Still in rude and frosty vein, I buried myself deeper in my lunchtime reading, after shaking his hand, when André B showed up at the Canteen and plonked himself virtually next to me. The unfortunate fellow's going through one of the phases that means he's best left alone.
But still he was out to provoke (I summarise):
"What are you reading?"
"Science et Vie."
"Is is still as bad as it was?" The sneer was almost audible. "Not on a par with 'Nature' or 'Science'? A popularising magazine?"
"Not especially, André. I find it worthwhile enough to suscribe to, often very well-written."
He peered closer.
"Ah. Sub-atomic particles. For the kind of people in search of the very latest kind of everything."
'It's really quite interesting." The warning edge must have slipped into my voice.
"But what is its hidden agenda, its ideology?"
"Its ideology? I'm not aware that there is one!"
"It doesn't talk about psychoanalysis then? All about brain structure and neurons..."
"The focus is more on the hard sciences, yes."
"So it considers psychoanalysis of no great interest. Hmm. That's what I mean by its ideology."
Now I was exasperated, since it was evident that we were headed straight back to yet further discourse on Papa Freud.
"I'm no longer terribly interested in psychoanalysis myself, these days," I told him bluntly, without bothering to qualify the observation. "I can't think of anybody I know who's been through it and come out the better for it."
"Oh!" This exclamation was followed by a theatrically pained silence and then a muttered something I didn't catch apart from the word "knife".
A moment later, he shoved his newspaper under my nose, in which he was busy underlining passages of yet more on the horrors perpetrated by the American and Israeli governments...
If Baudier wants me to blog him again, which he does, insisting on believing that being one of the cast here adds to his international renown whether I'm nice or nasty, he must find a new hobbyhorse or two. I'm not flogging his regular ones to death.
Tom Coates is generally less unkind, noting that there "are people out there reading (my mother, my brother, some potential employers) who I have to be aware of." Me too, but I can't let my own awareness of those who constitute the "Faithful 5 ¾" -- as still I prefer to think of those who regularly stop by -- be a constraint on what I write, even when the family take issue with me.
Though I'm not deliberately hurtful and respect people's privacy, there's no point in being any more paranoid about this blog than I am on the rare occasions I've known my email to be be tapped or the more frequent ones when somebody's listening in on 'phone calls, as can happen at work. If they don't like it, that's their lookout.
But Tom can be trenchant sometimes too, even aggressive, by his own admission today at 'plasticbag'.
As part of an ongoing debate, he writes:
"My link read: 'I've noticed that people are much less intellectually rigorous when they read articles that they agree with. Case in point: Most read blogs least original, says blech 2lmc'."
The debate, which has been lively in the blogosphere, was triggered by an article Amit Asaravala wrote for 'Wired':
"The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution" ('Warning: Blogs Can be Infectious'; Wired', March 5).
Few things raise my journalist's hackles more than this failure to attribute copy or to source your material. You see it frequently and I've got four words for it: plagiarism, disrespect, incompetence and idleness.
It's because this is one of my hobbyhorses that some names, including one or two "famous" ones, have been ousted from my blogroll without compunction. I'll happily link to people I disagree with, knaves included, but not those who ignore the basic criteria for credibility.
Amit's story for 'Wired' told us that the HP researchers had come to their conclusions with the help of the 'Blogpulse' innovation from marketing and business intelligence outfit Intelliseek.
This firm has been mining data since 1997 and is one of many whose activities, while part of the common business practice of our time, make me feel uneasy. Its press room (Intelliseek Events) promotes what they call "Webinars", such as this one on March 23:
"'10 Things Everyone Needs to Know About Word-of-Mouth'
What marketers traditionally know as 'word-of-mouth' behavior has exploded with the growth of online discussions, Internet 'buzz,' online blogs and other consumer-to-consumer discussions in cyberspace. Intelliseek dubs the phenomenon 'Consumer-Generated Media,' and CMO Pete Blackshaw lets marketers and others in on the key concepts to remember about today's cyber-enabled word-of-mouth."
Their previous "Webinar", next Tuesday, is on "Financial Services: 'Unlock the Insights in Customer Data'."
To be clear, I'm not for one instant casting doubt on Intelliseek's ethical code or integrity. I'm simply using the firm and its tool as an example of one of any number of ways people out there are professionally mining and classifying all kinds of information we -- you, me, hundreds of thousands of bloggers -- often unwittingly cast out into the Net, the better to be "targeted" in the relentless process of free market capitalism in action.
Like the dozens of cameras that film the city dwellers among us as we go about our daily business, above ground and under it, this is a fact of life we have to endure.
To endure such practices, however, obviously doesn't mean I like them.
Where I do feel an affinity with Baudier is in querying social trends and underlying assumptions about their rightness and necessity we are all expected to take for granted, particularly the international homogenisation of economic and consumer practices which make it hard to distinguish nowadays between old-fashioned notions of "left" and "right".
Last weekend, I read an article in the "Trib" about a development in France which had me musing a livid letter to the paper.
"It was an affair that could not last," wrote Alan Riding in 'Paris intellectuals on ramparts' (IHT). "One year after France's leftist intelligentsia and conservative government joined forces to oppose war in Iraq, the love fest has ended in fresh talk of war. The intellectuals have now accused the government of waging 'war on intelligence' - brain power, that is, not spying. The government, in turn, views an angry petition signed by about 40,000 members of the educated elite as itself a declaration of war.
Behind the squabble is money, of course."
Where the hell does that arrogant, patronising and complacent "of course" come into it? That's what I wanted to know. Had Riding actually read the petition? Was that all it came down in his opinion disguised as fact? Money?
And how dared the paper publish as front-page "news", without qualification, a masterly achievement in completely missing the point of the petition?
The "Trib" was rarely more than a compendium of agency copy to begin with, but with this, since the take-over by the New York Times, it really had gone down the tubes. It was pontificating to the world about the "squabble" in France in a way which perpetuated received ideas and almost implied that the ruling French right was right to dismiss the petition as an exercise in "overwhelming conceit", as Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon did.
On reflection, Riding's article is more balanced than I initially allowed. Nevertheless, it's penned on the basis of the unwritten assumption that free-market capitalism and savage budget cuts across the spectrum raised by intellectuals with nothing in common but a "gripe" -- another loaded word -- are, of necessity, the natural, correct and sensible way of managing an economy and a culture.
And suddenly, I could be Baudier myself, angrily underlining whole passages in articles that get up my nose.
Instead, I align myself with ... ahem, everybody else who signed the petition (at 'Les Inrocks)' and thus protested against the trend to uniformity and "dumbing down". We fear an undermining, almost by default, of the right to free thought, creativity, genuine innovation and a caring society. These are the things defended by many of the signatories.
It's not merely money the researchers, artists and teachers want, except in so far as they've objected to cuts in spending in key sectors of life and welfare. I've read the petition as an expression of outrage, in fact, at the assumption that financial gain, profit and cost effectiveness are -- of course! -- the motive forces underlying any healthy society.
Here I come back to Tom Coates. If something interests him less than a fair number of bloggers, it's his own navel, which is one reason why his site is among the oldest "friends" in my blogroll (even if he doesn't know me from Adam). Tom has also long been one of the rare people occasionally to look at the blogosphere from the outside and challenge assumptions.
For once, I'm going to quote a blogger on blogging at length, because part of Tom's essay today -- 'Why do bloggers kill kittens?' (plasticbag) -- taking HP's Blog Epidemic Analyser for his starting point, strikes a very strong chord in my own thinking:
"Firstly, we get straightaway down to the distinction between weblog as written for an audience versus weblog as written for me. Now clearly it's not just for me - I have to change what I write on occasion because there are people out there reading (my mother, my brother, some potential employers) who I have to be aware of. I don't write in the same way as I did when I started. Then I could bitch about people I didn't like and talk about my life without feeling particularly exposed. I was talking to strangers with no impact on my life. Now I'm not. But while my weblog isn't any longer 'just' for me, it's definitely not just for an audience either. I use my weblog as a searchable archive - a repository of things that I've seen and read and that I thought were interesting, I use it to record thoughts that I think might be useful and that otherwise I'll forget. I use it as a notepad, as a chronicle, as a place to store my photographs. There's an interplay between trying to be fresh for other people and not really giving a damn about other people. I think this comes back to my understanding of a weblog as a representation of a person online - an avatar with a voice. A self-representation is about being both true to yourself and knowing how to self-edit in different circumstances. That's what a weblog is to me.
Secondly, I operate with an understanding of my links as a kind of microcontent vote (also here and here). It's the idea that by linking to something I say, 'Yes - this deserves some of your attention - this is a good thing', and that the more sites that do that the more attention something will get. So by voting for something I like (alongside dozens of other people) that thing becomes incrementally more visible in Google, Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop. Also, in turn, those people who don't read a lot of other weblogs but read mine also get exposed to it. And those other people who have weblogs may choose to pick up that link and post it to, thus exposing more people to it in turn - putting their votes behind it too. Massive link propagation (as far as I'm concerned) is not a bad thing at all - it's how the web determines what's worth reading."
The rest of Tom's long piece is well worth reading; I've picked up only his primary links to previous thoughts in the above. In the past, with regard to other blog "analysis tools", he has rightly queried the dangerous US-centricity of what they sometimes come up with. I share that concern.
It's evident that American websites, blogs and cultures dominate the Internet and are bound to do so for a long time to come. But Tom's ideas help me to firm up a notion I've already recently voiced here.
If it's on Daypop, Blogdex and the like, or now in the "top 40" of the 'Blog Epidemic Analyser', then that's an excellent reason to buck the trend and blog about something totally different.
At the risk, of course, of seeing somebody pinch it. Unattributed. But I think I'd still marginally prefer to have any original notions of my own stolen, uncredited, than be a conformist. I'd rather be hung for a wolf, or -- heaven forfend! -- an accursed intellectual, than run with the sheep.
9:29:19 PM link 
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