Technology360

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 2 of 4)

Myth

This is the second of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

Myth – which I’m using here very broadly – is the most persistent method of lowering entropy, originating from the necessities of passing on information by oral means, and continuing to the present day – even in educated Western societies.  Poetry, song and legend are the building blocks of myth.  Easy to remember, crafted in metaphor, they have served through millennia to transmit culture, religion, history, law, social mores, and pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena.

I’ll pick an example from Norse mythology.  My maternal grandmother was born on the island in Denmark which is home to the city of Odense.  Its name comes from Norse words meaning “Odin’s sanctuary.”  My surname comes from the family farm in mid-Norway.  It has several ancient stone-pile graves and the name is likely a kenning – “Hár’s acre” – “The High One’s field,” from one of Odin’s many nicknames – for this field of graves.

Odin was effectively the Nordic/Germanic god of information –credited for eloquence, poetry, music, wisdom, magic, prophecy and inventor of the runes – writing.  His myth has it that he pawned one of his eyes in exchange for wisdom.  Each morning, he sent his two ravens, Hugin and Munin – thought and memory, respectively – to fly the world bringing back what they had seen and heard.

One of the poems in the Poetic Edda, preserved in Iceland in the 13^th century from the oral tradition, is Hávamál, The Sayings of Hár where Odin provides advice for wise living.  Examples below from the translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor:

No. 27
The ignorant booby had best be silent
When he moves among other men,
No one will know what a nit-wit he is
Until he begins to talk;
No one knows less what a nit-wit he is
Than the man who talks too much.

No. 58
Early shall he rise who has designs
On another’s land or life:
His prey escapes the prone wolf,
The sleeper is seldom victorious.

Pretty benign stuff, but myth derives strength by being close to power – the shaman or priest or official or family head.  Even today, otherwise sober people are demanding that myths be substituted for science in the education system of scientifically sophisticated countries.  Tragically, deaths from stoning or decapitation are still happening in other parts of the world when the codes that myths engender are violated.

But myth can also be sublime.  It would be hard to convince me that any form of information provides more “value per bit” to humans than literature, poetry and music.  To me, the music of Johannes Brahms and the novels of Halldór Laxness touch my soul – to use a very unscientific word – like nothing else.  From the latter’s masterpiece, Independent People, these words about the principal character’s step-daughter:

When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks:  Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth?  Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe?  No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja.

The essence of his subtle and complex novel is captured in this one paragraph in a way that a similar number of words of, say, business writing, cannot replicate.

Is it our ability to create myth that makes us human?  Myth hasn’t been replaced by media and “meta.”  To the contrary, myth was an early adopter of, and has arguably thrived under, each.

More about this in part three on media (part one was an introduction, part three deals with media, and part four will conclude with what I’m labeling “meta”).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 1 of 4)

Introduction

The Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen that ended today had as its theme the word, “human” – that simple and that complicated.  Until last week, I planned to attend and to do a talk on what one might call a human information theory of value.  The following from my notes for that talk takes a look at three successively-layered epochs of human information dissemination, which I’m labeling “myth,” “media,” and “meta.”

Note:  This is the first of four parts.  Links to the other three parts come at the end of this post.

In 2000, Michael Lesk, now a professor at Rutgers University, estimated that there were 12 exabytes (12 x 10¹⁸ bytes) of recorded information in the world and that it was increasing at 4 exabytes per year.  Another study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 5 exabytes of recorded information was produced in 2002 alone.  Five exabytes equals 37,000 libraries the size of the Library of Congress’s book collection.  That would put the aggregate amount of recorded information in 2007 in the 45-exabyte range – 6.8 gigabytes (6.8 x 10⁹ bytes) of recorded information for each of the 6.6 billion persons on the planet.

Roll back the calendar 2,000 years and the world’s population was the same as that of the U.S. today – 300 million.  Information then was largely recorded on scrolls.  The largest library of that era was the Royal Library at Alexandria, Egypt, a collection variously given as 400,000-600,000 scrolls at its peak.  I don’t know how much information was on each scroll, but let’s assume that each one was the equivalent of 100 typewritten pages – 200 kilobytes of information each – 100 gigabytes total.  This was a very comprehensive library, but let’s figure that it missed 90% of the world’s recorded information.  So a rough guess, then, that is the aggregate was one terabyte (1 x 10¹²) – just over 3 kilobytes (300 words) of recorded information for each person on the planet.  In 2,000 years, population has grown (mostly in the past century) 22-fold, but recorded information per person has grown some 2 million times!

Of course recorded information is not the only information in the world.  The information coded in Earth’s physical and biological structures no doubt dwarfs recorded information.  Atoms assemble from atomic subparticles and likewise molecules assemble from atoms through information.  Information also determines the development path of each organism and organisms make use of information to survive.  But these information systems are stable enough that one can treat them as effectively closed systems.

The late comic Buddy Hackett affected a bumbling on-stage demeanor and was once invited to replace Curly Howard in the Three Stooges, but his humor sometimes had an intellectual foundation.  My favorite was a classic explanation of entropy – a measure of disorder in a closed system.  While staring intensely at a glass of water, Hackett was asked what he was doing.  Hackett replied, “Someone told me that I could bring a glass of ice water to a boil just by staring at it.  I’ve already got it up to room temperature.”  The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes how the temperature of both ice water and boiling water tend to reach an equilibrium over time – in this case to room temperature – through increasing entropy.

Two thousand years back, an individual could get the equivalent of his or her share of aggregate recorded information – 300 words – in conversation at breakfast.  Today, an individual’s exposure to his or her 6.8-gigabyte share takes considerably longer, even with the New York Times next to the plate and the Today show playing in high definition in the background.  Entropy is still inexorable, but for humans, the “information room temperature” is increasing as we invent ever-more sophisticated ways of extracting information value from the disorder around them.

Part two takes a look at the first of these inventions – the role of myth in human extraction of value from information.  Part three will look at the role of media and part four will look at what I’m labeling “meta” – information about information in a networked world.  --Dennis

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The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth

Clay Shirky has a terrific short essay on the advantages of youth in the entrepreneurial sphere.  He writes:

... Young entrepreneurs have an advantage over older ones (and by older I mean over 30), and ... age isn’t in fact a mindset. Young people have an advantage that older people don’t have and can’t fake, and it isn’t about vigor or hunger — it’s a mental advantage. The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things. ...

Link:  Many2Many.  Thanks for the tip to the advantaged Andrew Haarsager.  --Dennis

Learning about change on a Normandy farm

Last week, my wife and I retraced (too quickly) part of my father's 1944-45 path across western Europe, spending a couple of days in Normandie (we spell it Normandy), France and counting coup with the Ardennes in eastern Belgium on our way back to a flight home from Amsterdam (from October through the end of the war, he was with the 28th Infantry Division in the Huertgen Forest, Ardennes Forest ("Battle of the Bulge"), and Colmar Pocket areas, among others).

My dad's initial unit, the 2nd Infantry Division, landed on Omaha Beach at the village of St.-Laurant-sur-Mer on 7 June 1944 (D-Day+1).  The previous day's initial invasion had cleared most of the resistance from the Germans on the beach, so as the division moved inland, it passed through two villages that had already been liberated, but engaged the Germans a few kilometers inland at Trévières, liberating that small town.  From there, they kept moving south, fighting what became known as the Battle of the Hedgerows -- the nearly impenetrable walls of stone and tall hedges that surrounded the many small fields. 

About 20 km south of the beach, they then engaged in an assault from 11 June to 12 July on a German installation on Hill 192, so named because, at 192 meters above sea level, it gave the Germans a very wide overview of the entire invasion area.  Hill 192 is a large feature with a gradual slope, the top of which is about a kilometer north of the highway which connects Saint-Lô with Bayeux and a kilometer west of St.-Georges-d'Elle.  That little hamlet changed hands five times during the battle.

A more peaceful and bucolic setting you couldn't find.  The viewpoint is about a kilometer west of St. Georges d'Elle.  It's located between the top of the hill, about 200 meters to the south, and a farm, about 200 meters down the hill to the north.  The sign there provides a visualization of the final attack in which the 2nd Division passed right through the farm in the orchard where the cow above is standing.

As I was viewing this scene, there was a clank-clank-clank sound coming from the farm and I noticed a farmer crouching in front of a shed hammering on something metallic.  It's likely that his grandfather was the farmer in 1944 and that he and his family were driven temporarily from the farm and that the farm largely destroyed by the month-long operation -- cows killed, apple orchards uprooted, buildings shot up, crops trampled. My dad was on a Howitzer crew until he was wounded on 23 June, so he no doubt launched countless shells into the farm and German outpost, now a barley field.

There were big things at stake in WW-II -- liberation from a foreign power, ethnic genocide -- about which few could question.  Yet the justification for the good guys and the bad guys at Hill 192 blasting each other might have seemed pretty remote to the farmer whose family and farm was being destroyed (many "locals" throughout Europe, including I'm sure some whose physical assets were being destroyed, joined the resistance and provided valuable assistance to the Allies).  And this is no doubt only one of many wars fought in the area over the centuries since the top of the has so much strategic importance.  Go back some 40 generations and a different group of bad guys who were my cousins and some of this farmer's ancestors sailed up the Seine nearby to the east, took over the area, and gave their name to it.  So dozens of generations of farmers have had to put up with these interruptions of their livelihood.  It would be tempting to put aside whatever issues caused these battles and just wish that people would leave them alone to farm.

I thought first how remote is our experience with resident wars as Americans.  The various Indian wars of the 19th century are the most recent example.  Our distance from that time might have contributed to our outrage over the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.

In that reflective mood -- and I'm now finally getting to the point of adding this to a technology blog -- it also occurred to me that this was maybe a good metaphor for why change is so hard.  I've been discouraged of late by how slow real change within the media -- particularly within the public media sector where I make a living.  I'm a natural optimist, but it now seems to me that change will come too late for many of us.

But maybe the natural way for humans to respond to disruptive activities -- whether it's the disruption of battle or the disruptions of innovation -- is to stick to the knitting.  "Just let me do what I know and enjoy," whether it's our mode of production or our linear programming tradition or our business model, is probably a very human way to react to big but but lumbering external forces.  "Yes, we'll probably suffer under the bad guys' regime, but it will be awhile before it really hits home."

--Dennis

Public broadcasting and statin drugs

I attended a meeting of National Public Radio station execs this week to which Alan Deutschman, author of Change or Die, spoke.  I'll let Andy Carvin take over from here:

Someone in the audience suggested to Alan Deutschman that maybe public radio is doing just fine, and that change could actually be a bad thing. Alan replied by asking a question and telling another story.  ¶  First, the question: if you could take a pill that would solve all of public radio's problems, would you take it? Even if it had zero side effects? Alan said you probably wouldn't, and he explained this by talking about statin drugs, which are taken by millions of people to prevent heart attacks. ...

Link:  Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth.  --Dennis

More thoughts on the CRB rate decision

The recent Copyright Royalty Board ruling about streaming rates has sure stirred things up among those who are streaming music online, both traditional radio stations and Internet-only radio operations.  I've posted about it here, here and here.  In what one of my colleagues called an "obdurate" (that's for sure) ruling, the CRB has now reaffirmed its ruling (see Copyright Royalty Board Upholds "Disasterous" Royalty Rates).  But also see Stephen Hill's post on this.  Even if you don't want to heed Stephen's call to "get over it," he provides some important information about how we got here, including this:

   

... If you want to understand the rights holder's side of the issue I recommend the interview BRIAN ZISK of the Future of Music Coalition did with JOHN SIMSON of SoundExchange in Royalty Week. (.pdf)   Simson is a very clear, very practical guy as you will see from what he says. One thing he mentions that is sure to be even more controversial is that SoundExchange and the RIAA intend to fight to change the law as it applies to legacy broadcasters so that ultimately...the rates are uniform.  ¶  This means that terrestrial broadcasters would no longer have the 'carve-out' they've enjoyed since the 1920's, where they pay only the music publishers, songwriters and composers for use of recorded music. With the radio industry already under pressure from changing advertising models, you can bet the screams about this will be much louder, and the lobbying from the NAB should be nothing short of tactical nukes. ...

Which prompts the first thing about which I'd like to comment, that the exchange of values in the music business isn't always obvious.

As we navigate these waters, it will be useful to analyze the historical exchanges of value in the music and broadcasting business.  This was brought to mind by the FCC's recent $12.5M in fines against four large radio broadcasters for accepting pay for play payments -- payola, something most of us thought was part of radio's adolescence, not its adulthood.  Yes, broadcasters have a "carve-out" from the rates, yet they're considered to add so much value to record sales that rights holders are willing to pay us to promote their products.  So powerful is that "reverse value" that we have to make rules against it.   Ironic, huh.  Likewise, many -- perhaps most -- artists don't make much money on record company sales, they make it on performance tours and merchandising.  Reform of this complex set of payments needs to recognize where true value is extended and where it is received.

The second thing is a point about this ruling's impact on innovation.

It's tempting to argue that the recording industry's true target is innovation.  Pandora, to name one, and its fellow innovators are the future of music online, not streams that mirror our broadcast services.  For our own survival, broadcasters need innovation that the CRB's ruling manifestly discourages.  I agree with Stephen that we ultimately must focus on business models that work, but innovation by legacy players is already handicapped by the need to continue to treat good legacy customers well and by the broadcasting culture.  The CRB ruling adds even more reasons not to make the innovative investments and related changes in our m.o.  Seems to me that's exactly what its proponents want.  --Dennis

Future Games

Bob Stein sent me (thanks) a link to a fascinating profile by Eliza Strickland of San Francisco game designer Jane McGonigal.  I've long thought that games were a logical expansion of public media.  McGonigal, without calling it that, has probably developed this concept further than anyone else.  Strickland writes:

... McGonigal wants to harness the power of the communal cerebellum her games create, and put it to work solving real-world problems. Maybe young folks in warring countries could play games together, and would be less inclined to shed each other's blood. Maybe players could analyze real scientific data in the course of a game, crunching numbers and looking for patterns just as they always do, but with a payoff that goes beyond advancing to the next stage of a game. ...

Link:  SF Weekly.  --Dennis

Reboot 9.0

A colleague on the NPR board suggested that I consider attending the Reboot 9.0 conference in Copenhagen/København May 31-June 1.  I've heard really good things about past Reboots, so I'm game and have made arrangements to attend.  Quickly scanning the list, I see a few names that I recognize, but only one person that I know personally (Rob Paterson). 

Are any readers of this weblog planning to be there as well?  --Dennis

Meet the metaverse, your new digital home

Daniel Terdiman writes:

The Internet in 2016 will be an all-encompassing digital playground where people will be immersed in an always-on flood of digital information, whether wandering through physical spaces or diving into virtual worlds.  ¶  That was the general picture painted in a draft report obtained by CNET News.com that summarizes the conclusions of several dozen pundits who met at the first Metaverse Roadmap Summit last May to prognosticate the "pathway to the 3D Web."  ¶  Within 10 years, the report suggests, people may wear glasses that record everything around them. They will likely see little distinction between their real-world social lives and their interactions in digital, 3D virtual worlds. And they'll increasingly turn to services like an enhanced Google Earth that are able to present data on what's happening anywhere, at any time, as it unfolds. ...

Link:  CNet.

Giving It Away

Bob Lefsetz writes:

I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free.  Oldsters can’t understand the economics!  ¶  I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!  ¶  This is your worst nightmare.  People who can follow their dream on sweat equity.  Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you.  It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death.  Same deal in Iraq.  ¶  It’s an eye-opener.  That your model is IRRELEVANT!  ¶  YOU need to pay the mortgage.  YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean.  But the new musicians?  They’re willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen.  Hell, they’re in their twenties, they’re not on the corporate track, they’ve got different ambitions! ...

... To believe that the majors will be the logical filters in the future is to be completely ignorant.  They’re only necessary if you want to reach the masses INSTANTLY!  Is that a good thing?  Furthermore, as every day goes by, it’s easier and easier to reach more people for almost free. ...

Link:  The Lefsetz Letter.  He writes about music, but it's equally valid for other businesses.  --Dennis