qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

Today the Government launched a new website called “Your Freedom” – designed for members of the public to suggest repeals or modifications of laws they find restrictive or bureaucratic. The name’s a little misguided from the start – after all, laws can be used to guarantee and enforce freedoms as well as restrict them, so merely repealing a law does not necessarily entail “freedom”. But let’s let that pass.

This could have been a nice idea; crowdsourcing opinions from ordinary citizens and the wider public away from the professional lobbyists or niche activists and giving them a more coherent and representative voice. It could be used to take a hard look at some of the laws that people have found restrictive over the years, whether they be anti-terror laws, anti-smoking or anti-foxhunting (for the sake of this analysis, I’m deliberately being neutral on what I think of these respective matters). Instead, it’s so vague and generalised that it’s become “a massive dickhead magnet” (© Justin) within hours of opening.

The submission form (login required) doesn’t ask for specifics on which laws or regulations should be looked at, but rather “ideas”, which renders it near-pointless. The questions for the form fields are so vague – “What is your idea?” and “Why is your idea important?” that you could literally put anything there. The moderation policy implies they operate post-moderation – i.e. no moderation – with little or no prescreening at all.

The result is that any old shit can get in, and it does. Even if those ideas are proposing adding more new laws, rather than taking them away – such as Restrict Immigration which turns into a rambling stream of barely-consciousness:

… Schools cannot cope with the amount of children who speak different languages and it is holding back our children’s education. The same with gypsies. If this is a life style they choose, fine. Contribute to the tax pot or do not expect use of public services. Why should taxpayers provide taxis for their children to attend schools etc. Ridiculous.

The ideas look like something that’s fallen off the back of Have Your Say. In fact actually if you look at the relevant HYS page you’ll see exactly that – people spelling out just how they want the government to enforce their own petty prejudices rather than reform what we have. Let’s look at the comments beneath:

Prison meant to be for punishment, but the so called Human Rightists…

Ok enough. Next…

My proposal would be for a new law…

Oh, fuck off.

So, what can we learn from this? First off, design your site better. If you want people to propose changes to laws, then make the users think about those laws when submitting. There should be a mandatory field asking them to specify which acts or regulations they would want to change – e.g. “Terrorism Act 2000″. Anyone who just writes “laws about immigrunts“, or doesn’t put a proper name for the law, or the year, filter it out.

(This has a beneficial side-effect – with a bit of fuzzy parsing, we could include a link to the relevant law on OPSI in the proposal so we can look up the more relevant section, and it also makes finding related proposals on the same law easy, a sort of auto-tagging).

Secondly, pre-moderate. If a proposed change is totally incompatible with our international obligations, say if some idiot wants to get rid of all human rights legislation or leave the EU or scrap the NHS, the moderation team should have the sanity and bravery to filter it out. Anything badly spelt, in all caps, copy & pasted from The Chap or proposing repealing murder, bin it. This is not an issue of denying freedom of speech – the green ink brigade are free to write wherever they like – but of keeping the site a proper and sensible civic space. If you want to get the most out of an online community, you have to keep it in good order.

Thirdly, delete duplicates and employ an algorithm to suggest duplicates to a user before they post – look at the number of duplicates for repealing the Digital Economy Act (though you’d think geeks especially would check for dupes before posting). Having five posts all call for the same thing dilutes the popularity of all of them, and leads to incoherent arguments for their repeal, weakening it further.

The shame is that here and there on the site there are constructively-argued ideas to help fix parts of our legislation that are inefficient or restrictive – for example CRB checks, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act or financial risk for small entrepreneurs (not that I agree with any of these, just that these were examples that look properly thought-out and considered at the very least).

As it stands, the site will end up as a total mess – in fact it’s well on the way there already. When it comes to closing the site down, I bet the politicians will take one look at all the “ban human rights act it give free school meals for wearing a burka” posts, shrug their shoulders and say that “the citizens have spoken, but it’s utter rubbish – they had their chance and they blew it”. No, the government who have blown it – they had their chance to make a valuable public resource, but we’ve instead got another poorly-designed, poorly-maintained failure.

The 2010 World Cup is almost upon us – so here’s a quick housekeeping message. Like when I watch Arsenal matches, I’m moving most of the footy Tweeting over to @gnnr to save annoying everybody else. And after mulling the idea for years, I’ve finally set up a football blog – called @qwghlm #wc2010 for the moment, it’ll be a Tumblelog of photos, videos, links, quotes and other things (Tumblr seemed a better fit than WordPress for the job). Check it out, and I hope you enjoy it!

Six months ago, during the Tiger Woods sex scandal non-story that gripped America, a curiosity cropped up from Hong Kong’s Apple Daily News. There had been no footage of the incident that sparked it all off – Woods crashing his car – and traditionally this might have been covered by either a still graphic or just describing the incident verbally. Thanks to computer technology, the Apple Daily had a much more inspired solution: if there isn’t any footage of the incident, no problem! Just make up your own instead:

The videos went viral in a sort of curious “let’s laugh at the cultural differences” way, similar to how Engrish gets covered in patronising Western media. And to be fair, the animation’s a bit wonky, and the Tiger Woods avatar doesn’t look very much like him at all to be honest. But nevertheless, it showed how far we have come. It’s now possible to turn around, within the time demands of 24 hour rolling news, a simulation of an incident if we’re unable to get actual coverage of it. The company behing it’s called Next Media Animation and they showcase their news simulation extensively on their website.

The Woods video was comical, but more worrying is when the events depicted within the simulation don’t necessarily have to be true. When allegations of Gordon Brown’s temper in the workplace broke a couple of months later, Apple Daily were quick to the mark, with an animated Gordon Brown causing trouble with his animated underlings:

Note the simulation of him physically striking an aide in the face at about 0:45. Though Brown’s temper and verbal transgressions are well known, he vigorously denied ever physically striking any of his subordinates, and no substantial claim of physical violence has been placed against him. It’s now possible to create simulations of events that don’t happen, and pass them off as being real. Apple Daily’s presence in Hong Kong and Taiwan rather than the UK (thus making legal redress more difficult), plus the inevitable language barrier, probably gives them more licence with the story; indeed, the English version of the video omits the simulated striking.

Perhaps as a defence, you can say it doesn’t look much like Gordon Brown (to me he’s more like a greying Ed Balls) and the animation still has a slightly unrealistic, wonky look to it. But some of the videos are more realistic than others. Two examples: firstly, coverage of the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in March:

Secondly, and I’m not going to embed this one as it really is far too graphic, is a simulation, gunshots and all, of Derrick Bird’s massacre of 12 people in Cumbria last week. The link is here, but be warned it’s full-on.

In both cases the animation is more realistic for several reasons. One, the protagonists were not publicly recognisable people before the news story broke, so the constraints of facial simulation are not such a problem and more artistic licence can be taken. Secondly – and particularly in the Cumbria shootings – the elements of the story are very much like the animated action in some video games (as betrayed by the numerous tasteless GTA jokes in the comments beneath the video), something which 3D animators are more likely to be adept with.

Inevitably though, the technology will get better – particularly once TV news outlets in the West pick up on the idea and realise it’s a cheaper and quicker alternative to real journalism. The quality may never match reality, but it doesn’t need to – our visual recollection of news events is fuzzy and not an exact copy of what we see. For example, recently Slate performed a survey of people’s reactions and recollections of images from faked news events, such as Barack Obama purportedly shaking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hand (the two men have never even met). Even though these images were Photoshopped and did not happen, many survey respondents still “remembered” the events as having happened and recalled their “feelings” at the time.

The old adage was that newspapers are the first draft of history. This technology looks like being the zeroth draft of history – a way of representing something before we get actual coverage of it, and we run the risk of it becoming our default interpretation of events. Somewhere in poststructuralist limbo, Baudrillard is laughing at us, saying “I told you so”.

Thanks & a hat tip to @rhodri on Twitter for Tweeting about the Derrick Bird video, which is what sparked this post.

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to The Times’ preview of their new website – which as virtually everyone knows, they plan to put behind a paywall at the end of this month. Rupert Murdoch’s edict is clear: he’s going to make people do what they’ve not done for a long time before, and that is pay for online news, and deny the search engines their share of what he sees as his pie.

With the new paywall comes a new look and a new structure. The URLs are much better for starters – thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk rather than the tautological timesonline.co.uk. And the designs are quite gorgeous, for a newspaper website; as one of the the Times editorial staff mentioned – the design of most other UK broadsheets tend to blur into each other. This layout employs larger photos and a more flexible page layout, mimicing paper news as well:

The paywall has afforded the Times and Sunday Times a few additional luxuries that free news misses out on; there’s no clutch of Twitter and Digg icons that clutter other news sites are no longer there, but of course the really big change is the reduction in advertisements. Without them, the site is so much cleaner, although it is not totally bereft of them – but to be honest, it wouldn’t look like a newspaper if it didn’t have any ads at all, would it? And the increased premium on those ads should mean an end to garish Flash animations, rollover, popunders, lightboxes and the rest.

Sadly for the Times’ designers, in order to pull off such a beautiful website that looks so much like a real newspaper, the controls have had to take a back seat. The menubars at the top rely on rollovers, and navigation buttons are small and fiddly; as an example, the pagination controls on the Sunday Times’ carousels are absolutely tiny:

All are fine for those of us on large monitors and point & click devices. But it comes at the same time as the iPad’s launch in the UK, and everyone’s talking about tablets as the future. A new iPhone is expected in the summer and the design paradigm of touchscreen smartphones is here to stay. Controls built for point and click, tiny icons and buttons and all, simply don’t work with stubby fingers on smeared screens.

The Times’ developers aren’t of course that stupid, and the same week the new site launched, an iPad app came out as well; Times and Sunday Times iPhone apps have also been released, although oddly the UI consists of zooming & navigating a PDF of the newspaper which then clicks through to fairly rudimentary mobile-friendly renderings of articles. A sign, perhaps, that things are a little rushed. Thinking isn’t also joined up across the pricing; accessing the Times & Sunday Times website and iPhone apps, the same subscription applies, but the iPad app is a separate subscripion of £10 a month instead. As a consequence, I fear a lot of time and effort is being duplicated over satistfying so many different platforms and pricing models.

Ah yes, pricing models. £2 a week for subscription is about £9 a month, but for £10 a month I can get all the music in the world on Spotify, or £12 a month I can get four TV channels, a shedload of radio, and a news website from the BBC.¹ The price of just one newspaper² a week doesn’t quite match up. £1 for a single day’s newspaper is even odder, in a digital market where a music track or iPhone game costs less, and last a lot longer – there is nothing tangible to keep or line the cat litter tray with at the end.

But then maybe Rupert need not worry. If News International starts bundling Times subscriptions with Sky packages, or other marketing tie-ins with partners, then all of a sudden that £9 a month looks a little less expensive, standalone, and more of a complete whole. So the Times will make money. With a little clever marketing they’ll probably make enough to justify the initial expense and loss of revenue from adverts.

Interestingly, it also raises some interesting possibilities. I’ve discussed here before about the tragedy of comments on news and how it devalues news websites so. But by fencing off the Times all of a sudden now becomes an interesting social experiment; as a further step they will be insisting on real names. It could be the start of a morecivil, closely-knit, vibrant community without the trolls and drive-by snarking (I hope). Conversely, now that commenters have paid up their subscriptions, their expectations about the website’s content will rise accordingly, and now the community management team there have a sizeable task on their hands.

So exciting Times. But at what other cost? Search, for one. The typical user journey for a non-subscriber is via the front page. Click on a link and an overlay will come up asking you to log in or sign up. Straightforward for a human, but that applies to the search engines just as well. When I pressed with a question about it, it was confirmed that unless a Times story was on the front page of the site, then not even the headline will appear in Google’s index for that URL. Sure, Rupert hates Google, but even they have found how to balance comprehensive search indexing with respecting paywalls – just look at how Google Scholar works.

It’s not just search engine robots that will be bemused by the paywall. Any bookmarking service that spiders the site you’re bookmarking – Digg, Reddit or perhaps most crucially, Facebook – checks ahead for the title and an excerpt (and photo thumbnail). The Times however, by refusing any sort of robot-friendly preview URL, ends up looking quite lost – for example, this it what happened when I bookmarked an article in Facebook:

To some extent, search and sharing don’t matter so much now you don’t depend on eyeballs. But nevertheless, the user experience still needs to be great to retain paying customers. For example, I for one rarely use my browser history to find a page I want to revisit that I last read a few days ago; with a rough recollection of its source and topic, I can probably find that page quicker in Google. If I were a Times paid subscriber, I’d be unable to do this with any Times pages I visited, and this might prove to be an annoying quirk at the very least.

But the bookmarking bug would irk me more. If there’s a great article that is worth parting with a quid for (overpriced though I think that is), then any sharing on Facebook, Twitter or Delicious, helps me let my friends and others readers know. Publishing socially-important metadata such as the headline and a one-line precis, while keeping the rest of the content behind the paywall, does nothing to devalue the content but is a quick win in extending its possible reach. With word of mouth so important for news consumption in the modern era, optimising for sharing should be as important as optimising for search – and it’s not about ramming endless Web 2.0 buttons down the user’s throat either.³

The Times’ paywall won’t be a dismal failure, as it comes at a time whe we’re finally getting mature about paying for digital content – whether it’s games and tracks off iTunes or subscription to Spotify. But the vast majority of its reportage is going to pretty similar to its free rivals elsewhere, so they face a battle for every single pound that comes their way. And to win that battle, they need to get everything else absolutely bang-on – search, social bookmarking, accessibility – to make it really work. Unfortunately for them, right now they’re not quite there – not yet anyway.

¹ Actually I pay less than that, as I share a flat, something else which isn’t factored into the paywall – shouldn’t it be per-household like newspapers are typically consumed, rather than per-person?
² Well, yes, two newspapers, but they don’t publish on the same days so perhaps they shouldn’t be counted. That said the Sunday Times is of distinctly different format and they intend to publish during the week, so maybe they should just do away with the temporal slicing.
³ Yeah, I know this blog post has a big icon top right to Tweet, but I’m not a national newspaper… ;)

[Note: Substantial spoilers, for both LOST and The Wire, lie within - if you haven't seen either series in its entirety, then be warned: there are dragons here]

After 121 episodes of polar bears, monsters, the sky turning purple, teleportation through time and space, parallel universes, the disaster-sci-fi-slash-rumination-on-philosophy series LOST came to a thundering and resolute conclusion this week.

Resolute by its standards, that is. LOST isn’t just one of those TV shows just delights or infuriates, both the frustration and delight camps themselves can be broken further down into differing factions. The show’s most ardent fans, and its severest critics end up agreeing on one thing – they hate the show for leaving so many questions unanswered.

What was the deal with the numbers? What were the DHARMA initiative up to? Why was Walt so special? Why did they go to the effort to rescue Mr Eko only for him to die two episodes later? Why can’t women survive pregnancy on the island? Who dropped the DHARMA supplies? Why does Mr Friendly throw like a girl?

The show’s detractors say this is what makes LOST a flawed television series, by being so patently ridiculous. Conversely, the show’s adoring fanbase grew increasingly demanding of a neat solution to it all to justify all the faith they’ve put in it. More laidback afficionados of the show will hopefully appreciate the irony at how this is a great example of faith versus reason, one of the show’s major themes.

Prior, to the finale, some fans seriously expected it to explain everything hidden about the island, and to provide a “satisfactory” conclusion. Instead, the writers chose to play one of the best jokes in modern television writing: for years fans had semi-jokingly explained it by saying the Island was actually Purgatory and this would be revealed in a “it was all a dream”-style disappointment. The writers decided to actually make that come true by telling the audience the cast was in Purgatory. Only it wasn’t the Island, but a parallel universe where the crash never happened, which we were all led to believe was an alternate timeline until the final twist. Everybody fell for it – not a single fan explanation for the “sideways timeline” comes close to predicting this.

The finale managed the difficult task of bringing closure to the series, but also, like in the underrated parody episode “Exposé“, it delivered with a delicious joke on the show’s fans’ endless theorising from the writers – if they want purgatory, we’ll give them purgatory. Smarting from this, fans and detractors alike have been quick to register their disappointment at a “cop-out” ending that steadfastly refused to answer all their questions. The mysteries of the show end up being dismissed as nothing more than the writers making it up as they go along, or even just utter toss from start to finish.

So, the following needs to be spelt out:

It doesn’t fucking matter that none of LOST’s mysteries got answered. That’s the point.

Let’s compare and contrast LOST with another fanatically followed and critically-acclaimed television series of recent times – The Wire. The Wire is everything LOST is not. By and large, the camera is a highly reliable narrator. Characters will lie, cheat and obscure, and you are quickly drawn into a series of deals, double-crosses and treble-crosses but it is still unrelentingly committed to being realistic. Storylines are complex but vastly dramatic plot twists are few and far between; events do happen off-camera, but when they do occur they are deftly explained and exposited.

This realism is perhaps unsurprising; Ed Burns and David Simon drew from their experiences as a policeman & teacher, and journalist, respectively. The realism even goes down to the names of the characters (many derived from or amalgams of Baltimore cops and criminals), and so much is their commitmen to reality that they even cast real-life police officers and former gang members in bit-part roles.

Barely a line of dialogue or a scene is superfluous – they all contribute to greater whole, an intricate mesh of threads where no piece of gossamer goes unwasted. The series is entirely linear with no flashbacks or other devices; the attention to detail is terrifying, and the resulting work is the sum of its parts, a meticulous depiction of people, institutions, and the city, woven together from the street corners, schools and precincts, upwards to the politicians, journalists and kingpins at the top, shows it in every detail. When put so deftly together, it makes utterly brilliant television.

LOST on the other hand is played out in a vastly different universe. Here the details are scattered among a world of myths, red herrings and outright lies. The characters in the show form only a tiny part of a much greater, unseen whole, connected loosely by seemingly random coincidences. The camera as narrator is incredibly unreliable (viz the flash-sideways, or Locke 2.0 turning out to be the smoke monster) and refuses to give up secrets easily.¹ Nevertheless, this makes LOST too a brilliant piece of television, despite the vastly different narrative setup.

As an aside – this does not mean that The Wire never gets weirder than LOST. Just look at some of the characters a supposedly realistic show brings out. The brooding Adam Smith-reading drug kingpin Stringer Bell, the profane yet nakedly corrupt state senator Clay Davis, and perhaps notably of all, the outwardly homosexual drug dealer-robbing stickup man with a heart of gold, Omar. And just when Omar couldn’t get weird enough, he teams up with Brother Mouzone, a pious softly-spoken hitman from the Nation of Islam, to wreak revenge on the druglord who wronged them. I mean, come on. You might as well have had armed polar bears.

The Wire is a forensic work of art – the situation and universe it depicts is built up entirely from what the viewer sees over the series, piece by piece. LOST is a holistic work of art – one where the entire universe is never apparent, and you can only pick at some of its pieces before revealing a complexity within. You were never meant to find out all the answers because the answers are way bigger than what you can see. Even the moment that defines and sets up the series: the plane crash – normally the focal point of disaster television – turns out to be an insignificant event played against the backdrop of a millennia-old struggle between good and evil (wonderfully foreshadowed by Locke and Walt’s game of backgammon in the second episode of season one).

So what’s the point of LOST then? As I see it, you’re meant to be paying attention to is how the characters wrestle with the situation that is beyond their grasp. It would be easy and boring to have all our questions answered and to become an omniscient observer with a reliable narrator. Far better to suffer along unknowingly with the protagonists as they try to work out philosophical struggles such as what being “good” means, faith versus reason, individualism versus communality, fate versus free will. That’s what science fiction is meant to do – take human nature and push it in extreme situations.

This is not to knock The Wire either for trying to be too realistic – indeed it confronts many of the same issues of morality as LOST does, in a very a different context and with a very different narrative structure. Ironically, the setups for both shows are the converse of what happens in real life – usually it is police investigations that are full of unknowns and ambiguities, whereas air crashes can more often than not be rigorously modelled and reconstructed second-by-second.

The solution is realising that there is no one “right” way to explore the ins and outs of human nature, the very best and worst of the human soul. Both approaches, of The Wire and LOST, do so in contrasting universes,² but neither is inherently wrong. To demand that LOST destroy its mysteries is as unfair on it as demanding The Wire to lose its gritty authenticity. In short: it’s not meant to make complete sense. It will be baffling in parts. The characters and the stories they live out, are all set against this backdrop, and you’re meant to experience it as the characters did. So can we please stop moaning about not knowing everything? Good. Thank you. And Namaste.

¹ About the only other work I know of that does this so well is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – an enormously long book which also has an unsatisfactory ending – well worth reading for any LOST fan suffering withdrawal symptoms.
² That is of course except for Matthew Abaddon and Cedric Daniels being the one and same, naturally…

The story of the Conficker worm is a fascinating one. On the face of it, it was just another worm infecting susceptible computers, but it turns out to be well-thought out, highly-designed and incredibly hard to remove. It’s a story worth telling. However, this article in The Atlantic is not that story. These are the opening two paragraphs to the article:

The first surprising thing about the worm that landed in Philip Porras’s digital petri dish 18 months ago was how fast it grew.

He first spotted it on Thursday, November 20, 2008. Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did. Porras is part of a loose community of high-level geeks who guard computer systems and monitor the health of the Internet by maintaining “honeypots,” unprotected computers irresistible to “malware,” or malicious software. A honeypot is either a real computer or a virtual one within a larger computer designed to snare malware. There are also “honeynets,” which are networks of honeypots. A worm is a cunningly efficient little packet of data in computer code, designed to slip inside a computer and set up shop without attracting attention, and to do what this one was so good at: replicate itself.

There’s plenty wrong with the second paragraph, the first meaningfully sized one. The unnecessary attention to detail when specifying the date. The arse-backwards explanation of what a honeypot is, before explaining what a worm or malware is. But most of all, it’s that third sentence. I mean, just look at it:

Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did.

One of the first sentences to hook the reader in, and it’s a paragon of inanity and tautology. Either people noticed it on the first day, or another day soon after? Really? Knock me down with a feather.

Nevertheless, the jumbled nature of the sentences and useless cruft are not what make this an especially awful tech article. It’s the endless conflicting analogies used to make the article more accessible for the lay reader that are the real problem. Take this analogy of computers as starships:

Imagine your computer to be a big spaceship, like the starship Enterprise on Star Trek. The ship is so complex and sophisticated that even an experienced commander like Captain James T. Kirk has only a general sense of how every facet of it works.

Taking something not in the layman’s terms of reference and turning it into something else which is also not in the layman’s terms of reference. Bravo. But no, wait, computer aren’t just starships. Later on in the article, they’re also castles. With maps!

When there is only one fort, and it is well policed, the lock is fixed and the vulnerability disappears. But when you are defending millions of forts, and a goodly number of the people responsible for their security snooze right through Patch Tuesday, the security bulletin doesn’t just invite attack, it provides a map!

As for the battle between security white hats and the bot’s authors, it’s a chess game:

The struggle against this remarkable worm is a sort of chess match unfolding in the esoteric world of computer security.

Except when it’s not:

In chess, when your opponent checkmates you, you have no recourse. You concede and shake the victor’s hand. In the real-world chess match over Conficker, the good guys have another recourse.

(Aside – I also dislike the typically American tendency to use the phrases “bad guys” and “good guys” in articles like this, but let’s save that for another blog post)

But by far the best awful analogy in the piece is provided in an interview with a security expert, who is trying to explain whoever wrote Conficker had to be an expert at very the top of their game:

“Not only are we not dealing with amateurs, we are possibly dealing with people who are superior to all of our skills in crypto,” he said. “If there’s a surgeon out there who’s the world’s foremost expert on treating retinitis pigmentosa, he doesn’t do bunions. The guy who is the world expert on bunions—and, let’s say, bunions on the third digit of Anglo-American males between the ages of 35 and 40, that are different than anything else—he doesn’t do surgery for retinitis pigmentosa.”

I have to admit I was in the process of Googling what the hell retinitis pigmentosa is, before realising this is the worst analogy I have ever read. It manages to turned the simple statement: “there are only a handful of people in the world who can do this” – which does not need an analogy to put it into layman’s terms – into some sort of arcane and utterly irrelevant reference to bunions.

To be fair to the author of the article, the last analogy is from someone he interviews, not himself. But to include it verbatim in the article, rather than judiciously excise and summarise it is a grave error.

Now you might at this point argue that the author is a professional journalist, and I am a nobody blogger who writes long and sometimes very boring blog posts with the odd spelling mistake, so I have no business criticising his writing. And you would be absolutely correct. I have very few stones to aim at his particular glass house.

But please bear me out, for there is a general point which this article exemplifies, and it is by no means the only one. In technological writing for the lay reader, there is an overarching tendency to patronise the reader by breaking everything down into analogy. Computers become starships, or castles, or cars, or anything you like in your attempt to explain one single aspect of their working. Google for the phrase “Imagine your computer is…” to see what people have come up with.

To be fair, there are good reasons to analogise, from time to time. A lay audience isn’t necessarily going to be familiar with the intricacies of computer security, or even computer anything. The growth in the computer and information industry has far outstripped the natural evolution of the English language. Analogies themselves are not inherently bad; they can be a way of illuminating a difficult or novel subject.

But analogies have their shortcomings. Typically, they can only explain one aspect of how something works, hence why authors are forced to use more than one analogy, and the inevitable contradictions, in an article. Even by themselves, these analogies can only be stretched so far before they reach a breaking point, and become not just useless but dangerously inaccurate.

Despite these shortcomings, all too often an author is too lazy or incapable to devote the effort or skill to explain something for what it is, in plain language. This is to the detriment of our discourse; by opting in to analogise everything by default, the writer creates a consistently patronising attitude to the reader. How are people expected to learn anything about a subject if it is continually abstracted away from them, to the point of infantilism?

Furthermore, the long-term consequence of bad analogies is even worse; they become part of the vernacular themselves. Coming back example above, once to look at the language involved, it’s only fair to ask why something us called a “honeypot” to attract worms; real life worms aren’t known for either producing or being attracted to honey. Rather than make the topic more accessible to the layperson, we risk making it even more illogical and confusing.

This doesn’t just contaminate our thinking in writing, but also in everyday speech. Over at the excellent Clients From Hell blog, two recent stories (here and here) show this taking place in the wild. In both conversations, the designer or developer is struggling to justify why their client should pay the price they promised to pay (apart from it being a breach of the law and all). Yet despite having right on their side, they end up using baffling analogies, involving lobsters and plumbers, that antagonise the person they’re trying to negotiate with.

This isn’t just a problem in technology (you see it also in finance and science) but it is one of the fields of writing where it’s most prevalent. While trying to dictate how to use language has always been futile, it’s especially futile in an Internet age where neologisms and jargon can be adopted by miliions near-instantly. So as much as I’d like to see more intelligent and readable tech writing, I’m not holding my breath. But hopefully this blog post will go a little way to raising awareness and provoke a little self-questioning.

So a message to all tech writers writing for a lay audience: in an age where column space no longer usually dictates the length of articles, the reasons against writing things out in a more rounded way have diminished. Spend a little more time thinking about how to write clearly rather than reaching for the first vaguely similar concept in your mind. Don’t just use jargon mindlessly, but question it and use it only if it makes sense (both logically and semantically) to the reader. And it’s not just writers’ responsibility. Meanwhile, readers, of all ability, need to start adopting better filters against shoddy analogies and other figures of speech in tech writing, and we need prepared to call bullshit on them when we see them.