July 2006
I found this in Lawrence Lessig’s column in this month’s Wired:
Good journalism likes two sides to every story. Lazy journalism fails to distinguish between objective sources and interested parties – and this issue has interested parties aplenty, from industry-funded think tanks to hired PR firms, feeding the press the disinformation it needs to make the story sound balanced. This is the media’s own inconvenient truth – that the institution charged with reporting the facts is so easily manipulated by those whose “salary depends upon [our] not understanding” the facts (to reuse Gore’s favorite Upton Sinclair quote). The result is the perfect storm for obfuscation. You can’t buy the story outright, but you can twist it enough that the truth is no longer recognizable.
It reminded me of a recent Rockridge article, Occupation: The Inconvenient Truth About Iraq:
It is time to tell an inconvenient truth about Iraq: it is an occupation, not a war. In wars, armies fight to dominate land. The US won the war three years ago when Bush said, “Mission Accomplished”. Then the occupation started, and our troops were not trained or equipped for an occupation under predictably hostile circumstances. Finally getting the courage to tell the truth that the US is an occupying force drastically changes the picture in Iraq. You cannot “win” an occupation. “Cut and run” does not apply to an occupation.
Regardless of the effect Gore’s movie has on the global warming debate, it looks like he’s definitely given liberals a new frame. When he titled his movie, he had to pick one aspect of his global warming spiel to stand for the whole thing. He chose to focus on the idea that global warming is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge. Now it looks like people are taking that frame and running with it, painting every liberal position as a brave stand by the reality-based community. I googled the phrase “another inconvenient truth” and got 47,000 hits. People are labeling all sorts of things as inconvenient truths: discarded electronics flood landfills with toxic components, urban gridlock is insoluble, dangerous chemicals are making kids sick. It’s a crowded bandwagon.
It waters down Gore’s message a bit, but if the folks working for universal health-care, election reform and civil liberties (etc.) can take advantage of his traction in the media, maybe they can get some rhetorical unity and finally get taken seriously as reality’s standard-bearers. I mean, when people talk about getting new frames into public debate, this is what they mean: the perfect storm of a compelling idea, a catchy name for it, and famous people to disseminate it.
I wanted to say that it’s a phrase best suited to liberal usage — that we own the phrase. However, googling the phrase “real inconvenient truth” results in 42,000 hits, most of which seem to be right-wing rebuttals along the lines of “You think that’s an inconvenient truth? The real inconvenient truth is X”. Funny thing is, most of the X’s are something like “global warming is a hoax”, which would not be inconvenient at all if it were true. So maybe we do own it after all.
Just thought it was interesting.
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All the nerd events I’ve been attending lately have highlighted a problem I’ve long had: sometimes, I’d like a way to keep track of all the folks I meet. I want something like <a href=”http://www.openngo.org”>CiviCRM</a>, but less complicated, and geared towards single users, not huge organizations. A personal contact manager.
The Mac Address Book is a wonderful thing, but I find it inadequate in a few ways. I’ve said that I’m not a big tagger — I see why it’s useful but it’s not something that helps me out very often. However, it’d be great to be able to attach a freeform list of tags to contacts, so that you can keep track of where you met them, what they do and so forth. I’ve looked all over for an address book with tags, and there isn’t any. CiviCRM purports to allow contact-tagging, but you have to define the tags beforehand, which runs counter to the philosophy of tagging. Plaxo doesn’t let me tag — it went into my Gmail account and slurped the address of anyone I’ve had email contact with, so now I’ve got a list of 1000 names and no context for any of them. That’s what tags are nice for in this case: to make it quick and easy to add additional useful context to a person.
Also, I got turned on to microformats at BarCamp, and it’s nice to see that a lot of the folks I met there have hCards so that I don’t have to type business cards in manually. Or, I wouldn’t have to type them in manually if there were any tools out there that use them (Technorati has an hCard-to-vCard converter, but extra work make me cry). I’d like to press the “New Contact” button, type in the person’s name, click “Find hCard” and have Technorati provide me with a list of possible hCards for that person that I can import directly.
So that’s what I’ve been working on a little bit, as a Summer of Rails project. The first step is to basically clone the functionality of the Mac address book. Lots of in-place editing, easy customizable fields, auto-complete goodness. Along with that comes tagging, because it’s trivial to make objects taggable in rails.
Then the hCard/vCard import/export hijinks.
Then the drag ‘n drop excitement.
Name? As of today, I’m thinking “Amigosphere”.
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