Review of Infomocracy, by Malka Older
Title: Infomocracy
Author: Malka Older
Publisher: Tor.com
Copyright: 2016
ISBN13: 978-0-765-38515-4
Length: 384
Price: $24.99
Rating: 98%
I received a promotional copy of this book from the publisher.
Timing, as they say, is everything. Tor.com releases Malka Older’s debut novel Infomocracy on June 7, into the teeth of a U.S. presidential election cycle, which is the best possible time for the book to come out. I’m happy to report that both publisher and author make the most of the opportunity.
World of Infomocracy
Infomocracy envisions a speculative future in the mid-to-late 21st century where most states have joined a world government system based on local rule. Under this system, the countries have been divided into centenals, which are governing units of 100,000 residents. Each centenal may chose the regime by which they wish to be governed, with choices including ideological governments such as Heritage (conservative), Liberty (libertarian), or Policy1st (everyone’s dream party that advocates the “demonstrably best” policies on each issue, for some definitions of “demonstrably best”); corporate governments including Phillip Morris, 888, and Coca-Cola; and a smattering of nationalist and local parties. The government that wins the most centenals gains the Supermajority, which gives it significant influence at the supranational level. Some countries, including likely candidates Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, decided not to join the world government scheme and govern independently.
At the center of Older’s world lies Information, a global service that combines our current internet, the Internet of Things (e.g., this pachinko machine paid out a 28,000 yen jackpot on such and such a date), as well as manipulable visualizations and heads-up displays. I think the combination of a governing scheme akin to that found in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash with an information service more like the one described in Minority Report serves the story’s needs admirably.
Ground Game
The popular aphorism that “all politics is local” describes a world divided into 100,000-person mini-states quite well. Infomocracy follows Ken, an undercover agent of influence for Policy1st, and Mishima, a researcher and sometime security worker for Information. As in William Gibson’s novels such as Pattern Recognition, we receive the barest hints of what the main characters look like, focusing instead on what they know, what they do, and how they react within their milieu.
As the story progresses, we follow Ken and Mishima around the world as they embark on assignments, react to emergencies, and explore their burgeoning relationship. Sometimes their efforts create the desired change, sometimes they get a mixed result, and sometimes everything goes wrong. Those varied outcomes, which highlight the joy and pain that are never far from the tactical-level worker’s mind, are no doubt the product of Older’s work as a humanitarian aid worker in Japan, Darfur, Mali, and other places (including three years as a team leader), as well as her appointment as a Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015. When you consider that experience in tandem with her master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and Ph.D. work at l’Institut d’Études Politques de Paris, you get a sense of the intellectual firepower she brings to the task.
Events in Infomocracy proceed in a manner that is both familiar and surprising. To paraphrase Chekhov, “If you see a global information network over the fireplace in Act One, it will go off in Act Five.” We don’t quite get to Act Five before the information and communication grid goes down, but fail it does and the hell that was breaking loose accelerates into a maelstrom Ken and Mishima must navigate.
Older brings the narrative to a satisfying conclusion. I didn’t give the book a 100% rating because I thought a few minor elements weren’t handled as well as they might have been, but I don’t feel compelled to write an artificially “balanced” review that makes too much of those quibbles. The book’s too good to spend much time on a few bits that were merely good instead of outstanding.
Conclusion
Infomocracy doesn’t read like a first novel—rather, it reads like the work of an experienced author who can leverage her significant life experience into a compelling narrative. I recommend Malka Older’s Infomocracy enthusiastically and without reservation. I look forward to her next book.
Curtis Frye is the editor of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Improspectives, his look at applying the principles of improv comedy to business and life. His list includes more than 20 books for Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media; he has also created more than 40 online training courses for lynda.com. In addition to his writing, Curt is a keynote speaker and entertainer. You can find more information about him at http://www.curtisfrye.com and follow him as @curtisfrye on Twitter.
Review of Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life
Title: Quantified
Editor: Dawn Nafus
Publisher: MIT Press
Copyright: 2016
ISBN13: 978-0-262-52875-7
Length: 280
Price: $27.00
Rating: 92%
I received a promotional copy of this book from the publisher.
Fitness trackers, such as the Nike+ FuelBand, FitBit, and (in some modes) the Apple Watch have grown in popularity over the past several years. Knowledge of one’s activity levels and physical state, even if measured somewhat inaccurately by contemporary sensors, empowers users by providing insights into one’s relative health and activity levels. Other sensors, including implanted devices such as pacemakers, record data more accurately at the cost of greater intrusion upon the self. In Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life, Dawn Nafus, a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs, leads an investigation into the anthropoligical implications of new technologies and applications.
Organization and Coverage
Quantified is a collection of papers from the Biosensors in Everyday Life project, a multi-year effort with representatives from several institutions that examined how biosensing technologies, using either”wet” sensors (e.g., saliva, blood, or another bodily fluid) or “dry” sensors (e.g., heart rate, temperature, or blood pressure), impacts individuals and society as a whole.Nafus divided Quantifiedinto three sections: Biosensing and Representation, Institutional Arrangements, and Seeing Like a Builder. The first section, Biosensing and Representation, contains four chapters that examine the Quantified Self (QS) movement from an academic perspective. The first three pieces are, as Nafus admits, written by academics using academic language. I was happy to discover those pieces are accessible to the general reader, which isn’t always the case with articles or dissertations written by specialists for specialists. For non-academics like myself, the first three chapters provide a useful glimpse at how professional scholars approach biosensing as both practice and artifact. The fourth piece, by Wired contributing editor and QS movement leader Gary Wolf, provides a bit of push-back against the strictly academic approach to biosensing.
The Institutional Arrangements section examines QS in terms of regulation, privacy, and autonomy. Images of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and assumed observation as presented in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Orwell’s 1984 immediately come to mind, but as with every new technology access to information is regulated by differing privacy regimes at the regional, national, and supranational level.
The final section, Seeing Like a Builder, approaches biosensing from the perspective of mechanical engineering, device design, and data management. The first chapter is an edited conversation between Nafus, Deborah Estrin of Cornell Tech in New York City, and Anna de Paula Hanika of Open mHealth about the role of open data in the biosensing movement. Subsequent chapters investigate environmental monitoring, data available through the City of London’s bike rental program, and personal genomics.
Topics of Interest
I’ve written a fair amount about privacy issues and public policy, so I naturally gravitated toward the essays in the Institutional Arrangements section. In the Biosensing in Context chapter, Nissenbaum and Patterson apply the framework of Contextual Integrity to data captured by biosensors. As the name implies, Contextual Integrity addresses the appropriate sharing of information given its context, rather than a coarser set of norms established by law or policy. For individuals taking advantage of QS technologies, they might want to share information with other members of the movement to gain insights from their combined knowledge (called the “n of a billion 1’s” approach elsewhere in the collection). Marking appropriate sharing and usage depends on accurate metadata, which is discussed in Estrin and de Paula Hanika’s exploration of the Open mHealth data framework from the Seeing Like a Builder section.
In Disruption and the Political Economy of Biosensor Data, Fiore-Garland and Neff address the narrative that new technologies favor democracy and democratization. Specifically, they challenge the notion that disruptive change is, by definition, good. As they note:
In their most extreme form, disruption discourses use the concepts of democracy and democratization as ways to describe technological change, and in doing so ascribe social power to technological change in a teleological, deterministic way: if we say a technology disrupts power by bringing democratic access to data or power, then the technology will be democratic.
As rhetorical constructs, “disruption” and “democratization” invoke ideas of personal freedom and autonomy, implicitly denying traditional authorities control over one’s data. As with most business models based on platforms that provide the medium through which data is shared (e.g., Facebook), this argument is inherently self-serving. In the United States, private companies face few barriers to collecting and analyzing individual data, and practically none at all if the data has been shared openly and intentionally. While the interaction of health privacy laws and QS data sharing has yet to be tested, existing precedent argues strongly in favor of an interpretation favorable to companies that want to analyze the data for private gain.
I also enjoyed Marc Böhlen’s chapter Field Notes in Contamination Studies, which chronicled his team’s effort to track water quality in Indonesia. Böhlen’s team had to wrestle with the cultural implications of their work and account for both the expectations of the Indonesian citizens affected by their monitoring as well as the initial suspicions of the Indonesian government. I hadn’t encountered a narrative of this type before, so I appreciated learning more about his team’s work.
Conclusion
Quantified is an excellent first multidisciplinary study of the Quantified Self movement. The field is certain to evolve quickly, but the pieces in this book provide a strong base on which to perform future analysis.
Curtis Frye is the editor of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Improspectives, his look at applying the principles of improv comedy to business and life. His list includes more than 20 books for Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media; he has also created more than 40 online training courses for lynda.com. In addition to his writing, Curt is a keynote speaker and entertainer. You can find more information about him at www.curtisfrye.com and follow him as @curtisfrye on Twitter.
Resilience is not a consolation prize
I don’t get angry at online writers, or headline writers, that often, but a tweet from Wired regarding the go match between AlphaGo, the computing engine built by the DeepMind section of the company formerly known as Google, and world champion Lee Sedol, pushed my buttons.
Lee lost the first three games of the match, but all five games were to be played regardless of the outcome. The Wired tweet that ticked me off referred to Lee’s win in Game 4 against AlphaGo as a “consolation win”. Cade Metz, the author of the piece referenced by the tweet, said that Lee “clawed back a degree of pride for himself and the millions of people who watched the match online.”
No, he didn’t. Not because Lee couldn’t regain his pride after having no hope of winning the five-game series, but because he never lost it. Lee admitted to playing a loose opening in Game 1, but based on the AlphaGo games he’d seen from previous matches, he didn’t think the program was strong enough to take advantage of the situation. It was. At no time, the world champion said, did he think he was ahead. In Games 2 and 3 he played better moves, but AlphaGo still forced resignation. Part of the problem was that AlphaGo didn’t use as much of its allotted two hours for early moves as Lee did, so the computer was way ahead on the clock for most of the game. Early moves create the framework for the rest of the game, so players must weigh them carefully.
Lee was clearly frustrated by his inability to win any games in the first part of the match, but he came into Game 4 ready for the struggle and played a surprising, powerful move in the middle of the board after not getting much out of the opening. Expert commentator Michael Redmond, a 9-dan professional player (the highest rank awarded), said he didn’t see Lee’s wedge move coming, but as the game progressed he realized its power. Despite running very low on time, Lee was able to maintain his momentum and take advantage of aimless play by AlphaGo to secure the win.
The Wired story should have centered on the theme of a human player beating a go engine for what might be the last time. The best computer chess programs are favored to beat even world champion Magnus Carlsen in 99.9% of their games. AlphaGo’s improvement over the past five months, when it played well enough to win 5-0 against a professional rated in the top 650 players in the world but made clear errors, is astonishing. AlphaGo trains its neural nets by playing against itself at high speed, earning decades of play experience in months. I don’t doubt it will be unbeatable by humans in a very short time.
Lee stepped up under extremely difficult and very public circumstances to secure a brilliant win. The advances in machine learning behind AlphaGo’s abilities in a game thought to be too complex for computers to manage are notable, but Lee Sedol’s play and fighting spirit are the real story.
Dr. Adam Gazzaley: Gaming and Brain (OHSU Brain Awareness Series)
Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) is a leading research and teaching institution located in Portland. They run a speaker series every year, with this year’s presentations centered on the brain. I’d forgotten to put the talk in my Outlook calendar, so I was very happy to receive a reminder message earlier Monday.
Our Speaker
The speaker, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, is a member of the faculty at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and, as required by California state law, a co-founder of and adviser to a start-up company. That company, Akili Interactive Labs, produces games designed to provide cognitive benefits to players who play the games for 30-minute sessions three times a week over the course of a month or two. Gazzaley is an engaging speaker, though it seems like he’s spent a lot of his recent appearances speaking more about ideas and vision than hard science. As another attendee remarked in the lobby after the talk, “His presentation was more like a performance than a science lecture.” That approach isn’t surprising, given that he co-founded a company and has to compete for investment funds, so I didn’t think it was a problem.
I have to admit that my heart sank a bit when I realized the presentation focused on brain training using games. Lumosity recently agreed to pay a $2 million fine to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission deceptive advertising action that claimed the company’s brain games could help students and seniors improve mental performance. Gazzaley was quick to point out that Akili’s games are going through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process, with their first game ready to move from a pilot program step to wider public testing. Unlike Lumosity’s claims and those of “nutraceutical” supplements (available in stores throughout the U.S. or your favorite multi-level marketing scheme) which make claims that have not been evaluated by the FDA, Akili is going through the rigorous, some would say onerous, testing required by the FDA before it will back up claims of a product’s efficacy. Gazzaley emphasized that if the games don’t pass FDA trials the first time around, they’ll revise them and try again.
Works in Progress
Gazzaley showed several games that combine motor skills and recognition tasks. The game that’s farthest along in testing is a driving game where the player attempts to keep a vehicle centered on a winding road using a joystick. The player must also press the joystick’s button when the vehicle passes under a sign that displays a designated symbol from a set of possible designs. The game’s adaptive algorithms increase or decrease the difficulty level based on the player’s performance, with the goal of encouraging an upward path. The player must switch between the two tasks — as switching becomes more fluid, their score increases. Gazzaley noted that “humans love to level up” regardless of age, a finding borne out by gamification research, so games are a natural mode for brain training.
He also noted that there is the possibility games can be used to treat Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, ADHD, and other conditions. While his work on games as treatment is still in the very early stages, there is the potential for significant advances. This research program will benefit from new devices such as Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s HoloLens, which generate virtual reality spaces in which a player may act. There are also interesting new neurological measurement devices, such as a whole-head electroencephalogram (EEG) helmet that transmits data to a waiting computer, that can provide researchers additional flexibility in measuring brain activity. I also see great potential for other serious game applications involving teams, such as squad-level military exercises or firefighting, though Dr. Gazzaley said that he’s not aware of any work yet in that area.
Conclusion
I enjoyed Dr. Gazzaley’s presentation. Yes, it was a little flashier and a little less sciencey than other talks I’ve attended, but he provided a lot of useful information and compelling demonstrations that made the hour fly by. I will definitely follow his work in the coming years.
To Be a Beginner Again
When I think of what it means to “be a beginner” at something, I think of learning a new language or trying a new sport. I didn’t expect to rediscover the joys and struggles of being a beginner as a writer.
I had just finished Microsoft Excel 2016 Step by Step for Microsoft Press, my sixth Excel Step by Step book, when the publisher approached me to take on Microsoft OneNote Step by Step. I looked at my schedule, swallowed hard, and agreed to do it. I’d worked a bit with OneNote as part of my Office Online Essential Training course for lynda.com, so, while I wasn’t an expert, I wasn’t coming in completely cold. Besides, I’m a writer and course developer—my job is to tease out a program’s intricacies and make them clear to the reader or viewer. How hard could it be?
I’ll pause until you stop laughing.
You can write a book about anything if you do enough research, develop a few ideas of your own, and quote liberally from other sources. I just read a business book, Everything Connects, that did exactly that. The main author probably wrote a great proposal based on his experiences as a serial entrepreneur and meditation practitioner, took his advance, and wrote down everything he could about those subjects. My guess is that he produced about 150 pages for a planned 250-page book, so the publisher brought in (or had already hired) a professional writer as co-author.
I also turned to the supporting literature on OneNote for guidance, but there’s not a lot out there compared to the vast, rich resources on Excel. That said, I wrote what I could and discovered a lot as I went along, but I didn’t have an experienced user’s feel for the program. I’m fortunate Microsoft convinced Ed Price, formerly a member of the OneNote product team, to be the book’s technical editor. Ed knows the software in depth, both as a user and someone familiar with the broader customer base’s needs and desires. He added a lot of material I’d considered not important enough to include, changed the emphasis of certain sections of the book to improve its usefulness, and became, in all but name, a full co-author.
I’m grateful for the substantial help Ed provided and hope to make him a full co-author, with cover credit, when it comes time to refresh the book. As a writer it was good, though incredibly frustrating, to write about a program I hadn’t worked with extensively. I had 20 years of skill and discipline to power through a first draft we could use as a basis for critique, but I had several flashbacks to when I was just starting out and lacked the tools I have now.
I survived (with the help of Ed and others), the book will provide good value to OneNote users, and I was reminded how difficult a thing it is to produce a manuscript from whole cloth. I’m glad I agreed to help out, but I’m sure glad we’re done.
Review of The Art of Language Invention
Title: The Art of Language Invention
Author: David J. Peterson
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2015
ISBN13: 978-0-143-12646-1
Length: 284
Price: $17.00
Rating: 94%
I purchased a copy of this book for personal use.
During my high school years, I thought it would be fun to invent my own language. Something like English, but heavily influenced by the many related Romance languages popular in Europe. I described this vision to my French teacher and she said, “You mean, like Esperanto?” One encyclopedia article later and I was on to other projects.
Others were not so easily deterred. David J. Peterson parlayed his childhood love of languages into a master’s degree in linguistics and a career inventing languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones, SyFy’s Defiance, and other projects. In The Art of Language Invention, Peterson shares his experiences as a language developer along with enough background in linguistics to appreciate the decisions and effort that go into creating a new language.
Linguistics as a Discipline
While at Syracuse University in the late 1980s, I had the good fortune to take LING 201 from Professor William Ritchie. That course surveyed the mechanics of linguistic analysis by introducing topics such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, while also describing writing systems, language families, linguistic evolution, and interactions that produce new forms of language such as dialects, creoles, and pidgins. I thought it was fascinating stuff and went on to take several more linguistics classes. I would have taken even more if they’d counted toward my degree program.
In a little over 250 pages, Peterson does an excellent job of covering the topics from LING 201 such that a reader with little or no training in linguistics can appreciate the tools and, perhaps more importantly, the effort that goes into developing a language complete with its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Even readers with only a passing interest in language creation but who would like an approachable introduction to linguistics could benefit from Peterson’s work.
Constructed Languages in Popular Media
The hook behind The Art of Language Invention, of course, is Peterson’s development of Dothraki and Valyrian for the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Peterson weaves the tale of how he developed Dothraki and Valyrian throughout his coverage of various linguistic topics, supplementing his own insights and results with those of other language creators. As a co-founder of the Language Creation Society, which you can find online at conlang.org, Peterson created a meeting point for language enthusiasts to share their work and their love of language.
What I appreciated most about language development at the professional level is the attention to backstory and evolution. Just as it’s impossible to fully appreciate English without knowing how it has changed over the years, developers can’t construct a new language without giving significant thought to its proto-language and the cultural, geographic, and political forces that shaped it over time. Peterson’s commentary on how those decisions get made, and how they affect the end state of the language, provide terrific insights into his process.
Conclusion
I believe The Art of Language Invention is a terrific book that intertwines the geeky worlds of linguistics and speculative fiction into a satisfying manuscript. Yes, I am in many ways an embodiment of this book’s target audience, but if you share even a part of my enthusiasm for the subject, you should read Peterson’s work.
Curtis Frye is the editor of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Improspectives, his look at applying the principles of improv comedy to business and life. His list includes more than 20 books for Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media; he has also created more than 30 online training courses for lynda.com. In addition to his writing, Curt is a keynote speaker and entertainer. You can find more information about him at www.curtisfrye.com and follow him as @curtisfrye on Twitter.
Management and Motivation
I’ve recently investigated online courses at the MBA level, including taking a managerial accounting course through the University of Illinois. My work and other obligations piled up after I took that course, so I’ve held off taking further for-credit classes until at least January.
To supplement my work through Illinois, I bought a DVD series from The Great Courses entitled Critical Business Skills for Success. The series combines 12-lecture segments on operations, marketing, strategy, organizational behavior, and finance and accounting. The material is presented as an overview of each broad subject, with specific lectures focusing on topics such as the time value of money, rightsizing inventory, and evaluating mergers and acquisitions. There’s very little math and no homework, so the lessons are nowhere near as rigorous as the managerial accounting course, but it’s a great introduction to material I’ll study in depth later.
I’m watching the organizational behavior section now, presented by Clinton O. Longenecker of the University of Toledo. In his lecture “The Motivation-Performance Connection”, he offers some surprising results from a survey of corporate managers. His research found:
- 85% of managers believe an employee’s motivation has a significant impact on performance
- 79% believe that motivating employees is one of the most important leadership functions
- 94% believe workforce motivation is important for overall operational success
- 82% believe management behavior has a significant impact on employee motivation
- 68% believe it is getting tougher to motivate employees
The numbers seem reasonable enough, so where’s the surprise? The surprise is that the first four items aren’t 100% (OK, 98% to account for the 2% lunatic fringe). It’s especially troubling to see the 9% gap between responses indicating belief that motivation impacts individual performance and that overall motivation is necessary for operational success.
I suspect there is a connection between those results and the final figure, that 68% of managers believe it is getting tougher to motivate employees. The economic downturn in 2008 led to significant layoffs and delayed retirements, which artificially flooded the job market with experienced workers who where either seeking employment or couldn’t afford to retire. Now that employment levels have returned to pre-2008 levels and the stock market has restored portfolio values, the labor market has started to tighten considerably, especially for highly skilled workers. When you add easy online communication about employment practices, increased expectations for good treatment, and labor mobility you have an environment where the privilege of coming to work tomorrow morning is no longer sufficient motivation for your employees.
Review of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Title: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Author: Whitney Phillips
Publisher: MIT Press
Copyright: 2015
ISBN13: 978-0-262-02894-3
Length: 248
Price: $24.95
Rating: 90%
I received a promotional copy of this book from the publisher.
Ah, trolls…so much fun to watch when they’re harassing someone you think deserves it and so infuriating when they get under your skin. Whitney Phillips, a lecturer in the department of communications at Humboldt State University, wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Oregon on trolling behavior. That dissertation provides the foundation for This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things from MIT Press.
What is Trolling?
Phillips notes that the central theme of all trolling is lulz, which she defines as amusement at other peoples’ distress. Proactive schadenfreude, I guess. Trolls are perfectly happy to derive their enjoyment from regular users, public figures, and other trolls. All that matters are the lulz.
One of the first widespread instances of trolling took place when a group of trolls invaded the Usenet newsgroup rec.pets.cats, asking increasingly odd questions and suggesting inappropriate solutions to feline health issues. Regardless of your cat’s respiratory issues, you probably won’t need to aerate it with a .357 hollow-point bullet. I never visited the rec.pets.cats group, but discussion of the trolls’ behavior leaked over to the groups I did participate in. Even the collateral damage was significant. Another early example on Usenet, though one that bordered on spam as well, was “Serdar Argic”, an alias for what appeared to have been multiple posters sending out hundreds of lengthy posts per day denying the Armenian genocide from the early 20th century to groups such as soc.culture.history.
Trolling as Rhetoric
As a communications scholar, Phillips takes on trolling as a rhetorical activity, placing it in a broader cultural context as both product and amplifier of certain aspects of society. Specifically, the masculine drive for domination and as a complement to the 24-hour news cycle.
One reason middle school is such a vile experience for many children is the constant barrage of status games, where kids try to find their place in society at the expense of their classmates. Male trolls, who appear to dominate the landscape, continue this type of aggressive behavior online. They base their rhetorical strategies on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer’s book The Art of Controversy, which melds Aristotelian logic and Socratian dialectic with the Dark Side of the Force. The trolls’ goal is to invoke negative emotions from their targets and, upon eliciting insults or harsh language in response to their own provocations, remind their victims that there’s no room for rudeness in civilized argument and go right back to taking arguments out of context, insulting their opponent, and racking up the lulz.
Phillips also takes issue with conservative media, particularly Fox News and its handling of the Birther controversy, which raised the question as to whether President Barack Obama (usually spoken as Barack HUSSEIN Obama) should release his long-form birth certificate and, after it was released, whether it was a legitimate document. Fox News rode that story hard for much of 2008 and 2009 — you can still hear the echoes if you listen closely. Trolls took advantage of the coverage and some images of Obama to create intentionally offensive and racist memes.
That’s not to say trollish behavior is strictly the purview of Fox News and its ilk. When the Tea Party affiliate in Troy, Michigan had early success turning sentiment against a levy intended to fund the town’s library, an advertising agency devised a campaign purported to be from a group named Safeguarding American Families. The ads expressed opposition to the measure and announced the group would hold a book-burning party. The outrage at this fictitious statement turned sentiment in favor of the ballot measure, which ultimately passed.
Phillips also offers an interesting commentary on trolls as trickster characters. The trickster is known for undercutting the foundations of a society’s cultures or mores but not replacing it with anything. Rather than offer a helpful solution for how things could be done better, tricksters start a fire and walk away. When there are no more lulz to be had, the troll’s work is done.
Transitioning to a Publishable Book
Academic writing is often completely impenetrable to anyone who isn’t a specialist in the author’s field of inquiry. My brother wrote his dissertation on a public policy subject I found interesting, but I couldn’t get through more than three pages of the final document. (Sorry, Doug. I know I said I read the whole thing, but my soup spoon kept creeping toward my eyeballs.) Passive voice is used to maintain a semblance of objectivity and distance, specialized language pervades the text, and rewrites continue until the ultimate academic hazing ritual is complete.
Kind of makes me wonder if dissertation committees haven’t been trolling candidates since the 1500s.
Phillips and her editors did a terrific job of excising unneeded jargon from the text, though some usage and conventions they kept leap off the page. The seemingly ubiquitous forward slash appeared in the section on method/ology, but at least there were no indiscretions on the order of the visual pun When the (M)other is a Fat/Her that William Germano mentions in Getting it Published. That said, while phrasings indicating someone is “gendered” as male have entered the general literature, saying someone was “raced” as Caucasian still seems odd to this generally interested reader.
Conclusions
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is a terrific introduction to the world of trolling, exploring how trolls put on figurative masks (or literal masks in the case of online anonymity) and generate lulz from those they encounter. As a former competitive debater in high school and college, I’m dismayed by the violence done to my beloved art of rhetorical controversy. Score some lulz for the trolls, I guess. Highly recommended.
Curtis Frye is the editor of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Improspectives, his look at applying the principles of improv comedy to business and life. His list includes more than 20 books for Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media; he has also created more than 20 online training courses for lynda.com. In addition to his writing, Curt is a keynote speaker and entertainer. You can find more information about him at www.curtisfrye.com and follow him as @curtisfrye on Twitter.
Marshawn Lynch and the Broken Sports Media Model
I’ve long been on record, not that anyone cared, as being in favor of a law banning the post-game interview. Professional athletes who have just spent 60-to-90 minutes of game time busting their guts for our entertainment shouldn’t be forced to answer questions asked for the sole purpose of getting a meaningless quote for an article or a four-second sound bite on television.
Marshawn Lynch of the Seattle Seahawks is calling out the absurdity of the system prior to Super Bowl L-1, but there are plenty of other examples from popular culture. Crash Davis drilling Nuke LaLouche on his cliches in Bull Durham, Bill Laimbeer of the Detroit Pistons giving the same answer to every question after a disappointing playoff loss, or the carefully measured statements Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, and LeBron James offer in their media appearances come to mind immediately. They all use language to discharge their responsibilities while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
What interesting information could Marshawn Lynch, or any other Super Bowl participant, provide without compromising their game plan? The fact they’re happy to be there and are taking it one game at a time isn’t interesting, but reporters ask their questions so they can get a fresh quote (any quote) to round out their article or broadcast segment.
The problem extends to broadcast and commentary as well. Julius Erving said that he quit his studio commentary gig because he was tired of dumbing basketball down to second-grade level. Richard Sherman, the amazing cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, similarly challenged a reporter, who persisted in trying to get Sherman to compare himself to a cornerback on the New England Patriots, to ask him questions that weren’t at “nursery school” level.
Even the broadcasters know what’s up. In a hilariously open and honest segment on a hockey broadcast I watched last year, two of them admitted as much. A player who had just retired joined the broadcast team in the booth and expressed an interest in becoming a color commentator.
Play-by-Play Guy: Go ahead and give a shot!
Recently Retired Player: I have no idea what to say.
Color Commentator (also a former player): It doesn’t matter…just say it with energy.
Recently Retired Player: The Sharks need to pick it up here!!!
(all laugh)
Color Commentator: See!!??
I’d much rather that professional athletes be given the opportunity to speak with the media after or before a game but that it not be mandatory, even for the stars. I care about the game. Pre-game interviews are not the game. Post-game interviews are not the game. Three days of mandatory media appearances before the Super Bowl are definitely not the game.
We get just as much meaningful information when Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, or LeBron James don’t speak to the media as when they do. Let’s enjoy sports for what they are and stop pretending we have a personal connection to the competitors.
Improspectives 
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