Trust me
Reality is contested, and it is an essential part of reality that reality is contested. There are two reasons that reality is contested: one is, obviously, that people mendaciously misreport reality in order to deceive. That's a problem, and it's quite a big one; but (in my opinion) it pales into insignificance beside another. Honest people honestly perceive reality differently.
If you interview three witnesses to some real life event, you'll get three accounts; and its highly likely that those accounts will be — possibly sharply — different. That doesn't mean that any of them are lying or are untrustworthy, it's just that people perceive things differently. They perceive things differently partly because they have different viewpoints, but also because they have different understandings of the world.
Challenges in the news environment
Two days ago I reposted my CollabPRES essay, written twelve years ago, which addressed problems of the news publishing environment that I was aware of then: centrally, the collapse of revenue which, at that point, affected local media most harshly.
Time moves on; there are other problems in the news publishing environment which existed then but which are much more starkly apparent to me now; and there are some issues which are authentically new.
How do we pay for search?
[This is taken from a Twitter thread I posted on June 27th. I'm reposting it here now because it's part of supporting argument for a larger project I'm working on about the future of news publishing]
Seriously, folks, how do we want to pay for search? It's a major public service of the Internet age. We all use it. Google (and Bing, and others) provide us with search for free and fund it by showing us adverts and links to their own services.
Signposts, not weathercocks
Last night, Jeremy Corbyn whipped Labour MPs not to vote for continued membership of the Single Market. This is why he was wrong.
Corbyn enthused a lot of young people to vote at the last election. People who don't usually vote, many of them for the first time.
These boots aren't made for walking
My lifestyle is probably tougher on boots than most people's; particularly in winter, but actually all year round. Consequently I've had (and worn out) a lot of pairs of boots. Three years ago I went into Tiso's mountaineering shop on Buchannan Street and asked for their strongest pair; they sold me a pair of Mammut boots, which I've worn ever since. But they're reaching the end of their life and it's time to decide what to wear next.
So I've been thinking a lot about why boots fail, and critically examining those old boots which I've not thrown away. The pair I wore before the Mammuts were by Scarpa, similar to these. They also lasted about three years. Prior to that I had a succession of pairs of Timberland boots much like this, which were light and comfortable (and much cheaper) but which wore out in nine months to a year. I've a much older pair of Loveson boots — bought more than thirty years ago while I was an undergraduate, and worn regularly for fifteen of those years; and still with some life in them.