Bleeping Blagojevich

The use of the expression "bleeping" to stand in for profanity has reached a fever pitch with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  In fact it's gone beyond that, it's a bleeping epidemic. 

Okay I got mine in, now let me complain about it.  Of course it all started with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference.  You really have to watch that clip to appreciate the awkwardness of how he handles the expletives: "quote - those are his words not our characterization, other than with regard to the bleep".  He has to explain to the audience (which is the entire nation) that Blagojevich didn't actually say the word "bleep".

First of all, if you read the actual criminal complaint issued against Blagojevich, you'll see that they really do use the word 'fuck' where he said 'fuck', 'shit' where he said 'shit and 'fucking' where he said 'fucking'.  There is none of this "[expletive]" crap when you're making a case to indict a Governor.  So when Attorney Fitzgerald used the word "bleeping" to stand in for "fucking" in the press conference, it was his call to do so.

Okay so you're going on national television to announce the arrest of a Governor - it's probably smart to watch your mouth, so let's give Fitzgerald credit.  He obviously didn't have time to think about the linguistic implications of what he was doing, since he was busy trying to put a corrupt Governor in jail.

Still, we all know what word he is covering up with the "bleep".  That's the point of saying "bleep-ing" for "fucking" instead of just "bleep" - it's so we know that he was saying "fucking" instead of "fuck".  And if we feel strongly enough about clarity that we want everyone to be able to tell whether our censored profanity is finite or non-finite, isn't it pretty silly that we dance around a word that no longer even has a profane context?

But more specifically, why'd Fitzgerald choose to say "bleeping"?  When words are censored in print we often use symbols: $#@% or ****ing, etc.   Sometimes they print [censored] or [expletive deleted] as an explanation of what has happened to the word that was really there.  But in spoken conversation, we can't pronounce symbols in any meaninfgul way and to say "censored" or "expletive deleted" doesn't make any sense because in print they are letting us know what happened in the past - the editor came along and removed the word from the text - but in real-time spoken conversation, the deletion is happening right here and now, so the past tense doesn't work and there are no brackets to denote that it is an editor speaking (unless you are Victor Borge).  So on television we get the bleep, and the onomotopaeia of the bleep takes its place in conversation without technical assistance.

What annoys me about "bleeping" isn't just the bowdlerization of media (which is stupid), it's that it's washed over into innapropriate formats.  In the December 22nd issue of Time Magazine. the article "Governor Gone Wild" the big text quote next to the big photo of Blagojevich reads:

'I've got this thing, and it's [bleeping] golden. I'm just not giving it up for [bleeping] nothing.' -Governor Rod Blagojevich, on a wiretap

However, in the actual body of the article, Time chooses to print it like so:

"I've got this thing, and it's f______ golden," he told an aide a day after the November elections on a home phone that was tapped by the FBI. "I'm just not giving it up for f______ nothing."

The discrepancy in how the profanity is covered up in a single article in a single publication is weird.  First off, how can "[bleeping]" possibly be appropriate in a text format?  There was no bleep, the man said 'fucking' and a print editor decided not to print it.  The word was never bleeped out (except for by Fitzgerald).  It bugs me that Time went with a colloquial method of indicating profanity, because if we're going to be informal why not just print the real word? Second, Time chooses to preserve the '-ing' (albeit in brackets) in the first instance, but opts to drop it in the second in favor of the single 'f' followed by a blank.  So f and ing are okay, but not uck?  I find the lack of editorial consistency and appropriateness more offensive than the word 'fucking'. 

Are children in danger of reading the Time magazine article about Governor Blagojevich and being exposed to the word "fucking"?  If a kid is taking an interest in the corruption scandals of Illinois politics, I think they can handle the expletive.

And so it seems we are doomed to have to listen to so-called news anchors saying things like "The Governor told his aide that, quote "Candidate 5 can go bleep himself in the bleep-hole with his bleeping offer, and then bleep it out onto a platter and eat it."  Except they he didn't say bleep, bleep-hole, bleeping or bleep."  Perhaps after a few months of that we'll all be ready for some actual fucking quotation.

Democratizing Democratization

In the past couple days I've read two Huffington Post commentaries that make a point of talking about "the democratization of _____".  In Michael Garrity's bit about Twitter vs. Digg, he touts the way Twitter has the potential to or already has democratized the news industry, media and it's own code base.  Shortly after reading that post, I came across Peter Daou's internet commentary about internet commentary and his use of the word stuck out once more, this time referring to "the democratization of opinion-making".

Years ago, when Wikipedia first came on the scene and before it really reached its tipping point as a go-to source of relatively reliable (though still not infallible) information, my Mom lamented the fact that "on the internet, anyone can say anything and there's no respectable authority to police if they are right or wrong."  In essence, she found it to be anarchy - and I think that remains a more accurate description of what Garrity and Daou are trying to describe than "democratizing".

Garrity draws a great contrast between Twitter and Digg, highlighting some really interesting ideas about how information is disseminated online, and how it will be in the future.  But I think claiming that Twitter is the superior democratizing agent is misuse of the term.

Now technically it's true, we can interpret the word democratize to mean a movement away from authoritarianism.  And so for instance, newspapers being supplanted as a source of information (and opinion) by unregulated and myriad blogs could be described as democratization - since it's a move away from a singular and authoritarian power.  But there are two problems with sticking with the word as we get further into the reality of what is happening to news and information - and more immediately, opinion - online.

First, there's the problem of relative accuracy.  Once we get past the idea that the old authorities are the arbiters of information and opinion, does democratization continue to accurately reflect what is going on?  I'd argue that the disintegrating influence of established news and opinion organizations and the rise of the online community is more accurately described as a move towards anarchy (anarchization?) in light of the fact that there is no collective elected power resulting from the swaths of commenters.  Online opinion is closer to 4chan than to Parliment.  If we are to continue to think of public information generation and consumption as analogous to politics, I don't think what we see online can be considered democratic.  And to be honest, democracy should not be the ideal when it comes to information and opinion anyway, since it is the quality and truth of the information that really matters - not how many people believe it.

Which leads to the second problem and the real issue: The sea-change we are seeing is not really about democracy or politics at all.  It is instead about the question of how our information sourced and vetted.  Use of the term "democratization" suggests that information gathering and vetting is akin to a political struggle in which dictatorial news organizations who have long ruled over the suffering masses are finally being overthrown and power to disseminate information is being transferred justly into the hands of a source elected the people.    Digg is democratic - the people vote for what should be "the story".  Twitter is a different sort of competition - instead of "electing" a winner, stories worthy of dissemination reproduce and spread, those that are boring, uninteresting or untrue die off - something that we also see in the blogosphere.

What we're really seeing is a marketplace of ideas - or one might say, capitalism.  So again I'd even favor calling it the "capitalization" of opinion-making to "democratization", if we're looking for a word to use.

So anarchy or capitalism work better for me than democracy as a descriptor for the changes brought on by the online opinion universe.  But here's the key to finding an even better adjective: It's not really about "the people" or news organizations - it's about the information itself, the word that we love to throw around online: the memes.

The world of online opinion has changed the environment in which ideas live and die.  No longer do they rely on a benefactor like a newspaper to give them life, but instead in the culture (in the scientific sense, not the social one) of the internet there are ample minds for ideas to grow and reproduce in.  This is the real difference between Digg and Twitter.  On Digg, ideas compete for votes to win the honor of being displayed for consumption by the masses.  On Twitter (and the blogosphere, and online in general) the ideas bypass the sanctioned competition altogether. Instead they duke it out in the mind of every person they encounter, and those that survive the encounter spread to other minds, sometimes changing in the process - adapting, evolving.  Yes, the process has moved from editorial boardrooms to the internet-using public at large, but it's not about people coming together to make a decision (democracy) - it's about people acting as incubators and hosts for communicable ideas, judging each one individually and transmitting it to those around them based on its survivability.  It's memetics.

What Garrity and Daou see as a revolution in information politics is really just a symptom of the revolution in information transmission.  We the people have no power over how popular an idea becomes, or how many people read a news story or opinion article.  That power rests in the idea itself.  We can provide the brainpower to adapt or transmit it, but the real revelation is that we are approaching an environment in which the success of an idea, story or opinion is based solely on it's ability to survive and reproduce.

And so, a warning.  The quality of ideas in an environment depends upon the nature of the environment itself.  Do our brains value truth?  True ideas will prosper and spread.  Do our brains value sensationalism and excitement?  The titallating and scandalous will dominate online.  Every blog post and link emailed to friends contributes to the conditions that new ideas evolve in.  Educated minds are fertile ground for great ideas, and as individuals and political entities we have the power to enrich the soil the ideas of the future grow in.  We have a long history of mistaking structure for substance, and let's not make the mistake of thinking that democratization (or whatever you want to call it) is a good unto itself.  Increasingly, it will be the quality of ideas themselves that matters - not the format they come in.

1 year later

Just over a year since my last entry.  A year ago I believed that it was possible for Barack Obama to win.  But the reality of it was made more of hope and dreams than the tangible and practical.  I didn't realize that until today, which I think is a testament to the power of hope.  Journey had it right.

I have seen a few presidential elections now, but I've never seen so many people cry.  We've given ourselves the opportunity to do something really great and everybody knows it.  The future is ours for the taking.  Think big, work hard.