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The Binary.

The Binary is the only formula that matters now in news reporting. Two sides of a story. No in-depth. No detailed analysis. Just The Binary. Give me left and right with some reporter’s jibber jabber in between to frame it up.

Nothing at all happens in reporting anymore. It is over. Finished. A reporter may as well be a CITY-TV Speaker’s Corner booth for all they add to our collective wisdom.

Is it really that bad? Years of consolidation, downsizing, syndication and shortening of deadlines have made it so. The news media now must output product on a continuous basis. There is no longer a media cycle. No longer a battle for top of the hour supremacy. News is now like a metastatic informatics tumor. Born of cathode radiation and the urgency of the buck, stories are like some mutant T-Rex, two huge feet stamping first left, then right, then left again until it stumbles and dies. Or until its spinal cord is severed by a bigger story.

Gone are the days when a reporter would provide four angles or more to a story: a pro, a con, some experts, and then the reporter’s estimation of what it all means. The reporter used to have the ability to think long enough to offer a guarded conclusion about an issue without being accused of bias or editorializing. This was because the reporter was presenting enough evidence for there to be emergent facts. This was because the reporter was informed on the subject. Probably more informed than each of the other individuals interviewed.

Perhaps I am guilty of fostering a myth of origins here, but I don’t think so. I don’t recall being so utterly incensed by the banality of the formula. Even our beloved but belimed CBC has fallen victim. I listened to the news at five pm tonight and heard that same formula. Introduction; lefty; righty; then nothing. End of story. No conclusion is drawn, no analysis offered. There’s no time for it. The budget happened. People disagreed about it. Same thing tomorrow, I’m guessing.

So, thus goes our popular culture. Our societal outbursts are now the same. Left talking points, followed by right talking points, followed by left talking points, followed by right, with a steadily increasing volume and decreasing interlocution. We now talk past each other. We now perform our role in an ever-binary single act play, the tragedy of the missing facts. Nobody expects there to be an outcome or a dialectic. It is performative. The winner performs the best, delivering talking points with the most panache. In bars and coffee shops, we emulate the talk show hosts, talking over and shutting down as the desired outcome, rather than a meeting of minds with a single outcome - or at least some movement and mutual respect.

I lament this. I bodes poorly for us. It means power can do as power wishes without fear, since facts are inconveniences now disabled and submerged by the very culture of discourse itself. That culture of discourse mirrors the debasement of the news media and the absence of analysis in reporting. We are told to trust the news. We trust it and emulate it. We do.

I’m sure there is a level of frustration building around this. I’m sure this is at the root of the growing nastiness, the closing off, the burgeoning otherness that lurks just over the neighborhood hill. Our intellectual isolation is making us paranoid.

So, blogging specifically and the social web in general are important because they open a space of discourse with time aplenty for the development of arguments, the presentation of evidence, and the evolution of positions. The ever tightening and singular cycle of traditional mass media has squeezed off a good sized bubble of desire for more depth, more discussion and more meaning. Some facts, please. It should come as no surprise that bloggers and people who read blogs are the same demographic that has traditionally consumed mass media forms like newspapers. People do want facts. They care.

Canadian politicians still don’t get this. A few have tried, but as many have failed dismally. The Prime Minster’s chief writer in the last election cycle thought blogging was about getting away with insults not deliverable through talking points. No clue. No clue whatsoever. Politicians are now wind-me-ups with durabite batteries. Don Newman is a Max Headroom simulation.

Mr. lefty what do you think? Well, that’s surprising. Righty, what about you? Whoa, stay in the box there boy. Our advertisers aren’t paying for distractions like facts.

People are getting it. Mass media moguls are starting to get it and are making big moves into the social web. There is some hope. The biggest challenge will be to ensure social media do not become simply a mash-up of the same story we tell ourselves day in and day out. Our own private talking points reinforced by our well-worn feedpath.

So for me, the question is this: how do we ensure social media develop in a way that encourages debate and the necessary social dialectic, rather than grow silos of identity that stand defiantly against each other?

The Bowerbird collects a sometimes incredibly beautiful array of objects to decorate the bower it builds. It builds this bower for mating purposes, in the hopes that its grandeur and aesthetic mastery will attract a female. When a female arrives, the Bowerbird will do a dance [rm|wmv]. If all goes well, the two will procreate. Nature is beautiful and fun, though sometimes heartbreaking as well.

This reminds me of the growing inventory of Web 2.0 applications. Every day a collection of newly minted companies trot out another mashup or social software application that leverages a new (or sometimes not so new) aggregation of data from the growing list of open APIs. Then, not unlike the original dotcom bubble, they hope to get laid (attract an investor).

This is not a bad thing. Sex is good. Money is good. I like both, and the dance of investor and start-up is very much like courtship and seduction.

The thing I find funny is the way these start-ups are just like Bowerbirds. APIs are the shiny objects, the bower is the application or mashup, and the dance is, well, the dance - the beautiful swirl of data intermingling and synthesizing to make something meaningful and useful. Gyrations that amuse and excite.

Good luck to you all. I honor you.

Is there a better place to quickly see what people are up to in the world of mashups than ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix? This thing is truly amazing.

If you want to see what the beginnings of fluid information synthesis (the holy grail) looks like, check out what is really the equivalent of the open prairie in the time of homesteader. These little plots are going to grow into something quite incredible and life-altering.

Playing with Drupal 4.7 tonight and wondering what the .install file does. After installing about twenty modules the old fashioned way - using PHPMyAdmin to run the .sql file to create the database tables needed to support the module - I decided to read an install.txt file. Imagine my suprise to learn that, if there is a .install file included with the module, all you have to do is upload it to the modules directory and enable it on the module admin page. Drupal now creates the database tables for you. I tried it. It works. Makes sense, given everything Drupal needs to know to do this is already in the config file.

Many people are not comfortable with adding database tables using PHPMyAdmin. Now they don’t necessarily have to use it to install modules. This will help the Drupal community extend its reach and grow the install base. And it will save me a bit of time on each Drupal project. Time is money. And it adds up.

Thanks, Drupal Gods!

Michel Foucault opens his famous The Order of Things with a fantastical taxonomy, derived from a Borges fable:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that
shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

The great thing about social media is that there is room for the one and the many. My listing of categories on this blog is particular to me and me alone. I chose this taxonomy, and have christened it a “taxono me” because it is mine and mine alone. It makes sense to me, my life, my way of looking at things.

Further down the page is the cloud of deliciousness. The tags listed there are a hybrid taxonomy of all my bookmarks. It is made up of tags I chose and tags chosen for me by the larger group of people inhabiting the delicious space. It is a tagsonomy.

Out of the taxono me comes the tagsonomy. The particularity of the one is conditioned by the absorbing and “mashing-up” influence of the many.

Interestingly, nowhere in this formula is an authority of final appeal. Isn’ this the way it should be? Individual expression has its space preserved for it. The solitary blog and its taxono me is free and available to all, and the benefits we all gain from allowing the individual to speak, regardless of how nutty they may seem at the time - are realized. On the other hand, the tagsonomy swallows the individual, making it part of itself and adjusting, ever so slightly. But no one force hands down taxonomy in the new space of social media.

This is significant, and something the programmers and activists who are nurturing this space should be proud of and fight to preserve. It is a giving thing. A generous thing that preserves space for the one while never allowing the one a final say.

“Well, there is really something to be said for the
exception, assuming it never wants to become the rule.”

- F. Nietzsche
#76, Part II of Gay Science.