Category: difference

Revisiting @cshirky : Overload and Filter Failure

Published August 14, 2011 by cgerrish

Clay Shirky may have done us a disservice when, looking at the torrent of information published to the Network, he turned the problem upside down and said it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure. His comment was a response to the notion that the solution to information overload is to use professional editors to filter out items of inferior quality before they are inscribed into the Network. This approach would be consistent with the historical practices of the publishing industry; and theoretically would result in fewer items tumbling into the bin of our cognitive load. Traditional models of publication are a statement about the quality and value of a work. If everything is always published in real time—every gesture, tick and passing fancy— publication is no longer a measure of quality, but merely a recognition of the act of inscription on the surface of the Network.

The purpose of the filter is to rummage through the “everything” that has been published—and is continuously published in real time—and come up with an appropriately-sized load. That is, something less than an overload, and certainly not an under-load, but rather a load that feels just right. Shirky inaugurated the era of “filter failure” in September of 2008; in the subsequent years the volume of items published to the Network has accelerated exponentially. However, we don’t seem to have made much headway with the “filter” problem.

We have a sense of what a “filter” looks like when it works as a gatekeeper standing between all that is written and what is eventually published. The editor and publisher make judgements based on commercial prospects, artistic merit, a writer’s track record, et cetera; and then select which pieces of writing will pass through the publication process. A “filter failure” in this context is a publication event that doesn’t find an audience willing to support or engage with it.

What does a “filter” look like when everything has already been published? Isn’t the horse already out of the barn? Early in Twitter’s existence, they placed a configurable filter on the publishing nozzle of the service. A user could select a set of keywords, the filter checked through all the tweets in real-time, and then it would spray a filtered set of tweets into the regular set of subscriptions. As the volume, velocity and user-base increased, it was technically unsustainable on a real-time basis. Twitter search now consists of keyword filtering of a smaller set after the fact. A number of services have rented Twitter’s firehose of messages in an effort to affix real-time filters over the publication nozzle. None have emerged with a solution to put an end to the era of “filter failure.”

From the perspective of editorial process, affixing a filter to the real-time publication nozzle is consistent with previous editing processes. The editor/user selects keywords that narrow the field of output prior to the publication of a real-time stream. The filter that Shirky proposed operates after the fact, everything has always already been published and this filter sifts through it all and scoops up only the good stuff. Wheat is separated from chaff. In this case the timing of the filter is less important than the quality and scope of its mesh. The filter should construct a value equivalent to, or greater than, that of a pre-filtered output, by assembling interesting bits and pieces it finds laying around. Because it’s less concerned with the now of real-time, Shirky’s filter can include elements from different periods of time based on their relevance, importance and overall quality.

In some recent attempts to crack the “filter” code, the word ‘curator’ is substituted for ‘editor’ and the blend of the publication is expanded to include both domestic and foreign products. Most traditional publications are reconstituting themselves along these lines. Another approach is to draw a circle around a set of curators and writers to create a tele-publication. To maintain and grow its value, the portfolio must be actively managed, occasionally rebalanced and look for opportunities in the event stream. (Global tactical asset allocation mutual funds are often managed in this fashion.)

A filter could be constructed correctly, be technically sustainable at scale, and still be a failure. If the mesh of the filter is configured incorrectly, its output may be the correct “load” size, but its contents of inferior quality. The mechanics of filtering are only half of the equation. What should the filter filter, and who decides what that is? Some say we don’t want an editor to serve as a gatekeeper, we prefer an emergent (another word for average) publication of crowd-sourced filtering. The odd thing about a spontaneously generated crowd-constructed publication is that it usually feels like you’ve already read it. The thing about what everybody knows is that everybody already knows it.

Assuming we could produce a technically-sound filter, we would need to configure its mesh. It’s possible one could go shopping for a mesh. A filter’s mesh could be an external product selected to produce a particular kind of output. Our choices range from the hand-crafted to the automated mesh. Techmeme is a hybrid of algorithmic and hand-crafted output. Google News has recently added a hand-crafted element to their largely algorithmic output. In a sense, this isn’t very different from the way an ink-on-paper magazine works.

One of the dangers of going shopping for a mesh is that one can easily end up in an echo chamber. By selecting only agreeable elements, one’s own bias seems to be confirmed by external sources. When you mix in hard-core ideology, a strange reversal takes place. As William Burroughs once said, “you don’t sell heroin to people; you sell people to heroin.” What at first appears to be looking in a mirror and becoming more and more beautiful, is really a process of the mirror surrounding and consuming you, until you become a part of its reflection. The external ideology has hollowed you out and takes up residence in the void.

If the era of filter failure were to end, would we have filters that were an uncanny match to our thoughts and desires? Would the filter take into account our conscious and unconscious selves? Would it know what to us is a set of unknown knowns? Would we be embarrassed when the filter mixed in objects of desire of which we dare not speak? Is it merely a matter of getting in tune with our true desires and affinities? Or should the mesh of the filter bring me more than I contain? How far do we need to take this?

After all, how perfect does a filter need to be before we can consider it a success? Perhaps all that has to happen is for the feeling of being overwhelmed to go away. Maybe that just happens with time and exposure. Instead of waiting for a future paradise where filters don’t fail and our minds are constantly blown by how perfectly tuned and relevant every single thing we encounter is; perhaps we should acknowledge that the future will be a lot like the present. Sturgeon’s law will still hold and 90% of everything will still be crap, spammers will still manage to show us advertisements we don’t want to see, and sometimes we’ll still feel overwhelmed by life.

The more we search for a fine-grained solution to filter failure, the stranger the “I” for whom the filter must not fail becomes.

At first the big flood of information seems to be fascinating. It has all the formal qualities of something that should demand our attention. It’s only after we’ve sat patiently and listened to it for a while that we realize how boring it can be. Boredom with the torrent of information may be the first step toward forgiving filters their failures.

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”

— Emmanuel Levinas (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority)

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Identity is Written by the Victors

Published August 10, 2011 by cgerrish

We think of the phrase “history is written by the victors” as being for the most part historical. When we look back at those other people whose history was written for them, we mourn the injustice of it all. Those whose stories were whispered in the shadows, at the margins of the dominant society, barely register as people at all. We only learn these stories well after the fact. We reconstruct them as we would a dinosaur from a footprint recovered from an archeological dig.

When I think of @IdentityWoman’s dispute with Google and their Google+ platform, I can’t help but notice that identity too, is written by the victors. In the battle for the Network, Google can only be considered one of the victors. On their platform, they can set the rules for what counts as a who. We obscure the hard edges of the platform by calling it a cloud, but it’s a centralized system with a set of hard and fast rules.

The “real” name is the identifier that can be bound to the flesh and blood of a human. It’s the “I” who is responsible for the debts and transactions initiated by the soul that is embodied as a particular being. The “consumer” is another way of describing this “I.” But is the “I” who vouches for the reality of a name, the “I” who then narrates the life of the “I” who lives that life? Is that “I” only the “I” who buys and spends? While the system can try to insist that the “I” use a “real” name, I can only hear the voice of Arthur Rimbaud saying “I is another…”

Extract from the Voyant Letter
Arthur Rimbaud
1871

‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who could judge it? The Critics! The Romantics! Who prove so clearly that the singer is so seldom the work, that’s to say the idea sung and intended by the singer.

For I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

In Greece, as I say, verse and lyre took rhythm from Action. Afterwards, music and rhyme are a game, a pastime. The study of the past charms the curious: many of them delight in reviving these antiquities: – that’s up to them. The universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally: men gathered a part of these fruits of the mind: they acted them out, they wrote books by means of them: so it progressed, men not working on themselves, either not being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil-servants – writers: author; creator, poet: that man has never existed!

The first study for the man that wants to be a poet is true complete knowledge of himself: he looks for his soul; examines it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must develop it! That seems simple: a natural development takes place in every brain: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors: there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! – But the soul must be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, yes! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

I say one must be a seer (voyant), make oneself a seer.

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Variations on Heraclitus

Published August 7, 2011 by cgerrish

We see the digital begin to stream on the Network and think we’ve seen something new. At what point did we start to see the analog stream? We call to things by name and they come from every quarter. It’s no longer enough that they stream; when we call, what comes? And what call do we make? We can focus on the medium over the message, and that will tell us something about our environment. But as background and foreground become compressed into a single mesh, we look more intently to the intimacy of the message.

Variations on Heraclitus

By Louis MacNeice (1961)

Even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling,
Nor only in terms of physics; the pictures
Bob on each picture rail like floats on a line
While the books on the shelves keep reeling
Their titles out into space and the carpet
Keeps flying away to Arabia nor can this be where I stood –
Where I shot the rapids I mean – when I signed
On a line that rippled away with a pen that melted
Nor can this now be the chair – the chairoplane of a chair –
That I sat in the day that I thought I had made up my mind
And as for that standard lamp it too keep waltzing away
Down an unbridgeable Ganges where nothing is standard
And lights are but lit to be drowned in honour and spite of
some dark
And vanishing goddess. No, whatever you say,
Reappearance presumes disappearance, it may not be nice
Or proper or easily analysed not to be static
But none of your slide snide rules can catch what is sliding
so fast
And, all you advisers on this by the time it is that,
I just do not want your advice
Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room
Since the room and I will escape for I tell you flat:
One cannot live in the same room twice.

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High Fidelity in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Published July 31, 2011 by cgerrish

In his 1979 essay “The Studio as Compositional Tool“, Brian Eno works through the set of technical innovations that resulted in the odd occurrence of person who didn’t play any musical instrument particularly well, didn’t read or write music, nonetheless ending up as a composer. Eno lacked all the traditional tools of the trade. It was only when sound was mediated through recording that it became a plastic material that could be manipulated into song-like structures.

Here’s Eno on the transition from transmission to translation:

So, to tape recording: till about the late ’40s, recording was simply regarded as a device for transmitting a performance to an unknown audience, and the whole accent of recording technique was on making what was called a “more faithful” transmission of that experience. It began very simply, because the only control over the relative levels of sounds that went onto the machine was how far they were from the microphone – like device. The accent was on the performance, and the recording was a more or less perfect transmitter of that, through the cylinder and wax disc recording stages, until tape became the medium by which people were recording things.

The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something’s on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren’t. It’s hard to do anything very interesting with a disc – all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can’t actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.

When we talk about a “more faithful” recording, the word “fidelity” enters the conversation. Fidelity is the quality of being loyal or faithful. Originally, it had the sense of taking an oath, as in swearing fealty to a monarch. Fidelity also has the sense of honoring oaths with regard to a spouse. A high-fidelity recording transports the original performance transparently—it is as though you are there. Poor fidelity dishonors the performance by leaving pieces of it behind or adding in artifacts that weren’t a part of the original. If we are a lover of a particular piece of music, we might charge a bad recording with infidelity.

In Eno’s recording studio, sounds become plastic. It’s only when a sound has been transformed into something that can itself be transformed that it becomes useful for constructing music. And this is the point where the sound no longer has fidelity to its source. The sound is only interesting to the extent of its potential infidelity. Transferring sound into a transformable recording media used to require a professional technical process. With digital recording, sound is directly sampled and encoded into a plastic media.

“I’d rather talk about the Plastic Eno Band, actually. It’s been in existence for a couple of years now. Over the past six years I’ve accumulated over 14 plastic musical instruments with a very wide gamut of sounds. And I’ve found that by slowing them down or speeding them up on tape, I can imitate any electric sound. With this in mind, I want to make a straight-forward rock record and then appear on ‘Top Of The Pops’ with a bunch of liggers playing these things. It would be an experiment in concrete music really as well as being an encouragement to all these kids who can’t afford their Vox amplifiers. There are so many things I want to do that will lose me so much money. . .”

As all media are slowly replaced with their digital equivalents, this shaky relationship with fidelity is true of more than just sound. Think about the camera and photography. How do we capture a scene with a camera? We see a moment we’d like to commemorate and we take aim with our camera. The flash from the camera floods the scene with enough light to get a good exposure. Here the process of recording essentially alters the source in the pursuit of fidelity. A skilled photographer may be able to light a scene for the camera such that when it’s processed, the photograph resembles the scene as it might have unfolded had no photograph been taken.

In the iPhone, the camera itself becomes a computerized photo studio and a compositional tool, in Eno’s sense. The photo itself is just the digital material that can be transformed with a set of filters. We don’t expect the snapshot to capture the mood; like the professional, we’ll fix it in post-production. We quickly apply a set of filters that more appropriately capture the mood of the scene and then flick the digital file into the stream of Twitter or Instagram. Is it the infidelity of the digital that enables another sort of fidelity? Or are we simply projecting the kind of scene we’d like others to imagine us playing a role within.

When we consider the picture being constructed of us through the data exhaust we emit in our online activities and our encounters with electronic and surveillance systems—does it make sense to talk about the fidelity, the truth, of the picture? Is the picture any more true because it’s constructed of largely unconscious digital moments? Is the ‘candid’ photo taken through a telephoto lens by a paparazzi of a movie star in their everyday life more true than the ‘glamour’ photograph constructed to create an image? When you apply for a job, do you present the candid or the glamour resume? How about applying for a loan at the bank, do you walk in the door with your candid or glamour finances?

In digital recording we have the production medium that is most open to transformation. In digital presentation, we have the consumption medium most open to transformation, both before we receive it, and after. Anyone with some form of computer has their own digital post-production facility. The blemishes can be removed, the wrong notes fixed and even the focal point of the image can be selected later.

If we were to imagine a medium that could somehow vouch for the fidelity of that which it recorded, it would be the opposite of the digital. This medium would capture the mark of the real and from that point forward it would be unalterable. In a strange way, in that moment, the mark would become more real than the real. The real itself would fade and change with time, but the mark would always have the vibrancy of the moment the impression was captured. In essence, this is the problem with using database models to stand in for real processes.

There was a time when to call something ‘artificial’ was to confer the highest compliment. The ‘real’ was a low form of existence that lacked the trappings of civilization. It was something that hadn’t been ‘fixed’ in post-production. The digital era has enabled new levels of artifice. The ‘real’ and the ‘natural’ may have to make way for the artificial. To ease the transition, the real and the natural will be the first things we need to simulate. As the French dramatist Jean Giraudoux once said:

“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

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