Wintery Knight concludes his post titled Mitt Romney gaffe: Romney fails miserably in interview with Bret Baier: “Is this thin-skinned RINO the person we want in the Oval office in 2012? Why elect a clone of Obama?”
Romney tells Baier his interview was overly aggressive:
Romney-Baier interview part 1
Commentary: Read More »
[...] The Romney team’s MO has been to pursue softball coverage in lieu of potentially dangerous interviews. He agreed to interviews with soft-lens magazines like Parade and People, but not with newsmagazines or websites, or even with The Boston Globe reporters who are writing a biography of the candidate. He has avoided The New York Times as well, and his only policy-oriented interview — foreign policy, exclusively — with The Washington Post was granted to blogger Jennifer Rubin, who holds similar views, writes Dylan Byers of POLITICO.com in a story titled Mitt’s media blowback
Byers continues:
Romney also avoids reporters’ questions on the trail. When confronted by a Times reporter about this, he countered that he had press avails “almost every day” — a preposterous stretch of the word “almost.” (In fact, the reporter noted, Romney’s most recent press avail had been nearly a week earlier.)
While tight message control has often made it seem as though he is on a glide path to the nomination, the fallout from the Baier interview also signaled that a backlash is always close [...]
yours &c.
g.
Earlier I described what I call de facto nationalization, the U.S. model of political-economic consolidation.
Question: What determinate form would the de facto nationalization of the national media take? Here would be your answer, friends and well-wishers, however tentative, in the form of a .pdf document titled FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION STAFF DISCUSSION DRAFT:1 POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM.
An LA Times “Top of the Ticket” blog burst titled Obama’s FTC plan to reinvent America’s news media summarizes the proposal as consisting in:
[...] major changes to the copyright law, including government licensing provisions; government pilot programs to investigate potential new media business models, antitrust changes to allow media companies to unite on imposing online pay walls, establish a journalism division of AmeriCorps with government underwriting the training of young journalists, tax incentives per news employee, increased funding of public broadcasting, a 5% tax on consumer electronics and/or assessments on users of public airwaves.
Another idea would be to allow taxpayers to direct a portion of their taxes — perhaps up to $200 — to a specific media institution as payment for media services rendered. (Now, if taxpayers could direct such sums to individual bloggers…. ) [...]
Caption: An artist’s interpretation of the relationship of the press corps to the state as imagined in the document titled POTENTIAL POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS TO SUPPORT THE REINVENTION OF JOURNALISM.
This would be the once independent enterprise of journalism passing into its opposite, just as our banks became zombie banks, or our automobile manufacturers became publicly subsidized public utilities.
Ponder in your hearts, for a moment, the opportunities and possibilities that the public funding of media operations opens up for our beloved political classes, and imagine how effortlessly tractable a crisis like the Deepwater Horizon Tragedy could be were we able to divert the massive resources necessary to shape public opinion to more productive outcomes, and all by assisting our brothers and sisters in the press corps, who in this storyline are publicly funded, to develop and distribute an account of events consistent with the good will and noble intentions of our masters in Washington.
And while you consider these possibilities, consider also how much more effective the decisions of our policy elites could be, particularly our elected ones, were they not pressured by an adversarial press to act too hastily, without the correct information or the time to reflect. Why, they could rule like philosopher kings …
If only … if only …
yours &c.
g.
[...] “Most successful insurgent and terrorist networks are hybrid forms of network and hierarchal organization,” writes Adam Elkus in a series of free-form, stream-of-consciousness remarks available at http://www.groupintel.com and titled Can Strategy be Crowdsourced?
1. Organizations in any sense are hybrid forms. The most steeply hierarchal organizations host informal, weak tie networks.
Elkus continues:
As Naval Postgraduate School professor David Tucker details, hierarchy enables organizations to enforce standards, efficiently marshal resources, and formulate strategic goals. Even the most protean “leaderless” organizations often have a strategic class of dominant personalities who create the basis for instrumental action by formulating ideas and punishing deviant behavior. Wikipedia, for example, is commonly cited as an example of the wisdom of crowds. Anyone, after all, can contribute to it. But Wikipedia enforces standards through a class of privileged monitors who scour the online encyclopedia for errors. It is also important to point out that a small group of contributors produce the bulk of entries, in contrast to the casual user who edits a couple of minor details
2. Elkus refers to star-and-entourage social formations if we read him correctly. This is the familiar notion that people in online groups tend to organize themselves around a few high performers. This is an early observation in the research literature. King et al. in their Rise and Fall of Netville identify “guru” figures as a part what they describe as the meritocracy of the early internet. This star-entourage social formation is redolent of Barabasi’s notion of the web as a scale free network. Baym in her Interpreting Soap Operas—an early study of a USENET newsgroup—identifies the same star-entourage social formation as the character and conduct of rec.arts.tv.soaps was largely shaped through the contributions of a few high performers. This is the story: In online communities and on the internet in general, what appears to be noise—what appears to be chaos—what appears to be a super-over-abundance of undisciplined proliferation—is an illusion. There are only a few sites that nearly everyone visits, e.g. google, yahoo, amazon.com, ebay. Everything else is background noise, the ground against which the figure emerges. It is the same in the many niches and online communities. Each will have its cluster of stars, gurus, popular bloggers, or high performers of whatever sort to whom most of the others draw from or link to. Halpin et al. in their Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging (Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web) develop evidence to suggest that tags in del.icio.us also follow a power law distrution. A few tags in any topic domain are high performing and used by many. The overwhelming majority get used by a few or used rarely.
Elkus continues:
3. All networks of whatever kind require subsidy and substrate. A neighborhood network requires a neighborhood and a neighborhood requires a social and a material basis. The networks that facebook or twitter host require the affordances of facebook or twitter.
4. If I read Elkus correctly, he struggles with the same contradiction in the notion of a scale-free network that I do. For me, a scale-free network is a heirarchy—it is the very definition of a hierarchy, just as a hierarchy is a special case of the network form. It may be an informal hierarchy or a hierarchy in some other special sense, but it is a hierarchy. Follow my reasoning. Post 9.11 network theorists including Barabasi considered the problem of how to disrupt or degrade the performance of networks whether human or otherwise. The consensus that emerged was that scale-free networks like the web or al qaeda were highly resiliant—a network could lose many, many nodes—provided that the network did not lose a so-called “critical node,” such as a key internet node (e.g. google) or a person with special skills. Put another way, a star can lose many members of her entourage and still be a star. But should the star disappear, the entourage itself would have no social or perhaps material basis. Those “critical nodes”—or stars or gurus or whatever—are the top of your organizational flow chart just as easily as they are the centers of your network diagram. Whether they wield formal authority or not, they are the hierarchs.
Networks and network centric organizations tend to be flatter. They host fewer intermediaries, the middle people, middle management, the supervisory layers. But they are still hierarchal in form and character.
5. In this sense an hierarchal organization with high redundancy can be more resiliant than a network. Consider a rifle company. Every element has the same basic skill set though different elements have different roles and specializations. Ideally the formation could lose half or more of its elements—and even its cadre—and still perform its mission. But this sort of resiliance is costly. Everyone must receive the same basic training and train together often. In a network, on the other hand, not everyone has to know everything; not everyone has to be able to do everything. As in a market, knowledge, tasks, resources, critical skills, all these can be distributed more efficiently. But just as a fully rationalized market—a market of complete efficiency, hence no duplication, loose couplings, or redundancy—can be disrupted or fail completely if a critical system fails or a key resource gets depleted, a scale free network can be brought down if one or two critical nodes fail.
Elkus continues:
6. The influencers of informal social organizations stand in a critical relation to the influenced—their entourages.This relation can be described as reciprocal altruism. High-trust systems or relationships can be easily spoofed or deceived the first time. But what you visit upon the system or the relationship will probably get visited back upon you. Give and it will be given to you again. Take too much or take without giving back and the system may edge you toward the door. Also, conditions change. Influencers can lose their influence. What counted as high performance yesterday may not count today. Stars can fall out of favour with their fans. The social mechanism will renew itself one way or another. Formal organizations seem to be designed to resist these processes. But “gullible human herds” left to their own devices tend to learn—they don’t stay gullible, or grim reality culls the herd of its gullible members—just as a market will correct itself in light of new data at the expense of its poor performers. My point is simply this: any so-called participatory deception will be exceedingly difficult to develop and especially to maintain over time. Or at the very least it will be as costly as any other sort of deception.
7. Elkus argues elsewhere in his article that “crowds do not think—the most basic perquisite for conceiving strategy.” A crowd may not think. But people do. From Virgil’s Aeneid, the first Homeric similie of the poem:
Deception without benefit of force or fraud is unsustainable. Force and fraud are costly to maintain. Trust and transparency are more efficient though the front-end costs can be high. The lesson is simply this: reputation is everything. It can move crowds.
And I accepted. I love the nice people at ‘A’ Morning. These are good times to be a rhetorician, friends and well wishers. Good times.
If you have questions about the inauguration that you would like me to address, please post them.
yours &c.
g.
[...] “Today the buzz word is no longer ‘good government’ but ‘good governance,’” writes the estimable Selwyn Ryan in a http://www.trinidadexpress.com story titled The media in the era of the permanent campaign
Ryan continues:
In pursuit of the latter, citizens are encouraged to participate in a continuous way in the political process. No longer is it satisfactory for a government to argue that results are what matter and that the people should trust them to do what is right for the country. Process was now as important as product. Government is seen to be too important a commodity to be left solely to politicians. All over the world, and not only in Trinidad and Tobago, people distrust politicians who are generally believed to be concerned primarily with their own personal or group interest. “Trust” and “politicians” are oxymorons.
The new role assigned to citizens has forced politicians and political parties to campaign on a continuous basis. The term, ‘permanent campaign’ was used to define what governing elites believed they had to do to get their programmes enacted into law and also to maintain their ratings. In the new political paradigm, politics becomes a media war between prosecutory “gotcha” journalists and executive flacks, an event in which the laws of political gravity have to be reversed or neutralised. In this environment, the line between news and propaganda becomes blurred and the media function more like opinionated pressure groups than conveyor belts along which “information” flows. News has to be laundered, sanitised, and packaged, and spun before it is made available for public consumption. Pundits have to be engaged, coddled and entertained to ensure their overall loyally to the brand [...]
yours &c.
g.
My name: g.v. wilkes iv, phd
My location: Victoria, BC, Canada
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This be a vanity blog, my brothers and sisters. Vanity, all is vanity. And a lot of combat, criticism, and commentary.
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The views I express here are my own, only my own, solely my own, and I represent no person, no group, and no institution, other than myself, and even then only partially and inconsistently, as my actions, and my intentions, are seldom in perfect accord, and they are subject to constant revision, review, clarification, and correction.
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