purple motes

Identity theft is a major problem.  Among U.S. households, 6.6% had at least one member who was a victim of identity theft in 2007.   These identity theft victims reported $14.6 billion in financial losses.   For comparison, total direct property losses from criminal and accidental fires in buildings amounted to $10.6 billion in 2007.[1]   Hence financial losses from identity theft were 38% greater than financial losses from structural fires.

Public spending on identity theft protection is much less than public spending on fire protection.  In the U.S., the main government agency that specifically addresses identity theft is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).   The total FTC budget for consumer protection in 2009 was $148 million.[2]  Law enforcement agencies also address identity theft.  Total spending on state and local police protection was $84 billion in 2007.  Probably considerably less than 1% of those resources are used to address identity theft.   Total public spending on identity theft prevention is probably on the order of $500 million.  For comparison, state and local spending on fire protection amounted to $37 billion.[3]   Hence public spending on identity theft prevention probably amounts to only 1% to 2% of public spending on fire protection.

Factors that help explain relatively low protective public spending per dollar of loss from identity theft:

1. Identity theft is a boring public problem.  Fires make good copy for news reporting.
2. Identity theft doesn't cause bodily harm.  Fires caused 3,430 deaths and 17,675 personal injuries in 2007.[4]
3. Identity theft is a relatively new problem.  Fires have been causing cause since humans constructed structures.  Governments have institutionalized fire protection for over a century.

Under current laws, identity theft may be a more public problem than fires.  Identity theft victims don't directly experience a large share of the financial losses from identity theft.   A 2006 U.S. identity theft survey found that 59% of identity theft victims experienced no out of pocket expenses from identity theft.[5]  A large share of identity theft losses are nominally shifted to financial firms and ultimately diffused across the economy.   Building insurance policies probably cover a large share of fire losses.  But building owners directly pay for these policies.  The level of insurance premiums relates personal cost to the risk of property loss from fire.  Of course, fires can spread from building to building.  But economies of scale among persons and criminal organizations perpetrating identity theft has a similar effect.

Public information infrastructure can strengthen identity protection.  Law enforcement efforts can reduce identity theft.  Greater public spending on identity protection seems to make sense.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] Identity theft losses calculated from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Identity Theft Reported by Households, 2007 - Statistical Tables, Tables 1, 4.    Fire losses are from U.S. Statistical Abstract 2010, Table 375.

[2] FTC, FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification Summary, p. 44.

[3] State and local government spending on police and fire protection are from U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government Finance, 2007.

[4] See U.S. Statistical Abstract 2010, Table 375.

[5]  Federal Trade Commission, 2006 Identity Theft Survey Report, p. 37, Fig. 13.

Offer Comments

Average television watching time per U.S. adult grew from 16 hours per week in 1995 to 20 hours per week in 2009.   From 2003 to 2009, television watching time increased 9%.[1]   Television watching time accounts for about half of total personal discretionary time and far exceed time spent on the web.[2]  Not surprisingly, new media firms are eager to combine television and the web.

While traditional television watching continues to dominate time using media, other changes suggest ongoing communications industry changes.  Time spent socializing and communicating in person and time spent reading (as conventionally understood) fell 12% and 7% on average among U.S. adults from 2003 to 2009.   Time spent playing (computer and non-computer) games and computer use for leisure increased 31%. [3]  Time spent playing computer games and using computers for leisure is likely to continue to increase relatively rapidly in the future.

Time use by age categories suggests that easing loneliness is an important value of media use.  Persons 75 years and older spent about twice as much time watching television and reading as do persons ages 15 to 19 years.   The former, elderly group also spend 36% less time socializing and communicating than do the young, later group.   Easy-to-use social networking technology potentially could offer the elderly a more engaging way to spend their time.

*  *  *  *  *

Data: U.S. time use data (Excel version)

Notes:

[1] These figures are for time watching television as the primary activity in non-work time.   They are based on well-developed, openly documented time-budget surveys.  Other commercially produced statistics of television watching time are considerable higher.  See Galbi (2001) Section III.  The second figure is based on comparisons among American Time Use Surveys.  In these surveys, a separate category specifies "computer use for leisure."  Hence television-watching time is best interpreted to mean watching video on the traditional special-purpose and specially placed device called a television.  For the data, see U.S. time use data.

[2] Persons in the U.S. ages 15 and older watched about 4600 minutes of television per month in 2006, compared to about136 minutes of online (web) video per month in March, 2008.   See note [2], sources and details of television vs. online video.   A widely cited comparison of television watching time to "personal Internet time" was quite misleading.

[3] See worksheet on U.S. time use trends over the past six years.

Offer Comments

In sixteenth-century Europe, the Theodore de Bry sold to elite readers expensive books describing foreign lands and peoples.  De Bry himself never left Europe.   His books were reprints, but he added to his sources many intricate, copper-plate engravings and fold-out maps that he created from secondary sources.  He produced the books in the large, prestigious folio format.  He printed the books in Latin as well as in vernacular European languages, and issued them in multi-part series.  Pictures, vernacular languages, and multi-part book series were well-established commercial techniques for expanding book markets.   De Bry thus astutely marketed expensive, prestigious books.

John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, acquired sometime before 1607 the first nine parts of de Bry's Descriptiones Americae (also known at Collectiones Peregrinationum in Indiam, Orientalem et Occidentalem / Grands Voyages).  These parts were bound in an expensive (full calf-skin) binding and kept in the Corpus Christi College library.  Underscoring the perceived value of the volumes, they were secured with a chain to prevent readers' borrowing or taking them.

The above image displays one of de Bry's engravings from Descriptiones Americae.  A Protestant who lost everything fleeing from prosecution in his native Liege in the 1560s, de Bry despised the Spanish and Catholics.  The engraving shows New World natives cannibalizing the Spanish.  One native pours molten gold into a Spanish soldier's mouth.  The engraving isn't a good source of factual knowledge and understanding about people and events in the New World.[*]  It's mainly a record of an elite representational battle that became the Black Legend vs. the White Legend.

Every representation offers a double relation -- a relation to that represented, and a relation to the representation's source.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

Image from German edition dated 1618 (Das sechste Theil Americae oder Der Historien Hieron. Benzo das dritte Buch. Darinnen erzehlet wirt, wie die Spanier die) in the U.S. Library of Congress's Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake.  See America, part 6, German, image 697.

A similar, but less detailed image of Indians pouring gold down a Spaniard's throat appeared earlier in Girolamo Benzoni's Historia del Mundo Nuovo (1565).  This was probably a source for de Bry's engraving.

[*]  de Bry tended to depict natives with European facial features and give them poses and physiques similar to those in Greco-Roman art.   However, many of his engravings do provide valuable historical information about life in the Americas in the sixteenth century.

Offer Comments

In my post on real-world public reasoning, I discussed the reception of Brian Kalt's law review articles on prosecuting murder and other crimes in the fifty-square-mile Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park.  Prof. Kalt responded with an email to me.  Since this was before my email and telephone policy statement, I will not post his email, which was gracious and intellectually substantive.  I responded with the email below.   He in turn responded with further discussion of the issues.  He noted, "Now that I understand what you were saying more, I am satisfied that all the response I could reasonably ask for is contained in the one comment already posted by Mr. Havens."  He also wrote, "I guess I prefer the 'nothing' approach, but not because I feel unfairly treated."

I have decided to post my own email regarding this matter because I don't believe that doing so is unfair to Prof. Kalt and because I believe in the importance of courteous public discussion of scholarly issues.

*  *  *  *  *

Prof. Kalt,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  On your sixth point, I do not think that all your work, or all the work of law professors generally, is useless.  In particular, your article "The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service" strikes me as intellectual impressive, publicly important, and quite useful for anyone thinking about public position of ex-prisoners.  I wish "The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service" had attracted as much attention as "The Perfect Crime."

Both "The Perfect Crime" and "Tabloid Constitutional" were fun to read.  I'm in favor of having fun and even manage occasionally to have some fun in writing.  See, e.g. http://purplemotes.net/2008/08/17/televisions-moving-into-the-toilet/ Having fun makes the world a better place.  I wish more law professors would have fun doing legal work and would share their fun with the world.   In this sense,  you're a great leader for your profession.

My post sought to analyze both attention to the legal issue you discovered and attention to your work concerning that issue.  You put forward a lesson, with a tone of righteous earnestness, about the marketplace of ideas.  I think the lesson you claimed to have learned misses key points of how the marketplace of ideas actually works.

But the point of this correspondence is fairness, not differing analysis or arguments about those issues.  I'll briefly try to convince you that what you feel is unfair really isn't unfair.  I hope to dissipate your feelings of unfairness. If you decide that I've failed, I would be happy to post on my blog the response you sent me, or a revised response if you want to create one, followed by my response.  Alternatively, if you would prefer not to have any public evidence that you noticed my comments (this seems to be a favored approach among persons who consider a commenter to be someone not relevant to their professional standing or beneath them), I'm willing to add to the original post an addendum that might lessen your feelings of unfairness without documenting that you expressed such feelings.

Your points four and five raise issues of fairness.  With regard to point four, you state that you were sincerely concerned that your law journal article could cause someone to be killed.  You also state that you attempted to avoid that bad outcome by notifying the authorities several months before it was published.  As you now recognize, your response to your concern was totally ineffectual.  I credited you with discovering a formal basis for making a sensational claim rather than accused you of extremely poor practical judgment.  I hope that you consider my choice to be fair.

You also state that you did not seek the attention that arose after you posted your paper on SSRN and that my extrapolation that you were competing for attention is unfair.  Please recognize that I am a communications industry economist.  Seeking attention and competing for attention are general, normal types of behavior in communication fields.  Competition for attention is an important economic structure in the legal academy.  To the extant that you want to acknowledge participating in it, competing for attention is not a personal failing for you as a law professor.  I have some sense that academics prefer not to acknowledge among themselves certain obvious aspects of their profession.  But I hope you consider it fair for a communications industry economist to recognize competition for attention.

With regard to point five, you state that it was "a bit unfair" for me to have written, "But surely for a law professor, the crowning moment must have been having a second article concerning the Yellowstone-Idaho crime problem accepted for publication in the Georgetown Law Journal."  That sentence followed quotation of your statement, "The crowning moment, though, was the article in the /National Enquirer/."  I interpreted your statement as having been written with some genial irony.  I see no reason that you cannot,  with a big smile, tell your fellow law profs that you had two articles on the Yellowstone-Idaho crime problem published in the Georgetown Law Journal.  Just as with mention in the National Enquirer, your fellow profs might laugh and be secretly envious.  I think it's fair for you to do that.  Isn't it fair for me to have written it?

If the above hasn't dissipated your feelings of unfairness, feel free to send me some statement that you would like to have posted on my blog. I will not edit your statement without your permission and your approval of any editing.  Alternatively, I would be happy to add an addendum to the original post.  The addendum would make these points:  1) "The Perfect Crime" and "Tabloid Constitutionalism" are fun to read, having fun is good, and that the author should be commended for adding to the world's fun; 2) The article "The Exclusion of Felons from Jury Service" is intellectually impressive, useful work, and, together with the author's other articles, demonstrates the value of a variety of ways of doing legal scholarship, 3) Texts are often designed to attract the attention of readers.  While such a design may be difficult to discern in many law journal articles, law professors generally seek to attract attention to their work.  Seeking attention and competing for attention is not a personal moral failing of any particular law professor, and nothing in the above post should be construed to imply such therewith.

Please let me know if any of the above possibilities satisfy you.  Doing absolutely nothing is also another possibility.  I'm familiar with that approach, and I also would be happy to adopt it in these circumstances.

Sincerely,
Douglas Galbi

[email sent on Aug. 27, 2008; I have added embedded hyperlinks to Andy Haven's comment and to Prof. Kalt's papers.]

3 Comments

Sacred to Commonweal was this net design'd
To pierce the heart and humanize the mind.
But if a hitless Blog, the Blogger's curse,
Shows us our Thoughts and Reasons lose their force
Unwilling we must change the nobler scene,
And in our turn present you Celeb-queens;
Quit Poets, and set Journalists to work,
Show gaudy scenes, or mount the starring Buck:
For, though we Bloggers, one and all, agree
Boldly to struggle for our -- vanity,
If want comes on, importance must retreat;
Our first, great, ruling passion, is -- to eat.

Offer Comments

Elite men competed intensely for public attention in the Roman empire.  Oratory was a primary field of this competition.  According to one Roman authority:

it is impossible to imagine [a pursuit] in our state richer in advantages, more splendid in its prospects, more attractive in fame at home, more illustrious in celebrity throughout our whole empire and all the world.  ... ["armed" with the art of oratory] a man can always bring aid to friends, succor to strangers, deliverance to the imperiled, while to malignant foes he is an actual fear and terror, himself the while secure and intrenched, so to say, within a power and a position of lasting strength [1]

Sophisticated Roman texts on oratory tend to emphasize the appeal of eloquent oratory to an elite audience.   A leading public intellectual of the third century GC chronicled the triumphs of sophists through the ages.  He described the attention accorded to a sophist who in the second century GC held the prestigious Chair of Rhetoric in Rome:

they listened to him as to a sweet-voiced nightingale, struck with admiration for his facile tongue, his well-modulated and flexible voice, and his rhythms, whether in prose or when he sang in recitative.  So much so, that, when they were attending shows in which the vulgar delight -- these were, generally speaking, performances of dancers -- a messenger had only to appear in the theatre to announce that Adrian [holder of the Chair of Rhetoric] was going to declaim, when even the members of the Senate would rise from their sitting, and the members of the equestrian order would rise, not only those who were devoted to Hellenistic culture, but also those who were studying the other language [Latin] at Rome; and they would set out on the run to the Athenaeum, overflowing with enthusiasm, and upbraiding those who were going there at a walking pace. [2]

Ordinary court cases created most of the demand for instrumental oratorical skills in imperial Rome.  But as lawyers soon learn, much of the action in ordinary litigation is quite dull.  Competition among orators for attention, students, and speaking fees created, as if by an invisible tongue, oratory focused on sex and violence.  Here are some mock cases that were the subject of discussion about two millennium ago.

• Law: A priestess must be chaste and of chaste [parents], pure and of pure [parents].
• Discuss: A virgin was captured by pirates and sold; she was bought by a pimp and made a prostitute.  When men came for her, she asked for alms.  When she failed to get alms from a soldier who came to her, he struggled with her and tried to use force; she killed him.  She was accused, acquitted and sent back to her family.  She seeks a priesthood.

• Law: Whoever catches an adulterer with his mistress in the act, provided that he kills both, may go free.  A son too may punish adultery on the part of his mother.
• Discuss: A hero lost his hands in war.  He caught an adulterer with his wife, by whom he had a youthful son.  He told the son to do the killing.  The son refused.  The adulterer fled.  The husband now disinherits the son.

• Law: A girl who has been raped may choose either marriage to her ravisher without a dowry or his death.
• Discuss: On a single night a man raped two girls.  One demands his death, the other marriage.[3]

These sort of discussions now tend to be associated with legal education.  Law professors might solemnly describe them as fine training for developing and practicing legal reasoning.  That's quite sophistic.  These cases developed out of intense competition for attention, students, and speaking fees among the Roman equivalent of law professors.[4]  That's a competitive pattern also seen in modern trends in the content of television talk shows, reality TV, and network news.  Intense competition for attention naturally generates representations of sex and violence.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory, 5 (circa 102 GC).  Quoted from Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942) pp. 737-8.

[2] Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 590 (circa 235 GC).  Quoted from Philostratus and Eunapius, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1961) pp. 231, 233.  The sophist described was Adrian the Phoenician (fl. mid-2'nd century GC).

[3] Seneca, Controversiae I, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1 (circa 37 GC).  Quoted from Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom (London: William Heinemann, 1974) pp. 59, 105, 121.  I've added the tags "Law:" and "Discuss:".

[4] Stanley Bonner, Roman Declamation in the late Republic and early Empire (Liverpool: Univeristy of Liverpool, 1949) p. 39 states:

the Senecan declamations were mostly delivered at gatherings of quite mature people. ... it is also true that nearly all these themes were invented for and debated in the schools, as is witnessed by their survivial in the Lesser Declamations attributed to Quintilian, where they are prefaced by the professorial sermo.  But most of the Senecan declamations appear to have been based upon debates where rival professors used the school-subjects to exhibit their powers and win the plaudits (or be shamed by the ridicule) of their contemporaries.

I think it much more likely that the school subjects followed the professors, rather than the professors the school subjects.

Offer Comments

Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, a recent, magnificent exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, included paintings memorializing the life of Maharaja Bakhat Singh. He was an eighteenth-century Rathore-Rajput ruler of the Jodhpur-Marwar kingdom, now in the Indian state of Rajasthan. A number of paintings depict the royal, cultured Bakhat Singh at his Nagaur Palace in a garden amidst a crowd of beautiful young women. They rub his legs, bring him food, play music for him, and bath with him. In one painting, Bakhat Singh, bare-chested in a large garden pool with twenty-one young women, playfully squirts, with an elongated pumping toy, water at one of the women.[1] Being a ruler gave Bakhat Singh extraordinary pleasure.

Before the Sackler Gallery's exhibition re-introduced them to the international art world, the Nagaur Palace garden paintings had never been published and apparently were largely unknown. Why these paintings were not previously celebrated isn't explained in the exhibition or accompanying book. Perhaps the paintings' subject matter was a cause of intercultural moral concern in the past. Some tragic history may also have caused unease: Bakhat Singh gained his position in Nagaur by killing his father, the reigning ruler of Marwar. The book accompanying the exhibition explains:

It is unknown whether Abhai Singh [the eldest son] incited the murder so he could gain the throne for himself or, as was rumored at the time, Bakhat Singh was enraged that his father was having an illicit affair with his daughter-in-law, Bakhat Singh's wife. Perhaps, as some historians have speculated, it was a joint effort formulated by the brothers to further their dual political and personal agendas. What is known is that when Abhai Singh returned to Jodhpur in late 1724, he gave Nagaur to Bakhat Singh in what many have interpreted as a reward for the murder. The Rathore nobles, however, never forgave this monstrous act. They found the patricide so abhorrent that no prominent structure was built for Abhai Singh at Mandore, the strikingly picturesque Rathore ancestral site where Marwar rajas' deaths are honored with elaborately carved, red sandstone cenotaphs.[2]

Bakhat Singh's Nagaur Palace garden paintings were not created to evoke horror and pity. But appreciating the pleasure they depict requires a simple heart.

The Tale of Shuten Dōji, now on exhibit at the Sackler, depicts a morally sanctioned response to a male with unauthorized, wicked relations with beautiful young women. The tale of Shuten Dōji goes back in illustrated form to fourteenth-century Japan or earlier. Shuten Dōji is a demon-ogre typically depicted as large, ugly, stupid, and barbaric. He kidnaps beautiful young women to serve him at his castle-fortress. The emperor dispatches samurai to rescue the women and destroy the ogre. Carrying out this mission leads to a series of prototypical incidents involving wise men, a distressed woman, some brave women, a magic potion, and disguises. Ultimately, the samurai prevail in a ferocious battle. They behead Shuten Dōji and kill many of his demon-helpers. They rescue many beautiful women from the ogre. Returning the women to the city, the samurai parade through the streets and display Shuten Dōji's head on a cart.

An early nineteenth-century Japanese wall hanging depicts Shuten Dōji with food and two beautiful women amidst blossoming cherry trees.  While one of his demon-helpers kneels on the ground in a guarding position, Shuten Dōji, in attractive human form, sits on a tiger skin.  The two women wear lavish, noble dress and have extraordinarily long, black hair.  One woman serves sake to Shuten Dōji, who does not look at her but rather gazes out on the cherry blossoms.  Below, a lone woman washes a kimono undergarment in a stream.  The remaining parts of the voluminous kimono rest on the river bank.  The kimono belongs to one of Shuten Dōji's unpictured female victims.  The wall hanging is large, about 1 by 2.5 meters, and sumptuous, made from gold on silk.  It presents an elegant composition with hints of barbarism and horror.  It is a well-designed as a noble incitement to anger and retribution.[3]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in a variety of media and became known throughout all levels of Japanese society. As a treasure made for the royal Japanese court about the year 1700, the tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in three, 20-meter long scrolls illustrated with color ink, silver, and gold on silk.  A noted painter made the illustrations, and an imperial prince and two other noblemen contributed calligraphy. Two large six-section folding screens, dating from 1625-1650, display scenes using ink and gold on paper scenes. During the Edo Period (1615-1868), the tale of Shuten Dōji was also depicted on lavish hanging scrolls and arrangements of multiple paper fans.[4]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was also represented through much more modest means. In nineteenth-century Japan, the tale was depicted in small, printed books with black-and-white woodcut illustrations and very little text.[5]  The book was relatively cheap and accessible to the illiterate. At the end of the nineteenth century, the tale of Shuten Dōji, with English text, was printed in Japan in a small, color-illustrated book series entitled "Japanese Fairy Tales." Book no. 19, Ogres of Oeyama is on display in the Sackler exhibition. Book no. 18, The Ogre's Arm, is available online through the Internet Archive (thanks to Armchair Asia for the link). Drawing on popular English Gothic clichés, the text at one point declares, "It happened one dark and stormy night...." The Japanese fairy tale series seems to be designed for middle-class Japanese readers eager to learn to read English novels.

Male sexual desire is a powerful motivating force. It plays out within interpersonal fields of authority, resentment, and anger.  Resentment and anger at an imaginary ogre's access to women was probably easier to generate and distribute than appreciation for a historical ruler's fantastic sensual delights.

*  *  *  *  *

The Tale of Shuten Dōji is ongoing at the Sackler Gallery through September 20, 2009.

Notes:

[1] "Maharaja Bakhat Singh Rejoices during Holi," Nagaur, ca. 1748-50, Mehrangarh Museum Trust, catalog number 20, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2008).  For a similar painting, click on the upper right thumbnail for the online gallery.

[2] Glynn, Catherine, "Rathore and Mughal Interactions: Artistic Development at the Nagaur Court, 1600-1751" p. 14, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur.

[3] "Shuten Dōji on Mount Oe Viewing Cherry Blossoms," Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858), from the Feinberg Collection, USA.

[4]  Kano Shōun illustrated the scrolls, which include calligraphy by Imperial Prince Fushiminomiya Kuninaga (1667-1726).  All the works described here, unless otherwise noted, are on display in the exhibition.  Some of the works can be seen online here.

[5] The exhibition displays such a book with illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): Ehon Wakan no Homare, Japan, 1850, thread-bound, woodblock-printed, Sackler item V20.2006.195.

Above images courtesy of the Sackler Gallery: The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Scroll 3 from a set of 3, section 7, by Kano Shoun (1637 – 1702); Japan, Edo period, 1700; Handscroll; Ink, color, gold, and silver on silk; 37.2 x 2405.2 cm; Purchase, Friends of Asian Arts, F1998.26.3.  The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Section 23, scroll 3;  Japan, Edo period, 17th century;  Handscroll; Ink, color, gold and silver on paper; 32.7 x 1338.3 cm; Purchase, F1998.303.3 .

Offer Comments

What's the difference between a search service and a service perfectly targeting informative advertising to its users?  Susan Wojcicki, Google VP, Product Management, recently stated:

Google's advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is very similar to our mission in search, and, like our colleagues in search, those of us on the ads team are constantly striving to achieve better results.

Daniel Tunkelang insightfully responded:

Google insists that it maintains a wall between its search and advertising businesses. But Wojcicki’s post–which is on Google’s official blog–suggests otherwise, at least in spirit. If Google believes that both search and advertising aim to “offer relevant content” and “deliver the right information to the right person at the right time”, then why put up a wall at all?

If an advertising platform truly provides only the most relevant, useful, timely information to its users, it gives advertisers no incentive to bid against each other to place ads.  The most relevant, useful, timely ad, not the highest bidding advertiser, would be presented to users.  Ad results wouldn't differ from search results.  The perfect advertising service would provide no incentive for advertising expenses.

For both search and advertising, emphasizing relevant, useful, timely information obscures the importance of emotions in human decision-making.  A vast amount of information is subconsciously processed within the human body.  Only some of this information is brought into the brain's working memory and higher-order cortical regions.  Competing for attention is not just the business of advertising.  Emotions have a major role in the ongoing competition for attention within the human brain.

Actually making a decision requires a motivational push, not just information processing.  In an influential book describing new understanding of emotions, a neuroscientist described the behavior of a patient with damage to brain regions associated with emotional processing.  The patient was offered the choice between two dates for a laboratory appointment:

For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date.  Just as calmly as he had driven over the ice, and recounted that episode, he was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis,  an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences.[1]

When the doctors finally halted this process and asked the patient to come on the second of the two dates, the patient was happy to accept that choice.   Human-Computer Information Retrieval services should not be implicitly modeled on the behavior of emotionally damaged humans and emotionless computers.  An impulse to choose, apart from organizing and accessing information, is a key aspect of human search behavior that concludes with choice.

Search and advertising involve much different emotional patterns in users' information processing.  Web search produces a list of choices designed to be informative, not emotive.  Given the importance of search result rankings to users' choices, users seem to view these results with a feeling "tell me right now" and "whatever, good enough."  The emotional drive is not primarily to make a good choice, but to go somewhere, to finish the search.[2]

Advertising has much more specific emotional targeting than search.  Advertisers design brand names and tag lines to be emotive.  Where possible, they use images and audio-visual materials that evoke favorable feelings.  Compared to clicking on search results, users are much more likely to click on an advertisement based on emotions that the specific advertisement generates.

Because emotions are an integral aspect of human information-processing and decision-making, advertising's future is secure.  Even if they perfectly target ads to be relevant, useful, and timely for users, advertising platforms cannot effectively rank the emotional value of ads.  Persons and companies have deep-seated feelings about how good they and their products are.  These feelings are fully sufficient to drive vigorous bidding for advertising opportunities.

Search will not replace advertising.  Information technology can greatly improve human's ability to organize, rank, and make accessible information.  No such technology exists for human emotions.  That fact will keep advertising platforms in business.

Notes:

[1] Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain (New York: Putnam) pp. 193-4.  Skin conductance responses, which typically are correlated with emotional responses, have been documented to precede a risky choice in normal individuals. Such a response does not occur for individuals with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices. The later persons' choices systematically differ from normal persons' choices within the same laboratory experiment. See Bechara, Antoine, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, "Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy," Science, V. 275, 28 February 1997, pp. 1293-5. Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis provides a more general framework for understanding such effects.

[2] Image search seems to involve a different emotional pattern than web search.  See the recent talk of Peter Linsley, Google Image Search Product Manager.

1 Comment

Crime and punishment has featured prominently in the rise of mass media. The first book published in Boston was A Wicked Man's Portion (1675), a sermon that Increase Mather preached at the execution of two men for murder. About this time in England, the Ordinary (minister) of Newgate Prison began publishing accounts of prisoners who were executed. Printed execution sermons in early New England and the Ordinary's Accounts in England became immensely popular news publications.

Broadsides -- single page, highly current news reports -- took news circulation to unprecedented heights. In England in 1849, the hangings of James Bloomfield Rush and of Maria and Frederick Manning each were reported in 2.5 million broadsheets rapidly distributed around the country.[1] That number amounts to about one broadsheet for every four persons ages 15 years old and older in England and Wales about that time.

In England about 1850, a news distributor, an industry veteran with more than twenty years of experience, explained how the business works:

There's nothing beats a stunning good murder, after all. Why there was Rush [James Bloomfield Rush, executed in 1849 for two murders] — I lived on him for a month or more. When I commenced with Rush, I was 14 s. in debt for rent, and in less than fourteen days I astonished the wise men in the east by paying my landlord all I owed him. Since Dan'el Good [executed in 1842 for murdering his lover] there had been little or nothing doing in the murder line — no one could cap him — till Rush turned up a regular trump for us. Why I went down to Norwich expressly to work the execution. I worked my way down there with 'a sorrowful lamentation' of his own composing, which I'd got written by the blind man expressly for the occasion. On the morning of the execution we beat all the regular newspapers out of the field ; for we had the full, true, and particular account down, you see, by our own express [printing shop], and that can beat anything that ever they can publish; for we gets it printed several days afore it comes off [before the execution]; and [I] goes and stands with it right under the drop [the gallows]; and many's the penny I've turned away when I've been asked for an account of the whole business before it happened. So you see, for herly [early] and correct hinformation [information], we can beat the Sun [a London newspaper] — aye, or the moon either, for the matter of that.[2]

Selling news to a mass market has long been a highly competitive business. Focusing on crime and punishment and having a pre-established story have been important competitive tactics. As this news distributor indicates, journalistic integrity has also been an important part of the business. The story should not be sold before the event happens.

The Newseum has recently re-opened. The news organizations that designed and funded the Newseum relocated it from Rosslyn, Virginia (about 4 miles from the U.S. Capitol) to a new, $450 million-dollar building about a half-mile from the U.S. Capitol. Being extremely close to the physical seat of the U.S. government apparently is crucial to news organizations' representation of the history of the news.

The Newseum contains neither a gallows, gibbet, stocks, nor pillory. While the Newseum's theater gives visitors a chance to Be a TV Reporter, it doesn't put them in front of a bleeding body (Maddy and Tess, when you grow up may you never have to spread news by reading from a teleprompter!) The Newseum fails to report well the importance of crime and punishment in the history of the news.

Notes:

[1] Mayhew, Henry (1851), London Labour and the London Poor (London), vol. I, p. 284.

[2] Id. pp. 223-4.

Illustration Credit: From broadsheet describing trial and execution of Charles Shaw, Richard Tomlinson, and Mary Smith, 1834. Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides. Courtesy of Special Collections Department, Harvard Law School Library.

1 Comment

For more than four months, hundreds of persons a week have probably viewed a display of minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC. A collection of minerals and meteorites were part of James Smithson's bequest to the United States for founding the Smithsonian as an institution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." James Dwight Dana, a mineralogist, looked at Smithson's collection and described the minerals:

a choice and beautiful collection...comprising, probably, eight or ten thousand specimens. The specimens...are extremely perfect, and constitute a very complete Geological and Mineralogical series....

Dana described Smithson's meteorites as "a valuable suite of meteoric stones, which appear to be specimens of most of the important meteorites which have fallen in Europe during several centuries."

The minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian are not Smithson's collection. They are a small number of specimens gathered from a variety of sources to indicate what Smithson's collection probably had been like. The exhibit explains that the minerals and meteorites in Smithson's collection were destroyed in a fire that greatly damaged the upper floor of the Smithsonian Castle in 1865. But how could a fire destroy minerals and meteorites? Stones don't burn!

Heather Ewing's deeply researched book, The Lost World of James Smithson, notes:

There remains some confusion about what exactly survived from the regents' room in the south tower. The report investigating the fire states vaguely that among the losses is "a part of the contents of the regents' room, including the personal effects of Smithson, with the exception of his portrait and library." Smithson's library and portrait survived because they were kept in the west wing of the building ( which was unharmed in the fire), where the institution's library was housed. [p. 356, note 9]

The fire at the Smithsonian apparently was an open fire fueled by wood and interior furnishings. There's no reason to believe that the fire was hot enough to melt or transmute minerals and meteorites. The fire would have left Smithson's minerals and meteorites disorganized and covered in soot, but not destroyed or even significantly damaged. So what really happened to Smithson's mineral and meteorite collection?

The Smithsonian Institution has for more than a century offered nationally sanctioned and acclaimed displays of authoritative scientific knowledge. In those circumstances, a claim that stones were destroyed in a fire apparently passes unquestioned. That's an impressive monument to the value of blogging and Wikipedia.

5 Comments