Posts tagged “media” from longer posts

From a Guardian story on the complicated relationship between scientists and journalism:

[A] seminal paper from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 said that if a study was covered by The New York Times it was significantly more likely to be cited by other academic papers.

Now, it's no big surprise that a mention in the Gray Lady is going to give your credibility a boost. Having the New York Times calls you a "well-regarded Democratic strategist" goes a long way towards making you a well-regarded Democratic strategist. From that point forward, it's like the old saying about safe choices: nobody gets fired for buying IBM. If you've been mentioned in the New York Times, then more many intents and purposes, you're IBM in the minds of many.

Again, none of what I've said if particularly mind-blowing, but what I think might be surprising, if we stop to look at it, is how today this model for the creation of reputation extends so far beyond major publications like the Times, and how validation comes from all sorts of places and all sorts of ways online. I know that just for my own part, seeing a mention of someone -- on blogs I read, whether big or small; on Twitter streams of people I know or admire -- can serve as a tremendous validator of reputation and standing of that person in my own mind.

While I'm not sure it's fair to characterize it as a major failing, I know I'm guilty of taking this idea of validation too far. If a friend has mentioned or blogged about or Twittered with a particular person I don't know all that well, and I'm writing up something quickly for a blog post or essay, I'm very likely to rely upon that third-party validation of that person (and even that third-party description of that that person does, which often, I think it's fair to say, some's straight from the horse's own mouth.)

To take it one step further, if you're career-minded, that reputation gets crafted in this way might makes networking maybe even more important than it has been in the past. If my network has validated you, then me relying upon you to link to or mention or cite is a reduced-risk proposition. I'm probably not going to be humiliated by that decision. But if my network has never heard of you, then it requires more discipline on my part to vet you and come to my own, potentially risky, conclusion. As a fair-minded grown-up (and especially someone engaging in acts of journalism), I have a responsibility to make the effort. But there's no doubt that when time is tight it's easy to fall back on buying IBM.

Todd Zeigler has some useful thoughts on the new TimesPeople feature that I talked about yesterday. I'll build on his thinking with one additonial note on the topic. What I like about TimesPeople is that it seems to embrace the perfectly reasonable idea that "social" is a how, not a what. We can engage in the news socially without having the need to take it to the level of full blown social networking. To take one example, Netflix isn't a social network by any stretch of the imagination but yet it has a great deal of social goodness mixed in. I might not form any more meaningful relationships with my Netflix friends, but who cares -- I sure get better movie recommendations than I would otherwise. That's the benefit of thinking of what we would otherwise do as something that might be made more communal in and of itself.

I'm having some fun trying out the New York Times' just-launched TimesPeople, an extremely light-weight social-networking app that rides above nytimes.com, storing the story recommendations, blog comments, and ratings for things like restaurants that I might make on the site, and showing me those of others I consent to having in my network to have in my network. TimesPeople isn't meant to be overly social -- the FAQs snarks "you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates" -- but it will replace the "Most Emailed" top ten list that generally only serves to make me depressed about what my fellow humans find most interesting.

Interesting contrast between how the Times is actively trying to engage its readers in new ways and how the AP seems eager to make sure it never gets linked to again.

I'm "nancyscola" if you want to make me one of your co-readers.

An amazing short movie from Dove shows how a frankly ordinary looking woman becomes billboard-beautiful through the magic of makeup, hair product, and Photoshop. There's no there there -- this gorgeous woman is entirely a creation, a product of editing and embellishment. Watch it and send it to the young girls, young boys, young women, and young men that you know. (via Ezra Klein)

You know, I can be so cynical. When I saw the hubub in the blogosphere around this week's Newsweek cover featuring "Losing Afghanistan" around the world and "My Life in Pictures" -- a story on photographer Annie Leibovitz -- in the U.S., I thought that it had to be some sort of prank. But sweet Mary in the morning, no. I hopped over to the Newsweek International site and they've got the covers displayed right there -- as they are below, except that I've got them horizontal instead of vertical for easy viewing. As if they don't even know to be be embarassed by this:

And we wonder why things are as they are. Sometimes the only thing to do in a situation like this is to quote John Kennedy:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Yep.

I don't imagine it's every day that a movie about war is described by Hollywood's Variety as "as powerful as anything apt to be shown on television this or any other year" and then by Rupurt Mudoch's Weekly Standard as "one of the most difficult hours of television you'll ever sit through--and also the most compelling." Baghdad ER premieres tonight at 8pm. If you have HBO, please do watch. I haven't seen it, but a good smart friend who has said that he really believes that every American should see this film.

I was just reviewing Wikipedia's entry on cultural anthropology and had a thought that ties together two of my favorite things -- anthropology and the movies. Here it is. In the old days, the bread and butter of anthropology was the ethnography, where the anthropologist went and lived with one circumscribed group of people for an extended period of time (generally two years) and then wrote up the results. That's where we get works like Evans-Pritchard's "The Nuer" and Firth's "We, the Tikopia." While, to the best of my knowledge, getting a doctorate in the field still more or less requires the completion of a traditional ethnography (and, oh, about a decade of your time), there's a new trend mentioned in the Wikipedia entry toward what's called 'multi-sited ethnography,' where the anthropologist tracks something -- like an idea or a commodity -- from one place to the next. Wikipedia cites this example, of a study that tracked human organs as they move through the black market.  All in all, a positive trend in the field, I'd say, that frees anthropologists to address more interesting and relevant questions. A trend in anthropology and a nascent trend in cinema, I think. I'm thinking about movies like Traffic and Syriana (both Gaghan films). Though I enjoyed neither immensely, I love how they tried to tell their stories by tracking a broad theme -- drugs in the former, oil in the later -- from place to place and through the perspective of the folks involved. In both anthropology and the movies, I think that we could do worse than to popularize this 'multi-sited' approach. For my money, it's a powerful way to tell enjoyable stories about complex stuff.

(By the way, the title of this post is a weak joke. Every emerging sub-field these days is called "toward an anthropology of" something or other, like "toward an anthropology of the Internet." Anthropologists don't like to be presumptuous.)

Propaganda, sure, but still a pretty great Flash piece from the ACLU on life without privacy.

UPDATE: I thought that this was kinda funny. Right after posting this, I Googled the phrase "Democrats supporting Patriot Act" to remind myself which Democrats stood where on the recent reauthorization. I clicked on an old Declan McCullagh's article in CNET called "Patriot Act critics propose temporary extension" and on the page it read (see for yourself):

Welcome, Google user! If this story isn't what you're searching for, try these other News.com search results for "Democrats supporting Patriot Act":..

Heh. So much for privacy.