Virtual Economics

A little quieter, please

An entertaining plea for less strident car ads from Giles Coren comes in today's Times. He suggests a future script for the things:

"Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement."

Seconded - all future car ad script to take that form please.

(Admittedly any sort of enthusiasm for cars is utterly mysterious to me, from that alleged "sport" Formula Driving Round And Round In A Big Circle Until All But One Of Those Ludicrously Fragile Cars Has Crashed Or Broken Down Again, to what happens on Top Gear to the appeal of Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe car ads are exciting to people who care about cars. Then again, those people also seem to know about cars and will presumably therefore make informed buying decisions, so I'm back to square one as to what showing millions of hours of ads for dozens of utterly indistinguishable means of getting from A to B is really imagined to achieve. Perhaps simply no-one likes to buy a car they've never heard of.)

Wifi in the garden

Ah, wifi in the garden, one of the better inventions of the early C21st. Apart from wifi I expect the main achievement of our generation will be remembered as the perfection of that strange waddle that allows a person to carry a full cup of hot coffee in an overcrowded public place. People have got incredibly good at that in the decade or so since Starbucks became ubiquitous and I occasionally wonder whether there's any proper use humanity could make of that widespread, entirely newfound and rigorously practiced talent.

Or indeed what else we could have learned instead in the same amount of time. I doubt it's a whole Wikipedia's worth of social surplus (already, I'm sure you'll agree, the standard measure of wasted man-hours - we should clearly start measuring our wasted hours in nano- or pico-wikipedias). But it might be close.

You may have already won a hundred cars!

The title of this post refers to the silliest piece of direct marekting I ever received. It came on a spam email a year or so ago. 100 cars! Clearly what every customer dreams of is an improbably valuable prize that's also a logistical headache.

Today I got a close second through the post, an "exclusive 3 for 2" offer - from a shoe company. (You can see it here.) Sure, I know what they mean...but hey. 3 for 2 on shoes. Tell your three-legged friends.

The balance chimera

Lloyd Shepherd picks up the John Lanchester article I referenced yesterday, and highlights yet another excellent passage:

"The problem with ‘balance’ is partly a problem with the way science is reported. ‘Balance’ works, sort of, as a way of discussing politics in a two-party system. (Though it has to be said that the remorseless polarisation, whereby I say yah because you said boo, is one main reason for the decreased interest in party politics.) Since the climate debate has been polarised on left-right lines in the US, it has seemed appropriate to the media to treat it as a polarised issue, one on which there are two schools of thought, which, in respect of the science, it isn’t: there is one school of thought, and a few nutters."

I liked that bit too - it reminded me of a tale my geography-studying friends used to tell at university. Apparently one lecturer would begin his course on glaciation with the statement that were "nominally two schools of thought concerning glaciation - the extreme views of Kelloway, and the truth", and go on to demolish the former in short order.

Whenever I'm confronted by this "balance" chimera in news reporting - especially as it pertains to the willingness of journalists to pander to the agenda of the (let's face it, unremittingly evil) global warming deniers - I remember that lecturer, and reflect that that's what "balance" really looks like, when the commentator has the expertise and the confidence to cut through the fog of dissenting views and present the audience with an accurate picture of the current expert consensus. (Or as we say more commonly in English, "the truth".)

"Balance" is what you default to if the reporter, commentator, anchor or other journalist simply doesn't have the expertise to adjudicate between two ostensibly plausible points of view and call "bullshit" on the one that's wrong. "Balance" is a chimera to disguise the fact that while a global-warming-denying pseudo-scientist knows a lot less about global warming than a real scientist, he still knows plenty more than the guy on the TV who gets to interview him. Enough, say, to pull the wool over the eyes of that interviewer and by extension the public for more than a decade with the pretence that there's still a debate going on about man-made climate change. There simply isn't a debate - there is, as Lanchester reminds us, "one school of thought and a few nutters".

I pointed earlier in the year to Jeremy Burke's research showing that "the desire to appear unbiased leads to information loss". It's still true. Better than balance, we need the news presented to us by people who, like the geography lecturer of yore*, have the expertise and confidence to get the extreme minority view out of the way in a couple of sentences and go on to explain to us what legitimate experts consider the truth.

*1994 doesn't feel like yore really. Not yet, anyway.

PickUpPal is a great idea

Found via a Facebook ad (those things do work after all!), PickUpPal puts drivers in touch with people who want to share a trip. So if I'm driving from London to Yorkshire this afternoon*, I can have a look on the site and see if anyone wants a lift - and get paid for it. Or if I want to get to Oxford on Saturday I can see whether anyone is going from near my house and/or for less than the price of a couple of train tickets. Like the brilliant Park at my House, PickUpPals uses the web to provide a peer-to-peer solution for a real-world problem that has historically only been solveable by businesses. This is exactly what the web is for - saving people money and hassle by coordinating effort properly. Love it.

(Turns out Mashable reviewed it earlier in the year as "eHarmony for hitchers". So I'm late to this party. So it goes.)

*Alas, I am not

Microsoft to eschew any further deals, buy Facebook, reports The Times

Yesterday's Times reported that Microsoft is not pursuing any further acquisitions after the Yahoo deal broke down and will "go it alone". Today's reports that Microsoft has approached Facebook about a possible takeover. Errr...

MySpace News finally finds its USP

More than a year ago MySpace News launched as a feeble aggregator, a Digg clone that I (and everyone) called a squandered opportunity. The last thing the web needed (then or now) was another generic news filter - as Scott Karp points out, publishing and republishing the same news story in thousands of different publications and filters merely serves to diminish the marginal value of each version.

What MySpace has always needed to do is tap its vast, unique resource of user-generated content and turn that content into a coherent news channel. I am, therefore, very impressed with Screen Junkie, their celeb site/channel that launched in the UK this week.

As Jeff and others have been arguing for really quite a while now, what news outlets really need is to deliver genuinely unique news and comment rather than rehashed wire copy or generic reviews of the same national or global phenomena; they need original material and unique sources; and they need authentic voices rather than allegedly neutral, balanced anchors. With Screen Junkie MySpace seems to have cracked the puzzle that has eluded a lot of respected, veteran news outlets. By tapping the real, unique benefits that its vast army of daily content-creators provide, MySpace takes the concept of news content creation in the information age a pretty considerable leap forward.

How we remembered to be afraid

From an excellent piece on climate change by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, HT the Guardian's Charles Arthur

"Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of SF fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc). Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us."

So true. The relationship between tech support and everyone else increasingly reminds me of that between priesthood and laity - they intercede on our behalf with the incomprehensible and capricious forces that govern our lives. (This can't be a remotely original thought: still, I don't recall where I might have seen it before.)

I strongly recommend the whole article, which isn't really about our slightly dysfunctional relationship with technology but our profoundly dysfunctional relationship with global warming. Another favourite bit:

"I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe." 

How you know you haven't got the hang of the future yet #38,895

I've been using the Internet since anyone except TBL had noticed there was a web on it. Indeed, one of the very first things I ever did with it was play games with friends over a network (some early version of Warcraft? Fantasy Empires? Something like that.) So I guess I shoudn't be quite so childishly impressed that a Wii, a wireless router and a copy of Mario Kart lets me race against my mate in Yorkshire. While I'm in London. But actually, really...how fucking cool is that?

(The facility to race in realtime against people in Osaka or Seoul, with names that aren't rendered in an alphabet I can understand, impresses me a lot less for some reason.)

Comprising it

More from Spook Country - this time protagonist Hubertus Bigend is explaining the state of the music industry to an ex-musician from a band called The Curfew. It is probably the best short history of the industry I've seen.

"In the early 1920s," Bigend said, "there were still some people in this country who hadn't yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That's less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a 'recording artist'" - making the quotes with his hands - "took place towards the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn't reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her" - and here he bowed slightly, in her direction - "was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media."

"Of-?"

"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."

"As opposed to?"

"Comprising it."

Much (most) of what we call media is currently in an - historically - anomalous situation. Pretty much all of the major forms of popular entertainment can be instantly and endlessly reproduced by amateurs. TV, film, music, even a lot of games, to the point that they become effectively public goods. The market for cinemas is broken because - beyond the advantages of the size of the screen - the business is all about gatekeeping something that has become ubiquitous. So for TV, so for music, so - we seem forever on the verge of finding - for books.

But this apparently natural, allegedly inevitable transition to ubiquitous media - media as "free as the air", as Prince liked to say before he realised the real fun was in suing his fans - could be the merest blip in the history of media technology. You can at least envisage the beginnings of a swing of the pendulum the other way when watching Beowulf in 3D at the Imax (try downloading that experience off the Internet to watch at home). Sure, a big room in which you show films that you pretend are new or exclusive is now obvious nonsense...but envisage a media technology that really provides an experience that can't be replicated at home, at least for the next thirty years (except by millionaires), and you've suddenly got a business model again.

Not that this will help the music industry a jot. Charging money to reproduce music was indeed "a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years". But we draw the wrong conclusion if we try to learn from that the - beguilingly attractive - lesson that all media is on the road to becoming inevitably as free as the air. All you need to believe today is that more media technologies are already on their way. Of course they are.