Crazy Talk

Beyond the Limits of Online News

A funny thing happened on the way to the press room last week. An editorial published in the American Journal of Psychiatry characterising Internet addiction as a compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder skipped out into cyberspace and became a warning that online gaming, texting or even email could – and quite possibly would – send you mad. Damn those slapdash bloggers, you might think, they’re giving us all a bad name.

But, no, the scare-mongers were online representatives of the traditional news media. The bloggers got it right.

So what was all the fuss about? Much of the problem seems to be that the editorial suggested a lot more than it could deliver for keyword happy journalists. Jerald Block argued that specific examples of excessive Internet use could be classified as “disorders” and were worthy of inclusion in DSM-V, the yet to be published update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by psychiatrists around the world.

To put this in its proper perspective, the new manual isn’t likely to be published for a long while yet, and only after an exhausting process of consultation within the profession and with the general public. Hence the importance of the editorial – it was a small part of a long process that will involve a great deal of careful thought.

Much of Dr Block’s focus was actually on the very public issue of Internet addiction in South Korea and China – which has gained coverage around the world – with the United States used as comparison because it boasts far fewer Internet cafes and is likely to have internalised the problem more, kept it private and largely out of reach. But he also laid out a very clear case for diagnosing symptoms that arose from “excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and e-mail/text messaging”. And that’s where the trouble began.

Snake-Oil for the New Millennium

The Knowledge Management Scam

It’s been a busy week for the information overlords. No, I don’t mean Bill Gates or whoever it is keeping the Internet’s main servers chugging along, although they’ve probably been busy too. Who I actually mean are the snake-oil salesmen of the Cyber Age – those who utter the term ‘knowledge management’ with illogical conviction.

Here in Hong Kong we’ve just had the local Knowledge Management Society’s forum, desperately attempting to ride in the ill-defined wake of Web 2.0. And one of the local newspapers ‘featured’ a thinly disguised advertisement for associated services this week. Not a good start, but let’s broaden our consideration for a while. One question is just begging to be asked: what the heck is knowledge management?

Over the last 20 years we’ve had tortured managerialisms like 360-degree assessment, Six-Sigma (though still with many defenders), business process re-engineering (from the ashes of methods and procedures analysis) and downsizing – that earnest attempt to re-focus business that became a vicious excuse to sack people. Downsizing is still alive and well, with major banks like HSBC excelling at it even though they’re earning record profits, despite claims of hard times after the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. The other methods are faltering, and will eventually fall behind newer fads, one of which is already fading. That’s knowledge management. But it’s not going down without a fight.

So much for the background – what does ‘knowledge management’ actually mean? Ray Sims recently posted an answer in cyberspace. Well, many possible answers really. Fifty-three all told. These aren’t similar, hairsplitting overviews, but “substantially different. There are only five attributes that are seen in 30% or more of the definitions”. At the Information Research blog, Tom Wilson commented that “in spite of all this he still calls ‘knowledge management’ a discipline!” Indeed.

The Great Communitarian

A Legacy Now Remembered

Things have a way of coming round again. It’s my youngest son’s first birthday tomorrow. Of course that’s special in itself, but it carries the potential for discord – my wife and I also have a two year old daughter. We jokingly think of her as our mini-boss, in training at least. She’s got that type of personality. So giving presents to her brother alone, something she’s never experienced, was looming as a problem. Then I thought of my great-grandmother, and everything has fallen into place.

Sometimes good ideas linger in the background, ignored far too long. My great-grandfather migrated to Australia from England before the First World War, survived the debacle in Turkey, married and eventually settled in a small tourist town on the south coast near Melbourne. Poppa Potts had lied about his age to join the army, and when he made it to the coastal strip he near built the local pub by himself. He was that sort of guy – happy to tell the tall tale, eager to build. After he retired from carpentry he built model chairs, boats and the like out of wooden pegs. Very clever.

And Nana Potts was at the centre of her small community, when it really was a small community before Melbourne’s suburbs began to spread out into it. When I was a very small child we moved north, so I didn’t get to see much of them, but twice a year Nana would do something that should have stuck more firmly in my memory, though it’s only properly surfaced now, over three decades later. For my brother’s birthday she’d send a package with one present for him and something small for me. On my birthday it was the opposite.

The Sneaky Art of Storytelling

John Irving, J.G. Ballard and the Best of Genre Fiction

Stories rarely do what we expect of them. Somewhere, in between the words, fiction becomes a little too much, detail doesn’t seem quite right. Few people ever read a story and think yes, that’s exactly how it should be, or was, or will be. And that’s surprising, because we search for structure, for shape and form, even as we lead unstructured lives.

Pity the poor storyteller. John Irving got in right in his autobiographical Trying to Save Piggy Sneed when he wrote that ‘real life’, or what we expect of it at least, is just not believable in fiction. “When the father drops dead with an apple in his mouth while urinating on the front fender of his mother-in-law’s car . . . uh, well, I just had trouble seeing it”. But it happened, and one of Irving’s students wrote it down.

There are, of course, ways of dealing with improbabilities on the page, or genre fiction would also be dead. Imagine that – no detective noir, no science fiction, no fantasy, no tragicomedy. The best case in point is Irving himself. It seems unlikely that someone’s mother would accidentally bite off her lover’s penis while giving him a blowjob in his car when her husband coasts down the driveway in the family station wagon with the headlights off to thrill the kids and – again accidentally – rams them. But I read that in Irving’s World According to Garp as a kid and I believed it.

Why? Because it carried with it equal measures of fear and titillation for the boy that never fade in the man, because emotion dictates what I should believe, if only in one instance. That’s the first thing about this art called storytelling – we’re forever at the mercy of the scribe, always willing to shift perceptions just a little bit, to say yes, alright, just this once. But maybe not again.

Market Malady

Ethnic Segregation, Maids and Shopping in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is renowned for two things: its libertarian economy and its cosmopolitan outlook. Here the dollar is king, and people from around the world can meet, exchange and learn in the market. It’s the economics of the human condition. Or it would be, if the city weren’t ethnically segregated.

No, you say, surely not! But consider this first up: in presenting the 2006 by-census data, the Race Relations Unit of the local government describes the 95% majority in ethnic terms as “Han Chinese”. Then it labels all fair-skinned non-Chinese residents as “self-identified” (because that’s the only choice they’re given on the census) “white”, and lists other minority groups under national designations such as “Indonesians”, “Filipinos” and “Nepalese”.

So, despite a Race Relations Unit committee that is supposed to promote ‘racial harmony’, for minorities we have one term that coheres a range of dissimilar ethnic groups under a skin colour that is no more white, and often less so, than the appearance of many ‘authentic’ locals, and designations that deliberately separate ethically similar people (Indonesians and Filipinos are both ethnic Malays). Framing this wayward categorisation we have the curious use of “Han Chinese”, when almost everyone here identifies with the Cantonese ethnic subgroup.

But, of course, we’re part of China now, and all Chinese should be the patriotic same.

Wild and Wiley Romans

Ruminations on Anthony Everitt’s Augustus and Tacitus’ Annals

Celebrity sex scandals, marriage and remarriage, the convolutions of temporary, loveless relationships – they’re all the trashy hallmarks of our day and age, right? Well, yes . . . but we shouldn’t think we’re unique, that civilisation is somehow tipping towards moral catastrophe. Next time you reach for People magazine, read the latest episode of Britney Spears’ sad derangement or wonder how happy Woody Allen is a decade into marriage to his ex-wife’s adopted daughter, remember that the Romans did it first. And, yes, they did it much better.

Sure, everyone knows the Romans weren’t saints. Most of you have probably heard of Roman orgies, even though they had more to do with gluttony than libido. Caligula, by all accounts, was fond of fornication – and we’ll meet him again soon – but even for him it wasn’t just sex and sweat.

Reading Anthony Everitt’s biography of Augustus Caesar recently I was struck by the melodrama in his account of the machinations between the First Citizen himself, his co-ruler and former son-in-law Mark Antony, and Egypt’s Macedonian queen, Cleopatra. In Everitt’s defence, he relies heavily on the writing of Cassius Dio and Appian, who are still the best we’ve got. And the situation was, even for the standard of the times, a little tawdry.

Everitt makes the point several times that sex, love and social relations were intertwined but by no means inseparable as the Roman Republic breathed its last. That Cleopatra was a sexual conquest for Augustus and Antony was largely incidental to her role in the politics of the coming Empire. She was both a chattel and a subordinate ruler: one did not necessarily imply the other.

Technotes 1.0

Microreviews from the Realm of Technology

One of the more intriguing things about what we vaguely call technology is not what it can achieve, but how we perceive it in many and varied ways. We can embrace change and its sometimes dubious ramifications, take up the new tools of our times, or we can stand back and watch as our expectations shift. We can also shout angrily at the mute gods of permanence, demanding that they bring back what we knew and loved.

Constantly we stand on the daunting threshold of the new.

In that spirit of change I’ve banished last week’s microreviews to the dedicated page. Their counterparts this week, now in the sidebar, were inspired by a range of reactions to technology – my own, of course, and those of people around me. In a follow up to my earlier post on the limits of copyright, I’ve also been reading the emotionally charged work of Andrew Keen, the Cassandra’s Cassandra when it comes to all things participatory on the Internet. In 2006, Keen grouped Larry Lessig, the Stanford law professor who sits on the board of Creative Commons, with those he labelled “intellectual property communists”.

What Makes Literature Great?

A Contribution from Comicdom

Sometimes the writing that affects us most is simpler than we’d like to admit. Occasionally, context outweighs convention and the comic book can offer more of substance to mull over than a dozen learned tomes. Right, you’re thinking, as if . . . But consider for a while Bill Willingham’s comic masterpiece, Fables.

Now in its seventy-first issue, Fables has scooped Willingham and his main artist Mark Buckingham numerous Eisner Awards, the American comic industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. It’s one of the more successful titles managed by Vertigo, the ever so slightly avant-garde imprint of DC Comics. The Fables community here on the Internet is very active, and as Kieran Bennett made obvious in a blog post recently, ever ready to stamp on perceived deviations from the quality it expects.

But what makes Fables particularly worth our attention is more than success or failure in a fanboy popularity contest. The series speaks to childhood and adult days alike, combining the rigour of contemporary life with the lackadaisical fantasy of stories read a lifetime ago, cast in new shapes and given new meaning.

Willingham carries with him the central tradition of fantasy writing, casting about for old archetypes with which to people his tales. Dark days have fallen on the many worlds of story; the rise of a crushing empire has pushed the best figures of the old fables and some of the new into our world. No less than in an upmarket New York neighbourhood.

So we have exiles from tales you might remember – Cinderella, Sindbad, the Arabian Nights, Little Red Riding Hood and a wealth of others – cut adrift in our mundane world, straining to cope with displacement and the disappointment of the ‘mundy’ lives we lead more comfortably. Their community, too, is more like our own than the benevolent autocracies they were forced to leave behind. Its creaky but barely democratic form of government, its security concerns, the way its citizens are disciplined and punished all point toward our own ways.

Who Knows?

Copyright, Creative Commons and the Limits of Knowledge

Share and share alike we’re told as kids, and it’s a pity we don’t always do so as adults. One of the more dubious, and most challenging, features of the Cyber Age is the promotion of intellectual property rights to the commercial extreme. Knowledge has become a commodity, and were it not for projects like Wikipedia and – let’s face it – rampant piracy, few would share the bounty of the times. But we can change that in our own small ways.

Yesterday I licensed the content of this blog under the auspices of the Creative Commons project. The details are at the bottom of the sidebar if you’re interested, and I hope you are.

I’ve included the notification button here again – just click on it to see the exact conditions of my Attribution Share-Alike licence. Horrible name, I know, but it means that you can use what I write any way you like as long as you state that I created it in the first place. And I’m also asking you to offer the results of any changes under the same licence.

I’m not expecting a general sigh of relief and a rush to quote my material – Heaven forbid! What I’m doing is lending my modest support to a worthy cause.

Dispatches from the Empire

Writing an End to History in Tibet

History never really ends, it just gets written off. Yesterday I mentioned the disquiet of the past, how history as a judgemental narrative is always contested, always one step removed from something that might only just resemble the truth. It’s easy to say that we need facts to clear our vision, to help us see what really happened. But more often than not facts are handed out like bribes, and events are carefully framed. Take, for instance, the current happenings in Tibet.

Unlike much turmoil in the world today, and much in the pages of the past, the riots in Lhasa are not generating a great deal of confusion. Motives, by and large, are certain, and the chronology is sound. Monks protesting in support of Tibetan independence were joined by less serene compatriots, who took to the streets rioting, looting and destroying what they could. The Chinese police fought back and then the central government sent in the army, which has effectively locked down the city.

Personnel carriers versus fleeing civilians – the classic mismatch of civil disorder.

History Matters

Microreviews with an Eye on the Past

A little change can do a lot of good. My recent foray into possible futures has taken me into realms I hardly expected to traverse. It’s certainly an adage worth remembering that the map does not precede the territory, that expectations aren’t previews of experience. So I began compiling this week’s microreviews with a good deal of trepidation because they took me back to a milieu of which I can claim some sort of mastery, at least in some areas – history.

The new efforts are now in the sidebar, with last week’s microreviews shuffled off to the dedicated page. It’s worth mentioning in passing that the microreview page is receiving quite a few visits – thanks to everyone who has spent their time pondering my brevities!

What Future the Book?

We May Not Have the Eyes to See the Electronic Page

As our expectations shift and shift again, the future of the book changes apace. Pages move to cyberspace, bookmarks tag ephemera, jackets become jpegs. Everything seems to point now at the screen. But are days to come arriving early, or is this just a techno-dream?

Reading through the front matter of Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe in PDF form recently, I was struck by his enthusiasm for changing the way in which books are offered to their readers. Part of his career depends on it, on dragging new readers in with electronic forms of his published work, at no charge. It worked for me, and I’m very thankful for it.

The book, Doctorow writes, is not what it once was: paper is now merely one expression of the form. As increasingly more people read books on screens, “fewer people are reading words off of fewer pages than ever before”.

Now, I’m a little skeptical about this. I’ve lived just long enough to have read the printed book’s epitaph, to have rejoiced at its revival and to have wondered at what next prediction would pronounce its indubitable fate. But I’m with Doctorow on one thing – electronic books have the potential to increase the reading public. And they’re not likely to be accumulated by people who won’t actually read them. Traditional paper books are sometimes little more than middle-class wallpaper, the pretentiousness of something never read.