The Good Wife 5.9: Reddit, Crowd-Sourcing, and the First Amendment on Trial

The Good Wife has been having a fabulous year - not only because of Alicia leaving Lockhart Gardner now LG and all the emotional dynamite that set loose - but because of its fearless, irrelevant tackling of of major new new media aka social media issues.   The fictional mega search engine Chumhum is the center piece of most of this, but the egregiously nonfictitious NSA also figured in a major episode, and this past Sunday Reddit got its turn in the barrel.

Not Reddit by name, but the pejoratively named Scabbit is the bad guy in an important suit that LG and Florrick-Agos are locking horns over in court.   In our reality, Reddit is the self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet," which it to some extent is.  It works in the same way the almost late, lamented Digg used to work:  users can posts links to anything on the web, in appropriate categories (subreddits).   Other uses can then vote the links up or down, and comment on them.  The links with the greatest number of votes make the front pages - the master front page of Reddit, and the front pages of  the subreddits.

Also in our reality, Reddit came in for its fair share of criticism earlier this year with its well-meaning attempt to identify the Boston bombers.   Pictures were posted on Reddit, and readers were encouraged to identify the presumed bomber.  Unfortunately, this crowd-sourcing produced a wrong ID, showing that democracy has its limits in the apprehension of criminals.

On Sunday night, a Florrick-Agos client is the victim of a similar problem.  He's wrongly accused of a bombing at a food festival, and his pictures continue to be posted on Scabbit even after he's legally cleared.  As these postings begin to ruin his life, Lockhart and Gardner defend Scabbit against Florrick and Agos's attempt to get the court to insist that Scabbit not allow any more of these damaging postings on its site.   Scabbit's reply is that they'll take down any postings after they occur, but committing not to allow any postings beforehand would constitute "prior restraint," or a violation of the First Amendment.

It's valuable to see this issue treated on television.  I'm an absolutist regarding the First Amendment when it comes to the government getting in the way of any speech or publication or peaceable demonstration - meaning, I think FCC fines for "objectionable" broadcasting and NYC Mayor Bloomberg's interference with the press during Occupy Wall Street are equally unconstitutional - but the First Amendment should protect neither traditional nor social media from libel and slander suits, when they act irresponsibly in publishing defamatory information.   Crowd-sourcing, in other words, has its limits, and we need to work a little harder to decide what they are and promote them.

See also The Good Wife 5.1: Capital Punishment and Politicians' Daughters ... The Good Wife 5.5: The Villain in this Story

And see also The Good Wife 4.1 Meets Occupy Wall Street ...  The Good Wife 4.2: Reunited ... The Good Wife 4.3: "Template-Based Link Analysis Algorithm" ... The Good Wife 4.5 Meets The Sopranos ... The Good Wife 4.20: Anonymous ... The Good Wife Season 4 Finale: Good Twist!

And see also The Good Wife 3.1: Recusal and Rosh Hashanah ... The Good Wife: 3.2: Periwigs and Skype ... The Good Wife 3.7: Peter v. Will ...  Dexter's Sister on The Good Wife 3.10  ... The Good Wife 3.12: Two Suits  ... The Good Wife 3.13 Meets Murder on the Orient Express ... The Good Wife 3.15: Will and Baseball

And see also  The Good Wife Starts Second Season on CBS ... The Good Wife 2.2: Lou Dobbs, Joe Trippi, and Obama Girl ... The Good Wife 2.4: Surprise Candidate, Intimate Interpsonal Distance ... The Good Wife 2.9 Takes on Capital Punishment ... The Good Wife 2.16: Information Wars 

#SFWApro

New York Times and Harvard Miss the Point About News

The New York Times reported a few weeks ago that "Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice" - this being the conclusion of a Harvard study which found "only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did." This means kids "aren't acquiring the news habit," observed Thomas Patterson, the Harvard professor who conducted the survey.

I think Patterson, Harvard, and, as per usual, The New York Times, are missing a crucial point: kids, teenagers, and young adults are getting their news on Digg, Netscape, Fark, and similar news sites.

People under thirty not giving up on the news - they're giving up on outmoded ways of presenting it.

Why read a newspaper, on paper or online, when you get headlines from hundreds of newspapers on Digg - in addition to blog posts and anything else with a url?

Nor does this mean that newspapers are finished - they just have to think of themselves as something different, a generator of stories that other sites pick up and distribute. In that sense, traditional organizations such as Reuters and AP are well ahead of newspapers in this new media world.

Of course, one problem that newspapers such as The New York Times will have is publishing misleading stories. It was one thing when the reader had the whole newspaper in hand, the good and the badly reported. It is quite another when a reader can effortlessly click off a story and go someplace else for another, or better rendition - or a different story entirely.

thoof.com and outer space

There's an excellent new site - thoof.com for personalized news - where you can easily get news stories, video clips, photos, etc suited to your interests. If Digg is a bustling, often frenetic department store, think of thoof as an inviting boutique.

Once you sign up and start reading (free, and the easiest sign-up I've ever seen), thoof keeps track of your interests. They serve you a personalized page of stories, vids, links, etc that reflect what you like.

When I logged on for the first time, at least half a dozen a stories caught my eye - a time.com piece about the worst sites on the Web, Harry Potter's first long kiss, and (of course) a story about iPhone were among them. But I decided to check out A Better Purpose for N.A.S.A. Space is one of my passions, and I've long thought that NASA could indeed be doing a much better job.

It's always a kick to find an article that you agree with wholeheartedly. Phil B. argues that NASA needs to set a much more ambitious agenda and framework (I won't say groundwork) for space colonization and settlement than it has done thus far. We need to learn how to work and live beyond our planet, not just explore. Efforts like the Biosphere II in Arizona need to be revamped and taken off of this world.

I also agree with Phil, and argue extensively in my own book, Realspace, that our efforts in space need to be less dependent on politicians. This is no easy task - government funding can launch a lot of space ships - but we have to make those ships and our habitats in space less hostage to a politician or party being voted in or out of office.

Had it not been for thoof.com, I would not have seen this important article - it was posted on the philforhumanity blog more than nine months ago. I'll no doubt be contributing articles of my own to this great new site. Count me a happy participant, reader, and writer.

Live Free and Die Hard: Great Movie!

I saw Live Free and Die Hard with my son this afternoon, and loved it! (He did, too.)

It was an especially satisfying and appropriate movie, in this the weekend of the iPhone.

Some background and explanation -

1. I thought the first Die Hard movie was superb, the second excellent (meaning, not quite as good as the first), and the third very good. I'd rate the fourth - Die Hard and Live Free - as definitely better than the 2nd and 3rd, perhaps as good as the first, and in some ways, even a little better.

2. This movie had a James Bond and Terminator feel - two different things, of course - but LF&DH had them both. Bruce Willis (John McClane) was a little smoother than in the previous movies (and Daniel Craig was a little rougher in the most recent Bond, which drew the two characters and performances closer). The Terminator quality - by which I mean getting up from an explosive fire burning all around you - was also in the previous movies, but was more pronounced and effectice in LF&DH. One of my favorite scenes had Bruce taking on a figher jet - from the ground - and doing pretty well for himself.

2a. McClane also has a heightened MacGyver quality in this movie, harnessing the little and big technologies around him, making them work in ways against the villain, when hands and feet and guns are not enough.

3. Justin Long was fine as Matt Farrell, the (at first, reluctant) hacker sidekick. If you think Long really looked the part, you'd be right - he's the "I'm a Mac" guy in the Mac-PC commercials. He also looks somewhat like Kevin Rose of Digg fame, but people sometimes think my "looks like"s are a little off...

4. Timothy Oliphant was a good, tough, highly intelligent bad guy for McClane - following the tradition of the other Die Hards - and his bad girl friend, played by Maggie G - was hot, as well only almost as bad, tough, and viciously intelligent as Oliphant.

5. The true meaning of the movie: Farrell at some point explains to McClane that although so much of our lives and jobs is conducted online, there are still essential off-line components. This not only plays a major role in the movie, but symbolizes McClane - it takes his analog, real-world attributes to combat an ingenious and ruthless cyber-villain (who also understands that the real payoffs may be offline). In other words, there are some things even an iPhone can't do.

Hey, I like this lesson so much, I even wrote a book about it in 2003 - Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age.

But you won't need to read it to see Live Free and Die Hard - it's great on its own.

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Ward Churchill - Professor Pinocchio

The President of the University of Colorado has recommended that tenured professor Ward Churchill be fired.

This seems like a good time to go over what I see as the reasons why and why not.
Let's start with three issues that should have nothing to do with his firing:

1. His views about 9/11, ranging from crackpot conspiracy theories to repulsive metaphoric links of victims to Nazis, should not be grounds for his firing. A professor should never be fired for his or her political views, however outrageous they may be. Of all places in our society, the university must be open to the greatest diversity of ideas.

2. The First Amendment to our Constitution does not protect him. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with speech and press. Although the FCC, with Congressional support and urging, violates this Amendment almost every day, neither one of them is going after Churchill. Universities should indeed encourage and enforce a maximum openness to speech and ideas - see #1 above - but this flows from university tradition and culture, not the First Amendment.

3. Tenure does not protect him. Tenure is often wrongly portrayed in our popular culture as giving its recipients immunity from being fired for any reason whatsoever. Not true. If a professor has tenure in a department which loses all of its students, and the professor has competence to teach in no other area, that tenured professor can be fired. Also, if a tenured professor commits a crime, or more to the point here is guility of fraudulent scholarly conduct, he or she can be fired.

Let's look at that last point, which in the university's view - based on its reports and the President's statement this morning - warrants Churchill's firing. Assuming the claims about Churchill's conduct are accurate, I agree.

Churchill is accused, among other things, of plagiarism (passing someone else's research and work off as his own) and its reverse, sock puppetry (passing your own voice off as someone else's). Either charge, if justified, would be ample grounds for Churchill's dismissal. Most people understand why plagiarism is wrong. What's up with sock puppetry?

I first became aware of the term almost a year ago on Wikipedia - where articles are edited, and can be removed, by group consensus. In this environment, an editor A logging on to Wikipedia under a false identity B, and arguing that A's point is brilliant, is clearly destructive to the system. Digg is beset by sock puppetry, too, but since Diggs and Buries are more the result of raw votes than protracted discussion, it takes a big number of sock puppets to do any real damage. (Meat puppets are real people who create accounts on an online system solely to support another person. Although they can distort online consensus-building too, the ethical violations of meat puppetry are far less clear than those of sock puppetry, since you can't know for sure what the meat puppet really believes.)

Back in the analog world, a scholar employing a sock puppet identity to support his or her work is the most damaging of all. At least on Wikipedia, a wrong decision made under the baneful influence of sock puppets can be easily reversed. A scholarly reputation in the real world and all that comes with it - including tenure at a university - can take much longer to undo, if necessary, because sock puppetry was part of its basis.

I am not directly privy to the facts in the Churchill case. But if it is indeed true that he even once wrote under a false identity to support his scholarly work, the University of Colorado should cut its ties to him and throw him out the door faster than a broken Pinocchio.

Digg and Wikipedia: Further Adventures in Gate-Opening

The latest stop in my world-wide-web tour of new media without gatekeepers brings me to . . . Digg.com - where readers not editors decide what is in the headlines, what makes the front page - because there are no editors.

First, the basics: You, anyone, can become a user or participant on Digg, as easily as you can on MySpace, gmail, Yahoo, and the rest. Once you have an account on Digg, you can submit a story - that is, list on Digg an already existing story, from some online venue, any online venue, a blog, a newspaper online, whatever, as long as it has a URL. (But not MySpace - at least not today - as I'll explain below.) Most of the stories are about some aspect of news - entertainment, business, tech, etc - and Digg also has listings for videos and podcasts.

But listing is just the beginning, and by no means the most revolutionary aspect of Digg. Because once listed, a story can be "dugg" by any other members of Digg - who also have the option of "burying" a story (which also can be just ignored, too). The more net diggs a story has, the higher it gets in the rankings. And the highest ranked stories make the front page, where they can be seen and ranked by everyone who logs on to Digg.

Newly entered stories get put in a high profile upcoming category, where they'll sink or swim - get buried or get too few diggs to make the front page, which of course happens to most stories.

Users also can comment on stories, and these comments can themselves be dugg or buried (but buried comments are still viewable - requiring just a click to come back from the grave).

Now, if this system seems Wikipedian to you, I'd agree. What Wiki is to encyclopedias, Digg is to news media - in both cases, the reader has replaced the expert editor. The aggregate of humanity, rather than the professional few, are calling the shots. There are some differences. Wiki is even more open to the unidentified masses - anyone can edit on Wikipedia, you don't need an account. And, of course, befitting an encyclopedia, the best articles live forever in equi-accessibility on Wiki - which also doesn't put new articles up for a vote, unless someone sees a problem with them. On Digg, articles sooner or later fall in the listings, out of sight and out of mind of most readers.

But the similarities are impressive, considering that Digg and Wiki are, after all, two very different systems. Digg, like Wiki, is constantly embroiled in the struggle between Light and Darkness - between vandals and builders - that is also the daily tableau on Wikipedia. A Digg vandal, for example, would be someone who puts up links to the same bogus article, with cleverly different URLs. Or a vandal with a couple of hundred friends on Digg can make a lame article very popular. People who want to "game" the system have lots of opportunities.

And, just as Wikipedians can sometimes remove worthwhile articles in an attempt to keep the encyclopedia up to often blurry standards (such as "neutral point of view"), Digg can keep certain items out of its system, whatever their quality. I just noticed today, for example, that MySpace blogs - any URL with the blog.myspace.com prefix - is not allowed listing, because some entry or entries with that prefix were "reported" (meaning, accused of being part of some gaming or vandalism).

But as I do with Wikipedia, I think the pros far outweigh the cons on Digg, precisely because the system gets imput from everyone, not just the pros. In the old media system, Walter Cronkite used to end his CBS Evening Newscast with the words "and that's the way it was..." But the truth is, that kind of news cast did and still does reflect the way that a tiny group of editors think you should think that it was ... That would have been a lot to admit, at the end of a newscast.

The New York Times still says you're getting "all the news that's fit to print" when you read the paper. But the truth is you're getting all the news that a small group of editors deemed fit to print. Doesn't parse very well, either.

Digg, whatever its flaws, is a valuable alternative to that kind of pretension.

Have a look for yourself - www.digg.com

Expanded podcast with some additional points: diGGin' Round