Tag: Slashdot.org

Does the Internet Lead to a Narrowing Views?

Slashdot’s Jon Katz wrote an article about the long term social and historical implications of the Internet. Katz seems to agree with University of Chicago Law Professor Carl Sunstein’s this in his book, republic.com, which Katz summarizes as claiming,

In his new book republic.com University of Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein warns that the emerging Net culture — busy creating personalized “me” media — threatens to undermine one of the basic tenets of democracy — the willingness of people with diverse viewpoints to speak to and hear one another.

The Net is beginning to endanger a democratic society, Sunstein fears, with its fragmentation, advanced moderation and filtering systems. What makes free expression work, Sunstein asks? His answer: exposure to materials that people might not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unprogrammed encounters are central to democracy. A culture that offers increasingly customized speech control preferences enables people to eliminate from their screens and minds anything they might not want to see or hear or might disagree with.

This is a pretty generic claim that academics in communications have been making for years about the effect of technology on media, but it is correct? I don’t see any evidence for it.

In fact, web media is far more diverse than anything the traditional media has ever produced. This is especially the case for international events. Neither the local newspaper nor the national television broadcasts have said anything, for example, about the ongoing controversy in Senegal about whether to try former president of Chad, Hissene Habre, for war crimes (which is especially odd since he had the support of the U.S. government while he was ordering kidnappings, murders and torture in Chad).

Yet on the Internet not only can you find plenty of coverage of such an event, but you usually find coverage from numerous viewpoints. You’re not stuck with the bland Associated Press or Reuters version of events.

If people choose to stick with homogenized, narrow reporting, I suspect it’s because they’re so used to having the traditional media deliver news in that manner rather than something inherent in the web.

The Web and Illiteracy — Putting the Cart Before the Horse

What was Jon Katz thinking when he wrote this little ditty,

The Net and the Web have revolutionized certain areas like academic and scientific research. But they’ve done little to eradicate illiteracy or poverty, or alter education for most students.

I think it’s the other way around — the web presupposes literacy. Saying the web hasn’t helped eradicate illiteracy is a lot like saying that television hasn’t helped eradicate blindness.

And illiteracy is going to be the ultimate source of the over-hyped “digital divide.” Channel surfing past CNN the other day they had the mayor of Washington, DC, begging for more government funds. The voice-over claimed that a survey of DC residents indicated that up to 40 percent of them were functionally illiterate to the point where they would not be able to read and understand a classified ad for a job.

The web isn’t going to be able to touch that level of mismanagement except indirectly.

Slashdot Drops the Ball Again

According to a post on Slashdot from last night, this story means that,

Blizzard Entertainment is suing New Line for using the word Diablo as the title of a movie release. Blizzard wants to make a movie of their own with the same title and feel New Line is only using the word to cash in on the popularity of the Diablo gaming world. Since when did Blizzard own all rights to the word “diablo”? And what kind of precedent would this set if they were to win.

The first sentence is correct, but everything that comes afterward is nonsense. Blizzard isn’t claiming they own all instances of the word “diablo.” Rather, like any other company making a movie Blizzard applied for a trademark for a film titled “Diablo” back in 1996 which was approved in 2000.

This is a common practice in the movie industry and hardly anything for Slashdot to start creating hysteria over.

Why I Read Slashdot

CNN ran a story about a small town in Georgia experimenting with a cutting edge technology that delivers up to 60 television channels, telephone service and DSL over copper wire phone lines. Revolutionary? Not.

Within a couple hours of posting the story on Slashdot, readers there posted links and information on dozens of places using such technology, many of them having done so for 3 or 4 years (apparently there is a stretch of Canada where this sort of thing has been available for several years).

In addition there is misinformation in the CNN story. While CNN’s David George implies that the technology involves sending out 60 television quality signals simultaneously, in fact this technology involves only a single channel at any given time which is switched at a central router. The main drawback of such a system, of course, is that it doesn’t scale very well — start adding tens of thousands of users and the costs tend to escalate quickly.

The one aspect that is truly amazing is that depending on the technology deployed at the back end, there is still plenty of bandwidth to be squeezed from plain old copper wires. Given the opportunity costs, don’t expect fiber optics to be arriving in your neighborhood anytime soon — odds are that for the forseeable future it will be cheaper to simply take the next upgrade path with copper.

Source:

Small town tests TV, DSL comob via phone lines. David George, CNN, January 22, 2001.

Jon Katz and Literary Detective Work

My wife says I shouldn’t be, but I am always shocked at how credulous people will act toward anyone who simply writes a book and labels himself an expert. Case in point is a Slashdot book review by Jon Katz of Don Foster’s Author Unknown.

Foster claims that, “no two individuals write exactly the same way, using the same words in the same combinations, or with the same patterns of spelling and punctuation,” and so by comparing an writing sample whose authorship is unknown or questioned with enough known writing samples, that he can infer who the author of the passage is.

I am extremely skeptical of Foster’s claims. My skepticism is only increased by the fact that numerous online reviews of Foster’s book note that he spends little time discussing exactly how he goes about comparing written passages to each other.

Before I’d buy into Foster’s claims, I’d like to see a series of double blind tests which involve Foster matching unknown samples with their authors. This could be easily accomplished by using say long forgotten novels from the 19th century and correspondence by their authors in a genre that is relatively similar in form and style.

This sort of technique has been abused in the past. In 1991 two National Institutes of Health researchers, Ned Feder and Walter Stewart, who were supposed to be looking for fraud in the biomedical field decided to turn their attention to historical biography. They created a computer program which compared Stephen B. Oates’ Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myth with a 1950s-era Lincoln biography by Benjamin Thomas.

The charges created an initially sensational reaction, but when the details filtered out they proved groundless. Here, for example, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence of Oates’ plagiarism.

I strongly suspect that this sort of detective work is right in line with other popular but suspect methods such as the so-called lie detector test.