“It was a very elaborate system,” Seroy recalled. First came “the Call.” Winfrey’s producers would contact publishers in advance of a book’s selection, requiring them to sign nondisclosure agreements. The publisher would secretly print huge quantities of special Oprah editions of the book, and solicit orders from bookstores. “We had to assign new ISBN numbers so the title could be kept secret.” The business was swarming with “handicappers,” betting on which title had been picked.
Inside Putin’s Information War
At one end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: “We all know there will be no real politics,” he said. “But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”
“So what should we play with?” he asked. “Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!”.. In a country covering nine time zones and one-sixth of the world’s land mass, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts, from near-medieval villages where people still draw water from wooden wells by hand, through single-factory towns and back to the blue glass and steel skyscrapers of the new Moscow—TV is the only force that can unify, rule and bind the people.
.. The 21st century Kremlin might be controlling the media just as it did in the Soviet era, but there’s one mistake today’s Russian will never repeat: It will never let television become dull.
.. When the entertainment network TNT, for example, made the Russian version of The Apprentice, the show flopped. The premise of the show is to reward the self-confident and self-assertive business mind. But in Russia, it is the grey apparatchik who is celebrated, while the independent, bright entrepreneurs end up in prison or exiled
.. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection.
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to “épater la bourgeoisie,” to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs.
But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. (Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.)
.. Yet, at the same time, most of us know that provocateurs and other outlandish figures serve useful public roles. Satirists and ridiculers expose our weakness and vanity when we are feeling proud.
.. In most societies, there’s the adults’ table and there’s the kids’ table. The people who read Le Monde or the establishment organs are at the adults’ table. The jesters, the holy fools and people like Ann Coulter and Bill Maher are at the kids’ table. They’re not granted complete respectability, but they are heard because in their unguided missile manner, they sometimes say necessary things that no one else is saying.
.. Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people.
The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange
Usenet Practice of Quoting developed because most people didn’t have access to more than a few days worth of usenet history (7 min)
Programming, Yeshiva, Math communies use language which keeps out the outsiders. When you are trying to get expert answers, you don’t want to attract every demographic.
We hate fun. A question is asked by 1, answered by 1-4, and viewed by hundreds. The site is designed for google, for creating a great artifact. The old q&a forms were conversations, that did not produce great artifacts. We don’t want multiple answers because we want to produce canonical ones.
A lot of non-constructive questions draw a crowd because it is fun to watch a fight, but they do not create a good artifact.
Quora is provoked blogging (45 min)
Wikipedia requires articles be: Notorious with Citations (53 min)
Philip Roth wanted to correct something on wikipedia, so he did an interview with someone and cited it.