Terrible Idea (.net)

I’m on a vacation of sorts until Monday.  I may post something tomorrow, but probably not.  Meanwhile, here’s a great post by Scott Greenfield, succinctly summing up my (and most of my classmates’) views on the Bluebook.  It’s called “Once There Was a Bluebook.”

I like the turn at the end, where he sticks one to the law profs and accuses them of desiring arcane knowledge to raise the barrier of entry to law journals.  I don’t know how true that is on an individual level, but the incentives are there on an institutional level to make it a plausible scenario.

This points to a larger problem: the tension between a strictly controlled, “peer review” system of academic publishing, and a free for all, wikipedia-style publishing.  Peer review ensures quality (and correct citation formats), but a more free publication would make it so, as Mr. Greenfield says, “anybody could do it,” providing an venue for ideas challenging the accepted paradigms in whatever field.  I think this is important, especially outside of the hard sciences.  Hard science relies more on empirical data to disprove its accepted theories far more than non-hard science fields, which means that a small journal committee doesn’t have as much room to wiggle around and prevent non-accepted research or conclusions into their academic publications.

Anyway, I’m already running late, more when I get back.

In a strange reversal of the norm, I was made aware of an internet resource by a print medium.  Sitting down to eat my breakfast, I flipped open the day’s issue of the local rag.  The first thing I turn to in the Monroe Evening News is the opinion section, because I find it’s the best way to get a feel for what’s actually happening in town — columns about local politicians, letters to the editors showing how people feel about last week’s news, and so on.

Today, the feature opinion was… a blog.  In a startling fit of technological savvy, the Monroe Evening News had reprinted a blog entitled “If You Seek Great Beer, Look Around You” from the blog Michigan Beer Buzz.  Now, having perused the website myself, it makes sense — the blog is hosted by a site run by the Monroe Evening News, called “Monroe Blogs.”  But of course, this fact is also interesting.  My local paper is getting involved in online alternative media.  It’s even sponsoring it.  It seems like an excellent symbiosis, and something that other papers should consider.  By setting up a central site where community members can write about the goings-on in their community on a regular basis, the paper gains (1) the goodwill of the citizens, (2) potential material for opinion columns (like this), and (3) a finger on the pulse of the community.  For the same reason that I read the letters to the editor to find out what people in Monroe really think, the paper can read the blogs they host.  The paper has created a sort of an online town square.

(On a side note, glancing through the articles on MI Beer Buzz, I did a double take when I saw an article with this quote, and the attribution: “Great Lakes, great brew.”  -Jack Hittinger, Hillsdale Collegian.  I knew Jack in passing in undergrad, and he’s penned a great article also talking about Michigan beers.  It’s a small world.)

Another great reason for posting the blog article in the print paper is that it consists of an exhortation to Monroe bars to carry more Michigan-brewed beer.  Though I had the pleasure of enjoying many a fine Michigan barley soda while in undergrad and beyond, I never realized that my native state has such a fine brewing industry.  But despite this brewing industry that rates its own blog, very few bars in Monroe carry Michigan-brewed beers.  I can vouch for this fact from personal experience — I’ve been to many a bar in the Monroe area, and the selection is sadly limited.  So, cheers to Sarah, Kevin, Rob, and John at Michigan Beer Buzz.  Here’s to Michigan beer, and to the hope that I’ll be hoisting a tasty, Michigan-brewed Bells instead of a Killian’s next time I’m at the local watering hole.

I’ve talked before about the benefits of television shows over full-length films, but there are distinctions within TV that are important as well.  While watching various TV shows in undergrad, I came to appreciate the difference between episodic and serial shows.

Episodic shows have no real continuity between the episodes — they could be watched out of order, and very little would be lost.  They are characterized by granularity of the individual episodees; hence the name.  Serial shows need to be watched in series for the full effect, because the plot arcs over multiple episodes.

Few shows are wholly one or the other.  A perfect example is The X-Files, which has monster-of-the-week episodes that can be viewed in isolation, at least within the context of their respectives seasons, but also has “mytharc” episodes that carry on a larger story spanning the entire series.

Realizing the full advantages of the TV medium that I talked about earlier — the discrete episodes and extended time-frame that allows for more exploration of characters and themes, as well as the develpment of those characters and themes — is best served by serial shows.

Each discrete episode of Lost concentrates on one person or one couple, but contributes to the development of the overall story.  Simply having character studies, viewable in any order and disconnected from the overall story, would not allow for the characters to develop as they have.  Locke’s transformation from a mysterious guru-like figure, to an angry, scared cripple, then to the current violent and flawed visionary, could not have happened without a continuing story arc.

But within serial shows, there is another important distinction that I had not thought about until recently.  Some shows have a direction from the beginning, like (allegedly) Lost, or the serial of serials, Babylon 5, whose entire 5-season story arc was carefully planned before filming even began.  The other possibility is not to have a specific end in mind, but to work from episode to episode, while staying within a coherent story arc.  I started thinking about this style a couple days ago, when I found out that Ronald Moore and the writers of Battlestar Galactica subscribe to this approach.

Now, this tidbit comes from the trivia section on BSG’s IMDB page, so take it with a grain of salt.  If anyone can confirm it, please let me know.  But regardless of its truth, I think this method of developing a story-arc driven TV show has distinct advantages over years-ahead planning.

As I’ve said, part of what makes a serial show appealing is the chance for character development.  Obviously this sort of development can be written into the story arc from the beginning, and small allowances can be made by the writers within the pre-planned story, but this puts the creative control into the hands of a single person, or a single homogenous group of people: the writers.

But when the show is developed more spontaneously, the writers will (hopefully) react to how the actors treat their characters, and how the audience reacts to the characters.  The development of the story arc becomes a dialogue among the viewers, the actors, the directors, and the writers.  The show can develop organically, around the strengths of the actors, the interest of the audience, and the overall plan of the writers.  There can be character (and plot) development in the truest sense of the phrase.

In Battlestar Galactica, the story seems to be steaming toward a confrontation involving Helo and Athena’s hybrid daughter.  But consider this: after the miniseries that kicked off the entire show, the plan was for Helo to be written off — he was left on Caprica, assumed dead.  However, the actor (and the character) were strong enough that they decided to start a subplot involving his survival on Cylon-occupied Caprica.  They brought in a different Cylon Boomer, but even then, it wasn’t until later in season 1 that they decided that the subplot was going to involve the Cylon’s interest in biological reproduction.  Now, the entire story is swirling around this issue.  And, as a side note, having a survivor on Caprica allowed the introduction of the character of Anders as a resistance leader, who is now revealed as one of the final five Cylons, another centerpiece of the storyline.  The entire series is culminating around people whose characters were written off, or didn’t even exist, at the beginning of the series.

Of course, not having a definite plan can lead to meandering, aimless stories that limp into their final days, and are cancelled because of low ratings rather than ending on their own terms.  The X-Files is a prime example.  Having a goal can keep the stories moving and driven, something that Babylon 5 did admirably until they had to wrap up the story in the 4th season when they thought they were going to be cancelled, only to be renewed for a 5th season that unfortunately had to consist mostly of filler material.  But if the writing can stay tight, like it has (mostly) on BSG, I think the un-planned serial has more to offer than the pre-scripted story.

So, I applaud the BSG team’s decision to take the story where it goes on its own, rather than where they want to push it.  Similarly, I’m happy that they’ve decided to end the story on their own this season, and I can’t wait to see what they do with it.  I may be writing about specific episodes as they air in the coming weeks.

At Concurring Opinions, Professor James Grimmelmann writes a post called “DRMbarassment for Us Law Professors?“  The title is derived from the specific technology about which he writes in the post, but I want to talk briefly about the larger points he brings up at the end of his post.  He writes:

We law professors who regularly opine on high technology are often dangerously blasé about the details of the technology we’re opining on. We get caught up in the minutiae of 1201(a)(1) versus 1201(a)(2) versus 1201(b), and we don’t pay anywhere near as much attention to the surrounding web of other kinds of IP, business arrangements, and especially technical specifications as we ought to. Consider these posts another plea for better interdisciplinarity. Our students are doing a better job of it than we are.

I think these problems are true on a broader scale.  Over at Simple Justice, in a post called “Hitting the Internet Wall,” Scott Greenfield touches on the same problem from a different side.  He writes:

[Cross-examining a witness with material from a website] made me competent to talk about [technology] back then. In retrospect, the idea of an old codger like me (meaning anyone over 30) talking about technology is laughable. Today, if you haven’t tried any of the tech ideas that appeared online in the past 30 minutes, you’re out of date. I am, regretfully, out of date.

The technical expertise required to understand what is going on with something even as simple as visiting searching for something on Google is substantial, and the details of what happens behind the scenes can be legally significant.  For those of us who have grown up with computers and the internet, certain things come naturally.  For the old codgers, new technology must be imperfectly analogized to old concepts.  Spyware as trespass to chattels comes immediately to mind.  And in the legal world, where precise definitions are needed, imperfect analogies can lead to mistakes.

These sorts of problems aren’t going to go away.  The nominal students know more than the teachers when it comes to many aspects of modern technology, and I don’t know of any easy way to fix the problem, other than waiting until the old guard retires and the youngsters move into the roles of power.  Of course, if the pace of innovation continues, we will be just as clueless as our former teachers.  At least we don’t live in boring times.