Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:

“As a journalist covering the weblog beat, I officially love weblogs. But sometimes that love can be sorely tested. Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.

…(I)f you’re a journalist trying to break news, Blogs are the new Borg. Blogs relentlessly track down every scrap of news, assimilating it into the Blog Collective hive-mind with stunning efficiency. It doesn’t stop there: individual blogs each add a small insight to the story, drawing on their personal experience and contributing to the conversation. Then the conversation takes over, exploring every possible implication and insight with a ferocity that astounds…” — John Hiler Microcontent News

This is, in contrast to the Wood column to which I blinked below, a more level-headed appraisal of the dialectic between hive mind and individualism in the blog world, its relationship to journalism, the emergent aspects of the weblogging network, and the balanced strengths and limitations of ‘the Blog Collective’.

This has helped me think further about my distress about the gap between the peacebloggers and the warbloggers in my What Am I Doing Here? post of several weeks ago. Hiler points out that as a journalist he’s had to deal with his consternation over the fact that the weblog world often ‘scoops’ his insights about a story by the time he gets around to writing and publishing it. In this case as well, some of the responses from readers, especially other webloggers, to my angst about ‘preaching to the converted’ presaged what I read in Hiler’s essay.

Girl Suicide Bombers:

“The message for Israel, and the rest of the world, is clear: Terrorism is not just a fringe phenomenon. Terrorists are not just strange young men whispering in dark rooms. Terrorists are high-school students, terrorists are women—and terrorists are all around you. No one—not the old man on the bicycle or the young girl walking to school—can be discounted. All Palestinians are potential terrorists, and terrorism will never go away. Whether or not all of this is actually true is immaterial: The point is to make the Israelis think it is, and thus give up, withdraw, quit the Middle East—or else undertake a massive and potentially disastrous military operation of the sort that may have begun this week.” — Anne Applebaum Slate

That the Palestinians sponsors of the suicide bombing campaign are branching out from the use of typical malleable, futureless male zealots, I agree with Applebaum, tells us on the most pedestrian level something about the effectiveness of the Israeli border checkpoints in excluding ‘the usual suspects’. But while Applebaum concludes that the ‘girl bombers’ represent the radicalization of more pedestrian, non-fanatic Palestinian discontent, one might just as easily speculate that they are the exception that proves the rule. I don’t think anyone knows how many young women are lining up to detonate themselves for the cause, how plausible the claim of the al Aqsa Brigade that they are training 200 female suicide bombers is — although, as Applebaum points out, it makes perfect sense for al Aqsa to claim they are. The distinction Applebaum tries to draw, between a ‘political’ war and a ‘religious’ one, is too simplistic, especially in the Middle East, to be a basis for answering questions crucial to anyone troubled by events in the Middle East — how inexhaustible a supply of potential suicide bombers the Palestinians have at their disposal and whether any measures to prevent their attacks can be effective.

A Collection of Discards.com Wired

Stealth P2P network hides inside Kazaa

A California company has quietly attached its software to millions of downloads of the popular Kazaa file-trading program and plans to remotely “turn on” people’s PCs, welding them into a new network of its own.

Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a California-based digital advertising technology company, has been distributing its 3D ad technology along with the Kazaa software since late last fall. But in a federal securities filing Monday, the company revealed it also has been installing more ambitious technology that could turn every computer running Kazaa into a node in a new network controlled by Brilliant Digital.

The company plans to wake up the millions of computers that have installed its software in as soon as four weeks. It plans to use the machines–with their owners’ permission–to host and distribute other companies’ content, such as advertising or music. Alternatively, it might borrow people’s unused processing power to help with other companies’ complicated computing tasks. CNET

I noticed that the number of hits FmH received yesterday nearly doubled from my normal weekday count of 400-500 to 899. (It’s probably best left for a different post to marvel — and sigh? — that with everything else changing all around us in this world the number of you who read FmH has been so absolutely unvarying for many many months…) My referrer log tells me that this was probably due to a link I got in Molly Wood’s Net Effect column on CNET about the Google/Scientology flap.Down at the bottom of her seventh paragraph, she points to my speculation that it was a “concerted bombing campaign” (which attempted to rank a site critical of Scientology higher on Google) that was responsible for Google removing that site from its index until public outcry forced them to reverse that decision. Wood is critical of the googlebombing concept, finding it ironic that Google, beloved of geeks everywhere, may fall victim to geekish manipulation no different, she feels, than Scientology’s infowar on its adversaries. Funny thing is, while she seems to take my word as the causal gospel and goes on to base a critique of blogger ethics on it, my speculation that it was the googlebombing campaign that caused Google to cave was probably not accurate, as my post goes on to point out.

A Patriot’s Guide to Debating the War-on-Terror® Salon

Part of the MIT Communications Forum Media in Transition series, Humor on the Web is an April 4th conference in Cambridge, MA:

“Humorists and humor magazines historically have played an important role in American political and social life, focusing attention on hypocrisies and inequalities, helping us to take ourselves a little less seriously, and introducing alternative perspectives into national debates. The Onion and Modern Humorist have emerged as two of the most significant humor magazines on the Web, and they have received heightened attention in the wake of the contested 2000 election and September 11. In this forum, we’ll explore what aspects of digital media have facilitated the rapid growth in the visibility and reach of these online publications. Do these formerly underground publications face pressure to remain in “good taste” as they reach more mainstream audiences, and how is this reconciled with their identity as alternatives to consensus media? How do these publications define their relationship to the grassroots strands of humor that circulate across the Internet? Are new forms of humor emerging as a consequence of the interactive and collaborative potential of digital media, or do these publications simply build on the traditions of print humor? How has of the accelerated communications of the new digital environment affected the consumption of humor? What might these publications tell us about the shifting relationship between news and entertainment?” [thanks, Richard, for alerting me to this…]

An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Euro-America: “Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing

rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental

illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues

that it is necessary to take into account both social process and personal

cultural meaning when explaining psychiatric illness and “deviant” behavior.

Littlewood brings anthropological and psychiatric literature to bear on case

studies of self-poisoning, agoraphobia, hysteria, chronic fatigue syndrome,

post-traumatic stress, male sexual violence, and eating disorders. He contends

that Western psychiatric illnesses are themselves “possession states”–patterns

by which individual agency is displaced through an idiom of alien intrusion

whether of a spirit or a disease.” amazon.com

“The Netherlands has become the first country in the world to legalise mercy killing after a controversial law on euthanasia came into force on Monday.

The legislation allows patients experiencing unbearable suffering to request euthanasia, and doctors who carry out such a mercy killing to be free from the threat of prosecution, provided they have followed strict procedures.” BBC

“It will be interesting to see if Into the Buzzsaw gets any play in the outlets it exposes. Don’t count on it.” Michelle Goldberg reviews former CBS producer Kristina Borjesson’s book on the journalist victims of media censorship:

“The majority of the eighteen pieces in Borjesson’s book are about hard-working mainstream journalists, dedicated to the ideals of their profession, who stumble into the buzzsaw and have their careers and reputations eviscerated. Though the subjects and personalities involved are wildly diverse, the stories echo each other in disturbing ways. Journalists are sent by their bosses to do their jobs — in the case of Borjesson, to investigate the crash of TWA Fight 800 as a producer for CBS news. Sometimes what they find is impolitic, other times it brings threats of corporate lawsuits. Suddenly, editors kill the story, or demand changes. In some instances, like that of TV reporter Jane Akre, who was investigating the use of Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone, reporters are ordered to insert outright lies in their pieces or face firing. Other times, like with Gerard Colby’s book about the Du Pont family and Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA’s role in the crack epidemic, the bosses are spooked after the fact and withdraw their support from work already published, hanging reporters out to dry.” AlterNet