#digitalmedia
On Paperwork vs. Digital Formats
tired: Our customer's paperwork is profit. Our own paperwork is loss.[1]
wired: Your proprietay data format is loss. Our proprietary data format is profit.
I'd remembered the first aphorism from a long-ago collection of Murphy's Laws.
Thinking through my struggles at organising online and digital media, references, etc., I realised that a huge problem is that these formats don't serve my goals. They're designed far more around their authors' goals, or even more often, the publishers' goals, largely around advertising, marketing, tracking, building lock-in, creating and defending monopolies, and the like.
Digital formats that are in the end-user's interest and specification serve the user. Those that are in the publisher's specification serve the publisher.
A related thought is that a key affordance of printed periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals) is that of garbage collection, to put a contemporary spin on it.
When you're done reading a newspaper or magazine, you pick up the whole lot and throw it out. There's an intermediate level of organisation other than "the article" and "the whole collection" (that is, everything published in your office or home), "the issue". (Or perhaps a box or shelf of archived media.) That is, _there are multiple naturally-occurring levels of aggregation.)
When you're trying to sort through a set of browser tabs, you generally have only two levels of aggregation: the individual tab, or the entire session. There are typically no intermediate levels, and sorting through what you want to keep (or re-read, or work with) means you've got to go through the set one at a time and resolve disposition. The data format serves the browser vendor, but not the user.
Tools such as Tree-Style Tabs, an absolutely essential Firefox extension, give a higher level of natural organisation, the tab tree. Here, a structure emerges, without user effort, of related content. At the top of the tree is whatever page began an exploration, and as you descend it, you go further down into the search. When cleaning up, it's possible to pick any given tab, branch, or whole tree, and close it out in one fell swoop. Garbage collection costs are reduced.
(Three guesses as to what I've been attempting to do, and the first two don't count.)
Notes:
- (Tony) Brown's Law of Business Success
#media #paperwork #DigitalMedia #DigitalFormats #FileFormats #DataFormats #kfc #docfs #UserCentricDesign #TreeStyleTabs
Fairness Reconsidered: Receiving Public as a Commons
The conceit of the Fairness Doctrine was that broadcast spectrum was a commons, and a limited public resource, arbitrarily allocated to a given (usually private) party. The right came with the obligation to manage this common resource in the public interest. The doctrine went through a few iterations before arriving at the "Fairness Doctrine" formula in 1949, notably the Mayflower Decision (1941). There is similar history, though often arriving at different policies, elsewhere, notably the heavy reliance on government-owned or -controlled broadcasting through much of what was otherwise free Europe: the BBC, Germany, France, etc., much of that strongly informed by the rise of fascism and Nazi German in the 1920s and 1930s. (The US had its own fascist / populist demagogues, notably Father Charles Edward Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy.)
This past week's On the Media podcast has a good introduction to the Fairness Doctrine, in the context of Fox News and why the F.D. itself is inadequate to address Fox. (Hint: Cable subscribers.)
The past 5, 10, 20 years or whatever timeframe you care to throw at it, of experience in the online world suggest that treating digital media over (mostly) private infrastructure as strictly private ... has some pronounced failure modes, to use technical understatement.
I haven't seen others making this argument yet, though I suspect some are, but my view is, roughly, that public mindshare is itself a commons, and should be held and managed in the public interest. There's a point at which reach or penetration themselves become exploitation of a public resource, and concern over the impacts of such reach are legitimate public concerns.
If you look at the fundamentals of information theory, there are three (or four) major components:
Sender -> Channel -> Receiver
You could also add noise, encoding, and decoding.
The Fairness Doctrine concerned channel.
Both free-speech and classic censorship matters, concerns sender (and to at least some extent, channel).
The new doctrine I'm suggesting covers the receiver, and specifically the general public as a general message recipient.
One could argue that disinformation, fake news, propaganda, and distraction are forms of intentionally introduced noise, and I'm sure there are elements concerning encoding and decoding which might be similarly considered.
Again, I'm not aware of anyone else offering a similar view, but it seems to me that our traditional models of speech, publishing, broadcasting, censorship, and responsibility are failing us here.
#FairnessDoctrine #FCC #Broadcasting #DigitalMedia #Media #OnTheMedia #Commons #Audience #InformationTheory