Shaun Randol

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In promoting his new book about Twitter, Nick Bilton sat for an excellent interview with Shaun Randol of the Los Angeles Review of Books. A passage in which the Times reporter describes the changes in journalistic portraits in the Information Age:

Shaun Randol:

Can you speak about writing a narrative using at least four competing memories?

Nick Bilton:

There were over 100 competing memories. Everyone has a different viewpoint of what happened. I interviewed not only the founders and the board members; I interviewed also the people who worked there in the early days, their spouses, their ex-spouses, ex-girlfriends, and ex-boyfriends. I found people who worked at nearby coffee shops. I spoke with anyone who I could have a conversation with.

What I found the most fascinating was that I could go back to social media and use that in my reporting. For example: There’s a moment in the book when Twitter launches at the Love Parade, a rave in San Francisco. Everyone I spoke to believed it happened in June or July, or the beginning of summer. I looked up the Love Parade online and discovered it was in September. So then I went through and searched Jack’s tweets and those of other people from that time, and I ended up finding references of them at the Love Parade in September. Their memories believed it was the beginning of the summer, but they had actually documented it was the end of the summer.

That was the moment I realized that I could use these tweets and social media as a reporting tool for this book. There was a treasure trove of stuff that existed online, whether it was tweets, Flickr photos, videos on YouTube, Facebook updates, or Foursquare updates. These things existed everywhere and allowed me to pinpoint almost with exact accuracy where people were at certain points in time. I was able to untangle all of the somewhat different memories.

Shaun Randol:

There are significant implications of leaving that digital breadcrumb.

Nick Bilton:

Yes. If you want to write a book about me and I won’t let you interview me, you could potentially say what I was doing at certain points in time just by looking at my social media feeds: Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter. For this book, I had access to thousands of emails and other documents, but there were certain events that I could find via social media. The places people had gone. Videos of boat trips they took. Writing and reporting this story was a real eye-opening experience.

Shaun Randol:

I’m reminded of Gay Talese’s famous portrait of Frank Sinatra, ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’ in which a vivid portrait of the singer was drawn without ever speaking to him.

Nick Bilton:

That’s the piece that everyone attains to when they write a story like this. Imagine how Talese’s piece would have looked if Frank Sinatra was on Twitter and there were photographs on Instagram of him. As you see in my book, there are incredible details about what people were wearing, the temperature that day, and even the gusty wind. I used the internet to find these things. I could look at almanacs to find what the weather was that day and the photos on Flickr of what people were wearing that day.”

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At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Shaun Randol interviews Paul Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, who agrees with David Mamet that we should have armed security in schools. An excerpt:

“Shaun Randol: 

You mention how we’re not going to have policing in public spaces anytime soon —

Paul Barrett: 

I said a ‘police state.’ We, of course, have plenty of policing of public spaces. We have public spaces that are basically locked down. You can’t get into a federal courthouse without getting thoroughly searched. It would be very, very difficult to get in there with a firearm. You can’t get past security in an American airport without being pretty thoroughly searched. We have lots of security in lots of situations.

I think that security does deter crime in general and mass killings in particular. With this debate about what we do about schools, the proposal [by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre] that has been lampooned by a lot of people, I personally think is a very reasonable proposal.

Shaun Randol: 

Please elaborate.

Paul Barrett: 

I’ve written about this for Businessweek. We have grown accustomed, in this country, to having a fair amount of security in many kinds of public and private venues where a lot of people gather. There is security in the building that you and I are sitting in right now. Not just anyone can walk in.

When you go to Yankee Stadium to see a baseball game, you can’t just walk into Yankee Stadium. They channel you through certain entranceways and, if you’re carrying a bag, they’re going to search your bag. The guys who take your tickets are there to also look you over, and there’s both uniformed and plainclothes security throughout the stadium.

I think all of those steps are rational steps. I don’t think they’re perfect, but I do think they do deter crime and they would deter a mass suicide-killing episode in those venues. Therefore, if you are truly anxious about securing schools, I can’t see the serious argument against having armed security at schools. It doesn’t seem to me to be a distraction. It doesn’t seem to me to be a panacea, either. It’s not perfect, but few social policies are perfect.”

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Shaun Randol of the L.A. Review of Books writing about the numbing intersection of warfare and software:

“As Paul Virilio has noted, with the filming of the 1990-91 Gulf War, most notably by CNN, the American public was encouraged to see war as a technological process and a media event. The ubiquitous green and grainy images of anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad, or black-and-white videos of missiles slamming into boxy structures from projectile-mounted cameras were so bereft of the realities of warfare — blood, guts, screams, and mangled bodies — that they were shown in prime-time news broadcasts. Much of the public enthusiastically embraced this antiseptic projection of war. Now, many soldiers and their civilian leaders see war through the same technological lens. 

American military training and planning increasingly uses video games and virtual reality (for pre-deployment and decompressing) and autonomous robots (for actual fighting). Peter Finn surmises that ‘the successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.’ Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution has written extensively on how the increase in military research into robots, be it nanotechnology or outsized pilotless aircraft that can — theoretically — stay adrift indefinitely, indicates the direction of the U.S.’s fighting strategy.”

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