Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.
I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.
Thereâs a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know itâs not an exclusively American phenomenon. Tom Nichols, the bookâs author, writes, as quoted in The New York Times, âAmericans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told theyâre wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that arenât true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.â
I venture to say that the “death of expertise” is an Anglophone phenomenon. Head into Wikipedia, for instance, and youâll find proof that the masses are not a good way to ensure accuracy, at least not in the English version. Head into the German or Japanese editions and you find fewer errors, and begin to trust the pages more.
Given that many of âthe peopleâ cannot discern what is âfake newsâ and what is not, or who is a bot and who is not, then itâs absolutely foolhardy to propose that they also be the ones who determine the trustworthiness of a news source, as Facebook is wont to do.
I canât comment as much on countries I have spent less time in, but certainly in the Anglosphere, Iâve seen people advance, with confidence and self-authority, completely wrong positions, ones not backed up by real knowledge. You only need to visit some software support forums to see online examples of this phenomenon.
When I visit Sweden, for instance, thereâs a real care from individuals not to advance wrongful positions, although I admit I am limited by my own circles and the brief time I have spent there.
Itâs not so much that we donât value expertise, itâs that the bar for what constitutes an expert is set exceptionally low. Weâre often too trusting of sources or authorities who donât deserve our reverence. And I wonder if it comes with our language.
Iâll go so far as to say that the standing of certain individuals I had in my own mind was shattered when we were all going for the mayoralty in my two campaigns in 2010 and 2013. There certainly was, among some of my opponents, no correlation between knowledge and the position they already held in society. It didnât mean I disliked them. It just meant I wondered how they got as far as they did without getting found out.
Fortunately, the victor, whether you agreed with her policies or not, possessed real intelligence. The fact she may have political views at odds with yours is nothing to do with intelligence, but her own observations and beliefs. I can respect that (which is why I follow people on social media whose political views I disagree with).
In turn Iâm sure many of them disliked what I stood for, even if they liked me personally. Certainly it is tempting to conclude that some quarters in the media, appealing to the same anti-intellectualism that some of my rivals represented, didnât like a candidate asserting that we should increase our intellectual capital and pursue a knowledge economy. No hard feelings, mind. As an exercise, it served to confirm that, in my opinion, certain powers donât have peopleâs best interests at heart, and there is a distinct lack of professionalism (and, for that matter, diversity) in some industries. In other words, a mismatch between what one says one does, and what one actually does. Language as doublespeak.
So is it speaking English that makes us more careless? Maybe it is: as a lingua franca in some areas, merely speaking it might put a person up a few notches in othersâ estimation. Sandeep Deva Misra, in his blog post in 2013, believes thatâs the case, and that we shouldnât prejudge Anglophones so favourably if the quality of their thought isnât up to snuff.
Maybe thatâs what we need to do more of: look at the quality of thought, not the expression or make a judgement based on which language itâs come in. As English speakers, we enjoy a privilege. We can demand that others meet us on our terms and think poorly when someone speaks with an accent or confuses your and youâre. It gives us an immediate advantage because we have a command of the lingua franca of business and science. It gives us the impunity to write fictions in Wikipedia or make an argument sound appealing through sound bites, hoping to have made a quick getaway before weâre found out. Political debate has descended into style over substance for many, although this is nothing new. I was saying, although not blogging, things like this 20 years ago, and my students from 1999â2000 might remember my thoughts on Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign as being high on rhetoric and light on substance. Our willingness to accept things on face value without deeper analysis, lands us into trouble. We’re fooled by delivery and the authority that is attached with the English language.
Youâll next see this in action in a high-profile way when Facebook comes forth with more comment about Cambridge Analytica. I can almost promise you now that it wonât hold water.
I don’t know if Instagram does this on all phones, but when I make multi-photo posts, it often leaves behind a very interesting image. Sometimes, the result is very artistic, such as this one of a LotusâFord Cortina Mk II.
You can see the rear three-quarter shot just peer in through the centre. I’ve a few others on my Tumblr, but this is the best one. Sometimes technology accidentally makes decent art. I’m still claiming copyright given it’s derived directly from my work.
As many of you know, between around December 8 and February 2âdates during which I had Microsoft Windows 10âs fall Creators update without the January 31 cumulative patchâmy computer suffered roughly three to six BSODs per day. Going on to Bleeping Computer was helpful, but Microsoftâs wisdom tended to be hackneyed and predictable.
While I was lucky at Microsoft Answers and got a tech who wasnât rehashing remarks from other threads, eventually he gave up and suggested I download the old spring Creators update, if that was the last version that was OK.
I never had the time, and on February 2, I got the cumulative patch and everything has been fine since.
It means, of course, that Microsoft had released a lemon at the end of 2017 and needed a big patch to deal with the problems it had caused. No word to their people on the forum though, who were usually left scratching their heads and concluding that the only option was a clean installation.
I had bet one of the techs, however, that there was nothing wrong with my set-up, and everything to do with the OS. We know Windows is no longer robust because of the QC processes Microsoft uses, with each team checking its own code. Thatâs like proofreading your own work. You donât always spot the errors.
I said I could walk into any computer store and find that the display models were crashing as well.
Last weekend, I did just that.
Here are the Reliability Monitors of two Dell laptops running factory settings picked at random at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt.
Above: The Reliability Monitors of two display Dell laptops at JB Hi-fi in Lower Hutt, picked at random.
Above: My Reliability Monitor doesn’t look too bad by comparisonâand suggests that it’s Microsoft, not my set-up, that was responsible for the multiple BSODs.
The Monitors look rather like my own, not scoring above 2 out of 10.
They are crashing on combase.dll for the most part, whereas mineâs crashing on ntdll.dll. Nevertheless, these are crashes that shouldnât be happening, and a new machine shouldnât have a reliability score that low.
For those of you who suspect you have done nothing wrong, that your computer has always worked till recently, and you practise pretty good computer maintenance, your gutâs probably right. The bugs arenât your fault, but that of slapdash, unchecked programming. I doubt you need full reinstallations. You may, however, have to put up with the bugs till a patch is released. It is the folly of getting an update too earlyâa lesson that was very tough to relearn this summer.
P.P.P.PS.: Lumino’s head office has taken this case very, very seriously, and has been following up on Ezidebit and Goody. I’m actually really impressedâenough to add the two words to the title. They get that I’ve never put my cellphone number on an any app in the past, and they, too, know that the timing of the scam calls is suspicious. I’ve had a promise that they’ll follow up.âJY
I signed up to the Lumino Dental Plan yesterday (Friday). Big mistake. Lesson worth repeating: listen to your gut.
Some days, the pleasant side of me kicks in and I give people the benefit of the doubt. I read the T&Cs while I was still there but it started getting unreasonable with my standing at the counter while they’re trying to deal with their other patients. ‘Don’t be such a wanker, Jack,’ I thought. ‘So their agreement wasn’t drafted by a professional lawyer. You’ve used Lumino before and the dentist last year was great, and this hygienist was excellent. Let the office manager’s sales’ technique win the day, it’s no big deal.’
Naturally, she really wanted me to sign and made it quite clear that that was the result she wanted.
But it was a big deal. I spent an hour last night writing the below to the companies involved. They gave five different emails so I contacted them all.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
After due consideration, I do not wish to enter into this Dental Plan, and exercise my right under the Consumer Guarantees Act to cancel it. I have been advised by Lumino the Dentists the Terrace that the cooling-off period for this sale is the standard five (working) days and I will be refunded in full.
I was asked by the practice this afternoon to email you with my reasons should I cancel. As all the above addresses have been given to me in one communication alone, I am taking the liberty of writing to you all.
First, I do not feel I had sufficient time to absorb the Ezidebit agreement today (Friday the 26th), especially on a tiny tablet screen, under what I felt was an expectation that I would sign before I departed.
If I recall correctly, the tablet app links to Luminoâs terms and conditions and these are different to the ones in the DLE brochure introducing the plan. I was not made aware of the DLE’s terms and conditions initially and was led to believe that the only ones were on the tablet.
As I advised Lumino while at the practice today, I had serious concerns about the Ezidebit agreementâs poor drafting and its reference to non-existent legislation. I was assured that should I sign, I would not suffer any loss because (a) that the cooling-off period for direct sales applied; and (b) that all Lumino customers who have cancelled to date have been refunded in full.
Among my concerns: I have never heard of the Contracts Privacy Act (neither has my partner, who has legal training), and there is confusion about whether I will be charged administration and transaction fees (Lumino says I wonât, Ezidebitâs T&Cs say I will). I also see there are SMS fees, although I was told at the practice that my cellphone would not be used and was led to believe that its request in the app was a formality. There is no specificity on any of these fees, other than for a failed payment. Generally, the Ezidebit agreement appears to be a copy-and-paste job, its constituent parts drafted by two lawyers who hated each other, and assembled by a third who hated them both.
Neither party has come forth with information about the handling of my private information.
Going to Ezidebitâs parent company, Global Payments, didn’t help, since the US firm’s website says there would be information on its cookie usage on its terms of use pageâbut there isnât. I never went further.
Now that I have had a chance to sit down and review the documentation in your email, I have to conclude that with two businesses telling me different thingsâand the American one not even sure of what it has on its own website, let alone what laws exist in New ZealandâI have no trust in this arrangement.
The principle might be sound enough but the execution leaves much to be desired.
I will be happy to meet the full cost of my hygienistâs session today once I am satisfied that the refund has taken place. I respectfully request that I be refunded in full as soon as practicable, including any fees that may or may not have applied. As no privacy policy was given, I must also request that all personal details held by Ezidebit (in New Zealand and Australia, since both companies are named in the agreement) or its parent Global Payments on me, including my name, email, Visa account information and cellphone number, be deleted immediately after the refund is made. I trust that any intermediaries or contractors who got them during today’s transactions will remove them as well.
Thank you,
Yours sincerely,
Jack Yan
A company called Goody was involved, and sent me the email asking for programme confirmation. I wrote to them separately. I’m not sure what their relationship is since the only T&Cs ever presented to me were for Lumino and Ezidebit. Goody could be an innocent third-party service provider, who also now has my personal information. I’ve asked them to delete it and take me off any programme of theirs, too. I had a peek through their terms and conditions and privacy policy, and both appeared up to snuff.
Tonight, Lumino sent me a survey form asking me what I thought of their service. Read on if you want to find out what happened earlier today (Iâll italicize it).
The care was excellent and I do not want that mixed up with the very harsh words I have for the Lumino Dental Plan. You have already been emailed about my choice to end my participation forthwith and to pay full price for my visit once I get confirmation that I have been refunded in full including any unspecified charges. In summary, US-owned Ezidebit whom you have partnered with looks like the dodgiest company around. I do not share my private cellphone number as a matter of practice but felt compelled to do so on your app on the assurance of your staffer that it would actually not be used. I put it into your tablet and within 24 hours I have a scam callerâyours is the only âunknownâ company that has this numberânot any more, it seems! The American company had no privacy policy and, as I pointed out at the time of signing, cited non-existent legislation in the T&Cs you gave me. You evidently have no idea how seriously I take my privacy and I feel disappointed, distressed and let down by this whole experience. I really should have listened to my gut and walked away at the practice, instead of spending an hour writing last nightâs email and even more time to update you on the scam calls I now get. I have heard of loyalty programmes but your Dental Plan is the first time I have come across a disloyalty programme.
I feel very let down, and it’s been a lesson for meâbut also for any business that decides to lend its good reputation to something highly questionable. It pays to do your due diligence, and that includes going through the customer sign-up process yourself to spot what holes there are. It’s become pretty obvious that this didn’t happen.
PS.: The scam caller on my cell came from +64 4 488-7021. Feel free to look it up for yourselves.âJY
P.PS.: The Lumino practice sent me an invoice for the hygienist’s session for another $153. No apology at all. Instead, ‘once this account is settled we will process your dental plan cancellation.’ Really?
Good morning:
I am deeply disappointed you have chosen to do it this way when I asked for the Plan to be cancelled first, as is my rightâand which is something you plainly stated I could do. I don’t even get an apology or explanation for all the shortcomings in the Plan or the inconvenience caused, which is indeed surprising, or some assurance that my personal details were not sold. Given the scam calls on both my cell and land lines since providing you with my number on your app, I am sadly forced to conclude that they were.
Let me clarify our respective positions under New Zealand law.
Here’s where I stand:
I have a right to cancel this Plan. You’ve said so and I know so. I’ve exercised this right as of Friday night.
You do not have a right to make the refund of the Plan conditional on my settling the account.
I have an obligation to settle your account independent of the Plan’s cancellation.
Here’s where you stand:
You’ve done dental work on me which you should rightly be paid for.
You’ve had a written offer from me to settle this account already.
You’re in an extremely strong position to make sure I settle the account without making settlement conditional on the Plan’s cancellation.
Your doing so violates New Zealand consumer law.
Unlike you, I can make this conditional on your cancelling the Plan, in part because I have no way of finding out whether you’ve taken my $299 or not.
It appears from your email that you already have.
Logically you could refund the difference between $299 and the invoice amount, which would be taking some responsibility for this mess.
I cannot see why I need to be out of pocket for $452 at any time. I am sure you can see how this is grossly unfair.
This seems like a delaying tactic to make sure the five days go by.
I now respectfully ask you cancel the Plan immediately and refund the difference, which seems the easiest solution.
Sincerely,
Jack
The matter is now before the support team in Auckland. Hopefully they can sort this without my contacting their CEO (which seems like the next logical step).âJY
P.P.PS.: The practice manager on the Terrace has received the above and responded far more professionally, asking me to leave it with her and she’ll sort it out. She assures me my details have not been soldânot that I doubted Lumino but I still have very massive doubts about Ezidebit and Global Payments. She’s also offered me 5 per cent off on future treatments out of goodwill, which is a very promising solution. Lumino’s support line in Auckland was also very friendly and logged it into their system.âJY
P.P.P.PS.: Lumino has remained on the case and tracked down Ezidebit’s privacy policy, which I had never seen till today. And I believe we have our smoking gun. Ezidebit’s claims that they have not heard of this happening before suddenly fall flat. In cl. 3.1:
When we share your information with third parties whom we partner with to provide our services (for example, providers of software or any other electronic applications which have been integrated with Ezidebit to enable us to process payments for users of that software or application), those third parties may use that personal information to provide marketing communications and targeted advertising to you.
In cl. 3.2:
We may disclose your personal information to our related companies or to third parties located outside of New Zealand, including:
âą The United States;
âą Australia;
âą Philippines;
âą The United Kingdom; and
âą Hong Kong.
That latter clause explains the scam call on Monday, January 29 then, which was on my cell and asked for me by name. The caller had a Philippine accent and claimed she was calling from Hong Kong.âJY
While I no longer live in the Southern Ward in Wellington, I know whom I would vote for if I still did. Itâs after a lot of thought, given how strong the candidates areâI count several of them as my friends. One stands out.
I have known Laurie Foon for 20 years this year and have watched her genuinely take an interest in our city. This isnât just political hype: two decades ago, she warned us about the Inner City Bypass and how it wouldnât actually solve our traffic problems; her former business, Starfish, was internationally known for its real commitment to the environment and sustainability (its Willis Street store walked the talk with its materials and lighting); and as the Sustainable Business Networkâs Wellington regional manager, sheâs advised other companies on how to be environmentally friendly (sheâs recently received a Kiwibank Local Hero Award for her efforts).
In 1997, when I interviewed Laurie for Lucireâs first feature, she had enough foresight to say yes to a web publication, at a time when few others saw that value. (This is in a pre-Google world.) Itâs important for our local politicians to be ahead of the curveâyet so many voters have opted to look firmly in a rear-view mirror when it comes to politics, fixated on re-creating the âgood old daysâ. If I vote, I vote for our future, and Laurie really can make a difference in councilâas she has been doing in our community for the past two decades and more, issue after issue. Sheâs forward-looking, and she can help make our city carbon neutral, waste-free, and socially responsible. Itâs a wholehearted endorsement for Laurie to make good things happen.
Amazingly, Microsoft Windows 10 Creators fall update arrived last week on my desktop PC, and it took all of 25 minutes to do (running a Crucial 525 Gbyte SSD). (Add an extra 35 minutes for me to put my customizations back in.) This is in contrast to the Anniversary update, which took 11 attempts over many months, including one that bricked my desktop PC and necessitated repairs back at PB Technologies.
However, I began getting regular BSODs, with the error message ‘Driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal’ (all in caps), saying that tcpip.sys was the system file affected. An analysis of the minidump file using Windmp revealed that the cause was netio.sys (add âNetio!StreamInjectRequestsToStack+239â if you want the full line).
There were few people with a similar issue, though I can always count on people in the industry who helpâusually itâs folks like Cyrus McEnnis, whom I have known since we were in the third form at Rongotai College, or Aaron Taylor, or, in this case, Hayden Kirk of Layer3, who pointed me in the right direction (that it was either hardware or drivers).
First up, Windows Update isnât any help, so letâs not waste any time there.
Secondly, Device Manager was no help, either. Getting Windows to find updated drivers doesnât necessarily result in the latest ones being downloaded. If the file that was crashing was tcpip.sys, then it does hint at something afoot with the TCP/IP, i.e. the networking.
I couldnât solve it through a virus scan, since a full one would never complete before I got another BSOD. (In fact, one BSOD knocked out Avira, and it had to be reinstalled.)
It wasnât Nvidia Control Panel, which was a regular culprit that people pointed to. I did remove and reinstall, just to be on the safe side, but that didnât fix the problems.
I had used the âUpdate driverâ option in the Device Manager for my network adapter, the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller #2, and while it did update, it wound up on version 1.
Without much to lose, I decided to feed in the full name of the adapter to look for drivers. Realtekâs website took me here, where I selected the Win10 Auto Installation Program.
This installed a driver that was version 10, and last updated on December 1, 2017, according to Realtekâs website (the driver is dated October 3, 2017).
So far Iâve been BSOD-free, and things appear to have settled down.
If youâre interested, I filed a bug report at Bleeping Computer, and my dump files are there.
Also remarkable is that my Lenovo laptop, which had attempted to install various Windows 10 updates for over a year, and failing each time (I estimate over 40 attempts, as usually I let it run most times I turn that laptop on; as of April 18 it was at 31 attempts). That laptop was on near-factory settings, so the fact no Windows update would work on it was ridiculous. (Iâve even seen this at shops, where display laptops have Windows update errors.)
Again, thereâs plenty of advice out there, including the removal of Avira as the antivirus program. I tried that a few times over the first 31 attempts. It made no difference.
I am happy to report that over the weekend, the spring Creators Update actually worked, using the Update tool, and the only alteration I made to Avira was the removal of its System Speedup program.
And as of this morning, the same computer wound up with the newer fall update.
There havenât been BSODs there but to me it confirms that Microsoftâs earlier updates were incredibly buggy, and after two years theyâve managed to see to them.
I can report that the advice on the Microsoft forums didnât work and I never needed to result to using the ISO update methods. The cure seemed to be patience and allowing multiple attempts. Since Windows 10 behaves differently each time you boot it up anyway, one of those times might have been compatible with the update patches.
Hopefully the above helps those who have been struggling with getting their Windows 10s to update. Iâd advise against attempting some of the more extreme solutions, especially if your gut or your logic tells you that you shouldnât need to go to those lengths just to update, when easier solutions worked perfectly fine when you were on Windows XP or Windows 7.
PS., December 12: After a day without crashes post-driver-update, they returned the following day. Investigations are ongoing ⊠I’ve updated the Bleeping Computer link page.
P.PS.: Updated a remote-access program as well as Java (which hadn’t updated despite it having been set to automatic updates). During the former, I had another BSOD as it tried to shut down various network services. Wish I wrote down what they were. However, it does point at a networking issue. Also I saw some hackers in Latvia and the Netherlands try to get in to the system and blocked their IPs. Coincidentally, they had not attempted anything yesterday, which was the day I didn’t have BSODs.
P.P.PS.: Event Viewer revealed those hackers were really going for it. Hayden says it was a ‘port exhaustion hack’, which does, logically, affect TCP/IP. I’ve replaced the remote desktop program, though Java 8 wound back on the desktop because of another program I run. The PC has stayed on since the afternoon, so hopefully that is that. It does mean a day wasted on ITâand it does seem worrying that Windows 10 Creators fall has potentially more holes by default, or somehow falls over more easily when attacked. Those attacks had always come, but they never resulted in BSODs. It was, overall, more robust in updating but it may have some other problems, if the last few days are any indication.
The external HD was also moved to another USB port. There could be a connection to USBs, as it crashed once after my partner unplugged her phone, and on another occasion I distinctly heard the external HD activate just before a BSOD.
P.P.P.PS.: The above never solved it, but one month on, this might have done the trick.
Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience.
Above: The lengths I went to, to make sure I didn’t wind up buying a car with an automatic transmission: source it from the UK and spend ten months on the process.
I advise strongly that you use a company specializing in the importation. Thatâs where Jake Williams and Dan Hepburn at Online Logistics of Auckland came in
Having identified the model I wanted, I had to trawl through the websites. The UK is well served, and some sites allow you to feed in a postcode and the distance youâre willing (or your friendâs willing) to travel.
However, if you rely on friends, youâll need to catch them at the right time, and both gentlemen had busy weekends that meant waiting.
VAT was the other issue thatâs unfamiliar to New Zealanders. GST is applied on all domestic transactions in New Zealand, but not on export ones. This isnât always the case in the UK, and some sellers wonât know how any of this works.
One of the first cars I spotted was from a seller who had VAT on the purchase price, which logically I should get refunded when the car left the country. I would have to pay the full amount but once I could prove that the car had left the UK, the transaction would be zero-rated and I would get the VAT back. I was told by the manager that in 11 years of business, he had never come across it, and over the weeks of chatting, the vehicle was sold.
Car Giant, in London, was one company that was very clued up and told me that it had sold to New Zealanders before. Theyâre willing to refund VAT on cars that were VAT-qualifying, but charged a small service fee to do so. The accountsâ department was particularly well set up, and its staff very easy to deal with long-distance.
Evans Halshaw, however, proved to be farcical. After having a vehicle moved to the Kettering branch close to Keithâs then-residence after paying the deposit, and having then paid for an AA inspection, the company then refused to sell it to me, and would only deal with Keith.
Although the company was happy to take my deposit, Keith was soon told, âwe will need payment to come from yourself either by debit card or bank transfer as the deal is with yourself not Mr Yan,â by one of its salesâ staff.
I wasnât about to ask Keith to part with any money, If I were to transfer funds to his account, but not have the car belong to me, and if Keith were to then transfer ownership to me without money changing hands, then the New Zealand Customs would smell a rat. It would look like money laundering: NZTA requires there to be a clear chain of ownership, and this wasnât clear. Evans Halshaw were unwilling to put the invoice in my name.
Iâm a British national with a UK addressâagain something a lot of buyers Down Under wonât haveâbut Evans Halshaw began claiming that it was âpolicyâ not to sell to me.
The company was never able to provide a copy of such a policy despite numerous phone calls and emails.
Essentially, for this to work and satisfy Customs on my end, Keith would have to fork out money, and I would have to pay him: a situation that didnât work for either of us.
Phil, a qualified lawyer, offered to head into another branch of Evans Halshaw and do the transaction exactly as they wanted: head there with âchip and PINâ, only for the company to change its tune again: it would not sell to me, or any representative of mine.
The refund from Evans Halshaw never materialized, and I found myself ÂŁ182 out of pocket
What an honour it was to appear as one of the first batch of people in the Human Rightsâ Commissionâs Give Nothing to Racism campaign. Taika Waititi, New Zealander of the Year (and a Lucire feature interviewee from way back) introduced the campaign with a hilarious video, and it was an honour to be considered alongside my old classmate Karl Urban, and other famous people such as Sonny Bill Williams, Sam Neill, Neil Finn, Lucy Lawless, and Hollie Smith. Somewhere along the line the Commission decided it would get some non-celebs like me.
The idea is that racism propagates through each of us. Laughing along with a joke. Letting casual racism in social media comments carry on. Excusing racist behaviour. Or simply accepting it as âthe way it isâ. Thereâs no place for it in 2017, certainly not in this country, and for those who seek to indulge in it (Iâm looking at certain people in politics and the media in particular), youâre simply covering up the fact youâve very little of substance to offer. I #givenothingtoracism.
My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others.
It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment.
I remember those days well, although my progress was probably the opposite of yours, and, in my circles, blogging began very selfishly. Lucire began as a publication, laid out the old-school way with HTML, and one of the first sites in the fashion sector to add a blog was a very crappy one where it was about an ill-informed and somewhat amoral editorâs point of view. For years I refused to blog, preferring to continue publishing an online magazine.
Come 2002, and we at the Medinge Group [as it then was; we’ve since dropped the definite article] were planning a book called Beyond Branding. One of the thoughts was that we needed one of these newfangled blogs to promote the book, and to add to it for our readers. I was one (the only?) dissenter at the June 2003 meeting, saying that, as far as my contacts were concerned, blogging was for tossers. (Obviously, I didnât know you back in those days, and didnât frequent ReadWriteWeb.) [Hugh MacLeod might agree with me though.] By August 2003 it had been set up, and I designed the template for it to match the rest of the bookâs artwork. How wrong I was in June. The blog began (and finished, in 2006) with posts in the altruistic, passionate spirit of RWW, and before long (I think it was September 2003), I joined my friends and colleagues.
An excerpt from the Beyond Branding Blog index page.
In 2006, I went off and did my own blog, and even though there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of blogs by now, decent bloggers were still few. I say this because within the first few weeks, a major German newspaper was already quoting my blog, and I got my first al-Jazeera English gig as a result of my blogging a few years later. It was the province of the passionate writer, and the good ones still got noticed.
I still have faith in the blogosphere simply because social media, as you say, have different motives and shared links are fleeting. Want to find a decent post you made on Facebook five years ago? Good luck. Social media might be good for instant gratificationâyour friends will like stuff you writeâbut so what? Where are the analysis and the passion? I agree with everything you say here, Richard: the current media arenât the same, and thereâs still a place for long-form blogging. The fact I am commenting (after two others) shows there is. Itâs a better place to exchange thoughts, and at least here weâre spared Facebook pushing malware on to people (no, not phishing: Facebook itself).
Eleven years on, and Iâm still blogging at my own space. I even manage a collective blogging site for a friend, called Blogcozy. My Tumblr began in 2007 and itâs still going. We should be going away from the big sites, because thereâs one more danger that I should point out.
Google, Facebook et al are the establishment now, and, as such, they prop up others in the establishment. Google News was once meritorious, now it favours big media names ahead of independents. This dangerously drowns out those independent voices, and credible writers and viewpoints can get lost. The only exception I can think of is The Intercept, which gets noticed on a wide scale.
Take this argument further and is there still the same encouragement for innovators to give it a go, as we did in the early 2000s, when we realize that our work might never be seen, or if it is to be seen, we need deep pockets to get it seen?
Maybe we need to encourage people to go away from these walled gardens, to find ways to promote the passionate voices again. Maybe a future search engineâor a current one that sees the lightâcould have a search specifically for these so weâre not reliant on the same old voices and the same old sites. And Iâm sure there are other ways besides. For I see little point in posting on places that lack âcharismaâ, as you put it. They just donât excite me as much as discovering a blog I really like, and sticking with it. With Facebookâs personal sharing down 25 and 29 per cent in 2015 and 2016 respectively, there is a shift away from uninspiring, privacy-destroying places. Hopefully we can catch them at more compelling and interesting blogs and make them feel at home.
If you’d like a closer inspection, here’s my photo cropped roughly where hers is.
The clouds are the giveaway, and trust me, no one was standing in exactly the same position I was when I took the original.
I have called Dr Weaver out on Twitter and in a message via her website, with a proposal: how about giving me a set of the notes from the seminar my photo helped her sell, and we’d call this a winâwin? Attendees paid NZ$40 to attend her do, and I reckon NZ$40 is a fair price for a photo licence. I hope she’ll biteâseems an amicable way to get round this.
Update: Dr Weaver’s team were really punctual at getting back to me. The following morning, I received a reply from Felicity on her staff, who added my credit on the photograph caption. There were no notes from her seminar, howeverânote-taking is the attendee’s choice. However, they were happy to send me a book, and I notice this morning (Wednesday, two days after) they have asked for my address. Well done to their team on a swift response, and look out for the book appearing on my Instagram when it arrives. If it’s the sort of thing our readers like, we might even put it on Lucire.
The lesson: both sides wanted to turn something negative into something positiveâwins all round.