What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs.  Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience.  But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself.  There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake.  However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.

A comparison might help to explain my optimism.  When we first moved to a village near Frome, Somerset, in the early 1980s, it was a bit of a desert – a supermarket had opened up in the centre of town, which had put family butchers and small shops out of business.  Everyone wanted in on this new phenomenon of cheap convenience, but over time it just wasn’t enough.  The town now has two family butchers, a fruit & veg shop, a weekly farmer’s market, a bustling café and a fantastic delicatessen amongst many other things.  Most of these are luxuries – particularly the café and delicatessen – and Frome is by no means poor compared to other towns.  But I think people eventually felt the emptiness of a shop dedicated purely to cheapness and convenience – people’s needs to feel part of a community, to know that more of their money was going into the local economy, to be offered something new by a shopkeeper, reasserted themselves.

Reading is definitely going to change, and there are lots of issues to contend with – many of which are talked about on the excellent if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book.  Some are very basic – the Kindle, for example, only has a black and white screen, so can’t show anything with colour pictures.  However, I recently surprised myself by reading an entire 400-page book on my iPhone on the train from Edinburgh to London (the fantastic Your Name Here available for a suggested $8 as a PDF from Helen DeWitt’s site) and didn’t feel frustrated by the small screen or having to cover part of the text with my finger to scroll.  The current form of deep context will perhaps disappear – but, particularly given the possibilities for audio, video and image opened up by the internet, I’m confident that something else will develop to take its place.

Other interesting sites:

My Own Private Alexandria
textsound
Project Gutenberg
Stanza for iPhone
Readability

Splash image by Nic McPhee

Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.

I saw the Chinese spectacle.  The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world.  It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony.  It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.

When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.”  They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries.  The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US.  Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”

PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel.  It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.

So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.

The Bird's Nest, Beijing

Observing the way that medal tables were displayed in different parts of the world was a microcosm of the differing perspectives on the Beijing Olympics.  The New York Times displayed them in order of total medals, which put the USA at the top.  The official Beijing Olympics website displayed them in order of Golds, then Silvers, then Bronzes, which put the Chinese at the top.  The BBC site could do either, as the strangely-named “Team GB” ended up in fourth whichever way they chose, but opted for the official table layout.  News.com.au also stuck with the official line, even though Australia stood to gain a place by using total medals as the gauge.

But the fundamental problem with any table which uses absolute numbers of medals is that it ignores the most important factors that go to make up those totals: population and wealth.  Australian economist Bill Mitchell has been compiling medal tables based on GDP, population, GDP per capita, gender and other measures for a few Olympics now, and the results give a much better insight into how impressive various countries’ performances were.  Here are a few of the highlights (listed in order from 1st to 5th):

Top five taking GDP into account:

North Korea, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Jamaica, Georgia

Top five taking population into account:

Jamaica, Bahamas, Iceland, Slovenia, Norway

Top five taking GDP per capita into account:

North Korea, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zimbabwe

And here’s where the top five in terms of the official medal table came in the adjusted table (out of the 87 countries that managed to win at least one medal):

Taking GDP into account:

China (44th), USA (72nd), Russia (37th), Great Britain (54th), Germany (61st)

Taking population into account:

China (65th), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

Taking GDP per capita into account:

China (2nd), USA (44th), Russia (36th), Great Britain (22nd), Germany (32nd)

There are full details on Bill’s website, including how he arrived at the calculations (using North Korea’s GDP must have been very close to dividing by zero).  There’s a sense of justice in the fact that, for example, Zimbabwean athletes are up there, given how amazing it is that they managed to make the games at all.

The political atmosphere of the games was bound to linger on and even seeped into national politics – Robert Mugabe awarded a white Zimbabwean swimmer US$100,000 for her four medals and called her “a daughter of Zimbabwe” (she must have been glad it wasn’t in worthless Zimbabwean dollars); the British cyclist Chris Hoy, who won three golds in Beijing, complained of politicians “cashing in” on his success.

But what of Tibet?  What of the Beiing factories closed to clean the air?  What of the promise that by holding the Olympics in China, the Chinese government would start to relax their iron grip on the people and start to be more open?

Shanghai Scrap, a blog written by an American writer living in Shanghai with some interesting coverage of the games, has watched as things start to get back to normal.

Although it is dangerous to draw historical comparisons, as it is easy to take them too far, this is nonetheless eerily reminiscent of the Munich Olympics in 1936, when anti-semitic propaganda, the beating of Jews in the streets and any sign of rubbish, beggars, mangy animals and so on was cleaned from the streets for the duration of the Olympics – and this despite the fact that the Nuremberg Laws, which gave a legal basis for pseudo-scientific discrimination against Jews, had been passed only the year before.  As shown with compelling clarity in the BBC documentary The Thirties in Colour, Germany became the place to go on holiday after the spectacle of the Olympics.  Holidaymakers who went after the games, however, were confronted with the full force of the Nazi’s rabid anti-semitism with Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer on many street corners.  What will travellers to China see in a year’s time?

Image credit: Shajahan Moidin

Google was started by two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who shared a common interest in retrieving relevant information from large data sets – their first co-authored paper was called The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (PDF, 124Kb).  Google now considers its mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  Note the change from a passive relationship (”searching”) to an active relationship (”organising”) with the content of websites.  They are also very much “in the advertising business”.  (Both quotes are from The Search Party, an interesting article about Google by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker).

Google Adsense works by taking the text content of the page, analysing the discrete blocks of text that we see as “words” and “sentences”, and using them as a way of serving up “relevant” advertisements.  (This blog has them at the bottom right of each page).  The programming techniques that make this happen (”algorithms”), and the secrecy surrounding them, are what has made Google an enormously successful company – their ability to take the text that someone enters and produce adverts and links to sites that they feel like clicking.

But what Google does has nothing to do with language, except in a very dissipated form. Rather than using language as you or I would understand it, Google’s algorithms are simply a form of pattern matching. Search for “car”, and Google will give you results for “car” and “cars”, but not “automobiles”. The inability of Google to understand the meaning of words can produce some strange results. (There are exceptions – searches for medical terms such as “alzheimers” for example, that offer other searches for “symptoms” and “treatment” – but these have to be flagged manually by Google).

Another part of the puzzle is that Google works to a large extent on how people link to other sites. If a website has a large number of links pointing to it with the words “car auctions”, it’s much more likely to turn up on a Google search for “car auctions”. (Although if the site being linked to was actually about My Little Pony and called www.mylittlepony.com, that effect wouldn’t be very strong for obvious reasons – the links, to Google, are a measure of a site’s popularity; but unless the links and the site’s content match up, the effect is reduced a great deal.)

In this crude way, Google starts to understand what most people mean by “car auctions”, and places sites in its results accordingly.

A good example of this effect was what happened to our Google Adsense adverts when Lelyn posted his blog Our Man In Cairo – Bright & Hot about his first impressions of Cairo.  It seemed likely that Google Adsense would pick up on the references to Cairo and offer holidays to the Red Sea and Sharm el Sheikh.  But looking down the list of ads when the page first went live, most of them were adverts like “Meet Sexy Arab Women – Thousands Sexy Women Online Join Free!”

The main words that Adsense is picking up on in Lelyn’s blog are obviously “Arabic” and “Hot”. Put together in that way, combined with the knowledge of the way that Google works and how it ascribes meaning to language, it becomes more obvious how adverts like that appear, and the way that the content of websites determines the way that Google sees the web.

This isn’t just a one-way process however – the effect also feeds back into the way that content is written for the web.

The death of printed newspapers, reported with much hand-wringing by the press, is seemingly not far away. Whether that turns out to be true or not, the sense of panic in Fleet Street is palpable as newspapers fall over each other in the rush for the internet. However, one of the problems with the internet is that it doesn’t pay well. The most common source of revenue on the internet is online advertising – but one million visitors to a site don’t generate nearly as much revenue as one million readers who both pay for the paper and have to sift through the advertisements in it. As documented with unflinching and refreshing clarity in Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (previously featured on this blog in John Lanchester, Riots, terrorism etc.), the decline in print readership has lead to precipitous declines in newspapers’ incomes, which were hardly secure to begin with.

This, combined with website visitors’ increasing ability to shut out adverts when they read sites, means that even the most popular newspaper websites struggle to produce a significant amount of income. Further to which every visitor to the site, whether they click on an advertising link or not, costs the newspaper company money for the bandwidth that they use by requesting pages and their graphics.

For a long time the Guardian website, Guardian Unlimited (now simply guardian.co.uk), seemed to be leading the field.  Whether it actually made any money or not is a moot point. But recently, with enormous fanfare, the Telegraph website telegraph.co.uk rocketed to the top of the list of newspaper sites with the most “unique monthly visitors”. The editor of telegraph.co.uk appeared throughout the media, positively gloating over the online triumph of what is seen as one of Britain’s “quality” newspapers. Rather timid questions were asked about lies, damned lies and statistics, but were robustly brushed off by the Telegraph, and indeed it seemed that the site had actually had a vast increase in visits. Of course the Telegraph’s line in all this was the triumph of quality content in a medium full of trivia – they attributed it to “a string of major news stories – particularly around the credit crunch – and in depth coverage of the Budget, for which it built a micro-site and commissioned exclusive videos on Telegraph TV”.

What ties these two threads together – the way that Google works and telegraph.co.uk’s huge increase in visitors – is provided by this story in the 11th-24th July 2008 edition of Private Eye, which is short enough to quote in full but very enlightening nonetheless:

What is the secret of the Telegraph’s online success, which has propelled it to the top of the pops in Fleet Street in terms of the number of “hits”?

First, news hacks are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the website boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and / or get as many of those key words into the first part of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are “Britney Spears” and “breast cancer” – hey presto, the hack is duly obliged to file piece about young women “such as Britney Spears” being at risk from breast cancer.

The second new development is to run as many downmarket and sensationalist stories as possible – to the horror of old Telegraph hands (or at least the few who are left) and readers. Since the young guns manning the website neither know nor care what the Telegraph stands for, they bung in whatever grabs their Heat-reading fancy.

Thus a story appeared the other day about the woman with the world’s largest breasts – plus picture – and a man with a rare disease who was “turning into a tree”, again with pics. After complaints from female members of staff, the megaboobs item was eventually taken down – but not before it had earned plenty more “hits” from salivating web-surfers whose tastes are clearly rather different from those of Sir Herbert Gusset.

Here are the two stories:

World’s largest fake breasts – Maxi Mounds – Telegraph (now taken down, here’s the Digg page)

Tree man ‘who grew roots’ may be cured – Telegraph

Each person that visits a site is called a “unique visitor”. But the value of these “visits” differs widely. One visit is counted every time a person visits a website, whether they:

1. Click a link for telegraph.co.uk from Google, decide the page isn’t relevant without having to read much of it and leave straight away or
2. Are a regular visitor, come to the site using a bookmark in their browser, and spend an hour reading numerous news stories from beginning to end or
3. Anywhere in between those two.

(The LoveHowlMuse blog gets a few visitors of the first kind too – mainly people searching for “show me your cunt”, who end up on the blog Selfish Cunt opens for Motorhead – Show me your fucking money). It seems likely that the vast majority of the new visitors to telegraph.co.uk are of the first kind, given the kind of Darwinian survival-at-all-costs tactics that they’ve started to use. They probably don’t tell that to the people who are the targets of the publicity drive, though. Not the readers so much as the people who they really get their money from – companies who place online advertisements.

Clinton’s appearance features heavily in the coverage of her campaign, for example Carl Bernstein’s disgust at her “thick ankles”.  If we’re talking about appearances, what about Obama’s fat lips?  Can you imagine the McCain audience question “How are we going to beat the bitch?”, to which he replied “good question!”, rephrased as “How are we going to beat that black bastard?”  There’s a whiff of suspicion that, admittedly along with other concerns about Clinton, the commentators would prefer a man to win, even if he is black.

Thirty eight years ago, in 1970, Robin Morgan was working for one of the leading counterculture newspapers in New York City, Rat.  Disgusted with the creeping sexism in the paper, she and her female colleagues took over the paper, and for the first female-only edition wrote a celebrated polemic, Goodbye To All That.  Goodbye To All That lamented how the New Left hierarchy, dominated by white men, had simply replaced one form of sexual repression for another, subtler version.  You can read the original article in full on the Fair Use Blog.

Until now she has resisted the temptation to write another version, but the treatment of Clinton by the media has enraged her enough to write Goodbye To All That (#2).  Goodbye To All That (#2) is another polemic, this time about the viciously misogynist media coverage that Clinton has had to endure.  Whether you’re for Clinton, Obama or even McCain, and despite some flaws (Morgan voting for Clinton because Morgan is a woman seems very dubious), this article is a sobering reminder of how far we haven’t come.

You can read the article in full on the Women’s Media Centre website.

“Well they say women shouldn’t be the president

Cause we go crazy from time to time

Well push my button baby

Here I come

Yeah look out baby

I’m at high tide”

Laurie Anderson – Beautiful Red Dress

What he was using is called “misdirection” – a simple trick where the magician makes you more interested in something else (in this case his close proximity and the close attention he directed at me) while removing your watch.  (Having said that, and to his credit, you still have to be extremely dexterous to do something like that).

Another more threatening example was when my mobile phone got stolen.  I was sitting outside a cafe when some kids came up to me and one thrust a piece of paper with something scrawled on it into my face, mumbling something unintelligible – all my attention was on the fact that the first kid was too close for comfort, and I didn’t notice that the second one had simply picked my mobile up from the table until they were long gone.  Misdirection can seem like magic, but in a different context you can feel like you’ve been conned.

Advertising and marketing have adopted this trick of misdirection, except it’s more subtly done, and it aims to avoid the feeling that you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes – on the contrary, it aims to please.  This move towards misdirection has been recent, as advertising has become steadily more sophisticated.  Have a look at this Persil advert from the 1960s:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s easy to see that advert and wonder how on earth people fell for it.  But this advert was only made during the early stages of advertising and marketing’s move from simple claims for a product – that Persil washes whiter, for example – to the use of psychological techniques, and particularly those based on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud.  These techniques allow advertisers to transfer a much subtler non-verbal message than “I felt ashamed because Jimmy’s shirt wasn’t as white as Tom Williams’ shirt”.

This process was charted in “The Century Of The Self”, a documentary by Adam Curtis, which examines the strong influence of Freud’s theories on advertising and marketing in the 20th century:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who among us would say that they’re not influenced by advertising?  If you’re not the target market for a Persil advert then it’s easy to scoff – but what happens when, for example, a Jean-Luc Godard fan sees an advert for a High Definition DVD boxed set of his films, or a Mac user sees an advert for the latest video iPod, or a gardener sees a new kind of hybrid rose in a catalogue?  She can resist the temptation, but there is no-one among us who wouldn’t be tempted by something.  Here’s Bill Hicks on marketing and advertising – the really interesting part starts at about 01:20 when he starts talking about the “anti-marketing dollar”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As advertising has become more sophisticated, so have audiences in a psychological arms race.  Just as the Persil advert above seems ridiculously simplistic, over time people’s intellect adapts to advertising’s techniques as they start to consciously notice how these new techniques make them feel – and something that you notice you can resist.  Advertising’s Holy Grail is an advert that totally circumvents people’s rational thought and in the process side-steps their ability to resist by thinking about it, creating an unmediated desire for a product.  There is a tacit understanding of this in the stricter regulations governing advertising to children.

Misdirection in advertising is mostly used to remove the audience’s barriers to buying a product, to reassure them about buying something that they have rational reservations about.  This is particularly useful when public opinion turns against a group of products in a way that cannot be tackled head-on, and a good example of this is cars and car use.

Leaving aside the truth or falsity of global warming, which is another subject altogether, I think we would all accept that being “green” is now a prerequisite for companies and their commercials.  No company can afford to be seen to be unconcerned about environmental issues (unless they’re going for the anti-environmental dollar).  Because of the weight of public opinion that global warming is a real problem and that car use is a major contributor to this problem, in terms of advertising messages car manufacturers have the choice of accepting that opinion, or telling their potential buyers that they’re wrong.  The second strategy risks completely backfiring and alienating their potential customers – particularly in an age where the customer is always right, or “you’re worth it”.

In this situation, car companies basically have two options:

1. Completely and radically change the way they build cars, and the infrastructure that revolves around it, and advertise these profound changes.  This would be an enormously risky bet because if, for example, they started building large quantities of electric cars, not only would they have to bet on a completely new worldwide charging-point infrastructure being built, but they would have to completely change their manufacturing methods which would be vastly expensive.

2. Make as little change to their manufacturing processes and business model as possible, but make these changes the centre of attention in their marketing, just to the point where people can reassure themselves that it’s actually OK to buy a new car.

All the major car companies are currently taking the second course.  And no wonder, because without being able to share the risk with someone who has very deep pockets, the outcomes for the first are either glory or death for the company that tries it – not something that you want to take to a meeting with shareholders.

Here’s an example of how the second approach works when it comes to advertising.  This is Honda, telling you how environmentally friendly their new diesel engines are:

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the core of this advert, Honda’s message is “buy more cars” – no more or less than that.  But “buy more cars” is a culturally unacceptable message now, even if that’s something that people would really like to do, and this environmental barrier is one that needs to be overcome.  The bright colours, lovely cartoon animals, reassuring voice and soothing music all go to make up a very reassuring, if sickly sweet, context.  Honda’s cartoon animals – obviously exercising the will of “the environment” – kill off all the old, smoky diesel engines and then frolic with Honda’s new engine in a blissful environmental heaven.  If this was all the advert was, most people would be sickened by all the schmaltz – and so to undercut this, the song is about how it’s good to hate some things.  A very simple clash of opposites, but the irony that it generates allows enough of a knowing feeling to forget that in fact the core message, deeply buried, is “buy more cars”.  Or, more accurately, “that submerged desire that you have for a new car is ok – you go ahead and buy it”.  The fact that the song is about hate also prevents any feelings that Honda are being wilfully naive and ingenuous.  

There are many examples of this kind of misdirection in advertising, particularly combined with the message that it’s ok to desire and buy things like cars, removing barriers put up by rational thought.  Thought is anathema to this kind of advertising, which wants to take the shortest route to the viewer’s feelings – creating stronger desire, damping down negative feelings about a product and so on.

If you’re not in the least moved by an advert, you’re probably not the target market – perhaps you’d be more moved by a Jean-Luc Godard DVD boxed set, a new iPod or a new kind of hybrid rose.  And if you’re still unconvinced, here’s Derren Brown, who was that barrister-turned-”mentalist” in Bristol, getting one over on the advertising industry themselves:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Essentially Riots, Terrorism etc. is a précis of the entire book, with some observations along the way – and it makes both fascinating and depressing reading. Hyperbole generally disgusts Lanchester, but he starts the review with a bold claim:

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry.

The idea for the book started with the press coverage of the “millennium bug”, which was supposed to bring the world to its knees as computers failed to cope with the change of year from 1999 to 2000:

Davies chooses to focus on the fact that of the millions of words written about the bug, all of them were written by journalists who had no idea whether what they were writing was true. They simply didn’t know. Flat Earth News makes a great deal of this. The most basic function of journalism, in Davies’s view, is to check facts. Journalists don’t just pass on what they’re told without making an effort to check it first. At least, in theory they don’t. In practice, contemporary journalism has been corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories in a manner so fundamental that it almost defies belief. The consequences of that are pervasive and systemic.

Lanchester goes on to show how Davies’ research team illuminate his claims with some simple but effective research:

The team looked at a fortnight’s production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases; and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a good way.

They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.

So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies’s stinging coinage, ‘churnalism’. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.

This leads to observations on the pervasiveness effect of PR in the news media, the industry-wide use of bent private detectives, the culture of error at the Daily Mail, the ease with which the government co-opted the Observer to make the case for war in Iraq and a reappraisal of the way that Alastair Campbell deliberately distracted the UK media from the lack of WMD in Iraq by the “scandal” of the “sexed-up” dossier. Definitely worth a read – and it’s available for free, along with the other two articles mentioned at the beginning, on the London Review of Books website:

Buy Flat Earth News by Nick Davies on Amazon.co.uk

Riots, Terrorism etc., a review by John Lanchester of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

Warmer, Warmer by John Lanchester

Cityphilia by John Lanchester