Shakespeare Was an Aggregating Social-Media Pirate

Portrait of Shakespeare

Aargh?

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, theater critic Charles McNulty wrote a marvelous column inspired by his objections to the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. Though he disputes the movie’s thesis that no one with Shakespeare’s lower middle class roots could have written such great masterpieces, that wasn’t his aim in writing. His goal, rather, was to remind us that the Bard’s works were not simply the output of an individual, but the result of a collaboration with a crowd of other writers, actors, scholars, and editors.

Nothing McNulty tells us would surprise even a casual student of Shakespeare. But without perhaps meaning to, he offers some enlightening arguments against those who doubt the validity or value of social media.

While Shakespeare “is indisputably the master architect of his work—the genius in chief, if you will,” McNulty writes, “his plays took a literary village.” His plays, that is, were the result of collaboration and conversation with predecessors, contemporaries, and even later generations. His plots and characters were frequently borrowed, his words undoubtedly shaped by interactions with his actors, and the final form of his output determined by later scholars and editors.

He was a master aggregator, one who would certainly be accused of plagiarism if he was a 21st-century artist. But the accusation would be false. As McNulty writes, what “we would call plagiarism today was considered borrowing back then, a practice cradled in the curriculum.” Shakespeare didn’t simply borrow, though: “Whatever he touched, he alchemized. His poetic and dramatic instincts could spin gold out of dross.” A useful reminder, perhaps, that the best aggregators improve the things they borrow.

Not only would our age treat a contemporary version of Shakespeare as a plagiarist, it would also spurn him as a copyright pirate. The Renaissance, McNulty notes, was “an age unconstrained by modern copyright laws.” As Mike Masnick asked earlier this year, would Shakespeare today “be able to produce any of his classic works, since they’d all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement”?

No, I’m not defending plagiarism, or opposing copyright. But I am saying that an excessive focus on those issues is bad for our culture. Accordingly, I will borrow as my own McNulty’s eloquent conclusion: “Shakespeare’s legacy is pretty much assured. That of our own age is still up for grabs.”

We’ve Got Algorithms. Who Needs Editors?

In an article published last weekend on Mashable, Sarah Kessler asked the question, “Can Robots Run the News?” It’s an important question not just for journalists, but for anyone who creates or curates content on the Web.

The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of algorithms to identify news topics. There’s obvious value to automated content creation, and as Jeff Jarvis has declared, “Data is (are) journalism.” But we should be careful not to confuse computed content with communication.

Computed content is a set of data; communication is the expression of an attitude toward, or perspective on, those data. Without a point of view, content is just an audience speaking to itself.

Using Web analytics from a test period to automatically choose between two headlines, as we’re told the Huffington Post does for its stories, can make sense—if both versions are true to the content. If you balance crowd-sourced feedback with the content creator’s point of view, you’ll have a productive conversation. But if the crowd takes precedence, it may simply replace content’s individual vitality with the bland mean.

Take, for instance, the English title for Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It may not have been crowd sourced, but it certainly plays to a corporate idea of the crowd. Is it really better than the literally translated original title, Men Who Hate Women? (That’s a rhetorical question. The original title nails the book’s central concern; the English version just wraps it in a pulp-fiction cover.)

Even in content marketing, where knowing what people want is critical to the content provider’s success, a one-sided conversation dominated by the audience won’t fly. For a conversation to work, there must be differences between the participants. The power of new media is the way it enables the audience to challenge the creator. That doesn’t mean, though, that the creator should stop challenging the audience.

This balance seems to be what Yahoo VP of Media Jimmy Pitaro is after in the company’s news blog, The Upshot. In her interview with him last week on All Things D, Kara Swisher noted that while some see computational journalism as a “‘democratizing’ of the news, others are more concerned about relying on algorithms to determine the best coverage and the implications for a society guided by its own searches.”

But as Pitaro noted in his video interview, “data and audience insights” constitute just one component of the content. In addition, Yahoo uses the “old-school” methods of “manually identifying topics” through its team of editors and writers.

Similarly, as Kessler mentioned in Mashable and as Claire Cain Miller explored at greater length in yesterday’s New York Times, the tech-news site Techmeme uses both algorithms and editors to produce its content. Why? Because “humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.”

If readers didn’t care about such things, algorithms alone might be enough. But they do care. The same audience whose searches drive the algorithms also want the human touch in their content.  Until computers can pass the Turing Test, it isn’t likely that they will replace people in content creation.

There’s a Reason They Don’t Call It Mobsourcing

An article published today by Michael Masnick on his Techdirt blog takes on a Forbe’s opinion piece that tries to debunk the “myth” of crowdsourcing. The Forbes contributor, Dan Woods, claims that the commonly cited triumphs of crowdsourcing like Wikipedia (the supplier of this definition of crowdsourcing) are in fact the products largely of individuals, not groups.

Masnick’s reaction is basically, “Well, duh!” As he says, “of course there are individuals, and the point of crowdsourcing isn’t that everyone in the crowd is equal, but that they each get to contribute their own special talents, and something better comes out of it.”

The mistake Woods makes in his Forbes piece is in confusing the prolific diversity of crowds with the monolithic single-mindedness of mobs. The one is productive, the other, destructive. Woods’s error is one publishers climbing up the new-media learning curve should strive to avoid.

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