CNNfail

As I've already mentioned, Twitter has been the go-to place for news and updates about what's happening in Iran. American media has been pretty quiet, although some outlets seem to be getting into gear now. This has been criticized by American bloggers, but at this point the Twitterverse has definitely noticed and people arepissed at cnn for its pathetic non-coverage. There's a new hashtag going around: #CNNFail. (By contrast, NPR has done enough to get the tag #NPRWin. Good job, guys.)

This raises, to me, the interesting question of who gets to determine what news is and whether people have the right to see "their" events represented on the news. Not whether they're correct to desire it--I think they are--but whether they have a right. Probably in the strictest sense they don't, but it depends somewhat on how important you think discourse, language, and media are in the real world rather than in the abstract world, and on what your opinion of news as private vs. public enterprise is. I happen to think these things are extremely important, and I would rather news be either publicly run or public in the diffuse sense (i.e. Twitter, blogs, etc.) than that it be private corporations, but the fact is that CNN is a private corporation and therefore does not technically owe anything to anybody. I think they have responsibilities and they should uphold them, but if they don't I can't sue them for it.

In this case it's largely inapplicable, since I can't imagine by what logic the current upheavals in Iran don't count as newsworthy. Still. One of the effects of the social media/citizen journalist universe's breaking down of the centralized information systems of the 20th century is that everyone is a media critic at some point. This is related to the point I made yesterday about the role of communication technology in circumventing centralized power--knowledge is power, after all--but it's not always the same. Or at least, it's not always the same kind of power.

I don't think I can answer that

Via digby:

I hardly know what to say. What’s worse: A healthcare system where someone is so desperate, he’d blow up buildings to pay for his brother’s treatment, or homeland security that thinks nothing of setting people up so they can claim they caught some “terrorists”?

A Renaissance of specialists?

My first year in college, I read parts of Emile Durkheim's The Division of Labor In Society for a social science sequence misleadingly titled "Power, Identity, and Resistance" which was more or less a tour of the greatest hits of liberalism, starting with Adam Smith and going all the way up through Fanon, Hayek, and Joseph Stiglitz by way of Marx, Rousseau, Locke, and many others including Durkheim.

Durkheim was a dense read (I am to this day a member of a Facebook group bemoaning his prose), but I liked the book a great deal. A Kevin Drum post I read today put me in mind of a particular meditation of his: that the notion of the Renaissance Man was becoming unrealistic. There had been a time when every man (it was men) could call himself a natural philosopher or a scholar and reasonably be considered an expert, or at least well-informed, on a broad variety of subjects, from moral philosophy to the beginnings of economic theory, biology, physics. etc. By the time Durkheim was writing in the 1890s, the industrial revolution and the advances of each science and social discipline were making this impossible.

It seems undoubtedly clear that the view is gaining ground that the division of labour should become a categorical rule of behavior, one that should be imposed as a duty. ... The time is past when the perfect man seemed to us the one who, capable of being interested in everything but attaching himself exclusively to nothing, able to savour everything and understand everything, found the means to combine and epitomise within himself the finest aspects of civilization. Today that general culture, once so highly extolled, no longer impresses us save as a flabby, lax form of discipline.

Now for Peter Suderman, via Drum:

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

In other words, books taught us to think like they do — as tools for storing extensive knowledge. Now the web teaches us to think like it does — as a tool for recall and connection.

[...]

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

Drum comments:

Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it's reasonable to draw from it. That's because they don't know the context. They don't know the rest of the story. And that's because they don't read enough books.

I'm tremendously interested in this. I do think we are socially becoming more enticed by the notion of the mind as a sort of grabbing machine, pulling quotations, facts, arguments and experiences from a nearly endless store of information which is largely (though not solely) available through the internet.

But to do that, we need to grab from someone or somewhere. Somebody else has to go out and have experiences, say insightful things, collect facts--essentially, do their homework so everybody else can include them in their personal SparkNotes. An analogy might be the relationship of blogs to certain aspects of newspapers: Newspapers have, in addition to a lot of other less-valuable work, employed people to go and collect facts, have experiences, do research, and--in some cases--be expert. They've been paying people to do their homework while bloggers have taken on the ever more enticing, exciting, and vaunted function of sorting, filtering, aggregating, and sharing.

I don't know whose thought this originally was, but my father has repeated it to me a few times: no medium has disappeared entirely; each one just finds a niche that no other medium quite fills. We still use stone tablets for plaques, headstones, and inscriptions. Books will likely find their own uses, as will newspapers.

Will books remain the domain of the specialists, the conscientious nerds who read and annotated every part of the assignment, while blogs become the domain of the more casual population? And if they do--or if they are--are readers and writers of blogs dilettantes or generalists? I suspect we shall see both, and there will be a spectrum from generalism on a massive scale (Slate, for example) to specialization (Abu Muqawama) with much in between. But how are we to distinguish dilettantes--practitioners of Durkheim's "flabby, lax form of discipline" from the perfection found in wholeness? And how do such shallowly omniscient directories coexist with the focused, determined, and admirable specialists on whom they must rely?

Perhaps this last, at least, isn't really a question. After all, it's already happening. I would consider myself something of a Dewey Decimal-style mind with expanded sections for certain areas of personal interest to me, and I interact with more focused people all the time just fine in my personal life; I consume information provided by such people and store it exactly as Suderman suggested. It is neither difficult nor problematic.

I think the fear of specialist loss, so to speak, which has appeared in some discussions of the fate of newspapers, is a reasonable concern--I can imagine a dystopia of thousands of generalists all groping in the dark for information that isn't there. When no one does the homework, the entire day of class is useless. But I just don't see it happening. As much effect as media and technology may have on the way we process information, I think some people truly are predisposed to generalism, others to specialization, others to dilettantism, and some are polymaths. The distributions may shift but no category is ever empty. Just as books and newspapers (or something like them) will find their niche, so will the fact-finders and the experienced. We'll need them far too much to let them disappear.

As usual, David Brooks falls half into making sense and half into making me want to punch him in the face.

The observation that Obama has a huge fundraising advantage among "creative classes," "information workers," and the educated is not all that unexpected except for the degree to which he's popular among hedge funders and corporate types. The key here, according to Brooks, is education and training--people who came up from liberal areas, went to "left-leaning institutions" like Harvard (excuse me?) and now want to see people like themselves--educated, liberal, savvy types in government, not "people who used to run Halliburton and are backed by evangelicals."

The crucial thing that I think Brooks is missing here is the following: All these people have access to information (information workers? get it?). They, I would conjecture, are more likely to follow the news closely, to be plugged into the state of the world around them, and to accept experiential as well as empirical evidence of inequity or problems in the country--their educations trained them to believe statistics and to believe an aggregate of experiential accounts. This is the picture the Democratic party is working with.

Meanwhile, the Republican party continues to harp on social alarm buttons like gay marriage and taxes without any reference to reality because that's the only agenda they have to go on. The Republican party has largely enacted the policy platform of the conservative movement, and it was a disaster for everyone but the management-employed, country club set (those who tend to give to McCain). Now they're reduced to OMG GAYZ smoke and mirrors to try to get the electorate to allow them to continue doing the same. I highly doubt that people whose education, training, profession, and so daily lives involve empirical analysis, adaptive thinking, and basic reality-based information analysis are likely to buy that kind of strategy, regardless of their various positions on abortion.

In no way is this meant to denigrate those who do not fit this description as somehow plebeian or dumb. All I am trying to point out is that the kind of occupation Brooks identifies is necessarily a predisposition in this particular political climate to vote Democrat.

Oh, wow. I took a break from writing this and found some really scary statistics totally by accident (well, okay, by reading a political and cultural blog, but without intent):

Only 2 in 5 voters can name the three branches of the federal government.

--Nearly half (49%) of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution.

--Only 1 in 7 can find Iraq on a map.

--A majority (70%) continued to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, even after the 9/11 Commission reported that the claim was groundless.

--Only 1 in 5 know that there are 100 federal senators.

Right now I'm primarily interested in "Nearly half (49%) of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution." If you were of this opinion and you heard all the hullabaloo over FISA, for example, you might wonder what the big deal was. The President can do whatever he wants as long as he says so, right? Back to whatever I was doing. That's eminently logical and a fair allocation of one's mental energy, especially since approximately 98.24% of all political hullabaloo is bullshit.

But the kind of professional that Brooks describes is highly unlikely to hold this kind of misconception and so will understand fairly quickly and intuitively what the problem is, again chasing them toward a Democratic vote.


Going back to Brooks, his conclusion that this is "a battle of the elites" is not entirely wrong--information and education elites vs. (his words) country club and corporate elites. I'd say each does have a mistrust of the other. At the same time, the divisions between these two camps are not nearly as clear or as deep as pundits would like us to believe, and even if they were I think it's a misdirection of the information Brooks is using as a starting point. What's important here isn't that the latte-sippers are coming to take over the power of the country-clubbers; it's that the people with information and analytical occupations are trending Democratic.

In addition, Brooks' conclusion that once the power grab is complete, the claims of the liberals' re: unions, economic equality, etc. will fall by the wayside is almost certainly true to one degree or another--we all know about campaign promises. However, I think that this class of voter and politician is more likely to have a systemic understanding and positive valuation of how economic betterment for others results in economic betterment for them, too, in the long term, as opposed to robbing the bank in the short term a la BushCo. Whether or not such people are more likely to be governed by altruism is a question I will not mire myself with.