Inflammatory campaign rhetoric: nothing new

Reading through the IPDI report on online political videos, my only thought is that, fundamentally, this isn't anything new. Yes, it's in a new medium, and has a further reach, and is therefore a revolution in the scale of such things. However, the rhetoric described in the article is nothing you wouldn't see in a direct mail piece, or an anonymous flier distributed the weekend before an election. American politics has a tradition of inflammatory, hurtful, and destructive rhetoric in its campaigns, much of it in mail or other forms that rarely catch the attention of the media, and so are rarely scrutinized. Just because such messages are put online does not herald a new low in American politics.

Another thought on censorship

Thinking further about the Chinese censorship study, one line in the conclusion caught my eye:"The state employs a sophisticated infrastructure that ... tolerates overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."

This reminds me of the battles in the 1990s over censoring obscene material from the internet in order to prevent children from finding it. Some schemes involved some sort of age verification requirement; others required libraries and other public computing facilities to put filtering software on their computers to prevent patrons from using them to look at lewd material. Inevitably, these filters filtered out too much--there were stories about people not being able to find information about cancer because the webpages had the word "breast" on them. In the end, the filtering schemes failed because Americans weren't willing to "tolerate overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."

Internet censorship

I was surprised by the level of censorship the OpenNet Initiative found in China. Not because I didn't think the Chinese government was that interested in limiting its citizens' access to information; clearly, every totalitarian regime wants to ensure that its citizens only know what the regime wants them to know.

No, I was surprised because I didn't know that the Internet was that censorable. We hear all of these claims of "free information" and the decentralized nature of the internet making it impossible to control. Well, clearly, the Chinese have found a way to control it. How can we be sure our own government will never decide to do the same? PATRIOT Act III, anyone?

Credit card market failures

There's an interesting market failure at work in the micropayment credit card situation, as described in Big Bucks in Micropayment. The problem is that the incentive to minimize the number of credit card transactions (transaction fees) is not paid by the person deciding how many transactions to make (the customer). I go to Starbucks every day at spend $1.87 on a cup of coffee, and pay with my debit card. How much money does Starbucks actually make off of that? Not much--but what incentive do I have to remember to re-fill my Starbucks card on a regular basis, minimizing the number of credit company transactions? Not a lot.

The rise of micropayment-focused companies fixes this failure of the market, because they act on the merchant side. The customer rarely sees the micropayment company (except for PayPal). When I buy a song off iTunes, I use an iTunes interface to do it. The customer doesn't have to do anything differently, while the merchant saves a little money. The free market does work eventually, even if it's sometimes a little slow.

Micropayments

The first problem I see with Jakob Nielsen's micropayment for webpages scheme is that I, and probably many other people, are pretty unwilling to pay for something I haven't seen yet. Yeah, it's only a few cents, but if I'm doing research for a school paper, I'm sure I can go through a couple hundred webpages, if only quickly clicking there to see if it has any information I need. I suppose pages could have a summary that a reader could look at before deciding to pay, but that puts a significant extra step in the browsing experience.

Personally, I prefer the Salon model, where you watch a 30 second commercial for a pass for the whole day. I probably look at Salon once every couple of months, and if I follow a link there I'm usually happy to let the commercial play before viewing the site. Once I have a day pass, I can read as much as I want for 24 hours. No worries about whether the content I'm going to get is worth letting a commercial play in the background before viewing the site.

Obsolete industries

Clearly, the story of RCA's involvement in the history of FM radio as discussed in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture bears similarity to the role of the RIAA and MPAA in this century's battles over digital media rights. The business of the distributors of movies and music are threatened by new distribution channels, whether legal or illegal. Who needs a music label when you can sell your new CD online yourself? RCA is no longer a major force in American radio; someday the major record labels will have been made obsolete by emerging technological developments.

Um, y'all realize this is satire, right?

There seems to be some confusion about the "The African-American Blogging Thing" post on XX Blog. You all know it's satire, right? I wouldn't point it out, 'cause it always sucks to be the person pointing out a joke everyone else already got, but it's listed under the category of "Race and Ethnicity" in the syllabus, and the other posts I've read on the topic seem to take it seriously.

The post is satire. Go back and read it. Now go read this post on BOP News titled "The Woman Blogging Thing". The latter was written during the most recent (but surely not the last!) kerfluffle about why there aren't any women bloggers. (Answer: There are plenty of women bloggers, men just don't bother to read them. Mmmm....sexism....)

This piece from XX Blog isn't about race and the blogosphere. It's about gender and the blogosphere. The author's point is that Matt Stoller's musings on gender are sexist, but it's hard to notice the sexism unless it's placed in a context in which we're all more attuned to bias and discrimination, like racism. The same sentiments which are taken as legitimate arguments when said about women seem deeply insensitive and out of place when said about African-Americans. Nothing in this post should be taken as opinions or thoughts or facts about race.

Agree or disagree with the blogger, but that's what this post is about.

How'd I figure this out? Well, first, I'd read the "women blogging" piece when it was first written lo these many months ago, and this one seemed a little familiar. But mostly, I read the first two comments on the assigned post. Commenter one notes the similarity and politely asks about plagiarism, commenter two points to the satire.