'The Internet Puked on my Shoes'

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame continues to amaze.

As do his readers, or so he says. And the “low information” voters he’s got pouring over to his site from The Huffington Post, the Daily Kos (his words) and other left-leaning sites since he endorsed Mitt Romney for president last week – not because he agrees with him, but because he believes President Obama committed a “firing offense” for going after state-legalized marijuana dispensaries in California, something Adams says Obama did for political reasons only.

Adams’ Oct. 21 post bristles with his trademark snarkiness, as he addresses the Obama fans who “puked on his shoes,” so to speak, as they misinterpreted what he said, among other such general nonsense.

The best moment? Right here (emphasis Adams’):

You're crazy when you say a good reason to believe Romney won't be a disaster as president is that he's lying about what he would do in office.

I'm betting that a chameleon will stay a chameleon. That's his history. He adapts to whatever situation he's in. The alternative is to believe a candidate for President will do all the things he promises during the campaign. How has that worked out for you?

For once today, I was glad I was alone in my pitiful little trailer out here in the Arco desert, because I laughed out loud. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for Mitt Romney, of course, but it is probably one of the most honest and objective endorsements I’ve read in a long time.

Read Adams’ screed in full (warning, one F-bomb). It’s worth your time.

'They're Always Mean to Me'

Ironically, I was just thinking this morning, after a rather emotional Easter weekend, that going back to work today would be a good thing. Lo and behold, Scott Adams read my mind.

No, Mr. Adams, No.

I know it’s a popular thing right now to pick on Scott Adams for his Internet ramblings. But when a guy has to stoop to sock puppeting to find defenders for himself when he plants himself in hostile territory, you know you’re stirring – this is a popular Adams phrase – a big kettle of crazy.

So it is with his latest blog post.

But it’s not his fault.

It’s mine. Because I’ve now provided a link to it through my blog where an audience Adams didn’t intend to read his message may now find it.

See, his new message is the concept of “author by location,” which is this (quoted from his own blog post; emphasis his):

I believe authorship - at least in terms of responsibility, not copyright - should transfer when a person moves material from one context where it is appropriate to another where it is not. The same should be true whenever moving material from one context to another changes the message.

As with many logical people, Mr. Adams fails to see the flaws in this belief. Though I can’t blame the guy. He’s stirred up a big kettle of crazy with some feminist bloggers who took umbrage at some of his ramblings. He also kinda contradicts himself in the last paragraph of his post, which reads "This model maintains complete freedom of expression, including freedom to quote material and to criticize. It simply recognizes that moving and changing a message makes you the Author by Relocation."

I agree with the latter portion of his first statement, that in changing an author’s message, the messenger bears responsibility, because the messenger is creating a derivative work. The flaw lies in Mr. Adams’ the first part of the statement in which he implies moving material unchanged from one audience to another shift authorial responsibility from the author to the messenger.

In other words, bringing a new audience into a message makes me the author of his blog post as far as cooling down any kettle of crazy I might stir up by shepherding an audience his direction. That makes as much sense as making Japanese disaster response teams responsible for cooling down the Fukushima Daiichi reactors rather than the nuclear plant experts simply because their radioactive message got spread around by that tsunami. More from his post:

As a writer, you recognize that a huge part of your job is choosing your words to fit your intended audience. When a third party introduces a different audience to your writing, it destroys the audience-matching element of your craft. In a real sense, it changes the product.

Writers should also recognize that they have no control over who their audience is, intended or not. Additionally, this is a phenomenon that existed long before the Internet, which Adams singles out as making this audience transposition by his “authors by location” easier.

While it is true writers may start out writing a piece with a specific audience in mind, once the piece is published – whether in book form or in a blog post or Quattro or a list of theses nailed to a church door – the writer has no control whatsoever over who views that piece, unless he or she puts the piece behind a walled garden and allows in only those whom he or she intends the piece for. That others may come in and read that message and be offended by it – or take it out of its intended audience into a sphere where the original author hadn’t intended for it to be read – does not remove authorship from the original writer in any way, whether the message went beyond its intended audience or not.

I do agree with Adams that if the messenger changes the message by taking things out of context, the messenger then becomes an author because in that case – and this is clearly outlined in copyright law – the messenger has created a derivative work of the author’s original message. The law is clearly on the side of the copyright holder when it comes to someone else making a derivative work of an author’s message.

If, as in Adams’ case, the authors of blogs like Jezebel and The Huffington Post took something from this humble blog, altered it in the translation, and then stirred up a big kettle of crazy in my direction, I’d be understandably upset, as Adams is. But to insist that the mere introduction of an unintended audience to a message not meant for them shifts responsibility for anger over that message from the author to the person who provide the link is ludicrously illogical.

Authorship does not change, however, if the messenger introduces the message to an unintended audience in its entirety. It’s still Martin Luther’s signature on the Ninety-Five Theses whether that paper is nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg or in the hands of Pope Leo X, delivered to him by someone else than Luther.

Creator or Consumer?

One of the most stinging – meaning the most truthful – critiques of the so-called Blogosphere is that the vast majority of bloggers do not create original content. They may riff off of someone else’s content – commenting on a news article, say – but the “originality” quotient of most blogs is fairly low.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams today ponders the effect modern technology is having on creativity, and poses this series of questions:

Another interesting phenomenon of the iPhone and iPad era is that we are being transformed from producers of content into consumers. With my BlackBerry, I probably created as much data as I consumed. It was easy to thumb-type long explanations, directions, and even jokes and observations. With my iPhone, I try to avoid creating any message that are over one sentence long. But I use the iPhone browser to consume information a hundred times more than I did with the BlackBerry. I wonder if this will change people over time, in some subtle way that isn't predictable. What happens when people become trained to think of information and entertainment as something they receive and not something they create?

We’ve seen, I believe, the answer to that final question in society for at least the last several hundred years. True, modern technology is putting massive amounts of information at our fingertips for instant access, but until there are 48 hours in each day, until we have four-hour work days and until we have computers or smartphones permanently wired to our eyeballs and cerebral cortexes, the amount of information flowing our way means little – we can and do still choose how much of that information to consume.

And we’re still creating scads of stuff, just like Mr. Adams did on his Blackberry.

The bloggers as non-creators argument is funny coming from newspapers, because they function a lot like blogs. Like blogs, they create original content. And, like blogs, they use content from a lot of other sources. Ever heard of the Associated Press? Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Example: We have a lot of comic books at home. Because they’re there, our kids have them out constantly, poring over them. We also have copies of “Diary of A Wimpy Kid” at home. Cartoons all over the place. They’ve lit a fire under our oldest son. He’ll sit and read the comics for a while, but then put them aside, get out paper and pencil and draw comics of his own. For hours. For much longer than he spends reading comics. He’s producing a lot more than he consumes. It’s not terribly original right now what he produces, but for a ten-year-old kid, he does occasionally have a flash of inspiration that leaves him with an end product that is his, original.

If he were not exposed to comics – if he were not consuming them – it’s likely he would not now be a budding creator of comics.

Another example: We have many Legos in the house. Our youngest son is constantly poring over the Lego magazines that come into the house, and, as a result, is constantly asking us to find instructions for him so he can build the latest Lego gadget. We don’t always have the parts he needs. But he improvises. As he consumes information and entertainment, he creates his own versions of the Lego models he wishes to build. And he’s happy as a clam – except when nobody will help him find the parts he wants.

If he were not exposed to information and entertainment coming his way courtesy of the Lego models he doesn’t have, his desire to create would be stunted.

We’re not the robot drones Scott Adams thinks we are. The act of consuming information and entertainment can and does result in the desire to create information and entertainment of our own. Yes, that desire arrives in greater and lesser degrees in people, but the desire does come. That most of the stuff created out there does not become known – is not repeated on the radio, published in a hardcover book or on the Internet somewhere – does not negate the fact that the stuff was created and born in the consumption of other stuff. For many, the information and entertainment consumed act as catalysts for the innate desire we have to create.

The act of creation isn’t limited or stunted by the amount of stuff we consume – but in the amount of time we lend or are allowed to lend to the act of creating.

Online Activism, or, It's Feel Sorry for Scott Adams Time

Scott Adams today at the Dilbert.com blog writes that one of the reasons for making online reviews of books, restaurants, et cetera, illegal is that controversial books tend to attract one-star reviews by those who disagree philosophically with the books’ content. I quote:

My argument for making online reviews illegal is that illegitimate reviews have a huge potential economic impact. For example, when I published my book that was a collection of blog posts (Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain), I got hammered with one-star reviews from people who loved the writing from which it came. Their gripe was that, in their opinion, blog material should remain free and online. I had somehow violated a rule I didn’t realize was a rule, and so I was punished with negative reviews. The one-star reviews dragged down the average star rating on Amazon and presumably influenced other buyers.

Any controversial writer – and I sometimes fall into that category (Google "God’s Debris"), gets one-star reviews from people who want to suppress certain points of view. Online reviews are the digital equivalent of book burning. True Believers from the left and the right pile in to drive reviews low enough to sink book sales. It is activism masquerading as reviews.

His arguments – and I should note this is a thought experiment on Adams’ part, as he emphasizes he doesn’t really believe online reviews should go away – are weak at best.

Let’s talk first about the statement “Online reviews are the digital equivalent of book burning.” Uh-uh. While both negative online reviews and book burnings may have political or philosophical motivations, neither act truly succeeds in the goal -- stated or unstated – of suppressing the book in question. It’s my belief that such acts are isolated in time and, thus, at the time they occur – or are read, in the case of online reviews – they may have an impact, but that impact lessens as time proceeds. Books that were burned were still available to those who wanted to read them – just not the copies in particular that were burned. And if we as consumers truly let poor online reviews in a mixed batch of reviews for the same product, no one would purchase anything.

For instance, shortly after Christmas I purchased a USB-to-parallel cable in order to hook at parallel laser printer up to a computer without a parallel port. The cable – the least expensive offered at the online store where I was shopping – received a smattering of reviews, some good, but most of them ranked the product as poor. If I merely looked at the average rating the product received, I might not have purchased it. But because online reviews, in the aggregate, offer a wide spectrum of experience with the product, I read them all and concluded, through inference and direct evidence offered in the reviews, that the product, more likely than not, would work for me. I bought it. I installed it. It did not work. It is probably at this point that many of the one-star reviews were written because, as I read them again, they were expressing the same frustration I was experiencing. However, in re-reading the positive reviews, I discovered further clues that, on a subsequent attempt to install the product, led to it functioning flawlessly. Thus, a potential one-star review from me turned into a five-star review.

My point is this: Often, as I read the one-star reviews of any product – be it a computer cable or a book – I find clues that will help me have a five-star experience with the product.

And, yes, I have written one- and two-star reviews. Such is a natural part of being a consumer: If we encounter something we do not like, we share that feeling with others. If not, sites like The Consumerist would not exist. Recently, at goodreads.com, I wrote a short two-star review for “Ackroyd,” a book by Jules Feiffer. I really, really wanted to like it because I really, really enjoyed the film “Popeye,” for which Feiffer wrote the screenplay. The book, however, was a disappointment, and I let the good folks at goodreads know why. Will it influence others at goodreads? I kinda think that’s what the site is for. But there will be fans of the book who will disregard my poor review, and in the aggregate – since I explained clearly why the book did not appeal to me – those who have not read it will either find my review useful or parochial. That is their choice. One is not obligated to remain silent if one does not like something one has consumed.

Further, Adams goes on to say “True Believers from the left and the right pile in to drive reviews low enough to sink book sales. It is activism masquerading as reviews.” I have to say: so what? This goes beyond what Adams calls a “knee-jerk” and “naïve” appeal to the First Amendment. Adams is effectively telling those who don’t like what he writes that they ought not to write negative reviews because if they do they will hurt his economic viability. What Adams fails to realize that while he may consider this “activism” as a knee-jerk reaction from readers who want to suppress his work, it is only a natural reaction to what his readers perceive as activism masquerading as writing a book. If he is as “controversial” as an author as he believes his reviews say he is, then he ought to understand that those who read his work have the right – outside of the First Amendment – to respond to his activism with activism of their own.

Adams also writes that reviews of one of his books – which was a collection of blog postings – were generally poor because readers objected to having to pay for his postings in book form, when they were available for free online.

Well, Dave Barry can tell him all about that. How many times have I read in book jacket blurbs that his latest offering is not a collection of newspaper columns, but fresh material? Often enough to infer that Barry, too, has felt that sting. Here, Adams is simply butting heads with the naïve Internet reality that once something is free, it will remain free forever. He ought to write a book masquerading as activism on that subject.

Adams, in a way, is experiencing the “organizing without organizations” effect that Clay Shirky writes about in “Here Comes Everybody.” The Internet – through Adams’ blog, his book sales on Amazon.com, and in other outlets – is providing both his fans and his detractors ample opportunity to react to what he produces. That some of it is negative, and that some of it “presumably” effects his economic bottom line, is inevitable and unavoidable. It is also, as he concedes, unstoppable.

Note: The comic accompanying this post also appeared on Dilbert.com today. Chillingly ironic, no?