How technology can make us dumber

A couple of items to ponder:

Crap detection 101 and social media

My gripes about social media and the future of technology in general, comes around to how we’re increasingly rewarded for volume online, or believe we will be rewarded for volume, rather than quality. Which is strange given how successful the web has been at making volume of information moot. We have more to read, watch and listen to than we can consume in a thousand lifetimes. Volume isn’t the problem. It’s the search for quality and the shortage of critical thinking that we need to solve and this includes the promotion of the kinds of questions Rheingold suggests everyone asks of things they read online.

I discussed one other aspect of the speed/volume problem here:

When Instapundit speaks

This piece from Armed Forces Journal is so accurate it hurts:

Dumb-dumb bullets

As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool

Must read

On 6 August 1945 the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Rev. Donald Sensing writes about it here:

The atom bombings and Japan's surrender

Before there web, radios were the new media

Newspapers have never liked competition.

See this outstanding piece by Jack Shafer:

The Newspaper-Web WarEver get the feeling this battle was fought before?

Marketing and innovation redux

This post raises some interesting issues:

Are Engineers, Scientists And Mathematicians Enemies of Innovation?


Innovation is about social applications of inventions, not about the inventions themselves. Engineers, scientists and mathematicians don’t get this. It’s not part of their culture. We see time and again, engineering-driven corporate cultures failing because they don’t address the social needs of their customers and they don’t address the social ramifications of invention.

Any time this problem appears, we are looking at a company that ignores one of Peter Drucker's most important insights:

It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance- especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers "value," is decisive- it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it prospers.

And

Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two- and only two- basic functions: marketing and innovation.

If a firm takes Drucker seriously, the marketing and engineering people work together to turn inventions into innovative and successful products. Most companies, however, do not operate this way. Instead, they clutter their internal processes and dysfunction results.

One cause of the dysfunction is the tendency of engineers and other technologists to build things that appeal to engineers and technologists. They then expect "non-technical people" to buy their cool stuff. Someone has to speak for the customers and the technical types have to listen.

Executives often make it hard for the communication to take place. They allow the 'expense" areas to dominate internal communications. The critical dialogue between inventors and marketers is drowned out in the verbal free-for-all.

Marketers often fail to live up to live up to the high responsibility Drucker places upon their shoulders. They lack the strategic insight and product knowledge that are vital. Instead they rely on a handful of shopworn tactics to push products out the door. Often, these tactics are chosen, not because they are the best for the product or company, but because they are the only tricks the marketing department knows.

This problem is exacerbated by the high turnover that is endemic to marketing. new people bring new tricks and new buzzwords.

In such circumstances, i cannot blame the engineers for tuning out the marketing types.

Contra-Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, Upsets, and Red Teaming

A few people catch on

Pittsburgh Pirates keep dumping talent

Do the Pirates have any fans left?

If so, Major League Baseball owes them an apology. Ditto manager John Russell, his coaches and the players who have the misfortune to have wound up there through the amateur draft or a trade. You all deserved better.

Manny and Ortiz

Oh, the horror. Red Sox Nation must be tortured with guilt. They spend the spring taunting A-rod for juicing. Now they find out that their two best sluggers from the championship teams were dirty as well.

Sweet.

Actually i agree with the last half of this Bob Ryan column. The revelation that a given player was dirty in 2003 or 1998 is no big deal anymore. Two other points are much more important:

1. When the Mitchell Report was issued, many people were either angered or, at the very least, intrigued by the absence of Red Sox names. There may not have been a single raised eyebrow were it not for the fact that George Mitchell is more than a little associated with the Red Sox. His name is high on the team masthead as a “Director.’’

Sportswriters treated the Mitchell Report as if it were handed down from Mount Sinai. I wonder if any reporter is willing to dig into the methods used and the reason why Ortiz and Rameriz were missed.

2. Here’s another question: What exactly is going on with the leaking of these names?

To me, that is the biggest question of all. The list in under court seal. The people leaking it are breaking the law. That is a far worse than cheating in a child's game.

Pittsburgh sports: the good and the bad

From Nice Pick, Cowher:

While the Pittsburgh Pirates continue to be the biggest laughingstock in all of baseball, the Pittsburgh Steelers once again show why they are the NFL’s most elite franchise.

On a day when the Pirates traded a nine year defensive wizard and a multiple time All-Star for a bunch of guys nobody has ever heard of and nor they ever will, the Steelers were busy locking up one of their best players for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I know they’re different leagues and different sports but this pretty much sums up why one team is a first-class organization with a winning tradition and the other is an embarrassment to the championship city of Pittsburgh.

Straws in the wind

When I was young and naïve I thought that media critics, public editors, and ombudsmen played a vital role in maintaining the standards of the profession of journalism. As I grew older and better informed, I was forced to put away such childish illusions.

What is the true function of a public editor

Media criticism and corralled rebellion

CNN’s Howard Kurtz provides and on-going seminar in how to “cover” a beat while missing all the juicy stories. It is easy to do when you are more concerned with protecting the guild than with getting at the truth.

This week’s “Reliable Sources” addressed a couple of sports-related issues. First up, of course, was the voyeur video of Erin Andrews. Kurtz condemned a couple of easy targets (bloggers and Murdoch-owned media) but he devoted much of his segment to the rehabilitation of Christine Brennan.

Brennan initially responded to the Andrew’s video by blaming the victim. Since that time she has engaged in a laughable attempt to muddy the record.

Christine Brennan Continues Her Erin Andrews Smarm Offensive

Kurtz chose to give Brennan a platform for her self-serving spin, and never brought up her tweet or Facebook posting. He let her pretend that the whole affair was created by dishonest selective quotation.

Kurtz then turned to the civil suit filed against Steelers’s quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Both he and Brennan condemned ESPN for downplaying the story. No one suggested that maybe ESPN had learned something from the Duke lacrosse debacle and wanted to avoid a terrible rush to judgement. (I heard Colin Cowherd on “Sport Nation” and he explicitly cited the lacrosse case as the reason he was not going to discuss the story.)

It is not surprising that Kurtz saw no need to mention the media’s performance during the Durham travesty. He has studiously avoided dealing with the media’s gross failures in that fiasco.

There are odd echoes of the lacrosse case in Brennan’s criticism of Erin Andrews. For instance, in the early days of the frame-up, the media spent a lot of energy discussing and condemning “lax culture”, Duke’s party atmosphere, and the players “privileged” background. Brennan, before she backtracked, suggested that Erin Andrews tacitly encouraged her stalker by appealing to the “frat house” demographic.

In both cases, journalists committed analysis by stereotype. If you are in the guild, you can get away with such things as long as you pick politically correct groups to disparage.

Kurtz and Brennan were in solemn agreement that ESPN should have been more aggressive on the Roethlisberger story. (Howie knew it was a big story even though he did not know how to pronounce Big Ben’s name.) Curiously, Kurtz was uninterested in a story he helped break.

Military and Media Clash In Complaint
Navy Spokesman Alleges Abuse by Miami Reporter

“Reliable Sources” had no time to discuss the complaint lodged with the Miami Herald by Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon. The officer alleges that Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg made “vile and repulsive comments” including “multiple incidents of abusive and degrading comments of an explicitly sexual nature.”

This was a story almost tailor-made for a media critic. Almost.

Imagine if this story had different participants. If a female reporter lodged those accusations against a football coach, Kurtz would have devoted his whole show to the problem of misogyny in the locker room. Christine Brennan and Selena Roberts would fill the hour with commentary about the dark side of the culture of big time sports.

Let a reporter attack a military officer and we get crickets.

In his WaPo story Kurtz lets the guild offer up a defense by non sequitor. Did Carol Rosenberg do these things? The Post’s Jerry Markon tells us that Rosenberg “is a great reporter.” Kurtz himself blandly ascribes the matter to a “culture clash” between journalists and the military. (Note that Kurtz never suggests that there could be a “dark side” to journalistic culture.)

While Kurtz had no time to discuss Rosenberg’s behavior, he chose to devote a segment to the “birthers” and their “ludicrous claims”. Unlike Cmdr. Gordon’s allegations the birthers do not put the MSM in a bad light. Instead, it lets the guild get in a few well-placed kicks at crazy right-wingers and talkd radio.

Taken as a whole, the program demonstrated why Kurtz is “respected” by his media colleagues. On issues that make the guild members look bad, he either ignores them or provides a platform for self-justification. The only people who come in for harsh criticism are those outside the MSMbloggers, Fox News, athletes, talk radio, etc.

UPDATE: Just One Minute discusses another angle of the birther story and Kurtz here.

Keeping up with IG-gate

Robert Blevedere of Camp of the Saints has a new blog that aggregates the coverage.

IG-GATE: The Inspector General Scandals - Linkage Site

Dead on

This is a good example of why I hate television news. Say what you will about the impact of the blogosphere on journalism, TV has been degrading our profession for decades.

Television is a totalitarian medium, which has trouble accommodating diversity of opinion in a Hayekian universe of facts, where not all facts support any one particular side of an argument.

RTWT

Michael Vick: Nagging Thoughts

First posted Monday, August 27, 2007

The end of the Michael Vick case leaves a bad taste. I have far more sympathy for the soon-to-be inmate than I ever did for the overpaid and over-hyped player.

Some of it is the piling on by Big Media. The ritualized denunciations of Vick are all out of proportion to the actual crimes. Do Nancy Grace and Sean Hannity really need to incite their mob of slobbering mouth-breathers day after day?

(Side point: Joining these mobs serves the same function as the Diana memorials Maureen Orth saw in San Francisco. It is a way for a pathetic loser to get close to fame.)

Another troubling question: Were the lurid stories about drowning and electrocuting dogs put into the indictment to taint the jury pool and put public pressure on Vick? I do not think cruelty to animals is a federal crime so why were those stories in a federal indictment?

Were the stories true? They came from people trying to make a deal. Maybe they had an incentive to exaggerate a little. And maybe an ambitious prosecutor will be less than diligent when he scrutinizes those statements if they point to the big fish he is targeting.

Why did this become a federal case anyway? A local drug bust led to allegations and evidence of dog fighting. State authorities moved too slowly for the DOJ, so the federal government brought its full power to bear.

The energetic federal response in Virginia stands in stark contrast to federal indifference to another high profile criminal case in California. When Lindsey Lohan was arrested the last time, traces of cocaine were found in her purse. Local authorities treated the matter as a simple DUI. The Feds deferred to the state.

Is dog-fighting now a higher priority for the DOJ than the “War on Drugs”? If so, maybe they should give this guy his money back. Maybe they should stop funding those SWAT teams that kick in doors in the inner city looking for crack and pot.

If the War on Drugs is still important, why did the DOJ pass on the opportunity to pressure Lohan and her posse into revealing her supplier? Why id a high profile dog fighter a prize worth bagging but the “Hollywood Connection” is a matter of indifference?

Somehow, I don’t see Lohan’s posse as a tougher nut to crack than Vick’s “friends.” So why not break them and find out who the dealers are?

The media mob displays the same double standard. No one is calling for Lohan to lose her career despite the fact that she has flaunted the law and endangered innocent lives. She is treated as a victim (of what?) Vick, however, is evil personified who is denied all chances of redemption.

The pressure on the NFL to ban Vick has no analogue in Hollywood. Dog fighting is wrong, but so is rape. Nonetheless, Roman Polanski is making movies and winning awards. The media mob yawns.

Unadulterated awesomeness

Slublog on Frum:

Frum: History Began When I Decided to Remake Conservatism in My Image

Why advertising usually sucks

Reason #1. Clients do not take advertising seriously.

Speed-Dating: Is This the New Normal?

So a strategic partner was to be chosen primarily via a meeting scarcely more than a week away, based on creative that, except for the free-standing insert, was speculative in every sense of the word.

Kind of like setting your wedding date and then using speed-dating to pick your mate.

Did Madoff Act Alone?

Edward Jay Epstein suggests he had help.

how we live today

From Dr. Helen:

Why men shouldn't volunteer with children

Who is Valerie Jarrett

Michelle Malkin fills us in on the parts the New York Times "forgot" to mention:

What the NYT’s 8,100-word Valerie Jarrett profile didn’t tell you

Steve Sailer also has some smart insight into Obama's big sister:

The Empty Pantsuit

The best commentary on Henry Louis Gates

is over at Patterico's. Start here and keep scrolling.

Great journalism is not dead

This piece from LA Weekly tells an incredible story about some dedicated cops who closed a cold case.

How LAPD's "Closers" Nabbed the Westside Rapist

Outstanding

The Officer Didn’t Stereotype Henry Louis Gates — Henry Louis Gates Stereotyped the Officer