Month: April 2003

Categories
Personal Publishing

Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere…

I’m going to be playing catch-up for a while here – picking up on things that I would have written about except I took a holiday (never again). First things first, let’s have a gander at this article: Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days (on ‘The Second Superpower’). This is an extraordinary piece of work that manages to merge legitimate concerns with some of the most neurotically paranoid reasoning I’ve ever seen. The argument is simple – the phrase “The Second Superpower” originally referred to “World Public Opinion”, but because someone subsequently wrote some politically castrated techno-utopian article with the same name (and said article got taken up by some ‘significant’ webloggers) if you now do a search on Google for the term, you find no trace of the original meaning. All that remains is the knock-off.

The article seems to ascribe this change to a kind of weird A-list cabal of webloggers. This is true in that a certain group of people who are much-linked-to have linked to the article in question – that’s reputation-based rankings operating to save us from people writing “The Second Superpower” three-hundred times in their meta tags. Unfortunately it’s also rubbish in the sense that – as a vast conjoined semi-self correcting connected network of webloggers exists – all it takes is one Register article (picked up in turn by other webloggers) for this problem to self-correct. People get so tense nowadays… And about so very little… In the meantime, let’s all raise a glass to you, oh gloriously self-correcting blogosphere…

More on this subject:

Categories
Language

On Paralepsis (Part Two)

One of my favourite words is paralepsis (I’ve even talked about it before). It’s a word from the ancient study of rhetoric and it essentially means that you state loudly the subjects that you’re not going to talk about – in the process bringing what you’re omitting into the forefront of people’s consciousness. Here’s an example:

“Let’s not get bogged down here… Let’s pass swiftly over the vicar’s predeliction for cream cakes. Let’s not dwell on his fetish for Dolly Mixture. Let’s not even mention his rapidly increasing girth… No no – let us instead turn directly to his recent work on self-control and abstinence…”

It’s an immensely satisfying and highly entertaining piece of verbal fun, even if it is also a bit of a blunt instrument. Paralepsis is a collision of statement with intent – it presents itself both as an obvious paradox and as the extension of language’s ability to use fragments of fact to allude to larger and more involved passages or narratives – the paralepsis is a signpost that there’s more going on here than the person’s in a position to talk about, even as he or she talks about it. It’s an insidious move as well as a revelatory one, and it reveals one of the greatest difficulties of speaking the truth – that even if one doesn’t lie one can easily mislead. This is the terrible sin of ‘lying by omission’ – of using carefully selected and accurate information in such a way that totally mischaracterises the situation in hand. And an extension of that is the way self-censorship tries to stop individual people making connections of this kind. We all need a weird kind of internal paralepsis, perhaps, to make those connections that we don’t want to make out loud – or perhaps we feel we can’t…

Which is all, in its way, merely an introduction to one of the most blatant, glorious and important use of paralepsis I’ve seen in my life. From the Onion: I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America…

P.S. For the Americans amongst us, “Dolly Mixture” is a peculiarly British kind of sweet that traditionally you would buy in small paper bags by weight from large glass (or later plastic) bottles held behind the counter. I can find little about their origins online, but I believe they got their name by being small enough to look like food for dolls’ tea parties and the like. Shamefully, they are a personal favourite.

Categories
Random

Wants: song by Denice Williams, featuring Jekyll and Hyde?

I’m back in London now, looking around me suspiciously and thinking about what to do next. But the first thing I want to do is resolve an issue that’s been driving me insane for about three years now. When I was a kid, my mother used to listen to fairly terrible cassettes in the car on the way to school – this must have been somewhere between 1981 and 1985. She had this album in the car and it was kind of Motown and it had a song on it which I really liked. Mum swears it was by Deniece Williams. All I remember about it was that it had a line about a guy seeming to be like Jekyll, but actually being like Hyde. You see – clearly a quality song. Anyway – does anyone (i) know what the name of said song is? (ii) know where I could get a CD or decent quality MP3 of it?

Categories
Random

From the Financial Times this morning…

From the Financial Times this morning: UpMyStreet.com in Administration

“Upmystreet.com, one of the pioneers of the UK internet sector, yesterday followed many of its long-gone peers into administration as financial pressure led the company to file for protection as it sought a buyer. Tony Blin-Stoyle, founder and managing director of the company that provides local information to users, said the company had chosen a “prudent course of action” that he hoped would give it time to find a buyer. “We have filed for admini-stration, but still have time as we are fully solvent while looking for a buyer,” he said. Upmystreet developed a reputation for high-quality database technology that made use of the internet’s ability to link people with information relevant to them and won a string of awards. Its website links consumers to postcode-based information such as council tax rates, house prices and local businesses, while its commercial services help business and public sector bodies organise their web-based information. The group, owned in part by News International, BSkyB and NM Rothschild, earns annual sales of about £2m but has suffered from the media and technology slowdowns.”

Categories
Random

Apposite but Innaccurate…

There’s a quote going around the internet at the moment that’s widely attributed to Julius Caesar – and it’s tremendously rousing and potent and apposite. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that it’s not also total bunk.

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

Categories
Random

Slashdot and Conversations

I’m a bit of an enforced holiday at the moment. Evidently I’ve been getting too crazed with work as last week my boss started passing me notes saying things like “You need a holiday” and “Get out of my company”. So it’s ironic that after all those months of carefully tending UpMyStreet Conversations that it should be the first workday that I’m out of the office this year that the site gets Slashdotted.

I haven’t had a chance to read through all the comments yet but mostly people seem interested in the concept of geocoding content generally – with Conversations itself getting fairly limited coverage. Nonetheless I’m hoping for a few insights here and there… It’s a pity that Slashdot’s audience is so US-centric, of course – since the site is designed for people who have UK postcodes. Most of the people who come via Slashdot won’t be able to participate in any particularly meaningful way.