Mercedes Bunz

Done! Finally I am about to leave the house in order to say hello to the summer. I have spent the last days drawing my powerpoint slides to deliver a follow up at the Berlin re:publica to this talk: How algorithms change our society. Or: What can we expect from the Internet of Things? Had quite some good discussions about its potential in the last days, and look forward to the talk now.

Currently I fight with facebook. There are two reasons for this: first of all, I try to bring the social network into the line of an essay I am writing. And as some of you know, thoughts never behave. They always dance out of the line, the more if you write about a network which doesn’t like straight lines anyhow. It will surely be easier to discuss the problems with facebook live at the upcoming UnlikeUs conference in Amsterdam to which I am looking forward to go.

Secondly, I am tired of facebook. Not because I suddenly despise it, not at all. I still think people who get all riled up about facebook should simply leave. For quite a while I liked it, but now I am utterly uninspired about what to communicate. However, I don’t want to leave because you only grow out of a relationship to replace it with a new one. Yes, this applies not only to humans but also to technology. We have started a blog which we later abandoned for a micro-blogging platform. Or we talked with friends on facebook which we are now about to leave for talking to them on Google+.

Interestingly enough, switching networks is not that easy. Which is why I thirdly fight with facebook. The problem is, you can’t just sign up to a new network and start a conversation right away. If you are new on Google+, for example, your contacts won’t pay attention, even if you are connected to a lot of people. Surely you have noticed yourself that people who do nothing but re-direct their Twitter feed to facebook barely ever get a facebook-comment.

Today, you need to cultivate a network like you cultivate a friendship. This is why most of us are whether on Twitter or on facebook or on Google+, but nearly no one actively handles all of them. Like friendships, we have a partiality for a certain types of computerized communication, and soon our preferred communication network will become part of our profile. Okay, back to facebook.

The following sentence weirdly hang about in Fyodor Dostoyevsky “The Possessed”, which I read between the years. Okay: still read, but it is nearly finished.

Daughters will grow up even in the most careful families, and it is essential for grown up daughters to dance. 418

Happy 2012.

It started as a trick: in the summer of 2006 I came back from an extended stay to Berkeley. As part of me didn’t want to leave the XXL-mildness of California, I came up with the brilliant idea that I am not really back unless I expose myself again to German television. No sooner thought than done. The small black old school plastic box in my living room stayed switched off. I had stopped watching television. Recently I researched the future of television for an event of the association of private television VPRT, and learnt that this wasn’t really the case. It is more complicated. The truth is, I stopped using a television set, but I continued to watch.

Television will be even more beautiful after it has fallen out of the sky like Cupid’s arrow from Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in San Francisco

Television sets have been saved a bit by their slow replacement cycle. As analysts Spencer Wang of Credit Suisse said, people only buy a new television set every 7 years while they get a new smartphone every 2 years. However, 2012 will be the year that television will say hello to digitalisation. More and more channels and TV brands have now started to embrace it. They have woken up. Up till now most of them thought of the internet as nothing but a marketing place to promote their TV content. Now we are about to enter a new era and it becomes a distribution channel, too. Welcome to the post-cannibalisation-era!

Yet old media looks a bit nibbled off, and at least partly this is their own fault: they’ve waited to long. Here television has been in a lucky position. Its industry had the possibility to learn from the mistakes of others, mainly the unhappy music industry. Being worried about illegal copying, they denied to enter digital distribution and tried to lock themselves up in the fortress of DRMed CDs. Instead pushing themselves on the new medium with a generous gesture forward, Apple and Steve Jobs did their job. They did it very well, and also took away their control. Afraid of getting iApple-ed, the television industry has learnt their lesson: the safe bet against illegal copying is to make your content widely available, provide it with a realistic price and set up a very easy way to pay for; better even several ways.

Under attack by television-to-go

But as vertical expansion has been stuck in the head of executives, for TV the problems are already beside distribution. On the internet, finding content is the key. So who will be the television guide to find content online? Who will become Google for television? Besides clicker.com, several other companies try to give an answer, among them the social approach of the Berlin based Tweet.tv. In a world of information overload, the TV guide will be the meta-channel users need. Conceptually half portal, half search engine with social add-ons delivering an overview across all brands, friends and followers sounds quite perfect for a key position. Consequently, CBS made a clever move when they bought clicker.com earlier this year unlike television portals which simply dump all their content on their homepage. They just prove that they don’t understand the new medium – zapping already sucked in the real world, and on the internet more is everywhere, so less is more.

Finally there is television-to-go: the iPad and the Kindle Fire tablet have become something like the walkman of television, and Amazon as well as Apple’s iTunes is their content provider. And there is go-to-television: Google has developed the GoogleTV browser that will soon find its place on Sony’s, LG’s and Samsung’s sets. Plus Google’s YouTube has invested 100 million dollars in content production for its channels with Disney among the producers. Apple also approaches the TV set by making use of their creative perspective: Its patents show that they plan to develop a television you can shout and gesticulate at in order to make video editing easier and seamlessly sync all your devices, er, all your Apple devices, of course.

In short, when YouTube reinvents itself “as Internet’s answer to cable TV”as my colleague Janko Roettgers has put it, when digital companies start to produce tablet television devices, when TV sets come with a browser in order to display internet content, then the vertical integration of TV has started to push and shove. As the president of VPRT Doetz demonstrated at the event, an open discussion among private television has not only started started but is thought of as necessary. Surely some scepticism remains, but 2012 will be a decisive year for television. I might even buy one.

In this meeting room of Lloyds in London experts in risk meet and enjoy the view.

We all enjoy living in a society that is characterised by division of labour. As social beings, we might be worried that the gap between rich and poor widens, but we also believe that the difference in wages are not simply unjust. They are based on skills each individual offers to society.

Well, maybe not.

For when I understood the excerpt of Daniel Kahneman’s book chapter published today in the Observer correctly, that might not be the case. In it the Israeli-American psychologist analyses the illusion of skills and how results that deeply question our cultural routine and rules, are simply ignored by all of us. The example he uses is that of society’s best paid men, the financial traders and their predictions.

Some years ago I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of financial skill up close. I had been invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarising the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for each of eight consecutive years. (…)

It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance in each year and to determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among them and whether the same advisers consistently achieved better returns for their clients year after year.

And the outcome?

The consistent correlations that would indicate differences in skill were not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.

The news that their well rewarded skills were an illusion, their success was due mostly to chance, and algorithms would have done a better job, only shocked the self-esteem of these men briefly. Something set in Kahneman calls “cognitive illusion”. And if Kahneman is right, this is what we are all living in. File under #ideology2011. So who would you choose, bankers or algorithms?

Daniel Kahneman: When confidence blinds us to reason. From: Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking fast and slow, Penguin 2011

After I came home from the ICA yesterday where several political thinkers had spoken, I turned on the news while preparing dinner. The BBC reported on Libya, and I got deeply worried. I checked other news sides, but the tendency was the same. We are at war.

Listen to the following cut copy news paste: The Americans had launched Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from a Trafalgar Class submarine and Stormshadow missiles from Tornado GR4s. The fast jets flew 3,000 miles from RAF Marham and back making this the longest range bombing mission conducted by the RAF since the Falklands conflict. The operation was supported by VC10 and Tristar air-to-air refuelling aircraft as well as E3D Sentry and Sentinel surveillance aircraft. One large airbase alone is reported to have been hit with 40 bombs from an American stealth bomber. Maybe we are also at a sports competition.

Is it a Jeff Wall picture, or the war? – The New York Times isn’t sure.

What is reporting the war turning into being part of the war? When are we close, when are we too detailled? When does reporting turn into propaganda? The matériel battle that unfolded in front of my eyes made me feel uncomfortable. Angry. I turned to Twitter, and was relieved to find several people expressing the same worries.

Cameron said what we are doing is necessary, right and legal, and that the soldiers were the bravest of the brave. A retired general said that Lybia should be afraid. We are telling people in our news they should be afraid of us. The BBC broadcasted it. No, they didn’t comment.

Of course, Libya had pushed the horrible disasters in Japan from the top spot. And it pushed it away, because there is so much at stake. After… No. Besides Afghanistan and Irak, we are at yet another war. There is an UN solution. Gaddafi is fighting his own people. Are we hunting down a bad leader? Mohammad Nabbous, the face of Libyan citizen journalism, was killed in a firefight the night before.

Can there be a just war? Can bombs bring democracy? I debated with my friend A later on what is going on, before we went out. While I had the feeling, that we engage here for other reasons than civilians in danger, she is supportive for it. She said that we need to learn to take responsibility, and that this is a step. She answered my question, why Libya and not Syria or Jemen. This is a start, she said. We both agreed, however, this is no reason for this kind of reporting.

There is a difference between reporting the war, and being at war. Thank god, there have been reflective voices, the nice considerate live drawing of Patrick Blower at the Guardian, the excellent opinion piece of Andrew Rawnsly from The Observer, or this slide show of the NYTimes also showing the wounded. But in general, our reporting way to close. It propagates the war. It hurts.

When is a picture to good? Shall we make war look like a fantastic action thriller? Reporting the matériel battle is scrupulously precise. We need to be careful not to become too live, and too detailed. When does transparency turn into blind fascination? As journalists we are part of the war, and will always be. But this is awful.