a thaumaturgical compendium

I was initially disappointed that the folks over at Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour had not gotten back in touch with me on the blogging segment they did. I’d gotten a phone call a couple months back from someone starting to pull together a story, but never heard back. She had apparently interviewed others as well, including JD Lasica. Having seen the segment, which aired Monday, I’m actually pretty glad I wasn’t in there.

It wasn’t bad for what it was—alerting a wider population to the existence of the phenomena—but it did lack the kind of thoroughness you would expect from the show. The “four guys in a bar” setup is fine*, but some of the more challenging questions were not asked, and some of the more typical stereotypes were reinforced.

But it also seemed there was a bit of pandering going on. Though the guests tended to be more equivocal, the presented story suggested strongly that the Lott affair was driven largely by blogs. I guess this is nice because it will make for a good intro to a paper I’m finishing up, and makes for a nice straw man to pull down. The contribution of blogs was not nearly as black and white, nor as decisive, as the short segment made it out to be.

I guess the segment may serve the function of introducing more people to blogging, it’s just too bad—if not too surprising—that it focused so heavily on the A-list and corporate bloggers, which, in my opinion, kind of misses the boat.

I did talk to another journalist today who seemed to “get it”—but it would have been nice to have seen something a bit more probing on a program with a national audience. I’ll be curious to see what some of the other bloggers, not just the politicos, think of this piece. It is pretty pro-blog, so I suspect it will be relatively well-received among the ur-bloggers, but they may not find much in it to make it worthy of commentary.

• Would have been better if they had mentioned it was part of a meetup.

Speaking of propaganda…

Two hundred thirty-three years ago, Paul Revere printed and circulated this etching of the Boston Massacre. This image sent a fairly clear message about what was in fact a very messy situation. There can be little doubt that Revere and other revolutionary propagandists made use of the event to turn the tide of public opinion against the British.

Why then are we blind to the damage in image that can be done by firing into a crowd? This will not hurt the administration’s position so much here at home, which for whatever reason appears unassailable, but it can toss a lot of people off the fence who are ambivalent about the US occupation, or worse, can push people toward the ethical order of an Islamic state.

It’s a bad thing to happen, if only because armed soldiers firing into protesting crowds—regardless of the actual context—carries with it a pretty dark symbolic message.

At the end of last year, I decried the lack of a coherent propaganda offensive, and suggested that “We have an amazing marketing and PR machine in the US. You would think that we could sell the country a bit better.”

A recent Slate article (Bad Information) lays the blame at the doorstep of Charlotte Beers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It seems that with the end of the cold war, public diplomacy got tangled up in red tape in the US. Why wasn’t it made a priority?

For all the criticisms of JETRO and similar organizations, the aggressive combination of advocacy and trade seems like a far better solution than speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

When Jamie and I get ready in the morning, Finnegan lies just at the intersection of the bathroom and the bedroom, so that he can flick his eyes back and forth to monitor our ablutions and arrangements, without having to work too hard to maintain a doleful visage. (And though Jamie insists that the latter is a function of pedigree rather than disposition, I remain suspect.) Weekends, in the current canine conception, are the Sunday and Monday when Daddy tends to work at home for a few hours. That hasn’t been the case lately. Vengeance was his.

He really has been very good. Our sofas and tables, while heavily drooled upon, have never been chewed. But over the last few weeks he has been gradually ratcheting up the shred-while-you’re-gone strategy. It started innocuously enough: an errant paper towel, a neighborhood flier, my pay stub. Now he is in his electronics phase. It began with a Netflix CD a week and a half back. And then this. It may not be obvious, but the picture is of what was once the remote for our cable box. Luckily, the batteries remain outside the dog. I suspect some of that plastic got swallowed; I just have to hope it makes it back out the other end. There may be no punishment that can match his own shame.

Why should a communication scholar care about SARS?

There are some obvious answers to this, many of them having to do with risk communication. For instance, why should we be worrying about SARS when you are still far more likely to be killed by a lightning strike (let alone an auto accident or heart disease).

While there is no doubt that SARS is communicable, can we take it a step further and consider the disease a form of information? The question, for me, is raised because SARS has pointed out an interesting network of relations among people, and especially people who belong to what was formally considered the “jet set.” This would have remained isolated to China (and perhaps kept secret) if not for a global rendezvous at the Hotel Metropole in Kowloon (which, incidentally, has some great discounts right now). A number of travelers have now allowed it to spread around the world. Almost like a tracer dye, the epidemiological trail gives us an insight into global patterns of travel and migration.

Those who think about social networks have already been widely exposed—so to speak—to the ideas of epidemiologists, and SARS again has them interested. Valdis Krebs, in a post to SocNet, points to this powerpoint presentation from the CDC, which demonstrates just how important the hotel was to the spread of the disease. Is this a communication problem?

In perhaps a prosaic definition of human communication, we can say it is the transmission of information from one person to another. Is SARS a form of information? At first glance, no. In fact, to claim it as such would seem unscientific: we know that it is a virus. On the other hand, what if we consider for a moment what information is: a way of forecasting the future by foreclosing possibilities. (I’m taking a lot of shortcuts here, considering entropy to be found most clearly in the number or range of possible future states of a system.) The ultimate sort of communication, then, would be one in which the future state of the human was completely predictable.

During my short time at the Santa Fe Institute, I had occasion to chat with a cardiologist who noted that the only stable attractor (which the NIH notes is a redundant term, but is used here to differentiate from the strange attractors found in heart rates) of the human heart was when it stopped—i.e., when a person died. When a person is exposed to the SARS virus, in some percentage of cases, he or she will exhibit symptoms of the disease, and in a smaller proportion of cases, will stop living. While that sort of behavioral effect is not at all common among the sort of communication we are used to, I think the comparison goes beyond analogy or homology. SARS is a subset of what we call communication, and its networks are communication networks.

Took one of the candidates up to Niagara Falls yesterday. It was a good day to go. It was also a kind of forced mini-vacation. I really couldn’t have justified that time away from work—but my tour guide services were needed. The photo here is taken from Goat Island, right between the American and Canadian Falls. There is a fatal flaw: the observation deck and bridge line up in a disquieting way. But it’s the only photo I took, so…