Rhetoric: July 2008 Archive Page

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

As traditional news organizations face increasing pressure to cut back on investigative reporting and depend more heavily on celebrity and puff pieces (cheap to produce, attractive to advertisers, accessible to a mass audience), Dan Gillmor suggests that advocacy groups such as the ACLU have an opportunity to fill the gap.  If only they were fairer to the opposing view...

They're falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they've been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides' arguments, however weak. (That's sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

A 2001 article from the Columbia Journalism Review... blogging it because one of my journalism courses this fall will focus on election coverage.

What's sure is that TV's election night practices are in for significant reupholstery well before the 2002 races. Several networks promise they'll project winners in the future only when all polls have closed in a state, not just a majority of them. ABC intends to advise viewers that projections are "informed, statistically based estimates" of the probable outcome of elections, not definitive declarations. They'll also remove television sets from the proximity of their decision desks so that analysts feel less pressured to make hasty calls.

Beyond that, legislators -- mostly in the person of congressman Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana -- have been scrutinizing TV's election night performance. Tauzin says he won't sponsor any bill aimed at preventing exit polls or limiting vote projections -- legislation which, in any case, would clearly affront the First Amendment. He and a Democratic congressman, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, are introducing legislation to require the fifty states to close their polls at the same moment -- an often-proposed idea that would force drastic changes in the way TV news handles projections.

Despite the mistakes, gaffes, and embarrassments, or perhaps because of them, election night 2000 attracted the most households and viewers to TV screens since Nielsen began keeping such records with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cliffhanger. The late-night host Conan O'Brien joked that the networks were so thrilled with the ratings that they plan to call all elections incorrectly from now on.

The public's loss of trust in television news, however, was no laughing matter. In a CNN poll 79 percent of Americans said the networks did not act "responsibly" on election night. In future close elections, will most viewers believe what the networks tell them? How long will it take to regain their confidence? Why serve up quick-draw projections at all, since the public isn't clamoring for them? Is it really worth each network's paltry saving of $5-$10 million per election cycle to cede to a single entity so much influence and discretion? Or, contrarily, should the networks dismantle their individual decision desks and delegate a reconstituted, better funded VNS to make all projections, but in a more cautious, unhurried, less frenzied, and non-competitive mode?

Rather than link directly to the article, which was published by the Associated Press (an organization that tries to charge bloggers for quoting excerpts of more than a few words), I'll link to the Slashdot discussion of the article.

I just saw Wall-E with the family. It's rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie -- my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn't knock my socks off; the "Daddy, is he really dead?" ending was predictable -- I think the death of a supporting character was probably necessary to boost the emotional energy, but I did like the supporting cast of malfunctioning robots (I wanted them to have more screen time).  But those are quibbles.

For bedtime reading, my son and I are going through How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and I just taught him about the uncanny valley last night. So it was interesting to see how human the robots seemed in this film, and how artificial the humans seemed (though that's a design choice that fits well with the story). In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes a thoughtful review of Wall-E:

This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril -- and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind -- a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

Wilfred M. McClay:

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities--­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide--­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in--­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

Language Log has a good post on a phrase that I've seen cropping up increasingly in journalism:

Person of interest, called a "euphemism for a suspect" by the National Association of Police Chiefs, is now routinely used in investigations of all types, from murders to brush fires. 

Donna Shaw, writing in the American Journalism Review two years ago, said:

Officially, "persons of interest" means...well, nothing. No one has ever formally defined it-not police, not prosecutors, not journalists. The terms, "accused," "allege," "arrest," and "indict" are all dealt with in the Associated Press Stylebook, but there is no listing for "person of interest." Similarly, the US Attorney's Manual-the guide to federal criminal prosecutions-uses the terms "suspect" "target" and "material witness," but "person of interest" gets no mention. So what are reporters to do?

What indeed? Journalists are stuck with using law enforcement's word, that's what.

So there you have it. Person of interest is an expression that has no legal meaning, yet it carries an undefined and highly pejorative meaning about those so designated. So far at least, it's apparently okay for law enforcement to use it, as long as they don't mind the inevitable lawsuits that will follow.