It seems that the People’s Republic has decided to shut down several major blog-servers. Nobody ever said they were subtle. They blocked access to a bunch of US university sites and email for several months last year, causing a real headache. I really do wonder if such ham fisted policies work to their advantage or disadvantage.
I heard a report on public radio today about the Bush administration’s use of video news releases to promote the new Medicare law. Some have suggested that the $100 million effort, which includes ready-to-go inserts for the evening news (a fairly common PR practice), smacks of propaganda. In my opinion, it does certainly smack of propaganda, but only to the degree that most PR campaigns do. (I wonder if this will put me even further in Google’s doghouse!) Nonetheless, the differences in approaches between US and Chinese efforts to control public opinion. Which one do you think works better?
Everyone’s already read As We May Think, but a reminder cannot hurt:
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
Allow me to be clear: Google will still index your site, but you may not advertise using AdWords if your site has anything negative to say about George Bush. In response to my question about why I was “disapproved” I received the following:
It seems you are allowed to “advocate against” poverty. And you can advocate for bush in interesting ways. You can even run pretty clear political ads in favor of George Bush and get AdWords for those. But if you speak against Bush, or quote someone who speaks in a particular way, you are no longer acceptable to Google. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?
I have reviewed your website and would like to explain the reason for this
disapproval. As an example of language that advocates against an
individual, group, or organization, in the entry entitled ‘NOT-SO-GLAD
TIDINGS’ all the excerpts from the letter you received would be fall under
this category advocating against women, liberals and homosexuals.
Additionally, you go on in your commentary to use language that advocates
against President Bush. All of this sort of material would need to be
removed before we would approve the ad to run on Google.
My emailed response is below.
Read the rest of this entry »Anyone working on a college campus will tell you that there is a graduate student divide. This is particularly striking in fields with a technical component. That used to mean just engineering and science, but increasingly it means the social sciences as well. I recently proposed we recruit only Indian students to TA our English classes since they seem to be able to write so much better than students educated in the US.
I’ve gotten off track. What I meant to say is that there is a problem. Foreign students are much more likely to be both technologically and mathematically literate, and bilingual. It used to be a Ph.D. in the social sciences required fluency in two languages in addition to English. Recently, language requirements at the graduate level and at the undergraduate level have disappeared or been ignored, at just the moment the ability to communicate globally is more important.
Luckily, the federal government has a plan: draft those students who can speak a second language or work with a computer. What!? I guess market-based solutions are great when they work, but otherwise, we’ll force those who are more able to serve to give up private sector marketing of their skills and show their patriotism by translating the marching orders of foreign armies. Now, I guess in some ways this is better than the drafted troops of the Vietnam era that over-represented the under-educated.
But how about other solutions? First, be more accepting of gays, especially in intelligence. One of the reasons for the shortage of Arabic speakers is waves of purges of gay soldiers and civilian workers. We could extend this to hyperbole by saying that intolerance of gays in the US led to 9/11.
This is really only a corner of the issue, though. The better way to go would be (gasp!) to pay for linguists and computer-savvy folks to join the military. The culture of the military often makes it less attractive to those who are used to free-thinking environs, so they would need also to establish free-thinking enclaves. This sounds bizarre, but military-funded labs often provide spaces for creative thought—it seems like a similar model could be followed in intelligence.
Of course, most of what they are looking for here are not those who will live within the sheltered existence of a lab, but who can settle disputes “on the ground” among those who do not speak English, and who can do tech support when a network crash means that important information isn’t being communicated. Again, I don’t see why a market-oriented approach isn’t made here. If you pay them, they will come. If you offer the average soldier increased pay and free training, the need for a draft diminishes.
Of course, one of the best ways of attracting such recruits would be to reduce the danger of being shot in a foreign land while increasing pay. Is that such a strange idea?
Several weeks ago, I bought a google adword for myself. Why? Mostly just for fun, to play with the technology. It gives me some indication of how often I am “googled” and lets me cover the most frequent mis-spellings of my difficult name. Unfortunately, I am apparently not “Google material.” Just got this email:
> > AD TEXT: > > Alex Halavais > He sees all, knows all. > Want to know why? > alex.halavais.net/ > > Action taken: Suspended – Pending Revision > Issue(s): Unacceptable Content > ~~~~~~~~~ > > SUGGESTIONS: > -> Content: At this time, Google policy does not permit the > advertisement of websites that contain “language that advocates against > an individual, group, or organization”. As noted in our advertising > terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial > discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.Of course, they haven’t told me what is objectionable on this site. I have an email in, but while waiting for the official response, I figure I’ll leave it to the readers to place bets on what the offending parts of the site are. (I certainly have my own guesses—but it’s really hard to be sure.)
Wasn’t there some quickly forgotten ideal at Google not to do evil? Since when did enforcing political homogeneity fall into that rubric.
Alex
Computerworld is running a story on the future of news. Many of the “big names” in this area are quoted. But I think they ought to be thinking less “Minority Report” and more “Bloglines.”
That’s not to say that I think the future of news is RSS. In some ways it sounds like this is what they were suggesting. Rather, I think it might be worthwhile to see why some people don’t like RSS, or use it only for headlines. I’ve seen a lot of people express lago’s[1] viewthat text and layout (while seperable for design) support one another, and that stripping text of its visual context may not be the best way to experience it.
What is, then, the future of news delivery? Call me quixotic, but I’m sticking with the good old early explanation of what online news will bring: the bottomless news hole. I want full transcripts, scanned documents, citations, links. I want the ability to do my own factchecking, even if I never make use of that opportunity. I don’t want to make my own news, but I do want to be able to make my own discoveries.
And I want to have a conversation, not to be a party of eyeballs, a mute audience. I want to know what others think of the news, and then what others think of what others think. Getting at the facts is a vital part of this, but I do not have the time or energy to “interact” with my news on an individual level. I do want to do so at a social level, in much the way we always have.
fn1. Who, due to a trick of typography, I have permanently imprinted as Iago (as in this guy).