When we say that Google searches the web, we don’t have it quite right. Google, and other search engines, spider the web— bring back an impression of what they find and deposit it into an index. When a search query is submitted, Google checks the map it’s constructed of the Web and provides results based on their snapshot.
This is where we must turn to Alford Korzybski, the father of general semantics. He reminds us to look at the space between the territory and its map.
“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness”
Search engine optimization is the process of teaching the territory to look more like the map. In this case we have a landscape that wants to flatten itself into the shape of the map. The reasoning is that only by using a map could something be found. After all, you can’t just ask someone walking down the street.
In order to have the best and most accurate search results, one must construct the best map. But the territory is live earth, it changes from this to that, expands, contracts and sometimes parts of it disappear all together. The map must be continually updated, a drawing that’s never finished. Can we ask a question of the snapshot taken 4 months ago? How about ten minutes from now?
And here’s where we must turn to Borges and his thoughts on maps, territory and the exactitude of representation:
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
So one might ask, in the real-time web, is there a map worth looking at? Or is it the territory itself that we seek to uncover, locating the swarms of attention that congregate across the digital landscape. Not the representation of the thing, but the thing itself. Perhaps we could just ask someone walking down the street.
The malleability of the digital is perhaps its essence. Everything in the digital world is constructed from a combination of ones and zeros, and because of that anything can be changed into anything else. The freedom to rearrange those ones and zeros is the basis of our information economy. But as signifiers pointing to actual events in the world, the digital is an unreliable narrator. There’s a sense in which the raw capture of the world through digital sensors is considered the starting point, the beginning a a series of digital transformations.
We’ve seen movie stars from another era reconstructed digitally and made to sell products to which they had no connection. We’ve seen digitally altered photographs released through newswires purporting to give us an eye witness view. What happens when we want digital media to authentically transmit the raw capture of an event? Can we ask the digital to put aside its transformational qualities and stand as an honest witness? The question about how we prove the authenticity of a digital artifact is a difficult one. A witness swears an oath and tells us what she has seen. A man signs a paper with wet ink to attest to the truth of statement he has written.
John Markoff of the NY Times recently reported on a new approach to preserving the authenticity of witness testimony encoded digitally. The process involves creating a cryptographic hash of timestamped digital material. This signature is unique and any change to the digital material would result in a new signature that would not match the original. It’s a process commonly used to ensure the integrity of a message as it is transmitted from one point to another on the Network.
…a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive. This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide. Such tools are of vital importance because it has become possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear.
In the digital world we have uncertainty surrounding all the elements: personal identity, signing or attesting and the digital document which contains the testimony. And even if we can verify that the digital document has not been altered, we have to apply all the usually filters to the testimony itself. In our courts, we have a bias against “heresay.” Wikipedia’s article shows us what degree of scrutiny we apply to this kind of testimony.
The theory of the rule excluding hearsay is that assertions made by human beings are often unreliable; such statements are often insincere, subject to flaws in memory and perception, or infected with errors in narration at the time they are given. The law therefore finds it necessary to subject this form of evidence to “scrutiny or analysis calculated to discover and expose in detail its possible weaknesses, and thus to enable the tribunal (judge or jury) to estimate it at no more than its actual value�.
Three tests are calculated to expose possible weaknesses in a statement:
Assertions must be taken under oath
Assertions must be made in front of the tribunal (judge or jury)
Assertions must be subject to cross-examination.
Assertions not subject to these three tests are (with some exceptions) prohibited insofar as they are offered testimonially (for the truth of what they assert).
The basis for our scrutiny of witness testimony is that it is a recounting of the past. The memory of an event from a single point of view is not considered highest form of trustworthiness. In that sense our idea of witness and truth rely on the social character of truth, we ask for a corroborating witness or evidence. We ask for the right to cross-examine an assertion, and hear the story from other points of view. It’s through this process that we come to terms with what happened.
In his TED talk from 2006, Peter Gabriel talks about Witness, an organization that seeks to spread the use of digital cameras, blogs, and cellphone cameras around the world. Their battle cry is “See it, Film it, Change it.” By capturing human rights violations on digital video and making that footage available through the Network, we can see what’s happening for ourselves. This kind of communication isn’t conclusive, but rather it is the start of an investigation. Here we must rely on the authority of the person capturing the event and Witness, as an organization, to guarantee its veracity.
This brings us around to the real-time web and its role in this process of “See it, Film it, Change it.” A cellphone camera with the capability to instantly publish an image to the Network changes things substantially. A cellular telephone with live video capability changes things further. A cellular telephone with live video capability, GPS and a verifiable timestamp changes things even more. A real-time witness has a very different standing; many real-time witnesses bring in the social element of corroboration. While the world may not always be listening, real-time capability changes the political equation.
We’re very early in our understanding of the real-time web. As with any technology, this real-time capability can be used for good or evil. And the technology itself will be the target of repressive political forces. We’re already seeing the Taliban threatening to attack cell phone infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan. A real-time infrastructure changes the conversation from ‘what should have been done in the past, and bemoaning our lack of foresight‘ to ‘what’s happening right now, and how can and should we change it?’
My Sunday morning reading started off in one direction and veered suddenly in another. I had been thinking about the position Jason Calacanis put forward on yesterday’s GillmorGang broadcast. Calacanis has recently been lamenting what he believes is the death of blogging. He sees a “race to the bottom” where writers will do anything for ratings. Rather than write a blog, he’s returned to the era of epistolary exchange and combined that with the mailing list. In the limited economy of that form, he finds more of the kind of value he’s looking for.
The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.
This free flowing economy of thoughts, ideas and conversations was perhaps a Utopian ideal from the beginning:
Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor’s approbation, printed in full in their text.
This is where Darnton hijacked my stream of thought. My desire to explore the political economy of restricted and general systems of epistolary conversation was shoved aside as Darnton revealed his purpose in the essay. He enlightened me to the fact that Google has monopoly ownership of the right digitize our nation’s books. And this of course means that all access will have to go through Google.
Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.
Darnton mourns the lost opportunity to create a National Digital Library. As Google search is increasingly the provider of our first hyperlink to click as we enter the World Wide Web; now they will have absolute power over access to all books under copyright. In this Google moves from Soft Power to Hard Power. We choose to use Google’s search engine because it works well for us. If we want to search the nation’s digital library, our Republic of Letters, we will have no choice but to ask Google. Darnton believes it’s too late to change the outcome. I hope he’s wrong.
The tape bow violin was created by Laurie Anderson and Bob Bielecki. The horse hair of the violin bow is replaced with recording tape, and the bridge of the violin is replaced with a tape head. Early experiments included working with palindromes. My favorite piece is called ‘Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-ture.’ The tape bow violin is similar to the loop in that its range of sound is limited to a short sample. The difference is it never loops, it moves backward and foward at varying speeds.
It took me a while to track down the phrase. And as you begin to roll it around in your mind, it reveals surprising depth and a few sharp corners. Its origin is either with Lenin, Gorky or Godard, but most certainly in Godard’s film Le Petit Soldat.
For Godard, yes, his life is film; “everything is cinema,” he says. Godard asserts that “it may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en-scene itself.” Lenin (actually Gorky, according to Godard) is approvingly quoted by the protagonist of Godard’s second feature film, Le petit soldat (1960), as saying: “Ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” This character, photographer and right-wing government agent Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), falls in love with Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina) just as Godard fell in love with Karina during the filming.
It’s the tangle of political thought that ties ethics and aesthetics into a gordian knot. In her performance, Anderson puts the emphasis on the “few,” and so our thoughts naturally turn to Brecht. The two phrases contained in this piece “ethics is the esthetics of the few” and “ethics is the esthetics of the future” reveal a movement from scarcity to abundance. And so, from one kind of politics to its opposite. Truth and beauty have long been aligned, here we align the Good and the Beautiful. It’s a pairing that on the surface seems natural, but at its depths can strike some dissonant chords.
