Simon T. Kaye

My third piece for First Drafts, the blog of Prospect Magazine UK. I’m quite pleased with this one.

I offer a few critical thoughts about how the show was wrapped up. I think most sensible folk agree that it was unsatisfying. But I also argue that the fun was always in the magnitude and cleverness of Lost’s web following.

I’ve got a bit of form talking about Lost on this blog – take a look through the ‘TV’ category if you don’t believe me. I think I’ll miss it.

My Prospect post is here, and here is a little extract:

Perhaps Lost’s creators shelved whatever overarching explanation they had originally concocted when they realised that it could never compare to the intricate, crowd-sourced theories of their viewers.

Oh, and beware the spoilers.

“The next ten or fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.” 

These words were uttered at a hearing in the heart of Political America recently. You can see it, and an interview with Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, over on this webcast of a segment from MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’.

Oh yes; journalism (its nature, its state) isn’t just making news at the moment; it’s in the news. The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ has been a perennial issue for some time; as a journalism student I saw many well-known journalists speak and the one topic that they all always came back to was the changing face of their trade in the age of new media.

Alan Rusbridger failed to convince with an almost-powerpoint about how the Guardian’s transition to the ‘Berliner’ format was an attempt to shore up sales while papers do the job of convincing people that their coverage is worth actually paying for (I think I’ve complained about his talk before…). Of the writers, ‘columnist’ Polly Toynbee was particularly derisive of this challenge to her status as arch-opinion-former.

It’s at the movies, too. State of Play (which is excellent) feeds off the in-house tension between a veteran political reporter who types onto a dark screen with two fingers at a time and the young thing behind his paper’s attempt to survive online. When Crowe’s character says “You think I’m over-fed, too expensive and take way too long”, he isn’t simply referring to himself. Newspapers now cost around £1 a day in this country (which almost legitimises my ever-more-frequent splashing out for the International Herald Tribune, at closer to a quid-fifty). Why pay that to read news that was only fresh ten hours ago?

The Independent, under Simon Kelner, tried something new. Objectivity? Who needs it! News is subjective. Importance is relative. Everyone writing this paper is human; let’s not pretend we don’t have opinions. The result was the ‘viewspaper’, a concept which has slipped away somewhat since the start of Roger Alton’s reign (he prefers the more old-fashioned approach of decorating the pages with beautiful women. They “basically make the world a better place”, after all). Today I’m not quite clear whether the ‘viewspaper’ ever made the Indie into anything more than the Express of the left.

The recent outcry over Swine Flu panics on the Internet allowed every traditional-media commentator to point out what they perceive to be the inferiority of blogs, and twitter, and social networking sites. If it’s not edited, it’s not safe. No-one making this claim can have seen some of the front-page headlines I saw a week ago. “Swine Flu to kill 91,000 Londoners” is a personal favourite.

Newspapers are not immune to misjudgments, errors, factual inconsistencies and unqualified opinions. It’s pretty ironic to see the stalwarts of the printed-press attacking new information-distribution systems for inflating problems or being hysterical when the very slump in sales caused by new media is the driving force behind the popularisation, dumbing-down and spectacle-seeking that practically every newspaper I can think of has been moving towards (though I do feel inclined to point out my belief that the USA’s daily printed media are of a sustained quality compared to the papers here in the UK).

The current, excellent issue of Prospect magazine (I know, I keep linking to them) mounts a debate around and defence of ‘serious journalism’. More here.

This seems particularly timely as the Telegraph, mocked and criticised (Private Eye calls it the ‘Maily Telegraph’) for its massive staff cuts and new-found interest in celebrity nonsense, dominates everyone’s news-schedules for the second day running. Its comprehensive investigation into and explanation of Parliament’s flawed expenses system is an absolute must-read, clearly the product of prolonged research, and a genuine scoop. Are there mistakes? Of course. Dozens, I’m sure (it’s still worthwhile).

But, crucially, The Huffington Post probably couldn’t get away with this many factual issues or slightly-libellous claims without compromising its standards. I’m simply not convinced that we hold our more established online news-sources to a lower standard than we do our printed media. I’d personally trust a twitter feed more readily than an editorial in the Express.

Warren Ellis advised us in last month’s Wired (another great magazine) not to trust the new media as a source of news. Why? Because online news providers “have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount”. But how, precisely, does this differ from the editors and writers of the modern-day newspaper, faced with shrinking sales and deflating advertising revenues?

Things move quickly in this new world. Amazon’s Kindle, the most successful of the e-ink reader systems, is moving toward a larger format that can more effectively accommodate the big pages of newspapers and journals. The days of getting ink on our fingers may well be numbered, and this would be no bad thing for an environment that needs its trees.

Are newspapers going to disappear? No. They’ll change, they’ll be forced to adapt. I personally think they’ll become more like magazines. I’m reading more magazines now than I have at any other time in my life; I’ve referred to at least three different magazines right here in this article.

To return to the quote at the top of this blog – is the decline of the traditional media really going to undermine the accountability of the political world? People thought this way when radio hit newspapers, and again when television hit newspapers. The truth is that it has become harder to do wrong, and to get away with it, than ever before. This fact raises ethical issues of its own.

But let us not delude ourselves that ‘serious journalism’ plays some quasi-constitutional role that more democratic systems of reportage cannot match.

Another marvelous image from XKCD

Evgeny Morozov, who writes an unmissable blog for Foreign Policy, makes a more important criticism of twitter’s current role, suggesting that it’s providing more disinformation than anything else – but also mentions the possibility that the internet could work as a fantastic finder and predictor of emerging biological threats. With the increasing integration of mobile phones and other devices, the internet ceases to be merely our nervous system, and emerges as a component of a global immune system.

Prospect Magazine (for whom I once worked! woo!) have put online a fascinating article: Mark Honigsbaum writes about the means of catching pandemics early. He points out that Swine Flu may well have been abroad in Mexico for a few weeks before the news broke in any meaningful way online. More importantly, his assertion is that the nature of the internet renders it less useful for disease detection – underinformed or worried searchers on google, for example, would distort the information on a given outbreak. Or, to extrapolate from this: the internet is too open, too democratic to operate as an even quasi-scientific virus catcher.

The logical outcome of this – and explicitly suggested by the above – is that the brains behind Twitter and Google and the rest turn their attention to a reserved system of aggregating relevant information for the purposes of planetary self-defence and early warning.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this recommendation. The advantage of the internet as it stands is that it is simply the broadest information-exchange ever constructed. I don’t see how a more limited network could articulate the information more quickly.

Swine Flu is surely the most quickly discovered and shared potential-pandemic that we’ve ever seen. If it had started in a western country, it would have broken out on Twitter within moments (though there is weight to the counter-argument that, hey, these things start in poorer countries were internet access is more rare. But that is changing…)

As for informational quality – well, this is a perrenial problem anyway. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the blind assumption that vetted, ‘establishment’ data is always preferable.

Systems such as Digg and others have an almost marketised hierarchy built-in. The preferences of many translate into the emergence of decent and flawed information: it’s all available, but it’s clearly sorted. Such a system is clearly the next step for micro-blogging as well.

This is the kind of thinking that reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, which posited an emerging planet-wide sentience. In effect, this is a far simpler idea: our ‘intelligent’ superstructure is conscious only as its individual, reporting components are. It’s the beginnings of a hive-mind.

So – I won’t be so quick to sneer at the torrents of little fears, hopes, jokes, and links that pour through twitter on the theme of Swine Flu. It may be our fastest defence against the next big pandemic - whether that’s tomorrow, or twenty years away.

On a slight tangent from the last piece:

A friend of mine on Facebook reminded me about Berkeley’s course on Starcraft and Game Theory. I tracked down this video of their first lecture. They all seem to be having a lot of fun.

This is probably of most interest to nerds who enjoy Game Theory experiments (like me!). But it’s an interesting interpretation of a strategy game, and the information they are deriving or modelling with it seems to have very little to do with narrative or story. Compare and contrast with MIT’s approach.

On a completely different topic –  doesn’t that guy look too young to be a teacher? Must be a PhD student.

The Massachusetts  Institute of Technology, as part of its very friendly ‘let’s share the knowledge’ Open Course commitments, has been publishing the course design and full reading-list and materials for its Video Game Theory and Analysis class online. It’s just a little bit out of date, but intriguing nonetheless. 

Here it is!

They have listed the course as it appeared in Autumn 2006 and 2007, but the difference is really negligable (they had a few guest speakers in 2007).

Apart from making me want to enrol at MIT (ha!), a bit of scrutiny of the outline and reading-list is quite revealing. 

Perhaps they're learning about games RIGHT NOW?!

First of all, I’d like to point out that any course whose requirements include “complete (or play, at minimum, 70 hours of) a single contemporary videogame or a grouping of games in a particular series or genre (example: Civilization III and IV, plus expansions or online play; the Zelda series, etc.)” can only be a source of massive nerd-joy.

I’ve written a tiny bit on why I think we ought to take ‘gaming’ seriously – in fact, it was more of a declaration of why the broader media and public can’t take the hobby seriously as it stands, based on a criticism of the terminology which we seem to have reversed blindly  into over the years. 

MIT’s course – which is by far the most serious and impressive engagement I’ve ever seen with gaming by a big-time university – lessens the kind of outrage I was throwing about in that other article.

Each student on the course seems to be required to complete a project, based, in the main, on their engagement with a particular videogame and their understanding of it. It’s all listed here – so let’s see what the class of 2007 regarded as the most ‘important’ games of our era.

Knights of the Old Republic. Bioshock. F.E.A.R. Half Life. These are just the PC games. 

Okay, so far, so peachy.

But look a little bit further, and it soon becomes clear that the majority of engagement with these titles – with all of the titles they list, and the works they cite – is intrinsically founded in a narrative understanding of art. Games are viewed as “semiotic domains” for the development of stories. 

There does remain an understanding of the origins of videogames lying somewhere beyond narrative, in an Atari-flicker of puzzles, reflexes and technological joy. But most of this  material seems to place the modern, story-driven game (the game as vehicle for story) atop a pedestal, as if everything else has been evolving toward it.

Agency, and the impact of player participation, is an underlying theme of the course. But it’s treated as a kind of enveloping trick, a facade: the tale is as it is, and the importance of your activities is a clever way of immersing you. Even World of Warcraft is seen in these terms. 

This raises a few questions – first of all, are the folks at MIT right about our hobby? Are games simply the latest presentational package for old-fashioned narrative arcs? (Certainly, in the vast majority of cases, this is true?) 

But do we believe that our hobby is capable of more – that there’s more to the collective media and art generation that is modern games development than creating a plausible (or at least cohesive) space within which to tell stories? 

With these questions in mind (and I’m genuinely puzzled by them) I fully intend to read every book on that list. Do you think they’ll give me a certificate afterwards?

(Click headings for links)

The sun is getting colder.

Only a bit colder. This sort of news tends to get the climate-change deniers very excited indeed. This is because they are idiots (a worrying trend, which I want to write about some other time, is how stupid science-denying and edgy-internet-libertarianism seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of the time. Just what kind of a super-culture are we breeding here?).

The sun has cooled from its modern-day heat peak of 1985. UK scientists suggest the sun is on an 11-year cycle; others that the sun follows a centuries-long pattern. Either way it’s unnerving that there is now no sun-spot or flare activity. One is put in mind of the excellent Sunshine. Or of Alastair Reynolds, who points out in his Revelation Space trilogy that messing with a star would be the best way for an advanced intelligence to totally obliterate planet-bound species. The sooner we’re operating in more than one solar system, the better. Also, someone should write about human civilization trying to cling on post-mysterious-sun-extinction.

The sun without its spots.

Alternatively, what if the intelligence is within the sun? Better yet,what if the intelligence is the sun? Watching us roast or throwing us a helping hand?
 

Scientists are reverse-engineering the mammalian brain.

This follows news a while back that half a rat’s brain was successfully reconstructed within a computer model and run for 60 seconds, non-real-time (the rat brain’s subjective time was operating at a fraction of real time for processing reasons). In just those moments of subjective time, the brain generated patterns recognisable from brain-scans of living rats. Now the Blue-Brain people have rebuilt a part of the human brain, with similar results. THE SINGULARITY APPROACHES. 

“It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed.”  – BBC News reporting on the ‘Science Beyond Fiction’ conference
 

The cow has now joined the ranks of the fully gene-mapped.

A Hereford cow named Dominette is deemed the archetypical bovine for the purposes of mapping their genetic profile. Perhaps we can take away their pain receptors for guilt-free meat-eating. That is all.
 

A vast ‘Lyman-Alpha’ blob – a bundle of gas and energy several times the size of a galaxy – has been spotted by powerful telescopes a long, long time before it should have had time to form in the early universe.

What exactly are we seeing here? Lyman-Alphas (not a term for the CoS of a fictional White House) are essentially structures that give birth to millions of stars. Clouds of interstellar material are ballooned by the energy output of their contents.  We’re starting to look so far back in time that pretty soon we’ll have to see some of the oldest emitted light in the universe. If this thing existed before it was supposed to, then what was it? A remaining cloud from whatever existed before the big bang?
 

Pig flu is more dangerous and more likely to go pandemic than bird flu.

Oh god, the Jews and Muslims were right.

Seriously, though, I’m starting to seriously think that pig-meat should be off-limits. We’re talking about the fourth-smartest animals on the planet here. The fact that their evil diseases could kill us all is just gravy for the potatoes.

And finally, we could send emails through the planet.

I had to include this, as it’s a Queen Mary scientist making noises about it. Perhaps a more intriguing use for this technology would be the ability to transmit signals through other planets – say, to our base on the far side of the moon without an intermediary satellite?