event mechanics

Appending ebooks to something is a practice belonging to subcultures on twitter and derived from the meme surrounding the horse_ebooks twitter account. Here are some notes on the cultural meaning of ‘_ebooks’.

 

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Various ‘_ebooks’ accounts have been created. What they all have in common is the algorithmic act of sampling source material and turning it into a tweet. On the process behind horse_ebooks:

The algorithm that produces the horse_ebooks stream, like most spammic algorithms, relies on user interaction to grow more effectual. It interprets text as data, and determines which keywords might best promote an outcome like the sale of Cialis or Horse Medical Records. Just as with many of our more popular and less insidious internet applications, the more interaction the algorithm gets, the smarter it becomes. The growing popularity of horse_ebooks has reciprocally allowed it to become better at generating tweets like “The Fear Of lowlife criminals With Environmental Protection” (October 30, 2011; 49 retweets).

[...]

While it is true that the algorithm publishes tweets that were, at some point, somehow, written, it is non-author in the sense that it defies the binary border between ebook and reader. It imagines non-authorship in a way that even social media, with its dissolution of anonymity, can enable.

Sure. There is something else going on when _ebooks is appended to non-_ebooks; that is, something that is ostensibly not the algorithmic poetics actioned in the event-space between discourse and code. Something has been extracted from the _ebooks phenomena and has now been folded back into the social practices on social media.

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What has been extracted? (Or what makes ‘_ebooks’ singular?) It is something that, firstly, plays with the relation between sense and nonsense. horse_ebooks enthusiasts are sometimes criticised for anthropomorphising the algorithm-based expressions. The non-discursive semantic sampling of source material is an algorithmic variation of the creative/aesthetic practice of producing and exploding disjunction. Contra the critics, this does not foreclose the possibility of meaning, only that the discursive dimension of the sample has also been parsed by the algorithm. What is this discursive dimension? The incorporeal materialism of all language. ¹

So a little nugget of sense emerging from non-sense. From the perspective of information theory, this is clearly irrational, because signals do not simply emerge from what is ostensibly noise, noise impinges on signals and so on. The meaning produced by _ebooks twitter accounts is (unintentionally?) meaningful but in a quasi-random manner. ‘Random’ because it is derived from the sampling algorithm, ‘quasi’ because it relies on coded text that otherwise belongs to the logical systems of language. That is, the _ebooks are never quite ‘noise’ because they are, at a minimum, sensible as nonsense.

The _ebooks tweets exist not just as a ‘text’, however. They are better understood as an event. Techniques and technologies of representation (language, media, etc.), like all kinds of communication, are forms of transport. ² Representation brings a time and place into contact with another time and place. The singular quality of this contact is the event of sense. Practices on twitter materially enact this process of representational transport. Retweets are ambiguous, ‘favourites’ are less so.

The practical dimension of ‘retweets’ and ‘favouriting’ modifies the relations of visibility and the relations of valorisation inherent in all acts of communication. The normative content of a tweet does not have to be the content that is valorised; rather, more sophistcated twitter users often retweet in an ironic fashion. Twitter users can choose to participate in these processes of transportation by retweeting, this is obvious; less obvious is the purpose of retweeting ostensibly nonsensical tweets. In the passage of the retweet — the ‘journey’ of the communicational transport — what is gained or lost?

 

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For a long time subcultural groups have created entire languages of meaning that appear to be nonsensical to outsiders. This is in part happening here as ’_ebooks’ is a syntactic morpheme belonging to denotational practices of twitter-based subcultures. Retweeting can be understood as a practice of citation; think of that bloke everyone went to school with who knew every single line from the Simpsons. Citing the Simpsons produced a measure of cultural cache as a performance of cultural taste.

Retweeting does something similar, but with an additional dynamic dimension. The political economy of belonging in online networks not only means ‘following’ the right ‘people’ (or emitters of becoming-sensical content), but also of participating in the passage of meaning as meaning itself is enacted. Not only is the content shared, as per Raymond Williams’ definition of communication, but the becoming-sensical of the content is also shared.

Think of a joke that develops over the course of an evening. The release of tension signalled by the smile (weak) or laughter (strong) is triggered by a disjunction that produces the affective tension present in all humour. ³ Such jokes cascade, but they are also repeated other nights, just as the possibility of such a joke developing is repeated. The algorithmic disjunction of sample text of the original ‘_ebooks’ twitter accounts is pregnant with a similar potentiality.

 

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What does ‘_ebooks’ represent?

What happens when ‘_ebooks’ is appended to something?

It is an ironic signifier. Instead of signifying the becoming-sensical of the original algorithmic ‘_ebooks’ twitter acounts, it is signifying the (allegeded) becoming-nonsensical of an actual person’s expression.

 

 

 

Go and see it.

Great track. “Fell On Your Head” by Francis and the Lights.

The point isn’t whether or not he was going to kill himself, it was that he had a moment of lucidity — and he wanted to share that with his kids; and when he was debating whether or not to erase the robots memory it was a realisation that if he did, he was being deleted; a metaphor for his state of being — he wasn’t living, if he couldn’t remember.

News Ltd has anounced they’re moving to the Méthode content-management system. Méthode seems to be the favoured newsroom CMS for a number of publishers. A part of the News Ltd announcement focused on the integration of social media streams into the newsroom. This is possibly the least interesting feature in the rollout of Méthode. In most circumstances Méthode is an attractive CMS for large cross-platform publishers (newspaper, magazine, web, app, etc.) because of the way it deals with content.

What is Methode?

I’ve come up with a list of features of Méthode largely framed in terms of how I have taught my ‘Online News’ journalism unit this semester. My main focus for part of the unit was to introduce students to using a CMS for editorial production purposes. (The other focus was ‘data-driven journalism’ and presenting students with the challenge of finding, assembling, analysing and incorporating ‘big data’ into their set of practical journalistic skills.):

1. Integrated cross-channel publishing platform.
This is the “One CMS to rule them all” approach. In LOTR there was a single ring of power; in publishing land, there are integrated CMS packages that bring together all publishing channels into a single integrated production flow. Méthode is produced by Eidos Media. Eidos calls this cross-channel publishing. A properly integrated cross-channel publishing has been the ‘holy grail’ of publishing:

The holy grail of the CMS producers has been creating a onesize-fits-all solution; something which seamlessly integrates the reporters producing the content, the production journalists, and the website and print production software and hardware.

This has a few practical implications.

2. All staff engage with the same production process interface.
Everyone is (or at least can be) working through a CMS. Copy is not ‘filed’ as much as it is copied and pasted into specific fields. I am currently typing in the ‘body’ field of a ‘new post’ in WordPress. There is also a title field and various SEO fields. (I experiment with new SEO plug-ins on my site for teaching purposes.) I also have access to my site’s media library for inserting multimedia files. Méthode is integrated with industry-standard Adobe software for the designers to do their thing. Eidos even treats advertising the same way with advertising copy and so on entering the production work flow. It is not surprising that the most advanced in-house or custom content management systems I’ve seen are normally organised for advertising sales and placement.

3. Every editorial element in Méthode is a database element.
‘Data-driven journalism’ normally refers to stories produced by critically engaging with a dataset. Méthode transforms all editorial copy (and other elements) into database elements. A good example is the way Méthode handles images:

When several channels are being served from the same content base, images will be required in a wide range of formats and resolutions, both during the workflow process and for final publication. Wherever an image is published, in a print page or an online channel, it must first be tailored to the resolution and ‘colour space’ requirements of its destination.

When an image is uploaded to the CMS it auto-formats these images to be used according to the necessary standards of each page template of each publishing channel. There is a single content base which is repurposed across multiple channels. Every different element of a story/package can be published in a number of different ways, including body copy, standfirsts/ledes, headlines/titles, captions, etc. The same headline may exist as a print headline, website post title, email newsletter subject line and so on. Eidos calls repurposing of editorial elements and republishing of stories across channels ‘compound stories’:

4. Automation.
I don’t know if News Ltd print designers use templates and if they do to what degree, but Méthode enables the sophisticated use of CSS templates, which will save a great deal of time. This means copy can be posted and the formatting and design work is already done at the template stage. I imagine that some competent journalist/editors will be given responsibility of some sections without any design input (beyond the template stage) whatsoever.

Not everyone thinks that the use of templates is a good idea, however. A few creative directors will be very unhappy if the level of customisation possible from non-template design was ever completely removed from the production process. As one CMS developer told the Press Gazette a number of years ago:

The efficiency of any technological publishing solution is dependant on the amount you are willing to use templates. The CMS companies can provide this – but editors are generally unwilling to make too much use of templates on newspaper and magazine pages because they want to have the creative freedom to display stories as they see fit, so this is where the idea of having a fully integrated system breaks down.

Even in the design-heavy world of magazines, the use of templates in some parts of he production process would surely free up valuable time. There are many staff writers who have been given the unenviable task of preparing copy for email newsletters by hand normally using the editorial copy of magazine ‘contents’ pages and simply copying and pasting the headlines and standfirst/extracts that reside in the contents descriptions. Contents pages, email newsletters and other regular sections of magazines (‘Coming next issue’, ‘News’, etc.) could easily be based on templates and only require very minor tweaking.

5. Future-proofing the production process?
Méthode is an XML-based system. Basically, this is the web designer/developer/engineer way of saying that all the editorial content is being translated into an XML database. Through the use of filtering with appropriately categorised data (editorial) elements, any piece of data can be repurposed for any given XML-friendly platform, even those that do not exist yet. Eidos has already produced an iPad version of the CMS editorial interface, which basically turns the iPad into a mobile mini-newsroom.

CMS Thinking? Journalism Education

Perhaps the introduction of an integrated CMS will see other changes at News Ltd. Amy Gahran argues that “tools embody mindsets” and she suggests that journalists need to develop a ‘CMS thinking’:

Content management systems have become the core tech tool of the journo trade. These days, journalists absolutely need to know how to use a CMS — not just to file stories, but also at least the basics of how to set them up for projects, integrate stylesheets and themes with them, choose the right CMS tool for the job, integrate content from a variety of sources (including feeds, databases, and XML), and creatively distribute and promote their stories.

Gahran further develops this line of thinking in the discussion around her original post:

Think of content as modules that can be structured, mixed, mashed, and reused — rather than thinking strictly in terms of narrative stories. This is a key point where hands-on experience with a CMS affects journalistic practice. When you start thinking of your end product as a series of modules that can be configured in a story but that can also be used and distributed in other ways on your site and beyond your site, that can affect how you go about doing the reporting.

We’ve decided on using WordPress in class. It is a cheap and relatively powerful system. It does not really allow for a properly integrated approach across non-online channels, but it does present the opportunity for students to begin developing their ‘CMS thinking’. I use the Edit Flow plugin to transform the blog-based CMS into something closer to an actual newsroom CMS. As part of the changes to the UC Journalism course we are creating a final year ‘Newsroom’ unit that is designed to provide students with the experience of using a CMS in limited ‘newsroom’ conditions. We are gradually going to incorporate greater functionality into our WordPress-based publishing platform.

As a sidenote, the font I’m using in headers does not render accents above letters (the é in Méthode) and apparently neither does The Australian’s font package.

EDIT 22/02/12: Annabel Crabb has a new show on the ABC: Kitchen Cabinet. Blurb from the show’s ‘About’ page:

A half-hour entertainment series that serves up a delectable combination of political discussion and good food. Each week one of Australia’s most respected political commentators – Annabel Crabb – takes a plate and leads us into the homes and hearts of some of our most notable and engaging politicians. She sits down and talks food, recipes and carbon tax with MPs from both sides of the fence.

Food and politics are never separated for long. The best plots are hatched over lunch. The best stories are told over dinner. In Canberra, dinner bookings are an anthropological study in themselves. If you go for a walk around Manuka or Kingston during a sitting week, you see a graphic illustration of the capital’s power shifts. Why is that minister sharing noodles with that factional opponent? What is that disenfranchised bunch of back benchers plotting? And the best way to get to know a politician is to break bread with one.

Kitchen Cabinet will deliver a refreshing human touch, as we watch our politicians drop their guard and go about their daily life at home.

I transcribed part of a panel discussion from last year’s #NewsNews event at the Melbourne Writers Festival primarily for the students in my online news classes. The panel was titled Outsiders and involved Belinda Hawkins, Greg Jericho and Jay Rosen. I took an interest in the panel when following the hastag for the #NewNews event and noted much tweeting and retweeting when Belinda Hawkins joked that to get people to engage with political journalism parliament should be turned into a cooking show. I downloaded all tweets with the #newnews hashtag using The Archivist software. It allowed me to figure out precisely what was tweeted and when, then track down the panel name and eventually the video of he panel. The video of the panel is here. Below is the transcript of the relevant sections of the panel. It begins with a section from Rosen about how his keynote to the panel, which he had made publicly available before delivering it, has been critiqued by a working political journalist (I think this is the critique Rosen is referencing). It is this comment that is later referred back to when an audience member asks the panel about engagement. It is worth reading both sections to get a proper sense of Rosen’s example (at the end of the transcription below) from This American Life.

Video Time: 30:13 -35:08

Jay Rosen

In this piece, and it’s kind of a long analysis from someone who does political journalism, and he makes the point that you make, he says “Look… what lots of these academics don’t understand…” And I knew it was going to be good when someone starts lecturing me about journalism, this is going to be good… “is that the market for political journalism is actually very small. It’s a small number of people, often you hear this phrase ‘political junkies’…” You know, ‘For all those political junkies out there’ who sort of really, really care about politics. You could never really build a business on it, because it is such a tiny percentage, and most people, you know the larger percentage of the public, is, you know, watching other spectacles, is interested in entertainment, whatever… umm, and when you realise that you’re reporting for this small group of people who are intensely interested, then what the insiders are doing to manoeuvre and manipulate this larger body of people is actually what these political junkies want to know about.”

And so he’s saying is that ‘people like Rosen don’t understand how political journalism works because they think the entire public is like hanging on our every word, when actually we’re just addressing this…’ ok? He has a very elaborate defence, even though, yes, much of the time it is a bunch of crap… I think this is really interesting, because it goes back to like classic debates in the 1920s about the nature of the democratic public. I think there is a tension when we come upon a tension like this when we come across two different ways of perceiving this.

One is to say, basically, he’s right. Most people don’t care. They’ve got lives to lead and they’ve got other things to do and basically the best they’re going to do is pay attention a little bit for the vote. Yeah, they’re going to be shaped by advertising and stereotypes, but that’s just the nature of the world and we have to be mature and admit it. Right… And then we can found our ideas about politics and journalism on an honest assessment of them. So that’s one point of view.

Then the other point of view is.. Well, wait a second; in a democracy the only legitimate basis for government is the consent for the government and if you are actually saying that people can’t actually know enough to give their consent, then what you are really saying is that we don’t have a democracy, we have a kind of aristocracy which has the appearance of the consent from the governed is there, but actually most people are just manipulated masses.

So this journalist says “No, is true that it’s hard to get people engaged in politics. It’s true that there’s many competing interests, it’s true that we have to be realistic and modest in our expectations we also have to continually try to interest the broader public in what matters to them. If you work in politics, if you work in journalism and you don’t think that’s important anymore, because really it’s a small group of people who are interested in politics, then you’re in the wrong business… Ok? And I tend to come from the second perspective and a lot of people in political journalism really take the first perspective, which is why they’re always telling me you don’t understand how it works.

Video time: 46:44

Question from Audience

I just had a question about what Jay was talking about before, about how it is too difficult to get… to engage people, umm… I wanted the panel’s thoughts on how you actually… ‘cause, in a sense, we’re all here today, because we’re actually, you know, on a Saturday morning talking [Jay Rosen starts nodding] about media and politics and [inaudible, ‘blogging issues’?]… the people who are living in middle… middle Australia , I’m not sure how interested they’d be, so how do we reach out to the people…

Belinda Hawkins

[Interrupting] I know the answer… I’m telling you I have the answer [Rosen looks very sceptical, Greg Jericho is amused] In television you’ll gauge whether people are watching you or not by ratings. Stories about certain topics do not rate, we know they do not rate, we run them, we look at them, we go into them because there is a wider purpose at the ABC than just thinking about ratings, um…

The story on Four Corners about abuse of animals in abattoirs in Indonesia did not rate, there was a huge turn off factor, and yet it generated an enormous amount of discussion and it was invaluable because of that.
Stories on Australian Story that I do about politicians, we know.. we go into it… except for the one about Julia Gillard before she was Prime Minister, every story I’ve done on politicians didn’t particularly rate… Politics is a turn off. So what do you do to fix that?

You turn parliament house into a cooking program. [audience laughter] MasterChef… [audience laughter] MasterChef is destroying current affairs on a nightly [inaudible] on the ABC. Everything needs to be couched in terms of a cooking program… and there’s no reason why parliament couldn’t be done that way [audience laughter]
No but seriously what do you… [gesturing]

Jay Rosen

I think that this is a really really hard problem for the reasons that you just heard articulated and I go back and forth on it. This American Life is probably the best radio program in the United States by the brilliant Iva Glass is a story-telling program and lots of times the show will be about… people have bizarre relationships with their mothers… people that cross cultures. It’ll be people… This American Life is about stories of real people. But every once and a while they’ll do something completely different than that and their most famous recent program, actually its older that than that it is three years old now, which was The Giant Pool of Money. Which was a one hour documentary on the [inaudible, ‘bank crisis’?].

It started when Ira Glass, who’s the host, kept hearing these stories in the news about sub-prime mortgages and the collapse of banks and they didn’t know what was going on and they were befuddled like any other citizen would be, because they’re not economics correspondents and so they decided to try and explain – what was happening and why we had this crisis that ultimately cost the treasury hundreds of billions of dollars – to themselves. And their one hour documentary, The Giant Pool of Money, is overwhelmingly, by a factor of ten to one, the most downloaded program they’ve ever done and it’s about the intricacies of the mortgage market. So when you come upon things like that, it makes me think, ‘Well there is a way to engage a larger audience, you just have to help them understand and that that’s actually harder than reporting the news, because that’s what that program was, ‘We’re going to help you understand this really complex, strange, bizarre event that cost you hundreds of billions of dollars, right… And the key to the program was that the people making it began in the same position as the overwhelmed ignorant public and they travelled to competence [inaudible, ‘by observation’?] and looking back to where they were when they started, and how they achieved mastery, they told the story so others could have mastery as well. So sometimes I think that if sometimes we had journalism like that we could expand the circle.

This passage from unknowing to knowing (and the affective character of the non-formal knowledges produced) is best captured in the ‘how to’ or ‘instructionable’ style of article. My current work is begins to develop an archaeology of ‘how to’ articles. Why are there not far more socio-political ‘how to’ articles? ‘Pol Inst’ anyone?

On one of my recent trips up to Sydney from Canberra I listened to the debate hosted at the London School of Economics and produced as a program for the BBC with the theme of Keynes vs. Hayek. I listened to the ‘complete’ version availble on iTunesU, posted by the LSE. Keynes is traditionally understood to belong to ‘the left’ and Hayek to ‘the right’. I listened with an accute curiousity that developed into a sense of disbelief. The most sensible voice in the debate was Lord Robert Skidelsky who suggested that a targeted investment program would get most western economies out of the slump they find themselves in. On the other hand, from a systems theory perspective the Hayekian approach seems the most sensible — let the market-based systems sought themselves out, booms and busts equalise over the long term. But, for Hayekians, how does this happen? Representing the Hayekian side is Professor Georg Selgin. In the written version of his prepared speech (Skidelsky’s presentation is also there), Selgin says:

Liquidate, in short, the whole sub-prime bubble-blowing apparatus that was nurtured by easy monetary policy.

That would have meant letting insolvent banks that lent or invested unwisely go bust.

But instead our governments chose to keep bad banks going and that is why quantitative easing has proven a failure.

Quantitative easing failed because almost all the new money the government created has gone to shore up the balance sheets of irresponsible bankers.

‘Irresponsible bankers’? Ok. This sounds great! In fact, both sides of the debate seemed to agree that at a certain point economics becomes a discussion of morals. For the Keynesians it is a question of recognising the humanity of those suffering because of irresponsible decisions mostly by others (i.e. Selgin’s “irresponsible bankers”). On the other hand, the Hayekians argue that governments should not support ‘markets’ (or the legacy organisation of commercial entities that function “irresponsibly”) through spending because that will just encourage further irresponsibility, so the only appropriate response is to weather the downturn and work on making sure it doesn’t happen again when a ‘bust’ rips through a society.

What I do not understand from the Hayekian position, based on what Selgin was saying, is that the unfettered “market” is both the source of freedom and the ‘fairest’ way to distribute responsibilities while at the same time also the mechanism by which agents that constitute the market (i.e. “irresponsible bankers”) are morally censured/reprimanded (or something) so they will not participate in or contribute to unsustainable ‘booms’ again. I was actually shocked by this suggestion. Firstly, that most “irresponsible bankers” couldn’t care less what damage they do to ‘markets’ through their unfettered pursuit of profit, and, secondly, that the ‘market’ is the same mechanism that enables this unfettered pursuit of profit (discussed by Hayekians in terms of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’) will also somehow distribute punitive measures to those deservingly responsible. Is there not an inherent contradiction here, where the ‘market’ is asked to do two things at once? I know there are some allegedly intellectual Hayekians so I’d welcome any response that attempted to resolve this contradiction.

Let me frame it another way. Below is a clip of one of the “irresponsible banker”-types that Selgin is discussing. Real capitalists (who are the real problem) do not care where their profit comes from; they game the markets to exploit any opportunity possible. This is a pathological position based on an active disavowal of humanity and the suffering that accompanies the collapse of a market (or for that matter the unethical production of surplus value). (Found via here and here.)

The ‘market’ as discussed by the trader above is not the Hayekian market of Selgin — one that is both the source of ‘freedom’ and moral disciplinarity — it is the market constituted by thousands of capitalists who attempt to embody the most pathological dimensions of capital itself. There is no discussion of the creation of real value and no discussion of how to correct the immorality of previous consitutent participants of an obviously failed composition of the ‘market’. How would a Hayekian respond to the above trader? How would a Hayekian concerned with booms as well as busts respond to the current mining boom in Australia? What mechanisms would be put into place to restrict the irresponsible boom that is currently being created through the commodities market?

Do Hayekians have a concept of a sustainable opportunity? This is my interest in all this. I am thinking about the current state of the journalism industry that can no longer rely on legacy business models from the print-era or broadcast-era media industry. Is there a Hayekian concept of opportunity that is not framed in terms of the entrepreneurial recognition of a capitalist profit that only has to be actualised through a commercial enterprise, but is rather turned towards a sustainable commercial model? I have been researching this and I have not come across anything like the concept of a “sustainable opportunity” in any of the economics/business literature.

This is why Skidelsky’s response seems to be the most appropriate to me. A targeted investment plan does not mean investing money into capitalist enterprises solely designed to realise profit and hence game an inherently pathological market (i.e. the stupidity of the bank bailout), it means investing in projects that will produce real value.