch has several bookcases filled with cookbooks, while physics and chemistry fit into a couple of shelves.
May 9, 2009 9:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Selection bias might represent local interests. Mass media certainly does not represent local interests even if it represents mass interests!
Yes, I've been waiting for months now for Krugman's Return To Depression Economics. I recall there were over 30 people ahead of me on the hold list and just a few circulating copies. But often I get the book I request in just 3 days, hardly a major detriment to time value. For leading edge talkingpointsmemo work, 3 days might be a killer, but then books generally aren't even published in that time frame so it's unfair to judge the time value of a library on this score.
Some libraries have digital media resources available to patrons. I don't know about online books currently in their first paper printing, but other online resources such as digital versions of magazines ...
If you look at the cost of a book, an online version should have vastly reduced cost of publication, maybe under 10%. Authors can still get royalties but shippers and retailers are cut out along with printers.
May 10, 2009 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had forgotten about that. It is true though. And the library. Remember the library?
May 9, 2009 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah yes, the library. Isn't that sort of like Barnes and Noble, except stuff is free and out of date?
May 9, 2009 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
What an unfair dismissal of Krugman. Look at the stress tests, Jonathan. Citi and Bank of America need to raise north of 40% of their market caps. They will do this by converting the Treasury's preferred shares into equity. That's nationalization. Means Krugman was right.
I understand you blogging less. Have been as well. But you missed a whole lot of Robert Reich here that would have helped your understanding of the financial crisis.
May 9, 2009 6:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Even though most of my time is spent writing a book, I've been wondering why I'm blogging less, reading blogs less, watching less cable news and listening to less talk radio and more music.
I'm glad it's not just you, Jonathan. I was thinking of writing a post the other day titled, "Are the Blogs Dead?" But I couldn't tell if it was the blogs, or just me. And then it just didn't seem to matter much anymore.
I never listened to talk radio, or watched very much cable news, but for several years I couldn't get enough of the blogosphere. Now? Eh. I'm reading a lot more books, researching more, and neglecting politics. (Even working on a book of my own - unrelated to politics.) I am trying to recover the self I used to have before the trauma of the nightmarish Bush years.
I find myself burned out and exhausted by politics. Truth be told, I never liked politics much before, and gave it only intermittent attention, because political discourse is for me frequently mind-deadening, emotionally monotonous and an arena of perpetual conflict, sophistry and intellectual dishonesty, rage and violence. I have sometimes felt like the more I participate in politics, the stupider and more barbaric I get. But I perceived the Bush years as an emergency that required everyone's participation, and the whole post 9/11 period was unusually intense and invigorating politically.
What was happening in 2002 and 2003 required information and opposition, and the conventional media were clearly part of the problem. It wasn't just that so many in the media seemed so frequently wrong. Rather, they seemed worse than wrong. They seemed to occupy a world of rigid orthodoxies, enforced silences, kneejerk responses, absurd pieties and ossified conventional alliances.
The blogosphere was, at the time, the location of the cultural, political and intellectual resistance I was looking for. I found the blogosphere to be an alternate universe, filled with people who apparently felt like I did, and were equally alienated from the other 70% of the country. People were writing things here that made me go, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" but which were considered forbidden thoughts out in the dominant media culture.
And there was all this energizing interactivity! You could go online; read some blogs; follow some hyperlinks; find some journal articles or research papers; read some pieces from writers and independent journalists in Paris or Russia or Egypt; quickly find information on who was taking money from whom, who was beholden to whom; determine that some op-ed writer had said one thing in his op-ed but quite another thing at some obscure think-tank meeting; and within the space of an hour or two determine that the highly-publicized words of some famous pundits or politicians were completely ignorant and full of shit.
Mind you, the things that you discovered were frequently things that were widely known among some members of the media, but which the establishment-loving media never seemed to think they had an obligation to share with their readers or viewers!
And one of the attractions of the blogosphere was that you could actually interact from time to time with the people who moved among the decision makers. That might be something you take for granted, Jonathan, but it was a whole new experience for a frustrated nobody like me. Every so often, one got the feeling that one's words might actually have an impact.
There used to be a department here at TPM Cafe called "America Abroad" that contained pieces from people who worked in the Democratic wing of the foreign policy establishment. I think they initially saw TPM Cafe and the blogosphere as a place where they could communicate the approved messages from on high out to the unwashed masses. But instead they found themselves on the reciving end of a lot of criticism from mad-as-hell folks who didn't like their gospel at all. It was rude. It was rough. It was an intellectual riot of crazy people, some with bizarre personality disorders (like me?) But for a while, it shook things up. I know for a fact that they were taken aback by all of this hostility. For years, these folks had apparently lived in a polite, urbane bubble of conventional establishment opinion, with a one-millimeter wide gap between what they thought of as the "left" and the "right". Now, suddenly, they were learning how unpopular their views were when you got outside Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the Beltway or the Council on Foreign Relations.
The dominant approved attitude among established foreign policy practitioners is what I would now call, "patriotic imperialism." These people all felt instinctively comfortable with the United States possessing vast power and behaving like an empire. They only debated how that power should be used. Their rhetoric was filled with schmaltzy patriotic paeans to cities on a hill and American exceptionalism, and an absurd ivory tower conception of actual human behavior and state behavior. These elite practitioners discovered a previously unacknowledged group - or at least a group that was much broader than they had previously realized - who felt like galley slaves on the imperial ship of state, a ship which the slaves didn't build, would never have built themselves, and was sailing somewhere they didn't want to go, but over which they had no control.
The anonymity of the blogosphere was vital to its success, and the opened up a whole new space of ideas where various notions considered politically incorrect, morally unspeakable or patriotically impious could suddenly be voiced freely. It turned out that people had all kinds of things they wanted to get off their chests, but had previously found no place to vent.
Right now, I'm not feeling that old vitality in the blogosphere. Some of the blogs that were the most successful have been dumbed-down and co-opted, and have turned themselves into respectable parts of the establishment. Parts of the print media have also smartened up, so the gap isn't as great as it once was. I find myself aimlessly clicking from site to site, looking for something important to read. After you do that for a while without finding anything, you start to turn to other sources of stimulation.
I personally experienced a kind of depression around the time of the inauguration of Obama. Maybe it is PTSD? Whatever it was, I'm now recovering my equilibrium, but I don't have much of that promised "hope" in the political realm. Rather than being filled with hope, I have this sense of having hit the wall of the fixed boundaries of American culture. As long as Bush was president, there was still the feeling that things could at least get better. But now that he is gone and the Democrats are back in charge, it is more clear than before that many of the things I don't like about this country will probably never change. And why should they? Maybe I'm just in a very small misfit minority, and it is selfish and unreasonable to expect my preferences to be shared by other Americans.
May 9, 2009 6:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe hitting the boundaries of blogging is a sign that the boundaries need to be moved. Change which happens on its own only happens to be happy.
May 9, 2009 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Beautiful, Dan. I don't think you're at all alone in this view of the blogosphere/media. You were always one of the best analysts and writers here. You should start a blog!
May 9, 2009 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep...in the eyes of some we're a bunch of misfits who don't have the standing to have their opinions heard. The great unwashed, uniformed masses with our pitchforks.
Oh do I remember those 'America Abroad' days Dan...it was great fun even if it was maddening reading those CW foreign policy posts. The final straw was all the so-called 'liberals' trying to figure out how to tweak and then repackage the same old foreign policy and sell it as something new. Then when nobody bought what they were trying to sell us they had a hissy fit, ignominiously and bravely buggering off.
Great post as always even if some people don't like what you (we and us) have to say. Some day they'll get it and finally understand...maybe.
May 9, 2009 8:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent comment, but I think you need to take a longer view. The only way I can look at things with hope is to recognize that Obama's election was a step in the right direction, and one that most of the world has been following for recorded time, i.e., trending towards greater individual liberty.
A successful Obama presidency will presumably maintain a leftward trend in American politics for the next ten to fifteen years. Even fifteen years of half-measures will undo much of the depredation of the Reagan era. At this point, though, all I can do is wait, and fervent opposition to someone I only mildly disagree with seems to be pointless. Hence I also have found the blogosphere to be less compelling since the election. Not being really against nor for something makes for dispirited argument.
May 9, 2009 8:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Last Wednesday in the Senate, John Kerry chaired a hearing on the fate of Journalism and the Media. Amongst those testifying was Arianna Huffington and a lady from Google.
The gist of it all was what is going to happen to "content" in the era of New Media?
The Problem --as explained--is that the origin of basic news information comes from the MSM--The Newspapers, The Cable Networks, and above all the wire services.
The Blogosphere as such is parasitic on the MSM at least in this respect: they don't invest in actual investigative journalism ( call it boots on the ground) but comprise some vast commentariat that receives its raw data from the MSM and to some extent uses that information to construct heterodox analysis .
The problem is simple: if the MSM is starved to death due to lack of revenues (due to a shrinking viewership/readership), the Blogosphere (call it the alternative media, new media whatever) will be effectively blinded by a lack of raw data and will most likely veer off into more and more exotic interpretations grounded in less and less data—a recipe for fractionalization and confusion.
What to do?
Apparently nobody had any easy answers.
The problem involves intellectual property and its value. The Blogosphere simply takes the content gathered by MSM reporters without compensation.
This situation cannot be sustained and it does not seem that going back to the old days of NYT -in -front- of- your- door is going to come back.
Who is going to be doing the actual investigative reporting? Is Arianna or Josh going to come up with the kind of money required to staff and maintain a first class news room? If not, who is going to take the place of the dying MSM's role of generating basic data?
It seems from this that Jonathan's concern about the increase of "noise" in the political information channels is well-founded and it would behoove all of us to start thinking about how this is going to play out
May 9, 2009 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is it being argued that the information that a free press is supposed to provide about our government, that is supposed to keep safe our freedoms, has been reduced to the bottom line by those who provide it? It is just about the money? Show me the ching? Don't get me wrong I am all for the freedom to make money but when every issue just gets reduced to the financial bottom line it speaks volumes. So now it is, the truth be told only if we're properly paid to tell it?
May 9, 2009 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
The MSM doesn't invest in investigative journalism either. Talk about straw men. Most blogs are news filters... Some make news (TPM), and some will rise to the occasion and investigate. We are not helpless infants suckling at the corporate breast of information.
May 10, 2009 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think the issue is really one of blogs vs. newspapers, or even "new media" vs. "old media". It's more a question of how any group of people harness and distribute the resources that are needed to collect information that is sufficiently comprehensive, detailed, timely and accurate; and how they can sustain over time the personal networks and bodies of skill and expertise that are needed to keep this information flowing.
Who are the people who did the best job of getting accurate information out of Iraq over the past few years, and giving us a reasonably full and accurate picture of what was actually going on there? Off the top of my head, I would cite people like Patrick Cockburn, Nir Rosen, Dexter Filkins and Zaki Chehab.
What is required in order for them to do the work they do? At a minimum, hey have to stay in the country for extended periods of time; and they have to be able devote more or less all of their time to the effort. That means they have to be able to make at least some kind of a rudimentary living out of it. They have to be able to eat and pay their bills while they do their thing. They can either be free-lancers, who charge by the story, book or report; or they can be paid a fixed salary by a newspaper or news organization. But one way or another a sustainable revenue flow has to be set up that carries resources from the people who are consuming the information to the people who are working the story and collecting it.
I think most people would agree that if Patrick Cockburn is dodging bullets and roadside bombs in Iraq, and working his carefully built and ever-evolving network of connections to get an interesting story out of that country that I want to read, then somewhere along the line I should be throwing some money into the collection plate that pulls together the funds that sustain his work. The problem is that the old systems for doing this, that didn't work so well to begin with, are falling apart, and the new systems that are going to replace it have not yet been created.
I would say people turned to blogs in recent years, and the broader online community, either because they (i) found new sources of valuable information online that they couldn't find in the conventional media sources to which they had access, or (ii) they found opinions expressed online that they weren't hearing elsewhere, or (iii) they relished the opportunities for discussion online that weren't afforded elsewhere. I think (ii) and (iii) were the most important. But the hyperlinked networked information flow of the internet contributed to (i) as well. Information that had always existed out there somewhere and was accessible in principle but not, for most, in practice, suddenly began to flow much more freely.
But this created a massive free-rider problem which we haven't yet solved.
What I think the traditional media still doesn't get about the online world is the way in which the interactive, discussion-based format of most blogs is absolutely crucial to the way these new media function. There are many, many more two-way streets in the internet than their were in the traditional media. Sometimes even bloggers don't get this, because they think that everybody is coming to their blogs to read that blogger's own glorious words. But sometimes the visitors come mainly to talk to other in a thread that happens to be located under that blogger's words. And sometimes they come because there is something they want to tell that blogger, not something they want to read. The blogosphere consists of thread within threads within threads, and links to links to links. The "blogger" is just one node in the network, at the top of one particular sub-thread, no different in principle from the commentators below his posts.
The discussion aspect of the online world is vital, not just because it gives people the opportunity to vent, but because it creates a kind of authentic, dynamic workshop of spontaneous information demand, and that demand has more potential to propagate upstream to the people who are in a better position to gather the desired information.
Part of the MSM's failure is that it still operates on unreliable assumptions and guesses about what their audience wants to know. Another problem is the oligopolistic nature of the conventional media. If there is some kind of information that New York Times possesss, and that they are well aware that most of its readers would like to have, but if for whatever editorial reason they are disinclined to share it, well in the past they could simply withhold it, and their readers had no real options to go elsewhere. They still seem to operate like that. They still want to control everything. They claim its all about process and verification and what's "fit to print". But it is really about power and control: power and control over information that they collude with other powerful individuals and institutions to retain, but which is of a kind that is disintegrating daily.
May 10, 2009 3:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very nice review, Mr. K!
As perhaps an aside (but perhaps relevant): In your discussion of information liquidity, I was reminded of cash flow in business, and risk flow in general.
May 10, 2009 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks Eds. I think the traditional power of an outfit like the New York Times is based on its being the "paper of record" and thus depends as much on what it chooses to withhold as what it chooses to release.
It aspired to be the custodian of reality and the official royal chronicler of contemporary history. Its suppliers are the sources who possess the information they need for that ongoing record. It doesn't pay its suppliers with money, but by writing contemporary history in a way which is reasonably acceptable to them. The version of reality that is constructed is an equilibrium position among the suppliers of information, the paper, and the readers.
With the new deluge - the liberation of information from its established channels - it is impossible for the Times to play that role any more
May 10, 2009 6:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Make finer distinctions, the MSM is hardly monolithic. A lot of what the MSM produces is rehashed regurgitations and there is a lot of redundancy of "reporting" on the national level (eg, DC press conferences).
But yes, trimming the fat today might cause one to starve down the road. Good health is a balance between obesity and anorexia, metaphorically or otherwise. Do we need 30 reporters at a press conference, or would 10 do? How much does investigative journalism cost out of the budget of a modern "news" organization? How much fluff/fat is necessary as a "profit margin"?
May 10, 2009 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Five Corporations own 95% of it. That is rather monolithic in that very few media outlets are concerned with public service. They are concerned with profit.
The whole of the MSM is monolithic in that sense, surely. Look at the number of owners in 1983, vs. now:
From 50 to 5, eds. Keep in mind that the 1996 Telecommunications Act was supposed to encourage competition, not eat it.
May 10, 2009 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is another sense to "monolithic" and until you prove blanket collusion (which does happen and not just in re timing of commercial breaks) it's premature to deny diversity. And of course Fox's bias on the surface is different from Maddow/Olbermann et al, even if both networks are driven by profit motives to a large extent (control of ideas is another "motivation").
One other sense is that MSM is not monolithic conceptually and functionally, even if the MSM functions like an information oligarchy. This is closer to my point than questions about the number of relatively independent business entities.
And another sense is that if the MSM presents Infortainment, infotainment itself is manifestly not monolithic, it's not atomic but molecular -- information + entertainment.
Divide and be conquered?
May 10, 2009 4:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, I think it is time to divide them.
=D
May 10, 2009 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
That does apply to Big Bad Banks.
How would dividing up the Information Oligarchy result in an improved signal to noise ratio? Or are you saying that S/N quality is a red herring, that noise is better for us than it might seem?
May 10, 2009 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Personally I believe what the late Hunter S. Thompson had to say about the chances of 'the truth' being reported...
When the speaking the truth becomes dangerous to one's freedom then the truth is seldom reported...
May 9, 2009 8:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, there is a bias towards telling the truth about "them". This is part of the problem of Promotion.
May 10, 2009 2:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm still waiting for the New York Times, with all their careful editing, to just embrace the supposed liberalism that all the tighty righties have been falsely ascribing to them.
The world would be a better place if anything Limbaugh said about the "liberal" media were true. And the New York Times would make more money in the process.
May 10, 2009 1:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
.
Hey Taplin . . .
Things will pick up soon enough to satisfy your need for reality. It won't be long before the mighty Trojans begin another campaign for the multi-million dollar payday and cut crystal BCS football trophy...
I'm sure that'll keep you too busy to bother with blogging here at the Cafe.
~OGD~
May 10, 2009 2:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I get an interesting insight here, although the examples may do more to obscure it than reveal it.
I am here online looking for information, insight and some degree of understanding of the communities I live in, but what I am getting is useless "news." What passes for broadcast "news" is in fact faux news designed to fill an ever-expanding and inadequately indexed news hole. That total news hole is already much larger than anything that will ever be useful to me. The concept of "signal-to-noise" ratio on the broadcast media is the perfect catalyst for understanding. My surprise is that there appears to be such a massive distinction between what passes for "news" and actual useful and informative "information."
My utter disgust at the crap provided by "reality" shows that do nothing but offer a cheap product for the business organizations that broadcast uninformative and useless data is high. They are time-wasters intended to deliver ignorant passive and frightened consumers who know nothing except how to buy - buy -buy to advertisers. It saddens me that so many people actually waste their valuable time searching for some form of entertainment in the crap that is broadcast on TV. That's not surprising, though, in a society in which most people are trained to function as ignorant and isolated economic consumers rather than as intelligent actors working in a community of similar people.
May 10, 2009 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Baudrillard? Talk about leaving a turd in the punchbowl. If you are going to bring a heavyweight into a blog about spectacle, buttress your own work in order to do him justice.
Your post, Mr. Taplin, is bunk. The reason? You reach a conclusion rich with meaning (standing on the shoulders of giants) based on your own apathy and a dumbed down premise. It is as if you were Isaac Newton, but applied your theories strictly to the apple that fell on your head.
Yes, there is a lot of noise. The noise has been amplified because we are by and large collectively interpreting the base corporate signal (24/7 media cycle) in a public forum. The hyperreality stems from our inability to ignore the base signal (spectacle). Instead, we have to absorb and adapt to the spectacle and incorporate it into our lives like an ambient noise that distorts our consciousness the way static interferes with tv or radio reception. Or the way a family argument interrupts a child's sleep. What we are doing, Mr. Taplin, is adapting to the new environment and asserting a community of interpretation that incorporates the spectacle into our lives. The noise you refer to is mankind's struggle for independence. The problem is that yes, our cultural mandarins bring a single coherent 24/7 image of the world and it delivers instability and fosters anxiety. The carefully edited New York Times is a culprit, not an answer. The NYT is crafted with advertising revenue and flak in mind moreso than the presentation of truth. Tye NYT supports the military/industrial complex whose appendages infiltrate every Congressional district. The NYT supports the banks that have discretely transformed Wall Street into a gambling and charnel house whose chips consist of Main Street's retirement accounts. The NYT is a carefully edited mobius strip of manufactured consent.
It is a GOOD thing that millions of blogs exist that by and large exist separately from this careful editing. And you should be ashamed for using post-structural ideas to reinforce the soft tyranny of expertise.
May 10, 2009 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
In other words, Mr. Taplin: you are telling the blogs to ahut up so that the crystal stream of conventional wisdom can penetrate our little pleb minds. In that way bullshit artists like Friedman can prattle at our expense without refutation because he is an expert and we are amateurs incapable of seeing the world from beyond our front yards.
How dismally aristocratic.
May 10, 2009 12:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's annoying, right?
As if, that attitude were warranted. I have not seen that at all, in fact, the opposite.
May 10, 2009 1:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me clarify, Taplin can never resist the cheap shot. It seems to me he ought to.
May 10, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
A cheap shot fired from a .50 caliber intellectual machine gun. Kids like Taplin shouldn't play with deconstructionist ideas like a toy. He wants to prove that Krugman has feet of clay? Fine. But don't use Baudrillard without reading the instruction manual.
May 10, 2009 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I understand things correctly, the blogs do not have actual reporters digging up this basic information. They are aggregators. Most of the basic data is generated by organizations that have an extensive news apparatus with reporters, news rooms etc.
It is true that WHAT data they generate is itself an indication of what they find important or how they want to spin the story. But that the data they present is for the most part technically accurate is not in dispute. Someone upstream in this thread said that the distinction between signal and noise is that signal is clearest when it is more local, more noisy as you get further away from the "facts on the ground" and into generalizations. That's roughly accurate.
If the blogosphere is going to take the place of the MSM in the future it will have to start generating its own local signals by deploying actual journalist working in news rooms. Right now they don't do that they aggregate data from various mainstream sources and put it together to generate (let's call it) macro data (or analysis if you prefer). That's all I was saying.
May 10, 2009 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
But you are making an unnecesary conclusion that in its scope ignores facts that undermine your assertions. There is Greg Palast, Juan Cole, and Truthout that employ varying levels of investigation to send out news that is unique from the MSM. There are local blogs dedicated to regional politics that are independent from the MSM.
In other words, the transition away from the MSM is nascent but does exist. The blogs are not lampreys. They can be, but some are not.
I just think that many of the conclusions being drawn are unnecessary and contribute to a reflexive groupthink that perpetuates corporate power.
May 10, 2009 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find truthout.org to be a mirror service for the most part. Palast and Cole might be exceptions which prove the rule.
"I just think that many of the conclusions being drawn are unnecessary and contribute to a reflexive groupthink that perpetuates corporate power."
Do we need to look at ourselves as well?
May 10, 2009 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, absolutely. We need to look at ourselves. The last thing any of us need to do is thnk that we're above the social construct.
May 10, 2009 7:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Taplin has still not clarified his apparent lie back in March, to the effect that Paul Krugman had once said that only Hillary Clinton could beat the Republicans in the 2008 Presidential elections:
Details: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/truthseeker77/2009/03/jon-taplin-an-angry-obscure-me.php
May 10, 2009 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
So let me get this straight. Why exactly do we think that Palast etc will not have an agenda?
We will probably get a lot more variety out there but it seems to me a lot of commenters here are simply going to look for blog idols that re-enforce their pre-existing views. Like preaching to the choir. I'm enough of a communitarian to have some concern whether this will be good for the nation as a whole or whether it will further fractionalize us into intellectual Bantustans.
May 10, 2009 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not sure to whom that was addressed, but I mentioned Palast so let me offer a thought.
It is not that writers do not have agenda, it is that if the possibility of competition is real then there will be competing agendas. This is "dialectic", analysis into parts and then synthesis into a better Union.
"it seems to me a lot of commenters here are simply going to look for blog idols that re-enforce their pre-existing views"
That's a strange notion. The commenters here don't seem to merely rubber-stamp blog posts, as I see it. Yes, there is some back-patting, but people often add value or challenge posts, as in the case of this cafe article! Now we don't know about non-commenters, maybe they choose to read only stuff which makes them feel good about their views, and they are surely the dominant population number-wise if not sense-wise. But again, if there are competing blogs then we at least have the option of checking out the "opposition" even if we tend to stay at home a lot.
May 10, 2009 4:38 PM | Reply | Permalink