media

When A Comedian Is a Trusted Source.

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Getting an AI to generate Jon Stewart as a superhero was tricky. Fortunately, you can tell it’s AI by the hands that… well… let’s go with ‘moving really fast’ or something.

The return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show made me smile today. It will be good to have him around through elections.

I started watching The Daily Show in the early 2000s and really appreciated the satire of things going on in the world. When outside of the United States, I found ways to watch it because it not only informed, it entertained. This was a team effort but the delivery by Jon Stewart never disappointed.

He openly criticized the media, as someone needed to, and the platform of being after cartoons and/or puppets really made the point. He was like a news anchor with the spirit of George Carlin.

In these times, we need people like him, we need teams like that. Often, for me, it was a way of realizing that I wasn’t crazy because when I spotted idiocy being reported, I began to question myself. Is it just me? No, it wasn’t, no, it isn’t, and no, I wasn’t alone in silence wondering whether I should write about it, or even if I could in an engaging way. Watching it be done right and comprehensively while being pretty politically agnostic allowed the issues to come out of the mayhem of the media spin doctors.

When Trevor Noah took over, it didn’t feel the same. He’s a funny guy, and he’s closer to my shade of skin tone, but it just didn’t feel the same. I lost interest. Maybe I’m not ‘woke’ enough despite being sentient for longer than most ‘woke’ people.

Having caught up on his “The Trouble With Jon Stewart”, it’s apparent that he’s kept up his skills and further refined them. I loved how the episodes started with the team spitballing the show beforehand. I imagine working on ideas with him would be fun. Much of what he has done before keeps coming back, too, like George Carlin’s quotes and videos.

The world doesn’t make sense. It’s completely appropriate that he’s a trusted source because he earned it.

Shades of Grey’s Anatomy

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There’s been a lot of talk of diversity that I’ve experienced since the 1990s, and what is accused of being diversity is just an addition of more labels and managing interactions.

I can say that from where I sit that it’s all been pretty stupid.

I like medical dramas, and when I get an opportunity, I watch them because there are quite a few things I miss from my days of being a Navy Corpsman. ‘House‘ remains my all time favorite, followed by ‘ER‘. ‘Greys Anatomy‘ has managed longevity and has some interesting stuff in there too – and as it happens, it’s what prompted this post.

In speaking with someone here in Trinidad, I brought up a surgery enacted in Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t recall the details, but the person I was speaking with is an East Indian1 doctor. That doctor told me he was disgusted with Grey’s Anatomy because they don’t represent Indians often and when they do they go to the less preferred stereotypes.

Being half East Indian myself, I was curious. I don’t really identify as East Indian or any other race since I am mixed, but I acknowledge that a lot of people had sex that lead to me and they were pretty diverse. Still, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, because of my name, in some circles I’m seen as East Indian and all the stereotypes that come with it. It’s good to be aware of how one is perceived.

What’s funnier is that Indians, particularly those in the United States, generally have had a snobbish attitude with me, which is particularly amusing because they’re upset that some of my ancestors left India before their ancestors did. Worse, being of mixed descent, I’m not of any particular ‘race’, so I’ve found some of the sneering Indian ‘would not wipe my feet on your back’ sort of rhetoric almost normal and comical from that section of society. When someone tells you who they are by how they behave, don’t ignore them.

So I watched Greys Anatomy a while, and I saw what was meant. There was a glaring lack of East Indian representation and, when when they did show up, they were fired. Meanwhile, LGBQT is trendy on the show, mixed marriages, empowered Americans of African descent are sharing power with their former masters, Asians get a little better than token representation (Dr. Christina Yang left after some seasons as I understand it), the little Mexican representation was a single bisexual character and the Mexican Day of the Dead and… having seen the last season’s episodes, everyone is getting represented except Indians.

I don’t care, really. It’s not as if Indians have been particularly nice to me – quite the opposite. However, I do also know that not all Indians are like that, my experiences notwithstanding. Across the Internet, I’ve interacted with many from India who just view me as ‘another human being’, which is all I have ever expected of anyone, and all I try to offer.

It bugged me and so I did a search on it to find that I was not the only person to look at this, and that I was also quite late in looking into it. One of the better articles I found was from May 2020: ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘.

It’s the United States, where 8.5% of physicians are of Indian descent – so if there are 10 doctors on the show, almost 1 of them should be of Indian descent to be representative. They even have an association – the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, founded in 1982. Nevermind the nurses.

Now, there is a culture of East Indians. Famously, Richard Feynman (Nobel Laureate) was passing through Trinidad and Tobago and had a taxi driver take him around Port of Spain. The taxi driver, according to Feynman, observed that the East Indian parents would lose their teeth to send their children to get an education. This, however, is not a stereotype of Indians as much as a stereotype of immigrants.

People who leave one bad place to get to another generally appreciate that they have it better and they generally want better for their children, enough so that they make sacrifices like that mainly because they’re starting at zero – or even below zero. Despite stereotypes of crime, partially earned I expect, there are immigrants I have seen who just work hard.

In Costa Rica, I saw it in Nicaraguans who were disliked in Costa Rica. In the United States, I saw the Mexicans, and later more Puerto Ricans and later still those from Republica Dominicana. I saw it in the 1970s with East Indians from Trinidad of my father’s generation and earlier in the United States. It’s not about race, or any culture other than immigrant culture. These are people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children and showed how much they wanted it.

So, Grey’s Anatomy is pretty annoying in this regard for people I expect are East Indian, and judging from what has happened in the show since 2020, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t seem to care much about it.

What’s most interesting to me is that there has been a lot of focus on ‘non-binary’ gender, but not enough about ‘non-binary’ race. In the United States, you’re pretty much white or a shade of brown that is still treated as black.

…Diversity has been at the forefront of the Hollywood discourse in the last few years, but it shouldn’t be confined to black and white. When certain minorities are excluded from the conversation, it is the same problem.

Meehika Barua, ‘Grey’s Anatomy is failing its audience in a significant way‘, DigitalSpy, 18 May 2020

There’s a lot more to black and white in these conversations that should be outdated, and I’ll get into that with the next post.

1 In the Caribbean, particularly in Guyana and in Trinidad and Tobago, ‘East Indian’ is used to distinguish from ‘West Indian’, and in acknowledges the orphaning of the Indian diaspora who left India during it’s period of British Rule to attempt a better life somewhere else as indentured laborers.

Trapped In Our Own Weirdness.

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When I wrote about expanding our prisons, implicitly it’s about the removal of biases through education. For example, how can one who has even a passing understanding of the human genome still consider ‘race’ an issue? Here we are, having mapped the human genome, and we continue acting out over skin tones that have little to no correlation to genetics.

You can’t tell ‘race’ by a genetic test. Race is a label, and a poor one, and one we perpetuate despite knowing this.

It’s about history, like I pointed out over here when I mentioned the history of photographic film. It is a troublesome issue and one that we largely have reinforced by our own works that pass on from generation to generation.

At first it was just images, from the earliest cave drawings, then more formal writing and more elegant art, then recordings of all sorts. In today’s world we have so much that we record, and there’s a bit of wonder at how much maybe we shouldn’t be recording. These things get burned into the memory of our civilization through the power of databases, are propagated by the largest communication network ever built, and viewed by billions of people around the world independent of ‘race’ or culture but potentially interpreted at each point of the globe, by each individual, in different ways.

In an age of just oral tradition, it would just be a matter of changing something and waiting for living memory to forget it. Instead, we suffer the tyranny of our own history written by people who have their own perspectives. No one seems to go to the bathroom in history books or, for that matter, religious texts. An AI trained on religious texts alone would not understand why toilet paper has a market in some parts of the world, with a market for bidets in others.

Now we have the black boxes of artificial intelligence regurgitating things based on our history, biases and all, and it’s not just about what is put in, but the volume of what is put in.

The next few decades are going to be very, very weird.

A Few Notes On The Witcher.

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I was glad to see that the Witcher is back, finally, with Season 3 – something that may even inspire me to subscribe to Netflix again for a period. I got hooked on the Witcher not by the television series, but the books.

Yes, there are books. There’s even a Witcher boxed set now, but when I started reading the works of Andrzej Sapkowski he hadn’t gotten too popular yet.

Then the game came out, and CD Projekt Red did an outstanding job of putting the world described into a game. I played that game way too much, to be honest, but the world is so immersive and exploration off the beaten paths is so rewarding. If you haven’t played it yet, it’s worth looking into – it’s available on Steam.

Now, if you have played the game, you’ll find that the world shown in the television series is pretty much the same world you play in. The level of detail consistency is pretty good for the world, though the storyline and characters differ. There are also noteworthy differences between the television series and the books.

Some might argue the consistency should be the same, but it never is. What they have gotten completely right is the understanding that each audience is different and so there are changes… and I’ve found all 3 of them compelling in their own regard. That is no easy feat.

Of course, sticklers will say that the books are where it all came from, and that’s not wrong.

Personally, I’ve enjoyed the writing of all 3. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on The Witcher, but I can say that I have been thoroughly entertained by it. Would it be nice if it were all the same? Sure. But some things don’t translate to other medium well, and for a writer, that’s also worth looking into.

Of course, this is just my opinion. I’m not averse to others.

US News sites, GDPR, and Paywalls.

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ReutersInstituteonGDPRReuters Institute posted a thread on Twitter regarding how news sites in the United States reacted to the General Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the fallout. It’s an interesting thread, but the article linked to is actually quite thought provoking.

…One publication, USA Today, rationed EU users’ access, redirecting them to a GDPR-compliant bare-bones version of their site. Other US news sites, like The New York Times, immediately adapted to the GDPR and didn’t block. Although some of the hundreds of US sites that blocked remain blocked to this day, others, like the Los Angeles Times, restored full access after a number of months, and others after a number of years.

The differing strategies of these news sites allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects on consumption of temporary website withdrawal and temporary rationing…

This holds interests for other reasons, which I’ll get to later. What they found was:

…In conclusion, our study supports the theory that, under particular conditions, unavailability can reduce a product’s desirability, affecting future choices. Sour grapes, in this instance, had the upper hand…

So this demonstrates how making something exclusive doesn’t always make it more sought after.

The full study, “Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union“, is also worth a read if you want to get into the details – as I think you should.

The reason I brought this up is that we often consider site technical issues or business decisions as something that impacts whether a site’s content is seen. It has a latency issue after correction, it ends up, and while there’s not enough information from the study, it does seem the proportionality of return to use is proportional to to how long the content was unavailable. There are two issues I’ll bring up, the first being…

Paywalls.

I take issue with paywalls.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in writers getting paid, and I would like to get paid sometime for writing. I subscribe to a Iona Italia on substack and Unherd.com presently, and have been toying with going back to subscribing to Scientific American. I’m tough when it comes to subscriptions. I subscribe to Iona because I think reading her can make me a better writer – and while the same is true for Unherd.com, I enjoy the articles because they’re not just run of the mill, even those I find issues with. It’s original.

However, today I saw an interesting article on Twitter by Harvard Business Review (HBR), which dutifully distracted me by pointing out it was my last ‘free’ article for the month as some sites do. They have been getting me to click, according to the HBR article limits at present, 4 times this month and it’s the 19th.

I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the other articles I read on HBR. Still, what’s the cost, then?
$12.50 US a month.

So for 4 articles in 19 days, that would put me at 6.3 articles in 30, which comes up to $1.98 an article for me. I’m sorry, HBR, I just don’t see spending $2/article, when an article might take me 7 minutes to read. Now, this is not to say HBR doesn’t have good articles, but how often are they interesting enough for me?

Short answer: not enough for me to subscribe.

Does that mean I’m unwilling to pay HBR for articles? No. It means I don’t want to pay their monthly price because I can’t depend on them to be interesting to me every month. This was the problem with magazine subscriptions I had (and why I’m still debating renewing my ancient Scientific American subscription), whereas with Unherd.com I spent around $49/year, and while I’m not reading them every day, I peruse the site at least 3 times a week, reading at least12 articles a month. Quick math, dropping a dollar off the annual subscription gives us $48/year, which comes up to $4/month, where I’m reading 12 articles in a month and paying… $0.33/article.

More importantly, given it takes me the same amount of time to read an article on HBR as Unherd, I’m getting more time reading for the price. Now, this is unfair. HBR is a niche market and few of their articles would appeal to me – but the few that do, I might pay for, but I’m not going to pay more than I do for a can of Coke for something that lasts me 7 minutes. I’m a reader, not some client visiting a hooker.

New York Times does this, as do a few other sites, and each time I go through a similar process. I call it ‘signal to noise’ because for me, that’s what it is. I get better signal to noise with Unherd than I do with HBR, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the signal from HBR. I’m just not willing to pay for what I consider noise. Attenuate, attenuate!

So in my mind, people are leaving dollars on the table. I might start an account for $10 and pay 33.3 cents an article, and replenish the account if I get value for it. If I’m reading enough, the subscription price might be a deal.

This all lead me back to the days when I sat with Phil Hughes in Nicaragua and discussed revenue for print publications with him, then publisher of Linux Journal. He of course had a lot more experience than I, and he told me why print and web advertising were such different beasts – it has to do with verifiable views, which at the time were easily gamed by simply refreshing the pages. Now they can be gamed by bot farms, so the cost of web advertising began low and has credible reason not to increase except for one major thing: User accounts, which the newspapers and magazines have unimaginatively done without considering the money they’re leaving on the table.

Why am I so concerned? My real issue with paywalls is that they keep me from accessing information, or knowledge, and that affects how I make decisions – just as it affects how you make decisions. When you cut out segments of society and create silos of information, the Internet simply is repeating the same thing that print publications do except… you can’t let me read your magazine when you’re done, and I can’t do the same. There was a time when people would find valuable things in old magazines laying around.

So what happens when I see that I’m out of articles on a site? I roll my eyes, move on with my life and ignore links to the site for an indeterminate period, much like the Reuters Institute paper shows. It could be a month, it could be 2 months… and I’ll simply forget I have ‘free’ articles to read.

Yet even with that, I have the luxury of spending 33 cents on an article. Some people don’t. Some people may not even have access to a credit card in some countries, and just like that, the digital divide becomes an informational divide. The only real answer in my mind is to increase advertising costs to cover that of the writers, the editors, and the boss’s nephew manning the photocopier and fax in the basement.

Derivative Knowledge

Now, all of this impacts something else.

It impacts AIs being trained on the Internet, who are unlikely to see paid content and thus are stuck reading free websites. That seems stupid, but in the house of cards of business, maybe there’s an upside to having an AI trained without subscriptions. I just don’t know what it is.

There was a time when I thought all information should be free. There was even a stab at a Creative Commons license for developing nations, which would have been more equitable and allowed those who could afford to carry the cost for those trying to catch up. This could also work for AIs being trained, but, with the popularity of VPNs as they are, information accessibility in developed nations could easily be subverted by simply using a VPN server in Haiti, as an example.

And all of this leads up to derivative knowledge, because that impacts decision making – not just of machines, but that of people.

If the media industry on the Internet wants to actually be read and interacted with… understanding these things better makes sense. Or, that latency of not visiting could catch up, or… we could just leave a bunch of people behind because we couldn’t find a better solution.

Big Data, Social Media

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NumbersWithout individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people — but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?

Colors And NumbersWe draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

– American Gods, Season 1, Chapter 11.

(Why would I rewrite this?)

The First Victim Is Truth.

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Blue Sky Twitter‘Journalists, Please – We Have Enough Activists Already‘ is probably the best criticism of today’s journalism that I have seen in a while.

When you get done reading it, understand that the ‘need’ to report fast has replaced the actual need to report accurately, and that what you get immediately is likely not the full story.

A few examples from the link:

On Thursday, Peter Alexander, national correspondent at NBC News, reported (on Twitter, where most reporting happens now) that the U.S. Treasury Department had quietly eased sanctions to allow U.S. companies to do business with the Russian FSB; 40 minutes later, he noted that it was a “technical fix” planned under the Obama administration. The first tweet was retweeted more than 6,200 times, the second a piddling 247.

So the odds are good that you might not have read that it was planned under the Obama Administration.

Last Saturday, following Trump’s controversial executive order on refugees, CNBC’s John Harwood reported that the Department of Justice had no role in evaluating the order (3,000+ retweets); one hour later, he issued a correction (199). Similarly, Raw Story cited American Foreign Policy Council scholar Ilan Berman to suggest that there was “no readout of Trump-Putin call because White House turned off recording.” The tweet linking to that story has 9,700 retweets, and travel blogger Geraldine DeRuiter’s outraged tweet — “They. Turned. Off. The. Recording. When. He. Called. Putin. IF OBAMA HAD DONE THIS THE GOP WOULD HAVE HAD HIM TRIED FOR TREASON.” — has been retweeted nearly 30,000 times. Berman took to Twitter to explain that he didn’t know “for a fact” that the recording had been turned off; it was simply “conjecture.” Twenty-seven retweets.

Seriously, what is wrong with these journalists? Isn’t there some responsibility in reporting?

And it goes beyond the citations in this article, beyond politics, beyond all of that. Indeed, the responsibility has shifted to the reader to get the facts since it would seem that the media itself doesn’t want to be encumbered by the full story.

And people reposting them? They also don’t want to be so encumbered. It’s not as if they actually read what they share.

These Matters of Mind

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A Start

Mavens swoop down from their perches
Tear at the teaming creatures below
Ripping apart their hearts, their minds
Trying to discern their thoughts
When they cannot speak
Prescriptive, Descriptive
The cognitive war battles on
Yet the masses do not know
The mavens are doomed.

They are the minority.

Written in 2007. In fact, that picture may be of this from somewhere in Panama City, Panama.