In 2008 I delivered a keynote at a conference on law and journalism.  The mood among the journalists present was one of palpable contempt for blogging and “citizen journalism.”  You  would think we were witnessing the undermining of Western civilization at the hands of a rabble of pajama-wearing, due diligence-ignoring amateur (God forbid!) know-nothing ideologues.   During the post-talk Q&A  I felt compelled to tell the audience  that I was quite happy with my news choices and I sought online alternatives in large part because I had lost faith in traditional media’s role as the fourth estate.  This new study  from several Harvard students at the Kennedy School puts a fine point on that loss of faith.  You can read it here (pdf) but the  abstract is devastating:

“The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

While there is plenty of need to discuss the business models under which proper journalism can thrive (that was the purpose of my keynote two years ago)  it would be good for those in the journalism business to be thinking about how to maintain public credibility by focusing on the purpose of journalism rather than just the business of it…

I am reading Tournament of Shadows – a history of Russia, England, India and the “Great Game” for empire in Central Asia.   I just came across this quote and fancied it too good not to share.   This is Lord Salsibury’s advice to an increasingly alarmist Viceroy in India:

I think you listen too much to the soldiers.  No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated  by the experience of life as that your should never trust experts.  If you believe the doctors nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.  They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

This is a cross-post from Radar
I am flying to London this coming week on business. I have no idea if I will be able to use my laptop, emerge from my seat during the last hour of flight or be required to wear my underwear inside-out during the security check-in. Do I believe that any of these measures will contribute to passenger safety? No.

After the recent foiled airline bomb incident one thing seems clear; we are constantly retrofitting our security measures to defend ourselves against the last attack.  Often these measures seem like what Bruce Schneier in a great CNN article calls “Security Theater”

“Security theater” refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

What seems  equally true is that the media has ginned up a national hysteria over the incident that leads much of the senseless government action.   In the wake of blanket coverage officials are pushed to show a proportional response… the more hand-wringing the more actions need to be taken regardless of whether those actions have any salutary effect.  Most of the criticism that I have seen has been leveled at politicians lacking leadership.  Schneier concludes

The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

Amen.  And yet it isn’t people around me that I see freaking out.   It is the media, followed in lock-step by politicians.   One has to wonder if the United States of 2010 is capable of  the kind of leadership Schneier is asking for.   Are our politicians capable of leading when they can obtain personal advantage in either fear-mongering or finger-pointing?   Is the media capable of leading without the histrionics that sell ratings?

I am flying to London this coming week but I won’t feel any more secure  – just a lot more inconvenienced.

At the risk of offending everyone on planet earth… I thought this satire was an amazing bit of work…- Pure YouTube Genius.

Flickr : labguest

I came across this word today while attending (virtually) a session “What Comes Next For the Web.”

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad,^[1] who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.” (Wikipedia)

Ironically this word, arriving to me as it did on the heels of a recent conversation in which I was discussing apophenia without yet knowing the word existed,  struck me as not random but as another meaningful signal from the universe.

It is an odd confluence of events that leads to this short post on an unusual topic.  The topic is climate change.  It is unusual because I rarely focus on environmental or political issues on OpposablePlanets.    Climate change is inseparably both.

The odd confluence of events are these: I found myself this evening reviewing IDEO’s new website on climate change:  when I read this comment from Jim,

Are you willing to be open to designs that consider that global warming and climate change are a hoax? With the recent debunking of the “Hockey Stick” research, it is becoming apparent that global warming and climate change are not only not happening, but the very opposite is. Recall, the “Hockey Stick” is what propelled Al Gore into producing “An Inconvenient Truth.”

…It is incredible to me to see so many scientists and the general public take the word of non-scientific individuals to draw their conclusions on this particular area of science. A true scientist always remains skeptical.

Jim goes on from there in the same vein.   I began to write a comment – then realized I just didn’t have time to do it justice.  Then I checked my Twitter feed (why would I be doing that after having just stated that I didn’t have time to comment on the most pressing issue of our time?  Good, unanswerable question).   There I saw multiple calls to join Blog Action Day – and post something about climate change on October 15.  So without further ado is the comment I wanted to leave for Jim – I will also post it to the IDEO site just so Jim has a fair chance at response.

Dear Jim,

Consider which side of the bargain your position lies on. If you are right and there is no climate change what will we have lost if we operate under the premise that climate change is real?  We will likely have new, cleaner industries, less pollution and better, sustainable production of goods.   If however, we act as though you are right and you turn out to be wrong, what then?   What are the consequences of inaction?  The U.S. military seems to think it is “the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.”  Meanwhile as the ice in the Arctic visibly melts ( hoax?) the Russians are setting up a military force to protect its interests there.

Yours seems to be the untenable side of the bargain – even if you are right.

Gary Hayes has put together a running counter that depicts the various transactions occurring across the Social Web. It is a great visualization that shows how much activity (blog posts, tweets etc.)  is taking place at every moment across the web. The clock began when you opened this page:

I recently wrote a Radar post that generated a fair amount of discussion titled, “Stop Giving Newspapers Your Advice.  They Don’t Need It.” The point in that post was that we should stop doling out our advice to the newspapers because:

the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change.

While we have all been busy telling the newspaper institution what they should do differently we have missed one big point: Institutions are structured to precisely NOT do much of anything different.

As part of the writing exercise  I wrote out my imaginary timeline of how a group of entrepreneurs becomes an “institution.”

• An entrepreneur or small team of leaders blaze a trail – set the tone and culture of an organization – Think of the small geek-team for Microsoft in the early 80s.

• The initial company flourishes as an informal organization of people that know each other intimately.
• In order to perform at scale, interpersonal agreements are codified into process, procedural and policy documents, and legal contracts governing relationships.
• New employees are given orientation on “how things get done around here”
• A layer of middle management is put in place to promote efficiency, enforce policy and mitigate risk.
• Individuals, normally guided by self-interest, quickly become rule-followers committed to preservation of the codified norms of the institution. In this regard, institutions become a force unto themselves. They protect themselves  from the individual interests of their constituents. Institutions generally demand conformance and reject difference.
• The true decoupling of human intent and institutional intent occurs when the institution becomes publicly traded. At this stage the institution answers to an amorphous mass of “shareholders” whose only basis for judgment lies in quarterly growth figures.
• If institutions gain enough mass – such as the Auto Industry since the 50s or Microsoft in the 90s they disappear entirely from the “free market” that brought them into being.  They bully through lobbying, threats of job relocations and boards of interlocking directorates that stifle competition.

When an institution encounters disruptive change it will either die (music, newspapers  in the face of the Internet) or, if large enough, kill off the source of change (auto industry in the face of electric cars).    If an institution’s capacity for adaptation does not exceed the rate of environmental change for a sustained period of time – extinction follows.

I have been wondering a lot if there is a middle path where organizations can actually learn at scale and respond to disruptive change in a positive manner.

I just found The Gilt Groupe. From their site:

Gilt Groupe provides access, by invitation only, to Men’s, Women’s and Children’s coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Each sale lasts 36 hours and features hand selected styles from a single designer.

These are powerful ingredients:

+Exclusive membership
+Coveted Brands
+70% Off
+Time-limited sales

I am waiting for my membership submission to be approved…

Does your name contain your fate?  Or some clues into your personality?

One of the easiest ways to see where you are showing up on the Internet is to set up a Google Alert. Just tell Google what terms you are interested in – and you will get an email anytime that term shows up on Google’s radar. Like many people, I have set up an alert for my name since I want to know if I am being mentioned out there on the Interwebs.

More often than not however – I receive alerts on the hundreds of other Joshua Rosses out there.

In the digital era we are thrown into a much larger pool of reference. Suddenly where once my shortened name “Joshua Ross” was unique, I now find myself receiving daily alerts on the Internet comings and goings of all the Joshua Rosses out there. Scary. From Rabbis to repeat felons my fellow Joshua Rosses run the gamut (That is why, in an effort at having a unique identifier, I only use my full name now).

As the alert shows up in my email I receive a short description of why this particular Joshua Ross is making news. Often these are quite compelling and I often try to assign some causality between name and deeds. Do all Joshua Rosses share a common set of traits? You be the judge.

I am going to share some of my favorites as they arrive in my inbox. This came in this morning:

Mall kiosk challenged for selling ‘electronic cigarettes’

DesMoinesRegister.com – Des Moines,IA,USA

Kiosk manager Joshua Ross said he doesn’t understand why there’s a fuss about his wares. “What you inhale is steam. It’s about the same as what comes off a …