Twitter and A Flock of Seagulls, Publishing in a Networked World

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?).

These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on.

The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces and fits and starts through the social network of friends, family, colleagues. The network is the world of social publishing.

Why? Because it is to difficult to find works online among billions of documents and uncounted trillions of ever expanding words. You just can search for things you do not know exist. The social network trades in attention, which is necessary to discover what exists, through your social contacts.

It just does not make sense to "publish" a work to a certain location (or a physical book), then try to get everyone to come read it through clever marketing. It makes no sense to prevent copying, since copies are the method by which information spreads through a social network. The idea of scarcity and exclusivity makes no sense at all in a socially networked world, unless by exclusive you mean being friends with the author.

The network, by the way, does not really need to worry about this issue of citation, since there is usually a trail back to the original author, through a 'retweet path' (if dutifully or automatically maintained) or through carrying authorship information with the work through the social network (as I've talked about here before).

As a poet, nearly every poem I write is immediately published to the social network, so I can't give anyone "first rights" to it, and moreover, that is meaningless. I noticed the Haiku Society of America states, at least for some submissions, " The appearance of poems in online discussion lists or personal Web sites is not considered publication." a much more adaptive policy.

What happens on Twitter is more like a flock of seagulls, making all references to publication, first publication, second publication utterly meaningless, as we tweet to others and they tweet back at us, retweeting and retweeting. I suppose the next thing, is they will want "first tweet" rights. I understand the goal is to keep your publication fresh, but that simply does not fit reality. It says something about a publishing world where the consumer needs to be reassured they are not being "cheated" by recieving old goods, which are turned over from elsewhere, similar to the way "shovelware" became a problem in the 1990s CDROM publishing era. I suppose the same problem exists with bloggers, twitterers, who merely repeat what others write, but I just don't see the problem. In a network world it costs nothing to unfollow or unfriend a source.

Trouble in dead trees and inky fingers land

Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable

An excellent analysis of the situation newspaper based journalism is in.

I like the idea of micro-payments for content, such as New York Times articles. The only problem I have with it and why I would be reluctant to use it, is simply that I have to pay for the article before I've read it. Even if I saw an excerpt, it might not be enough to determine whether it is worthwhile or not. A solution for this problem might be found in social networking. I usually read articles my friends share with me (by sending a link in email or chat). I would be much more willing to pay for an article they recommend. Keep the price low and integrate with a social sharing system and it might work as long as the payment is by an "easy button."

The greater problem is content and authorship is changing radically with digital content available through the network, given the unlimited perfect copying and access without distribution. What we are seeing is a working out of the many pieces loosely joined paradigm described a decade ago. The newspaper started as a handwritten piece of paper passed around coffee shops in Enlightened London. I see nothing sacred about its continued existence.

The problem of journalism online is of course that Twitter is the new journalism but the content is too brief, chaotic and frequently idiotic. Micro-blog formats do encourage conciseness and sharp thinking, but they also promote a hyperactive and fragmentary view of subjects. As I wrote in my blog, there needs to be a "slow thought" or "slow news" or such movement (like the Slow Food movement), which you might say is what blogs already give, but not really.

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.



What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)


In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

Creative Photography: Subversive Detail and Conceptual Contrast

Subversive content in photographs. No, I do not mean politically subversive, but details in the image that subvert or comment on the image's subject. For example, you may be attempting a very serious image of an important landmark, let's say the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia, but in the foreground are parked a string of dump trucks or perhaps a string of circus vans. The presence of such contradictory details undermines the meaning and mood of the image. Of course, it can also be used by the photographer in a controlled manner to create commentary.

Here is an excellent example where subversive content is used to enhance the image. The graffiti in the background becomes a compositional element leading the eye to the hugging couple frame right and the joyous dancing figure of the iPod advertisement directly behind them communicates what the photographer "mind reads" or imagines is their inner feelings.

Hugs (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

(It reminds me of a late image by André Kertész from the 1970s of a couple I saw published in a photo magazine in the late 1970s, which if I recall, he made from his window).

Reflections in windows have famously been used as a way to introduce subversive content into images.

The important thing to keep in mind is the idea is not to introduce a lot of clutter or trash detail into your image, but to let the extraneous detail become a commentary. It has to mean something. You need to ensure the image forms and idea not just a composition (although sometimes a certain composition has such a powerful affect on the viewer that is sufficient to constitute an great image).

A good example of this by the same photographer. This image is powerful merely for it sense of captured movement and how the woman, coat, dog and background material "divide the frame," which is simply a term of art for how the three dimensional objects in the image divide the flat two dimensional area of the image into sections in an interesting way. Dividing the frame is an important concept in any two dimensional visual art.

Woman and Dog (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

Photographers also use contrast...not not contrast in exposure terms...but contrast in terms of visual language. For example, this image creates a feeling of loneliness by isolating the human figures as impersonal silhouettes in a large space inhabited by shafts of luminous light but contrasts the aloneness by presenting a group of people, not just one person. By this he contrasts loneliness and togetherness in the same image.

Across The Light (Tate Modern, London 2005, godfrey digiorgi)


By the way, I do not have to mention Godfrey is an excellent photographer who understands these important principles of authorship in photography. I found examples of both visual ideas discussed in this entry quickly on his site. He obviously understands that to make good photographs, to make photographs that are significant artifacts for consideration by society, the images must say something, not just be well exposed and composed, that the photographer must establish and manipulate a visual vocabulary. His best images have something to say and the few that fall flat are the ones that fail to establish and communicate an idea. A photograph without the presence of the author is nothing more than a documentary image (those have value as well, but that is not what I am discussing here...I certainly appreciate vernacular and documentary images).

Even if the photographer did not intend a specific message the images communicate one. There is a quote, I cannot recall exactly, but it was regarding hypocrisy and concluded the mind cannot know itself completely at once, which applies.