A Disaster, Privately Managed By DAVID CARR

June 13, 2010
A Disaster, Privately Managed By DAVID CARR
The three journalists crept along in a boat captained by James Ledet in a bayou near Golden Meadow, La., one early afternoon. We were all looking for the same thing as we traversed narrow stretches of water framed by swamp grass, in a landscape dotted with docked shrimp boats and old oil rigs.

And before too long, we all saw what we were looking for, almost motionless just below the surface.

A big ol’ redfish.

Of course, these days, the only thing reporters go looking for in the bayous is oil, and its collateral effects, but this was back on April 16, four days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 40 miles offshore. My buddies, both reporters at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, and I were in the midst of what has become a semiannual outing to catch redfish, but we go mostly to spend time in the swamp, with its mysterious watery tentacles and to watch the sun drop as we sit on the deck of a big cabin on stilts.

But that’s past. Cajun Resorts, the spot we stayed at, is buttoned up behind a widespread ban on fishing. Our captain, a former rig rat, has switched back to his old business and is now working with BP to limit the damage. When I called Poppy Duet, our Cajun hostess who helped cook up some of those redfish we caught, she sounded quietly beside herself.

“We’ve been closed for four weeks,” she said. “The oil’s over in the next bay, not here, but we’re all shut down. We’re waiting and working on making a claim, but we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. We’re watching the news, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.”

She’s not alone. Because the disaster was slow-moving, the full might of American journalism has been brought to bear. In one sense, the public has never been more informed. This is the first spill that has been covered in real time, with streaming high-definition video on desktops and televisions everywhere, network anchors racking up miles flying back and forth, and throbbing info-graphics that track the mess. We can all see the video for ourselves: an angry plume that looks like hell has been breached and is sending a dark, massive emissary to the surface.

But to look for clarity amid the murk is a daily riddle. The size of the spill has been a moving target, with estimates recently doubled to 25,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, even after BP stanched some of the flow.

So what amount of oil was coming out of that hole in the first place? We will never know, in part because our government has never gained custody of information. What is clear is that even weeks into the disaster, public information has been privatized in whole or in part. Every disaster has chaotic elements and a need to maintain order and safety, but the economic interests of a large commercial enterprise are clearly impeding the free flow of information.

Journalists in the gulf are now dealing with a hybrid informational apparatus that does not reflect government’s legally mandated bias toward openness and transparency.

The Coast Guard may answer the phone when reporters call the Joint Information Center set up to provide answers, but more often than not, the phone is quickly handed off to BP officials. As my colleague Jeremy Peters wrote last week, flights carrying members of the media seeking photographs of the disaster have been restricted, and news organizations including CBS, The Associated Press and The Times-Picayune have complained that their efforts to report have been hampered by limited access. And BP has refused to acknowledge giant plumes of oil under the surface that were observed by local residents and reporters alike.

On Thursday night, Anderson Cooper of CNN complained about seemingly ridiculous efforts to control the story, including the fact that rescued oil-covered birds were being guarded and hidden from view by members of the National Guard. Tom Foreman, a CNN correspondent, tried to interview BP workers, but they would only say, over and over, as if working from a script, “I am only here to support the cleanup mission.” Mr. Foreman pressed and a guard intervened, saying, “You can’t do that! Sir! Stop! I can’t allow you to do that!”

An employee of the St. Bernard Parish government, who asked not to be identified because he was not officially authorized to speak on the matter, said that issues of access were primarily in the hands of BP.

“BP is running everything down here,” he said. “It’s their show.”

What had been a kind of détente between reporters and BP broke down at the end of May, when the efforts at a top kill were clearly failing but the company refused to acknowledge it. Reporters complained and asked for more accurate, timely information, and a BP official responded with a memorandum saying that the company was prevented from answering individual questions by disclosure rules governing trade in its stock.

“Given recent volatility in BP share price, I’m told that information related to top kill is now considered stock-market sensitive, which means it has to be managed under disclosure rules for the London and N.Y. stock exchanges,” the BP media official said in an e-mail message. “In a nutshell, that means all investors must be provided information on an equal basis. That precludes me from sending you updates as various aspects of the operation unfold.”

Really? Should the volatility of a company’s stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?

The lack of transparency has turned James Carville, a Louisiana native and a frequent contributor to CNN, into something very similar to John Goodman’s character on HBO’s series “Treme,” a Jeremiah who is shouting into a wind of indifference.

Reached by phone on Friday in New Orleans, Mr. Carville said secrecy had a place in national affairs, just not this one.

“I believe this country is at war,” he said. “We are being invaded, but in this instance it’s not Al Qaeda or the Japanese, it’s just a hideous, greasy, stupid slick of oil that can’t adjust to our tactics, so why the secrets? It’s absurd that we have any secrecy around this, and absurd that the government is going along with it. There should be no limits on access, not for the scientists, not for the journalists, and not for the public that has every right to know what is going on down here and how much of the culture is being lost.”

Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press By SCOTT SHANE

Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative.

He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through.

So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.

The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.

In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.

Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.

As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency’s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants.

In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program.

Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”

Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.

The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.

Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.

“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”

Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.

“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.

Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. “What gets lost in the calculus is that there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ms. Radack said. “Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.”

Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets,” a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished.

“The system is plagued by leaks,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. “When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. “Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations — we don’t retaliate against them, we encourage them,” Mr. Miller said. “This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.”

Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried “leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.” He promised action “in the coming months.”

Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane’s Defense Weekly in 1984.

Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.

The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.

But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial.

By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment.

The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake’s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal “retention” of classified information.

An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: “Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.”

Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with “an incredible sense of duty and honor.”

When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend.

“It’s just so Tom,” Mr. Frappier said. “He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.”

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too.

But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials.

“It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.”

One former N.S.A. consultant recalled “alarmist memos and e-mails” from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: “The place is almost completely corrupted.”

Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark.

The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark’s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife — herself an N.S.A. contractor — and their teenage son.

“For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,” said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. “We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.”

Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him.

Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

March 21, 2010
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”

It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.

Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”

WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”

TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”

MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”

Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.

Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”

For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.

Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”

AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”

“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.

One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.

As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.

THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.

As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.

As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”

Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?

As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”

For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”

Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”

However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.

It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.

All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.

Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”

To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”

He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

March 21, 2010
FURTHER READING
Words, Version 2.0

A bookshelf for further reading:

REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)

TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.

INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.

GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.

The Media Equation After a Year of Ruin, Some Hope By DAVID CARR

December 21, 2009
The Media Equation
After a Year of Ruin, Some Hope By DAVID CARR

The current state of the media reminds me of the time I was taking down the rigging on my pal’s catamaran with my friend Ed. While I busied myself with the main sail, Ed, who was not much of a sailor, went to take down the small sail in the front of the boat. Instead, he pulled the pin that kept the mast standing, and everything — a mass of steel, rope and canvas — came crashing down around us.

As we stood there covered in the colossal mess, Ed said quietly, “So what’s the next step?”

So what is the next step? Not to go all Mary Poppins, but with a little bit of pluck, I think the media industry can work from here. Let’s start by counting our blessings in 2009.

Mainstream media have been accused of pathologizing the African-American male, but — let’s face it — three men who happened to be black moved a lot of units this year. Just try to imagine this past year in media without President Obama, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods. And lest you think it was all pathology and politics, it is worth noting that on Twitter, the elections in Iran outranked Michael Jackson, who came in second, according to What the Trend?, a site that ranked topics in 2009 (whatthetrend.com/zeitgeist). In an age that is ridiculed as chronically unserious, a life-and-death struggle for freedom on the other side of the world is the story that rang the bell on Twitter.

While we are on the subject of Twitter, we should point out that new generations of consumers are now guided to important news by the recommendations of trusted friends, and increasingly, they point to great reporting in sources that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

Blogs and new-media sites are cartoonishly written off as places where people write up the soup they just ate, but in the past year, many sites have added muscle and resources to the pursuit of news. Everyone knows about the reporting assets and influence of Politico (Politico.com), but you know things have changed when Gawker (gawker.com), the attitudinous Manhattan media blog, is hiring the kind of reporters who pick up the phone.

The founder of Gawker, Nick Denton, told me in a note that The Huffington Post and TMZ have demonstrated that news scoops are the coin of the realm and that Gawker will be heading in that direction. He suggested that the Web was further atomizing into sites that create original content and break news, and others that alter photos, float wild speculation or just gin up any old thing that will draw traffic.

“If Gawker’s bloggers are barbarian invaders, they’re Visigoths, who might have sacked Rome, but were themselves refugees from the even more vicious Huns,” he suggested, sounding almost quaintly old media (although don’t look for them to start covering the Congressional subcommittee on health care any time soon).

Let’s remember that news of the biggest media merger story of the year — Comcast-NBC Universal — arrived in The Wrap (www.thewrap.com), a Hollywood media site that is less than a year old. In my little corner of the kingdom, the increasingly converged media-tech space is often best followed by smart smaller sites, including Paid Content (paidcontent.org), Nieman Journalism Lab (www.niemanlab.org), and SearchEngineLand (searchengineland.com).

And just as new media have absorbed the enduring values of traditional media — developing sources, making phone calls — so more established players are adopting the tools of the insurgency. For instance, traditional media outlets are not waiting for the much-hyped Apple tablet to land next year before coming up with content that might soar on the device.

Captains of old-school magazine narrative like David Granger at Esquire and Terry McDonell at Sports Illustrated are moving very aggressively to refashion their brands for a tablet world and rightly so. When the iPhone is put on steroids, consumers will again be able to touch, flip and navigate serendipitously across things they want to see or learn about. And if publishers are able to move out of the nomenclature of “subscriptions” for content and into the universe of “applications,” there may be some gold in those hills.

Nobody had it worse than newspapers in 2009, but it all depends on whom you ask. After I wrote a column last week suggesting that The Wall Street Journal has tended to lean to the right since being bought by Rupert Murdoch, about 400 or so readers sent e-mail messages to remind me, among other things, that it can’t be all bad that one of the most successful media moguls in the business continues to invest real money in serious journalism. (And the News Corporation struck gold globally this weekend in outer space with “Avatar,” part of a strong finish for what could be a record year for the film industry, suggesting that people aren’t ready to trade going to theaters for downloads any time soon.)

The much-feared atomization of the mass audience had some terrific side effects this year, creating an era of the mini-hit. AMC came up with a show, “Mad Men,” that swamped the water cooler, “Glee” showed how a network could combine the competitive aesthetic of reality television with the conventions of drama and come up with a winner.

Even NBC, which was sold for parts as near as we could tell, put together a Thursday night that is actually a destination at our house — “Community,” “Parks and Recreation,” “The Office” and “30 Rock.” That reminded us that a suite of shows, carefully threaded, can keep you planted all night, or at least until Leno comes on.

The long-in-the-tooth technologies still have plenty of life in them. While many folks think it’s time for the legacy asset of print to get kicked to the curb, the writer Dave Eggers gathered a tribe of like minds in San Francisco to put out the glorious, 320-page one-shot Panorama, a newspaper with a wingspan almost of a condor (15 by 22 inches) and journalistic ambitions to match. The $16 a copy Panorama sold out immediately, foretelling a time when a printed newspaper will be a luxury item, a mass-niche product that people will pay a great deal of money to get their hands on.

And even postprint, the constellation of local news sites put together by ex-newspaper folks include the big and well-financed like Texas Tribune (www.texastribune.org), the small and charming like Baltimore Brew (baltimorebrew.com) and some experiments that seem less tentative all the time, like MinnPost (www.minnpost.com) and Voice of San Diego (www.voiceofsandiego.org).

It’s a reminder that journalists will do anything to avoid getting real jobs, including conjuring a new kind of workplace that doesn’t include any of the legacy costs of trucks and printing presses. Meanwhile, journalism schools are no longer content just to teach the inverted pyramid. A few weeks ago, I was at CUNY’s graduate school of journalism to help judge presentations from more than a dozen teams of young media entrepreneurs. There were some clunkers, as there always are, but there were also some scary good, real-world proposals from students who don’t have to think out of the box because they were never in one to begin with.

I tried to be courteous and deferential, partly out of a small fear that I may work for one of them someday. There are worse places to end up.

It’s Time to Stay the Courier By JOE NOCERA

August 8, 2009
Talking Business
It’s Time to Stay the Courier By JOE NOCERA

So you think your business has problems.

Consider the plight of John E. Potter, the chief executive of the second-largest employer in America. On the one hand, he has a guaranteed monopoly for much of his business. On the other hand, monopoly or not, the combination of the Internet and the recession is absolutely crushing his company, just as it is for so many other companies across the country. His last quarter’s results, which were announced on Wednesday, revealed a loss of $2.4 billion. The business is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion in 2009, on around $68 billion in revenue. That’s practically General Motors territory.

What can he do to fix the situation? Surprisingly little. His employees have clauses in their union contracts that forbid layoffs. Nor can he renegotiate their gold-plated benefits, the way, say, the auto companies did when their backs were against the wall. Political pressure makes it nearly impossible to shut down any of his company’s 34,000 facilities, no matter how outmoded or little used. He can borrow money, but under the law, he can add only $3 billion in debt a year — an amount that isn’t going to come close to covering his losses.

Oh, and get this. Every year between now and 2016, he has to put aside over $5 billion to finance health benefits for future employees. You read that right: future employees. There isn’t another business in the country that finances benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet.

Welcome to John Potter’s world. He’s the nation’s postmaster general. Yes, that’s right: for the last nine years, he has run the United States Postal Service, which, since 1970, when it stopped being a government department and started becoming self-sufficient, has been the oddest of ducks. It is expected to operate as a business, turning a profit and so on, and yet it is still subject to Congressional oversight and all sorts of legal constraints, like that ridiculous health benefit prefinancing for future employees, which was part of a big 2006 postal reorganization bill. (Its main purpose, it would seem, is government accounting: those funds get counted against the federal deficit.)

Even so, until recently, Mr. Potter had had a pretty successful run. A smart, likable, lifelong Postal Service executive, he got it through the anthrax crisis early in his tenure. He saw it through 9/11 (in no small part by engaging Federal Express to fly long-distance mail during the day, when its planes were empty, something it still does). He has overseen productivity gains and, according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a rise in customer satisfaction. Between 2001 and 2006, he even eliminated the Postal Service’s $11.3 billion debt. That year, 2006, was also when demand for mail service peaked, with 210 billion pieces delivered.

But the last few years have been brutal. The Postal Service lost more than $5 billion in 2007, and another $2.4 billion in 2008. And, of course, it is on track to lose that whopping $7 billion in the current fiscal year. (Its fiscal year ends in September.) The amount of mail being sent is dropping like a stone — it will be down to 175 billion pieces in 2009. Mr. Potter has reduced the Postal Service’s head count to 650,000, from 800,000, almost entirely through attrition. He has cut costs every way he can think of. And still the losses mount.

A few weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office added the Postal Service to its list of “high risk” federal agencies, meaning that it is in such dire straits that it needs “to restructure to address its current and long-term financial viability.” Indeed, if something doesn’t change by the fall, the Postal Service will have to renege on those health benefit prepayments — despite its legal obligation to pay them — or start missing payroll. “U.S.P.S. must align its costs with revenues, generate sufficient earnings to finance capital investments, and manage its debt,” the G.A.O. said. Just like any real business would.

“If you are asking me to run it like a business, give me the same tools that someone would have in the private sector,” Mr. Potter said when I spoke to him recently.

But as I discovered on Thursday, when I watched a Senate hearing on the current Postal Service crisis, that’s not likely to happen. For one thing, Mr. Potter isn’t really asking for the tools he needs to turn the Postal Service into a real business. He is asking Congress to relieve it from the health prepayments, which he is likely to get, at least temporarily. He is also asking that the Postal Service be allowed to reduce mail service to five days a week, and to eliminate some postal branches. These aren’t exactly revolutionary ideas — yet they are viewed as highly controversial in Congress, which frets that constituents might get angry if the local postal branch closes.

But even if Mr. Potter were to get his way on these two items, they would still be only stop-gap measures that fail to tackle the bigger question. As the Internet continues to erode the use of snail mail, does the Postal Service’s business model still make sense? Do we even still need the government to deliver the mail anymore?

•

To me, the answer is obvious: no.

Think for a minute about the mail that comes into your home. In the modern age, very little of it is personal mail. The vast majority is commercial mail of some sort — advertisements, bills, movies from Netflix or catalogs. Once upon a time, said Rick Geddes, an associate professor in the department of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, the postal service was viewed as “a way to bind together the nation. In subsidizing mail service to rural communities you were keeping them connected to the rest of the country.” But today, he added, “it is kind of silly to say we are binding together the nation through advertisements and catalogs.”

These days, the main justification for keeping the postal service as a quasi-government entity is the belief that no private company would be willing to deliver the mail to sparsely populated rural areas of the country. People fear that it would be a little like airline deregulation: communities that weren’t large enough to justify flights in the newly deregulated environment lost their carriers.

But that mission of universal service has all but blinded just about everyone connected with the Postal Service. Congressmen — many of whom, after all, come from rural areas — are loath to give the Postal Service too much free rein for fear that Mr. Potter’s minions will start shutting down post offices. (Never mind that 2,000 of them serve fewer than 100 people each.) The postal unions, with their no-layoff clauses, have used universal service to justify benefits so generous the Postal Service would save $600 million just by bringing them in line with other federal employees.

As for Mr. Potter himself, while he may want more freedom to run the Postal Service like a real business, he, too, seemed surprisingly wedded to outmoded ideas about mail service in America. “This country needs to have and to protect universal service,” he said. “Our business is all about making sure every American can stay connected with every other American.”

I failed to ask him the obvious follow-up question: Don’t e-mail messages now do that?

For most of us, of course, it does — and that will increasingly to be the case, as broadband makes it way into, yes, even those rural areas that everyone is so worried about. Michael A. Crew, a professor of regulatory economics at Rutgers told me that that while the Postal Service’s “short-term situation is bleak, its long-term situation is really bleak.” He is one of a number of experts who say they believe that even when the recession ends, the Postal Service’s woes won’t be over. As businesses look to save money in the recession, for instance, they are starting to do end-arounds the Postal Service. Online bill-paying is become ever more popular. Evite is starting to replace mailed invitations to parties. None of that business is ever coming back.

Which is why, instead of trying to find short-term, piecemeal solutions to the current crisis, those involved in managing and overseeing the Postal Service ought to be thinking harder thoughts about blowing up its business model. Maybe the Postal Service should turn itself into a giant outsourcer, handling some tasks but handing out others, for a fee, to more efficient companies. Maybe the government should allow companies to bid on lucrative urban delivery — with the proviso that they also deliver to rural areas. Maybe some areas should get mail deliveries less frequently than others. Maybe there should be radically different pricing structures. Maybe it should even lose its monopoly on first-class mail. I mean, why not?

Mr. Geddes, the Cornell professor, says he believes that the only solution is for the Postal Service to become “just another company” — lose its monopoly, shed its bureaucratic mind-set, become able to negotiate freely with its unions, and answer to shareholders instead of Congress, which is always going to resist significant change that might upset a constituent. Only when that happens will it be able to bring its costs in line with its revenue.

“The post office is not broken,” Mr. Potter insisted. But surely it is. And its current crisis brings to mind Rahm Emanuel’s line that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

Alas, here in the middle of its worst financial crisis ever, the Postal Service and Congress seem utterly intent on wasting it.

The Daily Me By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

March 19, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Daily Me By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Some of the obituaries these days aren’t in the newspapers but are for the newspapers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest to pass away, save for a remnant that will exist only in cyberspace, and the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

There was also modest interest in receiving manifestly silly arguments for the other party’s views (we feel good when we can caricature the other guys as dunces). But there was little interest in encountering solid arguments that might undermine one’s own position.

That general finding has been replicated repeatedly, as the essayist and author Farhad Manjoo noted in his terrific book last year: “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”

Let me get one thing out of the way: I’m sometimes guilty myself of selective truth-seeking on the Web. The blog I turn to for insight into Middle East news is often Professor Juan Cole’s, because he’s smart, well-informed and sensible — in other words, I often agree with his take. I’m less likely to peruse the blog of Daniel Pipes, another Middle East expert who is smart and well-informed — but who strikes me as less sensible, partly because I often disagree with him.

The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do.

Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties.

“The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes.

One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.

The result is polarization and intolerance. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor now working for President Obama, has conducted research showing that when liberals or conservatives discuss issues such as affirmative action or climate change with like-minded people, their views quickly become more homogeneous and more extreme than before the discussion. For example, some liberals in one study initially worried that action on climate change might hurt the poor, while some conservatives were sympathetic to affirmative action. But after discussing the issue with like-minded people for only 15 minutes, liberals became more liberal and conservatives more conservative.

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

So what’s the solution? Tax breaks for liberals who watch Bill O’Reilly or conservatives who watch Keith Olbermann? No, until President Obama brings us universal health care, we can’t risk the surge in heart attacks.

So perhaps the only way forward is for each of us to struggle on our own to work out intellectually with sparring partners whose views we deplore. Think of it as a daily mental workout analogous to a trip to the gym; if you don’t work up a sweat, it doesn’t count.

Now excuse me while I go and read The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Awash in a Stream of Movies By DAVID POGUE

ary 29, 2009
State of the Art
Awash in a Stream of Movies By DAVID POGUE

Any movie, any time. Is that too much to ask?

It’s technically possible. It’s what the people want. It will make the movie companies rich. And yet not a single legal source of movies — hotel, plane, pay-per-view, video store, Apple TV, Vudu box, Internet downloads, nothing — offers instant delivery of any movie you want.

Netflix comes close. It’s got the “any movie” part covered, since it stocks virtually every movie ever released on DVD — about 100,000 titles.

As for “any time,” well, Netflix is best known as a DVD-by-mail company. You can freely rent and return DVD movies all month long for a fixed monthly fee ($9 to check out one movie, $14 for two at a time); they come and go in bright red, postage-already-paid mailing envelopes. There are no late fees or penalties. But “any time” boils down to “in a day or two,” because you have to wait for the movie to come in the mail.

But Netflix has been clawing its way out of its dependence on the postal system with a feature called Watch Now — and it’s especially worth watching now.

Phase 1. Twelve months ago, Netflix revealed the original Watch Now. It let you, a regular Netflix subscriber, watch any of 1,000 streaming movies on your Windows PC, on demand, without having to download them first.

In the following months, the catalog grew to 12,000 movies; more are constantly added. Mac software came next. The monthly hours-of-watching limit was eliminated; now any Netflix member with a plan of $9 or more can watch unlimited streaming movies, for no extra charge.

No extra charge is a crazy, game-changing concept. It transforms movie consumption from à la carte into all you can eat. You can watch favorite scenes of individual movies, or try a movie for 15 minutes and then change your mind. In short, you can movie surf, without ever worrying about running up your bill.

Still, a desk chair in front of a PC is not what most people would call the ultimate home theater setup.

Phase 2. Eight months ago, Netflix and Roku introduced a tiny TV-connected box ($100) that does only one thing, but very well: it lets you watch Netflix streaming movies on your TV instead of your PC.

Since a remote control and a TV screen make a clumsy system for browsing and searching the catalog, you still pick the movies you want using your Mac or PC, at Netflix.com. Whatever assortment of titles you choose online appears instantly on your TV’s list of available movies.

The Roku box is great. But let’s face it: It’s another remote to learn, another gadget to connect and more wires around the TV.

Phase 3. About six months ago, things began to get really interesting.

The Roku box was basically just a plastic box o’ software — software that could be built into machines that are already connected to your TV.

One by one, the announcements came: Netflix instant movies became a TiVo feature. An Xbox 360 feature. A Blu-ray DVD player feature (LG and Samsung). Even a feature built right into the TV sets themselves (LG and Vizio, starting this spring).

There’s genius to this master plan; everybody, apparently, wins. Consumers get a better on-demand movie deal than they’ll find anywhere else: $9 a month, unlimited. Netflix attracts millions more subscribers. And the equipment manufacturers gain a marketable new feature without having to spend another nickel on hardware.

You shouldn’t be surprised, in other words, if this instant Netflix thing becomes a huge, megalithic hit, a dominant movie delivery system, a more-or-less standard feature of home theater setups.

To find out what that future will look like, I’ve made an enormous sacrifice in the name of science. I’ve spent several months watching movies, using three of the first Netflix-enhanced products: my own TiVo, an Xbox 360 and an LG Blu-ray player (the BD300). Here’s what I found.

TiVo: The Netflix feature quietly installed itself in the TiVo’s menus one night, without my awareness or involvement. On the TiVo menu, you choose Video on Demand; you’re shown a list of services like YouTube and Amazon Unbox. Choose Netflix, and bam: there’s your list of Watch Now movies, in a scrolling vertical list. Hit Play to play one. (This works on TiVo HD, HD XL and Series 3 models.)

Xbox 360: Assuming you’ve upgraded your Xbox with Microsoft’s most excellent November software update, Netflix is now part of your game console. Log in, choose the Video Marketplace page, click Netflix and there’s your Netflix movie list, gorgeously represented as colorful DVD cases, which flip past as you browse (something like Apple’s Cover Flow feature in iTunes).

There’s one crushing downside, however: you have to pay Microsoft $50 a year for this feature, which is absurd. (That gains you a Gold membership, which also includes other perks.)

LG BD300: The BD300 is a Blu-ray DVD player ($333 bought online). It’s black and shiny and slim, with a beautiful main menu that offers five icons: Movie, Netflix Streaming, Photo, Music and Setup. You don’t need a manual to figure out where to go to see your Watch Now movie list.

On all of these machines, each movie remembers exactly where you left off watching, even if it was on a different machine. Amazing.

Now, instant fixed-fee access to 12,000 movies and TV shows is giddy and life-changing. There are, however, some disappointments.

First, you need a high-speed Internet connection to your TV setup. The faster the service, the better video quality you get; hi-def TV shows, in particular, look fantastic on a decent cable modem.

Second, remember that these movies are streaming. They’re not stored on a hard drive (unlike the Apple TV, Vudu box or Blockbuster’s rival MediaPoint box). So every time you fast-forward or rewind, there’s a 10-second pause for “rebuffering.”

Fortunately, most people don’t scan through movies often; usually, you just sit back and let them play. And when you do scan, little thumbnail images of the movie scenes flash by, one for every 10 seconds of movie, so you have some guidance as you skim.

The third problem is that, as with all Internet downloads, you miss out on a lot: surround sound, subtitles, alternative endings, director’s commentaries and other DVD supplements.

Fourth, and biggest, problem: not all of those 12,000 movies are, ahem, what you’d call Oscar material. There’s an awful lot of chaff, and no new DVD releases at all. (Thanks to the ridiculous Hollywood system of “release windows,” Internet services can’t offer new movies until after they have had their runs on pay-per-view, hotels, DVD “new release” periods and so on.)

On the other hand, that still leaves several thousand great marquee movies to choose from (including the entire Starz Play catalog of 1,200 fairly recent hits: “Ratatouille,” “Superbad,” “No Country for Old Men” and the like). Furthermore, you’re still a Netflix DVD-by-mail customer; if you’re craving a movie that just came out on DVD, you can still get it by mail.

Actually, there’s one more point worth noting — not a technical one, but a psychological one. There’s a side effect of “any movie, any time” that not many people consider. Once you stop having to pay for movies individually, once you’re able to freely movie surf, you lose the risk of making the wrong decision — and some of the joy at having made a good one. In short, movies become a little less special.

Nonetheless, the industry has been trying to sell us on Internet movie downloads for years, and yet it’s remained a techie niche until now. It took Netflix to figure out how to crack the technology code, bringing us tantalizingly close to the “any movie, any time” future that’s surely just around the corner.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A Sleek Media Player With a Hint of Mystery By AZADEH ENSHA

December 25, 2008
A Sleek Media Player With a Hint of Mystery By AZADEH ENSHA

The electronics maker Cowon is bringing curvy back. But in addition to having a streamlined curved design, the company's S9 media player is loaded with features.

The multimedia gadget includes a touch screen display in a 16:9 format that uses superbright AMOLED (active matrix organic light emitting diode) technology, which is doing to conventional display technology what the CD did to FM radio. Oh, did we mention the S9 has an FM radio?

You can play 55 hours' worth of music files between charges. The S9 has Bluetooth, and a built-in microphone for live recording. It comes with a 500-megahertz dual-core processor and supports almost every video and audio format (as in, not iTunes). The 2.7-ounce S9 is available now with eight gigabytes ($200) or 16 gigabytes ($240) of internal flash memory.

The Cowon also has a brand so obscure, you'll look like a globe-trotting tech wizard. When someone asks, "What is that, a BlackBerry Storm?" you can calmly reply, "No, it's a Cowon S9 media player." Very jet set. AZADEH ENSHA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/technology/personaltech/25cowon.html?sq=Cowon&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning By MIGUEL HELFT and MOTOKO RICH

October 29, 2008
Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning By MIGUEL HELFT and MOTOKO RICH

SAN FRANCISCO — Settling a legal battle, Google reached an agreement with book publishers and authors that clears the way for both sides to more easily profit from digital versions of printed books.

The agreement, under which Google would pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning efforts, would allow it to make millions of out-of-print books available for reading and purchasing online.

It outlines the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The deal goes some way toward drawing a road map for a possible digital future for publishers and authors, who worried that they were losing control over how their works were used online, as the music industry has.

The settlement, which was announced Tuesday and was subject to court approval, would have the greatest impact on the millions of books that were still protected by copyright but were no longer being printed.

Since 2004, Google has been working with university and research libraries to create digital scans of their collections. Of the approximately seven million books that Google has already scanned, four million to five million are out of print.

Google now makes the content of those books available in its book search service but shows only snippets of text, unless it has permission from the copyright holder to show more.

Under the agreement, Google will now show up to 20 percent of the text at no charge to users. It will also make the entire book available online for a fee. Universities, libraries and other organizations will be able to buy subscriptions that make entire collections of those books available to their visitors.

"This huge body of books that were effectively lost to the marketplace are being rescued," said James Gleick, the author of five books and a member of the board of the Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

Google plans to take 37 percent of the revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors. If Google sells ads on pages where previews of scanned books appear, it will split the revenue on the same basis.

The settlement being paid by Google will go in part to establish a digital book registry that will administer the new system. The money will also be used to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and cover legal fees. At least $45 million is being designated to compensate authors and publishers whose books were scanned by Google before the settlement.

"We as publishers are encouraging the widest possible digital discovery for books, while ensuring the best possible commercial prospects for those books across both print and electronic markets," said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers, at a press conference Tuesday morning.

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and its president of technology, said in an interview that the broader book search service was "the kind of thing we built the company to do."

He added: "The thing that really made it come together is the shared vision of enabling people to get access to this information and enabling the rights holders to be compensated for it."

Google has long said that the scanning project was part of its mission to provide access to all the world's information.

Some authors and publishers hailed the agreement, saying it finally recognized their right to be compensated for their works and to control their distribution.

"It really says that individual authors can still survive in the Internet age and are not going to get dropped off the cliff," said Paul Dickson, author of 50 books and one of the named plaintiffs in the Authors Guild suit.

But some librarians and legal experts worried that the deal would give Google too much control over books and other materials that are the backbone of the nation's library system.

"On the one hand, one admires all of Google's inventions," said Rick Prelinger, board president of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that has scanned and made available online one million public domain books. "But when you start to see a single point of access developing for world culture, by default, it is disturbing."

The settlement of the lawsuits, which were filed in 2005, did not resolve the question of whether Google's unauthorized scanning of copyrighted books was permissible under copyright law.

Still, publishers were claiming victory, noting that under the settlement, publishers and authors must give permission for snippets of their in-print books to be included in Google's search program. Google had argued that under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law, it did not need such permission.

"I think that it is a stupendous victory for rights holders of the written word, because it has established that we should and must maintain control over the intellectual property that writers create and that we invest in," said Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster, one of the parties to the suit brought on behalf of the Association of American Publishers.

Ms. Reidy added that she did not view the settlement merely as a victory for publishers and authors, but also as an opportunity, enabled by Google. "Not only did we win our point, we also did so while enabling Google to move forward in creating opportunities for authors in the future," she said.

Google said its decision to no longer show snippets for in-print books without permission was made simply to secure the settlement.

"It is not a concession of our legal position," said David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/technology/internet/29google.html?sq=Rich%20Google%20Strikes%20Deal&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/7sjpw

Mourning Old Media's Decline By DAVID CARR

October 29, 2008
The Media Equation
Mourning Old Media's Decline By DAVID CARR

The news that Google settled two longstanding suits with book authors and publishers over its plans to digitize the world's great libraries suggests that some level of détente could be reached between old media and new.

If true, it can't come soon enough for the news business.

It's been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

It goes on. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial staff would be reduced by 40 percent.

And two weeks ago, TV Guide, one of the famous brand names in magazines, was sold for one dollar, less than the price of a single copy.

The paradox of all these announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem.

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper's Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.

"The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem," said Clay Shirky, the author of "Here Comes Everybody." "The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones."

For readers, the drastic diminishment of print raises an obvious question: if more people are reading newspapers and magazines, why should we care whether they are printed on paper?

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for.

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes — or sometimes pennies — is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.

The authors and book publishers looking for royalties from the Google deal may be the lucky ones in the old media sweepstakes. Print publishers are madly cutting, in part because the fourth quarter, postfinancial crisis, is going to be a miserable one. Advertising from the car industry, retail business and financial services — for years, the three sturdy legs of a stool that print once rested comfortably on — are in steep decline.

So who can still afford to pay for the phone calls that reporters have to make? USA Today was made exempt from the current rounds of cuts at Gannett but even national papers, including The New York Times, have resorted to modest staff cuts over the last year. The blogosphere has had its share of news breaks, but absent a functioning mainstream media to annotate, it could be pretty darn quiet out there.

At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a "cesspool" of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings.

But in this case, it wasn't an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.htm?%2339;s%20Decline=&sq=Mourning%20Old%20Media&st=Search&scp=1&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/7sje7

How we read online.

Lazy Bastards
How we read online.By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 1:00 PM ET
You're probably going to read this.
It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.
To really get your attention, I should write like this:
Bulleted list
Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
Short sentence fragments
Explanatory subheads
No puns
Did I mention lists?
What Is This Article About?For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?
It's a Jungle Out ThereThat's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)
Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.
Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)
Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.
Screens vs. PaperWhat about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?
When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.
The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:
Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
Minimize reflections.
Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
Avoid MySpace.
Back to the JungleNielsen's apt description of the online reader: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone.
And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer:
One idea per paragraph
Half the word count of "conventional writing"! (Ouch!)
Other stuff along these lines
Nielsen often sounds like a cross between E.B. White and the Terminator. Here's his advice in a column titled "Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy": "A good editor should be able to cut 40 percent of the word count while removing only 30 percent of an article's value. After all, the cuts should target the least valuable information."
[Ed. Note: Fascinating asides about the writer's voice, idiosyncrasies, and fragile ego were cut here.]
He's RightI kid about Nielsen, but he's very sensible. We're active participants on the Web, looking for information and diversion. It's natural that people prefer short articles. As Nielsen states, motivated readers who want to know everything about a subject (i.e., parents trying to get their kid into a New York preschool) will read long treatises with semicolons, but the rest of us are snacking. His advice: Embrace hypertext. Keep things short for the masses, but offer links for the Type A's.
No Blogs, ThoughNielsen may be ruthless about brevity, but he doesn't advocate blogging. Here's his logic: "Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easier to write. But they don't build sustainable value."
That's a debatable point. My experience has been that a thoughtful blogger who tags his posts can cover a subject well. But Nielsen's idea is that people will read (and maybe even pay) for expertise that they can't find anywhere else. If you want to beat the Internet, you're not going to do it by blogging (since even OK thinkers occasionally write a great blog post) but by offering a comprehensive take on a subject (thus saving the reader time from searching many sites) and supplying original thinking (offering trusted insight that cannot be easily duplicated by the nonexpert).
Like a lot of what Nielsen says, this is both obvious and thoughtful.
Ludic ReadingNielsen focuses on how to hold people's attention to convey information. He's not overly concerned with pleasure reading.
Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading." Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:
When we like a text, we read more slowly.
When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.
Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.
I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.
Final Unnecessary ThoughtWe'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."
Moby Dick has become a spa.
Slate is Grand Central Station.
OK, you may leave now.Michael Agger is a Slate senior editor. You can reach him at slate.browser@gmail.com
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2193552/

Geeks Crash a House of Fashion By DAVID CARR

May 19, 2008
The Media Equation
Geeks Crash a House of Fashion By DAVID CARR

Of all the dot-com publishing franchises, Wired seemed the most likely to end up as road kill on a superhighway it helped create.

The seminal artifact of the Web 1.0, it was bought by Condé Nast Publications in 1998 and then lost two-thirds of its ad sales during the bust from 2000 to 2002. Its newsstand sales dropped by over a third in the same period, and its Web site was no help because, well, it didn’t even own its site.

Chris Anderson, then of The Economist, was dropped into the crater in 2001 as editor in chief. A few months into his tenure, he and I sat in a booth in the Condé Nast cafeteria as he earnestly explained that Wired was not a confection of the digital age, but a magazine about the culture to come.

“This isn’t the domain of techies anymore. It has gone mainstream in a way that doesn’t diminish its power, but illustrates it,” he said.

Yeah, right, I remember thinking.

He was right. Magazines like The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Business 2.0, eCompany Now all went down the digital drain, but Wired rowed carefully and slowly away from its geek origins and survived. (Fast Company, another magazine I suggested was toast, is managing a similar feat on a smaller level.)

Wired had a very respectable 1,300 ad pages last year, and its ads are up slightly so far this year, an achievement in an era of secular and cyclical decline that is threatening all manner of old media. Newsstand sales are edging back to the boom years, and it didn’t hurt that along the way, Mr. Anderson penned a conceptual book, “The Long Tail,” that became the keystone for PowerPoints all over the land.

Perhaps most important, in 2006, the company reunited Wired.com and Wired magazine by buying the site from Lycos for $25 million, a fraction of its $83 million price back when Condé Nast bought the magazine in 1998. The traffic has tripled since the acquisition and the Wired brand, which once was perched on a very thin reed, is now a sturdy plank.

You might think that Condé Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square — where the September issue of Vogue is viewed as one of humankind’s crowning achievements — would be the last place to look for Web innovation. With its fat, luscious magazines and elevators full of thin, luscious people, it would seem to be the antithesis of the sneaker-wearing run-and-gun aesthetic of the Web.

After all, rather than run the risk of dulling the luster of the printed Vogue or Gourmet, the company produced Style.com and Epicurious.com, which took some content from the magazines, but kept the Web at arm’s length.

But there have been signs that the company is serious about constructing a digital business that is less beside the point. Soon after getting his hands on Wired.com, Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of the parent company, moved to buy Reddit.com, a social news site along the lines of Digg, although smaller.

Last week, all the attention was focused on the $1.8 billion grab by CBS for eyeballs with the purchase of CNet. But during the same week, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, a small but very influential Web tech site; Webmonkey, a site for Web developers that will be restarted today; and Hot Wired, a storied brand from early Internet days — which ran the first banner ad ever. The price was not disclosed, but the company probably spent another $25 million on the acquisition, according to executives there familiar with the deal.

Between the $50 million already invested, and another $50 million that may end up being spent on discreet, small acquisitions, Condé Nast has essentially re-geeked Wired. Much of the allure of the acquired sites is harvesting the bright young things who thought them up. But apart from all that the brain-collecting, executives at Condé Nast said that with the new properties at Wired Digital, the company will now have a male-skewing audience of about 19 million unique visitors, which will put them in the neighborhood of Forbes.com and the various Dow Jones Web sites.

Of course, every big media company is buying digital properties — in a landgrab either for audience or bragging rights. Condé Nast’s tack is different. It has a long history of financing impresarios and remaining patient, going back to Alexander Liberman, a Russian immigrant who arrived at the company in 1941 as a designer and became its protean editorial director. Tina Brown crossed an ocean to bring Vanity Fair back from the brink and then picked up The New Yorker and gave it a good tug. Anna Wintour, left to her own devices, turned Vogue into a behemoth, large enough to spin off Teen Vogue and Men’s Vogue, as well.

True to form, the captains of the Condé Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit — it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia — any more than they have told Ms. Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.

“We did not buy these sites to dictate what they should be doing,” said Mr. Newhouse, sitting in a borrowed office in the huge headquarters built by his father, Donald Newhouse, and his uncle, S. I. Newhouse. “There is a debate among big media companies about whether you achieve scale in digital businesses through big acquisitions, and all the cost and overhead that goes with it, or whether you do what we are doing, which is to lay the groundwork for a strategy that allows for real growth over time.” (He didn’t mention CNet, but he didn’t have to.)

David Carey, the group president with oversight over Portfolio, Wired, the company’s golf magazines and the ad sales at Wired Digital, would like to see a digital division that helps the company, which has always leaned on fashion-oriented print publications, make money off of a business audience as well.

“We have a great editor in Chris at Wired and a great team at Wired.com that has created a nicely profitable franchise in print and digital,” he said last Thursday. “We think we can scale that on the digital side through acquisition and growth into something meaningful.”

Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Condé Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — O.K., he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Condé Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business.

“We didn’t have to take them on faith,” he said. “They have a track record of understanding what they acquire, which was alarmingly not the case with the other parties we talked to.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com.