Paradigms of the Times
Two New York Times items this week:
The front-page headline in the Times' Thursday, June 12 edition reads: "On Frontier of Cyberspace, Data is Money, and a Threat." What follows is an extremely long article -- filling up a full two inside pages of the newspaper -- mostly detailing the sorry story of a woman who received harassing threats in the mail "from a stranger who seemed to know all about her, from her birthday to the names of her favorite magazines, from the fact that she was divorced to the kind of soap she used in the shower."
Aha! This harasser must have gone out to the "frontiers of cyberspace" and used some Internet smarts to dig up all those personal details, right?
In truth, the letters came from a Texas inmate who got the private information because a national direct marketing firm had contracted its data entry work to the prison. Not a jot of the information was online.
The rest of the many thousands of words in this otherwise well-researched article barely mention the Net. The kind of threats to privacy the piece chronicles arise from the sloppiness, stupidity or malice of corporate information warehousers. They have nothing at all to do with "cyberspace."
There are real issues relating to privacy and protection of personal information online, but this article wasn't about them. So why the headline? Do the editors of the New York Times have any idea what cyberspace is? Or do they just think that it's scary?
Understanding the continuing mutation of the telecommunications business today is so difficult that even institutions like the New York Times can get confused.
Tuesday's Times Business Day section covered Microsoft's $1 billion investment in the cable TV giant Comcast, with a pair of features headlined "A Changing Cast of Media Players: Software-Cable TV Deal Shows Phone Companies' Fading Role." Under the header "Paradigm Surfing," the Times published the following explanation: "A few years ago, combinations of cable television and telephone companies seemed to be the new model for distributing information and entertainment. But now cable companies are tying up with Internet players."
In the accompanying images, two TV sets sit side by side: One shows the glum heads of the CEOs of Bell Atlantic and TCI, Raymond Smith and John Malone, whose announced 1993 merger never came to pass. The other shows Bill Gates and Comcast exec Brian Roberts. The TCI/Bell Atlantic screen is smashed; Gates is grinning.
This is a situation where the journalist-analyst's attempt to isolate patterns in the marketplace has inspired gross oversimplification and plain error. In fact, "Combinations of cable television and telephone companies" never seemed to be a very good "model for distributing information and entertainment" -- except for a handful of corporate deal-makers like Smith and Malone and the reporters who regurgitated their hype. Cable companies and telephone companies have remained fierce competitors; they each have various competitive advantages; nobody knows which will prevail in the battle to provide high-speed data to the home.
Similarly, Microsoft is a software company that's just beginning to flex its media muscles. Who knows how the billion dollars it is sinking into Comcast will turn out -- or whether the deal will even happen? Gates, claiming the move is purely an investment, says, "We are not in the cable business ourselves" (which is pretty funny to hear from one of the owners of the cable channel MSNBC). But whether Microsoft and Comcast achieve profitable synergies in their new relationship or find that they can't look at each other in the morning, their deal is hardly any kind of "paradigm" -- it's another shot in the new-media dark.
One simple fact the Times report sidesteps is that the Internet caught every player in this game by surprise. The Times' explanatory timeline declares, "The emergence of the Web allowed the communications industry to think of the Internet as the interactive medium" (instead of the old interactive-TV model). "Allowed" is a nice gentle choice of words; a more accurate phrasing might read, "The emergence of the Web forced the communications industry to trash its pilot interactive-TV ventures and scramble to catch up with the public as it embraced the Net."
The ultimate irony in the Times' description of "Phone Companies' Fading Role" can be grasped by having a look at the main feature in this week's Salon 21st. The Internet is the new "paradigm," but don't count those phone companies out too fast: A half-dozen of them now own most of the Net's infrastructure.
June 12, 1997
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Scott Rosenberg
All sides of the story
The annals of journalism are littered with headlines that have called the news prematurely and wrong -- celebrated "oops" moments like the classic 1948 headline "Dewey Defeats Truman."
But it has taken the Web to bring us a new twist on this amusing spectacle. On Monday, the headline ticker at ABCNews.com began running the news: "McVeigh Guilty." That was accurate enough -- except that the report came an hour before the verdict was announced. Furthermore, the same ticker also reported, "McVeigh Not Guilty."
Subtle Borgesian commentary on the subjective nature of reality? Illustration of the essential ambiguity of the postmodern condition? Forget it; this was a simple example of runaway technology.
What actually happened at ABC's Web site could happen anywhere: The news staff prepared two stories to run depending on how the verdict came out, and the headlines for these stories were grabbed by an automated script that gathered headlines from a "staging server" to rotate on the site. When staffers moved both versions of the story to this server, the headlines started running on ABCNews.com's ticker. According to the Associated Press, ABC removed the clairvoyantly contradictory headlines within 30 minutes.
As Wired News pointed out, the preparation of such alternate versions of hot breaking stories is "common practice." In the old print world, the accurate version would run and the wrong version would get spiked; in broadcast news, the right script would get read and the wrong one would get trashed. But, like no previous medium, the Web blurs the distinction between what's formally published and what's not.
All it takes to "publish" on the Web is to move a file into a directory on a server -- and make that file available to the world by providing a link to it. If a file directory isn't properly protected, even files that aren't linked can be found by enterprising visitors. If you poked carefully through the file structures of many news organizations' Web sites, you could probably dig up a lot of technically "unpublished," alternative versions of reality -- like a "Guilty" verdict for O.J. Simpson (as Pathfinder briefly reported in 1995) or even "Dole Trounces Clinton."
Incidents of pre-publishing, mis-publishing and mal-publishing can only become more frequent as more Web sites adopt automated processes like the one that triggered ABCNews.com's embarrassment. Expect red faces to become commonplace -- and watch that old "editor's note" standby excuse, "due to a technical error," get a heavy workout.
June 5, 1997
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Scott Rosenberg
Spinning for privacy
The way the Web works today, anything a site owner wants to know about you -- who you are, where you live, what you buy, all the stuff marketers call your "profile" -- has to come directly from your typing fingers. Earlier this week, a consortium of 60 companies led by Netscape proposed a new idea called the Open Profiling Standard, or OPS. Under the new plan, you'll type that information only once and it will be stored on your computer's hard drive -- ready to be transmitted to a Web site once you give your permission by clicking an OK button.
OPS sounds like a plan to automate the transfer of personal information to Web site operators, something they desperately desire as they try to build the online commerce industry. That isn't an inherently bad thing; one of the promises of the Web is to offer highly personalized and convenient services, and nothing can be personalized for you unless you first provide personal information, right?
But on its way through the media food chain, OPS underwent some remarkably deft spin control -- and emerged as a "proposed Net privacy standard." Gee, "Net privacy" sure sounds more appealing than "automated transfer of personal information," doesn't it?
OPS arose in part as a response to the threat of government regulation, and it does include some privacy protections, to be sure. Under OPS, Web sites aren't supposed to reuse the information you give them -- by, for instance, selling or trading it to other companies who might bombard you with e-mail -- unless you give your permission. Which, when you think about it, isn't that different from the status quo: Today, too, you have to trust Web sites to honor their privacy commitments, and you're wary if they don't make any.
More importantly, OPS doesn't address the already widespread use of "cookies" -- another Netscape technology that allows Web businesses to track your visits to their sites and store other information about your behavior on your computer's drive. Though cookies aren't innately evil and they're rarely used for nefarious purposes, they inspire a certain amount of paranoia among Net users.
It's possible to set your browser to check with you before "setting" a cookie -- but if you turn this switch on, you get bothered by dialogue boxes every other click you make. Most users never do so, or try it once and turn it off again once they realize how annoying it is. One can easily imagine OPS's carefully devised "consent" provisions similarly falling by the wayside once impatient Web surfers realize how distracting monitoring that consent can be.
OPS is plainly an effort, probably a well-intentioned one, to balance two of the Web industry's aching needs: to serve the marketers who foot its bills and to assuage the privacy fears of its users. Yet every single headline we found in Tuesday's coverage of the OPS story heralded it as a privacy initiative. The San Jose Mercury News wrote: "Netscape, others team up to protect Net privacy." The San Francisco Chronicle: "New Standard Offers Privacy Protection." The New York Times: "Industry Group to Offer Initiative for Internet Privacy." C|Net News.com: "Net privacy proposal launched." ZDNet: "Privacy standard hopes to keep online predators at bay." At least Wired News, though it too adopted the "privacy" label, injected a note of skepticism into its headline (and matched it in its story): "Netscape Proposes Half-hearted Privacy Standard."
News of Internet technology is often much more complex than many readers can follow, and so the labels and headlines news organizations choose bear an extra-important burden. Call OPS a "privacy standard" often enough and people will think it's all about privacy -- even if much of the time this standard is simply expediting your name and vital info from your computer to someone else's.
May 29, 1997
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Scott Rosenberg
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