Adrian’s Microblog

Telling the news on Twitter is different than telling the news in a magazine or newspaper. I realize journalists have a difficult job these days. The way mistakes are made and disseminated and the way they are corrected, is utterly different on Twitter than at a magazine like Wired or a newspaper like the New York Times. This places unfamiliar demands on journalists and novel demands on consumers of news. And the bigger burden is on the consumers, which I imagine makes the journalists especially cross. Because if we consumers want to have a real-time account of events—and we do, it really makes us a better informed citizenry—we have to understand how to deal better with ambiguity.

Consumers don’t just have to be “skeptical” or “critical thinkers” of breaking information: but they themselves have to operate as do journalists, by e.g., waiting for at least two independent sources as confirmation, and even then realize a piece of news only has some higher probability of being true. Tweets about older events have a lower threshold for warrant than breaking news, for obvious reasons. The price of timeliness is eternal vigilance.

I can understand the temptation to want to edit some (perceived) egregious fallacy you accidentally helped perpetuate, but that’s not how things work on Twitter. Delete the tweet, tweet a correction, or write an elaborate apology on your blog. It will harm your reputation to make a careless error, but on the other hand the audience should know to expect corrections when who-they-follow switch to the breaking-news game. And the audience wants breaking news, warts and all.

(Begin quoted text)

Nick Kallen, who was a platform engineer at Twitter, wrote a good technical and philosophical response to Mat Honan’s request for a Twitter edit button. I still think Mat’s idea has merit but Kallen deftly explains why it’s beyond non-trivial.

This quote, about “telling news on Twitter”, though, is where Kallen reaches too far, irresponsibly so. It reads like Frankenstein promising his creation really is the key to eternal life, plus he’s great with kids, probably.

Kallen casually tosses out that a fire hose of real-time news makes for “a better informed citizenry” with absolutely nothing resembling a fact to back this claim up. I’m certainly unaware of anything that suggests the rush of breaking news equates to better democracy. In fact, everyone I know who seriously studies how breaking news affects news comprehension hypothesizes the end result is a net loss.

The fact is, we don’t yet know whether, as Kallen claims, “a real time account of events” actually does make for better citizens (and democracies) and probably won’t for some time. I suspect, though, that the proliferation of “slow news”¹ we’ve seen as a response to the Chinese water torture of news-like updates is an indication that our fellow citizens yearn for, and deserve, better. And, let’s not forget, those stodgy old newspapers often still manage to tell the story best.

Kallen also suggests part of the solution is to shift the cognitive burden of figuring out fact from fiction back to readers², that ambiguity and eternal vigilance are the prices we pay for an 86400000 millisecond news cycle. Call me old school, but I preferred when a journalist was someone we could trust to get it first, but first, get it right, instead of simply blasting out what any mope could hear coming across the police scanner.

I’ll note that I’m not laying the blame for the problems of breaking news at Twitter’s feet. These problems really aren’t new, they were with us long before Noah Glass wrote Twitter’s first Rails controller. In fact, I’d suggest that Twitter is perhaps uniquely suited to help solve these problems, beyond just an edit button, by putting all that Big Data to use sorting fact from rumor. Being the heart through which so much of the world beats has got to be useful for something more than telling me the kids still like Justin Bieber.

I’m no luddite and, perhaps surprisingly to my friends who work there, still have love in my heart for Twitter. I want to believe they can crack the secret to helping me know — really know, not just thumb through — the world I live in. Even if it’s not an edit button, I want to believe they’re trying.

(via jimray)

A good reflection.

sds:

www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2013…

Pull back the veil.‘We shall be the generation that has seen, and has not believed.’ -G.K. Chesterton

hilker:

Hate the fruit, love the bloom. #crabapplessuck #nofilter

Okay, now that’s pretty.

Valedictions

by yours truly

Looks like it rained a little overnight … :)

(via G)

Sifteo Cubes.

A new type of toy that blurs the boundary between physical and virtual.

(by sifteo)

Race Against the Machine

Our insistence on disconnecting body and soul has led to many of the difficulties of our times. — thought that occurred to me recently

Some great remarks about marriage and the recent Supreme Court cases – check it. :)

(via Heritage’s Ryan Anderson Debates Marriage on The Blaze by HeritageFoundation)

A reminder to focus on the things that last. :)

Andrew Peterson & Ben Shive sing Planting Trees.

(by Laity Lodge)

DocumentCloud

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. — Antoine de Saint Exupery (via G)

hilker:

(via Andrew Peterson | You’ll Find Your Way: A Letter and a Video) For my sons.

Beautiful.

A beautiful video commemorating the historic election of our Holy Father, Pope Francis. 

(via askthecatholic)

Amazon’s Kindle Website

Warby Parker

Shop for glasses on the web. Virtual try-on. Have 5 pairs shipped to your house, pick the one you like. $95.

So many innovative parts to this model – plus the added inspiration of the charitable giving done by the business. Gonna have to watch this again.

(via @WSJ)

“Research shows it’s pretty hard to be creative in a quiet space. But, the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing. Our team has delivered the vibe of a coffee shop right to your desktop, which means when your workspace just isn’t quite cutting it, we’ve got you covered. Coffitivity Enough noise to work.”

(via @jasonfried, via Coffitivity - Increase Your Creativity!)

And for a rain-themed site, check out rainymood.com

Happy birthday Mom! :)

I am one of those who believe that a human being is not an autonomous construction with no given structure, order, status, or role. I believe that the affirmation of freedom does not imply the negation of limits and that the affirmation of equality does not imply the leveling of differences. I believe that the powers of technology and of the imagination do not require that we forget that being is a gift, that life is prior to all of us, and that it has its own laws.

I long for a society in which modernity would have its full place but without implying the denial of elementary principles of human and familial ecology; for a society in which the diversity of ways of being, of living, and of desiring is accepted as fortunate, without allowing this diversity to be diluted in the reduction to the lowest common denominator, which effaces all differentiation; for a society in which, despite the technological deployment of virtual realities and the free play of critical intelligence, the simplest words—father, mother, spouse, parents—retain their meaning, at once symbolic and embodied; for a society in which children are welcomed and find their place, their whole place, without becoming objects that must be possessed at all costs, or pawns in a power struggle.