Space phenomenons. Music and lights at the very edge of perception.
https://video.mecp.de/embed/aAhcvuC23HE
https://hiemalambient.bandcamp.com/album/nimbe-daurores
#music_for_cosmic_phenomenons #drone_ambient #hiemal #longform_ambient
#music for cosmic phenomenons #drone ambient #longform ambient
About 300 Pakistanis died off the Greek coast in June. Others in their villages still want to make the same journey.#Features #Infographic #Interactive #Longform #Refugees #Asia #Europe #Greece #Italy #Pakistan
‘If I die, I die’: The allure of Pakistan’s death-trap route to Europe
The Nigerian singer-songwriter's artistry has been heavily influenced by places as varied as the church and strip clubs.#Features #ArtsandCulture #Longform #Music #Africa #Nigeria
Lojay, the preacher’s son minting romantic anthems from stripper therapy
He started off as a self-taught DJ in Paris, but Jeune Lio is now one of Francophone Africa’s most influential music per#Features #ArtsandCulture #Longform #Music #Africa #Cameroon #IvoryCoast
Jeune Lio, the Cameroonian-born ‘music conductor’ charming the Ivory Coast
Nigerian activist, actor and filmmaker Ego Boyo has been on a quest to up industry standards, for three decades.#Features #ArtsandCulture #Longform #Africa #Nigeria
The Nollywood pioneer seeking perfection in African storytelling
While the morning still unfolds...
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FSswE_U_cgs
#arctica #annunimas #ambient #longform
Spilling over from VTEL's Sunday Mix...
Struggled to remember the album name - and it's the name of this monstrously talented keyboardist, Lee Michaels.
I used to play [this long-form song and album until the vinyl - and 60's - faded away.
Alternative mind bender of the day (1968): In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
#music #musica #musique #musika #1968 #1969 #LeeMichaels #VinylAlbum #IronButterfly #60s #FM #longform
On January 20th, 2021, I stood on the press risers at the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, DC, photographing Joe Biden taking the oath of office. It had already been a busy and chaotic month. Two weeks prior, I’d stood on these same press risers making photos as tear gas clouded the air and violent insurrectionists broke through overwhelmed police lines to gain entrance to the Capitol. The dissonance between these two events was head-spinning.
When Senator Joe Biden won the election, I proposed a photo essay to Politico to document the first 100 days of the new administration and its effect on the city. I had previously done a similar story for them four years earlier that had run over 22 pages in Politico Magazine and online. They accepted the proposal and soon had put together an amazing team of designers, coders, and producers who would build the site for this story, integrating the photos, videos and audio I would capture over the next three-plus months.
Day 1: President Joseph R. Biden speaks at the 59th presidential inauguration in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, January 20, 2021 after being sworn in as President.
The structure of this project meant that each day was a new opportunity, a requirement really, to make a photo. I kept a running ideas document that I was constantly editing with the help of my photo editor at Politico. I closely watched a Twitter list I’d put together to find out about spontaneous protests, gatherings, and other opportunities. Every ten days, I’d put together an edit of what I’d photographed so far and send it over to my editor. This allowed us to work together to identify gaps in the story and be more intentional about telling a wide range of stories.
Day 2: A woman navigates the fencing setup for the Presidential Inauguration in parts of downtown Washington, DC, on the day after the Inauguration, on January 21, 2021.
Day 6: House managers walk the article of impeachment against President Donald Trump through Statuary Hall to the Senate Chamber in Washington, DC, January 25, 2021.
On day seven, I walked around the Capitol complex, which was completely fenced off from the public. A storm had come in overnight, covering the grass in wet, bone-chilling snow. The National Guard stationed around the Capitol worked twelve-hour shifts, standing guard through long, cold nights. They had been hastily called up, leaving behind school, jobs, and families, with little indication as to how long they’d be there for.
Day 7: National Guardsmen stationed around the US Capitol grounds in Washington, DC, January 26, 2021. Today, it was announced that the National Guard would remain in Washington, DC in sizable numbers until at least March, 2021.
On day 12, following a tip, I photographed an underground parking garage at a prominent private school in the city that had been converted into a large, outdoor classroom. By that time, my own kids had been attending school virtually for nearly a year and it was striking to see how private schools had managed to resume in-person, which was still months away from happening for public schools.
Day 12: An outdoor learning space set up in a parking garage at Georgetown Day School, a private school in Washington, DC, January 31, 2021. Public schools in the city have largely been closed or only accepting a fraction of their usual in-person students. DC public schools are scheduled to reopen on a limited basis on Thursday while the rest of the student population will continue to learn virtually.
Day 18 was a month to the day after the insurrection. Unseasonably warm weather brought throngs of people to the National Mall. Children played on picnic blankets, just feet away from the looming metal and concrete barriers that protected the Capitol. People stopped to take selfies by the fence, framing the photos to get the armed National Guardsmen over their shoulder in the shots, standing in silence.
Day 18: One month ago, insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol leading to the death of a Capitol Police officer. Today, a family picnics on the National Mall near a fence with National Guardsmen on the other side, in Washington, DC on February 6, 2021. 
Day 27: A foggy, rainy night at the Washington Monument in Washington, DC on February 15, 2021. 
Day 30: National Guardsmen shelter under an overhang at the Russell Senate Office Building during a snowstorm in Washington, DC on February 18, 2021.
I remember day 31 feeling like one of the coldest days of the winter. President Biden had made his first official Presidential trip to a Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan and I wanted to photograph him returning to the White House. I was familiar with the typical path that Marine One took and positioned myself on the National Mall, near the Washington Monument. The winter light was fading quickly as I stand in wet grass, waiting. At last, I heard a distance thump-thump of the helicopters, then watched Marine One fly past the Washington Monument to land on the south lawn of the White House.
Day 31: Marine One flies back to the White House after President Joe Biden’s trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan to visit a Pfizer COVID-19 production facility, in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2021. The trip to Kalamazoo was one of the President’s first official trips of his presidency. 
Day 34: Onlookers listen as the bells at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, are rung 500 times to memorialize the more than 500,000 people who have died from the coronavirus in the United States. 
Day 36: People dine outdoors at Le Diplomate, a restaurant in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC, on February 24, 2021. As of December, restaurants in the city were limited to indoor dining at 25% of their capacity. 
Day 39: Pro-democracy protesters march to the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, on February 27, 2021, in support of ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The State councilor was arrested by the military during a Coup d'état. Protesters blamed the Chinese government for its support of the Burmese military. 
Day 41: Workers remove the concertina razor wire from the tops of the fences surrounding the US Capitol complex in Washington, DC, on March 1, 2021. Despite enormous pushback, the fencing is slated to be replaced and the razor wire reinstalled. 
Day 46: A woman poses for photos near the Reflecting Pool at sunset in Washington, DC, on March 6, 2021. Today, the US Senate passed the $1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan on party lines. 
Day 53: Parents and students of DC public schools gather at Freedom Plaza to urge Mayor Muriel Bowser to reopen schools, on May 13, 2021. While some DC schools have reopened, they have only accepted limited numbers of students due to an agreement made with the Washington Teachers Union. 
Day 57: Activists participate in a vigil in response to the Atlanta shootings that appear to have targeted Asian Americans. Activists gathered near the Friendship Archway in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC, on March 17, 2021. 
Day 57: Activists participate in a vigil in response to the Atlanta shootings that appear to have targeted Asian Americans. Activists gathered near the Friendship Archway in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC, on March 17, 2021. 
Day 58: This past year has been incredibly hard on businesses in the city. Otello Osteria in the Dupont Circle neighborhood closed this past September after thirty-five years of business. 
Day 62: DC Statehood activists stage a protest in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, DC, on March 22, 2021. Later in the day, Mayor Muriel Bowser will testify in support of HR 51 which would make DC a state. The bill passed the House in 2009 and looks unlikely to be voted on in the Senate. 
Day 64: A knit mural of Vice President Kamala Harris is displayed near The Wharf. Artist London Kaye worked with 150 people across the country to crochet squares for the mural which were then combined. 
Day 67: Statues are adorned with facemarks at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.
Late March brought the arrival of the cherry blossoms, always a beautiful and picturesque time to be in the city. The normalcy of watching people walk under the pinkish-white canopy of flowers as the days grew longer had me hopeful that we’d seen the worst of the pandemic already pass.
Day 68: Visitors take shelter from an approaching storm along the Tidal Basin with the cherry blossoms trees approaching full bloom. NPS warned about the possibility of closing down the area if people were not maintaining social distance but as of today, have not yet taken action.
For a brief aside on equipment -- midway through the project (day 64 to be exact) I switched to Sony gear from Nikon. I’d been using Nikon DSLRs for years, shooting magazine covers, the BLM protests last summer, and many, many portraits.
I’ve been closely watching the progress of mirrorless cameras for years, noticing as more and more of my colleagues in DC make the switch. A few years back, I began using a Leica Q, an absolute gem of a camera that happened to be mirrorless. The experience taught me that my concerns about EVFs feeling laggy or not high-resolution enough were overstated and that it was time to embrace our pixel-ly viewfinder future. In January 2021, I took delivery of a couple of Nikon Z7 IIs. The cameras went into regular rotation.
My initial impressions of the Nikons were pretty mixed. It was a camera that felt slow overall -- slow turning on, slow focusing in low light, and slow switching from LCD to EVF.
I found myself casting about a little, unsure if I had made a good choice. When the Sony Alpha 1 was announced, it piqued my interest and I immediately pre-ordered one, receiving the first body in mid-March. The Sony Alpha 1 is the everything camera, a photographic tool with specs that seem tuned to conquer its competitors in a side-by-side comparison. The in-house CMOS chip production and an aggressive lens roadmap also drew me in.
For a few weeks, I shot the two cameras side by side, thousands of frames on each, and developed some strong feelings about how they were laid out. Generally speaking, I dislike the prominent positioning of the custom buttons on the Sony and prefer the way Nikon made more definitive choices about where important buttons should go (specifically the Playback and ISO buttons) which seem more logically placed. That said, the responsiveness of the Alpha 1 makes me never feel like I’m waiting on the camera to do something like I did with the Nikons. As a side note, I’m sure that the Nikon Z9 coming down the pipe will solve a lot of these issues but will also presumably weigh more which is a drawback for me.
The rest of the project was photographed with the Sony Alpha 1 and three lenses -- the Sony 35mm/1.4 GM, Sony 55mm/1.8 Sonnar, and Sony 70-200mm f/4.
As the weather warmed, I was able to photograph opening day at the Nationals stadium. Strict limits on press coverage meant I wasn’t able to get inside, but I found a nearby parking garage that gave me a good view of the field and nearly empty stands.
On April 2nd, day 73 of the project, tragedy once again struck the Capitol as a police officer was killed when a car crashed into a barricade. I felt tremendous empathy for the Capitol Police officers who were called to defend the Capitol, knowing they had once again lost one of their own.
Day 73: A US Capitol Police officer motions for the media to stay back as a group of National Guardsmen holding shields walk past him, during a lockdown after a car crashed into one of the permanent barricades surrounding the complex. Capitol Police officer William Evans was killed in the attack and another officer was injured. The assailant, Noah R. Green, was shot and killed by officers after emerging from the car holding a knife and threatening the officers. 
Day 75: An Easter Sunday service is held at St. Ann Roman Catholic Church, in Washington, DC. The church had previously implemented a reservation system for parishioners to attend services, but on this day, allowed anyone to come, but using an overflow room to help with social distancing. 
Day 77: The Washington Nationals play the Atlanta Braves on opening day of their season. The start of the Nationals season was delayed after some players tested positive for the coronavirus. 5,000 fans were allowed to attend the game.
The Nationals won the game against the Atlanta Braves in the bottom of the 9th as Juan Soto drove in the winning run to put the team ahead 6-5. 
Day 77: Fans walk to Nationals Park to watch the Nationals on opening day of their season. The start of the Nationals season was delayed after some players tested positive for the coronavirus.
The Nationals won the game against the Atlanta Braves in the bottom of the 9th as Juan Soto drove in the winning run to put the team ahead 6-5.
On day 83, I saw a post on Facebook that led me to a backyard concert for an audience of no one. These musician neighbors had gotten together every once in a while throughout the pandemic to play music together. It was joyful to photograph them very competently play some classic rock standards.
Day 83: Karen Harris (center), her husband Doug (right) play music in their backyard with their neighbors. The group of musicians in the AU Park neighborhood has gathered occasionally during the pandemic to play music outside. 
Day 86: Congressman Bill Foster walks through the Gun Violence Memorial on the National Mall. 40,000 flowers were placed on Mall to memorialize the victims of gun violence in the country each year. The memorial was implement by Giffords, a group led by Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona representative who was shot in the head at an event in her home state in 2011. 
Day 87: Section 60 of Arlington Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia where many of those killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. President Joe Biden announced it was “time to end” the war in Afghanistan, planning to fully withdraw troops by September 11, 2021. 
Day 90: A closed Lord & Taylor clothing store in the Friendship Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. The department store announced it was closing all of its stores in August of 2020 after declaring bankruptcy. 
Day 92: A man holds a sign in Black Lives Matter Plaza following the announcement that a jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd. 
Day 92: Cheria Askew celebrates at Black Lives Matter Plaza after a jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd. 
Day 93: A nighttime exposure of a cherry blossom tree at the Tidal Basin on Earth Day. This area of the Tidal Basin regularly floods due to a combination of rising waters from climate change and the land slowly sinking into the water. Many cherry trees have died after exposure to the brackish water. Today, President Biden pledged to cut US greenhouse gas pollution by 50% by the year 2030. 
Day 94: One of the lion statues outside of the National Zoo has a facemask. Today, the Smithsonian Institution announced that they would begin opening their museums, starting with the Udvar-Hazy Center opening on early May.
For weeks, I’d been thinking about what day 100 should look like. It had to be something with a near 100% chance of success -- I wouldn’t get another crack at it. I was looking for a photo that would both summarize and be worthy of my last day on this project. I decided instead of one photo, I would take (checks notes) 1,230.
Just like on day one, I got up well before dawn and loaded up a phalanx of gear. I drove down to a spot I had previously scouted a few days before, a statue in a traffic circle on 16th street that gave me an elevated straight-on view of the White House. I would photograph two timelapses (one serving as a backup) as the sun rose. At 4:45 AM, the cameras took the first photos.
Four hours later, the sunlight hit the White House’s iconic white columns and I was done. I rushed home to process the images and edit the timelapse. I sent the final video to the amazing team at Politico that had been building out the site over the past few months. A few hours later, the site went live.
Day 94: One of the lion statues outside of the National Zoo has a facemask. Today, the Smithsonian Institution announced that they would begin opening their museums, starting with the Udvar-Hazy Center opening on early May. 
Day 95: Ashley Ramirez, 14, of Culpeper, Virginia takes photographs for her quinceañera as her mother looks on at the District of Columbia World War I memorial. 
Day 95: The band Sligo Waterdogs plays at the first annual Petworth Porchfest. The music festival showcased local musicians playing on porches around the Petworth neighborhood.
Looking back, the best part of this project was the routine I’d developed of photographing day after day. While I won’t miss being glued to my Twitter feed, I did love the challenge of making an interesting image on days when there wasn’t an obvious news event to cover. I spent time in every ward in the city and had long conversations with people who (like myself) seemed eager to connect to another person after the isolation of the last year. I saw the economic devastation suffered by local businesses but also the inventiveness of those who were able to adapt, like a hairstylist who now made house calls after his salon closed. The work of photography often feels like a gift, an opportunity to be curious and look deeper and to do the work, day in and day out.
Day 97: Brood X cicadas emerge from the ground in Washington, DC after seventeen years underground. 
Day 99: Senator Joe Manchin leaves the Capitol grounds as President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress. 
Day 99: People cheer while watching as President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, from the Union Pub near the US Capitol.
Header image: Day 1 -- President-elect Joseph R. Biden takes the oath of office as First Lady-elect Jill Biden looks on during the 59th presidential inauguration in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.
_About the author: Stephen Voss is a photographer based in Washington, DC. He grew up in New Jersey and lives with his family in DC where he covers those in power and those seeking to be so. His clients include TIME, Politico, AARP, Salesforce, and Audi. His work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. He has an abiding love of bonsai trees, gardening, and going for nighttime runs.
His work can be found on his website. He writes about photography on Light Readings, and can be found on Instagram and Twitter._
#editorial #inspiration #longform #essay #first100days #joebiden #journalism #photoessay #photojournalism #politico #politics #stephenvoss #unitedstatespolitics
John Wehrle suggests at The Beginning is Near that it might be possible to split Google+ activity into separate activities using multiple tools. This is very much what I've been thinking, with the key requirement that the tools interoperate, and if possible interact.
What I foresee myself doing:
Write, blog, research, organise, and Wiki: GitLab, using a static-site generator, and finding some way to support search (a critical function) and if possible at least some commenting capacity. In this case, my source content is directly in my control, under git, on my own desktop, in backups, and at any other hosts I syndicate that to.
Direct syndication through RSS/Atom. Feedreaders and other systems can access / consume this. It's not widely used these days, but is the basis for basic syndication and other capabilities.
Propagation through microblogging platform(s). Mastodon certainly. I may even set up a Twitter account. I'm considering the username "Registered under protest" preliminarily.... (There's already a "dredmorbius", it's not me.)
Further propagation through social / lightweight blogging networks. Diaspora, Fediverse, Hubzilla, Friendica, etc.
Most of 3 & 4 would be automated.
(The lack of this is a major frustration on Reddit. It's pathologically bad for G+ Communities, do not even get me started.)
I think that's a big chunk of it.
If you want to engage with others, you have to be aware of what it is that they are doing. And in the unlikely event that there might possibly be any among the 7.3 billions of souls in this world you don't care to interact with, not being principally aware of what they're doing may prove helpful.
(Not being principally aware does not necessitate being unaware, as with a full block. Though that is frequently how the capability is implemented.)
A lightweight Notifs management as a secondary option could also be useful.
A gripe I have with Diaspora is that dealing with Notifs is slow. It's only a few seconds' lag, but that's seconds that don't have to be there. A <300ms target would be ideal. I'm getting ~3s, which is 10x worse, and which repeated 33 times (present notifs count) is three minutes spent just waiting for things to happen while I'm responding to Notifications. And in cases that bumps up 2-3x slower, or worse. Nine minutes of wait. And 33 notifs is light traffic, at least right now.
The models I'm thinking of are G+, Diaspora, Ello (which has had several variations of Notifications, and created then reverted the best I've ever seen, sort of a side-pane, Usenet reader (think Netscape's Usenet client, or rtin), Reddit, and Hacker News (great on everything except context, though limited to replies only). Mutt (console email client) is among the best interfaces I've ever seen, and some sort of local social-to-email gateway might address a few concerns / considerations.
Speaking of email and Usenet: among many factors which killed them (and there were many -- see "Why Usnet Died" at the Dreddit) was the fact that there was no standardisation of composing conventions. You had a few schools of this, but they interacted poorly:
(I've discussed this in the past month or so with Matthew Graybosh on Mastodon as well, if that discussion is discoverable. I'm ... not finding it presently.)
Among the fundamental failures was a failure to come to a common agreement on interactions. I had a revelation when reading about Docker, a lightweight virtualisation system. The technology consists solely of an agreement on how to do things. All the pieces were already there.
Incidentally, many of the problems with email also plague Web content. Sites are maddeningly inconsistent and idiosyncratic in their use of HTML, document structure (DOM), CSS, style, metadata, JavaScript, external dependencies, and more. I'm highly aware of this both given my dislike of most online styling (I have a large local CSS library applied to fix sites) and in trying to create a useful research archive of >10,000 articles from various sources. "Pocket: it gets worse the more you use it" is one of several critiques I've written of this, and there may be a project to address the useful utilisation of the Web as a research and collaboration platform. You know, as it was intended to be.
They can also create problems. Protocols that become change-resistant stagnate development. There are examples of this and the communications and information fields are rife with these because standards and conventions of exchange are the essence of communications. Lewis Carroll and the White Rabbit's "Glory" are the antithesis of communication -- if you use symbols known only to yourself, you can communicate with no one.
(Groups, though, using conventions known only internally, create the capacity to operate independently of an outside environment. This is a tool, for good or bad. See RibbonFarm's essay on "legibility vs. illegibility.)
SMTP, NNTP, IRC, SMS, HTML, nroff/groff, DocBook, Markdown, LaTeX (an extension of TeX), proprietary office formats (consider in context of above parenthetical note), RSS, Atom, XHTML, HTML5, the Federation / Fediverse protocols, Mastodon, diff formats, revision control formats, git, SSH, PGP, MIME, TCP/IP, Slack. They're all (at least in part) protocols, some open, some closed, some dynamic and developing, some static, some interacting, some not, some encapsulating, some encapsulated.
(Programming languages and various other bits overlap with this in various ways.)
OK, that's enough for this morning's ramble.
#googleplus #plusrefugees #protocols #MorningRamble #longForm #plexodus
Giselle Minoli made the point at #googleplus about only being able to trust what we make ourselves: I have to disagree entirely.
But she does get at an absolutely central point, and a concept I've been drilling into for a couple of years. Gideon Rosenblatt inspired a key insight as well.
Society is founded on trust. And how societies function is based on the level of trust within the society. There are high-trust, and low-trust societies, and this is a large area of study I've only just begun to scrape at (drop the terms into Google Scholar or Microsoft's academic database for starters).
We can trust in the institutions which found themselves on trust itself. That is, those which are accountable, open, transparent, commit to what it is that they will do. They may fail, but if they fail, they're open about that as well.
(Google are ... somewhat ... adhering to that last, though I wouldn't say they're doing a great job of this.)
Some time back on Hacker News discussing whatever, I replied to a comment saying "Oh, I could start up a project to do that" concerning some need with the observation that it wasn't the starting up that was hard, but the not-shutting-down part.
Silicon Valley, synecdoche for the information media technology industry as whole, is a start-up culture, but that goes hand-in-hand with being a shut-down culture. The sector takes risks, seeks extreme financial rewards, dubs them after fantastical creatures that don't exist, unicorns, and, if a venture is even only modestly rather than outrageously successful, kills the concept without blinking. Even if there are hundreds of thousands, or hundreds of millions of people affected.
Governments are institutions which are criticised for their inefficiencies, but a side-effect of that is a strong resistence to shutting down.
(Sometimes too strong, but then, all features can be useful or harmful, swords cut two ways, etc., etc.)
And governments aren't the only ends to these means. Social organisations, educational institutions, cities, and nations -- as cultural constructs of common language, religion, beliefs, traditions, rituals, etc. -- are extremely durable. Not indestructable, but far more resilient than most commercial institutions.
(I don't have explanations of why this is yet, though I'm thinking of a few possibilities. One that stands out is an ability to survive in a very-low-activity state for a long time -- call it a hibernation, pupal, or spore state if you will.)
What commercial structures provide is an immense capacity to capture capital flows and formation (debt, equity), attention (via the very information media technologies that Silicon Valley develops), political power, social, cultural, and propaganda influence, and the like. But the brightest stars burn out the fastest, and the trajectory of many tech firms is high but brief. AT&T, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft are among the oldest alive today. All are monopolies. (Something that goes very closely in hand with networks, physical, or logical.) All have reputations for playing rough, largely because there's very little other than aggression which creates a defensible space.
There are many things I've built myself which no longer work, or which I cannot maintain, or keep up-to-date with current needs. Rugged individualism is another trope, and in fact, the term itself is political -- Herbert Hoover used it in a speech in February of 1928, and its modern use is established from there (check that yourself on Google's Ngram viewer). So, no, we do need to work together, but we need to do so in ways that are trust-generative in and of themselves.
One of my strongest insights -- the one Gideon prompted me to -- was that advances in information technologies themselves tend to reduce overall social trust, and trust-building institutions. I'm not completely convinced this is correct, but it smells right to me.
In a pre-technological world, you could not communicate rapidly in rich detail beyond what you could immediately see or hear. You might be able to light a signal fire, visible for miles, to send a few bits. Or you could dispatch a messenger with a memorised or small written message, capable of covering 20 miles, possibly 250 miles on horseback, per day. Distant traval was impossible for months of the year -- November to May meant no seafaring due to storms and short days, in the Northern Hemisphere.
Every major preindustrial empire had an associated religion. The forms varied tremendously, but each had at its core a set of trust-generating precepts, behaviours that must be or could not be followed. Without the ability to check in on agents or counterparties at distant locations, you had to be able to rely on predictable behaviour. "A man's word is his bond." The concepts of name, that is, identity, and reputation, were virtually synonymous.
Deception occurred, certainly. History and mythology are full of it. But it's highly noted. Dante reserves his deepest pits of hell not for the transactors of violence, but for the betrayers of trust. This mattered to society tremendously.
Writing, printing, telegraphy, telephony, photography, cinema, radio, television, interactive communications systems, databases, the Internet, mobile connectivity -- all increased the capacity to see approaching real-time, or receive detailed representations of, conditions at a distance. You no longer relied on belief, testimony, and trust but on evidence.
(With profound implications for such trivial things as science and empiricism.)
A common observation of monitoring systems -- employee computer desktops, children's cellphones, professional review systems, etc. -- is that they break down trust. That's why you don't sneak a peak at your childrens' diaries or journals without a very good reason. (Generally: trust has already been broken.)
(This isn't an argument to stupidly deny evidence, but the line is a delicate one.)
Religion played this role before, I don't know that it can now, though I suspect something of roughly similar shape may be required. Note that the ancient empirical religions were not similarly structured; rather, they varied tremendously. Some were multitheistic, some pantheistic, some animist, some monothestic. Some had no gods, but were founded on meditation and practice. Some on ancestor worship. Some on rituals and sacrifice. And no, I'm not a Religions major, and my very casual familiarity with the field can certainly be corrected and strengthened.
There are also clear exceptions to the general rules. The Mongol Empire was largely tolerant of multiple religions, so far as I'm aware, and there were others as well, though I believe each did have a central faith of some form.
I don't have good answers yet, though I'm finding the questions interesting. I recommend others consider these issues.
Adapted from a G+ comment.
Society is a social network. Or more accurately, a social system, manifested through a network, with feedbacks, heuristics, sensing, learning (and forgetting), and interactions both with its external environment and internal components.
(I've been thinking this to death over the past few years.)
There are a lot of things that you can do to change a system, but if you change how it receives, processes, stores, retrieves, and most of all, transmits information, you change how it functions.
Want to cripple a man? You don't need to destroy his muscle or his brain, but only cut, or disable, or disrupt the nerve connecting the two.
Our information-technological social networks -- Facebook and Twitter, but also the telephone system, mail, radio and television, publishing, books, billboards, etc. -- have a whole slew of different characteristics, as I mentioned in my earlier post. And their impacts and influences on society are a direct consequence of those characteristics.
I haven't built out the comparison matrix yet, but I can think of a few elements.
Where communications are slow and analogue -- a messenger on foot or horseback, with a message committed to memory, and for which it might take days, or months, to traverse a territory -- the role of moral and behavioural frameworks is huge. I've been thinking for a while that it's no coincidence that every large pre-industrial empire had a major religious component to it. The forms of those religions varied massively (polytheistic/animistic, monotheistic, meditative, ancestor-worship, ritualistic), but the end result was largely similar: social behaviours as a whole were predictable.
As communications increased in speed, or in reliability, there's a shift. Written messages, which don't fade or forget, printed, which are reliably reproduced in mass, high-speed printing, enabling rapid dissemination of new development -- news. Visual reproduction or capture, woodcuts, etchings, photography, cinema, and audio in the form of phonograph, telephone, radio, tape, and digital records, create the ability for someone remote to receive a detailed record (or the appearance of one) of what is elsewhere.
Of mass reproduction, the three most-reproduced works in history are the Bible, the Sayings of Chairman Mao, and the Koran. Reproductions number in the billions. All are propaganda pieces. I find this significant.
Facebook dwarfs each of them, daily. The most viewed icon in world history is a blue F. Or, possibly, the Google Chrome symbol.
I'm coming to believe that increases in communications technologies result in decreased societal trust. If you cannot check up on somebody or some thing, you have to rely on trust that it is behaving as intended. If you can check on it, either periodically or in real time, you are freed from that reliance on trust, but in response, social institutions no longer need to foster and build that trust, and over time, begin to decay.
Claud Shannon in his paper on information theory I think (need to re-read that) distinguishes between two forms of message propagation. There are signals which move through space, and there are recordings which move through time.
("Information theory" is really a misnomer, I think, the field should be called "signal theory", to distinguish the transmission of encodings of meaning (information) for meaning itself.)
So we get one major division of communications systems: those which transmit signals and those which store recordings. There's some overlap, but you can usually find a fairly sharp and clear distinction between these.
Speech is a signal, writing is a recording. Telephony is a signal technology, phonography is a recording technology. There are cases in which the two elements are closely married: cinema combines recording (sequential film capture) with transmission (projection onto a screen), similarly television (video to tape recording, transmitter to receiver transmission), radio (via audio tape or other media), etc. In computers, the switch between in-flight and stored information happens extremely rapidly, with signals moving across wires, ports, cables, wireless media, etc., between disk, memory, cache, buffer, tape, optical, and other storage systems, but the two modes are still present if you look hard enough.
At the social level, you can divide many information technologies also by the sender-receiver relations:
For completeness, there are also null cases: 0:0, 0:1, 1:0, n:0, 0:n. These exist, and can be interesting, though they're largely not highly significant to this discussion.
We can also classify n and m as small, medium, or large, or perhaps by log(10) scales, at least roughly, with some fairly sharp transition points. 1, 10, 100, 1,000, ... 1,000,000 ... 1,000,000,000 ...
Then there's the question of bidirectionality (true or false), and interactivity or latency.
Applying this.
Speech is interactive and low-latency, but doesn't extend far (without amplification, channelling, or other means). It operates in 1:1 to 1:n and n:m modes, for small values of n and m. Conversations as such scale poorly past about 4 members, after which you start getting to a broadcast format, with varying levels of interaction between speaker (or speakers) and audience.
Writing is noninteractive and high latency but durable. It can be carried far, in both time and space. It is reproducible, and can be reproduced with high accuracy. It trades fidelity (tone of voice, accent, pauses, inflection, non-verbal cues) for compactness and transmissibility.
Printing is an amplification of writing. It tends to operate in broadcast modes, though you can have smaller-scale elements.
Writing and printing both rely on a social infrastructure of literacy or barring that readers or presenters who can express or encode from and to written form: scribes. (The original modems.)
Telegraphy, a store-and-forward system, combines both transmission and storage (the original telegraph patent required a message-recording capability). Other than a very few exceptionally low-bandwidth visual signalling systems (signal fires, optical telegraphs, semaphores) and lightweight messaging protocols (passenger pigeons), this was the first time any message could travel more than a few words or miles per hour beyond immediate audible or visual range. Within a few years of its invention (1835), telegraphs crossed countries and continents, within a few decades, oceans. Information had never moved further, faster, and it was absolutely revolutionary.
It changed how people wrote and talked. If you look at writing, personal or business, BT and AT (before and after telegraph), they are completely different. BT writing is ornate, flowery, deferential, ornate, obsequious. AT writing is terse, direct, blunt, and structured. I suspect two reasons:
Volume cost too much, literally. A telegram could cost several dollars for ten words, when a dollar was 10-20x its value today.
The volume of messages was increasing to the point that readers simply didn't have the time to plough through, and decode, the ornate speech of earlier times. Get to the point, and stick to the format.
Mark Twain, the first modern American writer, was a former newspaperman with much familiarity of telegraphs and wire copy.
There's a literature of this, particularly JoAnne Yates and James Beniger, on the evolution of business writing and communications.
The telephone offered person-to-person long-distance communication (where "long distance" meant beyond the walls of one's own house or office). The first p2p realtime network. Again, expensive, but revolutionary.
Phonography and cinema allowed a large listenership to hear, or see, performances, on demand. They functioned much as books do, but with the fidelity of audio and visual channels.
Radio and television broadcast an identical message to a large audience -- an entire city, later across countries and continents. It was possible to instill a mass message in realtime, but in a one-way transmission. Initially this was live -- what the audience heard over their radio or saw on television was being performed in a studio simultaneously. The invention of high-fidelity audio tape by Germany during WWII was a military-grade secret technology, and bamboozled Allied signals intelligence as it enabled Adolf Hitler to give speeches of apparently live-quality across all of Germany, or at times when he was located elsewhere. Development of the hi-fi industry in the U.S. after the war was supported in large part by military and intelligence agencies.
And broadcast media played a huge role in the emergence of fascism in Italy and Germany, as well as similar developments in the US -- Father Caughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and other demagogues, including those of the present time.
Following the invention of television itself, we've seen further developments which (OK, I've written way too much already), I'll just list out briefly: Color television, cable networks, FM radio, ham and citizens-band radio, talk radio, 800 WATS lines, dial-up remote computer systems, BBS systems, terminal-based computing, email / Usenet, increasing digital storage capacities, the Internet, Web, and mobile computing, high-definition video.
I'd break these into categories of fidelity, distribution, access, interactivity, storage, capacity, cost, bandwidth, latency, and total availability, with advances affording one or more of these.
Each changed behaviours, some more than others. And you can point to each of these and identify an age (TV age, radio age, ...), culture, commercial development, or political development, associated with them. Media and culture are interdependent and each influences the other.
(Also, to be clear, this is not stuff I studied in school, though I increasingly wish I had. This has been my ongoing research of the past few years.)
The question was asked "what already existing social institution is the closest analogy to digital social network platforms". I think you're right to think of transportation systems, and a dense set of roadways between a closely-spaced set of cities is probably a good analogy. There is lot of commerce and interchange, there is commercial, individual, institutional, and governmental traffic. There is positive and negative activity. There are unintended consequences. Roads bring plauges as well as commerce. Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome explores the co-evolution of disease and the Roman empire, shaped by its cities, geography, culture, and very, very much its transport and commerce systems, fascinating read.
You might also want to look at nonhuman systems -- interactions between different species in ecosystems, for example. Information traveling within and between different populations, at different speeds, again, sometimes to mutual benefit, or with predator-prey, host-parasite, symbiotic, and other relationships.
The biggest differences of digital networks are scale and speed. There's more information, moving faster. This in itself is disruptive, and dominates much else. The limiting factor is no longer bandwidth or storage capacity but attention and individual and social processing ability.
(Again: not new ideas -- Herbert Simon had realised this by the 1960s, Arthur Toffler's Future Shock explores the concept in depth as of 1974. But I've only just been realising the absolutely massive impacts.)
I'll toss one other bit into the mix: grief is not about loss, at least not in the sense that we're used to thinking about it, but of a challenge or destruction of our worldview. That is, it's when our model of the world is disrupted, we grieve.
The loss of a loved one, or news of our own impending death from a terminal illness (the subject from which the Kübler-Ross model was derived) fits this because the world to which we'd become accustomed has suddenly changed. A loved one -- parent, partner, child -- dying affects us deeply because there is so much attached to them in our worldview.
The loss of a job, or relationship, or a pet, affects us similarly.
But there are other ways for worldviews to be challenged.
We may lose (or gain) a faith in religion or God. We may find a long-held scientific belief is invalid. We may find some ideological construct -- the efficiency of free markets, the goodness of strangers, the badness of some other -- race, religion, other side of the tracks -- is invalid. Our worldview is changed.
There are less drastic forms of this as well. A favourite coffee cup breaks, we need to give up a car. We encounter somebody in a space we thought was empty. Being surprised, startled, disappointed, or even amused, by something unexpected, is, I think, an example of an emotional response at the low end of the grief continuum. Sadness, anger, annoyance, and irritation may fit in there as well.
These are all individual responses.
And we go through these at various points in life, sometimes at well-established points, sometimes not. We have rituals for major life events: birth, baptism, starting or graduating from school, marriage. All are hugely disruptive, but the ceremonies involved help carry us through the transitions.
There are unscheduled events as well, some have institutional support, others don't. Death offers funerals, but there's no established social ritual for divorce, or job loss, or macular degeneration, or a parent going senile. "They suffer alone" is the common refrain. Or in small groups.
Those can be bitter personal tragedies.
But what happens when societies grieve?
Again, there are some cases which are well-supported. A royal funeral or coronation. Elections, with their winners and losers. Inaugurations.
But what of a society which discovers as a whole that its beliefs, institutions, myths, are hollow? That its gods, or God, has died?
The tragedy of the RMS Titanic created a fantastic film. No, not David Cameron's, but a 1950s version, A Night to Remember. I'd heard of it long ago but only saw it within the past few years. One way of viewing it was the propagation of an understanding that a worldview had failed, through the crew and passengers of what's now an archetypal doomed ship. The first to realise are the ship's own architect and captain, not only that Titanic will sink, but that at least a thousand souls will die, despite anything they do. As the film progresses, others of the crew and passengers are faced with the reality. Some accept it, some deny it, some ignore it. But reality has a way of imposing itself, and eventually does.
What scares me about the present, is that I think we're going through two huge transitions. One is the information revolution I'd been talking about for ... the first way-too-long part of this post. The second is a breakdown of ... damned near everything. Our political systems, our economic beliefs, our understanding of humanity's place and role in the world and ecosystem, our 250 year myth of unlimited growth, of technology, of perfectibility.
And whilst we're not all realising this at precisely the same moment, it seems we're becoming increasingly aware of these breakdowns, and grieving, at the same time the sensing, feedback, storage, processing, and communications component of our social system is being completely rewired. Literally.
And that scares me a little.
Adapted from a G+ comment. There's a bit on information systems and platforms that it's referring to, though most of this should stand on its own. I'm planning on publishing the parent post after cleaning it up a bit.
#longform
#information
#systems
#media
#grief
#worldview
#socialNetworks
#society
