Content by Cory Doctorow (good non fiction books to read .txt) đ
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon â âWould Spock ever say that, in ârealâ life?â Whatâs more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in âSpock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise.â
This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because itâs hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be measured â what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling writers that theyâve given their characters the wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting.
Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters â drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination â are autonomous pieces of themselves. Itâs a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans whoâd set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself.
Thereâs something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. Itâs unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But thatâs exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that characterâs actions through his own lens.
Writers canât ask readers not to interpret their work. You canât enjoy a novel that you havenât interpreted â unless you model the authorâs characters in your head, you canât care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, itâs only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isnât disrespect: itâs active reading.
Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Letâs stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them.
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Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
(Self-published, 26 August 2001)
0. ToC:
* 0. ToC
o 0.1 Version History
* 1. Introduction
* 2. The problems
o 2.1 People lie
o 2.2 People are lazy
o 2.3 People are stupid
o 2.4 Mission: Impossible â know thyself
o 2.5 Schemas arenât neutral
o 2.6 Metrics influence results
o 2.7 Thereâs more than one way to describe something
* 3. Reliable metadata
1. IntroductionMetadata is âdata about dataâ â information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard â a Document Type Definition or scheme â for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine heâs seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. Itâs also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
2. The problemsThere are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia. Iâll enumerate them below:.
2.1 People lieMetadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa), artists compete for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be zero-sum, but theyâre damned close.
Thatâs why:
* A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like Altavista will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten results.
* Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like âRe: The information you requested.â
* Publisherâs Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler âYou may already be a winner!â
* Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to them.
Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order.
2.2 People are lazyYou and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information.
But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information. Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages on Geocities are called âPlease title this pageâ and your boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like âUNTITLED.DOC.â
This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3 files from Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title, artist or track information â this despite the fact that adding in this info merely requires clicking the âFetch Track Info from CDDBâ button on every MP3-ripping application.
Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas to add metadata to the average userâs files, weâre never gonna get there.
2.3 People are stupidEven when thereâs a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation.
Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for âplamâ on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for âPlam Pilots.â Misspelled listings donât show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.
The fine (and gross) points of literacy â spelling, punctuation, grammar â elude the vast majority of the Internetâs users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate â let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy theyâre supposed to be using â is self-delusion of the first water.
2.4 Mission: Impossible â know thyself
In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuffâs properties, noting those results.
Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, Americaâs Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: âMy daughter dresses like a slut!â
Ask a programmer how long itâll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long itâll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts â the answerâs likely to be just as reliable.
People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better; therapists rake in billions working for this very end.
Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature?
2.5 Schemas arenât neutralIn meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this:
Nothing:
Black holes
Everything:
Matter:
Earth:
Planets
Washing Machines
Wind:
Oxygen
Poo-gas
Fire:
Nuclear fission
Nuclear fusion
âMean Devil Womanâ Louisiana Hot-Sauce
In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on sub-hierarchies, with classes for reliability, energy consumption, color, size, etc.
This presumes that there is a âcorrectâ way of categorizing ideas, and that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on the proper means for building a hierarchy.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others. A manufacturer of small, environmentally conscious washing machines would draw a hierarchy that looks like this:
Energy consumption:
Water consumption:
Size:
Capacity:
Reliability
While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would want something like this:
Color:
Size:
Programmability:
Reliability
The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in a marketplace.
2.6 Metrics influence resultsAgreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric, regardless of those itemsâ overall suitability. IQ tests privilege people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30-and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesnât show videos any more â Nielsen couldnât generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldnât demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intelâs CISC chips over Motorolaâs RISC chips.
Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes.
Itâs wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable.
2.7 Thereâs more than one way to describe something
âNo, Iâm not watching cartoons! Itâs cultural anthropology.â
âThis isnât smut, itâs art.â
âItâs not a bald spot, itâs a solar panel for a sex-machine.â
Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.
And thatâs just not right.
3. Reliable metadataDo we throw out metadata, then?
Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.
Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.
This sort
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