Category: Digital Culture

Information Narcosis

The pen may well be mightier than the sword, but pens have been known to unsheathe a sword now and then.  So what about video blogs and guns?

In the wake of travesties like this latest shooting at UCSB, I’m sure the question raised at my dinner table last weekend was echoed in conversations around the country.  Why are we seeing an increase in these types of killings in the U.S. and what, if anything, might reverse the trend?  The gut responses are usually the same — gun control, less violence in media, better treatment for mental health disorders — and they always feel incomplete.  Yes, I’m personally in favor of smart gun control and loathe the NRA, but I’m more than a little skeptical that we can enact effective regulation or that doing so addresses the disease manifesting as an increase in random, multiple murders like the ones committed by Elliot Rodger.  More to the point, this latest killing by yet another disordered individual prompts me to expand on a thesis I’ve considered for some time — whether  the frequency of these acts of apolitical terrorism are in some way a byproduct of mass information diffusion.  (No, I’m not bluntly blaming the internet for school shootings.)

These recent murders by Rodger have become a flashpoint for many to raise the issues of gun control and misogyny; and while there’s never a bad time to keep either subject in the foreground, both are likely diversions from an understanding of this killing in particular and to fathoming the chronic nature of these acts in general.  As I have referenced before, terrorism expert Christopher Dickey explained to me once that all acts of terrorist-type violence contain three ingredients that can be reduced to the acronym TNT.  This stands for Testosterone, because it’s almost always young men; Narrative, a belief by the individual(s) that some wrong is being righted or avenged; and Theater, a need to perform a big act on a big stage.

The concept is neatly personified in the figure of John Wilkes Booth, whose motivation for killing Lincoln was at least tinged with the hue of envy that he was the lesser actor compared to his prodigal brother, Edwin.  And although Edwin continued to be a great, classical performer even after his brother scandalized the family name, many more of us are familiar John Wilkes’s last moment on stage shouting sic semper tyrannis! than we are with Edwin playing Shakespeare.  This desire for legend through infamy is described smartly in this article by Mark Manson, who argues that various well-meaning agendas co-opting the Rodger killings are missing the point, and I agree with him.

With regard to Dickey’s acronym, Testosterone and Narrative appear to have been closely interrelated for Rodger, and synthesized through the fog of a dissociative disorder that simultaneously excluded him from society and confused him about the reason for his exile.  It would be wrong to see Rodger as merely spoiled by privilege or as a garden-variety misogynist or chauvinist.  If you’ve ever met a child who is “on the spectrum” of autism, it isn’t a hard leap to follow the arc to the young adult, who would wonder, “But I have Armani sunglasses, why don’t girls like me?”  If it didn’t turn violent, it would be cringingly sad and deserving of empathy.  It may still be deserving of empathy (the word Manson also uses) if for no other reason than to wrestle more honestly with the complexities of a case like this.

So in regard to our underlying frustration with the volume and frequency of these crimes, we can’t dismiss the fact that the other Rodgers and Lanzas and Harrises out there have too-easy access to firearms; but I don’t think it’s irrelevant to consider the fact that they also have easy access to Theater, thanks to the expansion of both professional and user-generated platforms. Moreover, the Theater of digital diffusion is interactive, not only providing a free stage for every psychosis but also enabling every psychosis to find some resonant Narrative that concludes with the rationale of violence.  In Manson’s article, he addresses the fact that it is in our nature to avoid acknowledging the “weird guy,” who says or does uncomfortable things, the irony being that people like Rodger not only show signs that forecast their violence, they compose whole preludes to it that we ignore.  Manson writes:

 “…we fail to spot shooter after shooter because they are so close to us and so much like us.  We miss them because they are our neighbors, or classmates, our friends or even our family members.  They are right in front of our noses and we ignore them for a whole host of trivial reasons.”

Of course, there’s a lot of crazy talk on YouTube videos out there.  If we wanted criminologists and psychologists to sift through it all to try to identify the guys most likely to translate their ravings into action, we’d need many more experts than we have.  Nevertheless, there’s no denying the fact that somebody out there identifies with Rodger’s video manifestos; and there’s no denying the fact that rapid diffusion combined with the economics of web traffic ensures that this Theater of the insane welcomes all performers and will turn the most dangerous ones into shooting stars.

No, this essay is not meant to promote abolition or restriction on the use of YouTube or other social media.  These are observations that may or may not be worth exploring, and I share the thoughts humbly in that regard without pretense to knowing any answers.  Twenty years ago, the video manifesto of a future, crazed gunman was not so easily distributed; and there was no Daily Mail website enticing monetized clicks with every irrelevant, salacious detail it can turn into a headline.  To what extent all this breeds some generalized narcosis is hard to say.  But we do call it “viral.”

There’s no such thing as used digital media.

It’s science.  Deal with it.

We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on.  But the idea that a digital file of a song, a movie, a book, etc. can ever be called “used” is nothing more than an attempt to transplant a very old model into the soil of a new, technological market.  So, who’s being anachronistic here?

On purely technical grounds, there is literally no such thing as used digital media because “use” does not in anyway degrade a file.  A digital file of a song or a movie plays as pristinely the millionth time it’s played as it does the first time it’s played.  If you worked in video post-production in the days of early digital tape media, you would have seen a new term affixed on the spines of those tapes — clone.  Because that’s what a digital “copy” actually is; it is an exact replica with no generation loss from the original source.

So, if you transfer a file of a song or a movie to someone else, it will not in any sense be “used” simply because you experienced it before someone else did.  The new “owner” of that file will have a brand new experience, the value of which is identical to the original “owner’s” purchase price of the file from the original distributor.  If we’re talking about a movie, for instance, the only thing that differentiates Viewer A from Viewer B is that the former has seen the film and the latter has not.  Yet, the logical argument being made by certain “new model” entrepreneurs is that Viewer B should be entitled to pay less for the identical experience simply because Viewer A has already paid the original price one time.  This is patently absurd. By the same logic, the ticket price for a movie in a theater ought to decrease incrementally after each screening because the film has been “used” by other viewers. (Yeah, somebody in the copyleft crowd just thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea!”)

This notion of “used” digital media is just one way in which technological opportunists can be disingenuous when it comes offering up what sound like market-based theories.  They want the luxury of cherry picking from both the past and the present as suits their purposes.  In reality, though, these ideas don’t come from particularly innovative technologists, but rather from standard-issue middlemen looking to exploit a consumer-serving limitation on copyrights to siphon value from creators and line their own pockets.  In the long run, though, transporting this doctrine into the digital market, which makes no rational sense, would likely drive prices up in what I’ll call first-user experiences in order to offset lost revenue.

Naturally, when a work is distributed on physical media, the notion of “used” remains intact.  First sale doctrine in copyright law says that I can buy a novel and then sell the book as used at my next yard sale, regardless of whether or not I read it to a dogeared pulp or kept it in pristine condition and never cracked it open.  The condition of the book may affect the second-market value in my yard sale, but it has no bearing on my right to sell or otherwise distribute the used copy one time.  Because this transaction involves a physical object, replicating the process even in tens of thousands of yard sales all over the country would never produce a secondary market for novels that clones the primary market and inherently reduces the value of all novels everywhere.

But this is exactly what would happen in an all-digital “used” market in which a middle-man like Amazon, Apple, or Redigi removes a previously purchased file from Consumer A’s computer, sells it to Consumer B for a lower price than the original, and profits from the transaction while kicking a little something back to Consumer A.  Never mind how easy it would be for the selling consumer to cheat that system by storing files any number of ways, the so-called “secondary” market would very rapidly become the primary (i.e. only) market, and therefore just another means by which tech-happy leaches artificially drive the value of creative works below sustainable levels while pocketing millions before the producing entities collapse.  (Anyone who just thought “Good, I can’t wait until the movie studios, record labels, and publishers collapse,” should understand that it will be the independent, small and mid-sized producers who will fail first.)

I find it hard to believe that any legislator or court would be bamboozled by the parlor trick in which a file is moved from one consumer to another through the resale transaction without making a “new copy.” This is an analysis of the state of the technology and its role in the market viewed through a pre-digital lens, semantically bogged down in irrelevant terms like “copy” while ignoring how the technology actually works and what its potential market impact can be for good or bad.  So, if we’re really talking about developing new business models that correspond with new technology, then the language we employ might have to be new as well.  And in the digital world, the word used has outlived its usefulness.

NPR Reports Teens Reading Less

It’s a longstanding cliché we parents repeat that our kids can have more fun with a box than with the toy that comes in the box.  It’s still true, and we still don’t trust our own wisdom in this regard because presenting a kid with an empty box for his birthday or some other occasion is a risky bet that I personally have yet to make with any of my own kids.  I’m also as guilty as many parents out there who’ve gifted children with tablet “readers” that are admittedly used most of the time for every feature they offer except reading.  We do limit our kids’ time with devices and computers, and when they have to read or choose to read, they still pick up physical books most of the time.  This is partly because we just happen to have a lot of books in the house, but there remains something to be said for narrowing the range of options in one’s periphery or at one’s fingertips in order to derive the most enriching experiences.  Sometimes, you just gotta sit and study the empty box for a moment before you discover its many possibilities.

This story from NPR reports that reading among teens has sharply declined over the last decade, according to a study by Common Sense Media.  Jennifer Ludden’s report emphasizes the need for parental involvement in helping kids learn to moderate their use of devices that offer so many attractive diversions and eat up time that might be spent exclusively reading.  The story caught my attention of course because it is yet another example of why more access to something like literature does not automatically result in an increased benefit to society.  Technology companies that want to scan every book ever written “for the greater good,” and copyright critics who cry foul over the volumes of works not yet in the public domain are ignoring the fact that society will not necessarily behave according to the idealism they promote.  Personally, I don’t think it’s counterintuitive that more books more cheaply available through more portals can fail to produce more literacy.  There are too many factors at play that determine a teenager’s or young adult’s choice to read for pleasure, and the many diversions offered by eReaders and other devices is just one of these factors.  I’d certainly stop short of outright blaming digital technology for driving down reading; but at the same time, anyone who says more has to be made available for the “good of the people” is either very naive or more likely has a multi-million-dollar axe he’s looking to grind.