Reporting vs. Interpretation
Source : Lion Kimbro's Blog
I just saw this transcript of Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers talking.
Excerpt:
MOYERS: What do you see that we journalists don’t see?
STEWART: I don’t think… I think we see exactly what you do see. And… but for some reason, don’t analyze it in that manner or put it on the air in that manner. I can’t tell you how many times we’ll run into a journalist and go, “Boy that’s…I wish we could be saying that. That’s exactly the way we see it and that’s exactly the way we’d like to be saying that.” And I always think, “Well, why don’t you?”
MOYERS: But when I report the news on this broadcast, people say I’m making it up. When you make it up, they say you’re telling the truth.
STEWART: Yes. Exactly.
What I take from this, is that people want a clear separation between event reporting, and interpretation.
I can imagine different groups making it their jobs in life to report on events within their respective fields. I can envision the groups, or people around the groups, attaching information to the reports. For example: Timetracks, geocoding, semantic intelligence, and connections with emerging stories.
Let me explain each of those concepts, briefly. This is an interesting diversion.
A “timetrack,” attached to a story, would be information about when and where the events happened. For instance, if a report said that a bank was robbed at 4:00 PM, and the police arrived on the scene at 4:17 PM, then the time track would show the time and duration of the robbery, and the time that the police arrived on the scene.
What could computers do with this information? Well, they could show you where you were at, at those times. If computers were following the story, they could look for patterns among robberies. The system could tell you if anyone you knew was around the area, at that time.
Geocoding is the “where.” It tells where the bank is, in the world.
Semantic Intelligence means telling more general intelligence about the situation: That this is a robbery, that this happened at a bank, that so and so people were involved, that it took place in the given city, etc., etc.,. With this type of information, you can ask things like: “Tell me about all the other bank robberies in the city. Tell me about all robbery, period, in the city. Show me all police actions reported in the city, in the last week.” With semantic information, the computers can do much more smart things for us.
One nice thing is, once you have a large enough body of semantic intelligence, it makes it possible for researchers to “freeload” off this data, and use it as a training set for computers. Then the computers can say, “Well, this report, which is just human text, sure looks an aweful lot like the other 3,854 descriptions of bank robberies I’ve seen before,” and try to automatically fill out the requisite data structures. Now a human doesn’t have to write up everything, merely approve it. After enough training, the computer can probably fill out metadata on it’s own, just as well as a human.
I’ve talked a few times about how AI’s (and robotic appendages) are going to be “trained” by humans, as we lead into independently capable AI. I believe that in the next couple decades, we’re going to see the “child rearing through infancy” of the AIs. We are all parents.
When you correct your robot, your computer intelligence, whatever- it’s going to send back a report to central, and it’s going to distribute back out to the others. Don’t worry, you’re going to be rated, and others will be rated, and you’re going to grow the AI amidst a trust network. The computers will gain your beliefs and biases and religions and metaphysics and philosophies and sensibilities and trusts and distrusts. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
Open Source hackers, Free Software developers, take heed: Data sets are becoming more important than algorithm encodings, and so it’s time to prepare multi-gig distributions of data, (not code,) and getting ready to slap some sort of license on it.
At any rate, back to our story:
And then, people are going to take this cybernetically enhanced news report about a robbery, and they’re going to say, “This is part of such-and-such trend.” Or “this is part of such-and-such emerging story.”
There’s going to be people saying, “See, this is evidence that our youth are going downhill, and the world’s going deeper into violence.” And you can see some other people saying, “See, this is evidence that our youth are going uphill, and there’s less violence amongst kids now than there has been in 30 years,” etc., etc.,. And we’ll click on that, and we’ll see all the evidence the sides have collected, and where they’re getting their intelligence from, and track it back to the original source reports, etc., etc.,.
This is part of why we believe so strongly in, why we so strongly want, a semantic web. The Internet is a network of computer, the semantic web will be an Internet of ideas. It’ll help you contextualize ideas, like when you go to Amazon.com, and greasemonkey shows you the book’s available in the local library. It’ll connect ideas from different places.
Okay: We have described some of the types of data you can attach to a story. You can tell about the times in the story. You can tell about where it happened. You can say what happens. You can link it with a super-narrative. This isn’t all-inclusive, there are other things to. Such as, who wrote this, what agencies publish it, keywords in the document, etc., etc.,.
So where was I?
Ah, yes: The seperation of events and interpretation.
Jon Stewart can get away with interpreting events, because that’s more or less what’s expected of him. His critics criticize his interpretations, not that he’s interpreting.
But the news agents aren’t supposed to be interpreting. And when they are, they are criticized heavily for it.
We all know that there’s no reporting without some presence of interpreting- after all, somebody thought that the event was important– important given some agenda or mindset, no matter how innoculous you may think it is.
We make allowances, and we struggle. But we try to keep them in reporting mode.
I think in the future, we’ll clearly distinguish the two, and think more consciously of them that way.
Turn, flip, another view: People don’t care about knowing just that an event happened, they want to mull over it, feel the emotions. People don’t want to form interpretations, or judge whether it’s more important that 17 people died in an accident, or 835 people died in a genocide. Do people want to form their own feeds?
Turn again: If they don’t want to, would they rather use a national “professional” feed, or a group with people of sympathetic views.
Flip: A coworker wants to just live a “normal” life, and doesn’t want to get in trouble. He doesn’t want to get involved with any messy communities of humans, rather, he wants the hand crafted message of the news elite, created to his standardized sensibilities, and sure never to surprise him with an aggitation. A comfortable place in a comfortable beurocracy, an honest days work for an honest days return. We’ll have none of this revolution business for me, thank you very much. Maintain the harmonychy. Chomsky’s favorite word: “Harmony.”
Well, I think fiction falls to facts, and my coworker, at the very least, has changed his thinking quite a lot, as has mine. People do change, and we do respond to facts.
I’m willing to put some more gas in this sucker, to see where it’ll take us.
Lion
le 07.01.06 à 23:39
dans News / Actualités
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