Tag: media

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The Eternal Cocktail Party

One of the things I like least about my job is the necessity to go to cocktail parties and make small talk.   I am sure that someplace in Dante’s Inferno is a level where unfortunate souls circulate endlessly and chatter eternally w/o saying anything at all.  Now Twitter is spreading the cocktail party experience to all the world all the time and airheads everywhere are elated and vindicated.   They seem to feel that when their inane and banal blather is ennobled when it is carried over advanced technology. 

Some people bragged that they were twittering during a recent speech by President Obama.   I mean they didn’t hide it; they bragged about it.  How rude is that?  The President of the United States is talking and you are invited to be there in person, but instead of listening, you are talking to others, commenting on what the man is saying before he has a chance to finish his thought.    The fact that you are doing it on with your thumbs on an electronic toy only makes it worse.   Maybe I am just old fashioned, but if the President is standing in front of me talking, I think it is a good idea to pay attention.   

IMO – Twitter is good for sending out notices and very short breaking news, not much else.  The idea that people will just share their unformed thoughts is just silly.  Not everybody agrees.  Take a look at this NYT story.

Think about the kind of people who like – really like – cocktail parties.  Do we really want so many more of them?   At least at a real cocktail party you have some beer to dull the pain.  A little twitter goes a long way.    Human attention is too rare and valuable to waste.

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Let the Games Begin

Continuing my thoughts on games in public affairs, interactive games will soon become the leading method of persuasion and a key advertising medium.   I know that is a sweeping statement.   Those familiar only with the “Space Invaders” game generation will think I am nuts.  The “Myst” people will see the merit in the statement, and those playing World of Warcraft would heartily endorse it, if they could divert their attention long enough from their games.   Games are already a primary way that young people interact with data, each-other and the world in general.   Even the EU now thinks that gaming might be good for young minds, so we better get used to the idea that games.  For a funnier approach, take a look at this video.

Games’ pervasive persuasive ability is part of a continuum of imagined worlds so let’s digress a little to the more familiar previous persuasion champion – the play (or in the modern versions the movie or TV show).  Sophocles and Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil and George Lucas & Steven Spielberg were/are masters of persuasion and they all knew what they were doing.   Think of a play as a very long commercial message that you volunteer to watch.  And remember that if a thirty-second commercial can sell you a product, don’t you think an hour and thirty minute play or a thirty minute TV show can sell you an idea or a lifestyle.

The writers, producers, directors and actors work together to sell you an idea.  Sometimes it is  innocuous; sometimes not.  Shakespeare sold us all the Tudor version of English history and we bought that Richard III was nothing but a sneaky rat and Henry V was a great and brave hero.  There is some truth to some of these characterizations, but they are fictional caricatures, not history.  It was a conscious effort at propaganda, but it was so skillfully done that it is still part of the fabric of our society four centuries later.   A skillful current propagandist is Oliver Stone.   Many people draw their knowledge of JFK or Nixon from his movies and the images are strong.  Even when you know the real history of the events, it is hard to get the image out of your mind.   The living, moving image often trumps the truth of history.   That is the power of the play/movie/TV Show.    

The writers/producers/directors control ALL the characters.   They can make the ones they don’t like unlikable or stupid.  It is all a set up.  They can structure events so that faults are revealed AND they can give characters the faults to be revealed.    It is analogous to your own dream, where all the characters are you but they seem to be others and that is how you react.   In every play, for persuasion purposes, the bad guys and the good guys are on the same side.  They are all working for the guy who wrote the play.  But the illusion remains.    Directors sometimes disingenuously talk about characters as independent or they ridicule critics by pointing out that it is only fiction.   Think of how you view familiar historical people or events.  Now consider whether your image came from reading actual history or just watching it on TV.   

BTW – the power of the producer has increased in Orwellian fashion.  Now many directors go back to their movies and change them to fit the current situation and sensibilities.   The “Star Wars” you saw in 1979 is not the same one you will see today.  “He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past,” is the philosophy of Ingsoc and Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.”

But the power of the play/movie/TV show pales in comparison to a modern game.  Viewer might get involved in a drama, but not matter how involved the couch potato gets, he is still a passive participant.   None of his intelligence or perception will change the course of the investigation on “Law & Order”  and none of his passionate tears will prevent one death on “House” or “ER” and the rerun will unfold exactly as it did the first time.

Not so in a game.   The game provides some choices and the illusion of free will.   What you do makes a difference to the outcome.   That is why games are so addictive.   You get to be a player in all the senses of that word.    The irony is that BECAUSE you are making choices and seeming to go your own way, the power of persuasion is multiplied.  

The game maker sets all the parameters.   He can suspend the universal laws of physics.  He can dictate the nature of human interactions.   He can dictate the nature of human nature itself.  Animals can become wise; inanimate object can be animated.   The game maker can determine heroes and villains, but now they are also YOUR friends and enemies.    Humans have a wonderful capacity to personify animals and objects.   It is much easier when these things have elements of a real personality.    Games create that.

I don’t think most game makers have an explicit social or political agenda, but they do have perceptions and prejudices that color their view of reality and so come to color the reality of many others. 

I no longer play many video games and I date myself when I say that used to play Sid Meyer’s Civilization, a game from the 1990s.   It is the only game that I really know well and it is familiar enough to many people, so let me use one example from that game.  You can find examples from other games at this link.

Civilization requires you to develop from a society of Stone Age wanders into a future with space travel.  As you develop various technologies, you get more options, both in civil and military matters.   The game makers have determined the relative merits of particular advances and you get them as givens. You compete with other civilizations and you have to spend a lot of time defending yourself and there was some criticism that the game was too warlike, but so was human history.

The first rendition of the game the other civilizations had characteristics broadly correlated to their historical activities.    For example, Hammurabi and the Babylonians were builders who spent relatively more time developing irrigation and road.  Lincoln and the Americans were technologically savvy and likely to develop democracy.   Shaka and the Zulus were less interested in technology and were more aggressive in attacking others.   The most aggressive and dangerous people on the board were Genghis Khan and the Mongols.   This was very un-pc and it disappeared from subsequent versions of the game.   

So the message of the later versions was that the unpopular idea of national character or any sort of cultural determinism was completely useless.   This is a very important point, BTW.   IF applied to the real world, it would mean that over time you would expect the Swiss and the North Koreans to behave in the same ways and that their national character would have no predictive value.   This, BTW, is the message of cultural relativism that you get in many universities.    If you get it directly, you can counter with the Swiss-North Korean argument.   If you imbibe it unconsciously as a teenager, it just becomes part of your world view.

But there is even a deeper message implicit in the game.  You, as the leader of your civilization, have nearly complete knowledge.  You make choices based on calculation or preference, but you can be logical.   Real world leaders never have this option.   There is always fog and uncertainty.   So if players take a lesson from the game, they have way too much confidence in the ability of leaders to run the economy or engage in foreign policy.   Conversely, if the leader does not deliver as promised, they are less likely to understand the constraints, unavoidable ignorance or mitigating circumstances.

Anyway, more and more we will use games to persuade and train.   Games are artificial models, created by humans, bundled with their unconscious preconceptions and prejudices and often peppered with deliberate manipulation.  As with any model, they represent one reality.  They are not THE reality.  But they sure seem like it to the players and I wonder what sorts of mind-sets the games are creating.   Games can create an entirely artificial world, whose characteristics players may carry over to the real world they (sometimes) live in.

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Just a Lane Change

Above is my morning commute on the W&OD bike trail in Arlington, VA.  Notice that they are doing utility work in one of those big cherry pickers.  The rain was coming in behind me.  You can see it in the clouds, but I got to work before the rain did. 

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Robust.  That is what we want and that is what are getting with the new media.  A robust solution provides lots of options and achieves desired outcomes by whatever means work best and whatever path is easiest. 

During a program supporting President Obama’s discussion with Turkish students, CO.NX provided a great example of how a robust system works in practice. 

CO.NX had an audience of hundreds of Turkish young people interacting over the internet while watching President Obama live on streaming video.   Unfortunately, the video pod on the CO.NX software broke down.   Disaster?  It would have been in an earlier technological age, but CO.NX is robust.  

The Adobe software gives users the ability to stream in video from other sources.   CO.NX staff just opened another link and viewers in Turkey seamlessly switched to watching video from the Whitehouse sources, or some preferred CNN Turk, which provided a local angle.  

What would have been an embarrassing program-killing crash is now as uneventful as changing lanes to pass a slow truck on the highway or pushing a button on your remote to get a different perspective. 

There is a greater lesson from this event about robustness. In order to achieve success, we relied on systems outside our own and that gave us several good options.  In the past, we would have needed to produce costly backups, which would have come with their own risk of failure and would never be as elegant as what we can get free.

I think an old saying fits well in this case:  why own a cow when you can just go to the dairy? The new media gives us choices.  Updating the old saying, why own a cow and get only milk, when you can just go to the supermarket and get yogurt, ice cream, Swiss cheese …?

Robust.  I am making that my word of the day.

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Below is the front of our townhouse complex.  I planted those pine trees.   The one in front is an Austrian pine.  Behind is a white pine.

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The Last Three Feet

Those of us who got our jobs in the old USIA grew up professionally with the example of Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was a great newsman when newsmen were great. He was  director of USIA & we remember him for the “last three feet”.  Murrow observed that communications spanned the world, but real persuasion happened when people made personal connections, in the last three feet.  Of course, we cannot talk personally to millions or billions of people and the challenge remains how to bridge those last three feet on a massive scale.  It is a paradox, like mass customization.  But mass customization is demonstrably possible with computer aided design and manufacture.  Maybe technology can help us too.  New communications technologies give us lots of opportunities to reach out in more personalized and interactive ways.  We can talk and listen in real time and engage and in ways that were not possible only a short time ago. And my colleagues are trying to figure out how to use new technologies and old techniques in new ways to adapt and engage in a mutually respectful communication. 

I don’t think they get noticed enough.  It is the usual problem.  People doing good things are too busy doing to have time to talk about them.  So I am making it my business to find success.  Let me start with CO.NX. CO.NX is the fastest growing IIP program in recent months.  It is the multimedia descendent of the simple webchats we started to do regularly a few years ago, but the character has totally changed in the course of its evolution.  We knew we were in a different league when we got 45,000+ questions during an election night program.  Much of this change was facilitated by technological improvements and changes in organizational culture. 

CO.NX use Adobe Connect, which is a very simple but effective interface.  It requires the recipients to download no software and a reasonably adept participant can be using the program within minutes.   Participant do not have to register, which is a big deal in many places.  It takes up little bandwidth, which is crucial given the vast diversity of technologies used by our audiences worldwide.  Important for the same reason is its scalability.   Anything from interactive video to simple text is possible, so countries and individual audience members can participate at the level and to the extent they prefer or their equipment allows. Programs are only useful in the context of the communities they create.  The creation of communities, both entirely online and online facilitated face-to-face communities, is the key to CO.NX’s recent meteoric rise.   The key to the communities has been Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent.  (Although we work across platforms, these are the ones currently producing the best results).   The original webchats relied on list serves.   This method is a clumsy way to reach an audience and does not easily facilitate discovery of new members or the viral spread of information.  

Facebook provides an excellent framework to connect the various parts of CO.NX.   It allows a simple way for people to become part of an online community as well as a place where information can be disseminated.  In addition, Facebook engagement is phenomenally well targeted and inexpensive.   First, you can simply engage through friends already in the community, but you can also search out interested new people with targeted advertising.  A recent outreach to build an audience in Pakistan among people interested in the new U.S. strategy in the region produced 203 participants for the program in about twenty four hours at the cost of just a little more than $35.00.   IIP research indicates that each of these participants has an average of 183 friends, which means that we touched an audience in the thousands, even accounting for overlap among friends networks.   Beyond that, the program made its way into the Pakistani blogosphere where the new U.S. policies were explained and discussed by opinion leaders.   A program like this would have been impossible to arrange a few years ago, no matter the price we were willing to pay.  

CO.NX can engage with audiences sorted by age, gender, location, university affiliation and even by major at the university, among other categories.  It is an amazingly effective tool and it means that we no longer have to put our product out there and wait for a reaction.  We can proactively shape the public affairs terrain where we participate.   Another free technology CO.NX is using is YouTube.    As I mentioned above, CO.NX can have a video component and most programs do.   Parts of these videos have been put onto YouTube, sometimes by the CO.NX people directly and sometimes by others, which show the interest our programs are generating.   If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, how much better is a direct copy?   In addition, in the Internet world,  having someone other than ourselves post adds to the credibility.    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama himself are among  those whose images and statements have made it into cyberspace with the facilitation of CO.NX. 

Of course, the IIP CO.NX staff is very small.  There is no way that a couple of full time employees and a few interns can effectively reach the whole world, no matter the technological leverage they enjoy.  Fortunately, IIP enjoys the support of a human network worldwide – our posts and IRCs overseas.  A network solution is emerging, with IIP providing the initial information, training and platforms, and people from posts overseas becoming more autonomous and helping each other.  This is especially crucial in time zones far removed from Washington. 

Posts such as Afghanistan, China, Thailand and Mexico have been avid pioneers in independently using the CO.NX system.   Secretary of State Clinton did a live town hall CO.NX program from Belgium.   A member of the IIP CO.NX staff was dispatched to advise, but the posts did all the heavy lifting for this immensely successful outreach.   This is as it should be and as it will become more commonly.   Note: CO.NX was a useful tool in building realationships with Turks around President Obama’s talk to students in Istanbul.  Follow this link to read about how the robust system worked.

Our overseas posts understand the local environments, can speak the languages and have the opportunity to build robust relationships, bridging the last three feet that Edward R. Murrow talked about.   That is what we need for persuasion and there is no substitute, but IIP CO.NX is helping us get in range and maintain relationships across space and time zones.  It is something simple that works.

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Television These Days

An unforeseen outcome of my sojourn in the Iraqi desert was that I lost control of the television remote.   Now I get to see American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen and others, but you do get a different perspective when you don’t choose all your own programs.   If left alone, I would watch the variations of History Channel, Discovery and the News, along with reruns of “Bonanza” & “Star Trek”.   I suppose some variety is okay and I can see what others are watching.

I really hate “Family Guy” and the boys know it, so they make a special point of coming up and turning it on. When I object, they claim that they are only seeking a family experience and something we can watch together.   “Family Guy” is clever, but very hateful.  It is an old comedy tradition to poke fun at society, but the writers of this show seem to hate everything about the way most people live.  Still, it provides a type of entertainment.   When the lead character, called Peter, does or says something particularly egregious, the boys look at me and wait for my ranting.  I don’t disappoint them. It is a family social event.

“South Park” is a show I started off disliking, but now generally enjoy.   It is very uneven.  Parts are horrible, but it there is some legitimate social satire.   The writers of this show don’t display the disgust I perceive in “Family Guy’s” treatment of our society.    The one today parodied the economic mess.  If you get a chance, watch it.

Chrissy likes the tournament style shows like “American Idol,” “Top Chef” and “Hell’s kitchen.”   We also get to watch “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”   I really cannot stand “Grey’s Anatomy.” The doctors are all ostensibly skilled, but rotten and selfish. They usually redeem themselves with an ostentatious show of some politically correct compassion or outrage.  It actually drives me out of the room.  I clean up the kitchen, which might indeed be its purpose.  Chrissy likes “Ax Men,” which I also like and we watched DVDs of “The Wire,” which was a great show.   We have now reached the end of it, however.    I used to like “The Office” but that is also starting to get on my nerves.

I guess you have to have an English accent to be truthful.  On “American Idol” only Simon Cowell tells the truth about the sometimes horrible performances.  The audience boos him for it, but I think most people respect his integrity.   Otherwise you just get that vapid praise.   Paula Abdul praises everybody, but doesn’t seem to be sure where she is or who she is watching, so it is not much value.  The terrible truth is that half of all people are below average and always will be, but that seems to be an unwelcome surprise. The other truthful guy is Chef Ramsey on “Hell’s Kitchen.”  Actually, I am not sure if he is truthful or just plain mean. He is constantly out of control.  Of course, they seem to pick a bunch of idiot savants as contestants. They seem to be able to cook, but lack all social skills and common sense.

Below – This happened near the Capitol. I don’t think anybody got hurt.  You don’t have to hit a car very hard to do a lot of damage.

We now have TViO, which means we can record shows for later viewing.   This is less useful that it might seem. We have lots of shows recorded but not enough time or inclination to watch them.   The only show that I record and actually consistently watch is “Modern Marvels.”   Recently they had episodes re how cheese and sausage were made, a history of pigs, oil refining, plastics and – my favorite – forestry technology.  I like it because you get the story with all its parts but w/o the social commentary crap that seems to have accreted to most things today.    For example, they talk about how pigs are raised and eventually turned into bacon and ham.   That’s it.  We don’t get the sad music or the criticism of modern eating habits.  I just want to know how things work.  I don’t need the help re how I should feel about it.

For all the criticism of TV, it really has improved and it is a great learning tool – if used properly.  You could get a decent general education from watching things like “Modern Marvels.”  “Nova,”  or the various History Channel Shows.    It also democratizes and fosters search for knowledge.  There are now a lot of people trying things out.  For example, there are whole cottage industries involved in figuring out how people in the past lived and built things by actually building them with the tools and techniques of the times.  

Of course, you could just spend your time watching reality shows.  They are popular, IMO, because all the losers watching can feel better than the even bigger losers on TV.

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A Continuous Process, Not a Plan

It was a nice warm spring day.  I ran around the Mall at lunch and had some random thoughts on using the new media.  I know that is nerdy, but it is what I do. 

Below is a pickup game on the Mall.  I am not sure what they were playing.  They had a soccer ball, but nobody seemed to be kicking it.  They were just wandering around.  BTW – I ran past them near the start of my run, and when I got back around them 20 minutes later they had made no progress. Maybe they were just enjoying the warm weather.

The New Media is NOT about technology any more than what you say on the phone or watch on television is about technology.    The new media is about using appropriate technologies and techniques with audiences or organization based on cultural, personal social, anthropological or organizational logics.   It is – in short – an intensely human paradigm.  Technology is the easy part – the transparent part.

The fluid and protean nature of the new media requires more flexibility and individual responsibility than we have seen in the past, and maybe more than many of us are comfortable with.  


 
In the new media, you not only learn by doing but you shape the reality by what you do.  That means that nobody merely observing the activities can properly understand the reality because it is in the process of being created.
 
Most organizations have a fantastic amount of expertise and knowledge locked in our people.  Together we can come to good decisions faster and better than committees of experts.   Our biggest challenge is to tap that power and channel it w/o ruining it by over directing the resource.   


 In general, I do not think a plan is possible, if what we mean by a plan is a specific set of things we will do and specific resources we will use.  The technological and social tools we will depend on five years from now or even next year have not yet been developed.   What we can bring into being is a process that will take us toward our goals, w/o specifying exactly what actions need to be taken.  In this way we can take advantage of all our aggregated knowledge, skills and passions for the work. 

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Dinosaurs Die; Lizards Soon Starve

Everything must be produced before it is consumed but it is easy to forget the roots when you are enjoying the fruit.    I fear this is happening in the media in regards to the “new media”.   Pew recently issued a report on the media.  It is rich in detail and hyperlinks.  I recommend it.  The new media is killing the old media, but may not provide a viable alternative. 

I am an avid user and producer of the new media, but I recognize that the way the new media lives off the mainstream media is more parasitic than a symbiotic. Most of the reliable information gathering is still done by professionals and paid staff of traditional media.  The new media repackages and reprocess it.   In doing this, they sometimes add significant value.   Maybe the resulting remix is objectively worth more than the raw material.  But you still need the raw material.  Everything must be produced before it can be redistributed or consumed.

The new media produces a lot of free riders.  They consume the information products of the mainstream media (MSM) w/o paying for it. You can get away with this as long as there are strong institutions doing the grunt work. You can even disparage these plodding pedestrians.  They denizens of the old media are not nearly as quick, cool or beautiful as those in the new media, but they do what needs to be done.  Many people in the new media work for nothing.  Some do this voluntarily and they know it; others think their big idea will catch on or they will someday figure out a way to make money off that blog.  Just enough make the breakthrough to bucks and/or fame to keep the others running after the prize.  It is a great way to have fun and foster innovation.   It is not a very good way to produce a product day-in and day-out.   For that you need the plodding pedestrians and you need an income stream.

The business model that supported the old media is collapsing.   I don’t know what will take its place.  Newsweek featured a cover story where the author advocated a kind of iTunes business model.    Others have talked re the problem of making this work.  Micro payments might work, but probably will not.

One of the secrets to iTunes is the long tail. I mean the “tail” on a normal distribution curve.  Most of the sales are made near the center, but iTunes has found that the tails, i.e. the less popular to obscure titles, go on forever.  While they don’t sell many of any particular title, the non-mainstream titles are a group sells very well because there are so many of them.  These titles are often practically free for iTunes and w/o iTunes they would be practically unattainable. Yet iTunes gets $.99 for each of them with almost zero transaction or inventory costs.  The volume of the obscure is a major source of revenue. (Somebody still wants “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers.) I don’t think you will be able to do that with newspaper articles.   Yesterday’s news is not very valuable to anybody.  Nobody feels nostalgia for the news story their father read back in 1965, as they might for an old song.  So who will buy it?

Most participants on the new media are self-taught, self-regulated and self-directed.  We write about what we like and cover stories as we like to.  The new media is more about opinions and personal viewpoints than it is about facts.  Let me speak as a new media person.  I try to be factual in my writing, but I don’t try to get all sides and I don’t pursue a story after I get sick of it.   I hope what I write is interesting and it may be a supplement to the news, but it is not the news.  All I know about what I don’t see myself comes from the media.  W/o that, I would not know much. 

Some people in the new media like to think of the old media as slow-witted dinosaurs, deserving of extinction.  They see the new media as the quick-witted and adaptive and they are right.   But the new media depends on the old media to an extent most don’t appreciate.  When the dinosaurs die off, the lizards that live off their droppings soon follow.

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Targeted Online Advert

I wanted to experiment with Facebook advertising, so over the weekend I made a simple ad directing people to one of my blog entries and ran it for three days in to college students in Germany and Poland . It took less than five minutes to make and submit the ad. I just wanted to see what would happen.

The complaint about advertising is that it mostly falls on those who don’t notice the ad or don’t care about what you are selling. (Many people treat commercial breaks as bathroom opportunities.) So, you don’t know who saw your ad. You don’t know if those who saw it paid attention. You don’t know if people who paid attention cared about it. And you don’t know if those who cared were committed enough to do anything. For Facebook ads, you pay only if someone clicks through to your site. The completed transaction indicates that the person is interested in your content because they took a required action to get to you. The ad may have appeared in thousands of places, but you pay only for the ones who saw it, paid attention, cared about it and took action to get more information. Google, Yahoo etc, offer similar deals.

You get the advantage of precise targeting, the Holy Grail of marketers through the generations. You can be reasonably certain that your advert for Denture Cream is not reaching an audience of mostly teenage girls. It is a fascinating new world for marketers and public affairs professionals, but it seems like nobody has figured it out how to thrive sustainably in this embarrassment of riches. Maybe those who know are not saying, but those who say clearly don’t know. Anyway that is why I did my experiment.

It cost me $16.93 to reach thousands of people over a three day period and get 180 new visitors to my blog entry on forestry. That doesn’t sound like many, but when you consider that on an average day I get only around 500 visitors to all the pages put together, it starts to add up. Mine is not a commercial site and I don’t sell or promote anything, but for someone who is in business a prospective, interested customer in the shop (so to speak) is probably worth the nine-and-a- half cents it costs. Advertising Age has an article about this. They say that Facebook is now sending more traffic to some sites than Google. I believe it. In addition to targeting, Facebook has the community aspect going for it. It is a pseudo-personal relationship, but it can seem real, elevating a targeted online ad to almost a word-of-mouth recommendation.

Interesting implications. Will Facebook steal market share from Google? Will Google create its own version of Facebook? Will both be displaced by an idea not yet formed and events that haven’t yet happened? The world of new technologies changes so quickly and it is possible to identify the winners only after they have come and gone. Sic transit gloria mundi – much faster than ever.

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Facebook 2

I am still trying to understand the new communication technologies.  As I look back and forward, I come again to the constant in all communication.  Technologies don’t talk.  All communication happens between humans and humans.   It is like the old philosophical conundrum: If a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?  The conundrum is easily solved if you define what you mean by sound.  It certainly creates vibration.  So it makes a sound in that sense.  But these vibrations only become meaningful as sound when somebody’s brain interprets it. 

When you add the human factor, you see that we are dealing with methods, not techie magic.   The technologies are just facilitators. Anyway, I noticed a couple of good articles to supplement my understanding expressed in my first Facebook posting. The Economist had a short but good article called Primates on Facebook that said some of the same things as my post re the limited of human cognition.  I didn’t know the source, but the limit of human interaction is called a Dunbar number, after an anthropologist who postulated that human face to face interaction can only go to around 150.  Somebody wrote a blog post about that.  It is more interesting than its title Extending Dunbar’s Number with the social web suggests. 

My own experience – that Internet steals memory – is evidently a common occurrence.  There was an interesting blog entry called Will Facebook ‘infantilize’ the human mind? 

But there is good news for geezers as I read in Older People on the Internet.  It makes sense.  Old people have time on their hands, are unenthusiastic about strenuous exercise and often no place to go, so they already have the prime characteristics of Internet nerds.  Large sections of the web will soon be big electronic geriatric wards.  That brave old geezer world will be well developed just about the time I get there, how convenient. I also got my Twitter account.  I like Twitter less, but I have been studying up on it.  Pew Research has a good summary of Twiterati demographics and habits.

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Getting the Moving Finger

Nobody really cares about Iraq anymore.  A couple of colleagues and I did a “brown bag” seminar on our experiences there.  The few people who showed up did so mostly out of sympathy for me. It was nice of them and I appreciate the support, but Iraq is the past.  Media coverage mostly disappeared last year, just about the time things started to improve. Even I have trouble remembering that it was such a big deal not so long ago.

Iraq is no big deal and that is a big deal. It might be useful to consider how that happened.   It did not happen because the problem just went away.  It happened because we solved it.  In a less timid age, we might have said that we won a victory there.

Only a couple years ago, most experts were predicting defeat and not just a little one. The view was that Iraq would collapse into chaos and civil war and that it would take most of the Middle East with it.  In fact, the more “realistic” pundits claimed that had happened already.  Their sage advice was to get out as quick as possible and leave the place to its unavoidable violent tendencies.

Fortunately, some of us didn’t listen to these hollow men and despite their heckling went on to victory.  I feel a little shy about using that term “we,” but I stepped up to do my part too and together we – Coalition forces, brave Iraqis and sometimes even hapless civilians like me – did it. 

But is important not to waste what we have accomplished.  Given Iraq’s strategic significance, the mission ceased to be a “war of choice” the moment American forces crossed the border in March 2003. Now we have no choice but to see Iraq through to stability.

Many of the same people who called for us to give up a couple of years ago, now feel vindicated that we can withdraw.   The logic goes something like this:  “Three years ago, we said the U.S. should get out.  Now the U.S. is going to get out (mostly).  See, we were right.”   This is indeed logical – if you ignore the events of the past three years and you forget the effects of time.

Let’s do a historical thought experiment.  WWII ended in 1945.  Count back three years and you are in 1942.   Now imagine a peace activist in 1942 saying that this Hitler guy and the Imperial Japanese Navy are not really very dangerous and we are just making them mad by standing up to them.  Three years later he says, “See, I told you so.  You didn’t have to waste all that time with D-Day or Iwo Jima.”

I am belaboring this point because I have seen this kind of historical credulity before.   The Cold War ended unexpectedly in 1989.   No matter how hard you look, you cannot find any expert who unambiguously predicted this outcome even two years in advance.  In fact, intellectuals had great fun ridiculing Ronald Reagan for thinking that bringing down the communist empires was possible or even desirable.   Many were shocked into humility by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they quickly recovered their composure.  Now it is hard to find anyone who will admit that he did not see it coming.   In fact, the new intellectual fashion seems to be that the fall of communism was inevitable and they have gone back to ridiculing Ronald Reagan, calling him a mere bystander at best and perhaps even an impediment.   (“We whisper together; are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.”) 

George Santayana said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.   I don’t know if that all that’s true.  What is true is that those who don’t remember history are doomed to be tricked again in similar ways. 

There are large forces at work in history and everything that happens has multiple causes.  Our choices are bounded.  Timing is important.   The strategy that achieves wonderful success in one situation may be an ignominious failure in another.   But the choices we make DO make a different.  The choices we make change the shape of the future.   We choose.  This is the lesson of history we should never forget. 

Looking down from the high summit of time, it seems like events are determined.   The more comprehensive a change, the more it seems inevitable.  But this is an illusion. 

We achieved a victory in Iraq. We stared down a radical insurgency in the heart of the Middle East and beat it back.   This is something they said could not be done.  We did it. Iraq, despite all its flaws, is now the most democratic country in the Arab world.  Someday soon – not today, not tomorrow, but soon – historians will see the spring of 2007 as an inflection point in Middle Eastern history.   It will be seen as the time when the old barriers to freedom and development were breached and a new freedom was painfully born and began to grow, fitfully at first, but inexorably   They will see it as inevitable and our choices that made it possible will be forgotten.  

“The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on.  Not all your piety nor all your wit can coax it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash away one word of it.”