Noise and News
I gave up reading Robert Scoble’s blog Scobleizer some time ago. Far be it from me to criticise the 31st most popular blog in the world, I just don’t go for Scoble’s frenetic techno-evangelism or the febrile adulation he elicits in some quarters. His name might not mean much to many regular readers of this blog but what he says matters to an awful lot of people. He has a knack of spotting technological trends, mainly due to his absolute immersion in new media and technology and, let’s face it, he’s ultra-bright and totally dedicated to his cause.
Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.
Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ‘swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:
So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?
I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.
This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.
Noise, in Scoble’s sense, is noise with information value, very different from the engineering sense in which noise is data without meaning, without semantic content. Scoble’s noise, like noise in the information theoretical sense has redundancy. This redundancy is what provides Scoble with the ability to detect patterns in the streams of Twitters and FriendFeeds coming his way. As a good journalist, he knows that just because fifty people propagate a meme (a troublesome term, but I’ll let it slide for now) doesn’t make it true, but he can see the drift of global conversation and concerns.
I’ve been toying with ideas of data, information and redundancy recently. About whether the physical nature of the internet, and the ways in which it transmits and reproduces digital data as a matter of course, could in some way constitute force-multipliers in the global insurgency (another troublesome term, as David Betz wrote yesterday). Does the fact that, once created, data continues to flow through the internet, somehow act to the benefit of the insurgent or terrorist sophisticated in the use of new media? I don’t mean the relative ease with which anyone can set up a website, or post a video of an IED explosion in Iraq. I mean the unpredictable course data takes once ‘released’ into the digital wild and its subsequent recontextualisation as actionable and significant information.
I suspect that it could do, although I’m not convinced it is yet happening, except perhaps in the sense of the deliberate viral spread of propaganda of the deed acts through visual media. One critical point is how (and whether) data is being recovered from parts of the internet and used somehow as a weapon or tool in whichever campaign or operation the individual or group is involved. Reconstituted ‘information bombs’.
See also:
Mining the digital
Global Information Flows
Update:
Oops, shoulda checked Zen’s feed first: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take the plunge? Is the fact that both he and I have written about this today a function of memetic correspondence, or sheer coincidence? I dunno, but read why Zen likes it here.
Hi Tim,
Great post!
I think you have summed up Scoble accurately. He makes high value contributions and is obviously quite a talented guy but the immersion in the social media “noise” that comes with following “the Scobleizer”, can be hard to take sometimes.
Presumably – and this is a big assumption since I don’t know Scoble personally – the swimming in the media gets easier cognitively as one gets habituated in discriminating patterns from amongst the static. My brain would be fried from trying to “follow” 20,000 ppl on twitter plus all the other platforms Scoble keeps tabs on – even with aggregators.
This was a really good read, first of all.
The image of Scoble watching 20k feeds twittering by reminds me of the classic comic Watchmen — where uber-genius character Ozymandias sits before a bank of hundreds of TV screens, just watching the entire zeitgiest at once and taking notes on cultural shifts.
Like Zenpundit, I’m also very interested in the cognitive martial arts techniques that allow for so much input. I would have a very hard time not getting curious about granular details, and staying focused on the organic and barely comprehensible whole.
Thanks guys.
@Zen,
… the swimming in the media gets easier cognitively as one gets habituated in discriminating patterns from amongst the static.
I can only assume this is exactly the case. The initial discrimination is probably between material with perceived value/relevance, and that without – filtering out the dross. We all do the same with RSS every day. I guess Scoble is very good at this. He’s also slightly disingenuous in his claims – he actually does think about where things are going, often before anyone else, regardless of what’s twittering past him at the time.
@Justin,
Scoble as Ozymandias? Hehe, perfect. Someone should Photoshop that asap.
I would have a very hard time not getting curious about granular details, and staying focused on the organic and barely comprehensible whole.
Who wouldn’t? I have a hard enough time keeping my eye on the bigger picture of my own life without getting bogged down in possibly irrelevant details. It’s always been an interesting dichotomy of the internet – the granular vs. the holistic. I guess the possibilities of both are endlessly recursive, fractal, and we are only just beginning to tap into its potential.
To you both – cognition crops up in both your comments, specifically Scoble’s cognitive ability to undertake the superhuman task which he has manfully hoisted onto his broad Ozymandian shoulders (if indeed he has). I would think all of us therefore must have the ability to perform similar feats, given the exposure and the Wing Chung training. True/not true, or is Scoble simply a remarkable fellow?
It’s a matter of practice. Once you got the food/rent routine down and you have free time to learn new skills, anything’s possible. Last time I worked myself free for a little while, I learned drums, which I assumed I lacked the co-ordination to play. Since then, I’ve concluded everything is practice…
Last time I worked myself free for a little while…
I slept. How’s the drum thing working out?
Read Nick Couldry’s “Mediaspace“. It’s a good account of how media acts culturally, socially, and geographically.
On the same note, news is current events. Noise is “atmosphere.” To really get to know a place, like say… The Matrix, you need to live in the atmosphere. Or, watch the code and let it flow over you like rain. OSINT emersion is what you need.
Consider Couldry added to my wish list. Thanks for the tip.
Is noise not also current events, however insignificant? It is atmospheric, environmental. As a great believer in ‘osmotic’ learning, I agree with you.
(Drums have become just another skill I’m too distracted to make money with, but it makes me happy I can do it.)
The noise/news question has me re-thinking Scoble’s entire strategy — he’s positioning himself right in between. News is noise that gatekeepers have decided is important, wether that’s voters at Digg or editorial staff at USA Today. Scoble is getting the pre-news noise and watching the news itself bouncing off everyone.
I realize that although I think of media/internets as an echo chamber, I have some kind of false separation in my head. The echo chamber is not an extension of the media, the media is also immersed in the echo chamber. The gnarly complexity of human culture is the larger environment, and that seems to be what Scoble is attempting to stare in the face.
I seem to recall some German weirdo warning us about gazing into the abyss, but I’ve seen a lot of TV since then…
I don’t think I conveyed it right:
I THINK OF MEDIA AND CULTURE IN TERMS OF PROCESS. I spent so long trying to understand it that I wound up taking my models literally, as a series of parallel but linear processes — culture shifts, media defines, humans respond, culture synthesizes, repeat.
What Scoble’s project made me realize, in a visceral AM coffee way, is that everything is happening at once. This has OODA Loop implications I’ll be thinking over for the rest of the day, and I’m supposed to be “working.”
I wonder if there’s any alternatives to Scoble’s immersive approach?
Are there any alternatives to the immersive approach? I don’t know. Your point re OODA is right on the money. It is a loop, so perhaps you can join anywhere? More likely, the OODA Loop itself is an outdated model that doesn’t fully take account of the non-linearity of the media environment. Commentators like Virilio have been harping on about the collapse of temporality for years, and I think they’re right, up to a point. This reduces the ability to observe (everything), orientate (with respect to what?), decide (anyone can decide anything) and act (on what? to what effect?). Damn, that’s going to be bugging me all day, and I’m meant to be ‘working’ too …