So you want to start blogging, but you're shy...

How to take better care when writing about science

Journalism professor Michael Bugeja hits the nail on the head with this one.

Link: Inside Higher Ed :: Sound Science or Sound Bite?

It is my biggest complaint about science coverage in the mainstream media, which forces very nearly every science story into one of three narrative templates:

1. Dreadful disease-of-the-week
2. Gee whiz science innovation and/or technology entreprenuer (usually male) saves the world, discovery-of-the-week
3. How the next apocalypse will be caused by this instance of science run amuck

I suppose we can thank Wired magazine for adding "technology entreprenuer-heros" to Number Two above. I love Wired magazine, and I'd really love to write for Wired, but I gotta tell you, the feeling that I'd have to include some variant of Number Two in every story I'd query makes me hold my nose and write for my blogs instead. I wonder if Wired deliberately chose this narrative path, a variant of the cyberpunk anti-hero cowboy, jacked-in to the system, or if it fell into it with the tech boom. It's been copied by other entreprenuer-hero magazines ad nauseum (Fast Company, Business 2.0).

So if mainstream media is screwing up its coverage of science and producing pathetic science writing, I'd hope bloggers, many working in technology fields, would do something to correct the larger error in their mainstream narratives.

This is for those bloggers who enter these spaces not to write endlessly about themselves, but rather, to use their blogs as a way to SHARE what they find interesting in the world, to say "Hey, lookee here!" and let their blogs be a way to interact with the wonder and silliness and oddness and create or enter watercooler conversations about these things (Boing Boing has too much oddness and not enough conversation, if you ask me).

Translating science into something relevant and understandable to a wider audience could bring real joy to bloggers who love and are fascinated with science, even if they've had to face the fact that most jobs in science don't allow them to indulge very much of the wonder that first drew them to the field. Yeah, I'm talking Popular Mechanics readers, Wired readers, sure, but ANY workshop tinkerer, ANYONE who loves to read and engage with how things work. Science is NOT impossible arcana. It can be accessible to those who don't have precise disciplinary specializations.

Just as I preach the need for public intellectuals in the Blogosphere, I also hope this space can help popular interdisciplinary science to thrive, so that it becomes an avocation that doesn't stop when you discard your childhood chemistry set, or rock tumblers, or that fun build-it-yourself radio kit.

Yeah, that was me as a kid. Somewhere along the line, someone in school (maybe me) decided my aptitudes ran toward the humanities (they surely do), but I never fell out of love with science and curiosity and a desire to invent. I know there's others out there like me.

Michael Bugeja has some advice below for would-be science writers, and by extension, bloggers. Bloggers have an opportunity to do mainstream media one better, because they don't have the commercial imperatives of advertisers to force every science story into one of those three godawful narratives. Bloggers are expanding this world of discourse, so I'm hoping they can expand on these narrow-minded science story templates.

But if bloggers excerpt and condense these stories, they run the same risks as journalists. They can reduce things to sound bites, decontextualize, and oversimplify just as badly.

Here's some tips on how to avoid doing that:

Link: Inside Higher Ed :: Sound Science or Sound Bite?

Sound Science or Sound Bite?

By Michael Bugeja

I direct a journalism program at a science-oriented university where my colleagues are modern-day alchemists, turning corn into fuel, conjuring twisters in wind tunnels, or morphing visitors at our virtual reality lab into plant cells during photosynthesis.

These professors rank among the most ingenious, passionate people I have ever met.

Put some of them in front of a reporter, however, and all bets are off.

Being misquoted in the media is commonplace, especially when the topic concerns science. Depending on the error, a quotation out of context can catapult a scientist into the national spotlight where the person gets to clarify the remarks and do it again, only this time for a mass audience.

[...]

Journalists, of course, are partly to blame for overselling science. True, big national newspapers and broadcast outlets have seasoned correspondents. Science happens everywhere, including college towns like mine, Ames, Iowa, where agricultural biotechnology is on display in fields and on shelves of supermarkets. Many reporters who cover science do not fully grasp it, interviewing sources with polar viewpoints on genetically modified products or exotic animal diseases.

My colleagues diagnose mad cows. Reporters love mad cows because the beasts in question have or do not have the disease. Better yet, we eat on average 67 pounds of beef annually per person, ensuring the story will be read. But the science of immunohistochemistry to test for bovine spongiform encephalopathy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory is, on occasion, an arcane topic for the reporter who also does restaurant reviews.

[...]

To put this into perspective, consider this: The scientist who visited my university and who reportedly made that comment happens to be the same person who wrote the essay, titled, “Creation Myths: What scientists don’t — and can’t — know about the world” in the journal In Character. His name is Robert Hazen, author of the extraordinary book, Gen-e-sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins, and a professor of earth science at George Mason University.

Read Hazen’s book, if you haven’t already. When you do, you realize that his comment as reported in the Ames Tribune actually is based on the molecular fossil record. Most reviews of his work note how fair and balanced his theories actually are.

You can’t deduce that, however, by reading the 387 words in the story about his talk at Iowa State University on February 3, 2006. You need to glean the 339 pages in Hazen’s hard cover book.

And in this numerical comparison is also the problem at hand.

Bites from Books

Below are some of the most influential books that helped shape a century of science, according to The American Scientist, the magazine of the Scientific Research Society. To illustrate my point, I have reduced each work’s premise or conclusion into a sound bite — an excerpt taken out of context — [...]

What would be the outcome, I wondered, if reporters attended lectures by authors of these great books, quoting them out of context in the year of publication, given the social mores of those times?

1. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (1954): “Although obviously superior to cocaine, opium, alcohol and tobacco, mescaline is not yet the ideal drug. Along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory” (p. 66).
2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959): “[M]an is seen not as a static centre of the world—as he for long believed himself to be — but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer” (p. 36).
3. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962): “Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” (p. 8.)
4. Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Fractals (1977): “Why is geometry often described as ‘cold’ and ‘dry’? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain a coastline, or a tree.… Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel” (p. 2).
5. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (1988): “Who knows what the chimpanzee will be like forty million years hence? It should be of concern to us all that we permit him to live, that we at least give him the chance to evolve” (p. 252).
6. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992): “If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers” (p. 251).
7. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (1996): “[W]riting emerged from a counting device.… Each change of reckoning device — tallies, plain tokens, complex tokens — corresponded to a new form of economy: hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry” (p. 122).

If you have read these books, you would realize that the above citations require substantiation. Those excerpts make great pull quotes in print or sound bites on air. However, taken out of context, they also provoke as much as inform. That is why I caution scientists to at least qualify similar remarks with humbler disclaimers, especially if they believe passionately in their assertions.

[...]

[Robert Hazen says]

“So what’s a scientist to do? My approach is to explain three things:

• “First, describe what we think we know about the topic (and, if possible, provide a little background about the measurements and theory that support that knowledge). How do we arrive at our conclusions?

• “Second, explain what we DON’T know about the topic, including the uncertainties, the controversies, and a sense of how much weight to place on different ideas. It’s always best to be honest about our imperfect state of understanding.

• “Third, and equally important, explain what we’re doing to find out more.”

According to Dr. Hazen, science is a never-ending adventure.

I feel the same way about journalism.

[...]

Michael Bugeja, who directs the journalism school at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005).

My favorite quotation of the day

I really do thing this applies to the Blogosphere as well, so we should give it pause.

Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade.

Now here's the context, a New York Times article about learning to read more slowly (or as Thoreau might say, deliberately).

Link: Learning How to Read Slowly Again - New York Times.

I like the idea of thinking about this, although I don't know if I like the writer's prescription of how to go about it. I don't want to necessarily become a neo-Victorian (thanks Neal Stephenson!) keeping my tidy Commonplace Book (what the devil is a blog, anyway?).

But I do think too many of us read like students and multi-taskers, skimmers, in other words. The beauty of a beach novel is that you can pause after a paragraph and stare into space, ponder an idea the passage raises, reflect, question, argue in the margins. But how many so-called "beach novels" are worthy of such a ponderous approach? But are you ready to take Middlemarch to the beach?!

More appropriate, I think, for blog authors and would-be blog authors, would be to reflect on what makes a piece of writing valuable outside of the moment that spawned it, that might even make it stand up longer, make it stand the test of time.

I had a non-fiction workshop teacher who urged us to think about our long essay-like pieces as an attempt to be THE definitive take on that particular topic. Now how's that for something to shoot for?

Bloggers tend to respond so much to the moment, and there's nothing wrong with that. But Thomas Paine was also responding very much to his moment, and his little pamphlet surely has stood the test of time. We could say the same about Ben Franklin's little aphorisms, or even what he wrote under the throwaway name "Silence Dogood." (Of course Ben Franklin also believed in his own aphorism, "Fart Proudly," which I think conveys both the right degree of irreverence and timeliness about those things we might wish could stand the test of time.)

Link: Learning How to Read Slowly Again - New York Times.

September 22, 2006

Learning How to Read Slowly Again

By WILLIAM GRIMES

The demise of print looks as if it will be a long, drawn-out affair. John Sutherland, the chairman of last year’s Man Booker Prize Committee, offers an arresting statistic: Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade. As he calculates it in “How to Read a Novel,” it would take approximately 163 lifetimes to read the fiction currently available, at the click of a mouse, from Amazon.com.

So what to read? That’s the question. But as Mr. Sutherland’s title suggests, there’s a second question entangled with the first, addressed in several new books devoted to the lost art of reading. It’s a Malthusian problem. The amount of printed material increases exponentially, but the time available for reading remains static or, in many cases, decreases arithmetically. So once we have decided what to read, the question then becomes, How to read? And the paradoxical answer is, Much more slowly.

In “Reading Like a Writer” the novelist Francine Prose shows how to do it. She forces the act of slow reading by singling out excerpts from her favorite writers and zeroing in on single words, then sentences, then paragraphs, teasing out the specifics that transmute raw language into style and an artistically meaningful form. She has a notion, quite correct in my experience, that all readers start out slow, savoring individual syllables and words. Gradually, under pressure, they speed up, consuming more but enjoying and absorbing less.

Reading becomes information processing. The sheer bliss of the childhood reading experience comes to seem like a lost Eden, recaptured only in thrilling fits and starts or when time, mercifully, stands still. Prison and vacation make good readers.

Ms. Prose sets out to rewire the reader’s circuitry and get the electricity flowing the right way again. She has excellent taste, and she picks fights, which is fun. She heaps scorn, for example, on the standard advice that a writer should show rather than tell. She also admits to a prejudice against using brand names in fiction. It’s the lazy writer’s way of placing a character or establishing a social setting. Nothing can date a work more quickly, she writes, “than a reference to a brand of bed linen that no longer exists.”

This argument raises an intriguing question. Balzac and Dickens did not rely on brand names, but they did minutely describe clothing to indicate social status and character. Like obsolete brand names, these styles and, in many cases, the articles of clothing themselves have become extinct. Only period experts understand the meaning of clothes, carriages and interior decoration in the world of Turgenev or Flaubert. What’s a literary realist to do?

[...]

These impediments do not figure at all for Edward Mendelson, who holds seven classic novels up to close moral scrutiny in “The Things That Matter.” Each book is chosen because it sheds light on a significant stage in human life, beginning, naturally, with birth (Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”) and ending with death, or at least the uneasy prospect of a future minus us (Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts”). In between, Mr. Mendelson, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, tackles “Wuthering Heights,” “Jane Eyre,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Middlemarch” and ‘To the Lighthouse.”

All seven novels are by women. Three, perversely, are by one author, Woolf. Mr. Mendelson defends his choices in a rather sophistical introduction, but then gets right down to the heavy work of close reading. He can be oppressively earnest. “The Things That Matter” can seem like an endless sermon or a higher form of Cliffs Notes (“ ‘Jane Eyre’ records a journey out of a childish world into an adult one and a journey out of inequality and into equality”), but the author’s shovel work generally turns up riches. He takes the reader deep into the moral universe of his authors and pulls together thematic threads with extraordinary skill. He is a good reader. Not my kind of reader, perhaps, but he thinks books are important and reads them as if his life depended on it.

So do the 55 contributors to “You’ve Got to Read This Book!” That’s how excited they are about “the book that changed their life.” They need an exclamation point to express it.

There’s something profoundly depressing about seeing “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” listed as someone’s No. 1 life-changing reading experience. But so it was for Lisa Nichols, described as “a motivational speaker, personal coach and the founder and C.E.O. of Motivating the Teen Spirit.” Uplift and go-to-it entrepreneurship trump Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, although a few fiction titles, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” make the grade. Otherwise it’s “The Science of Getting Rich” and “How to Make Millions With Your Ideas.” Maybe the Europeans are right about us, after all.

[...]

 

Another fascinating science fiction writer

After I posted about the death of Octavia Butler a while back, I went totally off on an Octavia Butler kick, and I must say, I now count Parable of the Sower as one of my all-time personal favorite books. Parable of the Talents a bit less so, but the Sower is something I carry around with me, in my head, like Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossesed, or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake. I'm haunted by Butler's envisioning of those homeless refugees making their way up California.

I'm not a natural science fiction fan, or I didn't come to it naturally, being biased by spending all my reading on the literary side, from getting my M.F.A. I came in through cyberpunk, during another grad program.

But the story of James Tiptree Jr. being a psuedonym Alice Sheldon held a mild interest when I first heard it, some years ago. This Salon article by Laura Miller opens up a whole new side of things and I'm totally fascinated. Maybe it's how Miller constructs it, but like Tiptree's correspondents, I may even be seduced.

Here's my favorite bits...

Link: Salon.com Books | Stranger than science fiction.

Stranger than science fiction

Before JT Leroy there was James Tiptree Jr. -- the writer and alter ego of Alice Sheldon, a beautiful woman who struggled under the weight of her talent, depression and sexuality.

By Laura Miller

Aug. 10, 2006 | People are understandably fascinated by the lives of great artists. We scrutinize them for the formative experience or the light-bulb flare of inspiration -- whatever it is that pushes a human being beyond the rim of the merely good and results in a work for the ages. But in a way, the lives of the near great are just as illuminating. They're more like us in both their fears and their limitations, and they're often better at showing us where the threshold is by not quite managing to cross it. With them, you can see the precise point when nerve failed, perseverance ran out, vision faltered.

Take the case of James Tiptree Jr., who for a few years during the heyday of science fiction's "New Wave," in the 1960s, ...  The reclusive Tiptree carried on involved, intimate correspondences with at least a dozen other writers and editors. They knew that their friend had gone on safari in Africa at the age of 6, learned to fly a plane and shoot a gun, worked for military intelligence during World War II and for the CIA afterward, published a short story in the New Yorker and obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. What they didn't know was that he didn't exist, or not exactly. The person writing under the name James Tiptree Jr. was actually Alice Sheldon, a woman in her 50s, living with her husband in suburban McLean, Va.

[...]  Yet "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon" offers a rich exploration of the attractions and perils of writerly personas, ... Alice Sheldon, as Phillips portrays her, was a woman who struggled all her days to do justice to her own knotted and painful experience of life; she came closest in Tiptree's fiction. But this biography conveys the pervasive sense of a gift thwarted on the verge of consummation, and Phillips' meditations on why that happened make this book exceptional.

What's particularly provocative about James Tiptree is that almost everything "he" told his epistolary friends about himself -- down to several passionate but doomed infatuations with unavailable women -- was essentially true. Sheldon lived an extraordinary life, and was a woman of immense charm, intelligence and talent. Yet somehow, she needed the mask, or rather the alter ego, of Tiptree to write her best fiction. When Tiptree's real identity was discovered ... nothing she wrote afterward "was ever as direct, honest and exciting as her work before she was exposed."

The most difficult and preoccupying relationship in Sheldon's life was with her mother, and it's not hard to see why. Mary Bradley was a popular author (she supported the family with her writing when her husband's business interests faltered during the Depression), a glamorous Chicago socialite and a fearless adventurer.

[...]

In a letter, Sheldon described her mother as "a kind of explorer-heroine, highly literate (Oxford & Heidelberg), yet very feminine whatever that is. You help her through doors -- and then find out she can hike 45 miles up a mountain carrying her rifle and yours. And repeat the next day. And joke. And dazzling looks ... I am still approached by doddering old wrecks, extinguished Scandinavian savants and what have you who want to tell me about Mother as a young woman."

[Hell, I want to BE Sheldon's mother. Mary Bradley sounds simply wonderful.]

... Sheldon would spend most of her 72 years trying to figure out how to be a woman. A chief obstacle was her own mother's manifest success at doing whatever she wanted while remaining "feminine whatever that is." Sheldon, who accomplished enough in her time to make the child of a more ordinary mom feel exceptional, wrote that her mother "didn't provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility."

[...]

Sheldon and her mother were very much alike -- but not exactly ... As a stylish debutante, she was photographed by admiring society journalists. Then she eloped with a bad-boy poet to live the boho life of a painter in 1930s California. Six stormy years of marriage ended in divorce, whereupon Sheldon joined the Army as one of the first WACs. She got into the burgeoning intelligence field known as photointerpretation (studying aerial reconnaissance photographs for enemy installations and activity). Stationed in Paris, she challenged an Army colonel to a game of chess, played blindfolded, beat him and shortly thereafter married him.

... Alice returned to the U.S. and the couple spent a few quiet years running (of all things) a chicken hatchery in New Jersey. In the 1950s, they moved to Washington to work for the CIA. Ting ranked high enough to sit in on National Security Council meetings with the president, but Alice soon got tired of photointerpretation and went back to school to study clinical psychology. She eventually earned her Ph.D., studying the effect of novelty on lab rats, and struck up a lifelong correspondence with the great psychologist Rudolf Arnheim.

Sheldon had loved pulp science fiction... but didn't make a concerted attempt to write it until she was past 50, when research psychology was turning out to be as hard to stick to as anything else she'd tried. She picked the name James Tiptree as a lark, inspired by a jar of Tiptree jam in a supermarket...

[...]

This new s.f., Phillips writes, aimed for "real characters, atmosphere, social criticism, style" at a time -- the 1960s -- when speculation about social change was in the air. Tiptree's first important story, "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," coolly recounts a multistop international journey by a doctor who is in love with a mystical female vision of Earth. It gradually becomes clear that he's intentionally spreading a lethal influenza virus as he goes, wiping out the human race to save the planet.

[...]

Tiptree's stories fused themes of sex, death and alienation in ways that many of his readers hadn't encountered before. "I read the first two sentences and felt like I'd fallen off a high tower," one critic wrote. Tiptree's fiction gained a following, and the persona blossomed as Sheldon began regularly exchanging letters with such innovative s.f. writers as Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and firebrand feminist Joanna Russ. Sheldon was a charismatic correspondent. (Under her own name she wrote fan letters to mainstream writers like Tom Wolfe and Italo Calvino; Calvino was so impressed he wrote back asking to see her stories, but she never responded.) Those who exchanged letters with Tiptree felt they really knew him, and both Russ and Le Guin have confessed to being more than a little in love with him. "Tiptree was a man designed by a woman," Phillips writes, "and that made him as appealing as any Darcy or Heathcliff."

[...]

Yet when the truth about Tiptree was finally revealed, Sheldon didn't feel liberated. Her writer and editor friends were overwhelmingly supportive and many were intrigued by Tiptree's true gender. But despite freeing herself from a deception that had become unwieldy, creatively, Sheldon felt enervated and wary; she'd interpret the slightest friction in any interaction with editors and publishers as a sign of her demotion in status from male to female.

Sheldon wrote in her journal of Tiptree, "I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity, I was -- though an aging intellectual -- of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman ... Tiptree's 'death' has made me face ... my self-hate as a woman."

[...]

Sheldon's distaste for her gender wasn't consistent. She was an enthusiastic supporter of second-wave feminism who joined NOW and subscribed to Ms. Magazine from the outset. She started and abandoned several sympathetic treatises on the dilemma of women, especially those women with "atypical" ambitions and desires.

[...]

Still, Phillips believes that Sheldon never shook off the ill effects of a youth spent trying to live up to her parents' expectations and her mother's example. In school, Phillips writes, "Alice had the bad luck to be extremely pretty. If she hadn't been, she might have given up the popularity contest. She might have studied harder, prepared for a career, and not cared what people thought ... Instead, she cared about appearances, practiced femininity and flirtation, and got addicted to the rewards for being a pretty girl." The result was a woman of tremendous charm who felt exhausted by the company of other people, even those she liked. Every interaction was a life-sapping performance.

Phillips suggests that if Sheldon had been able to accept those parts of herself that defied her parents' image of a good girl -- homosexual desires, anger and grief -- she might have been able to integrate Tiptree into Alice and sustain a brilliant career as an author without resorting to disguises.

[...]

Sheldon also suffered from some more commonplace creative problems. Throughout her life, she rushed into a profession -- painting, the military, clinical psychology, writing -- with idealistic, grandiose notions of how things ought to be done. Inevitably, she was stymied by the inglorious practicalities. She worshiped Mexican muralist José Orozco, only to be disappointed, upon meeting him in Mexico City, when she learned that he was painting a rich woman's portrait for the money. Her hopes for finding a utopia of female empowerment in the WAC were dashed when the women insisted on behaving like the imperfect human beings they were. She refused to accommodate the realities of academic life -- department budgets, grantsmanship -- and thereby quashed her chances at a real career in science.

Sheldon's struggles remind me of a famous conversation between the minor British writer Stephen Spender and the great poet T.S. Eliot. The young Spender told Eliot that he had always wanted to be a poet. Eliot's reply was that he'd never understood this thing of wanting "to be a poet"; all he understood was having some poems you wanted to write.

When what you really want is to write some poems, you don't let the ultimately ancillary issues of how a poet should live or whether you're an exceptional talent get in the way. Often, the difference between a minor writer and a great poet is a matter of insufficient -- or, rather, misplaced -- commitment.

With Sheldon, the nagging problem of her identity, who she wanted to be -- a genius, an artist, a scientist, a writer -- kept interfering with the things she wanted to do. By creating the persona of James Tiptree Jr., she was temporarily able to finesse the block. In time, though, the puzzle of identity intruded again, as this new imaginary self sucked up more and more of her time and energy. (Ellison, complaining that Tiptree wasn't producing a promised novel, insisted that all that letter writing was the cause.) If she'd managed to solve her identity dilemma, she might have, as Phillips suggests, figured out how to write about a girl growing up into a "whole woman." On the other hand, if she had cared more deeply, obsessively and passionately about any one of the half-dozen types of work she tried in her life, she might have looked up from it one day to find that the whole woman had arrived unbidden.

[...]

How to sell your soul and sell out your blog for 10 pieces... of paper?

Link: BloggerJobs :: Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads.

Egad! Should we start watching for these sell-out bloggers to appear on a spammer-scale? Will machines generate these blogs, these three-links-per fake-promo-link-farm posts, and then massively spam the comments field too?

I mean, direct mail folks (and by extension, spammers) operate under a low low LOW percentage response rate, five percent or something, but they look at that five percent (or whatever the number is) as rock solid, an entitlement that justifies a calculus of MILLIONS, gazillions perhaps, of no-friction messages sent out, just to get that rock solid single digit return on an investment of next-to-nothing.

I believe they think it is a valid method of creating value out of thin air. And by their calculations, it may be, but actually, it destroys far greater values to create that single digit value, in the same way fouling your own well does. They say dogs at least know enough not to defecate where they live, but it is a lesson many humans apparently never learned.

Suppose vast numbers of bloggers accept that blog version of an envelope-stuffing "job" below. Would that be enough of a disruption of the noise-to-signal ratio to disrupt the ecosystem of the blogsophere itself?

Comment spam and trackback spam are disruptive, but marginal (at least now they are, because of CAPCHA, but they were once out-of-control enough to radically turn an interactive space into one-way monologues). Google and Technorati already have a hard time parsing link-farms out of their records. What if it became impossible because humans were conned into becoming willing link-farm agents?

The Turing Test generally holds when it comes to distinguishing humans from machines... but what happens when humans are hired as willingly volunteers to become the machines, because machine-generated spam blogs can technically still be detected (AI not really being good enough yet to simulate uniquely human-style randomness)?

Link: BloggerJobs :: Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads.

Blogsvertise is looking for bloggers to post their ads:

Blogsvertise.com is looking for bloggers who are interested in getting paid to post a variety of assigned topic entries in their already-existing blogs.

Bloggers will be asked to post short entries on a variety of topics, including three links to an advertiser's website in each entry. You decide what to write; it is not necessary to endorse the advertiser's product or service.

Each completed task will pay $10 via Paypal after the entry has been online for 30 days.

This is a great way for bloggers to earn a small income in addition to or instead of featuring pay-per-click advertisements.

URL: http://www.blogsvertise.com
Email for more information: jess@blogsvertise.com

I include the addresses above, hoping someone with the capability to spam this person will have at it, as karma for the blogosphere pollution this ridiculous link-whoring will generate.

The blogosphere exists because some bloggers chose to make a stand on integrity, to be REAL in a world increasingly of media marketing-created surfaces, the NON-reality-based universe.

Now those media-marketing types want to remake the blogosphere in their image, to make the world safe for NOTHING BUT mindless promotions of every sort.

I have nothing against honestly using advertising on a blog, nothing at all. I do, however, have a problem with the influx of the direct mail/spamming forces who want to apply math on an absurd scale, in order to create highly questionable returns, and in the end, to ultimately destroy the system by overwhelming the search engines necessary to creating the blogosphere's value.

I remember a time before there were search engines on the web. In 1993 and 1994. Spiders, we called them then, when they first started appearing, Web Crawler and Lycos.

BEFORE search engines. Can you wrap your mind around that concept? It's sort of like imagining the world without nearly-universal electrical service (during this massive heat wave, it brings the point home) . I overheard a news report the other referring to the very IDEA of living without electricity as "primitive."

You know, I about gagged at such utter stupidity. Had this news anchor ever read Victorian literature? Would people in the modern age call Victorians, with their drawing rooms and excruciatingly correct manners and social customs "primitive"?!

Ah, nobody reads much anymore, and they wear their ignorance out in the open without even the good sense to be embarrassed by it. I was on a Jane Austen kick again last night, so I'm filled with outrage.

There can be civilized worlds without electricity, and yes, Virginia, the Web once did exist in its present form without search engines (I'm really not counting Gopher, Archie, and Veronica, because those were tools for the Internet proper, the blinking cursor Internet, which is not to put down their rimportant ole in the development of the Net).

My caution here is that if the "Well" of the Internet becomes so fouled by these entities or agents as to render search engines inoperative, if their scale overwhelms even Google's massive server farms (server farms, good, link farms, bad), we may find ourselves in the same sort of anarchy online as the world would go into without electricity.

But the Blogosphere COULD survive.

What we'd have to do (and maybe this is obvious to old-timers from the 1990s, but I want to make it explicit to newer arrivals) is simply recreate the original purpose of the Blogroll, as a TRUE ROADMAP to what would become an utterly roadless world, a chaotic sea of information and expression.

That, btw, is what made one of the first million-of-hits web sites a success, in 1994. John December's Internet Web Text was a guide for a world without search engines. Because of the carefully-selected value of his travel-agent's guide to the Web, the space became intelligible to people as a landscape, in a way that the blinking cursor and Gopher never could create for most of us.

If glorified link-farm spam comes close to killing the blogosphere, this is something we will have to do as well, to rebuild all the roadmaps for a world without search.

Smart Kid, Smart Teacher

A high school student did this terrific independent study, and I just LOVE the questions below that came out of it. Most excellent. Should note, also, as Ben does below, that he worked with a really extraordinary teacher, so I've gotta put a link and a shout-out to that teacher's blog too: Jesse Berrett teaching at San Francisco University High School.

Kudos, y'all! And I may be emailing for the whole document of your research as well. Fascinating stuff. I'm especially fond of the second bullet point below.

Is the “wisdom of crowds” always better than the opinion of one, and if so, how does that wisdom get “mined” on the web?

This bullet point also makes my socks roll up and down too!

Is objectivity in media “a view from nowhere”? In covering any controversial story, the media tends to simply let whoever has been defined as "the sides" dictate their beliefs and just do an "X said, but then Y said" story.

Link: Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Results of Independent Study on Blogs, Journalism, and Media.

Ben Casnocha: Results of Independent Study on Blogs, Journalism, and Media

From September-December (first semester) I embarked on an academic study on blogging and the intersection of journalism, media, and the 'net through my school's Independent Study program. I thus received academic credit for this work (I know, I was elated too!). My faculty sponsor was Jesse Berrett - he's the chair of our History department but well versed in a broad range of topics including popular culture and internet stuff. As a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and others on the side, and armed with a handy dandy PhD from Cal, he brought a healthy dose of skeptical perspective I needed. (His own blog is, for now, brief reviews of books he reads - all genres and types - and pictures of his baby. In 2004 he read 254 books, and he reflects on that year of reading here.)

Excerpts from the results of our research and work follows. If you'd like the whole document, email me.

Questions discussed:

• Do all conversations lead somewhere? How effective are conversations with many talking compared with one person lecturing?
• Is the “wisdom of crowds” always better than the opinion of one, and if so, how does that wisdom get “mined” on the web?
• What process do people go through to change an opinion? Are opinioned-blogs and the ensuing spirited conversations changing anyone’s opinion? How often do blogs (or any conversation for that matter) go beyond “I think this” and “I think this.”
• What role do blogs have besides the obvious one of being a watchdog/critic of mainstream media?
• What is the future of “hyperlocal journalism” where neighbors and community members write local stories in an online format?
• Is objectivity in media “a view from nowhere”? In covering any controversial story, the media tends to simply let whoever has been defined as "the sides" dictate their beliefs and just do an "X said, but then Y said" story.
• What are the limits/constraints of the blogging form versus the future possibilities?
• Does a lack of referees on the web tends to support an everyone-has-his-own-truth world where “truth” is up for grabs? Is it realistic to hope for a higher-up authority to separate truth from fiction either on the web or offline? How does the increasing lack of trust in institutions in America affect this?

[...]

Here's another good observation:

There seems to be a “truth” coalescing about blogs in mainstream media, which is that they are usually good watchdogs, but tend to be prey to all sorts of crazy rumors, speculations, and conspiracies. Thus, “the jury is out.” This may not be true, but this is the account that most major papers run whenever there’s a story covering aspects of blogging—a couple good things, a couple bad things. In essence the “they say X, these others say Y” story.

One venture capitalist blogger I read a few days ago said that his bet for the “the next big thing” is around an emerging “architecture of participation” or as he put it, “the revolution of the ants.” Everyone getting into the action. The participatory nature of blogs versus the one-way lecture of mainstream media is crystallized for me every time I read a column in the New York Times or Chronicle that I want to talk to someone about. I may agree or disagree or want to learn more. How can I scratch that itch? I can write a blog post linking to the column with my thoughts and solicit feedback or read others who have blogged about that column.

[...]

I like that, "revolution of ants." Granular. Cumulative. Asymmetrical. I just find myself nodding through this whole thing, yes, yes, yes. Vulcan mind meld, dude! I wish I wrote this well when I was in high school.

Blogs At Their Worst

“One of the biggest criticisms of blogs is that so many are self-absorbed tripe. No doubt, most are only interesting only to the writer, plus some family and friends,” writes Dan Gillmor in We the Media. He goes on to say that’s no reason to dismiss the genre, but it does raise an important question: does society need a lot more people voicing opinions or thoughts and does that create more produce intellectual, cultural, moral, etc. progress? I mentioned in the “best” section that my blog gives me a voice. It would be arrogant to argue that my voice needs to be heard, but not that nut-job propaganda-spreading conspiracy-theorist. The leading bloggers and pioneers in this field seem to agree that there should be virtually no restrictions or exclusivity in the blogosphere with a bet being placed on the notion that the best blogs will bubble to the top through links.

[...]

Do blogs promote an opinion-first, evidence-later trend in our society? Jay Rosen sees a new trend unrelated to blogs pertaining to information-gathering: first get opinions, then analysis, then hard news. One could extend this trend to people first expressing opinions, then maybe finding some articulate analysis to back up their opinions, and possibly some real data supporting their points. It is easy to blog an opinion or rant. A good footnoter is also a good linker, hence the emphasis by respected bloggers to link to sources or other sites to back up posts. But without some sort of “authority” deciding what has some foundation versus simple crazy rants, the blogesphere can house bundles of unsubstantiated opinions.

[...]

From September-December (first semester) I embarked on an academic study on blogging and the intersection of journalism, media, and the 'net through my school's Independent Study program. I thus received academic credit for this work (I know, I was elated too!). My faculty sponsor was Jesse Berrett - he's the chair of our History department but well versed in a broad range of topics including popular culture and internet stuff. As a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and others on the side, and armed with a handy dandy PhD from Cal, he brought a healthy dose of skeptical perspective I needed. (His own blog is, for now, brief reviews of books he reads - all genres and types - and pictures of his baby. In 2004 he read 254 books, and he reflects on that year of reading here.)

Excerpts from the results of our research and work follows. If you'd like the whole document, email me.

Questions discussed:

• Do all conversations lead somewhere? How effective are conversations with many talking compared with one person lecturing?
• Is the “wisdom of crowds” always better than the opinion of one, and if so, how does that wisdom get “mined” on the web?
• What process do people go through to change an opinion? Are opinioned-blogs and the ensuing spirited conversations changing anyone’s opinion? How often do blogs (or any conversation for that matter) go beyond “I think this” and “I think this.”
• What role do blogs have besides the obvious one of being a watchdog/critic of mainstream media?
• What is the future of “hyperlocal journalism” where neighbors and community members write local stories in an online format?
• Is objectivity in media “a view from nowhere”? In covering any controversial story, the media tends to simply let whoever has been defined as "the sides" dictate their beliefs and just do an "X said, but then Y said" story.
• What are the limits/constraints of the blogging form versus the future possibilities?
• Does a lack of referees on the web tends to support an everyone-has-his-own-truth world where “truth” is up for grabs? Is it realistic to hope for a higher-up authority to separate truth from fiction either on the web or offline? How does the increasing lack of trust in institutions in America affect this?

Ouch! Young author's book has passages similar to other published work - Boston.com

Looks like the entire book industry needs Google Books just to do whole manuscript plagiarism checks.

Check out the passages for yourself. It's an open-and-shut case of plagiarism, like something right out of the playbook of that RedState.com dude that lost his blogging gig at the Washington Post.

Link: Young author's book has passages similar to other published work - Boston.com.

Young author's book has passages similar to other published work

By Andrew Ryan, Associated Press Writer  | April 23, 2006

BOSTON --The debut novel of a Harvard University sophomore includes several passages that are similar to a work by another author published in 2001.

Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" was published in March by Little, Brown and Co., which signed her to a hefty two-book deal when she was 17.

On Sunday, the Harvard Crimson reported the similarities on its Web site, citing seven passages in Viswanathan's book that parallel the style and language of "Sloppy Firsts," a 2001 novel by Megan McCafferty published by Random House.

Viswanathan, whose book hit 32nd on the New York Times' hardcover fiction best seller list this week, did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. When reached by the Crimson on Saturday, she said: "No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about."

Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, said Sunday that the company planned to investigate the similarities.

Similar passages in the two books

"I can't believe that these are anything but unintentional," Pietsch said. "She is a wonderful young woman."

McCafferty told The Associated Press in an e-mail Sunday that some of her readers pointed out the likenesses.

[...]

Viswanathan said last month that she wrote the book during her spare time during her freshman year at Harvard, clicking away on a laptop in Lamont Library.

She is the youngest author signed by Little, Brown in decades, and the movie rights for the novel have already been sold to Dreamworks.

McCafferty is a former editor at Cosmopolitan who has written three novels.

"I do think this is one of the most difficult situations for an author," Joanna Pulicini, McCafferty's agent, told the Associated Press in an e-mail.

Difficult situation for an author? WHICH author? It's difficult for the person who had entire passages from her work lifted and put into another work by some Harvard freshman. It's difficult to see such a person climb the best seller's list when perhaps you didn't.

The ONLY way this isn't plagiarism is if you believe you can stick 100 monkeys in a room with typewriters and eventually one of them will type the complete works of Shakespeare.

An interesting observation by a now-ex-blogger

This one quotation from Sarah's article just jumped out at me.

Link: Why I shut down my blog. By Sarah Hepola.

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction—all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

[...]

[What she writes here below... I remember feeling EXACTLY this when forced to crank crap forgettable articles for newspapers, either the stress from constantly meeting new people and feeling shy while at the same time having to commodify them, or the personal humilation at knowing I was just dumping my interview stories into a rote formula. That was in the 1980s, though, so I went into an MFA program in creative writing instead, to learn to write for myself and my own standards again. And now, many many years later, blogs have taken me past the creativity-cramping I used to feel after some of my poems got published in good literary magazines, the fear of writing a poem that was pure crap. Blogs are works in progress, and publications. They're a dessert topping AND a floor wax. Can't beat that.]

Just prior to that, I'd been writing for an alt-weekly in Austin, Texas. What began as a great job had curdled into an anxiety nightmare. I would burn to write a certain profile and then, deadline looming, I would stare at the computer as another beautiful Saturday ticked away. I can remember crossing the street one night and thinking, absently, "If I got run over by a car, I wouldn't have to finish that story!" Don't get me wrong—I didn't want to die. I just wanted a really long extension. Thus my decision to leave the job. Thus my journey to the southern hemisphere. Thus the blog that I started, thinking no one would read it and secretly hoping they would. The blog was the perfect bluff for a self-conscious writer like me who yearned for the spotlight and then squinted in its glare. [...]

Eventually, I began enjoying my writing again. I stopped worrying about deadlines, audience, editors, letters to the editor, all the stuff that had smothered me before. I was writing so fast that I didn't have time to double-think my sentence structure or my opinions. What came out was sloppier but also funnier and more honest. I started getting e-mails from people I'd never met, and they were actually encouraging.

[...]

OK, now here's the bit that's my favorite quotation. Maybe I'll put this line up in the banner rotation on my blog. If it isn't too long.

At times, I started to feel that jokes and scenarios and turns of phrase were my capital, and that my capital was limited, and each blog entry was scattering more of it to the wind, pissing away precious dollars and cents in the form of punch lines I could never use again, not without feeling like a hack. You know: "How sad. She stole that line from her own blog."

[...]

[Isn't that cool? And it's just SO true. I've also felt that way about some rants I've written to a listserv I manage. I never know what's going to bite me in  the butt, or when the stars will line up and the universe or the tenth muse is going to speak through me, so stuff comes out that wouldn't otherwise. I have to appreciate that. But if that's the ONLY place where the universe is channeled through my writing, then I'm pissing away my best ideas too.

It did help a lot when I was writing my dissertation, to be active in private listserv discussions in the Xenaverse, the fandom community I was studying. Invaluable, actually, and I owe those people so much for being a sounding board, and for arguing with me when I got it wrong. Sometimes, now, when I read my dissertation, I wonder who wrote it, because I do feel that the tenth muse, or at least Xena and Gabrielle, were using me for a channel. Doesn't feel like I wrote it at all, and on really good days, I swear the dissertation wrote itself. I don't know too many harried and harassed grad students who can say that about the process, but it was one of the best times of my life.

There's one more bit that the writer has here that I thought was a particularly pithy observation:]

I suspect I'll come back to blogging eventually. It will be something I quit on occasion, like whiskey and melted cheese, when the negative effects outweigh the benefits. Practically every blogger I know has taken their site down at some point—for personal reasons, for business reasons, for boredom reasons. It's no different from the way we have to turn off our cell phones or stop checking e-mail so that we can actually focus on something. As much as I loved writing online, it's a relief writing offline: taking time to let a story unspool, to massage a sentence over an afternoon's walk, to stew for days—weeks, even—on a plot line. What a modern luxury. Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

I've been there and done that, and yes, it most certainly did feel very good. I really started blogging in earnest with Radio Userland in early 2002, and the blog I was posting to at that time (nameless here forevermore) rose up respectably in the blogosphere, and in the mostly tech-blog atmosphere of that time, got linked to by the A-listers of the day, which satisfied me but wasn't the be-all and end-all of my existence, having gone through that previous newspaper experience that drove me into the Arkansas MFA program. Regardless of who linked to me, I was really still writing for myself.

So by early 2003, and for certain by the start of the Iraq War, I was immersed in war coverage at work, putting in a lot of overtime, worrying about some war-bloggers in Iraq who are my friends, and I just needed some time off. I went inward, started learning the I Ching, and filled four handwritten journals in six months. Felt real good. And then I started blogging again. That felt good too. It's called "being your own boss."

Octavia Butler, and what it means to be a shy writer putting your words out there...

Link: Washington Post: Octavia Butler, A Lonely, Bright Star Of the Sci-Fi Universe.

I've been obsessively following all the Octavia Butler obituaries and kicking myself up and down the street for not having found more of her work when she was alive. The more I read and learn about her and her unique sensibilities, I keep wishing I'd have had a chance to meet her. But it is unlikely that I would have, because she was an intensely shy and private woman. Yet the impact of her words ripples across the Internet and the blogosphere while it barely causes a brief blink in the world of mainstream media or even the walking-around life of a lot of people.

Why is this? I hear all the time assumptions about "all people" or "most people" or about how much "people" don't read or think about anything except what they're told to read or think about, and even then, "they" just to respond deterministically, as buttons to be pushed, automatons to be easily manipulated. Folks I work with tell me that such people rule the world. Some mass media types I know even truly believe that sonambulistic masses are all that exist, and in that world view, I guess they are, because the fewer number of people who choose to live their lives in different ways are so marginalized into irrelevancy.

And I think, "Oh, 'those people' must be the kind who never get around to reading the works of Octavia Butler."

Don't think I'm about to go into a "Philistines at the gate" rant, because that's not what I'm drawing a bead on at all.

Rather, I want to simply highlight a peculiar divide, one that may be obvious to many people, so much as to beg the question, but I think it's a divide that we do need to make explicit, make visible, make conspicuous, even if it is obvious.

The divide isn't the so-called "Great Divide" between literacy and illiteracy. I don't believe in that as some kind of magical cognitive shift. It isn't the growing divide between the technology-haves and have-nots either. This is a self-selected divide, but even so, it exerts social force. Power? Maybe, or maybe not. (I do like reading stuff about something called "The Long Tail")

Those on the side of the divide who choose to read and think and do so actively, pro-actively, and interactively seem to be migrating away from passive media, advertising inundation, and rhetoric that insults their intelligence, and TOWARD the Internet, blogs, TiVo, and podcasting, not that they are more intelligent spaces (generally,those spaces are as mixed in intelligence as our general society is mixed, among the ideas that get published and spread around), but rather because the mix of stuff out there yields results for those who do think and actively search and pursue their own research questions or ornery and contrarian questions, or burning personal questions. These people know how to analyze and sort through a mixed bag of information and ideas.

Those who are frustrated in the wild and woolly spaces of the Internet may not have good sorting or analysis skills, or may prefer a passive style of media that rewards a lack of independent curiosity ("push"), or I just frankly don't know what, because I confess I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the motivations of such folks, the idea is so far away from my own experiences. But that is the divide I see self-sorting itself into our society.

Except that I perceive that the active and interactive thinkers, writers, and searchers are more marginalized and disempowered in U.S. culture right now, and the manipulators of the passive masses appear to be strongly pushing for dominant hegemony. This feels counter-intuitive to me, since cleverness ought to trump dullness, to my mind. I rarely see that happening, so perhaps I am wrong. Somehow people with a greater dullness of thought are being allowed to oppress people who are involved with more active thought.

One friend of mine likes to compare the (hermetic?) insider codes of the active online groups to other subcultures that have to move through and remain largely invisible inside a more dominant and restrictive mainstream culture, like the gay subculture, for instance.

This has happened in history, so I shouldn't be too surprised by it, I guess, with the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in the 1930s, with the Inquisition, the medieval period, various so-called "dark ages" when those who want to know less become righteous and demand that all people be like them, while seekers and thinkers are oppressed.

Are Internetties the "freemasons" of our growing dark ages, passing on hermetic secrets in traditions designed to preserve certain kinds of knowledge and skills that are being forgotten in our society as a whole?

I turn to Octavia Butler, just as I would Ursula Le Guin, as in "The Dispossessed." And I see all around me online people turning to Octavia Butler as well. This is a hopeful sign, except when I look outside our closed world of the Internet and the blogosphere fans of Octavia Butler. Where beyond here is her influence felt?

And so the divide widens.

Link: Washington Post: Octavia Butler, A Lonely, Bright Star Of the Sci-Fi Universe.

Octavia Butler, A Lonely, Bright Star Of the Sci-Fi Universe

By Marcia Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; C01

What must it have been like to be Octavia Butler?

There she was, this woman of great intellect, of immense talent, of tremendous passion, and, it seems, so very much alone. Her death on Friday after falling and hitting her head outside her home in Seattle has rattled those who loved her work. She was 58.

There she was, a tall, awkward and shy black girl thinking that she wanted to write science fiction, of all things. A young woman who believed the genre could deal with more than ray guns and transporters, and that she had a right to create fiction that tackled race and class and what it meant to be human in worlds where humanness had all but been obliterated. Publisher after publisher must have been puzzled. How could science fiction be set on a plantation?

Octavia Butler showed them how.

She was an African American woman claiming her space in a literary universe dominated by white men. After years of rejection, she eventually won science fiction's most prestigious awards, the Nebula and the Hugo. She picked up other honors along the way, too, including a PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

Her following was loving and loyal -- protective even -- for they seemed to know instinctively how precious and powerful and simultaneously tender and fragile a spirit like hers had to be.

"That's terrible, terrible, terrible news," my mother kept saying over and over at word of Butler's death. A die-hard science fiction fan, she is one of those people who gobbled up many of Butler's 11 novels. I was proud of myself for having turned her on to Butler's first work, "Kindred." Soon she was devouring the other works, among them "Dawn" and the highly regarded "Parable of the Sower."

[...]

The public and private lives of Butler, Due says, were remarkable to watch. "It's almost as if she lived in two worlds."

"I'm very happy alone," Butler once told Post writer David Streitfeld. "If I had to change myself into something else, I'd probably be unhappy."

She grew up poor in Southern California, where her father shined shoes before he died when she was a young girl, and her mother cleaned houses. Butler was a young black woman coming of age at a time when black women were mainly invisible. And when she was noticed, it was with unkind eyes. She was six feet tall by the time she was in her teens, a girl with deep brown skin and short hair. She was sometimes mistaken for a man, she would say. Early as a child, she cocooned herself in a world of books and nurtured audacious ambitions.

"She obviously had spent a tremendous amount of her early life feeling very, very alone," Barnes said. "She had no tribe. She didn't fit in any place. Her own family thought she was nuts . . . because of what she wanted to do with her life."

At one time Barnes lived just six blocks from Butler and they would spend time together, having dinner or just talking. One of the questions she seemed to care greatly about was, "Why is it that we are so cruel to each other?" Barnes says.

"The fact that she was so concerned with that made me think she had faced a lot of that" cruelty in her life, he adds.

She explored the question in a field that was forced, whether it wanted to or not, to acknowledge her talents.

"Women in general were rare in the science fiction field, and black women, ha," Barnes says.

She had to cloak her ideas thickly in metaphor, he says. "She was forced to speak through layers of obsfucation." Those challenges may have ultimately made her a better writer but must have taken their toll.

"It was like trying to drive in the Indy 500 with your brakes on," Barnes says. "You burn up."

God, I love that metaphor!

[...]

They worried about her, up there alone and probably pushing herself far too much, both in her writing and her travels. But she was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, they say, with its natural beauty and its opportunities for true solitude. Due wanted to call, but worried about interrupting her writing, the words that seemed so hard to come by lately.

I wonder if in all that aloneness, in all her solitude, she knew just how beautiful she was and that she was loved.

Blogging in your high school AP English lit class

Link: Blogging the Literary Life - Period 3 - AP College English - 2005/2006 - Oak Park River Forest High School.

A very interesting use of a class blog for high schoolers. Also of interest to teachers will be the instructors statement of responsibilities and introduction to blogging on the site. Bernie Heidkamp is the teacher, and it looks like some good things are happening in the classes.

Link: Your Blogging Responsiblities.

Each week you have a blogging assignment. You need to provide original entries to the blog as well as engage in a discussion of other entries by your classmates and teachers. You can always post an entry on any topic you think is related to the course (quickly linking to a story or a website that you think is informative, for example, or maybe offering a full-blown cultural analysis of a TV show you just watched) – but in order for your post to count for the assignment, your entries have to be connected to one of the following:

The text we are presently reading (either your own individual response to the text outside of class or a response to the discussion we are having about the text within class)

or

*The “Big Idea” we have associated with the text we are presently reading (or other Big Ideas that you see as clearly informing the text)

or

*A piece of contemporary culture that relates to at least one of the two above

Note: When I say they must be “connected” to one of the above, I mean that in a very broad sense. The blog is your space for your ideas. The only absolute requirement is that your response be original.

Each week you must

~Post at least one substantive entry on one of the above topics (at least one paragraph of 8-10 sentences or, more appropriately for the web, a series of smaller paragraphs) and

~Post at least two thoughtful, constructive comments on another recent entry (while you may disagree with the entry, do so respectfully, always trying to give credit along with criticism)

Link: All About Blogging ….

Can words really make a difference?

I stew about this all the time. Just had a discussion with someone last night over dinner over whether U.S. television viewers are pure Play Dough in spin doctors' hands, or whether critical thinking and questioning can make a difference.

Sophists would claim that words can be shaped to accomplish any desired result, with enough skill. Does it follow then that an audience is simply a mechanistic button to be pushed by the likes of Karl Rove? If that is the case, I argued at this wonderful Bangladeshi restaurant, why is the Bush Social Security pitch foundering?

I mean, when folks in the media (I work in TV news) saw the study showing that people who supported the invasion of Iraq believed more factual inaccuracies that had been clearly enunciated in multiple sources (in other words, "fact points" that could be easily checked and verified, confirmed) than people who were better informed and basically COULD pass a short multiple choice current events quiz, our incredulous response was something like, "wow, people will believe anything, even if it is wrong."

In other words, large numbers of people ARE Karl Rove's Play Dough.

It was also interesting to look at the correlation to where the folks got their information. Turns out Fox News viewers routinely FLUNK those short current events quizzes, while NPR listeners score the highest.

So the question is, why is the Social Security button-push "persuasion" failing? It is using all the same rhetorical techniques that Karl Rove has used to rewrite every PR and spin doctor textbook in the country. Why isn't the Play Dough cooperating?

Perhaps, as the columnist considers below, audiences never were Play Dough. Or in the immortal words of someone we know too well, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… can't get fooled again.

Link: Is Persuasion Dead? - New York Times.

June 4, 2005

Is Persuasion Dead?

By MATT MILLER

Speaking just between us - between one who writes columns and those who read them - I've had this nagging question about the whole enterprise we're engaged in.

Is persuasion dead? And if so, does it matter?

The significance of this query goes beyond the feelings of futility I'll suffer if it turns out I've wasted my life on work that is useless. This is bigger than one writer's insecurities. Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?

The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling "talking points." Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let's face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash.

By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what's right in the other side's argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.

The politicians and the press didn't kill off persuasion intentionally, of course; it's more manslaughter than murder. Persuasion just isn't relevant to delivering elections or eyeballs. Pols have figured out that to get votes you don't need to change minds. Even when they want to, modern media make it hard. They give officials seconds to make their point, ignore their ideas in favor of their poll numbers or showcase a clash of caricatures, believing this is the only way to make "debate" entertaining. Elections may turn on emotions like hope and fear anyway, but with persuasion's passing, there's no alternative.

There's only one problem: governing successfully requires influencing how people actually think. Yet when the habits of persuasion have been buried, the possibilities of leadership are interred as well. That's why Bill Clinton's case on health care could be bested by savage "Harry and Louise" ads. And why, even if George Bush's Social Security plan had been well conceived, the odds were always stacked against ambitious reform.

I'm not the only one who amid this mess wonders if he shouldn't be looking at another line of work. A top conservative thinker called recently, dejected at the sight of Ann Coulter on the cover of Time. What's the point of being substantive, he cried, when all the attention goes to the shrill?

[...]

But beyond this, the gap between the cartoon of public life that the press and political establishment often serve up and the pragmatic open-mindedness of most Americans explains why so many people tune out - and how we might get them to tune back in. Alienation is the only intelligent response to a political culture that insults our intelligence.

[...]