A compilation of governance tools that might deserve a programmer’s attention The Revolution will be Engineered
1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part DDanny Ayer to the Rescue – The W6 Vocabulary & the QuestionGarlandBen Hammersley connected the dots between my Assertion Processor plea and Danny Ayers’ brilliant QuestionGarland solution. First, Danny Ayers’ concept:
Aha! who, what, where, when, how, why! The prime directive(s) of journalism. When Ben and I first discussed the Assertion Processor at the Intermezzo Café in Philly, we too felt that the whowhatwherewhenhowwhy architecture was a guide to the answer, but we were thinking less specifically than Danny, and therefore less usefully, IMHO. Commenting on Danny’s structure, Ben remarked:
And here we are, back at the beginning again. The complications of our shared frailty causes us to seek truth when there is none (except among the prematurely convinced, but that’s another rant). I agree with Ben that there is no truth to be discerned here, but the utility is lost if we don’t encourage articles to assert the truth or biases they think they’re exposing. I can’t imagine some grand namespace in the sky that reveals the “truth” to us by showering us with the inconsistencies of our enemies. The point here is that there are no external enemies. As Pogo said so long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It’s an assertion processor! There is no way to mediate in the questionable processes by which biased authors, editors and reviewers populate assertion feeds to sell their biases to the rest of us. Just as there’s still no consensus on Sir TBL‘s dream of a semantic web to deliver us from ignorance (I know I got that wrong, but you get the drift). Who predicted Google? How about this new Vivisimo‘s results for Assertion Processor, which discovers the themes embedded in results themselves and organizes the results according to that discovered “namespace”? See how it discovers that I’ve been blathering on about assertion processors, leavened by Ben Hammersley’s treatment whereby he applies actual knowledge and perspective to the problem, which has never slowed me down! (Be sure to click Vivisimo’s [preview] link in each result for an instant glimpse of the found page). The Proof is in the Put-InSo I’m less focused on the establishment of an orderly system than I am on the set of tags to encourage liars to streamline their biases: None of us is to be trusted, my precioussss. My hopeful cynicism suggests that we embrace and extend Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland (who, what, where, when, how, why) with some additional tags to let the expositors sell us more efficiently on the outrageousness of
I’m kidding around a little but not a lot. We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they’re hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest. These are the elements that journalists strive for even as they attempt to push their master narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the press, as Jay Rosen is so masterfully teaching us. Jay, could you put an oar in here? I’m sure there’s some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White questions included in Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life’s challenges. |