David Weinberger for President


Recently I saw David Weinberger on CSPAN-2. He was Howard Dean's internet guy, and he's one smart cookie. Traditional marketing, he said, appeals to the lizard portion of our brains. Candidates are being sold to us like products, with the voting booth being the point of purchase.

Television generally makes me nervous. I can only watch a commercial channel for a short time before clicking to something else, and then I get bored and turn it off. There's a song by Bruce Springstein, "57 Channels and There's Nothing On," which describes the experience to perfection. So when I hit CSPAN-2 and listened to Weinberger speaking to a group of techies, and enjoyed every minute of it, that was unusual. Later I listened to his entire presentation a second time.

I'm an Internet person when it comes to finding out what goes on in the world. On the Internet, I can read blogs, zines, and compare news reports from several different countries on a subject. By the time I'm done I have a much better grasp of what's going on than I ever could by watching television news. In fact, television news is so mixed up with entertainment and profitability now that it has become almost a content-free zone.

There is no integrity, just marketing a product to the largest audience for maximum profit, which leads to such absurdity as having uneducated people like Bill O'Reilly, on Fox news, blathering like idiots to people who enjoy having their prejudices legitimized. This has nothing to do with news. It is more like admitting that you can get more people to go to a hanging than to a night class. When you get paid by the head, and money is your motive, you hire a hangman instead of an educator.

Weinberger pointed out that the value of the Internet is not built-in, as it is, for example, in television or in the telephone company. They try to anticipate what you are going to need and build it in, so that they can charge you for it. But with the Internet, even though the people who built it might have anticipated what would be needed by the consumer, they deliberately excluded it. For example, they knew a search engine would be needed, but they didn't build one in. If they had done so, Weinberger said, "we'd now have the best search engine nineteen eighties technology could produce."

Instead of being in that fix, we moved from Alta Vista to Google, and when something better comes along we'll move to that. The only thing allowed in the Internet model was a set of protocols. If you adhere to those protocols, you can post anything you want on the Internet. Cyberspace is a free country because of this.

With the rising popularity of open source codes, nobody will even have to pay license fees to Microsoft to ride on their dinosaur. That's why Microsoft has been financing the assault on Linux from behind the scenes. There are a lot of people who don't like to see something so powerful that belongs to the people, and that they can't charge them for. They see no reason why everything should not be on the backs of the population, moving wealth upward.

In the past, technology was so expensive that there were very few sources, as with newspapers and then radio and then television. Network television operated on a model of advertising, and they could make people listen to their message because it was a linear process. There were three major networks, so that the citizenry had no hand in producing what was on the news and entertainment. It was fed to us.

The music industry, the motion picture industry, the political industry, all operated on this top down model. Ronald Reagan even turned it into an economic model called "Trickle Down," the suggestion being that capital is prior to labor. It is elitist, of course, but it is also an unconscious assumption of the model of the entertainment industry by someone who was as immersed in it as a fish in water.

The key element that was built into this model was predictability. If you are going to invest large amounts of money, you want a predictable return, so you want to control the variables. You don't take a chance on something that is outside the parameters of what your audience feedback tells you is acceptable.

I recall being a disc-jockey when I was about twenty-one, and being told to play records from a certain stack, because they were the most requested. I thought about it and realized what was going on. The station took surveys and played the songs people said they wanted to hear. But all they were doing was feeding back what they were already hearing. It was a closed loop, and the direction of the quality of programming was straight to hell.

I was the only jock at the station who went through all the records that came in from the unknowns, and at least played the beginning and a sample from the middle. I went through hundreds of them to find three or four to play on the air, but they were terrific. Then I went through the old albums and played people like Pearl Bailey into the mixture. I had the best show in town if I do say so myself.

That model I ran into at the radio station thirty-five years ago took over American society. The pollsters try to find out what people think, and all people think is what they've heard. So they feed back what they've heard to them, and the dumbing down process sends the quality of the debate to hell.

But the Internet is not a top down model, but a truly democratic model, where information moves laterally, connecting by links to other information. On my site, for example, there are links to Patrick Buchanan's site, even though much of his politics is not to my liking. He and I have the same views on President Bush's messianic mental illness, however, and also on the Iraq War. So you can start with a very liberal position on one blog and in a very few links be reading an opposite viewpoint.

I'm also linked to David Weinberger, David Lynch, and now that I've got the blogrolling rolling, I'll begin to add more and more links. The only sites I won't link to are porn sites, hate sites, and sites that look too commercial to me.

It is this lack of selfishness, Weinberger says, which characterizes the flow of information through blogs. The traditional marketing model tries to hold your eyes on the product, whereas the new model tells you, "go away; follow some of my links."

But the most compelling thing he was saying was that this model, and the traditional model, are inevitably going to end up in a High Noon showdown. Traditional marketing is based on war analogy: The consumer is the enemy who is "targeted." The results of traditional marketing firms trying to sell on the Internet is that they reveal themselves as antagonistic by nature. Witness all these pop-ups, flashing gimmicky fake contests and other "traps" being laid to try and capture you.

In the new model, it is the consumer who looks for information on a product, compares prices, and buys or doesn't buy. The marketers are the ones being targeted by the consumer. And if a company doesn't perform, or cheats you, you can put that information on the Internet to be discovered by somebody else who is thinking of doing business with them. And they will probably find it. The E-Bay feedback model is on the larger web, you just have to do a bit more work to find out if there's negative feedback on a company or product.

One of the points Weinberger went to several times was the idea of perfection being a non-issue in the new model. When you read blogs you know that the writer is putting it up quickly, and that you are getting a rough draft of his or her day, or thoughts on a particular day. There are going to be mistakes, and typos, and sometimes they might get something factually wrong. But you accept that because the tradeoff of instant communication is worth it. There is more subjectivity, but from it you actually get a better grasp of reality than you can from a single "fair and balanced" source.

I heard someone on the radio this morning talking about how time is collapsing very quickly, now. He used the example of a soldier in Iraq who was wounded. When a soldier is about to die on television or in the movies he looks into the camera and says, "I die so that the Arabs are freed from Saddam," or some such creation of the propagandist's mind. But in reality he calls for his Mother, as this soldier did. It has always been like that in war. But this time somebody called his mother on a cell phone and handed it to him.

Posted: Wed - April 28, 2004 at 04:06 PM