Trolling is not synonymous with stalking or threatening people online

The UK national media have recently discovered the word “troll” in its internet sense. Unfortunately, every last journalist I have seen using it has deployed it incorrectly. For instance, the stories about Liam Stacey (he of the Fabrice Muamba tweets), or Frank Zimmerman (he who threatened the children of Louise Mensch).

The trouble is that neither of these men were trolling. That they were being unpleasant in a general sense is not in doubt. That they were directly, personally cruel or bigoted is not in question. But this is not the definition of trolling.

"Coolface" became the emblem of the 4chan trolls (image cribbed from Wikipedia)

My experience of trolling comes from 4chan (and that’s not something you often see someone admit in polite society). 4chan is that terrible place you’ve heard about where everyone is Anonymous and there are no rules. It’s the origin of many of the memes that have swept the internet, and it’s the current spiritual home of trolling (although the term has a storied past).

What defines an act of being stupid, aggressive or irritating online as trolling is all about motive. Trolling is about wearing a mask, adopting a pose to elicit a response from people who (in the troll’s eyes) take internet discourse too seriously. It’s almost never about communicating your own opinions accurately and honestly, which is why neither of these men are trolls.

I’ll give an imaginary example from 4chan’s /g/ board, which is nominally dedicated to discussing Technology. In practice, this generally means fanboi-ish flame wars between fans of Apple and fans of other technology (hardware and software). Apple tech arouses strong passions in both its adherents and its detractors; to the former, it’s finely-crafted, impeccably tasteful, user-friendly; to the latter, it’s over-priced, restricting and patronising.

So, a trollish post on Technology, aiming to stir up the Apple debate yet again, might go something like this:

“I enjoy buying and using Apple products. I know that the user interface has been crafted to exacting specifications by consummate professionals, that I will not be exposed to virus-ridden or poorly-designed third-party apps, and that simply owning an Apple product will be an outward sign of my creative soul and higher-than-average salary.”

The troll probably doesn’t believe a word of this. He most likely doesn’t care one way or the other about the issue. He wants to see easily-riled Android, Windows or Linux fans crafting an excoriating response to the smug, superior, supercilious Apple user they imagine to be behind the post. He wants to see Apple fans stimulated by these outpourings of rage into wasting their valuable time responding to the responses.

The key point to take away from this is that the troll identifies an emotionally charged, powder-keg debate in which he can play the mischievous soul who lights the blue touch paper and runs. Apple versus the rest of the tech world is classic troll fodder (other easy targets include discussing the relative merits of Dungeons and Dragons versions 3 and 4 on the “Traditional Games” board, or of the Kalashnikov and Armalite rifle families on the “Weapons” board, or Christians versus Atheists, liberals versus conservatives, and on and on).

The troll himself has no emotional horse in the race. He just wants to sit back and watch the fireworks that reward what he sees as his cleverness in identifying a weak spot in a community.

This comic (starring 4chan founder Moot) illustrates a fairly basic form of trolling

This means that weirdos stalking Louise Mensch or racists posting drunken obscenities while a black man lies dying on a football field are categorically not trolls. Whatever your opinion of those two cases, the men involved were most definitely personally attached to the opinions they were expressing. While trolling can and does fracture, damage and occasionally destroy online communities, simply being unpleasant or cruel in some online arena is not enough to qualify as trolling.

Trolling is closely tied up with the Anonymous culture that sprang out of 4chan and its many clones and imitators. It’s an affectation, an act of mockery aimed at people with strong feelings about social, political or other issues by those who claim not to care. Among trolls, Heath Ledger’s watching-the-world-burn role as the Joker in The Dark Knight was an instant role model and memetic goldmine.

I’d actually be sad to see the kind of trolling I’ve described here disappear from the net. Responding to a troll post and realising too late that you’ve been played is a key learning experience for anyone taking part in online discussions. That sense of intellectual shame for not having noticed the over-played nature of your baiter’s words is a valuable life lesson, particularly for journalists. “Just how plausible is this online text which I am taking so seriously, anyway?” is a question we should all be asking ourselves constantly. Learning to identify trolls by getting burned once or twice could mean that you take the time to identify something much worse later in your career.

6-month review: Asus EeePad Transformer

I’ve always loved mobile devices with keyboards. My first smartphone was a Motorola Milestone, and I later upgraded to a HTC Desire Z. The iPad frenzy of 2010 passed me by, as I wondered why people would want a laptop-sized device with no way of inputting more than a few lines of text comfortably (I wouldn’t, for example, write this review on an iPad). Then, in 2011, up popped the EeePad Transfomer:

A tablet with a keyboard: the Transformer is a handy if slightly odd hybrid device

It looks like exactly what I wanted – a device that could be a tablet when that made sense, and with a functional keyboard when you need to enter more text. Asus have even thought about the concept for more than five seconds and included an extra battery, USB ports and an SD card slot on the keyboard half of the device, making the Transformer a serious value proposition compared with Apple and other Android tablet makers’ less well-endowed offerings.

The SD card slot and USB ports come in handy more often than you'd think

I was previously schlepping a cheap MSI netbook bought at Argos around, so on first taking it out of the box the Transformer felt like a serious step up. It feels like a well-built piece of kit, with a metal bezel, Gorilla glass front and tread plate-textured plastic backing. The keyboard section is all-metal too, and feels reassuringly solid. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite live up to appearances, as you can see from the photo below.

Putting the EeePad down too hard can leave your power port looking the worse for wear.

This is the port you plug the power cable into when the tablet is plugged into the dock, and it looks like it’s a structural weak point. This resulted from one too many times placing the tablet down while inside its protective case, inside my shoulder bag. While I probably could have been more careful with it, I’d suggest that this section in particular (around a vital port!) should be better supported – it wouldn’t have buckled unless relatively hollow behind. Fortunately, the port still works, and the damage isn’t too conspicuous.

But on to the most interesting bit of tablet hardware: the screen. The screen on the Transformer is, without a doubt, fantastic. It’s bright, high-enough resolution for what I need it to do and responsive to touch. It’s so handy as a touchscreen device that I usually disable the mousepad even when I’ve got the keyboard plugged in, and just navigate through apps and the web directly on the screen (not as uncomfortable as some people, including Steve Jobs have argued).

The screen is bright, colourful and boasts pretty good viewing angles - here it's playing back an episode of Homeland.

This has even worked pretty well during extended use, like while live-tweeting day-long conferences – I used the Transformer to tweet all day long at the London Conference on Cyberspace in 2011 and at the far more enjoyable ORGCon 2012. Find a Twitter client that’s happy on a tablet (I like Plume) and the keyboard makes Twitter almost too easy.

I’m not going to go too far down the road of “apps comfortable on a tablet” since enough has been written about the lack of them for Android 3 and 4. Despite several software updates and jumping an OS version, though, the Transformer still has a few flaws. The most irritating is a dialogue box which pops up at random intervals announcing that “android.process.media” has to close, with no response possible but “OK”. Googling and forum surfing has revealed that this is a far from uncommon problem, and none of the suggested fixes have worked for me so far.

The second issue is a tendency to lag unpredictably. Sometimes I’ll be futilely pressing at a button for two or three seconds before getting a response, and there are times when a significant delay occurs when switching apps or jumping back out to the homescreen.

These aren’t uncommon problems with Android devices, and more likely than not a problem endemic to shoehorning the same software onto all manner of different hardware combinations (not unlike the perennial problems with Windows). For what it’s worth, Asus have been very sparing with customisations to the operating system, offering some apps of their own (generally not much cop compared with other options available on the market) and a few widgets which may or may not be to your taste. Other manufacturers could take note of this (I’m looking at you, Motorola) and it’s probably been a factor in the Transformer’s getting the Ice Cream Sandwich update so quickly.

Would I still buy the Transformer, knowing what I know after owning it for 6 months? That depends. It’s very capable for some tasks – tweeting and note-taking using the keyboard, reading the news in bed or on the sofa when detached – that you don’t really need a full-fledged laptop for. It’s got a fantastic screen and the UI is only getting more responsive with updates.

I often found, though, that when working, you miss the quick task-switching, easier copying and pasting (it’s still a pain on a touchscreen) and other productivity must-have that you’d get from a more traditional device. I don’t doubt that future Android versions and the tablets that run them will address this, but for now I’ve gone back to a relatively boring Samsung laptop running Ubuntu. It’s faster and I get more done (I have to suspect for lack of some of the shiny distractions that come with a tablet, as much as anything else).

For play and some specific work tasks, the Transformer is great, but there’s (for now) no getting away from a PC when you really need to Get Things Done.

3-month Review: Motorola Droid RAZR

A lot of tech sites give you a review based on a journalist getting a phone in the post and spending a day – or if you’re lucky, a few days – playing with it, running benchmarks and battery tests, and maybe even taking it out of the office for a test drive. I thought I’d do something a bit different and give you my impressions of a device after a few months of using it every day.

The Droid RAZR, seen from the front

I won’t lie: I was really excited when I heard that Motorola were launching another phone with the Razr brand. The original Razr was probably the phone that kick-started my love affair with technology – remember how amazingly thin it seemed in 2005? Many of Motorola’s Android phones, meanwhile, have been near-universally praised, starting with the original Droid/Milestone, which I owned and loved for over a year.

So how does the new Razr look after 3 months bumping around in my jeans pocket? The first thing I have to mention is the build quality. Yes, the screen is lovely Gorilla Glass, which has withstood drops, keys, coins and even a safety pin I tried on the corner. Yes, the back is smooth, tough Kevlar, which feels great to the touch and hasn’t got a mark on it either. But the edges are made of your basic run-of-the-mill ABS plastic, and unfortunately you can’t say the same about that.

The ABS shell gets scuffed all too easily

This is the corner of the Razr’s plastic bezel after dropping it once or twice over the whole time I’ve owned it. You can see that even short drops from hand height onto tarmac have caused deep dings in the plastic, which look quite unsightly even now there’s been some time for the rough edges to wear off. There’s no doubt that the phone’s stainless steel core and high-quality front and back materials make it feel tough (and this is purely cosmetic damage, let’s be fair) but this feels like a corner-cutting oversight on what was supposed to be a flagship phone.

This takes us on to the phone’s major selling point – that 7.1mm thin body. It is almost unbelievably thin when you look at it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a joy to use. In fact, given its size, it becomes almost a disadvantage. Particularly when trying to use it with one hand, manoeuvering around the screen often means that you’re putting the phone in a precarious position where it could get dropped, and the distribution of the phone’s weight across a wide, flat surface increases that risk quite seriously. It can feel like manoeuvering your thumb around the surface of a playing card resting on your palm and fingers.

The RAZR's thinness can actually work against it when you're trying to use it with one hand

The squared-off edges and extra-wide bezel compared with the width of the screen don’t help, and I’ve found the rounded back and slightly narrower face of the Galaxy Nexus much easier to deal with since switching. It feels like the Motorola design team pursued svelteness at the expense of usability, which is a shame.

Speaking of usability, how about that software? One of the big features Motorola launched with the phone was Motocast, a program you can install on your PC which then allows you to pull all your photos, music and video from there to the phone over a Wifi or 3G connection.

This is a great idea in theory, but it suffers from the classic problems of proprietary phone-link software: it’s clunky and unintuitive. I tried it for a while, but quickly grew frustrated with the ugly interface of the Motorola Music app on the phone, as well as its inexplicable inability to sort tracks by their track numbers on the album when I _knew_ they were present and correct in the ID3 tags. I quickly found mysef switching back to an old favourite app of mine, the open-source Subsonic, which does pretty much the same thing as Motocast for your music collection, but a lot less obtrusively.

Already having a fallback solution in place for this feature cushioned the blow, but what really bothered me about the Razr was the call quality. I frequently found myself being asked by people to speak up mid-conversation, something that’s never happened to me when using a Motorola phone before (and I’ve owned a few). Given that Motorola can and does sell itself on its long experience and enviable patent portfolio in mobile telephony, it’s troubling that this phone wasn’t giving me the same quality as the HTC Desire Z I was using before.

Despite its two mics and Motorola knowhow, the call quality just isn't up to snuff.

The camera was just as much of a disappointment. I never found myself pulling it out to snap passing moments of interest the way I have with other Android phones I’ve owned – it just felt too unreliable. Although I managed to get occasional worthwhile shots out of it, the extremely limited number of adjustable settings in the software made it feel like these were serendipitous gifts from the camera gods, rather than the result of experimenting and repeating what worked. The strange weight distribution of the phone also worked against taking decent images – it might have been easier with a dedicated shutter button.

All of this is a shame – I really wanted to like the Razr (not least because I bought it before many of the reviews were out – once burned, twice shy!). Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of those gadgets where the key features are subordinated to the questionable cause of being the biggest, the fastest, or the thinnest, no matter how transitory that title may be (and I have no doubt there will be thinner phones around, although the current standard seems to have settled around 9mm). Next time, Motorola might want to make sure that their device makes sense as an everyday phone as well as a technology showpiece.

Hansard Society – digital democracy, one year on

The three panelists at June 15's Hansard Society event

Yesterday I queued patiently outside Portcullis House to get past the MP5-toting police officers and hear what Dr Andy Williamson of the Hansard Society, Kris Hopkins MP and Dr Julian Huppert MP had to say about digital democracy.

The discussion veered from topic to topic a bit so I’ll try and group what I thought were some of the most interesting points raised under the following headings:

• Parliamentary and Whitehall procedures
  
• Open data and its benefits/downsides/obstacles
• Procurement and development

So, without further ado:

Parliament and Whitehall – what needs changing?

Do MPs need to be physically present at divisions?

The division bell brought Parliamentary procedure to the forefront of debate. An audience member suggested remote voting as a way of ending the time lost by MPs travelling. Hopkins and Huppert riposted that the division offers a good opportunity for backbenchers to talk to ministers and more senior members of the government in person and without interference, seeing it as a necessary back channel for raising issues.

Maybe remote voting could be an option, but how would one prevent it from becoming the norm? There are already some independent sites monitoring MPs’ behaviour (TheyWorkForYou and PublicWhip) – recording how many times they’ve voted remotely could be a way of reining in excessive teleworking by politicians.

Getting data around, into and out of Parliament

Huppert questioned the way information moves around Whitehall and Westminster, saying that when he tables a question to a specific department, it gets printed out, handed over, physically carried to wherever it’s needed and then typed up again.

Both MPs said more needed to be done about access to data. Hopkins said MPs need quick and easy access to the data on government databases, which are fragmented, and Huppert said the public need access to data about Parliament, which at the moment is only comprehensible to Westminster insiders.

He also pointed out that procedure changes at a pretty glacial pace. The Procedure Committee is freighted with inertia since it’s unattractive to new MPs like him who are out to change things in the real world.

But surely a prerequisite for getting things done in a democracy is good procedure? If things are sped up and made more efficient, other causes will benefit. Williamson suggested that there is now a wave of people in government and the civil service who want to improve Parliament’s openness and use of technology – there must be some way of harnessing this collective energy.

Open data

Changing attitudes to data and secrecy

Williamson said it would be “naive” for the UK to present itself as a leading light of open data – but he also said that opening up data means changing attitudes within the whole political and bureaucratic apparatus too. Open data means those people have to think about their jobs in a new way. Both the MPs seemed to have taken this on board, professing a strong belief  that data should be open by default.

Both MPs appeared to recognise post-Cablegate attitudes to classification, while avoiding mentioning Wikileaks by name. Hopkins said that any decisions about secrecy should have to be justified and un-self-interested. Huppert suggested those decisions should be brought to Secretaries of State so as to introduce some democratic accountability.

There was a piece of very good news – a suggestion that UK Parliamentary data may be published under Creative Commons.

Exaggerated fear of legal pitfalls

Both also recalled experiences from local government. Hopkins met stonewalling “justified” with the Data Protection Act when trying to issue library cards to Bradford children, while Huppert remembered a situation on one council where a fellow member was also a lawyer who had literally written the book on tort, and was able to dismiss fear of legal action.

Perhaps more training for politicians on what is technically and legally feasible might help – but both of those change all the time. Politicians need to be able to make policy without being independently-trained experts, as Huppert’s colleague was – maybe there’s a case for having a comprehensive, regularly updated document (maybe even legislation) laying out all the rights and restrictions for tech and data in the same way the Human Rights Act does? Could be an opportunity to push for net neutrality in the UK (although it’s been slapped down before…).

Procurement and development

Who are the gatekeepers for government data?

Hopkins argued that data itself is not stored in arcane formats or otherwise inaccessible, but big suppliers have tended to push expensive custom front ends and hardware. Williamson agreed, arguing that government should be moving on from the monolithic single-supplier, big-computer mindset – citing the many examples of people developing applications and examining government data for free.

SMEs could offer cheaper, better solutions – if government supports them

Huppert suggested that the government should contract ICT work out to more Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) – companies like that are more innovative and nimble, but often lose out to big companies because they don’t have the resources to negotiate with government or navigate the tax credits and other support on offer for them.

He and Williamson said that government should be allowed to do experiments and see if they work – not shy away from trying something and seeing it fail. That government is so afraid of failure is mostly the fault of the gaffe-hungry media, they said.

This seems to chime with Ben Goldacre’s suggestion last month that more policies should be subject to medical-style experimental trials, rather than being introduced as a consequence of ideology. Huppert has a documented interest in evidence-based policy, and if there really is a wave of modernisers, open data enthusiasts and experimenters in government, as Williamson suggested, now could be a great time to really give it a chance.

Here’s hoping for more

So that’s a potted summary of last night’s event – it was unfortunately rather short, but an encouraging demonstration that people are fighting and thinking hard about digital democracy and open data in Westminster. Just remember that for a lot of people in the audience and some MPs, Twitter is still something people use to chat about what they had for breakfast – don’t expect change to roll in tomorrow.

Financial Times bursts out of Apple straitjacket

Well, will you look at that. Techdirt and All Things D are reporting that the Financial Times is the first major media organisation (in the UK, at least) to figure out that Apple doesn’t have publishers’ best interests at heart and that apps for individual platforms might not be the best way to get their content out to their readers. They’ve launched an HTML5 web app and are encouraging users to switch to using it in preference to the installable variety – calling it a “new, faster, more complete app which is available from your browser rather than an app store”. The web app even keeps content accessible when the device has no connection.

This does ever so slightly echo the themes of a couple of blog posts I’ve written here and over at the Graduate Times, arguing that Apple is a poor choice of gatekeeper and one which will have an adverse effect on news content, to the detriment of readers’ and viewers’ understanding of and access to the news, and that development time spent on platform-specific apps is a money black hole that news operations would be better off avoiding in favour of HTML5.

Here’s hoping all the other papers and broadcasters who seem to think that the only mobile users who matter are clutching an iPhone or iPad follow suit sooner, rather than later.

And here’s hoping the Almighty Steve will be comforted by the Bond-villain-esque new headquarters he’s asking the city of Cupertino to give him planning permission for.

 

 

 

 

The article: future of journalism or vestigial relic?

Ignacio Ramonet. Photo: Ludovic Péron

I spent a pleasant couple of hours on Sunday afternoon reading an essay by Ignacio Ramonet, former editor of French-based international newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique; he’s called it L’explosion du journalisme: Des médias de masse àla masse de médias (The explosion of journalism: from mass media to a mass of media).

The essay takes a fairly familiar course through recent history and ongoing debates to anyone who’s been following the media’s coverage of itself; if you’ve got an inkling of some of the thinking behind and around online journalism, Wikileaks, Nick Davies‘ Flat Earth News, and the recent spate of paywalls, you’ll not find much new here. Falling print sales; desperate attempts to turn online readership figures into revenue; increasing amounts of work for fewer journalists paid less money; an increasing level of PR and spin finding its way into journalism; potential of the internet to create a “new kind of journalism”; whither the newspapers, the television stations and the radio broadcasters?

(I must add, lest it sound tiresome, that Ramonet does an admirable job of putting all of this together in the space of 130 sparsely-printed pages, and that if you haven’t read everything on the above list, been to a few debates and lectures with interested parties and read a bunch of stuff online about it then the essay will give you a welcome overview of the state of the media).

Where it gets interesting is right at the end. Ramonet takes a tour around some of the responses to the ongoing media viability crisis and settles on Germany’s Die Zeit as the shining harbinger of things to come. Zeit has succeeded in getting its print readership back up above the 500,000 mark in the last few years. Here’s what Ramonet has to say about why, in a closing remark subtitled Les avions ne remplacent pas les bateaux (aeroplanes don’t replace ships):

Comment son directeur Giovanni di Lorenzo explique-t-il cette réussite? C’est fort simple. Il a d’abord étudié en détail les besoins des lecteurs, puis il a decidé d’ignorer tous les conseils des experts en médias, de refuser les modes et de continuer à publier des articles longs, documentés, serieux et même difficiles. Persuadé qu’il faut aller à contre-courant des tendances médiatiques actuelles (urgence, brièvité, simplicité, frivolité) dictées par la panique, Di Lorenzo estime également que les gens veulent des “informations estampillées”, c’est-a-dire dont la tracabilité remonte à une source en laquelle ils ont confiance.

 …

Die Zeit et tous les journaux qui n’ont pas trahi leurs lecteurs, qui on su conserver leur crédibilité et qui maintiennent leur exigence de qualité, ne sont nullement menacés d’extinction.

(How does boss Giovanni di Lorenzo explain this success? It’s pretty simple. He first studied the needs of the readers in detail, then he decided to ignore all the advice of media experts, to resist fashions and to continue to publish long, sourced, serious and even difficult articles. Persuaded that it was necessary to swim upstream against the current media trends (urgency, brevity, simplicity, frivolity) which are dictated by panic, Di Lorenzo believes also that people want “pressed information”, that is to say information which can be traced back to a source they trust.

…

Die Zeit and all the papers which haven’t betrayed their readers, which have realised how to retain their credibility and who maintain their demand for quality, are not at all threatened with disappearance.)

This might look like a bit of wishful thinking from today’s US or UK perspective, where the papers which offer this kind of long-form investigative reporting tend to be in straitened financial circumstances of one kind or another. Ramonet would probably argue that those circumstances are a temporary blip and that these papers will at some point work out a way to make quality journalism pay.

Jeff Jarvis. Photo: Robert Scoble

But this isn’t the question I want to raise about Ramonet’s conclusion. Reading the last chapter of this esssay put me in mind of a post on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine I read on Saturday, called “The article as luxury or byproduct”. Jarvis cites a few recent rolling news successes where journalists have moved away from the traditional article form, and then drops the bombshell:

 …when and whether we need articles. Oh, we still do. Articles can make it easy to catch up on a complex story; they make for easier reading than a string of disjointed facts; they pull together strands of a story and add perspective. Articles are wonderful. But they are no longer necessary for every event. They were a necessary form for newspapers and news shows but not the free flow, the never-starting, never-ending stream of digital. Sometimes, a quick update is sufficient; other times a collection of videos can do the trick. Other times, articles are good.

I think Jarvis is on to something here. I get fed up very quickly trying to read whole articles on some newspaper sites, because the standard style journalists are trained to write articles in is one which assumes the reader has been disconnected from civilisation for the last six months and has no idea of what anything referred to in the article is. Jarvis does accept that not all readers will have been following closely all the complex stories that are going on, and that an article might be necessary then; that some stories are just other stories bundled together; that investigation and analysis require more than a Twitter feed.

But for the people who are following the story closely, who know the name (and Twitter handle) of the reporter their preferred news outlet has on the case, who have Google Alerts and RSS feeds and who are watching 20 blogs waiting for fresh developments, writing articles is an attempt to ossify and make static what is ultimately an ongoing flow of events. Sure, have a guy back at base writing everything up and putting the pieces together and making it look nice so you have something to stick in the archives, to help out the general-interest reader and so on, but that shouldn’t be the focus of what your reporter on the ground is doing.

Does this make Ramonet wrong? I don’t necessarily think so. As more and more of us begin to get the raw stuff of news in the way Jarvis describes, there will be more room for the insight, the analysis and the reflective objectivity which journalists in traditional media organisations are always telling us they add to news coverage (and they have some justification when talking about, for example, Wikileaks). The Indy‘s been doing this for a long time; the paper sells itself on the analysis and the commentary that you can’t get anywhere else, not on the articles cobbled together from wire reports or from the same press conference that everyone’s political editor and his dog went to.

So I think there’s space for both of these old journalistic hands to be right. As the news article loses its importance (and hopefully we stop seeing the horrible, horrible <Newspaper> reporter or by our <topic> staff bylines that are code for we-cribbed-this-from-a-wire-service-or-worse-a-press-release) there will be space for the printed papers to offer a product worth buying. The online news freaks can get their fix without having to wade through all the exposition and explanation first, and hopefully everyone will be a bit happier than they are at the moment. Sound realistic?

Photo credits: Robert Scoble and Ludovic Péron

Alan Rusbridger, libel reform, and Wikileaks

This evening I attended Alan Rusbridger‘s Anthony Sampson memorial lecture at City University, at which he addressed the hot topic of libel reform (today’s media law news has included Max Mosley losing his case for prior notification at the European Court of Human Rights, Evening Standard and Independent chairman Evgeny Lebedev’s remarks about press freedom, MP Zac Goldsmith’s call for a privacy law, the Telegraph being censured by the PCC for its secret recordings of Lib Dem MPs, and continued back-and-forth about superinjunctions).

You can read the text of Rusbridger’s lecture here, or a Guardian article that gives the gist of it here.

I’m not going to weigh in on the topic of libel reform itself, as far more learned and experienced people than myself continue to publish reams on the subject all over the press and online. What interested me about the lecture were the inevitable references to the ongoing impact the Internet is having on media law. Instances that cropped up included the Guardian‘s simultaneous publishing of material obtained via Wikileaks with the New York Times, as a means of covering itself against possible legal action, and the breaching of superinjunctions over the weekend by an anonymous Twitter user.

These two examples made me question whether the campaign for libel reform will be something we look back on in two centuries’ time, as with the example of the North Briton used by Rusbridger. My first instinct was to say no – in two centuries’ time, the idea that publication could be constrained by any one country’s laws will seem laughable. Whoever the anonymous tweep who exposed the superinjunctions was, he could have covered his tracks by such simple expedients as spoofing his MAC address and using a public wireless network to post the updates. Short of a 24-style trawl of thousands of hours of CCTV footage, he would be almost impossible to find.

Equally, Wikileaks’ distributed structure, broad appeal among people with access to the resources to mirror the site,  and multiple fallback hosting options in press freedom-friendly jurisdictions meant that it could defy the world’s most powerful government with impunity. Wikileaks seemed to represent a form of asymmetrical information warfare; where large multinationals could say what they liked and be confident of soaking up any fines or small loss of reader-/viewership, the Internet affords individuals and small groups of activists a similar freedom to publish and be damned. What price Britain’s libel laws and threats of contempt of court if the offending information sits on a server in the US (which recently introduced legislation specifically to prevent UK courts chasing libel infringers there) or Sweden?

I was fortunate enough to collar Rusbridger at the post-lecture drinks, where I asked his opinion about this. He pointed out that even if people are able to publish what they like, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be read or believed by people in the country at which it is aimed. Even Julian Assange agreed to the conditions, including pre-publication redactions, imposed by Bill Keller, Alan Rusbridger and the journalists at Der Spiegel (and later Le Monde, El Pais et al). This was because he needed the credibility (and the concentration of journalistic and editorial skills) that only large, traditional media organisations could provide if his material was to have the impact he desired for it.

It’s interesting to note that as Assange has been edged out into the cold (or quite possibly strode out there himself) he’s gone in exactly the wrong direction to get himself taken seriously, making strident, unfounded accusations of CIA meddling in the British press and Swedish criminal justice system. Assange may be able to publish what he likes, but without the discipline, fact checking and associated credibility of a Guardian or an NYT he is reduced to an irrelevancy.

And that’s an argument strong enough to convince me of the need for libel reform to protect the ponderous, traditional media institutions a lot of people online seem keen to see the back of. Without reform, and without the continued relevance of longstanding, trustworthy institutions, we won’t enjoy the full benefit of the centuries spent fighting for press freedom in this country.

Newsnight and the EDL, or why Murdoch can’t own all of Sky

Image of Rupert Murdoch from World Economic Forum via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to Charlie Brooker’s article on the Daily Star in yesterday’s Guardian, I came across Newsnight’s report on the EDL and subsequent interview with their leader, Stephen Lennon/Tommy Robinson, helpfully uploaded to YouTube by somebody or other. I’m not going to address the EDL’s policies or beliefs here -I think that’s been dealt with in lots of other media and everybody has more information and opinion than they need to make up their minds. The EDL highlights the risks we’re running in the UK as government considers a bigger issue which it is within our power as citizens to influence – the takeover of BSkyB.

What really worried me about the report was the way in which EDL leaders were shown attempting to explain to reporter Catrin Nye and to Jeremy Paxman just what it was they were organising themselves against. It’s unpleasant enough to realise that our educational system has left some people almost unable to articulate their political views. It’s even more terrifying to realise that that gap is being filled by talking points handed down from further up an unreliable chain of information.

Seeing EDL supporters speaking on camera reminded me of the US Tea Party movement. In TV interviews with their rank and file, you often find them parroting exactly the same bite-size tidbits of incomplete or downright wrong information fed to them by the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. A key moment for me in the programme was when Lennon/Robinson told Nye that he’d “never switched on a computer” before he started organising for the EDL.

Computer and internet illiteracy is something that makes people increasingly manipulable as political discourse becomes more and more exclusively web-based. Just a few weeks ago, Glenn Beck was asking people to Google an obscure academic article from the 1960s about the possibility of crashing the US economy by oversubscribing the welfare system. Academically and technologically literate people would probably recognise that believing 78-year old professor Frances Fox Piven is intent on subverting the US from within is ludicrous. It’s comparable with believing that a cabal of government officials is covering up alien encounters, or that the American government orchestrated 9/11.

That “information” and more is available on the Web – and for people who have no cause or context to question the gesticulating man on the TV or the words written in black and white on their computer screen, it can be compelling enough to galvanise them to action. That’s certainly what has happened with the EDL – just look at how quickly they latched onto Jack Straw’s widely-reported but unfounded comments about “grooming” by Asian gangs, to the extent that it was one of only two or three coherent points Lennon/Robinson could make to Paxman. EDL leading light and token Sikh Guramit Singh was shown receiving detailed breakdowns of objectionable verses in the Koran from some anonymous source – begging the question of what is motivating his benefactor to provide this information.

All of this should be providing a huge store of ammunition for people opposed to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover bid for BSkyB. Murdoch owns Fox News, the platform most of the misleading and misguided Tea Party demagogues appear on regularly. He doesn’t appear to have any qualms about presenting poorly-researched, emotionally-charged calls to action as “Fair and Balanced” news reporting, and there’s no reason to believe that he’d behave any differently in the UK. Sky isn’t subject to the same restrictions or public service remit that the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters are – there’s no obligation to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard, or that what is presented as news is even true.

Link to WorldPublicOpinion.org report which showed Fox News viewers were the worst informed in the 2010 midterm elections

If we want British people watching Sky to be as misinformed as Fox News viewers in the US midterms last year, the government should go right ahead and give Murdoch full control of Sky. Fox News is massively popular and hugely profitable, and the very existence of the EDL, and of the Daily Star articles Brooker’s been fulminating about, proves that there’s a ready-made audience out there.  Just be prepared to see a lot more groups like the EDL in future if the buyout goes through.

Journalism’s trouble with technology

Coverage of BAE systems’ Future Protected Vehicle programme illustrates how writing on new technologies often falls between two stools

Disclaimer: this article isn’t intended as an attack on the Telegraph or Sean Rayment – this kind of problem pops up in every media outlet all the time, and this was one instance that just happened to catch my eye.

As part of the International Journalism course at City University, I’m taking a technology specialism class with Telegraph Head of Technology Shane Richmond. One of the first topics we covered, maybe even in the first class, was the problem that editors face when deploying their journalists specialising in technology: so many stories, from medical to science to defence to motoring to media, can turn on an understanding of a particular piece of technology, but don’t necessarily fall into the tech journalist’s purview. There’s no easy answer about how best to use the editorial resources available to cover these cross-over tech stories properly, as is illustrated by this story from the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago.

On the face of it, it looks like a no-brainer; have the defence correspondent, who has all the right contacts in the military and the armaments industry, cover the story about BAE’s new tanks. The trouble is that this is almost entirely a story about the technology that will make these tanks different from the ones that have come before, and most notably the E-Ink camouflage they’ll hopefully be benefiting from. If you haven’t been keeping up with the latest consumer gadgets that use E-Ink (a lot of e-readers like the Kindle do) then you might have only the fuzziest idea of what it is and what differentiates it from other display technologies.

E-Ink is useful for e-readers (and for tanks) by virtue of its low power consumption; it only draws a significant amount of power when the information displayed changes. That’s why the Kindle battery has such a long life compared with devices like smartphones or tablet computers; unlike them, it isn’t coping with the demands of big, bright, colourful screens with all kinds of activity going on at the same time. Using that technology to adapt tanks to the local flora is a nifty idea, and I’ll be following the story with interest to see how they develop it (as an obvious question, what happens if the tank is hit by bullets or shrapnel?).

The trouble with the Telegraph story is that the defence correspondent in question, Sean Rayment, hasn’t been keenly following the tech blogs (and rightly so) and so was forced to rely on the press release provided by BAE for an explanation of what e-ink actually is – and the press release somehow managed to get it totally wrong. BAE said:

eCamouflage will allow a vehicle to match its camouflage to its surroundings by using electronic ink – rather like a squid.

This is the helpful-looking simile that later turned up in Rayment’s third paragraph, and unfortunately it’s totally misleading. E-Ink camouflage will probably be more chameleon-like than anything – squids don’t use ink to camouflage themselves, but rather as a screen or a decoy to fool predators about their true position. Tanks do have a system that allows them to use similar tactics, but it’s the humble smoke launcher, which has been around for decades and is well-demonstrated in this clip of a French Leclerc battle tank:

Launching smoke allows a tank to obscure its position after it’s been spotted by the enemy and withdraw to a different one while out of sight. The point of BAE’s eCamouflage will presumably be to make sure the tank doesn’t get spotted in the first place.

This story demonstrates a couple of the problems that journalists are facing at the moment. The first is that as technology infiltrates further and further into all other areas of human activity, having a dedicated “technology” correspondent on a newspaper becomes problematic; either he’s twiddling his thumbs and writing the occasional article about iPads while his colleagues struggle to explain technologies they don’t understand themselves, or he’s got a finger in every pie going and is likely to be massively overworked. I’d propose running tech-centric stories across the tech reporter’s desk as part of the editing process, but that would hold them back from doing their own work; maybe dedicated technology sub-editors are needed? That’s unlikely to happen at a time of shrinking budgets.

The other problem is very closely related to this question of editing and checking to make sure the facts are right. At the moment, mainstream media is so desperate to keep up with the web that their regular journalists are often posting content to the website throughout the news cycle – and it often looks like there hasn’t been time for it to go past another pair of eyes before going out. You can notice on a lot of newspaper websites that online stories often have far more typos, or leftover bits of cannibalised paragraphs, than would ever be allowed to appear in the paper. There’s no easy or cheap solution to this one either, but having the subs come in in the afternoon to edit material for the paper seems a bit outdated when much of the unedited content will already have been read by a big portion of the audience.

Hopefully tech coverage will develop to meet these challenges, but until then readers are likely to be left feeling confused by technology stories journalists weren’t fully equipped to understand.

Why Apple can’t be trusted with the future of news

Steve Jobs (Picture: Acaben, via Flickr)

So Apple has decided that it’s not going to let publications offer free iPad access to print subscribers (at least for some European publications, although when everyone affected inevitably rolls over and plays dead it’ll doubtless extend to other markets).

This is yet another glaring example of why the media industry’s favourite tech company can’t be trusted with the hopes and dreams for the future that everyone from Rupert Murdoch to The Guardian seems to be investing in it. If you’re Big Media and you haven’t got an iPhone and iPad app of some description, no-one is taking you seriously at the moment.  This is a huge mistake for people who want to make news profitable again and for people who want to keep the news free of undue influence and bias.

First, the profitability side of things: if you’re investing huge amounts of your developers’ time and energy developing an iOS application, that is a massive amount of investment that’s going to be lacking in your offerings for other platforms. It doesn’t matter how many millions of iDevices Apple has managed to ship in impressively short amounts of time; your target market for an iPad app is laughably small compared to the number of people who could potentially access your content using smartphones on a different operating system, lesser phones that still make up the vast majority of handsets available worldwide, desktop and laptop computers, netbooks, and the coming avalanche of tablet computers that was announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Not only that, but the drive to get content onto iDevices means that media organisations are going to be failing to perform their basic function of informing people about events. Ownership of such gadgets, as well as online services like Twitter that are constantly endorsed and reported on in news media, is overwhelmingly concentrated among a young, metropolitan demographic who are likely to be media workers of one kind or another themselves. News produced to interest and animate these people isn’t going to be the news that gets the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, to reach for their wallets – and that’s even if they had the chance to buy it in the first place, which they won’t.

Large media organisations are yet to succeed in finding a sustainably profitable model for making content available on the web, accessible to any kind of device with a browser. The big experiments are ad-supported Mail Online and paywalled-off Times Online – and the jury’s still out on whether they’ll still be around in five or 10 years. The one thing that’s not going to turn things around is artificially limiting the audience to those who think that an iPad is a good investment.

The second reason to reject the iPad as the saviour of the media is Apple business practice. As the Register article I linked to earlier notes, the company isn’t just forbidding print/iPad bundles just to get the 30% cut of subscriptions it gets as part of the App Store arrangements. What it really wants is to interpose itself between media companies and their customers, making it the middleman in the information transactions going on. It can earn 30% of customers’ money this way, but it can also go back to the newspapers, the TV channels and other businesses and sell them the demographic data on their customers that they need to get advertisers interested in their publications and programming.

Not content with extracting money out of its role as informational middleman, Apple has its sights on controlling the public discourse as well, at least as far as it takes place through the medium of their devices. The company has been repeatedly accused of censorship, rejecting dictionaries and James Joyce’s Ulysses from the App Store – with Jobs declaring that Apple offered “freedom from porn”. This is all done in the name of retaining Apple’s image as a family friendly computer company, the computer company that understands that you want everything done for you and served up on a plate without you having to think about it.

This might be fine for a company that is selling people what is ultimately hardware. They can’t have their products associated with the idea of children using them to access unsuitable material online. But that’s not how the news should work. Current events TV pictures and photographs, and even textual descriptions of events, can be harrowing and horrifying experiences, totally unsuitable for children and rightly so. If the news is squeezed through the Apple child-friendly filter, it’s going to provide us (or at least Apple users) with an even more sanitised, family-friendly, Western-centric and politically vacuous picture of the world than the one we make do with now.

Apple is a business. It wants to sell as many products as possible in as short space of time as it can, and to keep customers coming back for more. If we think that the news is more than a business, that it should aim for something more than sales figures, then jumping into the Apple embrace is the wrong move.