Extreme Changes Ahead!

I will be changing my blog from the old standard blogger templates to the new beta layout this weekend. Expect to find some weird stuff appearing, disappearing and possibly bugs floating around. Along the way I will move from using my del.icio.us account to tag posts, to using the new labelling system. This will be the second blog I've extensively modified using the new beta layouts, so all should go well.

Citizen vs Tribesman

America's ABC has an interesting article on Why We Will Never See Democracy in the Middle East. Steven Pressfield says the key is the longstanding conflict between the mindset of 'citizen' and 'tribesman'.

“What exactly is the tribal mind-set? It derives from that most ancient of social organizations, whose virtues are obedience, fidelity, warrior pride, respect for ancestors, hostility to outsiders and willingness to lay down one's life for the cause/faith/group. The tribe's ideal leader is closer to Tony Soprano than to FDR and its social mores are more like those of Geronimo's Apaches than the city council of Scarsdale or Shepherd's Bush.”

He makes a particular point about how the citizen takes part in war, but the tribesman takes revenge:

“The tribesman does not operate by a body of civil law but by a code of honor. If he receives a wrong, he does not seek redress. He wants revenge. The taking of revenge is a virtue in tribal eyes, called badal in the Pathan code of nangwali. A man who does not take revenge is not a man. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the sectarian militias of Iraq are not in the war business, they are in the revenge business. The revenge-seeker cannot be negotiated with because his intent is bound up with honor. It is an absolute.”

If true, then that places the War on Terrorism not within the religious grounds of Christianity vs Islam, nor within the political arena of Democracy vs Theocracy, but on the more philosophical grounds of State vs Tribe - or from the terrorists' view, of personal revenge.

I think that there is clear example of citizens winning this war once before ... Australia's ABC aired an interesting documentary last night called Carthage: The Roman Holocaust that looked at how Carthage was copied, and eventually surpassed, by Rome. The point made was that Rome took the advanced culture, agriculture and trading routes of the Carthaginians and added an extra element - the cult of the Republic. Suddenly people who were once Roman enemies, came to see themselves as Roman citizens, and part of what their ancestors once fought. Historian Richard Miles points to the baths, the theatre and the temple as the tools Rome used to bind newly conquered peoples to the idea of citizenship.

Carthaginian Veterans
Is there a lesson in this for our conflict with the tribesmen of the Middle East, or closer to home, the Solomon Islands?

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Do Web 2.0 thingies increase sales?

“the web 2.0 thing you built me didn't actually increase sales...”

Care of Hugh.

Scoble's not sure that they do (yet). I'm pretty sure that it might be the latest fashion to have a Web 2.0 front-end (and good design), but it certainly does NOT guarantee sales.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy

From sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor blog:

“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is that in any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, so that those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

Computers not so boring after all ...

In his Wired article Dream Machines, Will Wright (creator of The Sims) makes an interesting point about the difference between the traditional view of computers and the part they really play in our lives:

“Think of it this way: Most technologies can be seen as an enhancement of some part of our bodies (car/legs, house/skin, TV/senses). From the start, computers have been understood as an extension of the human brain; the first computers were referred to as mechanical brains and analytical engines. We saw their primary value as automated number crunchers that far exceeded our own meager abilities.

But the Internet has morphed what we used to think of as a fancy calculator into a fancy telephone with email, chat groups, IM, and blogs. It turns out that we don't use computers to enhance our math skills - we use them to expand our people skills.”

That's a really interesting point given that universities are still focusing on testing maths skills in computer courses. Are young IT graduates getting the training they really need to understand the place computers play in the modern world?

Have they been taught psychology, usability, graphic design, communications? Do they have any idea at all about how to make not just a technically excellent product, but how to answer real human needs? Clearly this is at the heart of recent successes in Web companies - MySpace, Flickr, digg and del.icio.us depend upon the social aspects of the technology and are (in some ways) clearly very simple.

More to the point, are modern IT organisations looking for the right people skills in the staff they hire? Are the job descriptions analyst/programmer, systems architect, DBA still meaningful? Or are we perhaps going to see a great divide between those who understand people and creative thought (the valuable ones), and those who fulfil the role of mechanics and street sweepers (the ones we outsource to the lowest bidder) in our new world?

Further on Lebanon

Further to yesterday's post, Dogfight At Bankstown points out some interesting information. As he says:

“One thing about this Hezbollah-Hamas-Israeli conflict: It certainly has exposed more that it has conquered.“””

Photos from Lebanon: Propaganda or Journalism?

During the War in Lebanon, we were given a nightly bombardment of shocking images of the toll taken on the Lebanese people. This continued during the day as the press ran with disturbing photos of the dead and dying, and the aftermath of war. Some small mention was made of the photoshopped smoke clouds that Reuters' bought from one of their contract photographers, Hajj.

But at the same time, alternative media outlets like Zombietime and Little Green Footballs have been unearthing some shocking irregularities in the War in Lebanon images that Reuters, AP and other newswire services have been shopping around. The LA Times picked up on this two weeks ago:

““”There's more, and it's worth your time to take a look. That's one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit.

What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred. Some of it may stem from the urge every photographer feels to make a photo perfect. Some of it probably flows from a simple economic imperative — a freelancer who produces dramatic images gets picked up more and paid more. Moreover, the obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world press means there's an eager market for pictures of dead Lebanese babies.”

At least Andrew Bolt is making a fair bit of noise on his blog (and here) about the Australian press' silence on their being taken in by the Hezbollah ambulance hoax.

Reuters has addressed some of these issues on their blog, but by and large they have only concerned themselves with photos that are blatantly and undeniably false. Their corrections page mentions that Hajj was posting straight to the Global News desk and not via a photo editor - a practice they claim to have tightened up on, but that does not address the root cause of many of these issues - which is that Hezbollah is blatantly manipulating the media - and getting away with it!

Finally, some fun has been poked at those who have accepted the fake images: