July 30, 2010 New York Times
Turning Right
By DAMON LINKER
NORMAN PODHORETZ
A Biography
By Thomas L. Jeffers
Illustrated. 393 pp. Cambridge University Press. $35
RUNNING COMMENTARY
The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right
By Benjamin Balint
290 pp. PublicAffairs. $26.95
Over the past decade, “neocon” has become an all-purpose term of abuse among critics of the right. Yet few of these critics appear to realize that from the beginning there have been two very different branches of neoconservative thinking. The first aimed to bring sober, dispassionate analysis and a skeptical temper to questions of domestic policy; the second specialized in devising cogent, often highly polemical arguments in favor of a militarily aggressive foreign policy.
The first exercised its greatest political influence during the 1990s with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s crime-fighting policies and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The second peaked in the years immediately after 9/11, when the administration of George W. Bush pursued a doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive war and set out to transform Islamic civilization at gunpoint. When critics denounce neocons, they rarely mean the first branch, which today is largely extinct. Instead, they mean the ideas and outlook associated with the second branch. That ultimately means the ideas and outlook of Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine, which he edited from 1960 to 1995.
Thomas L. Jeffers’s exhaustive but frustratingly uncritical biography, “Norman Podhoretz,” is most engaging in its early chapters, telling the story of how this brilliant and ambitious child of Jewish immigrants from Galicia rose from poverty in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn to become first, the star student of the great literary critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia University and then, at the age of 30, the editor of Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee and one of the two leading journals (along with Partisan Review) of the legendary New York Intellectuals.
By the late 1960s, Podhoretz’s considerable talents as a writer, critic, editor and high-spirited raconteur had won him a place at the center of the cultural and political action. Commentary published leading lights of the New Left like Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Podhoretz jousted with Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg at parties and in print. He organized soirees for Jackie Kennedy.
Jeffers, a professor of literature at Marquette University, skillfully weaves together these and countless other stories of Podhoretz’s dramatic ascent to the peak of influence within the liberal intellectual world. But he runs into problems when he tries to explain Podhoretz’s march to the right, which began around 1970 and has never ceased. In 1972 Podhoretz broke from the Democratic Party to vote for Nixon. By the end of the decade, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Ronald Reagan. But it wasn’t long before he was taking to the pages of The New York Times Magazine to assail Reagan for insufficient toughness in confronting the Soviet Union and defending Israel.
By 2002, Podhoretz had moved so far right that he thought George W. Bush’s bellicose response to the 9/11 attacks was merely a good start; in addition to attacking all three members of Bush’s “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran and North Korea), Podhoretz insisted that the United States needed to prepare for military assaults on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Libya. Today he believes Sarah Palin would make a perfectly fine president.
How could a once thoughtful man spend the past 40 years transforming himself into a commissar? In his 1979 memoir, “Breaking Ranks,” Podhoretz himself described his initial lurch to the right as a perfectly sensible reaction to the excesses of the counterculture, the rise of a black power movement tainted by anti-Semitism, the descent of the antiwar movement into nihilistic violence and the Democratic Party’s embrace of left-wing isolationism in 1972. Jeffers accepts this account but adds a surprising theological twist, telling us that in February 1970, Podhoretz experienced a mystical vision in the woods of upstate New York that convinced him “Judaism was true.” Jeffers has difficulty explaining precisely what this revelation meant, and how it inspired Podhoretz to change his political views, no doubt in part because it had no discernible effect on his observance of Jewish law and rituals. As Podhoretz himself puts it, he felt it unnecessary, both before and after the vision, “to go to services, eat kosher, all that stuff.”
To grasp the true significance of the vision, the reader must skip ahead about 120 pages in Jeffers’s narrative to a 1985 speech in which Podhoretz spoke of his pride at using Commentary to defend “my own” — “my own country” and “my own people.” In light of these comments, Podhoretz’s revelation appears to mark the moment in his life when he began to “unlearn” what, he said, he had been educated to believe as a liberal — namely, “that it was more honorable and nobler to turn one’s back on one’s own and fight for others and for other things in which one had no personal stake or interest.” Beginning with his vision in the woods, Podhoretz would devote his life to standing up for himself as a Jew and as an American against an ever lengthening list of those he deemed to be mortal enemies.
The story of American Judaism’s growing self-confidence — its increasing willingness to defend itself as well as its move from the periphery to the center of cultural and political power in the United States — is the unifying thread of Benjamin Balint’s beautifully written and richly researched history of Commentary from its founding in 1945 (15 years before Podhoretz took over), to 2010 (15 years after his retirement). By placing the man and the magazine in this broader context, Balint, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former assistant editor at Commentary, manages to strike just the right balance between respectful admiration and critical distance. The result is the best book to date about neoconservatism — and one offering far greater insight into the mind and career of Norman Podhoretz than Jeffers’s obsequious biography.
“Running Commentary” describes how the vision of the magazine in its early years was shaped by Elliot Cohen, its gifted founding editor. Cohen believed that intellectuals — writers who were seriously interested in the arts, literature and ideas — were bound to feel alienated from American life with its middle-class mores and middlebrow taste. That Commentary was a Jewish periodical in a predominately Christian country only intensified the feeling of estrangement. And yet by the time Podhoretz took over in 1960, the alienation had begun to wane, with the magazine tentatively, though still critically, affirming aspects of American life. In his first decade as editor, Podhoretz sharpened its critical edge, increasing its distance from the political mainstream. But by 1970, he had concluded that the criticism had gone too far, and that Commentary should take the lead in defending the United States, Judaism and Israel.
Podhoretz wasn’t wrong to sense a certain nobility in standing up for “one’s own.” Yet his self-defense, to the exclusion of other human values, be they moral, literary or intellectual, has come at a cost. Today Commentary regularly publishes essays that sound, in Balint’s apt words, “like speeches intended to buck up the troops or self-congratulatory sermons to the faithful.” As for Podhoretz himself, he has grown so intolerant of criticism and dissent, so terrified of impending doom at the hands of militant Muslims, and so furious with his fellow Jews that his intemperate rantings are dismissed by all but his neoconservative progeny. The Brownsville wunderkind has ended up an embittered, paranoid crank, standing by and for himself alone.
Damon Linker teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His new book, “The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders,” will be published in the fall.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
FSO Karen Walker on the Smith-Mundt Act (Public Diplomacy)
Ms. Karen Walker on the Smith-Mundt Act; from a Facebook SC discussion group; posted here with Ms. Walker's kind permission:
M. Karen Walker • Because Smith-Mundt may be a relatively esoteric topic allow me to add some background context for the common good and to encourage others in our group to weigh in.
The Smith-Mundt Act is the informal title referring to the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, designed as "an act to promote the better understanding of the United States among the peoples of the world and to strengthen cooperative international relations." [Tuch, Hans N. Communicating with the World: U.S. Diplomacy Overseas. NY: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 17]
Smith-Mundt became the operating legislation for the USIA at its founding in 1953.
The Act made clear that the programs it authorized, including if not most especially the Voice of America (VOA), were to operate overseas. Subsequent legal interpretations of Smith-Mundt would lead to a ban on any materials created under its auspices (meaning, by USIA). Quoting Cull, "It was the information equivalent of posse comitatus, the law forbidding domestic deployment of the U.S. military." In the early 1960s the act was interpreted as meaning that films produced by USIA required an act of Congress before they could be shown within the U.S. And from 1972 onward, the act underwent a series of revisions to make this ban explicit. [Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propoganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 40]
The Zorinsky Amendment of 1985 reaffirmed that no appropr[ia]ted funds shall be used to influence domestic public opinion in the United States, and no program material prepared by the USIA shall be distributed in the United States. These provisions carried over to the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act that enfolded USIA into the Department of State. [Waller, J. Michael. The Public Diplomacy Reader. Washington, DC: The Institute of World Politics Press, 2007, pp.491-492.]
The Thornberry-Smith legislation is informed by a December 2009 Congressional Research Service report authored by Kennon Nakamura and Matthew Weed, titled "U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues." The report acknowledges that Smith-Mundt provisions are seen as anachronisms in the current global communications environment, and notes that use of new communications technologies and techniques may be curtailed to avoid the risk of inadvertently propagandizing the American public. The report adds the DoD has interpreted the provisions as applicable to its communications efforts as well, and that Congress has asked DoD to review this interpretation to determine whether it is justified.
The CRS report cautions that repealing the Smith-Mundt provisions could result in US public diplomacy efforts becoming preoccupied with "communicating to the American public for political effect, to the detriment of creating effecive, targeted communications to specific foreign populations" (p. 56).
With this background now in place, what do I think? If public diplomacy programs continue to be Embassy and Mission-directed, with overseas public diplomacy specialists setting priorities, feeding requests to Washington-based program managers, and taking point in managing the programs' implementation, then public diplomacy will continue to support country-level and regional strategies based on a deep cultural understanding and approaches effective in local contexts.
If the repeal makes clear that programs can be implemented even if the diffusion effects expose Americans to the programming, it would remove constraints on public diplomacy officers in employing web based tools and social media, and could lead to more effective engagement of U.S.-based Diaspora communities in American diplomacy.
M. Karen Walker • Because Smith-Mundt may be a relatively esoteric topic allow me to add some background context for the common good and to encourage others in our group to weigh in.
The Smith-Mundt Act is the informal title referring to the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, designed as "an act to promote the better understanding of the United States among the peoples of the world and to strengthen cooperative international relations." [Tuch, Hans N. Communicating with the World: U.S. Diplomacy Overseas. NY: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 17]
Smith-Mundt became the operating legislation for the USIA at its founding in 1953.
The Act made clear that the programs it authorized, including if not most especially the Voice of America (VOA), were to operate overseas. Subsequent legal interpretations of Smith-Mundt would lead to a ban on any materials created under its auspices (meaning, by USIA). Quoting Cull, "It was the information equivalent of posse comitatus, the law forbidding domestic deployment of the U.S. military." In the early 1960s the act was interpreted as meaning that films produced by USIA required an act of Congress before they could be shown within the U.S. And from 1972 onward, the act underwent a series of revisions to make this ban explicit. [Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propoganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 40]
The Zorinsky Amendment of 1985 reaffirmed that no appropr[ia]ted funds shall be used to influence domestic public opinion in the United States, and no program material prepared by the USIA shall be distributed in the United States. These provisions carried over to the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act that enfolded USIA into the Department of State. [Waller, J. Michael. The Public Diplomacy Reader. Washington, DC: The Institute of World Politics Press, 2007, pp.491-492.]
The Thornberry-Smith legislation is informed by a December 2009 Congressional Research Service report authored by Kennon Nakamura and Matthew Weed, titled "U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues." The report acknowledges that Smith-Mundt provisions are seen as anachronisms in the current global communications environment, and notes that use of new communications technologies and techniques may be curtailed to avoid the risk of inadvertently propagandizing the American public. The report adds the DoD has interpreted the provisions as applicable to its communications efforts as well, and that Congress has asked DoD to review this interpretation to determine whether it is justified.
The CRS report cautions that repealing the Smith-Mundt provisions could result in US public diplomacy efforts becoming preoccupied with "communicating to the American public for political effect, to the detriment of creating effecive, targeted communications to specific foreign populations" (p. 56).
With this background now in place, what do I think? If public diplomacy programs continue to be Embassy and Mission-directed, with overseas public diplomacy specialists setting priorities, feeding requests to Washington-based program managers, and taking point in managing the programs' implementation, then public diplomacy will continue to support country-level and regional strategies based on a deep cultural understanding and approaches effective in local contexts.
If the repeal makes clear that programs can be implemented even if the diffusion effects expose Americans to the programming, it would remove constraints on public diplomacy officers in employing web based tools and social media, and could lead to more effective engagement of U.S.-based Diaspora communities in American diplomacy.
Re-Inventing Oneself in America and the Digital Age
From Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times
... For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the significance of the frontier,” in which the possibility of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing themselves.
In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.
But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.
A personal note: Throughout the years I have been giving a lecture, "Reinventing Oneself in America," to participants in the "Open World" program. The talk starts with Ben Franklin as the epitome of American reinvention, then goes on to talk about the two types of reinvention in the U.S. today: in the workplace and in people's personal lives. An American can have many jobs/careers; and he/she can have many "selves" throughout his/her life. The talk provides examples of American reinvention: The Great Gatsby; Arnold, the California gubernator; and Las Vegas. The presentation ends with reasons why Americans keep reinventing themselves, and asks the following concluding questions: Has natural, historical evolution been replaced by technological, future-oriented reinvention? To what extent does humanity want to reinvent itself and still remain "human"?
... For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the significance of the frontier,” in which the possibility of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing themselves.
In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.
But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.
A personal note: Throughout the years I have been giving a lecture, "Reinventing Oneself in America," to participants in the "Open World" program. The talk starts with Ben Franklin as the epitome of American reinvention, then goes on to talk about the two types of reinvention in the U.S. today: in the workplace and in people's personal lives. An American can have many jobs/careers; and he/she can have many "selves" throughout his/her life. The talk provides examples of American reinvention: The Great Gatsby; Arnold, the California gubernator; and Las Vegas. The presentation ends with reasons why Americans keep reinventing themselves, and asks the following concluding questions: Has natural, historical evolution been replaced by technological, future-oriented reinvention? To what extent does humanity want to reinvent itself and still remain "human"?
The Heart of a Realist (on George Kennan)
July 15, 2010
The Heart of a Realist
By MARK ATWOOD LAWRENCE
THROUGH THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR
The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs, New York Times
Edited by John Lukacs
276 pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $39.95
When the former diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George F. Kennan died in 2005, obituary writers were quick to proclaim him one of the most influential Americans of his age. By conceiving the “containment” strategy that guided United States foreign policy throughout the cold war, Kennan not only stamped his ideas on an entire era of the nation’s history but also, eulogists suggested, pointed the way to the ultimate American victory over Soviet Communism.
The curious thing about such praise is that Kennan himself vigorously disagreed. During his lifetime, he complained bitterly that the nation’s leaders had misunderstood his ideas and initiated a far more militaristic and dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union than he ever intended. But Kennan’s unease with his place in American history ran deeper. Far from viewing himself as an epoch-defining figure, he spent much of his life feeling out of sync with both his country and his times.
This powerful sense of estrangement from mainstream America pervades “Through the History of the Cold War,” a gloomy but fascinating volume containing more than 200 letters exchanged by Kennan and John Lukacs over half a century. The correspondence began in 1952, when Lukacs, a Hungarian émigré who later became a prolific historian of modern Europe, wrote Kennan to commend his view that the United States needed to resist Soviet expansion through political and economic, rather than military, means. To Lukacs’s surprise, Kennan wrote back.
As their literary careers grew over the following decades, their letters ranged far beyond foreign affairs to history, philosophy and theology, giving their correspondence a weightier, more abstract tone as time passed. Lukacs’s admiration for Kennan led him to publish an elegiac biography of his friend in 2007 and then to set about editing their letters for a separate book. His goal with this collection, Lukacs explains in his introduction, was partly to pay tribute to Kennan and partly to lay out the idiosyncratic opinions that they shared.
The collection conveys their enormous erudition and (especially on Kennan’s side) stylistic brilliance. More than anything, though, the book poses anew, in an admirably lean and accessible way, a question that has long swirled around Kennan: What were the intellectual underpinnings of his insistence on a restrained, “realist” foreign policy that shunned bold efforts to remake the world in the American image?
One answer is surely Kennan’s inordinately pessimistic assessment of human capabilities to effect change on a grand scale. If the world managed to escape catastrophic war, he wrote in one characteristically dark letter in 1953, “it will not be because of ourselves but despite of ourselves: by virtue, that is, of the fact that we have so little, rather than so much, control over the course of events.” Mere randomness was, for Kennan, a better bet for a happy outcome than the conscious efforts of well-intentioned people. Even they, after all, were constrained by “man’s fallen state.”
But Kennan’s ideas about the United States’ role in the world also sprang from his particular disdain for American democracy. An unashamed elitist ill at ease with his own modest upbringing in Milwaukee, he viewed Americans as dangerously susceptible to the pedestrian tastes of the majority, unmoored as they were from the aristocratic sensibilities that Kennan considered the best hope for resisting mindless enthusiasms. If he doubted Americans’ abilities to act sensibly on the global stage during the early cold war, he grew even more skeptical in an era of mass communications and mounting immigration. The United States was, he wrote in 1984, “a politically unsuccessful and tragic country” that lay “always vulnerable to abuse and harassment at the hands of the dominant forces of the moment.”
Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is “The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.”
The Heart of a Realist
By MARK ATWOOD LAWRENCE
THROUGH THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR
The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs, New York Times
Edited by John Lukacs
276 pp. University of Pennsylvania Press. $39.95
When the former diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George F. Kennan died in 2005, obituary writers were quick to proclaim him one of the most influential Americans of his age. By conceiving the “containment” strategy that guided United States foreign policy throughout the cold war, Kennan not only stamped his ideas on an entire era of the nation’s history but also, eulogists suggested, pointed the way to the ultimate American victory over Soviet Communism.
The curious thing about such praise is that Kennan himself vigorously disagreed. During his lifetime, he complained bitterly that the nation’s leaders had misunderstood his ideas and initiated a far more militaristic and dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union than he ever intended. But Kennan’s unease with his place in American history ran deeper. Far from viewing himself as an epoch-defining figure, he spent much of his life feeling out of sync with both his country and his times.
This powerful sense of estrangement from mainstream America pervades “Through the History of the Cold War,” a gloomy but fascinating volume containing more than 200 letters exchanged by Kennan and John Lukacs over half a century. The correspondence began in 1952, when Lukacs, a Hungarian émigré who later became a prolific historian of modern Europe, wrote Kennan to commend his view that the United States needed to resist Soviet expansion through political and economic, rather than military, means. To Lukacs’s surprise, Kennan wrote back.
As their literary careers grew over the following decades, their letters ranged far beyond foreign affairs to history, philosophy and theology, giving their correspondence a weightier, more abstract tone as time passed. Lukacs’s admiration for Kennan led him to publish an elegiac biography of his friend in 2007 and then to set about editing their letters for a separate book. His goal with this collection, Lukacs explains in his introduction, was partly to pay tribute to Kennan and partly to lay out the idiosyncratic opinions that they shared.
The collection conveys their enormous erudition and (especially on Kennan’s side) stylistic brilliance. More than anything, though, the book poses anew, in an admirably lean and accessible way, a question that has long swirled around Kennan: What were the intellectual underpinnings of his insistence on a restrained, “realist” foreign policy that shunned bold efforts to remake the world in the American image?
One answer is surely Kennan’s inordinately pessimistic assessment of human capabilities to effect change on a grand scale. If the world managed to escape catastrophic war, he wrote in one characteristically dark letter in 1953, “it will not be because of ourselves but despite of ourselves: by virtue, that is, of the fact that we have so little, rather than so much, control over the course of events.” Mere randomness was, for Kennan, a better bet for a happy outcome than the conscious efforts of well-intentioned people. Even they, after all, were constrained by “man’s fallen state.”
But Kennan’s ideas about the United States’ role in the world also sprang from his particular disdain for American democracy. An unashamed elitist ill at ease with his own modest upbringing in Milwaukee, he viewed Americans as dangerously susceptible to the pedestrian tastes of the majority, unmoored as they were from the aristocratic sensibilities that Kennan considered the best hope for resisting mindless enthusiasms. If he doubted Americans’ abilities to act sensibly on the global stage during the early cold war, he grew even more skeptical in an era of mass communications and mounting immigration. The United States was, he wrote in 1984, “a politically unsuccessful and tragic country” that lay “always vulnerable to abuse and harassment at the hands of the dominant forces of the moment.”
Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is “The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.”
Fake Femme Fatale
Fake femme fatale shows social network risks: Researcher Thomas Ryan says fictitious Robin Sage character fooled many holding security, military and intelligence posts
Jaikumar Vijayan
July 22, 2010 (Computerworld) Via Joshua Fouts
Hundreds of people in the information security, military and intelligence fields recently found themselves with egg on their faces after sharing personal information with a fictitious Navy cyberthreat analyst named "Robin Sage," whose profile on prominent social networking sites was created by a security researcher to illustrate the risks of social networking.
In a conversation with Computerworld, Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security, said he used a few photos to portray the fictional Sage on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as an attractive, somewhat flirty cybergeek, with degrees from MIT and a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire. Then he established connections with some 300 men and women from the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, information security companies and government contractors.
The goal, said Ryan, was to determine how effective social networking sites can be in conducting covert intelligence-gathering activities.
Despite some patently obvious red flags -- such as noting that the 25-year-old Sage had worked professionally for 10 years -- the scheme worked. The connections to Sage, who was depicted as a real-life Abby Scuito, a fictional character in CBS's NCIS television series, were established in less than a month.
Many friends freely shared personal information and photos, invited the fictional threat analyst to conferences and asked her to review documents. Some "friends" at major companies, including Google and Lockheed Martin, even expressed interest in hiring her, he noted.
A security researcher created a fake online profile for a fictional cyberthreat analyst named "Robin Sage." Had Sage really been a foreign agent, she would have had access to a lot of very useful information, said Ryan, who is scheduled to present his findings next week at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas. Excerpts from his interview with Computerworld follow:
What prompted you to conduct the experiment? One of the biggest drivers was all the talk about cyberwarfare and cyberespionage -- and what's real and what's not real. I wanted to see how much intel you could gather from a person just by lurking on a social networking site. I [also] wanted to see who was most susceptible to clicking. I wanted to see how fast this thing would propagate. One of the things I found was that MIT and St. Paul's [prep school] were very cliquey [note from the author of "Notes and Essays": As a graduate of SPS '66, I never saw Ms. Sage at class reunions]. If they don't remember seeing you, they are not going to click. You had less of a chance of penetrating those groups than the actual intel and security communities.
How many connections and friends did Robin Sage make? On Facebook, 226; on LinkedIn, 206; and on Twitter, 204. The connections on Facebook were security and military, LinkedIn was mainly security and intel, and Twitter was mostly hackers.
Did Sage mostly seek out these friends, or were they more likely to make the first move? It was a combination of both. I did approach a few people, [mostly] from the security industry. They had the most connections. They are the speakers, the ones that are always sociable.
What type of information can one get through such connections? Pretty much everything. I had access to e-mail and bank accounts. I saw patterns in the kind of friends they had. The LinkedIn profiles would show patterns of new business relationships.
Why do you think Sage was so successful at making new connections? Because she was an attractive girl. It definitely had to do with looks.
Were most of the connections male? It wasn't all men. The male versus female split was 82% to 18%. The highest number of women were from the intelligence community. The only women who were there from the security community were people promoting conferences and stuff like that.
Do you think a fictional male character would have been as successful in attracting "friends"? It depends on who the male was and how he was portrayed.
What did Facebook do when they discovered what was going on? Facebook shut down the Robin page and my personal page. They said, due to security reasons, I am not allowed to use Facebook again. LinkedIn just deleted the Robin account but [a cached version] is still there on Google.
What's the takeaway from the experiment? The big takeaway is not to friend anybody unless you really know who they are. The same tactic was used to infiltrate a secret Israeli base. The people on the base were the only ones on a private Facebook page. Somebody was able to gain access to it and gather intel on the base.
Anything else? I was never able to friend anyone from the CIA or the FBI. I tried. It just didn't work. Toward the end of the experiment, there was this massive influx of Arabs from overseas that were trying to get on the Robin page where all the military stuff was. I didn't really care for it. That was a bit scary.
Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan, or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.
P.J. O'Rourke: 'Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'
July 23, 2010
P.J. O'Rourke: 'Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'
This week, Facebook announced that its number of user profiles had reached 500 million. But American satirist and journalist P. J. O'Rourke is not impressed. In an interview with RFE/RL's Luke Allnutt, he explains why he isn't very hopeful about the future of journalism and what he thinks of when he thinks about Twitter.
RFE/RL: This week Facebook achieved 500 million users. Are you one of them?
P.J. O'Rourke: No, I most certainly am not. Are there 500 million people with computers? I guess there must be.
RFE/RL: But it's a remarkable achievement, right?
O'Rourke: I guess so. You know, had you told me that 500 million people last week wrote their name on the bathroom wall with a magic marker I would be equally impressed by the number, but I don't think that I would be favorably impressed.
RFE/RL: You've been notoriously characterized as a technophobe. Is that unfair? Do you own a computer or do you use the Internet?
O'Rourke: I own a computer. I don't use the Internet very much. I'm not a technophobe. It just doesn't help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn't help you. I'll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
RFE/RL: Well that's not a very rosy outlook for the future then. Anyone who's a writer or novelist might as well just hang up their hat now because it's going down the pan.
O'Rourke: I don't mean it that way, but I do mean that the ease and speed that one can put words into some sort of permanent state -- screen, paper, whatever -- does not improve the words that are put there. The real work goes on behind the eyes. And I find, I've used a typewriter for 40 years and so using a typewriter, [it's] simply automatic, it doesn't get in the way. I think [and] it goes straight to the page. I don't have to think about what I'm doing. When I try and use the computer I have to think about what I'm doing because I keep hitting the control key instead of the shift [key] and so on and so forth. When I'm really having a problem with what I'm writing, when it's really difficult for me, I will revert to longhand because that's how I learned to write in the first place. And I don't know, maybe if it got really really difficult I might revert to block printing like I did in first grade. I just find that -- everybody says the medium is the message, and there may be some truth in that. But when it comes to creating something, even something so modest a creation as journalism, it is the thinking that is the important part and the technology comes last and is least important.
RFE/RL: With that in mind, what do you think about the future of long-form journalism? And here I'm talking about 10 or 15,000 word magazine pieces. Do you think the Internet is threatening those?
O'Rourke: I do think the Internet is threatening long magazine pieces. Now some of them needed to be threatened. There was a time in recent memory, say 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when William Shawn edited "The New Yorker." And "The New Yorker was famous for 10,000 word pieces about wheat. There would be immense long pieces. "Granta" is an admirable magazine but I have known "Granta" to print immensely long pieces about [topics that] didn't need to be that long. Brevity is the sole of wit perhaps, but by wit, whoever said that meant intelligence, they didn't mean just being funny.
So brevity is a good thing and the Internet pushes us towards brevity. But is brevity always the way to go? Well, I think you could cut the last 100 pages out of "War and Peace" and not miss much. But you don't want to cut the other 900 pages out of "War and Peace." "War and Peace" is not a short form. "War and Peace" shouldn't have been tweeted. I think that kind of long-form writing -- well "War and Peace" isn't journalism, although it certainly has some of the best war reporting I've ever read in my life -- but I think long-form journalism will survive when it's needed. But frankly, it isn't always needed. So we'll see fewer long-form journalist pieces, but I think that they will be better justified in their length.
RFE/RL: When you hear the word "Twitter" what do you think?
WATCH: O'Rourke on Twitter
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O'Rourke: Little bird noises. I hunt birds. In fact I'm an avid bird hunter. And believe me if one of those little Blackberries flew up in front of my dog it would get the full force of my shotgun. There's small talk, and then there's very very small talk, and then there's Twitter. I don't see the need or the benefit.
RFE/RL: Have you ever tried Twitter or read a tweet?
O'Rourke: I've read some "tweets," but no I've never tried Twitter, my thumbs are too clumsy to work the tiny buttons on whatever these personal communication devices are called. Random sharing of my thoughts is something that I do sometimes late at night in a bar with other people who are in the bar late at night, who don't remember much about it in the morning. I think that's the place for random sharing of thoughts, you know, and it will all be forgotten in the morning.
RFE/RL: Can we just go back to one thing on long-form journalism. One of the arguments that's made, in particular by Nicholas Carr with his article about whether Google is making us stupid, is that somehow with today's climate of social media, it's basically reducing our attention spans. And this is somehow because of the onslaught of tweets and Facebook status updates and mobile phones going off and Blackberries, and this is somehow impairing our cognitive function. And it's actually affecting the ability that we have to read, in terms of deep reading where you're sitting alone with a novel for 10 minutes. I know you said you don't use the Internet much, but have you noticed in your own personal consumption that you've found it harder to read or concentrate since the Internet has been around? Or do you think you've somehow managed to enclose yourself?
O'Rourke: No, I'm too old to have been affected by this. But I take his point about the shortening of attention span and I think he's right. But I think he's coming late to the argument. It's not the fault of computers or Blackberries or Twitter. This has been going on arguably since the beginning of mass communication with the radio. People have been less able to read long, difficult books since the end of the 19th century. All you have to do is go back to "Middlemarch" or the afore-mentioned Henry James. What kind of book like that has been published since? Well, there have been some books of that difficulty, but they weren't worth the effort. I mean what kind of book with the difficulty and the length of "War and Peace" or "Middlemarch" that was truly worth the effort of the concentrated reading required has been published since? The diminishing of the public attention span has been going on for a long time.
That said, there've always only been a relatively few people who were able to sit still and concentrate long enough to become experts in their field. I mean, if you go around and talk to people who are truly experts in their field, you will find that the one thing that they share is an ability to sit still and concentrate. I don't have it, that's why I'm a journalist. But if I did have it I'd be a scholar or something nobler than a journalist. But I think it's wrong to blame the computer on that.
That said, I do see one pernicious trend, which is blogging. I don't care much for blogging because it is undigested thinking, because it comes straight from the heart, or the lizard brain, or the mouth without due consideration. Very little that gets blogged is of very much worth. Almost everything should be thought over. Don't we all know it from things that we've said to our spouses? That you should think twice before you say anything.
WATCH: O'Rourke on blogging
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RFE/RL: But would you actually think that blogging is a dangerous and damaging trend in journalism?
O'Rourke: I don't know if it's a dangerous and damaging trend. I think it's kind of a worthless trend. And I go into [what] my Irish great aunt would often say, too often because she drank a bit, "Come back my words." Think how many times you've said things you wish you could unsay. "Come back my words." And I wonder how many people wish they could un-blog.
RFE/RL: The argument in favor of blogging goes that it's actually a much more transparent and objective demonstration of the thought process, in the sense that we have thoughts and then we clarify them later. And that's something that we air in public.
O'Rourke: That's sort of like saying disemboweling somebody is a much more transparent look at the digestive system. I don't really buy the argument. Thought is difficult. Rational and reasonable thought is difficult, and it takes time, and it takes concentration. And the first thing that we blurt out, while it may be a true reflection of our particular feelings at that particular moment, is unlikely to be very illuminating for others. Blogging is very selfish. I mean, if you want a true picture of what somebody's thinking at a moment, kick them and see what they say. You'll get a blog. You'll get a tweet. You'll get a brief expression of how somebody feels at a given moment. But communication is all about the other person. It's not about the person who is communicating. It's about the person who is listening, or receiving, or viewing. And blogging is very self-indulgent. It's all about me. It isn't about the person who is reading the blog.
RFE/RL: I would probably take issue with that a little bit. I don't always think that blogging is self-indulgent. I think that tends to be a common perception, like the example people always use with Twitter, that's it's just people telling each other what they had for breakfast. And I think there are blogs that actually are fulfilling the function journalism used to of being the Fourth Estate. And they're run by civic-engaged people who are taking on the powers that be and they are also including their audience. I don't think it's always black or white.
O'Rourke: Of course you're right. The test is always in the content. And blogging is a very quick, easy, and inexpensive way to reach out to a large audience. If you have information to share that's worth sharing, information to give that's worth giving, great. The more communication between people and the easier that communication is, the better. Is this the majority of the stuff that fills the blogosphere? I'm no expert, but not so far as I can tell. There's a great deal of people sitting around in pajamas giving each other their opinions. I think that's undeniable. Again, the tweet, it's just like the cell phone. There are times in modern life when it's unbelievably handy to have the cell phone. You wonder how the heck did we get along without this. If you need to get me at 12:45 I'll be passing the phone booth at the corner of 48th Street and Third Avenue. I mean, how do we do it?
And yet on the other hand that's one out of the 100 phone calls that you get. The other 99 are "Will you pick up a loaf of rye bread on the way home?" "Honey, where are you?" "I just landed in the plane." I travel a lot, so I end up listening to, one half at any rate, of people's cell phone conversations. In the years of people commonly using cell phones, I have yet to hear anyone say: "You mean, it's a boy!" or "Gosh, I'd better sell that stock!" or "Oh my god call 911!" I keep waiting to hear the half of a really important cell phone call. But it's always "O.K. honey, I landed, I'll be home in about half an hour, plane was a little late." Or more often: "Huh? What? Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah that's what I meant. Huh?" You could do this without the cell phone and be communicating just as much to that other person.
RFE/RL: Just back to blogging and journalism, the big new thing over the last few years has been citizen journalism. Do you think the idea that news organizations potentially have millions of correspondents, armed with cell phones with the ability to take photos and videos, is a good thing?
O'Rourke: It is a good thing. It's particularly a good thing when something awful happens. We can imagine the value of this kind of citizen journalism when some terrible event happened that the powers that be attempted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cover up. We can imagine the power that this kind of citizen journalism could have had to mitigate the Holocaust, if this [was] being recorded. Some things, [such as] the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, may have happened too fast. But it would've been known much sooner with repercussions. The question of the Armenian genocide and the Turkish role in it would be settled if we had all sorts of citizen video of this.
On the other hand there is the Rashomon effect. One thing a professional reporter knows that I'm not always sure that a person who isn't a reporter knows is that it is very easy to see part of an event and miss the more important part of an event, to see one thing when something else has happened. You have to be very aware of how complex most events are, and how narrow one's vision of most events are. And the police will tell you -- my father-in-law is a retired FBI agent -- and he will certainly tell you that there's nothing as unreliable as an eyewitness. You don't even have to go to the movies to see Rashomon. Just take any couple that you know that's been divorced and ask for his story of what happened, and then ask for her story of what happened.
(WATCH: O'Rourke on cell phones)
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RFE/RL: And is that where you see the role of journalists coming in? We're faced with this infusion of content, this explosion of content, and do you see the journalist's role now more as someone who has to curate and filter that content and still do the very important job of making sure that content comes packaged to the audience in an objective way?
O'Rourke: We always had to do that. Maybe we have to do a little bit more of it quantitatively than we did before. But that was always the job of the experienced reporter. It really isn't any one person. It's the experienced news organization that filters this out. There's a reason those old movies about newspaper work [show] the reporter getting on the phone and saying "Give me rewrite!" Well, it's the rewrite man's job to take in the reports from anywhere from one to a dozen reporters and put this together in a story. Does this in any way make us some sort of Supreme Court judge of information and insure the accuracy of that information or the validity of that information? Alas, no. Mistakes can be made not only at a micro level but even worse mistakes can be made at a macro level.
The test of any news organization to me is not one given story but the way they deal with a variety of different stories over a long period of time, so then you establish a certain trust. I don't always agree with "The Economist," but I have a certain feeling of trust in "The Economist" because they feel that their mission is to deliver accurate information to businesspeople who are going to use this information. If the businesspeople find out the information is inaccurate they're going to quit taking "The Economist." So there is a positive value. A tabloid newspaper on the other hand, they want simply to attract readers. So accuracy of information does not have [a positive value]. Prince Charles, as it turns out, is not a space alien no matter what the girl on page three said. So it is our job to filter, organize, make sense of, edit all this information and now there is more information coming in. I think that the general fact of more information coming in is not a bad thing by any means. It's a positive good. But does it guarantee that the information coming in will necessarily be more accurate? Not perfectly sure on that.
RFE/RL: The big question now in journalism since everything's moved online concerns the future of newspapers, and in particular how to monetize online content. And we've seen Rupert Murdoch experimenting at the moment with putting up pay-walls, in particular with "The Times" in London. Do you think that's the way forward?
O'Rourke: I do think it's the way forward. Something that you get for free is usually worth exactly that. There is no way we can get decent journalism without somebody paying for it somewhere. If I have a gripe with the Internet, it isn't short attention spans, it isn't blogging, or it isn't ease of idiot communication. It would be that the initial effect of the Internet, probably because it has academic origins rather than economic origins, was to devalue content. And I mean that in a gross monetary sense. The idea was that information was suddenly free. Information is not free. You [always] pay a price for information. Sometimes the price is just paying attention or being careful. But usually there's a monetary price involved because it costs money to get people out there who know what they're doing and have reasonable judgment and knowledge and perspective and background, and you don't want it to be free. It's not going to be terribly expensive, it's probably going to be cheaper than what newspapers have come to cost. Of course advertising can pay for some of the content. I've got to say that advertising on the Internet is a whole lot more annoying than advertising in newspapers is. Or even in magazines with the exception of those ads that smell. I can't stand them.
RFE/RL: You said that information shouldn't be free. The problem is that now a lot of information is free. But also the people who are producing it are quite happy with it being free. And I'll just give you a real-world example. In this town I used to read the local restaurant reviews in the newspaper. Now there's a couple of food bloggers who blog for free and have great restaurant reviews. They don't want money for what they're doing. They're happy. It's what Clay Shirky described as the cognitive surplus, the idea that people are happy to spend their free time doing these things. So that makes it quite difficult to say that the information shouldn't be free, right?
O'Rourke: I take your point, and the fact that the Internet has made information less expensive is probably a good thing. And it probably doesn't matter whether something like restaurant blogs are free. But when it comes to the more important analytical side of news, where it is important say for instance for a news organization to have a team of experienced reporters in place with the background knowledge of the place they're in and contacts they've developed over time, you can't replace that with a random backpacker tweeting from Tajikistan.
RFE/RL: If you were teaching today at a journalism school in America, or anywhere around the world, what would your advice be to young journalists at the beginning of their career?
O'Rourke: Well I haven't taught at a school but I have taught classes, and actually I'm going to teach a couple of classes this fall. I'm going to two different schools in the United States to [hold] a kind of guest artist [position], an artist is overdoing it, but that's what they called me. I have pretty much the same advice to would-be journalists, which is: Please don't approach this as a calling, or even a profession. It's mainly a craft. The world of journalism came from lower-middle-class origins, educated lower-middle-class origins. If you were a working class or lower-middle-class kid -- even as late as [in] my era growing up in the 1950s -- and you liked to read and you didn't like to get up real early in the morning and lift heavy things, you basically had two choices. You could become a newspaper reporter or you could become a priest. You didn't go to "J School" to do this. H.L. Mencken, one of the greatest newspaper reporters who ever lived went straight from high school to become a reporter. You went and served an apprenticeship, starting maybe [as] a copy boy, or writing "deaths elsewhere," or covering the sewer commission. And you worked your way up to journeyman and eventually to some sort of master of the craft.
But you always knew that what you were doing was a trade, like brick-laying. And like brick-laying it's a very difficult trade at times. It takes skill. It takes experience. But your job was simply to be the public rubberneck. You were the person who was allowed inside the yellow police lines to look at the car wreck. Everybody wanted to know what happened in that car wreck and you were the person who was allowed inside the police lines and could come back out and say to the public: "That was a bad car wreck. Guy's head went right to the windshield. Always wear your seatbelts." The job wasn't to speak truth to power. Anybody can speak truth to power if they're far enough away from the power. I can sit right here and say anything I want about Robert Mugabe. Maybe [that wouldn't be] so easy if I were in Zimbabwe.
Too many people in journalism today are there on a world-saving mission. They should've joined the Peace Corps. At a formative age they saw "All the President's Men," and they saw Woodward and Bernstein bring down a wicked president of the United States and make democracy safe again in America. And they thought, "Boy, that's me! I'm going to do that and be played by Robert Redford." Somehow nobody ever saw themselves as being played by Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman looks much more like an actual newspaper reporter than Robert Redford does. But they're all going to be played by Robert Redford in the movie of how they saved democracy, and that's baloney. You're a paid rubbernecker. You are there as a surrogate for the public to see what's going on and if you're an honorable person you'll report this as accurately as you're able to. If you're a dishonorable person you can go to work for one of the tabloids or a cable TV station or something.
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P.J. O'Rourke: 'Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'
This week, Facebook announced that its number of user profiles had reached 500 million. But American satirist and journalist P. J. O'Rourke is not impressed. In an interview with RFE/RL's Luke Allnutt, he explains why he isn't very hopeful about the future of journalism and what he thinks of when he thinks about Twitter.
RFE/RL: This week Facebook achieved 500 million users. Are you one of them?
P.J. O'Rourke: No, I most certainly am not. Are there 500 million people with computers? I guess there must be.
RFE/RL: But it's a remarkable achievement, right?
O'Rourke: I guess so. You know, had you told me that 500 million people last week wrote their name on the bathroom wall with a magic marker I would be equally impressed by the number, but I don't think that I would be favorably impressed.
RFE/RL: You've been notoriously characterized as a technophobe. Is that unfair? Do you own a computer or do you use the Internet?
O'Rourke: I own a computer. I don't use the Internet very much. I'm not a technophobe. It just doesn't help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn't help you. I'll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
RFE/RL: Well that's not a very rosy outlook for the future then. Anyone who's a writer or novelist might as well just hang up their hat now because it's going down the pan.
O'Rourke: I don't mean it that way, but I do mean that the ease and speed that one can put words into some sort of permanent state -- screen, paper, whatever -- does not improve the words that are put there. The real work goes on behind the eyes. And I find, I've used a typewriter for 40 years and so using a typewriter, [it's] simply automatic, it doesn't get in the way. I think [and] it goes straight to the page. I don't have to think about what I'm doing. When I try and use the computer I have to think about what I'm doing because I keep hitting the control key instead of the shift [key] and so on and so forth. When I'm really having a problem with what I'm writing, when it's really difficult for me, I will revert to longhand because that's how I learned to write in the first place. And I don't know, maybe if it got really really difficult I might revert to block printing like I did in first grade. I just find that -- everybody says the medium is the message, and there may be some truth in that. But when it comes to creating something, even something so modest a creation as journalism, it is the thinking that is the important part and the technology comes last and is least important.
RFE/RL: With that in mind, what do you think about the future of long-form journalism? And here I'm talking about 10 or 15,000 word magazine pieces. Do you think the Internet is threatening those?
O'Rourke: I do think the Internet is threatening long magazine pieces. Now some of them needed to be threatened. There was a time in recent memory, say 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when William Shawn edited "The New Yorker." And "The New Yorker was famous for 10,000 word pieces about wheat. There would be immense long pieces. "Granta" is an admirable magazine but I have known "Granta" to print immensely long pieces about [topics that] didn't need to be that long. Brevity is the sole of wit perhaps, but by wit, whoever said that meant intelligence, they didn't mean just being funny.
So brevity is a good thing and the Internet pushes us towards brevity. But is brevity always the way to go? Well, I think you could cut the last 100 pages out of "War and Peace" and not miss much. But you don't want to cut the other 900 pages out of "War and Peace." "War and Peace" is not a short form. "War and Peace" shouldn't have been tweeted. I think that kind of long-form writing -- well "War and Peace" isn't journalism, although it certainly has some of the best war reporting I've ever read in my life -- but I think long-form journalism will survive when it's needed. But frankly, it isn't always needed. So we'll see fewer long-form journalist pieces, but I think that they will be better justified in their length.
RFE/RL: When you hear the word "Twitter" what do you think?
WATCH: O'Rourke on Twitter
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O'Rourke: Little bird noises. I hunt birds. In fact I'm an avid bird hunter. And believe me if one of those little Blackberries flew up in front of my dog it would get the full force of my shotgun. There's small talk, and then there's very very small talk, and then there's Twitter. I don't see the need or the benefit.
RFE/RL: Have you ever tried Twitter or read a tweet?
O'Rourke: I've read some "tweets," but no I've never tried Twitter, my thumbs are too clumsy to work the tiny buttons on whatever these personal communication devices are called. Random sharing of my thoughts is something that I do sometimes late at night in a bar with other people who are in the bar late at night, who don't remember much about it in the morning. I think that's the place for random sharing of thoughts, you know, and it will all be forgotten in the morning.
RFE/RL: Can we just go back to one thing on long-form journalism. One of the arguments that's made, in particular by Nicholas Carr with his article about whether Google is making us stupid, is that somehow with today's climate of social media, it's basically reducing our attention spans. And this is somehow because of the onslaught of tweets and Facebook status updates and mobile phones going off and Blackberries, and this is somehow impairing our cognitive function. And it's actually affecting the ability that we have to read, in terms of deep reading where you're sitting alone with a novel for 10 minutes. I know you said you don't use the Internet much, but have you noticed in your own personal consumption that you've found it harder to read or concentrate since the Internet has been around? Or do you think you've somehow managed to enclose yourself?
O'Rourke: No, I'm too old to have been affected by this. But I take his point about the shortening of attention span and I think he's right. But I think he's coming late to the argument. It's not the fault of computers or Blackberries or Twitter. This has been going on arguably since the beginning of mass communication with the radio. People have been less able to read long, difficult books since the end of the 19th century. All you have to do is go back to "Middlemarch" or the afore-mentioned Henry James. What kind of book like that has been published since? Well, there have been some books of that difficulty, but they weren't worth the effort. I mean what kind of book with the difficulty and the length of "War and Peace" or "Middlemarch" that was truly worth the effort of the concentrated reading required has been published since? The diminishing of the public attention span has been going on for a long time.
That said, there've always only been a relatively few people who were able to sit still and concentrate long enough to become experts in their field. I mean, if you go around and talk to people who are truly experts in their field, you will find that the one thing that they share is an ability to sit still and concentrate. I don't have it, that's why I'm a journalist. But if I did have it I'd be a scholar or something nobler than a journalist. But I think it's wrong to blame the computer on that.
That said, I do see one pernicious trend, which is blogging. I don't care much for blogging because it is undigested thinking, because it comes straight from the heart, or the lizard brain, or the mouth without due consideration. Very little that gets blogged is of very much worth. Almost everything should be thought over. Don't we all know it from things that we've said to our spouses? That you should think twice before you say anything.
WATCH: O'Rourke on blogging
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RFE/RL: But would you actually think that blogging is a dangerous and damaging trend in journalism?
O'Rourke: I don't know if it's a dangerous and damaging trend. I think it's kind of a worthless trend. And I go into [what] my Irish great aunt would often say, too often because she drank a bit, "Come back my words." Think how many times you've said things you wish you could unsay. "Come back my words." And I wonder how many people wish they could un-blog.
RFE/RL: The argument in favor of blogging goes that it's actually a much more transparent and objective demonstration of the thought process, in the sense that we have thoughts and then we clarify them later. And that's something that we air in public.
O'Rourke: That's sort of like saying disemboweling somebody is a much more transparent look at the digestive system. I don't really buy the argument. Thought is difficult. Rational and reasonable thought is difficult, and it takes time, and it takes concentration. And the first thing that we blurt out, while it may be a true reflection of our particular feelings at that particular moment, is unlikely to be very illuminating for others. Blogging is very selfish. I mean, if you want a true picture of what somebody's thinking at a moment, kick them and see what they say. You'll get a blog. You'll get a tweet. You'll get a brief expression of how somebody feels at a given moment. But communication is all about the other person. It's not about the person who is communicating. It's about the person who is listening, or receiving, or viewing. And blogging is very self-indulgent. It's all about me. It isn't about the person who is reading the blog.
RFE/RL: I would probably take issue with that a little bit. I don't always think that blogging is self-indulgent. I think that tends to be a common perception, like the example people always use with Twitter, that's it's just people telling each other what they had for breakfast. And I think there are blogs that actually are fulfilling the function journalism used to of being the Fourth Estate. And they're run by civic-engaged people who are taking on the powers that be and they are also including their audience. I don't think it's always black or white.
O'Rourke: Of course you're right. The test is always in the content. And blogging is a very quick, easy, and inexpensive way to reach out to a large audience. If you have information to share that's worth sharing, information to give that's worth giving, great. The more communication between people and the easier that communication is, the better. Is this the majority of the stuff that fills the blogosphere? I'm no expert, but not so far as I can tell. There's a great deal of people sitting around in pajamas giving each other their opinions. I think that's undeniable. Again, the tweet, it's just like the cell phone. There are times in modern life when it's unbelievably handy to have the cell phone. You wonder how the heck did we get along without this. If you need to get me at 12:45 I'll be passing the phone booth at the corner of 48th Street and Third Avenue. I mean, how do we do it?
And yet on the other hand that's one out of the 100 phone calls that you get. The other 99 are "Will you pick up a loaf of rye bread on the way home?" "Honey, where are you?" "I just landed in the plane." I travel a lot, so I end up listening to, one half at any rate, of people's cell phone conversations. In the years of people commonly using cell phones, I have yet to hear anyone say: "You mean, it's a boy!" or "Gosh, I'd better sell that stock!" or "Oh my god call 911!" I keep waiting to hear the half of a really important cell phone call. But it's always "O.K. honey, I landed, I'll be home in about half an hour, plane was a little late." Or more often: "Huh? What? Oh yeah? Yeah, yeah that's what I meant. Huh?" You could do this without the cell phone and be communicating just as much to that other person.
RFE/RL: Just back to blogging and journalism, the big new thing over the last few years has been citizen journalism. Do you think the idea that news organizations potentially have millions of correspondents, armed with cell phones with the ability to take photos and videos, is a good thing?
O'Rourke: It is a good thing. It's particularly a good thing when something awful happens. We can imagine the value of this kind of citizen journalism when some terrible event happened that the powers that be attempted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to cover up. We can imagine the power that this kind of citizen journalism could have had to mitigate the Holocaust, if this [was] being recorded. Some things, [such as] the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, may have happened too fast. But it would've been known much sooner with repercussions. The question of the Armenian genocide and the Turkish role in it would be settled if we had all sorts of citizen video of this.
On the other hand there is the Rashomon effect. One thing a professional reporter knows that I'm not always sure that a person who isn't a reporter knows is that it is very easy to see part of an event and miss the more important part of an event, to see one thing when something else has happened. You have to be very aware of how complex most events are, and how narrow one's vision of most events are. And the police will tell you -- my father-in-law is a retired FBI agent -- and he will certainly tell you that there's nothing as unreliable as an eyewitness. You don't even have to go to the movies to see Rashomon. Just take any couple that you know that's been divorced and ask for his story of what happened, and then ask for her story of what happened.
(WATCH: O'Rourke on cell phones)
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RFE/RL: And is that where you see the role of journalists coming in? We're faced with this infusion of content, this explosion of content, and do you see the journalist's role now more as someone who has to curate and filter that content and still do the very important job of making sure that content comes packaged to the audience in an objective way?
O'Rourke: We always had to do that. Maybe we have to do a little bit more of it quantitatively than we did before. But that was always the job of the experienced reporter. It really isn't any one person. It's the experienced news organization that filters this out. There's a reason those old movies about newspaper work [show] the reporter getting on the phone and saying "Give me rewrite!" Well, it's the rewrite man's job to take in the reports from anywhere from one to a dozen reporters and put this together in a story. Does this in any way make us some sort of Supreme Court judge of information and insure the accuracy of that information or the validity of that information? Alas, no. Mistakes can be made not only at a micro level but even worse mistakes can be made at a macro level.
The test of any news organization to me is not one given story but the way they deal with a variety of different stories over a long period of time, so then you establish a certain trust. I don't always agree with "The Economist," but I have a certain feeling of trust in "The Economist" because they feel that their mission is to deliver accurate information to businesspeople who are going to use this information. If the businesspeople find out the information is inaccurate they're going to quit taking "The Economist." So there is a positive value. A tabloid newspaper on the other hand, they want simply to attract readers. So accuracy of information does not have [a positive value]. Prince Charles, as it turns out, is not a space alien no matter what the girl on page three said. So it is our job to filter, organize, make sense of, edit all this information and now there is more information coming in. I think that the general fact of more information coming in is not a bad thing by any means. It's a positive good. But does it guarantee that the information coming in will necessarily be more accurate? Not perfectly sure on that.
RFE/RL: The big question now in journalism since everything's moved online concerns the future of newspapers, and in particular how to monetize online content. And we've seen Rupert Murdoch experimenting at the moment with putting up pay-walls, in particular with "The Times" in London. Do you think that's the way forward?
O'Rourke: I do think it's the way forward. Something that you get for free is usually worth exactly that. There is no way we can get decent journalism without somebody paying for it somewhere. If I have a gripe with the Internet, it isn't short attention spans, it isn't blogging, or it isn't ease of idiot communication. It would be that the initial effect of the Internet, probably because it has academic origins rather than economic origins, was to devalue content. And I mean that in a gross monetary sense. The idea was that information was suddenly free. Information is not free. You [always] pay a price for information. Sometimes the price is just paying attention or being careful. But usually there's a monetary price involved because it costs money to get people out there who know what they're doing and have reasonable judgment and knowledge and perspective and background, and you don't want it to be free. It's not going to be terribly expensive, it's probably going to be cheaper than what newspapers have come to cost. Of course advertising can pay for some of the content. I've got to say that advertising on the Internet is a whole lot more annoying than advertising in newspapers is. Or even in magazines with the exception of those ads that smell. I can't stand them.
RFE/RL: You said that information shouldn't be free. The problem is that now a lot of information is free. But also the people who are producing it are quite happy with it being free. And I'll just give you a real-world example. In this town I used to read the local restaurant reviews in the newspaper. Now there's a couple of food bloggers who blog for free and have great restaurant reviews. They don't want money for what they're doing. They're happy. It's what Clay Shirky described as the cognitive surplus, the idea that people are happy to spend their free time doing these things. So that makes it quite difficult to say that the information shouldn't be free, right?
O'Rourke: I take your point, and the fact that the Internet has made information less expensive is probably a good thing. And it probably doesn't matter whether something like restaurant blogs are free. But when it comes to the more important analytical side of news, where it is important say for instance for a news organization to have a team of experienced reporters in place with the background knowledge of the place they're in and contacts they've developed over time, you can't replace that with a random backpacker tweeting from Tajikistan.
RFE/RL: If you were teaching today at a journalism school in America, or anywhere around the world, what would your advice be to young journalists at the beginning of their career?
O'Rourke: Well I haven't taught at a school but I have taught classes, and actually I'm going to teach a couple of classes this fall. I'm going to two different schools in the United States to [hold] a kind of guest artist [position], an artist is overdoing it, but that's what they called me. I have pretty much the same advice to would-be journalists, which is: Please don't approach this as a calling, or even a profession. It's mainly a craft. The world of journalism came from lower-middle-class origins, educated lower-middle-class origins. If you were a working class or lower-middle-class kid -- even as late as [in] my era growing up in the 1950s -- and you liked to read and you didn't like to get up real early in the morning and lift heavy things, you basically had two choices. You could become a newspaper reporter or you could become a priest. You didn't go to "J School" to do this. H.L. Mencken, one of the greatest newspaper reporters who ever lived went straight from high school to become a reporter. You went and served an apprenticeship, starting maybe [as] a copy boy, or writing "deaths elsewhere," or covering the sewer commission. And you worked your way up to journeyman and eventually to some sort of master of the craft.
But you always knew that what you were doing was a trade, like brick-laying. And like brick-laying it's a very difficult trade at times. It takes skill. It takes experience. But your job was simply to be the public rubberneck. You were the person who was allowed inside the yellow police lines to look at the car wreck. Everybody wanted to know what happened in that car wreck and you were the person who was allowed inside the police lines and could come back out and say to the public: "That was a bad car wreck. Guy's head went right to the windshield. Always wear your seatbelts." The job wasn't to speak truth to power. Anybody can speak truth to power if they're far enough away from the power. I can sit right here and say anything I want about Robert Mugabe. Maybe [that wouldn't be] so easy if I were in Zimbabwe.
Too many people in journalism today are there on a world-saving mission. They should've joined the Peace Corps. At a formative age they saw "All the President's Men," and they saw Woodward and Bernstein bring down a wicked president of the United States and make democracy safe again in America. And they thought, "Boy, that's me! I'm going to do that and be played by Robert Redford." Somehow nobody ever saw themselves as being played by Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman looks much more like an actual newspaper reporter than Robert Redford does. But they're all going to be played by Robert Redford in the movie of how they saved democracy, and that's baloney. You're a paid rubbernecker. You are there as a surrogate for the public to see what's going on and if you're an honorable person you'll report this as accurately as you're able to. If you're a dishonorable person you can go to work for one of the tabloids or a cable TV station or something.
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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2010 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.rferl.org/content/PJ_ORourke_Very_Little_That_Gets_Blogged_Is_Of_Very_Much_Worth/2107985.html
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The Newest Killer App for Public Diplomacy
“It has always seemed to me the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or 10,000 miles. That is an electronic problem. The real art is to move it the last three feet in face to face conversation.”
–-Edward R. Murrow, director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which handled outreach to foreign audiences during the Kennedy administration and the Cold War, on ABC TV’s “Issues and Answers,” August 4, 1963
John Brown's Body Enterprises, USA's leading producer of Awesome Communications Software (TM), is proud to announce its latest Killer App, the result of literally thousands of years of development. This unique product, which Computerworld has predicted will be the craze of Generation-Beyond-the-I, has the following unique features:
Face-to-face conversation!
No, no need to buy it online -- you already have it in you if you use it!
Note: While this product can be used by every human being on the face of the earth, it can be especially useful for diplomats, including those involved in public diplomacy.
–-Edward R. Murrow, director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which handled outreach to foreign audiences during the Kennedy administration and the Cold War, on ABC TV’s “Issues and Answers,” August 4, 1963
John Brown's Body Enterprises, USA's leading producer of Awesome Communications Software (TM), is proud to announce its latest Killer App, the result of literally thousands of years of development. This unique product, which Computerworld has predicted will be the craze of Generation-Beyond-the-I, has the following unique features:
- It requires no factory-produced hardware;
- It automatically reinvents itself, reacting to changes in social situations, spontaneously improving communications to meet evolving human needs;
- Its grid -- called vocalcords -- are 99.9999% glitch-free and are more reliable than today's bug-infested software;
- It cannot be accused of reflecting American capitalistic cultural imperialism, as it is a universally-conceived consumer item;
- Unlike electronic products, it poses no danger to the environment;
- Its use, not only in childhood but beyond, leads to improved brain development and (according to social scientists) higher IQ;
- To get started, its users need no instruction books or specialized training;
- It's a life-long product, unlike other communications tools that last only a few years;
- To function, it requires no awkward "thumbing" or time-consuming pressing of keys;
- Anyone in the world, no matter his/her background, social status, education, or income, can use this product;
- Far more effectively than twitter, facebook, or other social media, it brings people together, leading to significant exchanges of ideas and in-depth relationships, including love;
- And last but not least this remarkable communications creation is ... TOTALLY FREE
Face-to-face conversation!
No, no need to buy it online -- you already have it in you if you use it!
Note: While this product can be used by every human being on the face of the earth, it can be especially useful for diplomats, including those involved in public diplomacy.
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