Tag Archives: media

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Agnotology: The science of ignorance

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luckyMany of my fellow citizens believe that the Apollo program was faked, evolution is a lie, global warming is a sinister plot by Al Gore to take away their Hummers, and President Obama is some kind of Nazi foreigner whose healthcare plan will lead to mass euthanasia. Disinformation seems to be a winning tactic.

So, yes, Discover Magazine’s interview with Robert Proctor, Stanford science historian and co-editor of Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance, had some resonance with me.

Snips:

Just what is agnotology?
It’s the study of the politics of ignorance. I’m looking at how ignorance is actively created through things like military secrecy in science or through deliberate policies like the tobacco industry’s effort to manufacture doubt through their “doubt is our product” strategy [spelled out in a 1969 tobacco company memo [pdf]]. So it’s not that science inherently always grows. It can actually be destroyed in certain ways, or ignorance can actually be created.

Have you continued your focus on tobacco?
I recently collaborated on an exhibit of the most outrageous tobacco ads called “Not a Cough in a Carload.” It’s centered on medical-themed tobacco ads: that tobacco’s good for your T-zone, that it calms your nerves. Scientific tests prove that brand A is better than B, or, you know, 20,000 physicians recommend Camels, and so forth. The use of athletes and models, and the artwork is just beautiful.

How do you maintain the perspective essential to your kind of research?… [I]t’s important to see the past the way the people saw it. So I’ve written two books on Nazi medicine, and the goal there was not just to condemn them, but to see how in the world they came up with those ideas and those movements and how they justified them to themselves. So we see them as full humans and not just scarecrows, so we can actually understand the depth of the depravity or whatever. But at least we see it honestly, and that’s a traditional historical virtue.

[Image: leifpeng]

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Niche magazine survival strategies and the author-publisher synergy

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magazines at the news-standThe Death-Of-Magazines debate seems to have gone off the boil in the genre fiction scene (albeit temporarily), but there’s still plenty of discussion – and innovation – going on elsewhere. Former Wired columnist and Japanophile Momus takes a look at the migration of magazines onto portable devices like the iPhone over in the Land of the Rising Sun:

Already, musician friends are thinking in terms of iPod apps the way they once might have thought of releasing albums on labels. Who needs a label when an app could be a worldwide delivery system for people interested in your music? Or how about keeping up with Japanese magazines? I’ve already mentioned Nakatree Viewer, a free app that lets you look at the paper ads for magazines that hang in Japanese subway cars.

Nakatree Viewer began as the ad sheets themselves (typically showing a modified version of the mag’s latest cover), then added pop-up QR codes allowing you to access some of the content of the magazines. Now there’s talk of the Viewer actually taking you to online versions of the magazines, either reduced versions (like Courrier Lite, a standalone application for one mag) or full ones.

At a time when magazines are dropping like flies, giving them a new distribution platform is giving them the chance of new life. Whether the iPhone is the ideal reading environment for magazines is another matter. I have a digital subscription to The Wire, but prefer to read it on my big computer, or on paper. But when Apple releases its iPhone-OS tablet computer — rumoured either for next month or early next year, depending on who you believe — who knows?

Meanwhile, Lifehacker flags up a web2.0 site called MagMe that puts full-resolution scans of magazines right into your web browser. While none of these examples are omega points for magazine survival, it’s plain to see that people are working to find solutions. The genre short fiction scene sadly lacks the money to invest in playing around with potentially viable solutions, but we can at least hope that one will come along soon enough for them not to die off entirely. [image by Diane S Murphy]

But talking of publishing models, and looping back to Momus’ comment about his musician friends thinking beyond the traditional record publication process, here’s an interesting reversal from the world of music: a record label that have signed a deal with a band [via TechDirt]. Yes, you read that right.

The release outlined a unique setup Blue Scholars have put together between Seattle’s Caffe Vita Coffee Co. and the excellent hip hop label Duck Down. Simply put, Caffe Vita is providing the cash flow, and they’re hiring Duck Down to run point on marketing.

Just another sign of what we’ve been saying for two years: the business is changing, artists have choice, and artists will find partners to help them get done what they need to — the mantra is no longer: “I’ve gotta get signed I’ve gotta get signed…”

Could this reversal of power work in book publishing? Consider a hypothetical author like Cory Doctorow, whose public profile gives him (or her) a lot of traction beyond the traditional book marketing channels; if they were offered a weak or creatively restrictive deal from their standing publisher (or, indeed, no deal at all) and decided to look around for alternatives, what small press wouldn’t jump at the opportunity offered by the chance to let that author publish the book they really want to write?

The author’s stature would reflect onto the small press and garner more media attention, enhancing its ability to shift units by lesser known authors; meanwhile, the author benefits from the experience and connections of the small press in the more traditional book marketing network, reducing the amount of leg-work required by comparison to a self-published (but already well-known) author trying to get the word out. It’s a potential synergy – and while there are plenty of details missing from that off-the-cuff idea, it doesn’t strike me as the most crazy scheme I’ve heard this week.

What do you think – can fiction publishing save itself by slimming down and becoming more flexible, or will consolidation, cost-cutting and rigid control be its saving grace?

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Wait, is this actually 1984?

I ask, not because of “my” government’s embarrassingly crazy surveillance obsession, but because this Guardian headline seems to have been beamed up from a quarter century ago:

Will 3D television be a hit?

Apparently BSkyB plans to launch a 3D TV network in Europe next year, for which you’ll need a special display set and glasses (and, no doubt, a hefty subscriber fee). That’s gonna claw viewers back fro the temptations of the intertubes, for sure!

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Hyperdense terabit storage medium

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computer rendering of a carbon nanotubeAt this point, the human species has more information stored and archived than ever before, and there’s more by the hour. The problem is that our storage media, while increasingly high-capacity, is increasingly frangible: CDRs and hard drives just don’t last long, and we’re in a largely unnoticed race between the growth of our body of knowledge and our ability to store it permanently.

Enter Alex Zettl and friends from the University of Berkeley, who’ve developed a storage medium based on carbon nanotubes that isn’t just extremely capacious but exceptionally durable and resistant to the ravages of time:

The system consists of a minuscule particle of iron encased in a carbon nanotube and represents information in binary notation—the zeroes and ones of “bits.” Using an electric current, information can be written into the system by shuttling the iron particle back and forth inside the nanotube like a bead on an abacus—the left half of the nanotube corresponds to zero, the right half corresponds to one. The encoded information can then be read by measuring the nanotube’s electrical resistance, which changes according to the iron particle’s position.

Because of their very small size, a square-inch array of these nanotube memory systems could store at least one terabit—a trillion bits—of information, approximately five times more than can be packed into a square inch of a state-of-the-art magnetic hard drive. But Zettl believes the technology could be pushed to much higher information densities.

“We can manipulate this particle and read out its position so accurately, we could divide the nanotube’s length into 10 or even 100 units instead of just two,” Zettl says. “Whether this is worthwhile to implement right away, I’m not sure, because it adds complexity, but it could immediately give us 10 or 100 times the information density with the same device.”

I’m immediately reminded of Charlie Stross’s thoughts about bit-per-atom data storage, and how it will enable us to record everything we do – literally everything. Bandwidth, processing power and storage are the pillar commodities of the information economy, and all three of them are still racing toward an omega-point of virtual zero cost; what happens when they’re all as ubiquitous as air itself? [image by ghutchis]

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The future of fiction is games

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computer game end-screenWe’ve already heard arguments to the effect that computer games could become the ‘new frontier’ for fiction writing and storytelling, but they’ve usually come from the games or fiction communities themselves. It seems the idea is starting to get some traction beyond the ghettos, though – here’s a reviewer at the Daily Telegraph responding to a new game based on Dante’s Inferno:

Dante’s Inferno may not herald a new era in literary gaming, but connoisseurs of story could do worse than watch the area for developments. A recent survey of American teenagers revealed that 97 per cent of the consumers of the future now play video games.

What’s more, certain independent games are entering a phase – familiar to historians of jazz, comics and indeed 20th-century literature – of vigorous experimentation with techniques of narrative. (An evening with the frightening and baffling The Path, rather like an Angela Carter story siphoned through The Sims, will show you what I mean.) And with book sales falling, it may not be long before prose writers jump ship for a medium that offers some of the most exciting possibilities of the new century.

It’s happened before. Veterans of home computing in the Eighties and Nineties may recall knotting their brows over the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams himself. Adams also wrote Bureaucracy, a game in which the paper-shuffling protagonist’s most pressing task is to avoid succumbing to a brain haemorrhage from stress. And the veteran sci-fi novelist Harlan Ellison delivered I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a game whose vision of eternal torture remains more shocking than most of its high-resolution descendants.

No surprise to see science fiction writers cropping up in the discussion – though whether that’s because they’re generally a more forward-thinking type of writer or because they’ve always had to struggle to find new markets is a moot point.

And, of course, computer gaming is still a medium in its infancy by comparison to the novel, song or poem – not to mention one that inherently has vast potential to absorb other media into itself. It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to imagine much of the consumer media we enjoy today being reparsed into more interactive forms; my only hope is that is doesn’t shake down to the levels of banality that tend to define television, the previous game-changing media technology. [image by blakespot; story via TomorrowMuseum]