Posts about germany

Apology to Germany

September 1, 2016 by Jeff Jarvis
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For the record. I did not insult Germans about VR. I was honored that Die Welt asked me to write about VR for a special they were doing. The lede gained something in the translation. I wrote:

Virtual reality will not change the world. But it might help change how we see it.

This was replaced by this subhed:

Deutsche Verbraucher sind laut Umfragen besonders skeptisch, wenn es um virtuelle Eindrücke geht. Liegt das etwa an der Nazi-Zeit? Oder daran, dass schon der Begriff Virtual Reality in die Irre führt?

Which means:

German consumers are particularly skeptical when it comes to virtual reality. Does that have something to do with the Nazi era? Or that is it that the term virtual reality is misleading? 

I have been critical of Germany’s overreaction, in my view, about American technology companies and copyright and privacy. But I purposely did not want to make this another German #technophobia story. Lower down in the piece, I raised the question and cited a few oddities — like the philosopher who found Nazi ideology in Pokemon Go (!) — but said that VR is sweeping Germany as elsewhere. And note that I pinned those oddities on German media.

Not a big deal. But I wanted to be clear, for the record. Here, by the way, is the English text (with German quotes still in German so as not to double-translate):

 

Virtual reality will not change the world. But it might help change how we see it.

Thanks to the internet, we are coming to the end of the Gutenberg Age. His era — not quite six centuries long — was ruled by text: content that filled the containers we call books, magazines, and newspapers. Now the information and entertainment that media provided are available in so many more forms: as databases, applications, visualizations, bot chats, videos, podcasts, memes, online conversations, social connections, education, and so on. Text is not dead. It just has a lot of new company.

Are we also leaving the Kodak Age, thanks to the advent of virtual reality? The printed photograph — like the movie and TV screens that followed — was bound by its two dimensions. But now images are freed to expand past those borders.

“VR” is being used, incorrectly, to include everything that breaks out of film photography’s flat Weltanschauung: 360-degree (and panoramic) photography, 360-degree video, augmented reality, light-field photography, and virtual reality itself (that is, a computer-generated, interactive representation of an environment).

At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, we believe we need to start our students not with VR but with 360-degree photography and video. We will push them to think and see outside the single path between the lens and the subject: straight-on, static, one-way. We want our students to ask when it could be useful for the public to see what is happening to either side or even behind them. How does that peripheral view impart added information or perspective?

As with every shiny new gadget that tempts us media folk, 360-degree media are being misused. There is no point in bringing a 360-degree camera to an interview, for when do you want to turn around and look the other way when talking with a person? Augmented reality is being used to make two-dimensional printed pages look three-dimensional; I frankly don’t see much point.

The first good and obvious use of 360-degree media is to put the viewer in the middle of a scene. Recently, news outlets used 360-degrees to put viewers in the middle of the balloon drop at the end of each American political convention or in an Olympic arena in Rio. They have used these cameras to give us a daredevil’s you-are-there perspective. All that is fine. But once you’ve seen one dangerous fall off a cliff, haven’t you seen them all?

I hear much talk that VR brings empathy to media, putting the viewer in the body of a story’s subject to enhance the viewer’s understanding. True. The Guardian took viewers into a six-by-nine-foot solitary confinement prison cell, a frightening experience. Bild took users to a battle in Iraq. I’ve stood in a virtual setting in which an angry man was pointing a gun at a woman just the other side of me; it is unnerving. I’ve even heard the empathy argument used to justify VR porn.

Making 360-degree video requires much expertise and expense: Multiple cameras sit in tricky rigs that can warp with heat and ruin the end result. Complex software is used to stitch all this video into one scene or to animate action. Virtual reality requires even more difficult software. And watching VR still requires a hassle: donning a cheap or expensive headset and looking like a fool while avoiding puking. Since the equipment is so expensive and difficult, I wonder whether we’ll soon see VR cafés just as, not long ago, we went to internet cafés to get online.

All that is why I am more enthused about using relatively inexpensive 360-degree cameras like the Samsung Gear 360 or Ricoh Theta S (or shooting panoramas on a phone). The best way to reach an audience of scale today is to post 360-degree photos on Facebook or video on YouTube.

The shiny new panoramic camera that has me most excited these days doesn’t even shoot 360 degrees around, only 150 degrees. The Mevo video camera captures a wider angle than regular video cameras, which simulates having multiple cameras as in a TV studio. It is controlled entirely on an iPhone or iPad: Click on someone’s face and that’s the closeup; move a box on the screen to shift the closeup. It’s the first camera written to Facebook Live standards. I’ve been using it to make my own podcasts. When I showed this small, $400 device to a newspaper owner, he ordered his staff to stop building their TV studio and control room.

Pokémon Go got me jazzed anew about the opportunities of augmented reality or AR. Years ago, a Dutch company called Layar showed the possibilities of adding information to what the camera on a phone saw (“This restaurant has great steaks” or “George Washington slept there”) but they were early. Now Pokémon shows how we could augment what a user sees in public with history or news about a location, restaurant reviews, ads and bargains, or annotations left by other users.

Ah, but leave it to German media to worry about the implications of a new technology and its application. In Bild, Franz Josef Wagner complained: “Aber die Nerds, die Millionen Pokémon-Süchtigen, sollten nicht nach Monstern suchen. Sie sollten die Wirklichkeit suchen.”

More amazingly (or amusingly), in Die Zeit, philosopher Slavoj Žižek discerned Nazi philosophy in Pokémon Go: “Und hat Hitler den Deutschen nicht das Fantasiebild seiner nationalsozialistischen Ideologie beschert, durch dessen Raster sie überall ein besonderes Pokémon – ‘den Juden’ – auftauchen sahen, das sie mit einer Antwort auf die Frage versorgte, wogegen man zu kämpfen habe?”

VR wariness is not just German media’s fault. An international survey by the firm GfK found German consumers the most skeptical about the value of a virtual experience. Nonetheless, especially in gaming, VR is also storming Germany.

Yes, there are issues to be grappled with in VR and its related technologies: When you shoot 360-degree photos and video, do the people behind the camera realize they are being captured? We have already seen that people watching virtual reality experiences have a heightened sense of reality. But I don’t buy the fear that people will withdraw into their VR headsets and experiences; it’s just another way to look at images.

VR et al might just give us another way to experience what other people experience — that is why both Facebook and Google are investing heavily in the medium, so we all can more fully share our lives. But fear not: just as text lives on after the Gutenberg age, reality will still exist after virtual reality.

 

 

 

That German guy and his beard

December 6, 2014 by Jeff Jarvis
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Just a brief post to cross the language barrier with an amusing story going on in German media.

Kai Diekmann is the explosively colorful, diabolically charming, dangerously brilliant, stunt-prone editor-in-chief of the largest paper in Europe, Bild (it’s a tabloid in spirit that is printed on really big paper so the bare breasts are bigger). His company, Axel Springer, scares even big, (not) bad Google. He unseated a German president. He is powerful.

For reasons I cannot remember — I think it had something to do with his nine-month-long visit to Silicon Valley, during which he partook of many delicious, digital lotus leaves — Diekmann started growing a beard that became his temporary trademark. His Christmas card last year was of him with a beard that wouldn’t stop growing. He retweeted every beard joke about him.

Today, in a stunt to end all stunts (well, probably not), Kai is shaving the beard on national TV. To benefit the Bild charity Ein Herz Für Kinder (A Heart for Children), the razor giant Gillette — of course — and supermarket giant EDEKA are paying 100,000€ to shave off Kai’s beard.

The German advertising magazine W&V calls it what it is: content marketing with a beard. The editor as native advertising.

One can hardly imagine a stuffy American editor doing such a thing. Heaven forbid. But, of course, American journalism used to have such larger-than-life editors: Hearst, Pulitzer, and James Gordon Bennett, Jr., whose paper, the New York Herald, was the namesake of the square where he is now memorialized and who funded expeditions to Africa (Stanley, meet Livingstone) and the Arctic:

bennett herald square

Digital media may breed such characters. Arianna Huffington was herself a bit of a swashbuckler, until she disappointingly — in my mind — shifted her ambitions from running the world to being Oprah. This week at CUNY, we gave the Knight Innovation Award to Shane Smith — he just returned from jumping off a helicopter in the antarctic — who has built an impressive empire atop his strong editorial voice. (Disclosure: He and Knight awarded the school $500,000 to establish a fund to support young journalists around the world.) But how many others are there?

Well, anyway, tonight Diekmann will be clean-shaven once again. I understand his wife will be relieved.

: Half-a-postscript: Halfway there:

Finally:

Oh, those Germans

October 23, 2014 by Jeff Jarvis
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warover

German publishers warring with Google — and the link and the internet — have now completed their humiliation at their own hands, capitulating to Google and allowing it to continue quoting and linking to them. How big of them.

The pathetic sequence of their fight:

1. German publishers under the banner of a so-called trade group called VG Media and led by conservative publisher Axel Springer called in who knows what political chits to get legislators to create a new, ancillary copyright law — the Leistungsschutzrecht — to forbid Google et al from quoting even snippets to link to them.

2. In negotiations in the legislature, snippets were then allowed.

3. The publishers went after Google anyway, contending that Google should pay them 11 percent of revenue over the use of snippets.

4. Google, being sued over the use of the snippets, said it would take down the snippets from those publishers this week.

5. The publishers said that for Google to take down the snippets they were using to blackmail Google amounted to Google blackmailing the publishers. And you thought Germans were logical.

6. The publishers went to the government cartel office to complain that Google was using its market power against them.

7. Officials laughed the publishers out of the cartel office.

8. Now the publishers have said that Google can use its snippets for free while this legal matter is being ironed out.

Of course, the publishers never wanted the snippets taken down because they depend on those snippets and links for the audience Google sends to them … for free. It is all their cynical game to try to disadvantage their new and smarter competitor. Those who can, compete. Those who can’t, use their political clout.

Enough. Genug.

I have written a much longer essay about the damage these German publishers are doing to Germany’s standing that I am trying to place in a print publication — so I can speak to the print people. I’ll link to it when that happens. Here’s the lede:

I worry about Germany and technology. I fear that protectionism from institutions that have been threatened by the internet — mainly media giants and government — and the perception of a rising tide of technopanic in the culture will lead to bad law, unnecessary regulation, dangerous precedents, and a hostile environment that will make technologists, investors, and partners wary of investing and working in Germany.

LATER: Ah, there’s another chapter already.

9. Like Japanese soldiers stuck on an island thinking the war continues, Axel Springer has declared that Google must take down snippets from four of its brands: Die Welt, and the auto, sport, and computer subbrands of Bild. Note well that they didn’t do that with superbrand Bild, their largest newspaper and the largest in Germany. They need the eggs. So as it loses its argument that Google is a cartel, the German publishers’ cartel crumbles.

Technoeuropanic

September 4, 2014 by Jeff Jarvis
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Europe is at it again. Or still. I’m told that a consortium of European publishers will run an ad in European papers this weekend attacking Google and the EU’s antitrust deal with the company. It’s the same old stuff: publishers whining and stomping their feet that it’s just not fair that Google is doing better than they are and government should step in to do something about this, this damned, uh … competitor.

Screenshot 2014-09-04 at 8.17.21 PMIn the ad, the publishers’ argument is that Google’s search is not “impartial.” First, who said it has to be? Second, Google does point to its competitors; see this search for “maps” to the left. Third, who requires the publishers to promote their competitors? Here, the so-called Open Internet Project — a front started by German publisher Axel Springer — demands “equal search” (what the hell would that be?) for, say, shoe listings, complaining that Google makes money pointing to its shoe advertisers. Hmmm. And here is Bild, Springer’s gigantic newspaper, selling shoes itself. I don’t see them linking to Google’s shoe ads. Shouldn’t a news publication be — what’s the word? — impartial?

But, of course, this isn’t the point. It’s a game. I’ve seen German publishers chuckling about it that way. They think they can use government and political pressure to cut some flesh out of Google. But they should beware the unintended consequences. They are helping Europe — and particularly Germany — get a reputation for being hostile or at least inhospitable to technology. Here is the Economist writing about “Germany’s Googlephobia.”

It so happens that I’m going to Berlin next week to speak at the IFA technology show about just this topic: Europe (specifically Germany) and technology specifically American technology companies). I worry about Europe.

Germany just banned Uber (despite the advice of EC VP Neelie Kroes). A European court instituted the ludicrous and dangerous Right to be Forgotten (what about the right to remember?). German government officials harassed Google over Street View so much that Google gave up photographing its streets (so much for Blurmany). German publishers got government to pass an ancillary copyright to go after Google quoting and linking to their content (but then lost a round in court). The German book industry gave technosceptic Jaron Lanier its big-deal peace prize and Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel is roaring up the charts. A German pol is threatening to break up Google (how?). Spain is looking to tax the link. The head of powerful German publisher Axel Springer raises the spectre of Google starting its own nation without laws. A German government agency is talking about declaring Google a utility and regulating it as such; I’d call that quasi-nationalization. “It is the core task of liberalism and social democracy to tame and restrain data capitalism gone wild,” declared Social Democratic Chairman Sigmar Gabriel in a German paper. “Either we defend our freedom and change our policies, or we become digitally hypnotised subjects of a digital rulership.” I could go on….

Would you invest in technology in Europe and specifically in Germany? I sure wouldn’t.

Some of this is about disrupted companies and institutions rallying to try to hobble their disruptor. Some of this is cultural technopanic. In either case, the damage to Europe and particularly Germany could be great.

At IFA, I plan to tell the technology executives there that they need to step up and defend progress or they might find themselves left behind.

Screenshot 2014-09-04 at 8.05.22 PM

The German war against the link

June 20, 2014 by Jeff Jarvis
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German publishers are not just fighting Google. They are fighting the link and thus the essence of the internet.

Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets. From their government filing, they want a cut of “gross sales, including foreign sales” that come “directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public.” [All these links are in German.]

Their demands are as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous. First, of course, Google is sending the publishers plenty of value as well. That is, Google is sending the publishers us: readers, customers, the public these news organizations allegedly want to serve. So what are we, chopped liver? I’ll be posting an essay soon that argues that one reason media have a problem building new digital business models is that we still think value is intrinsic only in content; we have no marketplace and metrics for valuing the creation of an audience for it (now that those functions are unbundled). If the publishers really want a fair exchange of value, then they should also be paying Google for the links — the readers — it sends their way. But, of course, that would create a moral hazard and corrupt search; that Google does not charge for placement in search and Google News is precisely what set it apart from predecessors and built a valuable and trusted service.

Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online. If we can find only the knowledge that pays to be found, then the net turns into … oh, I don’t know, a newsstand?

The publishers aren’t stupid. They realize these facts. That’s what makes their action so cynical. They are trying to blackmail net companies in hopes of getting some payoff from them. They’re not just going after Google but also Microsoft and Yahoo — though, interestingly, if a company has only a search engine, the publishers would charge them only a third of their tariff. That is to say, they want to go after the big net companies because they are big targets.

Earlier this month, I spoke at a Google Big Tent event in Berlin (Google paid my travel expenses; I do not accept other payment from Google) where a conservative member of parliament, Dorothee Bär, had the admirable guts to criticize these mostly conservative publishers for their efforts, telling them that she opposed passage of the law that is allowing this nonsense — a Leistungschutzrecht or ancillary copyright — and also warning them that a failing business model is no excuse to run to government begging for regulation. You’d think conservatives would agree about that. But that, again, is what makes the publishers’ campaign so cynical.

Note, by the way, that Google does not place advertising on Google News. Are the publishers seeking 11% of 0? Note as well that there is data to say that longer samples of content could end up sending *more* traffic to creators (more on that, too, in a later post). These are facts that will need to be discussed in any suits.

Add all this to other attacks on Google by German media and politics against Google: the Verpixelungsrecht — right to be pixelated — in Google Street View and calls by German politicians to break up Google. Add to that as well the recent European court decision upholding a right to be forgotten and requiring Google to take down links to content that subjects don’t like.

And I worry about the net. I worry about Europe and especially Germany about their efforts to protect the past. I’ll likely write more about that as well later.

But, of course, these warriors do not speak for all of Germany or all of Europe. The instigators of the war include Axel Springer, Burda, WAZ, the Müncher Merkur, and others. But other major publishers — Spiegel Online, Handelsblatt.com, FAZ.net, Stern.de, Sueddeutsche.de and [cough] the new German edition of Huffington Post — have not joined the war. And there are politicians such as Bär and outgoing vice president of the European Commission Neelie Kroes who have the courage to defend the future. Here is Kroes the other day responding to strikes across Europe protesting the arrival of Über:

The debate about taxi apps is really a debate about the wider sharing economy. That debate forces us to think about the disruptive effects of digital technology and the need for entrepreneurs in our society. . . .

Whether it is about cabs, accommodation, music, flights, the news or whatever. The fact is that digital technology is changing many aspects of our lives. We cannot address these challenges by ignoring them, by going on strike, or by trying to ban these innovations out of existence. . . .

I believe it is a fundamental truth that Europe needs more entrepreneurs: people who will shake and wake us and create jobs and growth in the process.

We also need services that are designed around consumers. The old way of creating services and regulations around producers doesn’t work anymore. They must have a voice, but if you design systems around producers it means more rules and laws (that people say they don’t want) and those laws become quickly out of date, and privilege the groups that were the best political lobbyists when the law was written.

That is old-fashioned compared to a system that helps all of us as consumers, and encourages entrepreneurs. We need both those elements in our economy; otherwise we will be outpaced to our East and our West. We’ll be known as the place that used to be the future, but instead has become the world’s tourism playground and nursing home. I don’t want Europe to have that future. . . .

More generally, the job of the law is not to lie to you and tell you that everything will always be comfortable or that tomorrow will be the same as today. It won’t. Not only that, it will be worse for you and your children if we pretend we don’t have to change. If we don’t think together about how to benefit from these changes and these new technologies, we will all suffer. . . .